'Saw the Strawbs at the Little Fox last night.  Well, a more mobile acoustic version of the Strawbs; no drums, and no mellotrons, but with Chas Cronk, Dave Cousins and Dave Lambert, left to right in this photo from the show.

An amazing performance, a small but very appreciative audience, great sound, and of course a great venue.  Awesome renditions of my favorites "Benidictus", "Ghosts" and "Autumn".  And Dave Cousins provided the stories behind the songs.  And we got a chance to hang with the band afterwards a little, which was a blast.

The Strawbs haven't toured the west coast for roughly 30 years.  Yikes.

'Saw Richie Havens at the Little Fox in Redwood City last night.  (The photo is from the concert.)

I've been a big fan of his since I was very young, and I've been developing an even greater appretiation of Greenwich Village folk music in recent years.  Richie Havens doesn't get out here very often, and this was in fact the first time I'd seen him play.

He hasn't lost it.  A thoroughly wonderful performance.

Also, the Little Fox is an excellent venue for live music.  I'll be there tomorrow for the Strawbs.

This remarkable Stretch Double VW Vanagon has its home in my neighborhood.  It was built by Otmar Ebenhoech.

Sure, it looks great, but the really amazing thing is that it has both electric and gasoline motors.  Use the electric for running around town and use the gas motor for longer trips.  Better than your standard hybrid.

Of course he also charges the batteries with the photovoltaic cells on mounted on the roof of his house.

How cool is this?  It's the Conference Bike!

Do check out the little movie on the web page.

Progressive Rock has a reputation for using unusual time signatures and adventurous rhythms.  And there are some folks who are convinced that Progressive Rock is all about unusual time signatures without understanding that they've been around for a very long time.

Here is an mp3 of Pete Seeger's "Fly Through My Window", from the album Birds, Beasts, Bugs and Fishes, recorded around 1955.  My kids listen to this alot.  How's that for an impressive use of changing time signatures for a classic folkie?

Folk music actually has a long history of interesting rhythms, often freely adapting the rhythm of the song to the lyrics at hand.  If you check out the early Simon and Garfunkel albums you'll hear all sorts of interesting rhythmic variations such as bars with seemingly arbitrary numbers of beats.  I remember reading an interview with Paul Simon where he explained that the unusual rhythmic structures of his songs came naturally and that he was unaware of them as he wrote the songs, but he was forced to deal with them for the "rock band" arrangements with other instruments.

Some of you know that one of my favorite musical instruments, the Mellotron, was originally designed as a home entertainment device, typically installed in a family livingroom.

Here is an ancient promo film of the Mellotron featuring a couple British guys and a "Professional Piano Player".  (3.5 MBytes, Windows Media Player required.)

Don's quote of the day:

"I get my news from both Bill O'Reilly *and* Jon Stewart."

If you're like me and you look at a lot of patents... here's a tool I recently discovered for viewing and printing patents: http://www.pat2pdf.org

The USPTO (US Patent and Trademark Office, http://www.uspto.gov) has scanned images of all the US Patents available on line, as well as an online patent search database for all patents after 1976.

That's great, but all the patent scans are in TIFF format.  TIFF format is used by graphic artists, and is apparently what patent offices use to share scanned images internationally, but most browsers can't handle TIFF formatted images, or require a plugin to display the images, and the plugin may not print out the images very well.  The European Patent Office web site (http://ep.espacenet.com) displays patents in PDF format, but it only works a page a time.

pat2pdf solves this nicely.   You browse there, enter a patent number and it runs a little script that:

• looks up the patent
• downloads the TIFFs for each page
• converts and compiles them to a single PDF file
• downloads and displays the PDF file

Here, try it out on the recent Microsoft patent, US 6,754,472 "Method and Apparatus for Transmitting Power and Data Using the Human Body".

Or US 6,368,227 "Method of Swinging on a Swing" (!!!).