Nigel Harpur-Carnival For Little Creatures
Posted on 2024-10-14
Listening Repertoire
I have developed this concept of listening repertoire, similar to practice repertoire or performance repertoire, but for listening.
Back in the olden days (also known as the sixties) when I got my paycheck I would head to the record store and buy an album. On a good week two but anything more than that would cut into my groceries and rent.
When I got home that record would hit the turntable and if I liked it as much as I thought I would it lived there for a while, at least several days before I would swap in the album I bought last week or one I had listened to for years.
But for that week and much of the next I'd listen to it a lot. When guests came over I would play it for them. If we had a party it would be playing in the background.
Now, jump to the present day, where I can listen to anything I want to, anytime. I rarely listen to an album more than once. I love live performances and I watch them on Youtube or listen to them on the Live Music Archive, usually once.
I think we can all relate to this experience. There's so much music and so little time it's hard to give any song or album the time it deserves. The in depth active listen, that only comes with repeated listening, sometimes in the background, sometimes sitting in your sweet spot, focusing only on the songs.
This is where listening repertoire comes in to save the day.
When I find a new (to me) album that I really like, I load it into my player and set it to loop. I pause it when I want and I start it again when I want, from the pause point or from track 1. But I let it live there, in my player, for a while, to get that deep understanding that only comes with repeated listening.
After a few days I'll swap it out for another album in my listening repertoire, for an old favorite, or for something new. But it remains at the top of my listening repertoire and I still put it on loop occasionally and just let it play.
When, after a week (or two) I find another album that I really like, it replaces the old with the new at the top of my listening repertoire.
Occasionally, I will scan through my listening repertoire and remove albums I'm no longer listening to frequently. Since they have been through my listening repertoire I know them well and I will certainly return to them in the future.
Some albums remain in my listening repertoire for a long time. I continue listening to them once or twice a month. They're just that good.
And yes, I keep a list of my listening repertoire. I add new albums at the top of the list. This formalization keeps me from forgetting an album too soon. Everybody's busy. Everybody forgets stuff. Removing an album from my listening repertoire is a decision I make, not something that accidentally happens.
You may have noticed that I am focusing on albums, not songs or playlists. I believe that the album is the musician's long form statement just like the song is their short form statement. An album has variety and depth so I can listen to it for several days. You do what works for you. I'm old. I like albums.
Here's my current listening repertoire. So it's newest (to the list) at the top. Not best at the top. The fact that Nubya's 5ive remains on the list after several years shows just how much I like it.
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Nigel Harpur - Carnival For Little Creatures
https://nigelharpur.bandcamp.com/album/carnival-for-little-creatures
Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong - Ella and Louis
John Coltrane - Crescent
ADHD Quartet - ADHD 6
https://adhdiceland.com/
Paul Bley - Fragments
Steve Khan - The Green Field
http://www.stevekhan.com/discog18.htm
Nubya Garcia - Nubya's 5ive
https://nubyagarcia.bandcamp.com/album/nubyas-5ive
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Posted on 2024-10-09
Going to The Biscuit
2024 King Biscuit Blues Festival.
Before the pandemic I went every year. First to dance and then to play. Not that I didn't dance and play every year.
I last attended in 2019. I played with The Emporium Orkestra at Downtown Bar and Grill. Delta Legends played on the Cedell Davis Stage. And I played with all my friends at Tent City and Helena Handbasket.
I am so looking forward to this. It's gonna be great. I'm taking my guitar, harmonicas, and my piano. I hope I don't get too tired.
I can't wait to see my friends again and eat another biscuit.
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Posted on 2024-10-08
Bebop Beatniks
Live At Blues Fest
Craighead Forest Bandshell
Jonesboro, Arkansas
September 29, 2024
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXeH69cZuHc
Songs
---
00:00 01 Low Earth Orbit
09:44 02 Yesterday
16:32 03 Summertime
24:41 04 The Blue Crane
34:14 05 Georgia
43:00 06 Malaysia
1, 4, and 6 by Larry Heyl
Personnel
---
Paul Lessard - Alto Sax
Jeremy Jackson - bass
Alex Washam - drums
Hairy Larry - piano, vocals
https://deltaboogie.com
https://bebopbeatniks.com
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The West Finch Blues Band-Jeff-Larry-Keith-Terry-Andy
Posted on 2024-10-04
Blues Fest has been relocated near the park entrance because of electrical problems at the bandshell.
