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Cover Songs – The Phil Collins Edition

March 22, 2020 By Bob Leave a Comment

Reading Time: about 3 minutes

It’s been a while since I’ve posted any cover songs, so let’s see what we can find from Phil Collins.

Phil Collins is another favorite artist of mine. The drummer of Genesis for over twenty years, he started his solo career in 1978 with Face Value. I’d listened to Genesis off and on, mainly via singles on the radio. I picked up on his solo stuff in the 80s, not necessarily because of “In the Air Tonight” and its 1984 appearance in the pilot of Miami Vice though.

“In the Air Tonight” is probably Collins’ most iconic song. Even if you don’t know it’s Phil Collins, you know the song, and people air-drum to it the way they play along to Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.” It’s also more than a little difficult to cover, because the drum part is so much a part of the song. He’s probably most famous for playing it at both LiveAid concerts, taking advantage of the Concorde to play it first in London, then Philadelphia. By the way, I’ve heard the rumors about the “story behind the song” since the 80s, and they’re not true.

Chris Daughtry has what I think is my favorite version of this song, one I’ve linked to in the past.

Sierra Eagleson has a lovely cover of the song. Collins himself played a piano version at Live Aid. Eagleson has a similar version, but I think does it a little more soulfully than Collins.

Blacktop Mojo does an acoustic cover in a distillery in Dallas. The link starts the video where the music begins, but you can rewind to learn more about the place if you like. The acoustics of the building and Matt James’ voice do wonders for the song. –

Lorde applies her unique flavor to the song.

I can’t find much about Corvyx, but his voice on this is fantastic, although if you don’t like snakes, you’ll probably want to just listen instead of actually watching the video.

Flutetastic has a beautiful version of the song, played on a Native American Flute to a conventional backing track. But the flute he plays it on I think fits the mood of the original lyrics incredibly well.

Barenaked Ladies appeared on AV Undercover doing a folkish/bluegrassy version.

“In The Air Tonight” is not his most commonly covered song though. According to SecondHandSongs, that honor belongs to “Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now),” his love song from the movie Against All Odds, covered by 100 different artists. Glee, Bonnie Tyler, Barry Manilow, even Straight No Chaser have all covered it.

Of course, he’s covered a few songs himself. Ten years ago, he covered Cyndi Lauper’s “True Colors.” I think though my favorite is his 1982 cover of The Supremes’ “You Can’t Hurry Love.” It’s not that he does anything special on the song, I think, but more because of the video.

Check out his listing at SecondHandSongs and tell me what your favorite song or cover is.

I welcome your support at Patreon, where you’ll see exclusive content like After, my post-apocalyptic serial novel, as well as first drafts, deleted scenes, and so forth. You can sign up for my infrequent newsletter here. You can find some of my other writing at The Good Men Project, too. Subscribe to the blog via the link in the right sidebar so you never miss an update here, either. You can also add my RSS feed to your favorite reader. And of course, I always appreciate readers sharing my posts via social media shares.

Blocked: When People Can’t Get to Your Website

February 19, 2020 By Bob Leave a Comment

Reading Time: about 6 minutes

What happens when your website gets miscategorized by web filtering technology?

I was out and about the other day and stopped in the local library for a while to get online. I try to check the back end of the website every day to get an idea about traffic over the last day, and see who’s reading what and how they found me. I logged into the library’s wifi and clicked over to my website, but couldn’t get in. All I saw at first was that the site was blocked, and it occurred to me that it might be because I was trying to get to a WordPress admin page. It sort of made sense to me that I could be blocked from accessing the back end of a website. I thought it was a little strange though because I’d worked on the site before from the library.

I tried to hit the front end of the site and got this message.

WebTitan web filtering technology miscategorized my website

Wait, what? Pornography?

If you’ve read more than a couple of pieces here, you know there’s nothing pornographic about anything I write. Granted, one series is about human trafficking, but there’s no pornographic content in any of the books. (And it just occurred to me that I might want to limit how much I use that word in this article, so I don’t get…you get the idea.)

Why The Big Deal?

I write books. I’d like to be able to tell people about those books, and the website is one of my main venues.

