And then, after a horrible experience with free hosting, I moved the back end to my home server. Which was a problem, because I used dynamic DNS (which puts me on a subdomain automatically) and as far as I can tell, you can’t have a subdomain of a subdomain. Or at least, the way my DNS registrar played w/ DynDNS, I couldn’t get it to work.

So, the blog sort of moved to http://jaket.is-a-geek.com/blog. But I left the original address working. Actually, I forwarded all of jaketolbert.com to that address.

Well, the time has come to fix that up–I need to straighten things out, so listento.jaketolbert.com is going away. If you’re still subscribed there, you’ll need to change the address to jaketolbert.com/blog (or jaket.is-a-geek.com/blog–either will work since the former will just forward to the latter).

It’s going to take me a couple days to get it all straightened out (and for the DNS changes to shake out around the internet) but that at least lets you know what’s up in case you were still subscribed at the old spot. I’m changing the feedburner link now: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ListenTo so it’ll still be right…

Enjoy!

As it turns out, it’s a 2 chord song, so maybe you don’t need them, but here they are. Woody plays it in Cm, but I’m not man enough to play a Cm through a whole song (perhaps he capoed?) so I’ve got it here in Am.

 Am
Along in the sun and the rain
Along in the sun and the rain
Along, a long, a long long long
              Em           Am
Along in the sun and the rain
Hey, boys, I've come a long ways...

I seen a whole lot of things...

I kissed a whole lot of lips...

I've seen a lot of towns...

I've had a lot of fights...

I've shook a lot of hands...

I'm gonna get my job done...

Clamping, or Perhaps Smashing

Here, I’m clamping the 3rd side on (the other long/tall side). Note that I’m using a cinder block on top of a scrap to exert downward pressure, since I’m using all my other clamps to do extert force in other places.

Putting the Bottom On

Remember how I said that you don’t have to worry about getting everything exactly square because it’ll all square itself up? Well, here’s where that happens. As it turns out, I was pretty close, but things were awful tight, so I couldn’t just put the bottom in place.

I actually had to slide it down from the top and, in fact, use a rubber mallet to tap it in to place. This resulted in a lot of glue getting pushed around, but all in all, it was a fairly tight fit.

And here’s a pic of clamping that. I didn’t use the cinder block on this one because it’s so much shorter than the other sides–if I set the cinder block on a scrap, most of the weight would be distributed on the other sides rather than the one side I cared about.

So I used one vertical clamp. Which wasn’t enough, but it was all I had.

This is by far the hardest piece to effectively clamp, since you can’t get on the inside. However, as I mentioned before, even without the glue, it’s still all really tight in there, so I don’t think it’s going anywhere.

After this all dries, I’ll be doing a bit of finishing work: sanding off any parts that aren’t exactly square, filling in any gaps with putty, and maybe even running a saw along an edge or two of the front–I want the tapa to fit on perfectly flush all the way around.

But we’ll get to that later.

All steps

We’ve already covered cutting things out and gluing internal bracing, so now we’re ready for step 3: gluing the sides and tops on.

Remember that we’re going to put the top (which you sit on) and the bottom (what sits on the floor) on the outside, sandwiching the back and the sides (the tapa, or front that you bang on, will go on last and isn’t structural).

Glue on the top

Like we did with the braces, we’re going to use wood glue and clamps to glue everything down. If your cuts are square, you should end up with largely square joints, as the sides get clamped not only to each other, but to the braces which sit at right angles to them.

With that in mind, don’t worry too much about this joint being square. If it’s not, it’ll square up once we get everything else in there (again, assuming your cuts are, for the most part, square).

Glue on the sides

After you glue on the top (again, that’s really the top in the geometric sense–the part you sit on), glue on the sides, one at a time.

Above, you can see how I’ve clamped the first side. You’ll want to do as much clamping as humanly possible–the more you can pull the side you’re gluing close to the brace and the side to which you’re gluing it, the tighter the joint will be, which translates into a tighter sound (and a better look).

After I do this side, I’ll do the other side, and then do the bottom after that. Unlike the sides, it’s really difficult to clamp the bottom, as there’s no way to get clamps on the inside to push the internal brace up against the buttom–you can only use bar clamps to push the two sides together (there might be some fancy way to do this using luthier/woodcraft know-how–I won’t be using it).

I’ll try to post more pics once the whole structure is put together (the back, sides, top and bottom). After that, it’s on to putting in the braces for the tapa.

All steps

Oh, did I mention, we’re not using any screws in this thing (except in the top/face/head/side-that-you-bang-on)? It’s 100% wood glue all the way.

With that in mind, and for that matter, even if we WERE going to use screws, we want something more substantial inside for the facing pieces to attach to.

