Apple is running a one day sale at their retail stores and online. All the iPods are marked down, as is the Airport Express, the new iMacs, .Mac, and a bunch of other stuff. I was going to go get a copy of World of Warcraft anyway… Update: I went up and the Apple Store was crazy crazy busy. In fact, the mall, no surprise, was about as crazy as it gets. I don’t understand the mentality that says today is the day to do your Christmas shopping. I guess the sales are good, but retail is more expensive than online anyway, so if you are looking for the best price, wouldn’t it make sense to stay away from the mall anyway? Picked up my copy of World of Warcraft. It was the last one at the game store, much to the disappointment of two people behind me in line. It also takes up a whopping 4 gb of hard drive space, so I have some drive cleaning to do before I can even install it. I wish that laptop drives were keeping pace with desktop ones.
This never gets old for me, maybe because I was there, and took the pictures. Maybe because I know the person involved well. Perhaps I should move it over to Flickr. IFellInAHole
It’s been a relatively fruitful year for music in my opinion. I’m going to talk about these cd’s/mp3’s/records/albums in no partcular order, so please don’t assign value to the order they are written in. I will be doing a top ten of the year in the next week or two.
Elliott Smith's From a Basement on the Hill, the record he was working on at the time of his apparent suicide, is more of the same sweet melancholy the Elliot Smith fanbase has come to expect and adore. It's one of those albums that I can go back and listen to on a regular basis. He wrote great songs, and this album is no exception.
Neko Case is about to explode. Of course I don't mean literally, but I have this feeling about her that I've had about other artists in the past who have gone from independent adulation to widespread popularity. No woman in music today has a more moving, powerful voice than she does, and I honestly don't say that lightly at all. My iTunes playcount on her newest effort, The Tigers Have Spoken, seems to average out to about twice a day since I purchased the album, which is an almost unheard of pace for me. I think, for those of you who aren't the biggest roots, torch and twang, or country fans in the world, you will find that this album is the most accessible in her current catalog. (New Pornographers excluded there.) The mix of studio work and live songs on this record seem to flow seamlessly, as do the mixture of covers and originals. Interestingly, this record is from the same label as the Elliot Smith one above, leading me to think that Anti, a sub-label of Epitaph, the Bad Religon label, has at least one person with very good taste manning the helm. Regardless, I am looking forward to Neko's forthcoming full length.
Last weekend, I went to see Helmet on their most recent tour. Well, it's not Helment so much anymore than it is Page Hamilton and a bunch of guys from other acts. Helmet was good, but that's not the point. A band from Oakland named Totimoshi opened up. They initially got my attention because the bassist, Meg Castellanos, is very attractve in a "I rock out and don't take bs from anyone" kind of way. (That's just a characterization, I did not actually get a chance to talk to her.) I know that's a shallow thing, but that's how the story goes. Anyway, they were phenomenal, great stage presence, great musicianship, and solid songs. I bought their most recent CD, Monoli, at the show, and ripped it the next day. They draw from a wide variety of sounds. The bands that belong in that list, in my opinion, include Nirvana, The Melvins, The Pixies, and Neurosis, in no particular order. They promised me they would be coming back to Atlanta to play again in the near future, and I am holding them to that promise.
When I went to New Orleans a couple of weeks ago, and asked people to give me suggestions, I got a ton from Scotty. One of them was "Check to see if the Morning 40 Federation is playing anywhere in town while you are there. I guarantee their shows." He is absolutely right. I brought a small group of fellow conference goers on Halloween to see them. They are difficult to describe musically, a party band with bawdy lyrics, a rocking blues band with attitude, a quirky band with odd song topics and lyrics, and perhaps the most fun band I have seen live in the last four years. I purchased their eponymous CD at the show, and am listening to it at this very moment. Their fun translates to the CD well, is mixed well, and is worth the purchase. Regardless of the CD, if you have a chance, go see them, I now am willing to guarantee their shows like Scotty.
Where have I been, you might ask. Not a bad question to ask, from my perspective. Right now, I am working on the PGA Grand Slam of Golf. I am in rainy cold Atlanta, not in Hawaii, working off the satellite feeds and the Internet to get information and get the information up onto the Web for the sports consumer. In the time since I last posted, I have been sick (still slightly), given Halo2 a good Bump style ass kicking, won a fantasy football game, and worked a bunch. Things that I should be doing, and am not, include reading and taking pictures.
Bump.net is over seven years old now. Thanks for reading. I'm very thankful that I have been able to continue a single project for this long. Of course, those thanks pale in comparison to how thankful I am for everything else in my life, especially my family. Have a great Turkey Day everyone.
Luxo points to a Sarah Vowell Interview. I had no idea that she was the voice of one of the characters, Violet, in the Incredibles, she is currently one of my favorite authors. Seems an incredibly odd combination to me, but it obviously works.
Policy Research: “Did Clinton ‘Gut’ the Military?” Interesting to see common perceptions, reinforced by years of political campaigning and media spin, combatted with black and white facts. I did similar research this summer, when hanging out with someone on a sporadic basis who said this same thing on a regular basis when I was with her. Truth of the matter, when looking at actual budget numbers, is that Democrats don’t necessarily spend less, or have less of a committment to defense spending, than Republicans. Having said that, this is not the issue I usually have with the Democrats, it’s fiscal responsibility. Oddly, they have turned the tables on that as well in recent years.
