SteveCastellano.com

One music book to rule them all

August 14, 2011

I love music books. If I could play a tenth of the music in all the music books I have lying around I’d be some kind of piano hero. I had a piano tuner ask if I was a teacher. Nope. I just like the books. There’s a part of my brain that thinks that owning a book is like knowing a thing. That part of my brain is wrong.

Tipitina and Me transcribed

January 23, 2011

This is probably some form of copyright infringement, but I have completed my transcription of Allen Toussaint’s Tipitina and Me, and since his publisher’s website clearly states they are not interested in publishing unsolicited transcriptions, I’m just going to give it away for free here.

Tipitina and Me: transcribing in Logic with Melodyne

December 8, 2010

I have a great fondness for New Orleans style piano solo, and it’s a nut I’ve been trying to crack for some time. It sounds very relaxed and natural, and not nearly as daunting as popular 20th-century forms like stride and rag. But the relaxed feel is very deceptive.

Sensory evaluation of wines wrap

February 18, 2012

Today I wrap another wine course, and assuming all goes well with next week’s exam I will be 3/8ths of the way to earning my Wine Specialist certification. Here’s a glimpse at the impressive selection of not-entirely-reasonably-priced wines we tasted in our final class.

Do the Gainsbourg

November 4, 2011

I’m a bit of a classicist and hard to please, and my preference for drinks being simple and straightforward often leaves me at a loss when selecting from a nearly limitless array of increasingly complex beverages. I have only created a couple of original cocktails myself, and the most recent is, I think, my most successful. It’s called the Gainsbourg.

Petrichor as wine note

October 4, 2011

I first heard the word petrichor in the recent Doctor Who episode The Doctor’s Wife and assumed it was an invention of the author Neil Gaiman. As it turns out it is a favourite word of his, but its origins can be traced back to two Australian botanists who coined the term in an article for the journal Nature in 1964.

Capital ideas

March 18, 2012

Back in my agency days I had a client whose in-house design team was responsible for laying down the law regarding their online brand standards. It is of course right that they should take ownership of their brand. One of their laws, however, was that all headlines on their website should be in title case. Allow me to explain why this is a bad idea.

QR Codes follow-up (haters continue to hate)

September 17, 2011

A while back I wrote a post about QR codes. It’s not a pet topic of mine, but I do have one on my business card. I have one on a self-inking rubber stamp. And of course there’s one on this site, if you happen to want to continue reading this on your iPhone. But are they worth loving or hating – or even arguing about? (Spoiler: no).

QR code haters gonna hate QR codes

July 14, 2011

I’ve managed to trip over the Business Insider article entitled “Death to the QR Code” twice in the past week, mostly as a result of marketing colleagues passing the link around via Twitter or LinkedIn. And if the purpose of that provocative headline was to drag more eyeballs onto the Business Insider site, then I must concede its success.

Catastrophes and catalysts

January 1, 2012

If you learn one thing from this article it should be back up your data – all of it, frequently and redundantly. Or maybe, if you find life kind of boring, and you have lots of spare time on your hands, don’t. Be like Inspector Clouseau, waiting for your man Kato to jump you when you get home, just to keep yourself sharp.

The new look

February 27, 2011

Stephen Jay Gould posited that evolution isn’t as gradual a process as people often imagine it to have been, that in fact it is more like a series of plateaus punctuated by dramatic leaps. I’ve been meaning to redesign this site for over a year now, and have hashed together a few designs, explored what feels like hundreds of existing templates, and even briefly toyed with the idea of switching to another CMS platform.

Let’s get small

January 18, 2011

Lest you think there’s nothing going on here behind the scenes at the vast steve of the web internet empire™, in celebration of the fact that I got myself an iPhone last year I’ve mobile-enabled SteveCastellano.com – surf here on your smartphone and you will be automatically redirected to the mobile theme, which should look something like this picture.

Bunny Suit

September 25, 2010

The following was a losing entry in the 6th Annual Geist Literal Literary Postcard Story Contest.

“What’s with the bunny suit,” my dad asked, and hearing that got my sister and me pretty excited. Easter had come and gone, but how could a bunny suit be anything but amazing?

And now, a word from Hitler

April 25, 2010

I’m sure you’re all familiar with the Downfall YouTube phenomenon, and the recent content ID blocking put in place by YouTube, ostensibly at the behest of the copyright owners, preventing existing parodies from being viewed and new ones being uploaded. You may also be aware that a number of parodies have been uploaded in the past week which offer commentary on these events.

Writing: How to do it

September 27, 2009

Heist (2001) is a daunting subject for analysis, as is its writer and director David Mamet. It is an example of what I call “semantic screenwriting,” in that it demonstrates that you can put pretty much any nonsensical line into Gene Hackman’s mouth and tell him to spit it back out as if it is the cleverest thing anyone in the room has heard all day, and people will likely assume that it is in fact a juicy bon mot that they just didn’t get.