Brave Combo is 26-year-old (!) “hot jazz quintet, a rollicking rock’n'roll bar band, a Tex-Mex conjunto, a sizzling blues band, a saucy cocktail combo, a deadly serious novelty act, a Latin orchestra, and one of America’s dance bands par excellence.”  [see their bio page] But they kick ass for many other reasons, too.

For those of you with short attention spans, fine… you can skip the rest of my brilliant commentary and go directly to Brave Combo’s music. 
A variety “dozen sampler”(tm) I recommend:  Breslau, Canto a la salsa, Down at the Friendly Tavern, High Bounce Polka, Hokey Pokey, My Tears are Nothing, No Work Today, Spaghetti Twist and Twirl, Swing it Baby Swing, The Hustle, Three Ducks Ondo, Waltz in C Minor,

Aside from the fact that this band is made up of great musicians that play a huge variety of contagiously fun music, it’s damn cool that they’ve made decent-quality one-minute segments of a ton of their songs available on the Web, no?  In fact, their Web site is informative, entertaining, and pretty comprehensive—a sad rarity for band sites, IMHO.

Here are other things that highlight why Brave Combo is an amazingly kick-ass band:

I grew up with snakes.  A Burmese Python named, appropriately enough, “Julius Squeezer.”  Lots of harmless king snakes and gopher snakes and more.

You see, my dad (a biology teacher) was friends with a herpetologist, and the two of them would often conduct hands-on educational seminars around the area to help people understand that snakes are our friends, not something to be feared nor chopped up with a garden shovel.  My dad and his friend also helped out the local sheriff by being part of what I called “The Snake Patrol”—comprised of environmentalist folks who’d go out to a house where some person—who had moments ago called 911 or whatever screaming incoherenantly about a deadly snake—was about ready to take drastic, lethal action against a harmless baby king snake or whatnot.  My dad would go out there, put the snake in a pillowcase, and release it into the wild. 

One time, alas, it was too late.  The frantic woman, who had spotted what she KNEW was a deadly snake outside by her trash cans, could hold off no longer.  About ten minutes before my dad arrived, she had repeatedly bisected the critter.  The purely rubber critter I might add.  Methinks that snake wasn’t posing all that much of a threat, eh?

As part of all these efforts, my dad would sometimes temporarily bring snakes to our home, where I got to hold them and learn that they weren’t slimy or (generally) deadly or even venemous.

Plus snakes eat things like wild rats, which are generally NOT our friends when they’re carrying diseases into our homes.

Microsoft Access is for masochists.  It’s expensive, a pain to learn, and—frankly—quite overkill for nearly any home application.

So, for too long, folks like myself have kept lists in Excel.  This works… sort of.  But it’s a pain to share, and it lacks a lot of the usefully-database’y features that make working with data multidimensionally both useful and fun.

For instance, I’m trying to keep track of where I’ve traveled around the world, what sets of pictures I’ve taken, where those pictures reside (online, in photo albums, etc.), who I have yet to share them with, and so on.  I *could* do lots of messy filtering and sorting on Excel as I try to handle related action items, but a database (featuring multiple persistent views) would be so much easier!

Well… dabbledb and Zoho Creator to the rescue!  Below I’ll talk about my initial experiences using both services, some advantages I perceive in each, and I’ll also demo my first “app”—a filterable/sortable list of movies I’ve seen and want to see (all 217 of them so far!)

First, a quick note to those SEOs who are still reading my blog hoping for detailed Google search-related tidbits.  It’s still unlikely.  If I ever do post nuggets of search wisdom here, I’m sure you’ll hear about it .  With that said, Google is moving ahead to improve communications, both internally and externally; I recently enjoyed visiting and discussing Search Quality issues with Googlers in Berlin and Dublin and also had a great time meeting with folks at the London Search Engine Strategies Conference.  Photos online soon, I hope!  And yes, we’re further extending the coolness of Sitemaps and related Webmaster tools, improving documentation, and much more. 

Okay, enough about that, though.

I wanted to bring back the musicness of my blog and so today I’m featuring a catchy tune by my friend Tat Tong… a lousy Webmaster (sorry, Tat) but a fine musician and award-winning sound recording engineer.

The short song below, Revocation, was composed, arranged, and sung entirely by Tat.
NOTE: Broadband connection required.  Sorry, I’m not dealing with bandwidth detection and uploading multiple / inferior clips anymore.

At Tat’s recording studio Web site, you can hear more of his recording work and learn about the awards he’s garnered.

I got a free ticket to go see the movie Da Vinci Code and while it won’t say it was worth what I paid for it… well, it wasn’t worth a lot more than that, either.

The movie in a word:  Joyless.

I can count the number of times the characters smiled on one hand.
I can count the number of times I smiled on probably one or two fingers.

I haven’t read the book, but judging from my reactions to this movie and the 7th-grade-level writing abilities I slogged through in one of Dan Brown’s other books, I can’t say I’ll be clamoring to read the Da Vinci Code anytime soon.

Things I *did* like about the movie:

I’m a member of some of those all-you-can-eat, er, all-you-can-listen-to online music services and I’m constantly amazed at the fun and beautiful music I stumble across.  Once, on a goofy whim, I did a search for the string “Chicken” and found a shockingly cool selection of funk, pop, and jazz songs.  More recently, I did a search on “waltz” since I’ve grown increasingly enamored with this music and dance form.

One of the beautiful songs that cropped up was First Impressions, featured on the album “Appalachia Waltz” with cellist virtuoso Yo-Yo Ma.  You can hear a sample by clicking on the player below and can enjoy other serene and joyful songs and learn more about the album on this Amazon.com page.

This simply-structured and sensitively-performed song packed an emotional punch for me, just as so many other songs have done in the past.  And this got me to thinking:  What is it about the instrumentation and orchestration of songs that moves me… and moves so many millions of others?  I’m not even taking into account lyrics here, which involve a whole different (albeit related) issue.  Just the sounds.

 

I haven’t had a chance to watch more than the first few minutes of this film, but Waterborne has been generally well-reviewed… and you can watch it for free either below or directly on Google’s site through January 15, 2006.

Rather than spoil even part of the plot, I’ll instead invite you to begin watching it now without preconceptions, with a note that it’s a serious film focusing on characters rather than explosive action.

 

Last night I had the pleasure of attending the final dress rehearsal for Palo Alto's Theatre Works' performance of Into the Woods. It was a thoroughly professional, impressive, and magical performance and if you're in (or can get to) the Bay Area, I urge you to get tickets for it right now.

Lots of you probably know I'm a techno-geek. But did you know I'm a music 'n' theatre-obsessed geek?

Well, I have lots... LOTS... on my mind about theatre stuff, but for now I'll just subject you to some random musings. Hope you don't mind.

After all the serious posts about geek stuff, I figured it was time to throw in a bit of levity again. So here's a sample I've lovingly clipped from The Blender's "Aunt Sue's Ant Soup." Click the little play button below to hear it (Flash and a broadband connection required)



[Did this stream nicely for you? Please let me know in the comments below!]

Here's a bit about this song and the group behind it... plus -- I know you're craving this -- the full lyrics I insanely transcribed in a fit of insomnia last night.