The True Story of Audion. Panic has decided to retire Audion, a great little music player, which had much similarity to a version of WinAMP for the Mac OS, for those of you unfamiliar with it. This article is a great behind the scenes look at independent software development in the Mac OS market. It is also an interesting look into this particular market segment, and the things that happened behind the scenes. Apple wanted to buy Audion at least twice, and AOL also tried at one point. Finally, this article reveals something that those of us using their software already knew, that the guys at Panic are truly great guys, and that they do what they do for all the right reasons. If you are a Mac user, they are offering Audion as a free download. I own a license, bought before the iTunes Music Store, and I haven’t had the app installed on my machine in a while.
So Atlanta’s favorite Yankee was named Yankees' bench coach today. Mel and the Don are back too. Now the question is, who will the Yankees purchase this offseason for them to coach? Unquestionably, the Boss has to be a wee bit angry that the Red Sox sold their soul to the Dark Side of spend too, with much success. We don’t want a guy who refers to a baseball team as his daddy, I know that for certain. Even if he hangs out under a mango tree sometimes.
The big news in the iPod market today? You can, get this, order the much anticipated iPod Socks from the Apple Store. Please people, get some kind of grip, any kind, and then move on. Seriously, please….get grip.
I should mention that I am way behind in posting, and that there are a bunch of things I wanted to get up here in relation to the Macromedia conference, but haven’t had time to export from my brain. As far as today’s news, aside from the good news about GMail POP access reported by Mr. Hammersley and the hilarious “Thumb Drive”, the ever delightful matt pond PA are playing at the Echo Lounge here in Atlanta tonight.
Friends of the Beltline are having a fundraising event next weekend with food and a live band. I’m planning on going, drop me a line if you want to tag along.
So, I arrived in New Orleans (nola) this afternoon. Everything so far has been a little bit off kilter. First, my room wasn’t ready and I had to wait in the Executive Lounge for an hour before they had my room ready. Instead of a non-smoking room, which is what I asked for, I got a smoking room with the ash trays removed. This place smells awful. There is an Everquest Convention going on in the hotel I am making my temporary home. As a result, there are some odd looking folks, even odder than your normal computer convention crew, wandering the halls. In addition, the hotel’s in-room Internet service is being rendered downright unusable. I can only surmise that the bandwidth is being sucked up with hundreds of Everquest sessions going on, but doing anything even slightly Broadbandish is brutally slow. The result will be that any picture posting may have to wait until either their convention ends, or I can get to a faster, less logjammed connection.
Officlal Macromedia page for Blackstone, the next version of ColdFusion. Lots of useful new features in this release, but probably the most interesting one they have revealed in these pages is Sourceless Deployment, which lets you distribute compiled Java bytecode versions of your applications. There are, of course, others, which I wish I could talk about, because they will allow App Developers to do things with ColdFusion/Java that just weren’t posssible before.
Well, clearly I should not have waited until today to advance vote. I arrived at the polling place at 7:30 am, half an hour after they opened the doors, to find a line of about 2500 people. I waited, with my seven new line friends, for six hours before I got to actually vote. The polling folks were very clearly unprepared for the turnout, with only 16 booths. I whipped through the touch screen voting process in about thirty seconds. I have now fulfilled my responsibility, and will now become a spectator. When I left the polling place around 1:30 pm, the line was longer than when I got there. (The polls also close at 7 pm, so if you do the math, some of those people are going to get shut out.) My feet hurt. Oh, and I don’t care who you vote for, but please vote. It’s a responsibility in addition to being a right. If I can wait in line six hours to make sure my ballot is cast, you can also take time to cast yours.
Things around the office have been really crazy this last couple of weeks for a variety of reasons. Reason number one is that it seems like tasks swell to whatever the current amount of available time is plus ten percent. Reason number two is that I am leaving town on Saturday and need to find a few hours before I leave to take advantage of Georgia’s new advance voting while still finishing out all of my team’s projects. Reason number three is that our office culture is one hundred eighty degrees opposed to one that fosters good development and specification processes. Features change, features are dropped, features are added, and while I do my best to keep things in check, I inevitably could do better. (That’s one that I have had to struggle with for the last 22 months, so I am not sure that it really counts.) Unfortunately, this means that I end up leaning rather heavily on those around me for support. We’ll see how this turns out, but Friday will, without a doubt, be a very interesting day.
Contrary to what you might expect from me, I am happy for the Red Sox and their fans. The imaginary curse has be obliviated, and the entire identity of that sports town is about to shift. No longer will they be able to cling to the “victim” status that they have defined themselves by for so long. Finally, this actually makes the whole Yankees/Red Sox thing a real rivalry. It’s not really a rivalry if one team wins all the time. Oh, and wait until next year:-)
Twice in the last two years to my delight, people who have disappeared from my life over time have re-appeared after finding my Web site doing a Google search for my unique last name. Most recently, a former college roomate and great friend who I lost touch with over the years commented on a post on my blog. However, he didn’t leave me any way to get back in touch with him. So Tyler, if you are reading this, send me an email at bumpnet – at – gmail – dot — com.