andy's blog

Feeding the Bow Tie Habit

andy — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 15:15:47 +0000

In late 2007, I decided that I wanted to get my hands on a bow tie. Not the cheesy, pre-tied clip-on thing you’d get with a rental tux or a movie theater usher uniform, but an actual tie-it-yourself bow tie. I saw a gentleman wearing one at a conference and I thought it looked pretty sharp, so I started keeping an eye out for bow ties.

Here’s the thing: they are rare as hen’s teeth in brick and mortar stores. Oh, people still wear them, but apparently not in sufficient numbers for it to be worth stores to stock them. Gentleman’s Wearhouse had a very small selection the last time I was there, but two years ago I had to resort to Ebay to get my hands on my first self-tie, or “freestyle” bow tie.

I was hooked immediately. I’ve always hated four-in-hand ties, which never made any sense to me as a garment; all they do is flap around in the wind and fall into your soup. Neckwear in general is really sort of a stupid convention for which we have 17th century Croatian mercenaries to thank, but at least bow ties remain true to their functional origins. They stay out of your way, and they look dapper if you wear them with the right attitude (“I’m wearing this because I think it looks sharp,” not “Hey, look at me! I’m that bow tie guy!”)

Freestyle bow ties are readily available online. Beau Ties Ltd has many wonderful designs, and makes fine ties (I own one and lust after many more of their offerings) but they are pricey. There are several vendors on Etsy who make nice bow ties for a little bit less, but still, $25 for a garment I’m only going to wear a few times a year is not an expense I can easily justify. I’ve gotten compulsive about looking for bow ties in thrift stores as well, but in two years of searching I’ve only had one find.

I’d been meaning to get my wife to give me a sewing machine hands-on for years, and last weekend it finally happened. Yesterday I picked up some cotton fabric and fusible interfacing. I made a pattern from one of my favorite ties, and managed to make myself a passable bespoke bow tie; I don’t have any sliders yet, so it’s fixed-length for my 16.5”ish neck. For a grand total of about $3.75 in materials, with enough fabric left over to make several more ties and/or a matching pocket square. Clearly, I’m onto something. Granted, silk yardage will be more expensive, but if I turn this into a cottage industry perhaps I can at least fund my own habit… and with Spoonflower, the sky is the limit.

If you’re interesting in doing this sort of thing yourself, BurdaStyle has one of the better bow tie patterns and instruction sets I’ve found online.

Update 2010-03-04
I just made another tie using the BurdaStyle pattern above, and I found it to be very short even when adjusted to full length — 16.5” isn’t particularly huge for a neck size, is it? Your mileage may vary. Next time I’ll just use the longer half of the pattern for both pieces of the tie.

Update 2010-03-06 I had another go with the BurdaStyle pattern last night, using the longer half of the pattern for both pieces of the tie, and although this one fits me fine, there’s still not a lot of room left for adjustment. I’d add another few inches to the adjustable half if I were going to sell these.

Camptown Hornpipe: Minstrel Banjo Tablature

andy — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 14:50:39 +0000

Since getting my gourd banjo the other week, I’ve been exploring some old minstrel tunes, played in the so-called “stroke style.” The Banjo Factory’s scans of Briggs’ Banjo Instructor from 1855 are an amazing resource, and I’ve already plugged a few into Tabledit.

If you’re not familiar with the tune, here’s Tim Twiss’ fine rendition on YouTube:

Attachment	Size
Camptown_Hornpipe.pdf	42.83 KB
Camptown_Hornpipe.tef	936 bytes

Cluck Old Hen

andy — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 23:55:15 +0000

An old-time chestnut played on my new Jeff Menzies gourd banjo. No frets + nylon strings will take some getting used to!

Vinyl

andy — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 00:32:54 +0000

vinyl
Originally uploaded by Usonian

My brother kindly gifted me an old Garrard GT12 turntable a while back, and this week I finally got hold of a new cartridge plus up a few albums to tide me over until I get my own old stash out of whatever closet it’s hiding in at our parents’ house.

There is nothing to compare to the physicality of vinyl records, both the discs themselves and all those gorgeous big sleeves… cover art used to be such a big part of the overall package. It’s been about 20 years since I had my own turntable… how I’ve missed it!

