Ukulele Strumming for the Beginner

I'm not sure if I feel comfortable giving advice on learning to play the ukulele. After all, there are lots of other people much more qualified to teach ukulele. However, I can pass along some of the things I've learned from the masters, such as James Hill and Hal Brolund. The latter rolls through southern Ontario a couple of times a year offering workshops. If you have the chance to attend a workshop run by either of these two, do it!

If you're picking up a ukulele for the first time, read on. Many beginners seem to worry most about learning the chords. And sure, that's important. But that will happen over time. The first priority when learning ukulele is rhythm. That is, keeping a steady beat while strumming. I've seen beginners play like this: They strum four beats, then pause while they change the chord, and then strum another four beats. When playing together with others, even if that pause is very short, it can still be disruptive for the group.

The point is this: When strumming on a ukulele, maintain the beat. Even if it takes a beat to fully establish your left hand fingers in their proper chord position, don't let up on that beat.

Now let's get down to a lesson. To start with, count out a simple 4/4 rhythm: One, two, three, four, one two, three, four, and so on. On each count, strum the fingernail of your index finger down across the strings, roughly at the point where the neck of the ukulele meets the body. Don't worry about the chord. An open C will do nicely. Practice that for a few minutes. Tapping your foot as you strum might help you maintain the rhythm.

Next, count out: One and two and three and four and one and two and three and four, and so on. Strum as before, but on the "and", strum your finger up across the strings. You're now doing both down-strokes and up-strokes. Again, practice this for a while to develop a smooth rhythm.

Next, you can try some more complicated rhythms. While strumming your hand down on the count and up on the "and", try omitting a strum. That is, keep your hand moving down and up in rhythm, but at certain points in the strumming pattern, your finger misses the strings. Here are some possible strumming patterns to practice. Skip the strums marked by parentheses.

• down (up) down up (down) up down up repeat.
• down up (down) up down up down up repeat.
• down (up) (down) up (down) up down up repeat.

Yeah, I know you're itching to practice those chord changes. The point of practicing your strumming is to make it second nature. Playing ukulele involves coordination between one hand strumming and the other making chord changes. The more you practice your strumming, the more natural the movement becomes. Once that becomes second nature, you can then better concentrate on the chords. Heck, even Manitoba Hal's recommended practice regimen for beginners includes five minutes of just this kind of strumming!

I'm Shopping For A New Ukulele!

A while ago, we decided to move from Toronto to Kingston. We sold our house in Toronto, bought a house in Kingston, and planned and implemented the move. The last step in the process was for me to find a job in Kingston. We knew that wasn't going to be easy. Kingston is a much smaller place, with less demand for programmers. As motivation, I decided that one of the things I would buy with my first paycheck would be a new ukulele. Well, I can now shop for that ukulele! I start my new job on Monday!

How did I get to this point? My "sabbatical" started getting a bit too long. So back in the Fall, I went to the KEYS Job Centre for advice. To start with, my councilor gave me some great advice on resume writing. She also recommended the MCF Kingston Practice Firm. What's a practice firm? It operates very much like a real company, allowing participants to gain real work experience, albeit without a salary. But in addition, participants are expected to spend time searching for jobs and learning the skills needed to look for work. I decided to give it a try.

I decided to concentrate on developing skills in PHP, since that's used by some local firms. I was assigned the task of developing a new software system for the local Operation Red-Nose organization to replace an old DOS-based application. I visited their operation on New Years Eve, and for what they were doing with that ancient program, they could just as easily be doing everything on paper.

To cut a longish story short, what I had implemented in five weeks using PHP and CakePHP, I had originally expected to spend most of my 12 week stint at MCF working on. Within weeks, I was able to confidently add PHP to my resume. I had expected to be at MCF longer. But an opportunity arose, I sent off my resume and cover letter, and I went for an interview and testing. I accepted an offer, and finished my stay at MCF after just those five weeks. Granted, there's still more work left to do on the ORN project. But I expect to finish that in my spare time.

What have I learned from this? First, that CakePHP is a great way to implement a web-based application. Some point out that it has a harder learning curve than other PHP frameworks. And sure, you need to understand why the framework insists on doing things a certain way. But having strong conventions is not a bad thing. In all, I think CakePHP was a good choice for that project.

Second, it helped me convince myself that the things I wrote in my resume were true. I can learn new skills. I got the skills. I know what I'm doing. I demonstrated that nicely with the ORN project. Sometimes it seems we can forget what we're capable of, and lose confidence in ourselves. Especially when between jobs.

