Month: December 2014

Have you ever linked a blog post to Facebook, then gone back and made some corrections, only to have the original text keep showing up?

It’s because Facebook caches a copy of the page the first time you post it.

Here is how to make Facebook refresh its cached copy, courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net:

1. Go to Facebook’s Developer Debugger: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug)
2. Enter the URL of the web page in question and hit the “debug” button. You may see some error messages, but if you cursor down the page, you should see a box with the updated information.
3. Go back to your status update and share the URL.

If you’d like to read the full article, it’s here: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/blog/tutorials/facebook-web-page-preview-showing-old-content/

So, about a month ago, the Bluetooth Keyboard on my work iMac announced its batteries were low. 

I checked it and discovered it was sitting at 18%. I held off changing them out, thinking I could probably get another day or two out of the current set.

As you can see, today’s reading, a FULL MONTH LATER shows I still have 14%. 

Despite this, every morning I get a stern warning that my keyboard batteries are low and I must change them immediately or dire consequences will resul

  

Just kidding. At this rate, I won’t actually need new batteries until February. If only my phone battery lasted so long.

The Mannheim Steamroller is bringing its Christmas show to Cedar Rapids again this year. And it’s special, because 2014 is the thirtieth anniversary of the release of “Christmas,” their first holiday album, and one that completely changed how people listened to Christmas music.

And it’s all thanks to me.

That’s right. Because I was the first person to play Mannheim Steamroller’s Christmas album on the radio.

Yep. To the best of my knowledge, at least, the old WMT-FM was the first station anywhere to put that record on the air.

And if you were around Cedar Rapids back then, you heard that music pretty much before anyone else in the world. Even (I think) before a lot of the people in Omaha, where the group got started.

I was familiar with the Mannheim Steamroller from their Fresh Aire series of albums, which founder Chip Davis, at one time a high school orchestra teacher, had originally conceived as a way to mix rock and roll rhythms with classical forms to make orchestral music more accessible to his students.

Heck, I actually go back even farther than that. I saw the “Fort Calhoun Nuclear Power Plant Band,” the name Davis and his Steamroller compatriots played under when they were C.W. McCall’s backup band. Yes, that’s the Mannheim Steamroller playing behind the Seventies anthem, “Convoy.”

Anyway, we were so taken with “Christmas” at 96 1/12 FM that we went a little nuts. I think we played every tune on the album. WMT-AM, at that time also a music station, got into the act as well.

Months later, I chatted with a rep from American Gramophone, the Mannheim Steamroller’s record label, who confided to me that their statistics showed an unusually high concentration of album sales in Cedar Rapids. I told her I knew why.

And of course, the album’s success in Cedar Rapids was what catapulted it into pop culture, changing holiday music forever, and giving Chip Davis a pretty nice retirement nest egg.

OK, maybe that’s pushing it. But I can tell you, we were first. So whether he knows it or not, when Chip plays Cedar Rapids, he’s coming back to the place where it all started.