The new Audio Technica AT92E cartridge sounds great, but there’s noticable wow in the playback - time to hunt down a replacement belt too.

Chords Module Changes Afoot

andy — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 14:50:10 +0000

Last night I decided to get more familiar with CCK and Views integration by way of rebuilding the Chords module, which is functional in its current state but doesn’t do much.

So, I’ve begun work on Chords 2 for Drupal 6. Major architectural changes:

The original module has been split into two:
- The Chords API module provides basic functionality around calculating and rendering chords (and keeps the original module namespace)
- The Chords UI module contains the simple chord builder tool from the original module.
- New modules are on the way:
- A Chords Field module will provide a new CCK Chord field and some useful formatters
- A Chords Views module may provide Views 2 integration, if Chords Field doesn’t cover it.

I know better than to state a timetable, as these things have a way of languishing when other shiny objects catch my interest. However, if you’re interested in playing with the latest and greatest code, check out the CVS HEAD.

It Only Took 12 Years

andy — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 16:39:36 +0000

It Only Took 12 Years
Originally uploaded by Usonian

Back in 1998, I became a docent at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis House in Los Angeles. I built the first proper web site for the house, and as a token of appreciation I was given this block tile - while not a reproduction of the actual blocks used for construction, it’s a full-size, fully accurate representation of the pattern repeated throughout the house.

This thing has spent the last 12 years leaning in various places - mostly in dusty corners and occasionally on shelves, and I’m quite pleased to finally have a place to hang it.

I’m still obsessed with Wright’s textile block houses. I swear I’m going to build a folly using the technique someday.

Some Masonic Terminology Explained

andy — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 17:41:37 +0000

I just killed most of a Saturday morning responding to some comments on a Flickr photo, and because the points I was responding to come up again and again in discussions about Freemasonry among people who don’t know much about it, I’m reposting my slightly edited comments here.

The first point of confusion in the original discussion is a common one, even among Masons. In a Masonic lodge, the honorific title for the Master is ‘Worshipful.’ Masonophobes absolutely love to foam at the mouth about the phrase “Worshipful Master”, because of course it must prove that the Masons are some kind of weird cult religion who literally worship their Master.

In fact, the term “Worshipful” is simply an archaic English honorific, and has nothing to do with worship in a religious sense. Indeed, the title ‘Worshipful’ is still used for Mayors in the U.K. but for some reason you never read incoherent rants about how towns in England all worship their Mayors. Masonic ritual and tradition does change slowly over the years, but much of the language hasn’t changed much since the 17th/18th century. There are a great many words in Masonic ritual that you don’t hear used much in the 21st century, and more Masons and non-Masons alike would do well to take the time to actually look them up, instead of simply reciting them without knowing what they mean.

Similarly, there is much confusion over the Masonic phrase, “The Great Architect of the Universe.”

In Masonic ritual, the “Great Architect of the Universe” is simply a symbolic construct, not a deity specific to Freemasonry; if you’re a Christian, the Great Architect is your Christian God. If you’re a Muslim, the Great Architect is Allah… and if you don’t subscribe to any specific religion but believe that there is some kind of guiding presence behind the existence of the universe, that’s ok too.

Most US lodges generally have a Christian Bible on the altar during meetings, by virtue of the fact that most members (in the US) are Christian. However, candidates of other faiths take their obligations on the Volume of Sacred Law specific to their own religion, and in larger, metropolitan lodges where there might be members of several different religions, it’s not uncommon to see several religious texts on the altar together.

“Volume of Sacred Law” is just another symbolic construct for the idea that a man should observe his own faith according to the guidelines of its religious text. Those whose personal faith might not have a religious text are intelligent and open-minded enough to understand and appreciate the concept, and don’t object to the use of the Bible or any other religious text, understanding that it’s all representative of a universal truth.

In general, Masonic ritual is all about symbolism… but people get hung up on interpreting Masonic concepts literally and love to quote things out of context.

