I was in Philadelphia this weekend to call a fly-in for the Independence Squares. I had a great time calling with Tom Miller and Howard Richman; however, the weather was a little weird…going from balmy to snow in just a few hours. Fortunately, the Weather Channel was predicting exactly that, so we were prepared.

Now I have a few days at home, and then off to Las Vegas for the CALLERLAB convention. I’ll have to do some serious websurfing to find tidbits for SquareZ.

Vic Ceder’s online database of his records continues to grow. He’s added cue sheets (the words) and the ability for all of us to add comments. That means that this database could become a communal record of what we think about various square dance records…at least the ones that Vic owns. Vic has also rated the records, so you can search for the ones that he thinks are “5’s” (excellent). (So far, he’s rated 218 records (out of 1225). Out of those, he’s rated 163 as excellent, 49 as good, 3 as average, and 3 as below average. (My guess is he’s been rating the ones that he uses, and of course, that’s going to be biased towards the ones that he likes.)

How I plan to use his database: I keep my own database of records that I own (in a fairly complicated set of Filemaker Pro databases). I can see using Vic’s database to find new music. I find that our tastes are fairly similar; out of the records that he rates as excellent that I also own, I mostly agree with him. So if he rates a record as excellent that I don’t own, I would consider buying it. According to his page describing the database, he may one day put MP3 snippets on line, in which case, we can also go and listen to records that we might consider buying (assuming they’re still in print).