Jim Trageser's CD reviews, Hot on the Web column from ComputorEdge magazine, ongoing Reading Diary, and music coverage and opinion column from the North (San Diego) County Times. http://trageser.com For funk-jazz keyboardist Robert Walter, the San Diego native who now calls New Orleans home, music becoming a career was the result of two competing trends in his life as a young professional. "When the Greyboy Allstars started, there became a point that it was a combination that we were traveling so much it was difficult to hold down a job and I was making enough money I could afford to quit my day job," he said by phone earlier this week from the road, on his way home from a gig in Nevada. http://nctimes.com/articles/2008/12/24/entertainment/music/zb3987fa295ef69b5882575220067423c.txt Set in San Diego, this teen mystery by Santee author Barrie Summy mostly gets it right in a fun, summery read. http://trageser.com/books/reading-2008.php#mysteries Not only a great read with a truly original story (a mob hitman in the witness protection program finishes medical school, and inadvertently runs into an old adversary while working at the emergency room of an inner-city hospital), but a unique voice from first-time author Josh Bazell. http://trageser.com/books/reading-2008.php#reaper Smoke is a hot topic around the region these days: tobacco smoke, wood smoke, purported marijuana smoke. From the "smoke won't get in our eyes" department comes news that folks in Riverside County won't be able to buy new houses with wood-burning fireplaces much longer: The South Coast Air Quality Management District is banning builders from including wood-burning fireplaces, and even residents with pre-existing fireplaces (now there's a phrase Orwell would have loved) will be prohibited from using them on days with high soot levels in the atmosphere. Since the bureaucrats who dreamed this regulation up say that holidays tend to be days with high soot levels, presumably because everyone has a fire going on Christmas and Thanksgiving, odds are those will be two of the days when fires will be banned. http://nctimes.com/articles/2008/12/28/opinion/trageser/z888b5d829439cd4b882575270067915c.txt