One of the single most appealing things about Freemasonry is the idea that you can gather with other good men regardless of their religious or political leanings, for the common goal of improving your own character, and by extension, improving your community. That’s why fundamentalist religions (and the Vatican, and many dictatorships throughout history) get so frothed up about Freemasonry; the idea that somebody else’s concept of God or their political ideas are perfectly valid and OK is usually at odds with their agenda.

All of which is fine - if your politics or the tenets of your faith prohibit membership in Freemasonry, all that means is that you can’t join. Freemasonry has no reciprocal attitude or agenda. Unfortunately, people with axes to grind take it a step further and make up all kinds of nonsense about the fraternity.

This Country is Broken

andy — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 15:45:19 +0000

…America went off the track somewhere - back around the time of the Civil War, or pretty soon afterwards. Instead of going ahead and developing along the line in which the country started out, it got shunted off in another direction - and now we look around and see we’ve gone places we didn’t mean to go. Suddenly we realize that America has turned into something ugly—and vicious—and corroded at the heart of its power with easy wealth and graft and special privilege…. And the worst of it is the intellectual dishonesty which all this corruption has bred. People are afraid to think straight—afraid to face themselves—afraid to look at things and see them as they are.

We’ve become a nation of advertising men, all hiding behind catch phrases like ‘prosperity,’ and ‘the American way.’ And the real things like freedom, and equal opportunity, and the integrity and worth of the individual—things that have belonged to the American dream since the beginning—they have become just words too. The substance has gone out of them—they’re not real anymore… -Thomas Wolfe

iTunes favorites mix tape generator: Now with more Entropy

andy — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 20:25:17 +0000

Last summer I devised an AppleScript to generate a fixed-length, one track per-artist iTunes playlist. This worked pretty well, but I’ve been using this script long enough and frequently enough that I started to notice that my supposedly random playlists contained clumps of tracks that had all been played on the same date a few months ago, as though my previous random playlists were just getting recycled into new ones.

So I added some additional logic to enforce a one track per artist, one track per-date rule - no more clustered tracks.

The updated script also contains a couple of other niceties:

It tells iTunes to focus (in case you’re running the script via some sort of launcher like Quicksilver)
It presents you with a choice of durations.

The next logical iteration would be additional interface allowing you to select source and destination playlists, but I haven’t gotten irked enough by that problem to solve it yet.

-- Mix Tape iTunes playlist generator -- by Andy Chase | http://andychase.net -- January 11, 2010

tell application "iTunes" to activate tell application "iTunes" set theSmartPL to playlist "Unrecent Alt/Rock Faves" set theDumbPL to playlist "Unrecent Faves Cassette"

set cassetteLengths to {30, 45, 60, 74, 90, 120}

set theDuration to 60 * {choose from list cassetteLengths with title "Cassette Length" default items {45} without multiple selections allowed}

set allArtists to {}
set allDates to {}

delete every track of theDumbPL

set selectedTracks to every track of theSmartPL

repeat with aTrack in selectedTracks

    if (the duration of theDumbPL ? theDuration) then

        set theArtist to the artist of aTrack
        set theDate to the played date of aTrack
        set theDateString to the date string of theDate
        if (theArtist is not in allArtists and ((duration of aTrack) + (duration of theDumbPL)) ? theDuration and theDateString is not in allDates) then
            duplicate aTrack to theDumbPL
            set end of allArtists to theArtist
            set end of allDates to theDateString
        end if

    end if
end repeat

set the shuffle of theDumbPL to true
reveal theDumbPL
play theDumbPL

end tell

Attachment	Size
Flip Unrecent Faves Cassette.scpt	7.03 KB

Ship in the Clouds: Clawhammer Banjo Tablature

andy — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 03:20:58 +0000

This tune was on my must-learn list a few years ago, and then slipped out of consciousness until I got obsessed with it a few days ago. It’s a crooked tune; the A part has six measures, the B part has 7 measures, and it’s typically played in an ABB pattern instead of the usual AABB. Download in TablEdit or PDF format below.

Ship in the Clouds: Clawhammer Banjo Tablature by Andy Chase is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Attachment	Size
ShipInTheCloudsClawhammer.pdf	43.2 KB
ShipInTheCloudsClawhammer.tef	1002 bytes