New Music Files #1

The other days I was surfing around in Spotify looking for cool bands I didn't know about when I hit the mother-load and found a couple of new bands that have since been dominating my playlists.   The first band I hit upon was the defunct "Ass Ponys" from Cincinnati.  Their catchy guitar riffs and dark and funny lyrics (See: Ball Peen) are great.   Then when looking at what the band members were doing now I found "Wussy" another Cincinnati band featuring Chuck Cleaver, guitarist and song writer from "Ass Ponys".   Here's Wussy playing one of their songs, "Pizzza King".  Chuck is my new favorite guitarist of the moment.

Last Resort

I cannot recall a TV show as schizophrenic feeling as ABC's military/political/corporate intrigue, love story, science-fiction, mystical island adventure series Last Resort.   It took Lost a long time to get as  tangled as Last Resort is after only a couple of episodes.  It's only missing vampires or zombies and  I wouldn't be surprised if they show up at some point.

It's been reasonably engaging but I'll need to find a thread to hang on to if I'm going to stick with it and so far none of the story lines have my full attention.  And for all the uniqueness of its premise it feels a bit too much like Lost. 

Other than Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, and Sea Lab 2021 I can't think of any other sub shows.  Am I missing any?

Root Note Studio

Just a quick post to plug my awesome guitar teacher Liz Lawrence of Root Note Studio in Lowell.   I've been taking lessons from Liz now for around 6 months and I've had a lot of fun and I've learned so much.  I'm just a beginner so I can't comment on her musical abilities much beyond that they seem magical to me but I can tell you she's a great teacher who makes learning fun and who constantly challenges me in ways that invariably improve my playing.

I take lessons once a week down at her teaching space in Whitesett Guitar Works on Market Street.  It's a cool and funky old industrial space that defies description.  Parking is easy enough, just make sure you have some change for the meters.

Highly recommended.

Android Libraries - When a Little Knowledge Kills

First post in a while but I thought this was worth dusting off the blog for.  So, I've been working on Android for nearly the last year and I've been enjoying applying my overall experience with Java and Eclipse to accelerate my team's productivity on the platform.  It's fun to know things.  But as the title of this post says sometimes it doesn't work out so well either.  Case in point, Android Libraries.  If you've worked with Java and Eclipse before I'm sure you're familiar with creating sub-projects for shared code.  It's easy, you create a jar project, add in the projects tab of the Classpath dialog of the project preferences. Easy-Peazzy-Lemon-Squeezy.  You can still do this with Android Library projects and things will compile and but you'll run into class loading issues when you run your code.  The solution is not use the standard Eclipse way of associating the library and instead go the Android tab of the project and add a reference to the Library project there.  That's easy too but if you're like me and think you know how to use Java and Eclipse it can take way too long to figure out.

TLDR: Don't use Eclipse standard methods for connecting libraries projects.  Use the Libraries list on the Android specific properties screen.