| 12-29-04.2 |
Is THIS our man?
I began a search in earnest for the original author of the site today. Very, very quickly
I hit upon a link to Forbes of all places (!) This is from their 2001 "Billionaires No More"
article, it lists a Daniel E. Smith from Sycamore Systems, a Harvard MBA (which fits with
the many pages which claim Dansm is a first-year grad student at Harvard). Check his pic about
halfway down the page (5 up from Martha!)
here, then check out a pic of Dansm himself from the site archive I received via mail this week
here. Wow, that's close, isn't it? But the dates don't line up. Hit Sycamore Networks' bio page on Daniel Smith, CEO and you'll see he was president of Cascade Communications in 1997, the time these pages were being authored by a first year Harvard grad student. His son perhaps? The search continues... |
| 12-29-04 | Whoo-kolay-coola!! So I forgot about the other mailbox, it happens, so sue me. Turns out,
a number of Dansm fans found the page via Google recently, and a bunch of them e-mailed me, and a handful
of them had some original files, and ONE of them had a full wget mirror!!THANK YOU!So, enormous thanks go out to David Wood, Jeff at Alley Cat Music, and mucho gracias a Mungo! I will be sorting through these fantastic contributions and getting things in order over the next couple of days. I've also had a couple inquiries about re-hosting - for now, until I hear from the original site owner, I'm not looking to relocate. I know, the popups suck, all I can say is get a blocker... I already tweaked all the pages to leave room for their silly ad banner anyway... and if you find Dan Smith, let 'em know I'm looking for 'em. |
| 12-27-04 | Happy December!! That was a nice little break. With the ChristmaHanuKwanzakah goodies, the
site's starting to get a little more traffic, mostly from HarmonyCentral who
were good enough to update their links and point to this new mirror. Please, tell your friends! Traffic (and e-mails!)
make me work harder to get everything back online. To that end, I'm happy to announce that the Fingerpicking Lessons page is back online, by request. As for the songs page, most of Dansm's original tabs had been deleted long ago (probably by an admin complying with a C&D) so I will be updating with a fresh page pointing to OLGA material. I'm still looking for someone to dedicate an hour or so to whip up some MP3s of chord progressions to replace the lost DanSm Real-Audio chord progressions - if you're interested, please contact me! Thanks for visiting, tell your friends, come back soon! Updated, twice in a day! Needed to do the Techniques page pretty badly, so I did it, albeit, pretty badly. Since these are really the fundamentals, I've gone ahead and up'd some sound files too. Those interested in how I got that sound can either e-mail or wait for me to put up that page too... it IS however an acoustic with an aftermarket pickup. |
| 11-27-04 | Happy Thanksgiving!! Well, I'd been targeting having scales and chords done by Thanksgiving
and I missed it by one day. Not too bad, considering the addition of the scale generator (below). The
generator can now do all scales discussed on the pages, including Major, Minor (Harmonic, Melodic and Natural)
and Pentatonic Major and Minor. On that same subject, the scale pages are about 70% of the way there, I just have to get the graphics done for pentatonics. There are 57 different images for the minor scales, each more unique than the last. I've been doing much of this work in an automaton-like state, so stupid errors are not impossible (in fact, up until yesterday the capo page had a chromatic scale that skipped G#). If you are lucky enough to find one, please drop me a line... anyway, back to work. 1:15pm PST - Scale pages are done! Was able to salvage some of Dansm's original images for the Pentatonic Minor, so you'll have to excuse the slight formatting change that occurs there, but it's easy enough to follow. I think I'm going to take break for a day or two now... |
| 11-24-04 | Big Fun today. Whipped up a Javascript scale calculator that shows you all of the
notes on the fretboard for any given key and scale type (currently does major, pent major, pent minor
and blues). Try it out! Then tell people about it. I'd love
to have one visitor to this new location... just one... |
| 11-23-04 | Yeesh. With the exception of the Transposing Chords page, the
chord theory pages are 100% complete today. Coming up next, Scales! Or possibly the Acoustic
Guitar pages, depending on how much work is involved in there... sometimes, I like to actually play
the guitar. |
| 11-20-04 | Completed about a third of the chord theory pages today.
The loss of Daniel Smith's original graphics makes this very challenging. I've already created
about 71 different new graphic files, including chord tabs, scales, and a really nifty new
interpretation of the chord leading diagram. Because I've been spending so much time on this, I've had time to reflect on why I'm doing it. In the first days I was learning guitar, I stumbled across Dansm's pages pretty early, and these pages taught me my first chords and scales. With a lot of practice but no lessons other than these, in a few months time I was playing "enjoyably well" and had a better grasp on the music theory than some people I'd known who'd played for years. So, the loss of these pages brought on an altruistic urge to put 'em back up. I'll try and keep 'em up for good now -- so go ahead, tell a friend. -- M |
| 11-19-04 | The open chords pages are complete, and I've picked
the format for the new graphics, check it out. Getting word out on this is going to be tough,
please if you frequent any guitar-related forums or message boards, let people know that these
pages are being resurrected, and where to find them. |
| 11-18-04 | Recovered about 75% of original HTML from Google cache. Ignored any Dan Smith personal or defunct tab pages. Recovered a very small subset of scale graphics from local cache. Anyone with old graphics, please let me know!
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