In my previous job, I used Zope and Plone, but without ever really reaching the point of fully mastering those frameworks. I took that job because it offered me the chance to use my favorite programming language, Python. But while I still love that language, I would never recommend using Zope. We just could never get the Zope-based project to where we needed to be, partly due to the complexity of the framework, and also due to some nasty intermittent bugs. These were the kinds of bugs that you could never really be sure you fixed. And no one should have to depend on that kind of system.

(Fortunately, the Zope-based project was shelved. Unfortunately, development moved on to an ambitious .net based system, which is not really a good place to be for a Linux/Unix geek. Frankly, I was glad that moving to another city offered me a good excuse to quit that job.)

But now my new job beckons, and I'm really looking forward to it. From what I've seen so far, it seems like a really great place to work, and I know I can make a difference there. And soon, I expect to add a new ukulele to my modest collection. A banjo-ukulele perhaps?

Later, dudes!

On Facebook, We Are The Commodity

Last September, Facebook foisted one of its biggest changes on its users. Like many others, I found myself faced with an almost unmanageable volume of postings on my newsfeed. The change was already bad enough to deal with, but Facebook made it clear that it was to decide what was important to me, and what could be ignored from my feed. It took me hours to configure my feed the way I wanted. And it took weeks before Facebook decided to honor my settings. But eventually the postings settled down to a more or less acceptable volume. And I discovered the trick of bookmarking https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr which always brings me to a "recent stories first" view.

To make things easier to handle, I also went through my Facebook friends, and unfriended about a third of them. Sometimes it seems like people treat Facebook as a game where the one with the most friends wins. But I didn't see much point in having such a large list of Facebook friends.

And I'm sure I'm not the only one who got the impression that Facebook didn't really care about the privacy of user information. They haven't always made it clear or easy to configure the privacy settings. Even after a flood of news articles about the importance of using the proper privacy settings, I still see many of my friends post personal family details to the whole world. I cringe whenever I see photos of children shared with the public, or when I see a persons location posted to the public. And not everyone is aware that that's happening. As a result of my own privacy concerns, I deleted almost all of my own photo albums off of Facebook, even the albums that were visible only to specific groups of people.

And then there's Facebook's new Timeline feature. Mind you, I have nothing to hide about my past postings. However, I just didn't see any point in making my past so accessible to my friends. And so I spent about four hours deleting and hiding past postings. Going forward, I plan on pruning my Timeline on a regular basis and keep just about a months worth of postings. That is, if I post at all.

With all that preamble in mind, I finally get the point of this blog posting: A couple of days ago, I mentioned to someone on Facebook that on Google+, I feel a lot less like a commodity than I do on Facebook.

Lets look at the business of Facebook. It's expected that within a couple of months, Facebook will go public with an IPO. Some people predict that Facebook will be worth $100 billion. What does Facebook own that's worth $100B? The only tangible asset they have is their user database. With about 800 million users, each user is worth about $125 to Facebook. People have gladly provided detailed personal information about themselves, where they live, what they like, and who their friends are, which Facebook can use in their own marketing endeavors. And every time you give applications access to your personal profile, you are allowing them to better target their campaigns.

So, with that in mind, whenever I go on to Facebook, I don't feel like a person. I feel like a commodity. Frankly, I count on Facebook too much to leave it completely. However, I just don't bother posting as much as I used to.

Lately, I've been encouraging my friends and acquaintances to check out Google+. Sure, they're a business too. But Google seems to be much more concerned about user privacy. And although Google+ doesn't have as many users, the quality of the postings seems much higher there. I just find it a much more comfortable place to do on-line social networking. Facebook isn't going to disappear any time soon. However, I think Google+ will, over time, attract a much more discerning audience.

Should Everything Run on IBM i?

re Shouldn’t Everything Run on IBM i?

To start with, I'm reminded of a couple of things told to me when I was job-hunting four years ago. First, a head-hunter told me that, at the time, the bottom had fallen out of the iSeries job market. Second, at a job interview, I was asked: "What's an iSeries?"

In the referenced blog, Aaron mentions that the IBM i has just seen 4 quarters of growth. That's good to see. I worked for 22 years on the iSeries and its predecessors, AS/400 and S/38. And I really don't want to see my good work go to waste.

But in his blog, Aaron suggests that everything should run on IBM i. The i is indeed a fine machine to store your mission critical data. You really can't go wrong choosing IBM i for your database. But I disagree that it should be used to run everything. (Those who like the i, tend to like it a lot, which says a lot about the system. The only people more devoted to their computers seem to be Apple fans.)

