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We talk a lot at home about the future, the climate and our responsibility for the earth. My children at home (13 and 15) challenge me: “what do you do for our future”. As parents we like to put savings in the bank for the future for our children, but establishing a lifestyle that is sustainable is like that, investing in the future of our children. What the world will look like when they are in their forties depends on me now.

What do we mean when we say sustainable? We mean meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. The problem is: we consume too much or in the wrong way. What nature has developed and stored during hundreds or thousands of years, we consume in a twinkling of an eye. The oil in the earth we soon have emptied and the rainforests we cut down to give place for short-term cultivation. A tree that has grown for forty years is used for a newspaper that is read for ten minutes and then thrown away.

We discuss at home and try to learn how to establish a sustainable lifestyle. We take a step at a time and try to change our habits, choosing alternative products. It could be easy to think that our small contribution doesn’t count or that we don’t have time, strength or money to change. But if we do not make the change who will? We need practical and sound advice. We as consumers need to get together and put pressure on the producers that we are serious in this. We need to catch the vision and begin to work on it!

In Sweden there is a growing interest and consciousness among consumers, especially young people. There are some magazines like Camino and blogs like CSR i praktiken that discusses these things. CSR i praktiken (sorry, in Swedish only) is interesting because it gives practical examples of how companies in Sweden are beginning to take responsibility for their products and services. Something at least is happening. If you know of a similar blog in English, please let me know.

I have recorded the playing of my band several times during the last weeks and as I listened to it, I became aware of some things about my own playing. It is very obvious when the bass in not playing, even more than when it is playing. The silence of the bass can be musical, but if it is not, it is like a hole in the music. I thought I was doing fine, locking in with the drums, standing close to my cabinet. But no, sometimes it did not sound good.

Legato, binding notes to each other should be consistent, independent of how difficult your finger movements are. If you break up the legato it should be on purpose, making phrases in the song. My bass, a Warwick Streamer LX, has a lot of sustain and that can also contribute to the sometimes chopped sound.

This led me to experiment some more with playing with my thumb, while resting the side of my hand on the strings close to the bridge. By doing this I get less sustain, the tone will die away more quickly and the holes will be less obvious.

Last night my band had a gig at a local party, with about 50 people. We had a great night with everyone being enthusiastic and happy. But the hall was very special. I noticed that every time I played a G, whether it was low G or high G, the note was amplified by the room and continued to sound even though I dampened my string. We’re talking about some resonance here! I have never seen a room behave like that before. I was lucky to have my parametric equalizer with me and I set it up to notch out low G at 49 Hz and its higher cousin at 98 Hz. That made my sound tolerable.

Do you ever make the same mistake twice? I do. Sometimes it is embarrassing. Have you ever resumed a project that was halted 6 months ago? I have. To help my failing memory I make personal log of lessons learned generally and per project. I jot down a few notes and describe the problem and the solution clearly enough so that I will understand it a year later. I also try to take personal notes of the background of decisions made in projects.

And how do you find your way in your own gigabytes of data? I use a Desktop Search Programs that is called Copernic. It is a nice, small program that silently indexes the content of your laptop when the computer is resting and it gives you search results fast as the lightning. There is also a Google Desktop Search Program, but Copernic is much better.

I love the way you can affect the tone of your bass with just your fingers. Where you hit the string with your finger affects how the string will vibrate and how it will sound. You can pluck the string from the middle of the string above the fretboard all the way down to close to the bridge and vary your tone considerably.

If you play close to the neck you will get a warm, round tone. The fundamental tone is accentuated, that is your tone will be more like a sine wave. You will get a deep, bassy sound.

If you play closer to the bridge the harmonics are accentuated and the tone has more treble in it. The tone is dry and dirty. The string is stiffer, which means that it will be in the same place each time you hit it. You can play faster. On the other hand the volume is weaker than when you play close to the neck. More effort is needed to produce the same volume.

How you pluck also affects the tone. If you play with a pick or with your nails or hard fingertips more of the harmonics are retained. If you play with your pads the vibration of the string is dampened at the pluck and the tone has less harmonics.

Added to all this we also have slap and pop and playing with thumb. I try to give the basslines of each song we play in our group character by varying the way I play. As bass players we are limited in the possibilities of adding effects because of the nature of the bass sound. Too much of effects just make the tone diffuse and undefined and your sound disappears among the guitars. But with a mostly clean tone and fingers we can achieve much!

