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About Jon
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I'm a guitarist and writer, dividing my professional time between these two pursuits. I've published five books in the Dummies series, as well as other books and magazine articles on guitar, audio, and music.
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It’s All in the . . . Timing
There’s an old joke about a comedian convention where the celebrity comics are scheduled to tell jokes at the event’s big banquet. Everyone in the audience knows all the jokes already because the jokes have been catalogued for the convention. To save time, the speakers decide to just say the joke’s number instead of telling the whole joke. The first speaker is a star, a legend in the business. “Forty-seven!” he calls out to laughter all around. “One-hundred and sixty-two!” The audience explodes with deep belly laughs and leaps to its feet in an ovation.
Takin’ Your Music to the Cloud
This week Amazon launched a major new online locker service called Cloud Drive. It is so named because it follows the current trend of “cloud computing,” which is just a fancy name for “online.” If you use gmail or yahoo mail, you’re already engaged in “cloud computing,” and all it really means is that you’re accessing something (music, email, word-processing functions) online instead of from your device’s internal hard drive, SD card, or other internal storage medium.
Kindle Envy
Every musician knows what it’s like to suffer buyer’s remorse in a gadget or equipment purchase. This is the feeling that manifests itself sometime between one minute and 24 hours after you finally plunk down your hard-earned cash. You suspect that the company you’ve just supported by buying their product will instantly relegate that model to the scrap heap and release something more powerful, cheaper, shinier, and happier. And inevitably, they do. If you stay in the technology-buying game long enough, you will swear that the company is simply waiting for you to buy before they announce their new releases.
Proper Netiquette Is for Keeps
“Young man, if I catch you doing that, it will go on your permanent record.” Certainly these words were leveled at me (more than once) to try to make me behave by instilling the fear that my mischief-making would have lasting consequences. (I don’t think it worked, most of the time.) We know now that these threats are largely empty, as kids are protected by laws prohibiting disclosure of most youthful transgressions. But even if kids are shielded, real life on the Internet holds more perils of indelibility.
Multi-tasking . . . or Multi-taxing?
Everyone thinks that multi-tasking is a good thing—or at least a necessary skill worth mastering for these modern times. Well, just because we’re forced into multi-tasking for work and home life doesn’t mean it’s healthy. Witness texting while driving: That’s multi-tasking, and that’s clearly an unsafe, bad, illegal thing to do. Many experts argue that simply talking on a cell phone in a car is dangerous, and that the whole “hands-free” loophole doesn’t really address the basic problem—that dividing your concentration ultimately makes you less successful at either activity.
In the Waiting Game, Technology Always Wins
As Ben Franklin famously opined, “Only three things in life are certain: death, taxes, and a new Apple model announced in the spring.” Okay, he obviously didn’t contribute the last bit (he was more of a Linux guy), but it might as well be added to that short list of life’s inevitabilities. Industry watchers and consumers fearing a seasonal bout of buyer’s remorse dread the early part of every new year, because the rumors start flying about what you would have gotten if you had only waited. Sure, there will always be something new on the horizon, but it doesn’t mean you can’t demonstrate bad timing in your purchasing.
"United Breaks Guitars" but Launches Careers
Unless you’ve been living in a new-media deadzone lately, you’ve certainly seen the viral YouTube hit song “United Breaks Guitars.” I think it’s a catchy song, but for the life of me, I don’t know why, as my local NPR station reported, United Airlines would be thinking of buying it to use as a “training video.” It’s a send-up, a spoof! Could they be buying it to kill it? A little late for that, don’tcha think? The horse is already out of the barn on that one. Perhaps they just want to use it as an “ice-breaker,” before settling down to the task at hand: not trashing the instruments of their customers.
The Best and Brightest (?)
I’ve always had a fascination with the Vietnam War, and particularly from the angle of the American government’s (mis)handling of it. Recently, two articles appears in the NY Times that both referenced David Halberstam’s book “The Best and the Brightest.” Below are the links. (BTW, if you can read only two books on the Vietnam War, that’s one of them. The other is Neil Sheehan’s “A Bright Shining Lie.”)
Harder to drink the Mac Kool-Aid
It’s just after Christmas 2007 in my household, and the graphics card that I bought my daughter (an NVidia GeForce Ge7300) won’t run in her pre-Intel Mac (which is not that old). This is yet another disappointment of the Mac platform that I keep encountering. Usually, I have to keep a watchful eye on the operating system, sorting out in my head the non-intuitive three-decimal system with the counter-intuitive feline imagery, to make sure that I can run a compatible program.
Blues Guitar for Dummies on sale December 18, 2006
My latest entry into the Dummies juggernaut is Blues Guitar for Dummies. This 384-page book includes a CD-ROM of all the musical examples that appear in the book (over 140 of them). The book provides tips on buying guitars, lists must-have recordings, gives a history of the blues and its key guitarists, and includes lots and lots of instruction and music examples. Everything from fingerstyle (Delta, Piedmont, ragtime, country) to electric (Chicago, blues-rock) to slide (standard and open tunings) is explored in depth. Blues Guitar for Dummies is perhaps a little easier than Rock Guitar for Dummies, and a good next step after Guitar for Dummies.
