Author: DOuG pRATt

Milk spilled backwards

A week or so ago I added a link over on the right for singer-songwriter Kate Klim. As Kate pointed out last night at the Off the Common Coffeehouse in Bridgewater, MA, her name is, yes, milk spelled backwards. Now based in Nashville, Kate Klim is originally from Illinois, and she attended Berklee in Boston to study music. I sent some money to Kate about a year ago when she was working on her new CD, Kamikaze Love, and that’s why my name is printed on the case.

This is Kate performing the title track. (I need to get a more light-sensitive camera with a lens stronger than 3x zoom!)

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Appearing with Kate was Susan Levine, whose most recent CD is Atlas. (Her Atlas didn’t shrug.) 😉 After their solo sets, which were both great, Susan finished the evening with Kate singing harmony. Wonderful!

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I think Carol and I were strangers in an audience of old friends, but we were made to feel welcome and we enjoyed the concert very much. It was nice being able to chat with Kate and Susan, and Kate demonstrated something cool that I’d read about on the tech sites, but hadn’t seen before — an iPhone with a credit card swiper!

A blogger’s final post

I started using WordPress in September, 2006 with the then-current version, 2.0.3. A bit over a year ago I was curious about the differences between WordPress and the previous leading blogging software for self-hosted sites, Movable Type. (Mark Evanier uses an outdated version of Movable Type.) I found this item by a blogger named Derek K. Miller. I was particularly interested in Miller’s discussion of a WordPress plugin that generates static pages, instead of using a WordPress caching plugin as a way to speed up sites on shared hosting services. (I later decided to cache.)

Miller was a writer worth reading, so I checked out some of his other posts. He was a musician, husband, and father, living in Vancouver. Reading Derek K. Miller’s posts, it quickly became apparent that he was a very sick man, and he was being treated for advanced colon cancer.

Derek, you have a big and loyal following — fellow musicians, fellow Vancouver residents, and others whose lives are affected in one way or another by cancer. Because of that I didn’t link to your blog, and I didn’t contact you, but for the past year I’ve been following penmachine.com. I am saddened to learn that you died two days ago.

He’s Mighty Sore!

It’s going to be a super-hero summer! (Especially if you consider Harry Potter to be a super-hero.) The buzz from Europe, where the Thor movie is already out, is that it’s a great, fun ride.

That’s good, because so far Jack Kirby’s creations for Marvel Comic haven’t translated to the big screen as well as the less cosmic characters Spider-Man and Iron Man. Captain America was one of Jack’s first, co-created with Joe Simon. As with Thor, I wasn’t too optimistic about the project until I saw the trailer, which looks very promising.

And there’s another X-Men movie coming too. The X-Men are also from the mind of Kirby, but the movies are based quite a bit on later incarnations of the mutant team.

http://youtu.be/0Yq7Za1JnZg

When I was a kid in the 60’s, Marvel’s summer special double-size, 25-cent comic books were a big deal. We’ve come along way from those days!

DC is represented this summer by Green Lantern, but this trailer leaves me feeling more uncertain about this movie’s prospects than Marvel’s offerings.

http://youtu.be/pHmMh0yikQ0