Ron Mertens' blog

Primal music

Ron Mertens — Fri, 17 May 2013 06:34:53 +0000

Last weekend we went to the Jacob’s Ladder festival, Israel’s Anglo-Saxons folk music gathering on the sea of Galilee. I had a great time, even though I didn’t manage to really listen to the music (what with all those kids around) except for one excellent blues/funk performance. As always it reminded how great it is to hear live music.

I’m currently reading Oliver Sack’s Musicophilia (which is interesting, though also somewhat exhausting). Anyway, in one chapter he touches on a subject that I think is fascinating:

People sing together and dance together in any culture, and one can imagine them having done so around the first fires, a hundred thousand years ago. This primal role of music is to some extent lost today, when we have a special class of composers and performers, with the rest of reduced to passive listening. We have to go to a concert, or a church, or a musical festival to re-experience music as a social activity, to recapture the collective excitement and bonding of music.

I’ve always somewhat disliked great performers. Maybe because I felt I’m better at improvisation than at playing other people’s music. But maybe because indeed we’ve taken music perfection and professionalism to such an extent that it’s difficult for the rest of us to participate in musical creation. As Michal would have said, we’re teaching our kids from a very early stage that only people who know how to sing or play instruments should do so (same goes for drawing and writing and everything). We’re suffocating our children’s creativity and as adults we no longer dare. Hey, I’m the same. I love playing music and singing but I’m dreadfully afraid of doing either in front of other people. Music should be about playing and singing and inventing new words and new tunes and not caring whether you sound perfect or not. Down with professional perfect musicians!

By the way (and this is dedicated to my lovely drummer wife), if you wonder what it is about music that binds people together, than it’s the rhythm. Here’s Sack again:

The binding is accomplished by rhythm – not only heard but internalized, identically, in all who are present. Rhythm turns listeners into participants, makes listening active and motoric, and synchronizes the brains and minds of all who participate.

So. According to the new found spirit, here’s my latest improvisation. I’m not happy with it, but what the heck:

Taking May off

Ron Mertens — Mon, 13 May 2013 04:11:49 +0000

Last week I published the 2013 edition of The OLED Handbook, after months of work. Yesterday I sort of finished my second big project, which I cannot yet disclose (it is not launched yet, but it’s out of my hands now).

I decided I’m entitled to take the rest of the month off (after all my birthday is coming soon). Fixing things around the house that need my attention, spending a little more time with Abigail & Noga, reading, playing music. And resting. And planning my next project

Another Pentatonic improvisation

Ron Mertens — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 10:49:13 +0000

Seems that lately I’m only posting on new music. Which is good, I guess. Seems like my piano lessons make me more creative. And just grabbing those sessions is so much easier than actually recording a track like I used to do once. So here’s the latest improvisation, another Pentatonic one (I think so, anyway, I’m waiting for my piano teacher’s verdict, actually):

Video-Alerts: 50,000,000 alerts, and counting

Ron Mertens — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 12:19:48 +0000

I launched Video-Alerts back in December 2008. I developed this service for myself when I wanted to find out about new OLED videos, and then I thought I’d offer it to other people too. While there is a premium option, I never really promoted the service. But still, Video-Alerts has over 2,800 users and I just noticed that the service sent out over 50,000,000 video alerts in the past four years since I launched it. Currently I send out around 1,800 e-mails per day (each with up to 50 video alerts). Nice

Improvising on Eb pentatonic scale

Ron Mertens — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 13:32:08 +0000

I’ve got an assignment from my piano teacher to improvise on the Eb Pentatonic scale, I thought it was nice enough to record and post. Enjoy!

Barack Obama : 1, Ron Mertens : 0

Ron Mertens — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 06:46:09 +0000

LinkedIn just informed me that I have one of the top 1% most viewed LinkedIn profiles for 2012. That’s rather cool – I have over 1,000 connections (mostly from the OLED and Graphene industries). LinkedIn themselves just celebrated 200 million users. It means that I’m more popular than 198 million users – at least. The most viewed profile? Barack Obama (526,270 views in 2012).

If you haven’t done so yet, check out my LinkedIn profile here. You won the first round, Mr. President, let’s see how 2013 goes…

Music rekindled, evening improvisation

Ron Mertens — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 04:59:06 +0000

In recent years I’ve somewhat neglected my music… I still play the piano, but I didn’t record anything in ages. And I almost forgot how to play from sheet music. Now (with big thanks to my darling lovely wife Michal) I’m back. I started learning guitar three months ago and it’s a lot of fun, and (since last week) I started taking some piano lessons. Anyway, yesterday I just sat and played this nice improvised tune, and I really liked it so I played it again and recorded it:

So this is just me playing on my piano, recorded with my small Olympus point-and-shoot. I think the music quality ain’t too bad, although you can hear Abigail & Noga chatting in the background. What do you think?

Utility-Kit, my second Kindle software, is released

Ron Mertens — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 07:50:56 +0000

My second Kindle title, Utility Kit is now released. Phew – it took me over a year to develop this particular title. Utility Kit is a collection of must-have applications for your Kindle, which can enhance your reading experience and make your life easier. It includes seven different applications:

Calculator
Stopwatch
Countdown timer
World clocks
Calendar
Units conversion
Notepad

Utility Kit is available on the Kindle PaperWhite, Kindle Touch and Kindle (K4) e-readers, only $1.99.

Bragging time: OLED-Info is the #1 result on the ‘OLED’ keyword in google

Ron Mertens — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 08:58:24 +0000

Yes, it’s time to brag. It’s almost nine years since I launched OLED-Info, and today I reached the #1 position in the ‘OLED’ keyword in Google (USA). I even took a screenshot to celebrate:

This is really cool. OLEDs are getting a lot of attention now (LG finally launched the world’s first OLED TV in Korea and in the US, and many companies showed exciting OLED panels at CES) so it feels good to be number one right now. Even if Google’s SERPs keep changing all the time…

Drupal woes

Ron Mertens — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 12:27:38 +0000

A while back I decided it was time to upgrade OLED-Info’s infrastructure – from Drupal 6 to
Drupal 7 (D7 was released in January 2011 – almost two years ago). The good news is that the
D7 based site is now up and running, and seems to be okay. I’m not sure when I’ll update the
rest of my Drupal based sites, but I’ll probably do it soon.

I thought the upgrade will be quite easy as I’m a very “regular” Drupal user (or at least I
thought so). But it took me almost a month to complete this move. Everything broke: images,
views, meta tags, some fields, links to amazon, taxonomies, my backup routine and more.

This is so frustrating. Drupal is great, and its amazing that so many people contribute to it
without asking for anything in return. On the other hand it seems that they simply do not mind
breaking backward compatibility when writing a new major versions. In addition a lot of the
“basic” functionality (for example creating an image gallery) is performed via “3rd-party”
modules, and some very popular and useful ones simply haven’ t been upgraded to Drupal 7. Some
do offer migration paths, but it can still be a lot of work.

Oh well. It’s now behind me. On other hand, Drupal 8 is just behind the corner. You can expect
a very similar post from me in 2015…