A few months ago I got a notice from the Norah Jones fan club about a contest to attend an upcoming "intimate" rehearsal she was having in the Los Angeles area. Of course I submitted my email address, but I also submitted the email address of my co-author, Michael. I meant to tell him I had done so, but forgot about it and one day Michael calls me and says "You'll never guess what I am about to tell you" to which I responded "Did you win Norah Jones tickets???" It didn't take him long to figure out what happened and it was pretty great that Michael chose me to go to the show with him without knowing I was responsible for him winning the tickets. He knows I'm a big Norah Jones fan, so it makes sense, but what if he had told me "Hey, last night my Mom and I saw a free Norah Jones show" - that would have been trouble!

Anyway, we went to the show and were nearly the first ones in line. Ahead of us was a childhood teacher of Norah's and her daughter who is the girlfriend of the drummer for Norah's half-sister Anoushka Shankar. Once we got in we realized just how intimate this show would be. The tiny rehearsal studio probably had around 50 chairs and since we were front row, Norah would be singing within a couple of meters from us. When Norah walked out it was very clear that she remembered her teacher as Norah's face lit up and she gave her the "call me" and hand gesture. The rehearsal was comprised of every song from Norah's new album, "Not Too Late" which comes out today. (We were sworn to secrecy about the album, which is one reason I am only blogging about it now.) I don't think the song order matches the album order, so I can't really give precise first impressions of each song, but I remember that the show started off with some sleepy songs that bordered on boring until she got to the first song that I really loved with I now know is called "Not My Friend" which warmed me up enough to enjoy all the remaining songs she performed. All in all, I'd say this probably will be considered a weaker album than the previous two, but still there will be several must-haves and the whole thing will be listenable straight through.

One thing that was kind of funny though, I don't know if it was our proximity to Norah, or the fact that we were talking a lot in line, but when Norah would ask the audience a question, Michael would basically answer her very specifically in a very clear voice. I thought Norah might be annoyed (maybe some of the audience was) but she actually seemed to appreciate having more of a dialogue. Instead of asking "How you all doing tonight?" and having a response of "rah!" she would here a distinct and well enunciated "Doing great except that we were in line for quite a while but we met a lot of interesting people." Part of me cringed, but I realized that Michael's attitude is the correct one - he's the star of his own world, and plus, he got to talk to Norah Jones!

In any event, you can see us both in the front row on videos from Norah's new Special Edition release of "Not Too Late" which includes a DVD of some of the songs from the rehearsal.

Even though the book isn’t done, I had to take the day off to attend the NAMM conference down in Anaheim today. Roland Corporation announced their VG-99 V-Guitar system at the show and I was invited because my website, VG-8.com served an important role in the development of the new VG-99. My web site and its mailing list is for users of the Roland VG-8 and VG-88 hexaphonic guitar processors, devices which Roland released many years ago. None of us in that group thought Roland was ever going to make a new VG, and in fact Roland didn’t have any plans to, but I posed the question “What would you like to see in a new VG?” When the response was too great to manage using just email, I set up this wiki page:

http://vg-8.com/wiki/Next_Generation_VG

to collect ideas and allow others to edit them. Secretly, back in Roland Japan the topic of a new VG device was brought up and someone (I think I know who, but I won’t say because I don’t know for sure) found our wiki page and it was used as a starting point for new development. Roland never let us know about it though, which is probably smart corporate policy.

Now, at NAMM we got to see the fruit of this virtual collaboration. The VG-99 is most of the important items from the users wish list plus more that we didn’t even dare to imagine. It feels great to be part of its creation, thank you Roland, and thank you fellow users of VG-8.com.

In August of 2005 I began writing a blog in which I mostly discussed the Ruby on Rails development that I was doing but more than occasionally I drifted off topic. In early 2006, two major events happened. First, I was approached by Addison-Wesley to write a book about Ruby on Rails. While I was excited about the prospect, I struggled with what spin my book would take- what would make my book different and more interesting than other Rails books? Unfortunately, it was during that time that my dog Maximus was diagnosed with Canine Lymphoma, puppy cancer. I took a few months to spend with Maximus and while he was still healthy I was mountain biking with him nearly every day. That was basically the end of my blog - I posted only one more message when Maximus passed away.

Things got better, though and it was then that I thought of a way to write a different kind of Ruby on Rails book. Most programming books teach concepts through a series of small example applications that aren't connected. That's fine, but doing so leaves it up to the reader to extrapolate what they've learned in the book in order to build a larger application with many interconnected components. So, I decided that my book would cover the creation of one web site from start to finish and I only had to figure out what kind of web site that would be. It would have to be something that could be simple enough for beginners yet complex enough so that many Rails concepts would be covered in the book. Since I had experience building community web sites at ArsDigita and sites like MySpace were "all the rage" I decided the book would be about building a social networking website with Ruby on Rails. I recruited a friend from Caltech, Michael Hartl, to be my co-author (he's the smart one) and the rest of the year has been dedicated to writing that book. We should be done soon and I look forward to doing a lot of different things this year. And, I promise I'll blog more often!