David Hemphill

Jun 16

If I could clone myself…

This thought just occurred to me a moment ago, “What would I do if I could clone myself and somehow still mystically enjoy the experiences of my cloned self?”

My first thought would be to let my cloned self chase his wildest dreams. He might move to Nashville and become a huge rockstar/producer type, having his own recording studio and successful music career. In reality, that probably wouldn’t have been a great idea considering the recent events in Nashville, but let’s pretend the flood didn’t happen in my little fantasy world. He would love absorbing the diverse musical creativity of so many artists, and I imagine that would be a fulfilling and motivating existence for him (me).

What if I sent him down my original path? My teenage-self always dreamed of moving to California and living it up there with my brother-from-another-mother, Chris. Well, he wound up moving to Hawaii a few years later, so that would be super-sweet. I can imagine this cloned version of myself living the sweet life in lazy Hawaii, absorbing the surf and salt-water, writing ska/reggae/punk-rock tunes all day. This dream sounds like a happy-ending fairy tale, but it would inevitably turn sour as Chris wound up moving back to Missouri. I would hope that my artificial twin would stay, but he likes to have company and if he didn’t have a significant other (which I would hope would be a cloned version of my wife) he would have probably moved back too.

What other dream might a cloned version of me chase? What other path would he take? It’s something interesting to think about.

May 21

I saw this little beauty on Craigslist and was ogling it, when my worship pastor Aimee decided she wanted to fund the purchase of it. It was but a few moments later that I was headed to meet the guy and buy it.

I remember seeing these at the music store back in my half-stack-screamo-rock days and scoffing at them, ironically thinking I would never buy such a thing. I mean gee-whiz, there’s no tone knobs! How are you supposed to make that sound good? Yet, there I was, driving 45 miles to get one.

Well, I plugged it in. Wow. This thing sounds really good. It takes pedals well, and it sounds good with just a clean boost between it and my guitar. I’m a fan.

I don’t think there’s enough wattage for the type of gigs I’ll be playing—I’m thinking I’ll need more like 15 or 30 watts instead. So I’m still eyeing a Vox AC15 Custom, or possibly a Fender Blues Junior.

I saw this little beauty on Craigslist and was ogling it, when my worship pastor Aimee decided she wanted to fund the purchase of it. It was but a few moments later that I was headed to meet the guy and buy it.

I remember seeing these at the music store back in my half-stack-screamo-rock days and scoffing at them, ironically thinking I would never buy such a thing. I mean gee-whiz, there’s no tone knobs! How are you supposed to make that sound good? Yet, there I was, driving 45 miles to get one.

Well, I plugged it in. Wow. This thing sounds really good. It takes pedals well, and it sounds good with just a clean boost between it and my guitar. I’m a fan.

I don’t think there’s enough wattage for the type of gigs I’ll be playing—I’m thinking I’ll need more like 15 or 30 watts instead. So I’m still eyeing a Vox AC15 Custom, or possibly a Fender Blues Junior.

May 16

This is the amp that I’ve been dying to get, a Vox AC15C1. I just saw the previous model on Craigslist (an AC15CC1) and this model has a better speaker, better switches, a better reverb (who uses that?) and more tonal possibilities than it’s older sibling. I’ll be holding out and will get that when the time comes.

That is, unless you feel like you need to finance this for me.

This is the amp that I’ve been dying to get, a Vox AC15C1. I just saw the previous model on Craigslist (an AC15CC1) and this model has a better speaker, better switches, a better reverb (who uses that?) and more tonal possibilities than it’s older sibling. I’ll be holding out and will get that when the time comes.

That is, unless you feel like you need to finance this for me.

May 13

This is the state of my guitar rig. I’d like to get a better overdrive in there to replace the Daddy-O. I’m pretty happy with the tone coming from this board though.

This is the state of my guitar rig. I’d like to get a better overdrive in there to replace the Daddy-O. I’m pretty happy with the tone coming from this board though.

May 12

[video]

May 04

[video]

Apr 05

Fixing Gmail’s iPad interface weirdness for Macs

I don’t know why I care so much about this, except that it’s been fun wading through Google’s horrific code and using nth-child selectors. Wait, did I just say that was fun? What I meant to say is that it sucks, but I have a hard time admitting defeat.

So, suffice it to say, I’ve fixed one of the many bugs presented when using the Gmail iPad interface on a Mac.

One of the most annoying is that you can’t scroll the message listing. Not with your scrollball, not with a two-finger swipe on your trackpad, and not even with selecting the text in the view and dragging down (you know you’ve done it before). I’ll spare you the details, but basically:

  1. Create a userstyle for the app with the URL pattern (it’s found in the Preferences area): *mail.google.com*
  2. Copy-and-Paste this code into the userstyle box:
  3. Create a userscript for the app and place this code into it to make it resize the window to iPad dimensions:
  4. Hope Google doesn’t change any of their code and bork this.

Apart from that, I think I’m done tinkering with this project, and will just go get an iPad instead. Enjoy!

Apr 02

How to get Gmail’s iPad interface as a Mac app

Gmail's iPad interface

Prompted by some tweets by @mheerema and @samsoffes, I just used Fluid to create a site-specific browser that uses Google’s awesome new iPad-optimized interface for Gmail. It appears LifeHacker posted something similar just as I figured this out, but I like this better than using Firefox extensions.

To do this simply:

  1. Download Fluid
  2. Launch Fluid and create a site-specific browser for http://gmail.com and call it “Gmail”
  3. Launch the newly-created application and in the menu bar go to Gmail > User Agent > Other
  4. Input this user-agent: Mozilla/5.0(iPad; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B314 Safari/531.21.10, then press “Okay”
  5. Reload the view by pressing Command-R.
  6. That’s it! You should have the beautiful new iPad optimized interface.

Hope you enjoy this!

Bonus: Download these icons and use them for your new Gmail app: http://csi.nfshost.com/goodies/

Need Help? Watch Sam do it: http://screenr.com/b0M

Mar 13

Hangin with wife today, and this is what we’re up to first.

Hangin with wife today, and this is what we’re up to first.

Mar 10

On Church Words -

At Lebanon Family Church, we’re very careful to be accessible to new people when we present the gospel. We may only have a short time before we’ve lost the attention span of unbelievers, so we choose our words carefully to make sure the message is easily understandable and free from terminology that would confuse someone.

Mar 08

Mama would be proud.

Mama would be proud.

[video]

Mar 01

elclinto:

Been there…

elclinto:

Been there…

Feb 21

Get the Content

Here’s a quick thought. I equate having a client who insists you design with no content to asking you to play a guitar with no strings. You have the skills to play the guitar, but you don’t have an essential tool needed to do the job. How are you to be successful?

Insist on getting the content before you design so you can make those strings sing.

Feb 09

[video]