I have not done much in the way of writing reviews here. I seem to spend most of my time doing the posts for my plugin posts. I enjoy looking around in the plugin depository, but once I have spent a few hours doing that and writing the posts, I do not feel like writing much else. So I am going to write this before the plugin post, to see if that will work out better.

The choice of what to write about is easy this time. I mentioned back in this post on Twitter that I was introduced to Marian Call’s music by following Phil Plait on Twitter. Since then I have bought her 2 albums, and listened to them quite a bit.

Vanilla

Her first album is named Vanilla, named after a song on the CD, and both live up to the name, if you are talking about vanilla extract. It is very pleasant and it can be very powerful. The song starts off slowly, with Marian playing her typewriter and singing about how dull and plain her virtues are, then segues into some fast paced swing that shows her voice is anything but vanilla. This song is probably my favorite off of both albums, and the song I most want to see her perform in person.

Fret starts the album off with an uptempo beat, which hides the subject of the lyrics, someone fretting about not being worthy of the person they love. If they really love that person. But they must, since they wrote the  song about that person.

Dark Dark Eyes is very a slow, mellow song. Inspired by character River Tam from Firefly, it is a song of reassurance and love. Promising to to always be there for the listener, Marian puts a lot of emotion into the quiet words she sings.

Then there is The Volvo Song, which sounds suspiciously like taking some real life incidents and dealing with them in song. You really love them, but they do something that really ticks you off. The frustration of dealing with the incidents and the person who keeps doing them comes through very well.

That ability to get the emotions of the song to her listeners is Marian’s strongest point. From the laid back feeling of Sunday Afternoon to the love expressed in I’m Yours, it is very easy to believe that she is singing about what she knows and feels.  And she lets you feel right along with her.

While Windows Media Player labeled this CD as Rock when I ripped it to my hard drive, that is not really accurate. Alternative is a better description, alternative folk, swing, blues, whichever way you want to come at it. Independent is even better, staying away from one label and just picking whatever style, or styles, works best for the song she is singing.

got to fly

This album is a bit different. It was commissioned by Quantum Mechanix after they heard Marian sing her song, It was Good for You Too. It is full of songs for geeks, from the first track I’ll Still Be a Geek After Nobody Thinks it’s Chic, which is what it sounds like, through to the last, the earlier mentioned Good for You Too, about a certain Mrs. Reynolds from Firefly.

If you are a geek of any kind, Browncoat, BSG, Trek, you will find something on this album to relate to. But you don’t have to be a geek to enjoy it. The feelings expressed in the songs, whether the alienation in I’ll Still Be a Geek, the frantic stress in Got to Fly, or the loneliness of In the Black, are all things we all share to some extent.

This shares the strengths of her first album, the beautiful voice pulling the emotions out of you, lyrics that are smart and sharp, and has the added bonus of touching on parts of the geek subculture. And it shows that while the touchstones may differ, geeks are not that different from the mainstream. Despite what both sides may say about it.

Finding the music

For digital versions of Marian Call’s music, you can get it from Amazon here, or from iTunes, or go to Marian’s web site where she has a variety of options for supporting her and her music. If you do purchase the digital downloads from Amazon.com, do not purchase the Prologue or Postmortem clips. They are small (10 sec or less) studio outtakes and you can hear all of them from the clips.

You can find CDs of Vanilla at CD Baby and CDs of got to fly at Quantum Mechanix. The got to fly CDs are limited edition, so you really shouldn’t wait to get one if you are like me and have irrational attachments to CDs.

I was thinking about a topic for this post by going back over my earlier posts and trying to branch off of them in a slightly different direction. I hit upon the idea of looking at plugins that allow you to add affiliate links, when I realized that the biggest affiliate program out there is Amazon.com. A quick check shows quite a few plugins for adding Amazon.com affiliate links, so it seemed like I found my topic. It turns out quite a few of those plugins are very old, but I have found enough to justify a short post on the topic.

Amazon MP3 Clips widge allows you to put a list of MP3s from Amazon.com on a page or post. The MP3s are the clips that Amazon.com uses as samples to entice you into buying songs from them. It uses a shortcode to create an Amazon.com widget that displays albums or mp3s from Amazon. You can add your Amazon.com affiliate number to the shortcode which allows you to get paid by Amazon.com for any purchases anyone makes through the widget. If you do not add your affiliate information, it appears that the plugin developer has his own coded into the plugin so he gets paid.

