If you haven’t heard of Lili Hayden, then let me have the honor of introducing you to one of the most talented musicians I’ve come across in a long time.  Classically trained (she played with the LA Philharmonic at the age of 15) she has several solo albums including Lili (1997), Light Blue Sun (2003), Goodbye Stranger (2007) and her latest Places Between Places (2008). It is on this album that she performs a cover of “Maggot Brain“.  If you are now saying to yourself – “Maggot What?” – then I have the pleasure of introducing you to a guitar rock classic. If you are already familiar with Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain then bear with me; you already know and understand that this song must be given it’s time in the limelight.

Maggot Brain was released in 1971 by the band Funkadelic. It was performed by Eddie Hazel and, as legend has it, George Clinton (who can be seen dancing and clapping in the video above), told Hazel to imagine that he had been told that his mother was dead, but it wasn’t true. Now there’s an odd piece of producer creativity. The result is a 10 minute guitar solo. It was recorded in one take and Clinton actually faded down the other band members as Hazel’s performance began to build steam. I’m sure as that track was being laid, somewhere in England David Gilmour sat up in bed and thought, “Holy Crap – that’s how it’s done!” Anyway, it’s a great song. If you haven’t heard the original by all means buy it, download it, steal it, whatever it takes. I may even post it here some day.

But back to Lili. She does thing with a violin that I never thought was possible. Ok, that didn’t come out right. How about she plays the violin really, really, really well.

The track on Places Between Places was recorded in a studio. In the video above she is performing live with George Clinton. She plays with heart and passion and she absolutely rocks this song.

I told you we should have taken the Jagermeister from the giant lizard!

There may not have been a “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit” moment, although there was the incident where the IE 4 release team allegedly snuck out in the dark of night to put a giant “e” in front of Netscape’s headquarters in Mt. View, CA. The next morning the Netscape team promptly kicked it over and stuck their 12-foot mascot “Mozilla” on top of it. Geeks will be geeks.

It was also interesting that Microsoft had created a browser so entangled with the operating system that it could NEVER be uninstalled. Really? Do they have a thousand crack addicted monkeys coding in Redmond?

The second browser war (I’m not making this up, Wikipedia actually refers to this) was the painfully long rise of Firefox. Every web designer I know, including me, encourages everyone to use Firefox. Why? It’s not because we secretly hate Microsoft (well I do, but that’s a whole different story), but because Firefox has typically been more secure and a whole lot faster. It also tends to embrace standards a bit better, which we designers love.

But lately there has been some grumblings from the Firefox fan base. For starters, the latest release seems slow and (gasp!) bloated. Worse, many of the beloved web developer plug ins wouldn’t work on 3.6 (to be fair, I haven’t tried to update my development machine in a while so this may have been resolved).

At the same time Google has made major improvements with it’s browser Chrome. Now one would think that, in a very crowded market (Firefox,  Opera, Flock, Avant, SeaMonkey, Camino, Safari…let’s see did I leave any out…oh yeah! Internet Explorer), that we wouldn’t need yet another browser. But apparently we do and Chrome is rapidly eating into Firefox’s well established number two spot.

A bit of the Chrome screen

My first attempt at Chrome had me a bit puzzled. The programmers at Google broke the cardinal FEV rule. OK, there is no actual FEV rule, I just made that up…but since the dawn of browser time, there’s always been a “File, Edit, View…etc” menu. Chrome is kind of a blank slate and when you figure out that the address field (where you normally type http://mysite…etc) doubles as a search field, things move along quite nicely. Plus, Chrome launches uber-fast and seems to load pages faster as well. But best of all, it features a “sandbox” security feature that helps prevent malicious code from infecting your system. Microsoft announced that IE 8 now has this feature as well, but rumor has it that it only works in Windows 7.  And far be it from me to perpetuate rumors about Microsoft.

Chrome has a large library of extensions, not as many as Firefox, but it is rapidly growing – so for those plug in happy folks (you know who you are) there are plenty of ways to customize your Chrome experience.

So am I recommending Chrome to my clients? Maybe not just yet, but like all things Google, Chrome is worth keeping an eye on, even if it’s a wary one.

Why? Well, because I can. Because I lecture my clients about doing a blog to keep their sites fresh, the search engines interested and their customers engaged. Because I spend waaaaaay too much time in my office with no one to talk to. Way too much. I mean, when the dog gets up and leaves the room because, let’s face it – you’re dull, you know you have a problem. And this is a really, really loyal dog.

So what do I have to blog about? Well, first there are the typical rants (Rant Time). Like this little irritation: I am writing this in Open Office – a great, open source, free word processing program developed by Sun. So by definition (being open source, Sun Technologies, etc) it should be hip to the latest technical terms, right? Not so much. The word “blog” is not in the spell checker for Open Office. Really? Blog?

It does suggest these alternatives: log, slog, clog, flog b log, glob, bog, biog, bldg, blot, bloc, blob and blow. Yeah, that blows alright.

But I digress. By they way dear reader, I do that frequently. Kinda like a squirrel spotting a shiny new object.

Other topics to be covered include the “BS Alert!” where I blow the cover on slimy little scam artists out there fishing for money, data or whatever. My favorite targets are those letters that you receive announcing YOUR DOMAIN WILL BE LOST IF YOU DON’T RENEW IMMEDIATELY…at five or six times the market price. These rodents are not even your legitimate domain registrar. If you’ve received one of these letters, scan it and send it to me and if they’re not already on my list, I’ll add them.

I’ll also cover cool technology that I think is, well cool (Red Hot Tech Stuff), ways to help your site become found on this thing we call the World Wide Web (SEO Pointers), reviews of music, movies and other pop culture oddities (POP! Culture) and just general dribble (General). I’m sure I’ll add more categories over time. Hopefully I won’t have any more with explanation marks in the title.

What’s up with that?!