Web filtering, in general, isn’t unusual or new. Schools and businesses and libraries have been controlling access to websites pretty much since the web went graphic. Lots of places use web filtering to restrict access to social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, so this site fills in that gap. I wasn’t surprised to run into it, even at the Muskogee library. I just didn’t understand how or why I was tagged for adult content. It can be very frustrating to spend a lot of time and effort to get your site looking good and ranking for certain keywords, and then discover that people can’t reach it because of overzealous web filters.

What I Did

At any rate, I started talking to some people and discovered I was blocked by both WebTitan and Webblocker. One friend suggested the server’s IP address might be blocked. I checked with DNSlytics and found BobMuellerWriter.com is hosted on a shared server, along with about 1,200 other sites. That by itself isn’t a big deal because I knew I was on a shared server, and being on a shared server is completely normal. The problem with shared servers though is that innocent domains can get caught up in an aggressive web filter that blocks an entire IP address. I checked about a dozen of the domains listed in the DNSlytics report, and accessed most of them just fine. I deliberately checked a couple of questionable sites onthat list and found them blocked.

That work established that it wasn’t an IP block. I also checked my Ravensbeak domains to see if someone had just reported all of my stuff. All of them were accessible (because who’s going to filter genealogy.ravensbeak.com, right?).

That meant I was going to have to contact the filtering companies directly.

As it turns out, I never did figure out why I got flagged. It’s possible but not likely that someone did it manually, but I haven’t had any other problems since then as far as I know, so I don’t think that was it. That’s one of the risks of web filtering algorithms: false positives.

I asked a couple of knowledgeable friends for ideas. One pointed me to Sucuri’s SiteCheck, a free resource that lets you check your website “for known malware, viruses, blacklisting status, website errors, out-of-date software, and malicious code.” That check came back clean. Unfortunately, the “Website Blacklist Status” list didn’t show me flagged anywhere.

My friend also pointed me to MXToolbox.com, which has just a boatload of testing resources for your website. Good news: I passed all those tests. Bad news: I passed all of those tests.

It was time to start calling companies. As it turns out, many of the web filtering companies share data. I eventually figured out that WebTitan and Forcepoint seemed to be the industry leaders for data, and that many of the other filtering packages used their lists.

Forcepoint did indeed have me classified as having adult content. Once I found their testing page, where you can check your website, it was easy enough to request a change. Click the “Suggest a different classification” link and choose what’s appropriate. The problem with Forcepoint was that at their main website, there’s no obvious link to their testing page. I think I emailed their sales or demo department to get the link. They haven’t changed anything on their website to make it easier to find though.

Next, I called WebTitan, getting an Irishman in the US. At least I think he was in the US. TitanHQ, the parent company, is based in Ireland, although I called a Tampa number. Who knows? He was very polite though and explained that they used a list curated by Zvelo. Once he got around trying to spell that for me with his Irish pronunciation, I was off to their website. I was indeed miscategorized there.

At both Forcepoint and Zvelo, once I got to the page I needed, the changes seemed to be almost instantaneous.

Where I Looked

The hard part for me was finding the sites to check the classifications. So of course I’m going to share those links for you here, because that’s the kind of guy I am. I’m making it a point to check these once a month now.

General Site Checks

DNSLytics will give you the IP address of your website’s server (not the address of the computer you’re browsing with), known as a reverseIP lookup. It’ll also list the other domains that might be hosted on the same machine, letting you check those domains to see if any problems you’re having are specific to your domain, or being caused by a block of the IP address.

Sucuri Sitecheck (listed under “Resources”): https://sitecheck.sucuri.net/

MXToolbox: https://mxtoolbox.com/

Web Filtering Companies

Symantec (Bluecoat, Webpulse, ZoneAlarmPro): https://sitereview.bluecoat.com/

McAfee (SmartFilter Internet Database, Webwasher URL Filter): https://www.trustedsource.org/

Webroot (BrightCloud): https://www.brightcloud.com/tools/url-ip-lookup.php

Cyren: https://www.cyren.com/security-center/url-category-check

Check Point (you may have to create a free account): https://www.checkpoint.com/urlcat/main.htm

Palo Alto Networks: https://urlfiltering.paloaltonetworks.com/

Forcepoint: https://csi.forcepoint.com/

Zvelo: https://tools.zvelo.com/

Forcepoint and Zvelo seem to be the primary data providers for web filtering companies. If you ever need to fix this kind of problem, I encourage you to start with them. Here’s hoping you never need this list.