Enter Craighead Forest Park at the main entrance. Blues Fest will be on the left. If you get to the roundabout you've gonne too far.
Blues Fest
Craighead Forest Park
Jonesboro, Arkansas
Sunday, October 6, 2024
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2:00 Hairy Larry and The Flying Hungarians
3:00 Mike Mcleod
4:00 The West Finch Blues Band
5:00 John Shepherd
6:00 Anna and the Tanks
I want to thank all the musicians in advance. The best way for you to show your appreciation is to come and enjoy the music.
It's Free!
Last Sunday we had a good time at the bandshell for the first day of Blues Fest this year. The featured acts were Bebop Beatniks, The Spencer Brothers, and Doug Butler. I record video and audio and I have already started work on some of last Sunday's recordings.
To keep up with Blues Fest, recordings, and other Delta News visit Delta Boogie and subscribe to the email newsletter here.
https://deltaboogie.com
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Posted on 2024-10-02
Episode 2 - Dirt Simple Photo Gallery
Dirt Simple Photo Gallery is the program that started me down the Plain Text Programs path. It predates my own thinking about Plain Text Programs by at least a decade. Ever since I wrote it I use it all the time. It is now my preferred web page generator for all kinds of web pages, not just galleries.
Like most of my programs I wrote it because I needed it. Vivian and I were putting on music events like Blues Fest, Sunday In The Park, Jazz Thursday, New Jazz In Jonesboro, and Bebopalooza. I recorded all the shows. Sometimes video, always audio. And we loved taking pictures of the musicians singing and playing.
After the shows we would dump the photo files to a hard drive, make all the original photos read only, and back them up to a CD or DVD. We really enjoyed scrolling through the photos, picking the ones we liked, cropping them and enhancing them, and resizing them for the internet.
And then that's where it fell apart. We recorded the show. We took the pictures. We cropped the pictures and had them ready to go for our Delta Boogie website. And we didn't want to write the html.
Some days we would have five or six bands playing. We usually had ten to twenty photos of each band that we picked out of hundreds of photos taken. Do the math. That's a lot of typing HTML code like a href =, img src, etc. A lot a captions to write. A lot of work to get done in a week. Because the next weekend we had another show. Another set of photos. Another bunch of html backlog.
And the thing I found out. If we didn't get the pages posted right away we almost never had time to post them later. I mean we had kids to raise, cooking to do, cars to fix, school to attend, not to mention work.
So, I loved writing programs more than I loved marking up html. And I could write one program and avoid marking up tons of html. And so I wrote the Dirt Simple Photo Gallery.
Even back in the dark ages of the internet also known as the nineties there were photo gallery programs. And just like today they were cumbersome and running them was a lot like data entry. You know what I hate worse than writing html? Data entry.
I had this idea. I would take all the photos we had ready for a gallery and I would upload them to a directory on our server. Then I would upload an index.php file and we'd have a photo gallery.
And that's just how Dirt Simple Photo Gallery works. And if that's really all you need you're done.
It wasn't quite all we needed. So I added a title.txt file and a notes.txt file so there could be a bit more than just the photos and captions on the web page. I was careful that I didn't have to write any html in the notes.txt file. The program even automatically turns copy and pasted links into hot links.
Now, you can include html in the notes.txt file. You can even embed iframes if you want to include an audio or video player. But you don't have to. Also, iframe embeds are just a copy and paste exactly like links. Easy peasy.
There's also the problem of the captions and the sort order of the photos.
Captions
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I use the file names to carry the meta data required for captions and sort order.
These are the characters I use in the file names. Alphanumeric, commas, apostrophes, dashes, and underscores. I don't use spaces but the underscores are converted to spaces in the captions. I use Thunar and I love the bulk rename option where I can search and replace a set of file names and change all the spaces into underscores.
