A few well chosen words.
Everything I say on this page is about Frank Zappa as a guitar player. His qualities as a composer, and as a human being, are another topic entirely. Frank Zappa was a severely overrated guitar player. Sure, he had an amazing unique single note technique but that didn’t extend beyond an extended one chord vamp, Continue reading
Jon Forrest nobozo@gmail.com I have a pretty good knowledge of standard musical notation, left over from when I studied trumpet in high school. But, I have no knowledge of what modern musical notation programs can do. These days I no longer play the trumpet but I’ve become pretty good at playing guitar. In fact, I Continue reading
I ve been using Evernote for around 20 years. It s OK, but the product seems to be flailing these days. Plus, I was forced to become a paying user. That, in itself, is no sin but it motivated me to investigate alternatives. Meanwhile, I ve been reflecting on all the gigabytes of Google Drive storage space available Continue reading
I started with V6 Unix at UC Santa Barbara in 1977. I remember that when V7 came out, I learned about the make program and started using it with great success to help efficiently build a large Fortran package for signal processing. For its size, there was a lot of computing going on in Santa Continue reading
In the early 1980s I was the computer system manager at the Institute for Theoretical Physics (ITP) at the University of California Santa Barbara. ITP is the kind of place where people from all over the world come to work on hard physics problems. As you can imagine, a place like this could tumble into Continue reading
Recently an unusual coincidence happened to me when I finally got my act together to get a new pair of glasses. The glasses I had been wearing were starting to fall apart, but that was my own fault for mistreating them. I believe I had bought them from Zenni Optical ~3 years ago. (I could Continue reading
(I originally wrote this in 2003, and posted it to the comp.arch USENET group then. It generated a fair number of insightful comments which I ve attempted to incorporate into this new version). You might not know it, but the programs that run on your computer are actually divided into 2 sections. One section is where the instructions Continue reading
I went to college at UC Santa Barbara in the 70s. In the late 70s I had a girlfriend named Pam. She told me she had a couple of sisters who were in a garage band back in Los Angeles. I m from Los Angeles too, so I knew that this was nothing unusual. The fact Continue reading
[Note: I originally wrote this in the early 1990s so some of the references are dated. Nevertheless, the point I m trying to make is more valid now than ever.] The Forrest Curve Jon Forrest forrest@cs.berkeley.edu There is a phenomenon sweeping the computer industry that is having a profound but largely unrecognized effect. I claim that Continue reading
I have to wonder if the reason why so many of those pop music stars self-destruct is simply because they re not having any fun. In my travels through YouTube I ve come across a bunch of music being played with what looks and sounds like big fun. The musical quality is all over the place, but Continue reading