I welcome your support at Patreon, where you’ll see exclusive content like first drafts, deleted scenes, and so forth. You can sign up for my infrequent newsletter here. You can find some of my other writing at The Good Men Project, too. Subscribe to the blog via the link in the right sidebar so you never miss an update here, either. You can also add my RSS feed to your favorite reader. And of course, I always appreciate readers sharing my posts via social media shares.

The Most Uncomfortable Truth Of All

January 20, 2020 By Bob Leave a Comment

Reading Time: about 5 minutes

I need to discuss something with you. It’s an excruciatingly uncomfortable thing to discuss. I get that. But it’s something every single person on this earth is going to face, and so many of us are woefully unprepared for this.

Hospital beds — Image by Silas Camargo Silão from Pixabay

As I write this, a friend of mine lies dying in a hospital bed. He suffered grievous burns to his trachea and lungs in what firefighters call a “room and contents” fire in his house. Firefighters responded quickly and contained the fire quickly.

They didn’t find Paul quickly.

Paramedics resuscitated him for 20 minutes before getting a pulse. Who knows how long he hadn’t been breathing when they started?

That was five days ago.

His ex-wife has been posting updates since the day of the fire, and they’ve been progressively less hopeful, not that they were hopeful in the beginning.

Last night, she invoked his DNR, and today she instructed doctors to begin palliative care.

Yes, my friend’s ex-wife has his durable power of attorney for healthcare. Their adult daughter may be involved, too. I’m not clear, and it’s not the time nor my business to ask.

I think it’s amazing that they had that kind of relationship after the divorce, that he trusted her to be there for him like she is. And I see the rolling eyes and hear the sarcastic comments about how well some of you would “take care” of your former spouse. Paul and Stephanie had the kind of relationship that he could trust her to do this at the right time. That’s fantastic.

My point in all of this is to tell everyone to have the damned conversation.

We’re all going to die. I’ve got congestive heart failure and diabetes, so I may not last as long as I’d like. Because I know what risks I’m facing, I’ve already had this conversation with my wife and older children. The paperwork is already drawn up and they know what I do and don’t want. For example, I’ve said several times that dementia and Alzheimer’s scare the absolute crap out of me. I could deal with mobility issues. Although I’m sure it wouldn’t be simple, I could deal with them. But once my mental train has chugged around the bend and off into the sunset, and the part that makes me me isn’t there anymore? Quit keeping me around. Let me go. That’s how you’ll show me you love me.

Here’s the thing though. Paul was 56 years old. He was getting ready to go to work the day the fire started. He had no clue he’d be dead in a week or so.

You don’t know when you’re going to die. Neither do I. I hope it’s down the road, and I’m doing what I can to push it even farther down the road.

But there’s only so much you can do to that end. You can’t control the drunk driver. You can’t control the electrical short in your house’s wiring. You can’t control the freak wave that throws you off balance in a foot of water at the beach, breaking your neck in front of your wife and kids.

There’s a lot of crap you can’t prevent. Here’s where I note that knowing Paul’s sense of humor, he’d drop a link to one of the Final Destination crash scenes.

The fact is you don’t know if you’re going to make it home from work today. Lots of us look at advance care planning as something we should get around to as we get older. But there’s no guarantee that we’ll get older. If you’re 18 years old, you can set up your advance care planning. You can even set up your will, and probably should. That’s probably a post for later though.

So there are three really important things that you need to do after reading this. First, you need to inform yourself about lifesaving measures. Don’t just say, “never intubate me,” or “never let a machine breathe for me.” There are plenty of times that short-term intubation or mechanical ventilation can save your life. So you need to get educated about medical treatments that are covered by advance healthcare directives.