So we’re going to use bits of 1x1s. Or whatever we can find in the scrap bin, assuming it’s got at least one flat, preferably two flat edges.

You can see in the pic below that I’ve got all my braces cut and laid out. These don’t have to be measured out exact–in fact, I make an effort to make sure I DON’T cut these the same length as the sides so that the braces don’t bump into each other.

If you’re really concerned about strength, I suppose you’d make these all fit up next to each other perfectly. And they’d all interlock and the thing would be able to withstand a 10 story fall.

As it is, it’s going to be plenty strong, so I cut the braces short so I don’t get part way through and find out that I don’t have room to fit the back onto the top because the braces are in the way of each other.

Also note: the braces that will go around the top/face/place-you-bang-on (ok, in the interest of not having to type that again, I looked it up and apparently the proper name for this piece is tapa so that’s what I’m calling it from now on) are supposed to be hardwood. I assume this is because you’re using screws (you want to be able to vary how attached the tapa is) and you want to make sure they won’t pull out when you start whacking on it.

You’re going to have to go the store on this one and buy some hardwood dowels. I think I got a couple 5/8″ dowels or something like that–they were $2.50 each, which seems steep to me. Good luck finding this stuff in the dumpster–almost all lumber, including MOST trim is pine.

Then again, you only need (2) 2′ pieces and (2) 10–12″ pieces, so if you’re lucky you might be able to find some nice oak trim scraps (maybe out of some old cabinets? who knows). I didn’t include these braces in the pic since I’ll be putting them in later (and differently).

Step 2b: Glue the braces

Once you get your braces cut, you want to glue them in. You want them glued in first so the piece you glue in has something secure to grab on to. But that’s a problem because you’ve got to leave room for the piece that you’re not yet ready to glue to go.

So I made a little jig. It’s just a small scrap of my 3/4″ plywood left over from sawing, screwed tightly to another piece of wood that’s, for the most part, straight.

When I’m ready to glue a brace on to the top (or wherever), I simply stand the jig up on the top, with the 1x2 hanging off. This keep the 3/4″ scrap flush with the edge of the top. Then I lay down my glue and press the brace up next to the jig (see below–in the pic, I’ve left the brace away from the jig just a bit to make it easier to see what’s going on).

Hold it by hand for a few seconds, then remove the jig and clamp, wiping off any glue that oozes out. Let that sit over night and move on to your next piece (unless you’ve got more clamps than me, in which case, do as many as you want as fast as you want!).

Don’t forget to do something about any metal clamps you might be using. It’s not a big deal if they dent the braces–those are on the inside of the box and won’t ever bee seen again. But the outside (what looks like the bottom in the picture above) may very well be the most visible spot on the whole drum, so throw something between your clamps and the wood.

And that wraps up Step 2!

All steps

Recently, I realized I’ve still got a lot of materials left over so I thought I’d build another one for myself, and this time, document the process.

My objective was to build something on the cheap–the majority of the stuff I’m using I already had, either in my scrap bin or as left overs from the last build project. I ended up buying most of the wood, but if I had more time, would have scoured construction site dumpster for the stuff I needed.

You don’t need a lot of wood–I’m sure if you’re patient, you could find whatever you needed in better quality than what I used.

Step 1: Cut the frame

For the outside frame (but not the “head”/face of the drum), you want the thickest nicest plywood you can afford/find.

I used 3/4″ pressboard. Using pressboard is a musical no-no, but a 4x8 sheet with one broken corner was about 4 times cheaper, at the lumberyard, than 3x4 sheet of good stuff, so I went with it.

The cajon I’m building is 2′ tall, 10″ deep and 14″ wide.

So I cut out 5 pieces:

• Top: 14″ x 10″
• Bottom: 14″ x 10″
• Back: 22½” x 10″
• Side 1: 22½” x 13¼”
• Side 2: 22½” x 13¼”

So the idea is that the top and bottom are the most outside pieces. The back and sides sit between them. And the sides butt up to the back (the back is just as wide as the top/bottom), which is why they’re smaller.

That’s Step 1–pretty simple.

All steps

Ok, in all fairness, I’m overstating the author’s argument. He never once said “bigot” or “small-minded.” He did, however, say a lot of things like:

But why would you want your kids to grow up with the same way of life as you and your grandparents? My best guess (and let me stress guess) is that those low in openness depend emotionally on a sense of enchantment of the everyday and the profundity of ritual. Even a little change, like your kids playing with different toys than you did, comes as a small reminder of the instability of life over generations and the contingency of our emotional attachments. This is a reminder low-openness conservatives would prefer to avoid, if possible.

Unstated here, is the author’s incredulity that someone would (could?) find “a sense of enchantment of the everyday and the profundity of ritual.”

