A New Guitar With A Fine Pedigree

Ok, so my dear wife is driving down the road and sees a sign that says Guitar Outlet. She tells me and we take a little field trip. I've been stuck in the house for a couple of weeks because of my back surgery and this was one of my first days out.

The storefront is Dean Zelinsky’s Guitar Factory Outlet at 3080 Skokie Valley Road in Highland Park, IL. First, if you have not heard of Dean then you don't play guitar. He is a guitar innovator and has a long history of designing and making great, interesting instruments. Dean guitars was born with his name. DBZ guitars was also his product line. These guitars a beautifully made and have extraordinary playability and sound.

DBZ Imperial

So how did I pick a guitar. It was a snap. Dean designed a guitar that is incredibly thin and has an amazing sound. This solid body guitar is 5/8" at the edges and no more than an inch at its thickest. Its a set neck guitar with a stop tailpiece that is set farther down the body giving the guitar a great feel and lots of sustain and I think a very mellow tone. All the components are top notch and the finish is incredible. Metal is gold and the fingerboard and fret work is as good as any guitar I've played. It reminds me of my custom shop Gibson that was Pleked at the factory. This guitar is so beautiful its really a work of art. Oh, almost forgot. Its light as a feather, well, maybe half the weight of a Les Paul.

Click above to learn more about Dean's Private Label guitars.

Or read about Dean at Wikipedia

A New Fender..........

Fender keeps coming up with these reissue guitars from the 60's and 70's and I am such a sucker for them. As the Fender website says:

The Starcaster® guitar is back. Virtually fabled since its original mid-to-late ’70s tenure, the seldom-seen Starcaster occupies a special place in our history as Fender’s one and only offset-waist semi-hollow electric guitar. Prized decades later by a new generation of adventurous guitarists with a flair for appealingly unconventional Fender style, the Starcaster now returns in fabulous new Modern Player form with greater sound, build and beauty that’ll have you seeing stars.

The Fender Starcaster guitar’s thin semi-hollow offset body has a bound maple top and back, with stylish bound f holes. Its “C”-shaped maple neck has a 9.5”-radius maple fingerboard with 22 medium jumbo frets, black-dot inlays and the distinctively curvaceous Starcaster headstock. Other premium features include full-voiced dual Fender Wide Range humbucking pickups with three-way toggle switching, three-ply black pickguard, four skirted “amp”-style control knobs (volume and tone for each pickup) and an Adjusto-Matic™ bridge with anchored tailpiece. In Aged Cherry Burst gloss finishes.

Pictures? I thought you'd never ask: 

 

Books I've Read - 2013

This is only the second year that I have kept track of the books I read. I believe that I might have missed a couple but I believe I enjoyed them all. Hardly enough hours in the day for me to read. With less driving back and forth to Wisconsin I seem to have less time to read.

1.     Mad River - John Sandford
2.     Poseidon's Arrow - Clive Cussler
3.     Cuba - Julia E. Sweig
4.     The Faithful Spy - Alex Berenson
5.     The Ghost War - Alex Berenson
6.     The Silent Man - Alex Berenson
7.     The Midnight House - Alex Berenson
8.     The Secret Soldier - Alex Berenson
9.     The Shadow Patrol - Alex Berenson
10.     The Fear Index - Robert Harris
11.     Fatherland - Robert Harris
12.     Enigma - Robert Harris
13.     Pompeii - Robert Harris
14.     The Last Jihad - Joel C. Rosenberg
15.     The Jerusalem Assassin - Avraham Azrieli
16.     Unintended Consequences - Stuart Woods
17.     The Empress File - John Sandford
18.     The Devil's Code - John Sandford
19.     The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
20.     Hanged Man's Song - John Sandford
21.     Silken Prey - John Sandford
22.     Code Name Verity - Elizabeth Wein
23.     Inferno - Dan Brown
24.     The Passage - Justin Cronin
25.     Zero Hour - Clive Cussler
26.     Red Sparrow - Jason Mathews
27.     The Tombs - Clive Cussler
28.     The English Girl - Daniel Silva
29.     The Holy Thief: A Novel - William Ryan
30.     The Darkening Field - William Ryan
31.     The Twelfth Department - William Ryan
32.     The 9th Girl - Tami Hoag
33.     Never Go Back - Lee Child
34.     The Hidden Order:A Thriller - Brad Thor
35.     The Lions of Lucerne - Brad Thor
36.     The Path of the Assassin - Brad Thor
37.     Doing Hard Time - Stuart Woods
38.     The Quest - Nelson Demille
39.     The Neon Rain - James Lee Burke
40.     Black Cherry Blues - James Lee Burke
41.     A Morning for Flamingos - James Lee Burke
42.     A Stained White Radiance - James Lee Burke

Reading:The Warmth of Other Suns - Isabelle Wilkerson

Getting Near The End

As some of you may already know, I will be terminating my employment with Cardinal Stritch University as of the end of this month. It has been a wonderful part of my career. I started at Stritch in the mid-80's under Jim Kasum and Linda Simmons. Meeting these two people was probably the best thing that ever happened to my career. They were both wise as scholars and as people. They helped me mature as a teacher and guided my way while I was at Stritch.

As part of my Masters program in Computer Science Education, I did a bulletin board. This was before the internet and when telecommunications was something for airlines and big corporations. We logged over 50,000 calls before we shut it down and went all internet. It was suppose to be my Grad project but I never gave it up, until the internet made us.

Here is the brochure that I used when I went to professional conferences to hawk our program and the board. This was so cutting edge that many people could not get their heads around what we were talking about.


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