Next, you need to have a really uncomfortable conversation with your loved ones. Explain what you want, and explain what you don’t want. Here’s the part that’s going to be uncomfortable for them: you need to ask them if they can carry out your wishes when the time comes. Because Paul and Stephanie had this conversation years ago (and multiple times since then, I’m sure), Stephanie knew that it was time to let Paul go. She knew that he wouldn’t want to live with the kind of brain injury he’d suffered, because so much of him would be gone, even if the body lived on. Those uncomfortable conversations gave her the strength and courage to do what he wanted.

These conversations should include discussion of organ and tissue donation. I’m not going to get into a lot of detail here, because it’s not the point of my writing this. Suffice to say it needs to be talked about.

The third step is to put your desires in writing. Find out what your state requires regarding advance care directives. Not all states are equal. The National Institutes of Health has a good primer page to get you started.

It may be that there’s no one in your immediate family that you want to give this kind of authority to. I get that. It’s sad to contemplate some of the reasons behind those situations, but I get it. Find someone else in your circle of friends. Maybe it’ll be your religious leader. Maybe it’s that one friend who’s the one you go to the most for advice, even if they’re not your best friend. But for these things to work, you need to give the authority to someone.

I hope your chosen person never needs to invoke their authority. But I’ll be very glad for you that they were able to.

What I Learned From My Last Short Story

January 14, 2020 By Bob Leave a Comment

Reading Time: about 4 minutes

It occurred to me that it might not be a bad idea to do an after-action-review of sorts as I finish a project. Look at what I was trying to accomplish and compare it to what I did accomplish. Figure out ways I could have done things better.

A couple of weeks ago, I signed up for the More Odds Than Ends writing prompt challenges. I’ve looked at different sources of writing prompts before, but as I said, it can be overwhelming. /r/WritingPrompts is a good example. In 15 hours one day, the subreddit had 193 prompts. Many of those go unanswered, buried in the landslide of new posts. The ones that do draw responses tend to have some really amazing writing posted. I end up getting overwhelmed by the choices and intimidated by the other writers, so even though I still skim the subreddit, it’s really not my best choice for prompts.

The beauty of More Odds Than Ends is that it’s a directed prompt. They assigned one to me (and assigned the prompt I came up with to someone else). I always hated those in high school, before I discovered how much fun it was to run your own world. I had a terrifically difficult time doing anything good with directed writing. I think part of my problem though stemmed from those directed prompts usually being expository writing. Granted, I do that with my blog posts now, but back in my teens, I hated it. And we never, as I recall, did any real fiction writing, at least not in high school.

As I got older though, the idea of writing prompts kind of grew on me, albeit slowly. I still struggled with the dislike cultivated in high school. Later though, one of my favorite exercises from the first writing class I ever took was the postcard drill. Mike Harden had you choose a postcard from a deck, then gave you ten minutes to write a descriptive passage. I did just over 340 words in that time, and I worked my butt off for those words.

The same thing happened with “Substitution.” It took me a day to get going, but I wrote a 6,000-word story in four days. I wrote over half on the last day. I think the deadline—I had a week to write the story of whatever length I wanted—was a huge help. It was a clear deadline even if there weren’t any clear consequences for not meeting it. But the idea at MOTE is that everyone posts their story on, or at least by, Tuesday (new prompts come out on Wednesday). I could have posted it any time Tuesday, I suppose, but it went up just after midnight.

So I apparently work better with a clear objective and a fixed deadline. Not a huge surprise, really. Most people do.

The problem with a fixed deadline for an indie writer is that there aren’t any real consequences to missing that deadline, unless I’ve put something up for preorder at Amazon. If you miss your preorder date, you lose the ability to set preorders for a year. I’m not ready to go that route yet because I don’t have the process quite settled. I’ve got an editor and a cover artist, and I’ve got at least a couple of beta readers. Still need to work out the process and the timeline though.

For that matter, I’m still working on figuring out my writing speed. For “Substitution,” I averaged 1,500 words a day. That means an 80k novel would take me about eight weeks to draft. Can I maintain that speed? I should be able to, but can I? I know of plenty of writers who do that in an hour or less, and draft 80,000 words in two weeks. That’s something of a distant goal for me, I think. We’ll see.

Have a great week.