I have code that allows you to include special characters in your captions by using html character sets but it's confusing to think about. And I discovered the only special characters I really needed were dashes, commas, and apostrophes. All three of these characters are legal in file names on all major systems. Dashes are not problematic. Commas can cause problems if you are using comma delimited data but, I'm not, so no worries. Apostrophes can also be an issue because in php they are used as single quotes and can be used to delimit strings in the code. There is a way around this with php. Use double quotes to surround the entire string. If there is a place inside of that string where you would use single quotes, which is not uncommon in html, replace the single quotes with escaped double quotes, that is \". So that's what I did.
So now I can use all the apostrophes I want in my file names and they fly right through my code, never accidentally truncating a string and throwing errors.
Commas and apostrophes are important in captions. Captioning group shots without commas leads to misunderstanding people's names. And if your caption has a possessive in it like Joe's Garage leaving the apostrophe out is just wrong.
Using double quotes in a file name will truncate strings in the php code and throw errors. Usually, anywhere you would want a double quote a single quote will do.
There are other special characters, like dashes, that aren't problematic. Forward slashes and back slashes should not be used in file names ever. Some special characters may work on some systems and not on others. I've been using this program for almost 25 years and I really want commas and apostrophes and don't really care about other special characters in captions. You may have special needs for special characters I don't. That's why it's open source. If you need something the program isn't designed to provide test it. Fix it. Right now there are fewer than 100 lines of code in the program. I have confidence in you.
Sorting
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Default sorting of images is alphabetical by file name. If you just name your files with good captions and don't add any numbers as a prefix that's what you'll get. Alphabetical by caption. This may be just what you need.
If, however, you want some other sort order you can prefix your files with nnn- where n is any integer.
000-filename.ext displays the picture at the top of the page. If the photo is narrow enough, the text from notes.txt will wrap around it to the left.
All the photos numbered 001- to 999- will display in a single column below the text. Unnumbered photos will also display below the text in alphabetical order. So if you want a photo at the top of the page add the prefix 000- to the file name. If alphabetical order is what you want for the rest of the photos you don't have to rename them.
Permitted extensions are jpg, png, or gif. (It's hapeg stupid!) It's easy to add other permitted extensions in the code but, of course, they have to be rendered by a browser. I did not include the jpeg extension choosing to rename jpeg files to jpg. This made it slightly easier to code.
There is a config.inc file where you can set your table width. The default is 700. I resize my photos to be 600 max width. I usually use jpg files with a quality level of 90. This reduces storage space and enables fast loading of images. The config.inc file also allows you to change background color, text color, link color, etc. There is also a CSS section in the config.inc file so you can change the font, the headline sizes, etc. Or add your own CSS.
If you have trouble getting the text wraparound to look good on your page there is a way to disable it in the config.inc file.
Install the page with ftp. Make a directory, where you want it on your website, and give it a good name. Upload index.php, title.txt, notes.txt, config.inc, and the image files into the directory. Go to your website and check it out. That's it.
Page maintenance is the same. Fix captions by renaming files. Add and delete images. Update the title or the text in notes.txt and upload the changes. Change the font, colors, or CSS in config.inc and upload the changes.
I have put up a demo site on infinityfree.com.
And I am posting my show notes on my blog at
https://home.gamerplus.org/
I will include links there to the demo site, the link to the comment thread for this podcast on Mastodon, and the link to the git repository on Codeberg.
If you can't find Dirt Simple Photo Gallery use the search feature.
To Network With Hairy Larry I have another plain text program at
https://deltaboogie.net/
If you use or have written Plain Text Programs please let me know. I want to do a podcast about them.
Thanks for listening.
More Links
Comment thread at Gamer+DBN on Mastodon
Dirt Simple Photo Gallery Demo
https://ptp.000.pe/Dirt_Simple_Photo_Gallery
Repository on Codeberg
Dirt Simple Photo Gallery
https://codeberg.org/hairylarry/DirtSimplePhotoGallery
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Bebop Beatniks-Larry, Jeremy, Paul, Alex
Posted on 2024-09-26
Delta Boogie Newsletter-Gamerplus News - October 2024 - Blues Fest
Since Blues Fest starts on September 29 I am sending the October newsletter early.