A while ago I read a lot about acoustics and the implications for a bass player. I might write more about that later, but clear is that the acoustics of the auditorium and the people inside it has great influence over how our bass sounds. We can’t do much about it, except accommodating by adjusting our equipment and perhaps give suggestions to the owner of the place. Reflections, standing waves and vibrations are our enemies. Absorption of midrange can be tamed, but boomines because of reflections is more difficult. Having a good sound at stage and having a good sound out on the dance floor is often conflicting.

One product I read about and that seemed very interesting was Auralex Gramma which you put under your cab to isolate it from the stage. Ed Friedland recommends it and also Patrik Pfeiffer. I have experimented with different kinds of isolation materials under my cab, but I have not found a good solution. I decided to try it, ordered one for myself the other day and will let you know how it works when it arrives (in two months!).

A good source of information, which you might not be aware of, is the online libraries that several publishing houses offer. I have tested (and still use) Wrox Books 24×7 and O’Reilly Safari. Wrox has a simpler interface and somewhat fewer books. The cost of subscription is $50 per 3 months. O’Reilly is more expensive, $40 per month. You can browse chapters, copy and paste text and code, add bookmarks and notes and in limited measure download chapters (O’Reilly). O’Reilly also has a very useful cross-reference between sections relating to each other in different books.

It is not like having the book on your desk, but it is a great complement. I like to underline with different colors and write in the margin of books that I read. You can’t do that (yet). Also, it is still more comfortable to read text on paper than on screen if you read for a while.

The main advantage is that you can search through the whole library and find several aspects of what you are searching for. Two explanations are much better than one. Another advantage is that most of these books are so heavy that you don’t carry them voluntarily. I often bike to work and I assure you that it makes a difference whether you have 1584 pages of Professional ASP.NET Special Edition in your bag or not. Online books as such is an interesting path from the environmental perspective, since it is a renewable resource.

The cost of the subscription is easily covered by the time you save.

I have been thinking for a while along the lines of how to be a learning person. Learning how to learn. Learning how to be a learner. How does that sound? I would like to be a learning person in all areas of my life. We so easily become like stiffened clay when we grow up. We know what we know and we do not really listen in a discussion and are not willing to examine the worlds of other people. We become like professional advocates and defend our own ideas. Think of a little child, how curious they are, how willing to learn and try out new things. Learning seems so natural and spontaneous during the first years. They explore the world, they learn how to talk and walk. How to coordinate the muscles and keep the balance is so complex and yet they just learn how to do it.

All of us are living with mental models of the world around us. We have opinions about things, sometimes strong. We do generalizations all the time and continue to build on our model. Our own mental model can be our worst enemy in life. Like an impenetrable sarcophagus. It can hinder us from looking at things from a different perspective than our own. It hinders the westerner from seeing that his lifestyle is ruining the earth. It hinders a man from discovering the needs of his wife. He feels safe in his own world. And yet it is not the reality.

Timothy Gallwey wrote a book on how to improve in Tennis called “The Inner Game of Tennis”. In it he talks about how to be aware of your thoughts and actions, cooperating with yourself and learning how to learn. He found out that the principles could be applied to other areas and inspired Barry Green to write, “The Inner Game of Music”, a very interesting book. We have some eternal truths here, folks.

I can’t help thinking of something that in electronics is called a feedback loop. A device with a feedback loop monitors the output (result) and feeds part of it back to the input and that way improves and adjusts the result. This is a continuous process.

Yesterday I recorded my band when we played together and listened to it afterwards. I noticed some bad habits on my part. I thought I was playing in one way, but the recording revealed that it sounded otherwise. If I paid attention to it, I could hear it and if I am willing and acknowledge it, I can try to make a change.

We can shy away from feedback. We can accept and be glad for it when it comes. But we can also strive for feedback, creating opportunities for it. Let’s challenge our own mental models, our own opinion of people, our own values. Let’s look around. Let’s listen next time our child, wife, husband or neighbor talks to us. Let’s listen to the needs of our society and let it affect us.

My eldest daughter is studying chemistry at the University of Prince George in Canada this autumn. As a part of the education they will take some computer courses and will learn one programming language. And which language does the faculty choose? C++. I have nothing against C++, I grew up on it. But, I am a developer. Why do she and other students in chemistry and physics have to learn about memory allocation and unsigned int’s, when there are languages with higher abstraction levels that are more suitable for their domain? I know they have the same approach at the University in my town UmeÃ¥ in Sweden. The purpose of computer courses for them must be to learn to solve problems and express algorithms in a programming language and the step between their world and the language shouldn’t be unnecessary big for no reason.