Don Xavier Cole’s birthday is today, and tomorrow it is Miles Davis’ birthday, which seems appropriate as they are both badass trumpet players. In fact, I can’t speak highly enough of Don in regards to his piano and trumpet playing, and his creativity because although the band shares song writing credit on most of our songs, it’s Don who frequently comes up with the chord progression or melody that sparks it off, or suggests a bridge or rhythmic device that is used more often than not.

In short, he’s AWESOME and we’re very lucky to have him as a major force in our band. A lot of our songs wouldn’t even exist without him. Here’s a photo of the preposterous monstrosity himself (BTW to be called a monster amongst the hep jazz cats is considered a compliment):

Curiously enough, the great guitar player Sonny Sharrock also died on Miles’s birthday (which is really weird considering he played with Miles on A Tribute to Jack Johnson, obviously NOT the Jack Johnson you’re probably thinking of). I only bring that up because our drummer Kent had frequently compared my playing to Sharrock’s before I had even heard of him, which I think is just a series of strange coincidences. But cool. And flattering.

Anyway Happy Bithday Don! (I can always remember Don’s birthday from a line in Rush’s Lakeside Park: “Everyone would gather on the 24th of May, sitting in the sand to watch the fireworks display”.

I think we are going to stop doing the BitTorrent thing for now until we see how this whole deal with the MPAA suing TorrentSpy for $110 million dollars plays out. Obviously, if the judgement stands up during the appeals process the MPAA is going to go after other BitTorrent trackers like sharks on a feeding frenzy. This will effectively shut them down, and only places like Pirate Bay that are located outside of the US and not subject to their laws will keep their doors open. And for a number of reasons I’m not going to go into here , I don’t like pirate bay and they’ve already been shut down twice. Plus, they’re not free and are facing legal battles too.

But that’s neither here nor there – my main objection isn’t the legality of BitTorrent, per se, but is more of a time issue: why should I spend (waste) time creating BitTorrents and uploading the seed .torrents if that entire house of cards is going to come crumbling down soon anyway?

Besides, with todays broadband speeds it only takes a few seconds to download one of our songs directly from our server anyway, and then our fans aren’t having their IP addresses logged like they would be by going to a torrent tracker.

BTW, our songs are free and it is perfectly legal to download and share our music with anybody you like. I own the copyright to all of The Dave Ryder Band music and give you permission as outlined by our Creative Commons License .

I love XKCD. This comic especially struck my funny bone:

Also I wanted to mention that I installed the Il Filosofo Automatic WordPress Database Backup Plugin (whew that’s a mouthful) a while back, and it’s working perfectly. Everyday at around 3:00 PM I get an email with my WordPress database attached as a MySQL file. How cool is that?

Today I installed the Registration Blacklist Plugin by Scott Horne. I kept getting a new user registration (sometimes several per day) from komatoz.net emails, but the site is clearly not interested in music, it is spammer city, those bastards (shakes fist).

It allows you to add domains and emails that you want to ban from registering as users. So we’ll see how well it works, if I don’t post about it again you can just assume it works and everything is all cool and shizzit.