Blues Fest
Craighead Forest Bandshell
Jonesboro, Arkansas
September 29, 2024
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2:00 Bebop Beatniks
3:00 The Spencer Brothers
4:00 Doug Butler
October 6, 2024
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2:00 Hairy Larry and The Flying Hungarians
3:00 Mike Mcleod
4:00 The West Finch Blues Band
5:00 Delta Legends - John Shepherd, Jeremy Burnett, and Hairy Larry
6:00 Anna and the Tanks
I want to thank all the musicians in advance. The best way for you to show your appreciation is to come and enjoy the music.
It's Free!
Last Saturday, September 21, these Blues Fest acts played on the KASU Arkansas Roots Stage at the Beatles At The Ridge Festival in Walnut Ridge, Arkansas.
Bebop Beatniks, The Spencer Brothers, Mike Mcleod, Anna and the Tanks.
We had rain and started an hour late. I want to thank Doug Butler who skipped his set to put us back on schedule. Doug will be playing at Blues Fest on Sunday, September 29.
Doug is carrying the load putting on Blues Fest. I help how I can with scheduling and promotion but I'm too old to do all the work that's involved.
I shot video of all the acts. Here's the Bebop Beatniks video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6-LYX4YDnU
As I get the other videos done I will post them on Delta Boogie and send out links in next months newsletter.
https://deltaboogie.com
We did get to talk to Joe Gordon at the Arkansas Roots stage. He's a fantastic bass player who helped us many times at Blues Fest.
I want to mention Reyzadren who joined G+DBN. He's into music and gaming just like me. If you're on the fediverse with Mastodon, Pixelfed, Peertube, etc. you can contact Reyzadren here.
@reyzadren@gamerplus.org
And if you're not on Mastodon I encourage you to join Gamer+ aka G+DBN here.
https://gamerplus.org
Please forward this email to your friends and share this link.
https://home.gamerplus.org/permalink.php?fname=Delta_Boogie_Newsletter-Gamerplus_News_-_October_2024_-_Blues_Fest.txt
Let me know what you've been doing. Do you have new music? Have you been playing any games? I want to spread the word on Gamer+, Delta Boogie, and in this newsletter.
I hope to see you at Blues Fest.
Thanks,
Hairy Larry
@hairylarry@gamerplus.org - my address on G+DBN
https://gamerplus.org/deck/@hairylarry - my G+DBN link
hairylarry@deltaboogie.com - email is the best way to contact me
And here's my Pixelfed and Peertube info. Pixelfed is great for images. Peertube for videos.
Pixelfed address
@hairylarry@pixelfed.social
Pixelfed Link
https://pixelfed.social/hairylarry
Peertube Link
https://makertube.net/a/hairylarry/video-channels
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Posted on 2024-09-23
Bebop Beatniks
KASU Arkansas Roots Stage At Beatles Park
Beatles At The Ridge Festival
Walnut Ridge, Arkansas
September 21, 2024
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6-LYX4YDnU
Songs
---
00:00 01 Low Earth Orbit
09:27 02 Yesterday
15:30 03 Summertime
23:34 04 Georgia
32:20 05 Malaysia
Personnel
---
Paul Lessard - alto sax
Jeremy Jackson - bass
Alex Washam - drums
Hairy Larry - pianos, vocals
kasu.org
bebopbeatniks.com
hairylarryland.com
Network With Hairy Larry
deltaboogie.net
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Greg Skaff-Polaris
Posted on 2024-09-21
Something Blue - Nights
https://sbblues.com/2024/09/21/night-2/
This is Hairy Larry inviting you to enjoy Something Blue every Saturday night at ten. This week we’re featuring Erroll Garner, Caprice, Greg Skaff, and Matana Roberts. For more about the show visit the Something Blue website at sbblues.com.
Don’t miss Something Blue, Saturday night at 10:00 PM CST, at kasu.org. Or listen now at the link above.
Erroll Garner - The Complete Concert By The Sea
https://www.errollgarner.com/
Greg Skaff - Polaris
https://gregskaff.com/
Matana Roberts - The Chicago Project
https://www.matanaroberts.com/
Caprice - From Dawn Til Dusk
https://njhb.bandcamp.com/album/from-dawn-til-dusk
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