I’ve been working for the last 5 months on build & deploy type projects. Both have been using Maven. I had started off convinced that it was pure evil. Many colleagues claim there is no place for it. I don’t know if I am convinced. Being with a central build and deploy team, responsible for making sure that up to 20 separate projects can be built and deployed to multiple environments, at differing schedules, Maven has made part of this pretty simple. Many arguments I hear seem very single project focused. They also seem very focused on only open-source dependencies. They also argue that they can manage their dependencies better by themselves, but theres the rub, “Themselves“. With 20 projects possibly managing themselves, and each having to share some environments, and all having to exist together as a product, that would be chaos. As my current client has observed.
Maven has been working (albeit with some pain). I do agree that a better way needs to be figured out and implemented, but I am not loosing any sleep about it.
I got the Douglas WF-165 TA for fathers day. Looks pretty good. The neck feels really great. Bending seems significantly easier than on my Fender Nashville Tele (I’ve been lazy and really need to spend some loving time with that one). I wasn’t expecting the pitched back headstock (must not have look close enough to the webpage). The setup was a little out of whack, but thats fixed now. Just switched out the strap buttons with Dunlop strap locks. Here it is on my workbench:
The pickups are Ok. I’ll hold off on changing them out until after the the rest of the work is done. I’ll see if I will ever use them, or just play exclusively through the VG-99.
So I have decided to start a new guitar modification project. I would like to get a Roland VG-99, but I do not want to have the big giant wart GK-3 hanging off any of my guitars. So I figure, I have some moderate wood-working skills, so why not modify a guitar to hide the electronics. I think I am going to go with the Roland GK-KIT-GT3: Divided Pickup Kit. I figure I would stick with all Roland on the electronics side even though the Graph Tech GHOST pickup systems also look interesting.
I also don’t think its a good idea to hack-up any of my current guitars, so I want to purchase an inexpensive model so if I mess it up, I don’t loose a fortune.
I have picked the guitar I want to try it on, and if I am lucky my family will have gotten the not so subtile hint to get me this for fathers day:
Douglas WF-165 TA
This is only $150.00 and since it will end up being basically a modeled synth, it doesn’t have to sound good. I can get the feel to be what I want with the toolset I currently have. If this guitar is of the same quality of the Agile PS-970 that I bought from Rondo Music then I won’t have much work. (These guitars are really good for the price.)
Agile PS-970 - This is the model I bought
I will also want to add a vibrato, so I will also add a Bigsby B5G and a Vibramate quick mount kit.
I expect this to take some time as I will need to work up the funds, but I think it will be fun. I will try to blog as I do this.
I am finally rejoining the the internet social world. I have been lax in partaking, since I moved to my new home. I haven’t had any DSL in about a year or so. I just got DSL again (no cable here in the boondocks, so it is not so painful. So I am now Twitter’ing ,Facebook’ing, Linked-In, TripIt’ing and CubeTree’ing….Now everyone can follow all the insignificant things I am doing.