It is supposed to grab a list of the latest best-selling mp3s if you use the base shortcode, or mp3s from a particular style of music using Amazon.com browse_nodes, but I consistently got a PHP error if I did not provide ASINs for specific albums or mp3s in the shortcode. This may be a shortcoming of using an older version of PHP, or it may be a real problem with the plugin.

This brings up what I consider a major problem with this plugin. Normally, I would go to the page for the plugin and bring it up errors there with the writer, but that is impossible for this plugin. The developer has no support set up at for the plugin at all. The only instructions are what is on the WordPress plugin directory and they are not all that great.

In a lot of ways, it is easier to go get the actual widget from Associates Central. If you want to add a specific work, you still need to go to Amazon.com to get the ASIN. If it works correctly for random clips, you need to find the proper codes for browse_nodes. The only thing it does that really helps is avoiding saving your post in html rather than the visual editor when using the Amazon.com code.

Amazon Reloaded for WordPress makes it easy to add Amazon affiliate links to your posts. In the option page, you put in your affiliate ID and chose which nations program want to use. The plugin puts a window on your post and page editing page, which contains an input field to search whichever nation’s site you picked.

The search is through every area of Amazon, e.g. Books, DVDs, etc., so you can get quite a few results.  But it is limited to only 3 results from each area so you will not be overwhelmed. And you need to be exact with your spelling, or nothing will show up.

The search results are presented as a picture with the name of the product below it. If you click on the link, it will place the link into the text area at your cursor’s location. You can also insert the image from Amazon, choosing between the 3 sizes that Amazon provides, which will also be linked to the product on Amazon. No need to look up the ASIN, copy & paste, or anything else. This does not remove all the hassles of adding Amazon links to your site, it doesn’t do a thing for widgets or embedded objects, but the most common way of linking is made extremely easy.

There are some limitations to the plugin. You need to be very precise about what you are looking for, or it may not show up in the search result. And if you use the image, you will need to add some styling to it if you want it to fit into the flow of your writing.

But all in all, a very nice plugin. It is not okayed for working with version 2.7.1, so you may have problems with it, but it did work fine on my set up. The author is working on a new version, with more options in it, but in the meantime it has some nice functionality as is.

Amazon Widgets Shortcodes uses shortcodes to place pretty much everything that Amazon offers for linking. You start on the configuration page by choosing the country you are using, then placing your affiliate id in the text box there. You can also choose to have documentation for using the plugin placed on your post and page editing pages. This is nice when it comes to using the plugin.

There are also layout options on the configuration page, which can be overridden on specific widgets when you add them. You can decide to show the widgets on your RSS feeds and enforce strict HTML and XHTML compliance. Finally, there are two additional options, enabling context links and product previews for Amazon hyperlinks.

The plugin is easy to use, it places a drop down menu on the Visual section of the text editor, which is how you add the widgets to your post. You do need to create the widgets at your Amazon Affiliate account in order to get the necessary information to put in the drop down menu. You can either follow the directions (a good reason to enable the documentation on the configuration page) to find what to copy and paste in the input fields, or copy the entire html that Amazon provides and place it in the second tab, which will use it to fill in the fields properly.

While there is a good selection of choices available on the menu, including placing a wishlist widget and a single product text link, but it does not include all of the options that Amazon offers. There is no search box option, and you can’t use it for digital media like MP3s or videos. But being able to use shortcodes rather than worry about messing up html by pasting it in the visual editor is worth a lot.

Final words

There are other plugins available for Amazon.com affiliates, some of which look like they have some nice options. But they either did not work on my test blog or required a version of PHP I do not have. I would probably avoid using the MP3 clips plugin, the lack of support and the errors I had are just not worth the trouble.

The other two plugins nicely complement each other. One for adding straight links to your pages, the other for handling widgets of various kinds. They work well and have good support from their authors. If you are an Amazon affiliate, you should check them out and see if they will fill your needs for your blog.

I like listening to music almost as much as I like reading books. I enjoy a variety of music, from all kinds of artists. People ask who is your favorite, and I find it impossible to answer. It depends entirely upon my mood at the moment. My playlist on my PDA includes Jimmy Buffett, Ray Charles, George Strait, the Nylons, and The Pipes & Drums, 1st Battalion Scots Guards.

