It was a beautiful moment. Eyes met pickups across a crowded store. From the first strum I knew that it had to come home with me. Especially as it was only 75 quid!

Yes, we have acquired another guitar. A 1998 reissue Danelectro U2 in Copper Burst. Photos and in-depth review and possibly even a couple of tunes will be available soon on the Wiki.

If we continue buying guitars at this rate, we’ll have to start putting them on the wall and turning our house into a would-be Hard Rock Cafe.

I quite like that idea, actually.

An odd sort of an online game…

not pr0n

Quite challenging. Many solutions require Googling, and you need a bit of a sideways approach – read the page source code for clues, peer at the images with your screen brightness up and down, modify URLs to move on, that sort of thing.

We got stuck at level ten. Found the sound file, but now we need some thing to speed it up and maybe turn it backwards

Enjoy. Or possibly become hugely frustrated.

Joke-e-oke

As any Peter Kay fan will be happy to demonstrate, this is nothing new:

How do you kill a circus? – Go for the juggler.

How does Bob Marley like his donuts? – Wi’ jam in.

See? Kar-e-joke-ee. It’s the future of comedy!

British cult artist Banksy snuck some of his work into New York’s top museums. The funniest one is the piece he smuggled into the Museum of Modern Art – very Warhol.

Spotted by one of the fine folks at MetaFilter

Boing Boing: Transparent screen illusion: set laptop’s wallpaper to a photo of the wall behind it

For more, see the Flickr tag page.

Update: – Slacker Manager points out the best one yet. There’s a tag now, with 38 shots to see.

Update2: – Joy of Tech goes one better, with X-Ray Screens

Slacker Manager are currently hosting a showdown between Steve Pavlina, with his hard work ethics, and Fred Gratzon, author of The Lazy Way to Success (obligatory Amazon links: US, UK . Today’s question is on Passion and Money. Both give very interesting answers, well worth reading, and they seem to pretty much agree on the issue.

• Steve’s Answer
• Fred’s Answer
• Commentary on the answers from Steve’s Blog.

Well worth a read if you feel stuck in a dead end job, or just feel you could maybe be doing something more interesting with your life.

Your passion isn’t money. Really it isn’t… unless you have a fetish about collecting smelly pieces of paper with pictures of dead people.

-Steve Pavlina

For your brain to be creative and inspired, it needs rest. At the very least, you should get enough sleep. (Be in bed with lights out and your eyes closed before 10 PM every night. I promise you that will do wonders.) Take long leisurely walks in the woods.

-Fred Gratzon

I’m so close to getting that bit right. I sit up until well after 10 each night reading Bill Bryson’s ‘A Walk in the Woods’ (Amazon US, UK) on my iPaq. See? Nearly there

There’s something about PigPog I feel I should clarify. When Michael says ‘we’, as in “We’ve made a Wiki” or “We’ve built a shiny new WordPress blog”, what he actually means is he did it, I just happened to be in the room at the time. He’s done some splendid things to the site over the past few days, and if you agree, please shower him with praise. If you disagree, go and have a nice cup of tea instead.

I made my first contribution to the Wiki today. About the GuitarPort, the newest addition to our musical toybox. You can tell I’ve written it, because it mentions Kirk Hammett .

If you’re reading this and feel you have more insight and expertise to offer on the subject of guitars, wikis or creativity in general, join in with the wiki and share your wisdom with us.

UPDATE – Just started using the GuitarPort again, and this time I’m not subscribed to Line 6′s paid content service. It’s just as much fun without it.

When we were first looking into buying a GuitarPort, we visited a local guitar store to see if they had any in stock. “We don’t sell them,” said the guy behind the counter. “They’re not up to much. It’s just a way to get money out of you by getting you to subscribe to a web site.”

He couldn’t have been more wrong.

Yes, there is a paid content service you can subscribe to, where you have access to tones, tracks and lessons, and I’ll explain more about those later, but there is so much more to the GuitarPort which makes it about as much fun as you can have with a guitar without getting Kirk Hammett involved.

