Ralford’s Ramblings

Did you get the memo? Dirty Superb is staging a hostile takeover of your work weary mind. Even though the semester just started, there’s a new CEO in town: Soul Power. Come watch Dirty Superb bring their musical synergy to the stage this Friday.

Dance grooves and general merriment await you in Pleasant Gap. So make the journey and fill us in on what you did on your summer vacation. Come Monday, you’ll be sure to have some stories to share around the water cooler. But this weekend, loosen your loafers and slip into something on the funky side.

Dirty Superb will be playing at the Red Horse Tavern in Pleasant Gap this Friday, September 4th. The show is from 9 to 12pm, with no cover charge. Hope to see you there!

ralford music Dirty Superb, funk, music, Red Horse Tavern

This has been an exciting summer of music…

On July 4th, Cootie Brown played at Central PA’s 4th Fest, which, come to think of it, was probably the biggest stage I’ve played to date. YouTube has some brief footage of us in front of Beaver Stadium.

A few weeks ago, I played my first wedding reception with Vitamin Funk. Towards the end of our set, a trombone and sax stood in with us, and we started into a blues instrumental. Also at the reception was The Lovin’ Spoonful’s John Sebastian. During the blues jam, he hopped on stage with us and wailed on the harmonica! I saw him play for the first time last year with David Grisman at the State Theatre, and have been listening to their folk recordings ever since. To say the least, playing music with him was surreal.

Throughout the summer, Dirty Superb has been playing about once a month at Pleasant Gap’s Red Horse Tavern, and we are going to be doing our first gig at Bar Bleu this week in State College. We are also now playing as backing musicians for Gina Riggio, and will be joining her for a set at the Bar Bleu show.

And finally, State College’s funk/soul/Motown band, the Hounds of Soul, will be making their debut this week at Tussey Mountain WingFest. If you enjoy the music of the 60’s and 70’s, and are into the powerful horn lines of Tower of Power and Blood Sweat and Tears come check us out!

Here’s August’s schedule so far:

• Dirty Superb and Gina Riggio: Monday 8/10 – at Bar Bleu (10:00pm)
• Hounds of Soul: Thursday 8/13 – Tussey Mountain WingFest (7:30pm)
• Hounds of Soul: Friday 8/14 – Bellefonte Arts and Crafts Fair (8:00pm)
• Hounds of Soul: Monday 8/17 – 2009 New York-Penn League All-Star Mountain Bash (7:30pm)

ralford music Bar Bleu, Cootie Brown, Dirty Superb, Hounds of Soul, music, Vitamin Funk

Last week I used a Photoshop plugin to create a favicon.ico file for the Dirty Superb website. This was my first time making one, and it took me a while to get it looking right since I wanted the image to look decent at 16 x 16 pixels. I started with a 64 x 64 pixel image, and sharpened the edges before shrinking it (if you don’t sharpen the edges they can get lost or blurred when you shrink it). That didn’t work too well for me, so I settled for a simple two-color icon where sharpening wasn’t an issue.

Shortly after, I whipped up an icon for Ralford.net. When I had something that wasn’t horrible, I published it. A few days went by, and when I saw it next to the link on my Google Profile page, I thought it kind of looked like crap… so… I took it down. Today I checked out my Feedburner Subscriber count and saw it drastically went from a whopping 5 subscribers down to 1. Feedburner’s Subscribers chart showed me that this happened within a day or two of removing my favicon. Until I removed it, I’ve had a steady 4 to 5 “readers” (almost all of them bots) since creating this blog.

So I suppose the moral of the story is to not create a half-assed favicon the first time around. Get it right, publish it, and be satisfied. Though the Ralford.net favicon is still in the works, I’m rather happy with the first one I created. You can see it over at the Dirty Superb website.

ralford Uncategorized Dirty Superb, Feedburner, RSS, Wordpress