That someone could be incredulous that daily ritual and long-seated tradition can be meaningful and important seems strangely ignorant, even for someone who claims to be “liberal.”

I’ll be the last to defend the saccrine sentimentality of modern country music, which I find emotionally manipulative and artistically shallow. However, the art I create with my band is specifically crafted to honor this sort of routine and tradition WITHOUT the sentimentality, to remind us of the good things our grandparents and their parents did, without tugging at heartstrings, and to teach us to open not JUST to new experience, but to OLD experience as well, which I think liberal people (myself included) are largely bad at internalizing.

And perhaps, this is what troubles me most about this article: while touting openness to new experiences as one his primary values, the author sets up a false dichotomy between old and new experiences, where the cannot be synthesized.

In fact, I think it’s only when we can honor the tradition of which we’re a part while including new experiences and ideas that we can be truly progressive. Anything less than that involves lying to ourselves about our identities, convincing ourselves that we aren’t who we actually are and aren’t influenced by the things that have surrounded us all our lives.

I started working at Millikin a little over a year ago. What I do is hard to define: it’s not IT, but it’s geeky. I work for the Alumni Office, as part of the Communications and Services team. I oversee our section of the database, although, not directly–I’m responsible for business practices and the staff that does day-to-day entry. Plus web communication, social media, reporting and being the department’s liason to IT.

Overall, it’s a great job, but it’s not the kind of thing you can put in a standard form: it’s not IT; it’s not communications; it’s not fund-raising. It’s somewhere in between all of those.

And as it turns out, this is a huge relief.

A few years ago, I was a campus minister. That was the primary definition of who I was: my job. After that, I worked in marketing. And I never really felt at home there, because I never really considered myself a “marketer” (or marketing guru or marketing exec or any other ridiculous title). Even thought that was my job, I never felt comfortable with it defining my identity, even though, most of the time, I felt like it did.

Now, my job doesn’t fit into any neat boxes. I’m not a “campus minister” nor do I “work in marketing.”

I’m not even “in IT.”

And it’s really freeing–now, I can consider myself a father and a Christian and a musician and a poet. I might not be particularly good at any of those things, but they’re labels I relate to, regardless of whether or not I’m making a living at them.

Which brings me to the most interesting question of this all: why DO we tend to define ourselves by our jobs? and define others the same way? Is this an American thing (I’ve picked up vague rumblings online that it is; but I don’t have any way of quantifying or showing that empirically). And more importantly, how does this sort of mindset, where we define ourselves primarily by our jobs, inform our lives a Christians and how (un?)healthy is it?

I could have edited it all out, but it would have been really time consuming–the CMS I’m using had each one in its own element–so I needed a quicker, more programmatic way to deal with it.

I needed to replace text within a bunch of elements using a regular expression.

To do it, I used a bit of jQuery magic:

$('span').html( function (foo,oldhtml) {
var content = oldhtml.replace(/\(.*\)/gi,"");
return content;
});


To walk through this:

$('span').html( function (foo,oldhtml) {


Here we get all the html/code inside each span. Then we open a function with foo as the index (no clue what this means, it’s just what the documentation says) and oldhtml is a variable that lets us manipulate what used to be in there.


var content = oldhtml.replace(/\(.*\)/gi,"");


Here, we make content a new variable and use replace and a regular expression that looks for anything that’s in parenthesis and removes it. The .replace function is a regular Javascript function, not any fancy jQuery nonsense.

Of important note here: the regular expression does NOT go in quotes, but the “replace it with this” string does. Also, you have to escape the parenthesis because if you don’t, you end up grouping.

The rest of the code just dumps out the new, manipulated string; and because we’re using the html() function, the returned string is what ends up as the contents of the original selected span.

Got that? Good.

I enjoy it, but one that’s always drove me crazy–if the web app serves up a .csv, but labels the extension as .txt or serves up a .tsv (ie. tab-seperated) and calls it .txt or .csv or any sort of mismatch like that, you get an annoying error, something like:

The file you are trying to open is in a different format than specified by the file extension…

Here’s how to turn that stupid error off (courtesy of msdn.com):

Basically, you have to add a new key to the registry (open regedit.exe and browse to the right spot, see below. Note: on my computer, I had to put it in …/Excel/14.0/.… instead of 12, because I have the next version up, whatever it is (Office 2011?)

• Location: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Excel\Security
• Create a new key:
  • type: 32 bit DWORD
  • name: ExtensionHardening
  • value: 0 = Disable check; 1 = Enable check and prompt; 2 = Enable check, no prompt deny open

By default (ie. if they key doesn’t exist), the value is set to 1. Translation: it’s always going to ask you.

Create that key, restart Excel and you should be good to go!