First, Aaron brings up the common strawman argument that the choice is between IBM i and Windows. Clearly, there are more choices out there, especially in the Linux, Unix, and BSD realms. For example, for the top tier in a web site, you can't go wrong with OpenBSD running on a couple of inexpensive Intel servers. You can easily configure OpenBSD to offer 100% availability, for at least your static pages, with rock-solid security.

But let's look at the application tier. Many shops choose an IBM i solution for one simple reason: The application they need only runs on i. If the application is implemented in RPG, then it's basically limited to the i. What if you need to develop your own custom application? Is RPG the best choice? Frankly, no. Thirty years ago, when I started working on the RPG III compiler, it was already an oddity among programming languages. It has advanced quite a bit since then, and I'm proud of my own contributions to its evolution. But it has not kept pace.

Is there an ideal choice of programming language? Again, no. Actually, I think that's the wrong question to ask. Today, when choosing a programming language for a particular project, you don't look at the characteristics of the programming language. If the attributes of the language were a primary consideration, Python should be the most popular programming language on the planet (in my opinion). Today, one does not program using just a programming language. Today, you use a programming language and a framework.

Consider PHP. By itself, it's a rather ugly programming language. But it's popular because of the rich frameworks implemented using PHP. In the i community, Zend is commonly used. Elsewhere, frameworks like CakePHP and CodeIgniter are popular. Other programming languages have their own rich frameworks: GWT, .net, TurboGears, Ruby on Rails, to name just a few. Lately, I've been implementing a web-based application using CakePHP, and I can attest to its convenience and power. But, as far as I know, the RPG community has nothing like these frameworks. IBM i does support a number of modern tools and languages. But then, unlike RPG, those tools are not limited to IBM i.

That is, when using an interpreted language like PHP, you have something that a language like RPG can never have: platform independence. For my own modest CakePHP application, I can run it on Windows and I can run it on Linux. I'll bet that it could also run on IBM i! In other words, by using many of these rich frameworks, you can run on many different operating systems, and so, you can render the choice of operating system platform irrelevant. To get back to the original question, should or shouldn't everything run on IBM i? I say this: It doesn't matter. And hasn't mattered for a long time.

Hans

Church Pickets

Yesterday while reading the Toronto Star, I was drawn to one particular front-page story. A story involving the Covenant Reformed Church in Toronto. Some of my relatives were once members of this church, and I sometimes went with them to Sunday service at this church when visiting them back in the 1960's.

Here's the story: Love thy neighbour, protest thy neighbour, be sued by thy neighbour

In a nutshell, one church member, Jack van Halteren has a business dispute with Gary DeBoer. In order to try to resolve the dispute, van Halteren went to his church for help. You might wonder, why would someone involve their church in a business dispute? Van Halteren justified his action by quoting from the Bible. Matthew 18:15-17 in particular:

¹⁵ “If your brother or sister sins, go and point out their fault, just between the two of you. If they listen to you, you have won them over. ¹⁶ But if they will not listen, take one or two others along, so that ‘every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.’ ¹⁷ If they still refuse to listen, tell it to the church; and if they refuse to listen even to the church, treat them as you would a pagan or a tax collector."

Unfortunately, when the church was not helpful to van Halteren, he decided on a rather provocative next step: Picketing his church. Frankly, I'm not sure what passage in the Bible supports that action, but the result has been legal action against van Halteren, including a $500,000 lawsuit by the church and another $1,000,000 lawsuit from DeBoer.

Clearly, van Halteren would have saved himself a lot of grief and expense if he had just hired a lawyer to try to settle his dispute, instead of turning to the Bible for help.

There are other cases of people picketing churches. For more than a decade, one man has been picketing the Unitarian Church of Montreal. In 1992, a member of that church underwent a "profound revelatory experience of God which revealed that the total solar eclipse 'Eye of God' is a 'Sign in the Heavens' that symbolizes God's divine omniscience". He told his fellow church members of his revelation. However, he was so insistent in the preaching of his new-found religion, that eventually he was ex-communicated by the church. Since then, he has made it his mission in life to protest and picket that church. You can read about him in this story from 2000: Cops arrest religious visionary

What drives people to take such action? Is it a profound belief that they, and they alone, are privy to God's truth? How can you reason with people who truly, sincerely believe that they totally understand God's will?

I've often been struck by the variety of beliefs within all of the major religions. Over the past two thousand years, the history of Christianity is chock full of schisms, splits, and secessions. The Covenant Reformed Church acknowledges the schisms in their own history on their website: A Short History of the Reformed Churches. And every time there's a schism, both sides believe fervently in the absolute correctness of their side.