The Hardware

The GuitarPort hardware is simple but rather cool-looking small chunky red device with sockets for the USB cable and headphones/speakers in the back, a socket at the front for your amp lead, and a big dial in the middle that is just begging to be turned up to 11.

The Software

The GuitarPort software is where the fun starts. Hook the GuitarPort up to your computer’s speakers or microphone input, install the software and you’re ready to play with the same technology that went into the POD. Plug your guitar into the device and you can fiddle about with 101 different preset tones including bass tones, metal tones and vocal tones. All the tones are a combination of one of GuitarPort’s 16 modern and classic amps and 19 stompbox effects. There is also a tuner, which makes switching between standard and drop-C tuning easier than ever, and a metronome with several different drum effects.

The GuitarPort also has a player, into which you load whatever you want to play along with and there you can adjust the level so your guitar playing blends in flawlessly, and if you’re not so flawless, you can slow the track down without altering the pitch.

The Bit Where They Want Your Money

The preset tones, the effects, the metronome, the player – that alone is enough to justify shelling out £99 for. But if you want to have access to lessons from the likes of Steve Vai, or classic Hendrix tones, or specially modified tracks to jam along to, then you need to sign up to GuitarPort Online. For about $8.00 a month you can access as much as you want, and a quick search proves there is a lot out there. Lessons on the styles of all sorts of artists including Steve Vai, Jimi Hendrix, Metallica and The Beatles. Tracks, tones, all sorts of great stuff. But, here’s the crucial thing, you don’t have to sign up to that to enjoy GuitarPort, the GuitarPort Online account just gives you access to loads of great extra stuff.

Should you get one?

If your guitar playing goes as far as messing around at your ‘puter, then yes, get one. You will have so much more fun. And if, like a couple of folks I know, have pretty much given up on playing because their living circumstances don’t allow much rocking out, you need one of these things, or you need to sell your guitar.

And the moral of the story is…

Don’t always trust the opinion of the bloke who works in the guitar shop.

The Credit Card Prank II

Zug did a credit card prank long ago. He’s outdone himself now, though…

Now, someone should have caught this. First of all, everyone knows that Shamu works at Sea World. Second, how could Shamu accurately render a scale drawing of himself? That kind of penmanship would be unlikely from a creature using only its vestigal fins.

In an effort to make PigPog look a bit more like one site again, we decided to try to make the colours match everywhere, and we decided to match the one’s from Mike’s excellent theme that we’re using in WordPress.

All seems to be looking quite good. We’ve not tried to match the look, just the colours at the moment, and we’ve only modified the background of the Wiki pages, but it’s made a big difference.

The odd thing is the number of visitors we seem to be getting since the weekend. Saturday was more than triple our usual daily visits, and I don’t entirely know why. Still, I’ve tended to find in the past that if you just keep doing what feels right, and keep writing what you want, not what you think will bring in the traffic, the traffic tends to follow. The Google idea is giving people exactly what they want, and they’ll be happy – then let the money follow on from that. Maybe with this sort of thing, you just have to start with what feels right for yourself, and the people will follow.

The money can actually follow on here, too. We’re paying four times what we used to pay for the hosting now, because we upgraded at the end of last year. We were hoping to do a bit more with the site, and try to get more traffic, so we upgraded to a plan with 1.2 terabytes of data transfer per month so we’d be able to cope with most things this web thing could throw at us. Within a couple of months of doing so, we had our first profitable month – the ads brought in more than the hosting cost. We’d not managed that before, even when we were paying a quarter as much.

Now, the traffic has stayed high (kept growing, actually), but the income has gone down again. People who read about Productivity and GTD obviously click on more ads than people who read about Variax Guitars and Beatallica, and that was where our traffic was coming from at the time. So for best profit, I need to write about GTD – problem is, I don’t have much to say, so it wouldn’t last. People would get sick of it and remove what links they’ve made to PigPog. It would end up worse for us.

So, yeah, write about what feels right. Which at this moment seems to be rambling about nothing. Must be time for bed.