Bismo and I were rhapsodizing last week about recording Star Trek as kids, by holding tape recorder mics up to TV speakers. My tape recorder was an Aiwa TP-32, a Christmas gift from my parents when I was ten years old. I soon leveraged my mastery of the prized possession into an audio-visual aid gig at school.
The TP-32 in that video is slightly different from the one I had, which looked like this.
Every so often I check eBay to see if there’s a TP-32 worth buying. Sometimes I see one, but in keeping with my goal of having fewer physical possessions, I never bid.
When I saw The Who at Fenway Park five years ago, Roger Daltry thanked Massachusetts General Hospital and a Boston doctor for restoring his singing voice.
Dr. Steven Zeitells had developed groundbreaking restorative laryngeal techniques, and operated on Roger just before our 2010 Super Bowl appearance. He was here in the audience tonight, somewhere, and without question would have been pleased by this stadium-full of happy fans. “He saved my voice.”
Julie Andrews famously, and tragically, lost her singing voice in 1997 from a botched vocal cord procedure at New York’s Mount Sinai Medical Center. Julie later came to Boston and met with the same specialist that Roger Daltry saw.
Julie’s familiarity with Boston goes back a long time. Fifty-three years ago, she made this reference to Filene’s Basement that was lost on Dick Cavett.
On my TiVo is Soundbreaking, a documentary about recorded music that was shown on PBS in 2016. The producers of the series put out this nice tribute to George Martin upon his passing that year.
It was exactly three years ago that I finally whacked down the technical moles that were crippling my WordPress installation. In the aftermath of my struggles, I was left with some residual problems on older posts that I occasionally fix on an as-needed basis.
Now there’s a different sort of WordPress trouble. WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg isn’t happy with WP Engine, a large hosting service that caters to business customers, rather than hobby bloggers like myself.
His complaint is that WP Engine, which is owned by a private equity firm, takes advantage of the free resources available from WordPress.org, without contributing very much of anything in return. This goes against the idea of being an Open Source software participant.
Mullenweg cut off WP Engine’s access to WordPress.org, and WP Engine sued in response. A judge has decided that Mullenweg must restore full access to WP Engine.
Mullenweg’s hosting service is WordPress.com, so I can understand why he isn’t pleased with a competitor that wants the freebies without playing by the rules. I am neither on WP Engine nor WordPress.com. I’m on the third leading service specializing in WordPress, which is also owned by a private equity firm. Here’s hoping all is well between the respective parties.
Follow-up: It’s getting extra nasty!
“It’s hard to imagine wanting to continue to working on WordPress after this.” – Matt Mullenweg
I saw the James Bond Aston Martin DB5 at the (now-defunct) Caldor flagship store in Norwalk, CT. The car had previously been on display at the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair, where this picture was taken.
I watched the demonstration of the car’s secret agent tricks as many times as my father would let me. I was so taken with the DB5 I talked my father into going back for another viewing.
Speaking of Andrew Sandoval, on “Come to the Sunshine” he played this song, produced by Shel Talmy. I liked it so much I bought Wild Silk’s compilation CD.
