General – Page 101 – The Bald Heretic – Short, bald dude with a goofy beard

Mark your calendars

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I’m all kinds of excited about this show!

And what’s not to be excited about?

Aqua Velva, Houston’s only and by default, best B-52’s cover band, Clouseaux, a band that defies description…lounge, tiki and eclectic are good adjectives to start with and The Flying Fish Sailors…all combined for one evening and it’s a pajama party to boot!

Can you say extravabonanza?

*I know there is a typo on the flyer – blame Thomas Escalante from Sig’s Lagoon

Molly and the Ringwalds will be doing they’re usual happy hour show from 7-9ish. There’s no guarantee they will wear pajamas but the rest of us will be adorned appropriately. Wear yours and get in free!

Reelin’ in the years

The Flying Fish Sailors had a very humble, yet ambitious beginning. This is a photo from one of our first live performances (circa 1988) at what was then known as The Wellington Stone on W. Alabama in the Montrose area of Houston.

Left to right: Jay Lee, Greg Henkel and Joseph Linbeck.

Click picture for a larger version

It’s hard to imagine that we are coming up on 20 years of performing together.

Kudos! I love kudos!

I know it’s not everybody’s cup of tea, but the blogging I do as part of my contract work for The Houston Chonicle over at the Helpline Blog is pretty cool to me.

My great grandfather, Franklin W. Lee, owned the Rush City News of Rush City, Minnesota and my great grandmother took it over after his death. Marilla Upright was the first woman newspaper editor of the country, and made the speech opening the Minn. pavilion at the 1892-3 Worlds Fair in Chicago.

I actually have my great grandfather’s journal that he wrote. It documents the birth of my grandfather and even has his first drawing in it. Kinda like his “blog” so-to-speak.

Anyway, I like what I do at the Chronicle and I like getting to be a part of the online aspects of what is happening there.

Today I got the news that the Chronicle has been recognized for it’s efforts in blogging.

New York University Associate Professor Jay Rosen from Pressthink and his students conducted a study to determine which major U.S. newspapers were best at blogging.

Fifteen undergraduates in journalism, two grad students, and one professor set out to determine–by our lights– the top blogging newspapers in the U.S. among major dailies. We found six standouts, two honorable mentions and some wacky blogs. Number One in our eyes: the Houston Chronicle. By a mile.

Coming in second is the Washington Post.

You can read about the study here.

I don’t fancy myself a newspaper man but I suppose there is some of it in my blood. Franklin Lee is one of my favorite relatives. He was a journalist, poet, playwright, essayist and editor.

I’d like to think that he might be proud of my efforts, or at least see them as something worthwhile. At any rate, it’s good to be acknowledged by one’s peers. And that’s what happened today.

Congrats to Evil Dwight over at chron.com and to all the Houston Chronicle Bloggers!
We’re #1!!!

It’s official, AOL sucks! @!*#

The company I work for has between 600 and 800 people working globally. We generate a LOT of e-mail, as you might imagine. Here recently I have been getting a rash of calls about e-mail from here to AOL being delayed.

I remember reading this article about AOL’s plan to implement a fee for bulk e-mail messages.

Basically, if you want to send a certain amount of e-mail to AOL users and you don’t pay your e-mail priority is lowered.

I had one user here who indicated that they sent an e-mail to their spouse’s AOL address and it took two days to get delivered.

While I was discussing this one of our engineers forwarded me the following:

Some interesting news that I thought that I would share with you, and this may be old news to you but it was new news to me.

Late last week one of our employees started receiving Marshal “˜your email has been delayed’ messages on some (but not all) email that he was sending to his wife @aol.com. Since I had implemented the new HOU MTA servers, we were thinking that there was some correlation of his issue and it being related to the implementation of the new servers.

I was able to recreate his delayed email situation by sending 4 test emails to the employees wife @aol.com. It appears that one of the four emails made it through to her, the others were queued on our side. After searching the MM logs, there was a link within the logs pointing to http://postmaster.info.aol.com/errors/421rlynw.html. This url basically says that ourcompany.com is a spamming website and we have been throttled as a domain to only be allowed a small percentage of bandwidth of email thru at a time. This is a per domain restriction, not a per user restriction. However, our company could if it chooses, pay AOL a fee to become a “˜certified’ email sender with AOL, which would allow us more bandwidth for sending emails. If choose not to pay the fee, then we will be throttled to only allow certain amounts of email data thru their pipe at a time, which is our current situation. As a result, mail to aol.com is being queued on our side until eventually there is enough bandwidth to allow the email to go thru. The side effect is that the sender will be receiving delayed messages from MM.

The MM folks tell me that yahoo.com is going to be implementing the same thing soon too. There are several other domains that also have adopted this philosophy, but I do not have their email domains.

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Interestingly enough, we are not listed on any of the RBLs (Real-Time Blacklists) so I don’t know what criteria AOL used to determine we were a “spamming” company.

And to think, I defended AOL not too long ago.

A Sweet Little Bullet from a Pretty Blue Gun

The latest shirt. Cynthia made this on Saturday. The fabric was one she noticed first.
When it was brought to my attention I loved it but was not absolutely sure it would make a good shirt.

We talked about it and looked at it and looked some more. A nice older woman passed by and said to go for it and seemed genuinely enthused by the idea of a shirt made from this fabric.

I like it because it has a retro 50’s/60’s thing going on with the Audrey Hepburn style women at the vintage bar. The repeating pattern has a very tie-dye look. All the elements come together and, best of all, it complements my blue eyes.

This one is called “The Blue Lady”

Son, you’re gonna’ drive me to drinkin’ If you don’t stop drivin’ that Hot Rod Lincoln

Saturday night at the Continental Club was Jesse Dayton’s Honky Tonk and Hot Rod Music Festival. The show featured one of my favorites, Jesse Dayton and the Road Kings along with two of my other must see performers, Telecaster legend Red Volkert (Red was lead guitarist for the great Merle Haggard for many years) and Two Hoots and a Holler.

Red Volkert

Also on the bill was a band I was not familiar with. C.C. Adcock from Lafayette, Louisiana.

C.C. Adcock put on an amazing show. Jesse Dayton even joined them on stage and the two guitar players had at it and it was a rockin good time.

I had to take a flash shot of CC Adcock’s bass player to better show the pepto-pink upright bass.

Uhhh, yea…

All in all a pretty spectacular evening.

Knitta, please!

(yea, I stole the subject line from the story in the Houston Press)

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Knit one, perl two, arrrr!
Knit one, perl two, arrrrrr!

I got an e-mail from Christine, the proprietess of Big Pink Cookie. Apparently she is producing a podcast about knitting called Pointy Sticks.

It occured to her that the song I wrote for the Flying Fish Sailors, Poke You In The Eye, would make the perfect theme song for the program. Being the ethical person she is, she sought permission from the author before proceeding and I, being the generous person I am, gave her said permission.

Episode one and two lack the theme song but her husband Mike (www.coffeecorner.org) informed me yesterday that subsequent episodes will feature my little ditty with all the appropriate credits and sundry hoo-ha.

So yea, it’s not the generational anthem I may have envisioned in my optimisic and glory seeking youth, but it’s still cool knowing that small children and domestic adults alike might take delight in singing about poking someone in the eye.

If you would like to hear the song you can download it here.

Keep on knitting in the free world!