Love on the Inside

This is the Deluxe Fan Edition of the Sugarland album, which was only supposed to be available for limited time before the standard edition of the album was released. This was a good marketing idea, since I at least do not normally not rush right out and get a new CD as soon as it is released. But I was enjoying Sugarland’s second CD, Enjoy the Ride, so I went out and got the Deluxe Edition when it came out.

I stuck the CD in my 6 disc changer in my car for my trip out west in August, planning on switching out all of the CDs as I went and the mood struck me. I have done this before on multiple day trips, getting a good mix of styles and artists as the mood struck and avoiding getting tired of one particular artist or CD. This time, things did not work out that way. 5 of the CDs I did not hear enough of to get tired of them. That is because I spent so much time listening to the sixth CD, Love on the Inside.

I didn’t love every song on the CD, the fourth track,” Joey”, I found somewhat annoying at times. That may just be because I am a cranky old man that has heard too many songs about teenage love ending in tragedy. Given that Sugarland’s aim for this album was to explore different aspects of love, it was probably inevitable that a song like this was on the CD, but that doesn’t mean I have to love it.

“Steve Earle” is another song that I am not in love with. It is a humorous song, and how much I enjoy hearing it depends very much on my mood. But it doesn’t ever annoy me, I just sometimes don’t enjoy it as much as others.

After those two songs as the weak points in the album, I found myself with 15 songs that at the very least I like to hear over and over. Depending on how they strike me at the moment, I can find myself hitting repeat on my CD player to listen to any of the 15 over again.

Instead of getting very tired of the repitition in the first single, “All I Want To Do”, I enjoy the upbeat rythym and the very idea of blowing off a day to be with someone I love, just because I feel like it.

“It Happens” also has an upbeat style, at odds with the events that happen in the lyrics. But the style helps sell the philosophy, as John Lennon put it, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” But Sugarland’s way of saying it is more fun.

My favorite song, most of the time anyway, is “What I’d Give,” the tenth track. The lyrics, especially the first 4 lines, make me think of someone I would like to sing them to, with appropriate changes to the genders, and the instrumental section makes me just want to hold them. Other songs invoke the pain that can result from a failed relationship (“Keep You”) or the desire to take care of someone you love that is hurting (“Fall Into Me”) or physical desire (“Come On Get Higher”). They are all very moving and powerful in their own ways. But none of them move me the way that “What I’d Give” do.

This is a very good album, with a lot of solid songs. It covers a wide range of styles but only has one real subject matter, love in all its forms. For an album of love songs, it is certainly very diverse. I don’t know if Jennifer and Kristian succeeded in their aim to make an album that will be a reference anytime someone wants to do a love song. But they certainly succeeded in creating one that covers the subject in depth and in style.

I am not sure about starting this blogging thing. There are already plenty of them out there, and I am not really certain I have a lot to add to the current flood of words that is flowing through the channels of the web. On the other hand, I am not a typical middle aged white male from the Midwest USA.

I admit, there are not actually very many people that are typical. Everyone has their own foibles and idiosyncrasies, some blatant, others more subtle. This means that being normal is somewhat difficult, if your particular oddities are too far from that mythical standard.

And the worst part is that what is defined as normal shifts based on where you are. Normal at a high school in Ohio is very different than normal at Juilliard in NYC. But in some ways, they are identical compared to what constitutes normal at a school in Zagreb or Beijing. Not that most students from that Ohio school would necessarily agree with that if suddenly placed in Juilliard.

But despite the differences between each of those places, I would bet that they all have their in-crowds and outcasts. The in-crowd defines the limits of normality, then spends their time categorizing where the outcasts belong in their exile. The outcasts then have the choice of accepting their place outside of normality or trying to convince the in-crowd that they are not really beyond the pale.

Personally, I was a nerd when I was younger. No, not a geek, geeks were still relegated to the sideshow at circuses back then. Now I am a geek, in a variety of ways, although I prefer the term polymath (my learning may or may not be great, but it is varied). I don’t claim to be of the same capabilities as the men listed at Wikipedia, but someone has to be on the low end of the scale.

Two of the areas I am interested in are traveling and photography, which I have combined at my main site. Other things include reading, gaming, TV, history, and recently, trying orienteering. And I have been known to listen to music and follow some of the politics that has been going on. That is probably something I will comment on from time to time, at least until the general election.

That may be the most useful part of this. Someplace to vent when something really irritates me. I guess I will see.