Cheers! Hans

Building Your Own Ukulele Chords

When learning the ukulele, one of the first challenges is learning the chords. One page chord charts become indispensable for the beginner. (Here's one.) However, as you gain experience, you realize that there are multiple ways to finger each chord.

Why learn different variations of the chords? As an example, think of a two chord song. You can add interest to the song by using different forms of those two chords. Even in more complex songs, it may still be useful to change to a different form of a chord from one bar to the next. (Here's a good video demonstrating switching between alternate forms of G and C.)

Here are some examples of some alternative fingerings for a couple of common chords:

(I especially like the 0454 form of A7. Think of the main chords in the key of D: D, G, and A7. When changing from G to A7, you just have to slide your fingers 2 frets up the fretboard.)

How does one figure out different chord variations? I've put together a couple of charts to help me come up with different fingerings. You can always learn the patterns for barred chords. However, if a chord includes one or more of G, C, E, or A, these charts can help you find easy alternatives using open strings. You can download the charts from here.

The first chart lists the notes for many of the chords we use. The notes are identified by Roman numerals. If you haven't seen that notation, just think of the notes by their other names: do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, and do. For example, a major chord consists of three notes: I, III, and V. (Or do, mi, and sol.)

The second chart represents the notes on a ukulele fretboard. The notes shaded in yellow are the notes of the open strings. The white area is for the notes on a standard soprano ukulele. The other notes (blue) represent notes found on bigger ukuleles, as well as an additional extension for convenience so you can see full octaves on the chart, even for the key of G#.

After printing out these charts, fold over the top edge of the second page (or cut it off) so that the top of the page is the edge of the fret board. The idea is that you can place the fretboard chart over the chart of chords and have columns line up.

How does this work? As an example,  let's say you want to find a fingering for the Am7 chord. Line up the fretboard chart with the "min7" row on the chord chart. The root note of Am7 is A, and so line up the I column with an A on the top line of the fretboard. You can now read off the notes of the chord: A, C, E, and G. You'll recognize these as the open notes of all four ukulele strings. But let's find an alternative so your left hand has something to do.

The next step is trickier. We must now find A, C, E, and G from different places on the fretboard. It's really guesswork at this point, but let's start with the C at the 5th fret of the G string. We're now left with the task of finding A, E, and G. We see an E at the 4th fret of the C string and a G at the 3rd fret of the E string, leaving us with an open A. These notes are all close together, making the 5430 a really easy way to form the Am7. (Since discovering this form of Am7, I seem to be using it a lot!)

Some notes: First, note that what is commonly called the "diminished" chord is really a "diminished 7th". The row labeled "dim" is the true diminished chord, and not the diminished 7th. Second, the keen observer will note that the 9th chords have five notes. Since the ukulele only has four strings, you need to delete one of the notes. Usually, the III or V is omitted.

I always enjoy finding interesting chord alternatives. I hope you find these charts as useful as I do.

Cheers! Hans

Santa Claus Arrives in Kingston, Twice

In the Kingston area, there are two Santa Claus parades. The first in the middle of November takes place in Amherstview, a quiet bedroom community immediately to the west of the city of Kingston. The big Kingston parade takes place a week later.

Santa arrives in Kingston

Santa, of course, arrives at the end of both parades. And both parades feature many of the same groups and floats. But there are differences. The Amherstview parade takes place during the day, while the Kingston parade takes place after dusk. In Kingston, thousands of people crowd along the parade route along Princess Street, while in Amherstview, spectators can enjoy a more relaxing event.

A clown at the Amherstview Santa Claus parade

So far, since moving back to Kingston, we've been to both parades for both 2010 and 2011. Here are some more of my observations: First, the clowns in the Kingston parade are noticeable by their utter absence. No clowns? How can you have a parade with no clowns? Second, the Kingston parade is much more commercial, and loud.

Holding the parade at night is an interesting twist. The Kingston parade ends up at City Hall, and Santa helps with the official lighting of the Christmas tree in the market square. This year, we watched the parade at the corner of King and Princess, so we saw how popular the Christmas tree lighting was.

Considering that both parades feature much the same content, I'm surprised that more people don't attend the Amherstview parade. It's less noisy and less commercial, and it's easier to find a parking place on a side street close to the parade route. In a way, the Amherstview is Kingston's best kept secret of the holiday season. On the other hand, many Kingstonians like a good downtown party.