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Our family will be traveling out to Colorado Springs for the next week, visiting Melissa’s grandparents and aunt. We love going out there; there’s so much gorgeous nature to be had. Melissa’s found us two new (to us) places to visit: Royal Gorge and the U.S. Olympic Training Center. We’re planning to revisit Santa’s Workshop, and I’m sure we’ll go see the Garden Of The Gods again. It should be a nice week away from work and the net.
I wanted a new book to read during the trip, so I picked up Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near. I’ve heard good things about his book The Age Of Spiritual Machines (the inspiration for OLP’s Spiritual Machines), which was the book I was looking for at Borders and couldn’t find. This should be a good read. I’ve also loaded up the Hi-MD with recent CD acquisitions that I’ll finally get to digest.
See ya in one week.
OK, I usually don’t do these things, but when I saw Geoff’s list (and his request of me) I was intrigued by what might show up.
Here’s what you do:
- Turn on your favourite media player and turn your shuffle feature on.
- Hit “play” and keep track of the next 10 songs that come up. (If you have iTunes, you can make a smart playlist that will automatically list your most recently played selections.)
- Post your 10 shuffled songs, along with these instructions. You are not allowed to lie, omit tracks or otherwise try to make your musical taste seem hipper than it actually is.
- Tag five people on your friends list to do the same.
My random ten:
- Wall Of Voodoo | “Mexican Radio” | Call Of The West
- Beastie Boys | “Brass Monkey” | Licensed To Ill (appropriate, given that Geoff and I listened to this in high school)
- Joe Satriani | “Hill Of The Skull” | Surfing With The Alien
- I Mother Earth | “Levitate” | Dig
- Yes | “Everydays” | YesYears (out of print; originally on Time And A Word)
- John Wesley | “Star” | Shiver
- Extreme | “Who Cares” | III Sides To Every Story
- Porcupine Tree | “The Moon Touches Your Shoulder” | The Sky Moves Sideways
- Platypus | “I Need You” | Ice Cycles
- Led Zeppelin | “Tea For One” | Presence
I’m sympathetic to Doug Pinnick’s complaints about the failure of King’s X to get enough exposure to draw in the fans that would make the 25-year-old band a profitable enterprise. Doug, Jerry, and Ty have put out lots of great music over the years, and I still listen to their stuff regularly. I also try to listen to and purchase a lot of their respective side projects’ material. I don’t get to see them all that often since they haven’t been booked closer to Harrisburg than Philly (to my knowledge) since I’ve been here. One of Doug’s complaints is that KX can’t profitably (or otherwise) book earlier/all-ages shows, which limits the availability of venues and of appeal. If I was going to travel an hour or two to a KX show, I’d much rather be driving back at 11:30PM vs 2:00AM. If you haven’t heard their stuff, definitely go over to Amazon and check out some samples of their songs. If you like what you hear, buy a CD or two. I think the guys still have a lot of music to make.
Blackfield (the collaboration between Porcupine Tree’s Steven Wilson and Aviv Geffen) now has a Myspace page and they’re sharing some music from the forthcoming second album. The full track “Once” is definitely the heaviest they’ve done to date, and the 30-second preview track reveals lush arrangements of the songs “Miss U” and “Epidemic” that they’ve played live. They’ve also re-done the previously non-album track “Where Is My Love?”. Everything sounds great and I can’t wait to get a copy. Check out their stuff.
Rush is well on their way to releasing another studio album near the beginning of 2007 and hope to tour next spring. They also have a DVD-repackaging of the “Exit… Stage Left”, “Grace Under Pressure Tour”, and “A Show Of Hands” videos coming out next month called Replay. It also includes a CD of the GUP Tour. Out of these works, I only own a VHS copy of ASOH, so I will definitely be picking this up. I can remember watching the GUP tour laserdisc in the media room at the UB Student Union. Cool!
The EFF has a great portal that helps one to determine if they have one of the Sony/BMG CDs that contain the invasive DRM enforcement software (XCP or MediaMax) and where to go to make a claim for relief. In addition to receiving a clean version of the CD (heck, maybe it’ll even sport the CDDA logo!), the claimant may receive a free download of the music on the CD (apparently from a DRM-laden store), and software to help clean up your computer. In addition, you may have the opportunity to receive some cash back and/or some amount of free downloads of DRMed music. I recommend taking the relief offer that involves the least amount of downloads; I don’t prefer DRMed downloadable media.
If you own any of the listed CDs, I highly encourage you to make a claim; it’ll deter the music publishers from trying things like this in the future. CDDA shouldn’t be futzed around with.
I only own one of the CDs on the list, Our Lady Peace’s “Healthy In Paranoid Times”, but since I have the DualDisc version I wasn’t subject to the XCP software.
As a guy who works with Dell and HP servers every day and prefers AMD’s Opterons, my initial take is that Dell’s announced plans for a 4-socket Opteron server are the first real salvo they’ve fired at Intel for lagging in that part of the server space for several years now. The primary comparison in this space isn’t individual processor speed, it’s how fast data can moved around in the system, between disks, memory, processors, and back. The direct connect memory archecture of the 4S Opterons has been superior to Intel’s single- and dual-front-side-bus architectures of their 4S Xeon MP solutions. IBM recognized this a while back and instead of building 4S Opteron servers, engineered their own chipsets for the Xeon MP to address Intel’s shortcomings.
I suspect the Dell offering (a PowerEdge 6955?) will have feature parity with the HP ProLiant DL585, but I wonder what they’ll improve on besides perhaps the price. News more interesting than this would be a Dell 2U, 2-socket Opteron server to compete with HP and Sun in the higher-volume server market. With two dual-core processors and 16 to 32GB of RAM per server, these are fun boxes for the price.
I’ve played with Rogue Amoeba’s Airfoil For Windows Beta on and off over the last few days and it’s just not reliable enough for me to consider purchasing a license for at this time. I’ve been able to get it to redirect my laptop’s WaveOut to the Airport Express, but moderate CPU/disk activity (such as firing up a browser to post this) causes stuttering and gaps in the playback that are definitely not caused by the source application or limitations in network bandwidth. Even in the absense of other active applications, the audio occasionally skips. iTunes streaming to the AE is rock solid on this system in all but the most stressful situations. Something about Airfoil’s hijacking technology isn’t fully baked, at least on this config (a Compaq Evo N610C 2.0GHz P4 running WinXP SP2 with a Wireless-G connection to the AE).
I’ve also found Eric Milles’ Remote Speakers plugin for Winamp to be highly stable, even though it’s certainly not as flexible as Airfoil. But I don’t want any arbitrary audio output to go to the AE, just the output from my media player of choice. Now if we can just get Eric or someone else to port his work to Foobar 2000…
I had my comment publishing settings set to auto-publish authenticated commenters only, but since I haven’t yet taken the time to add OpenID support and MT’s junk detection has worked well for me I’ve decided to auto-publish all comments. Subject to change, of course, but I find I’ve been approving a lot more comments than I’ve been deleting.
TSN: Flutie announces retirement
Doug Flutie retired Monday, ending a 21-year career in which the undersized Heisman Trophy winner threw one of college football’s most famous passes, won three Grey Cups and played a dozen seasons in the NFL.
“It’s just been a fun run for me,” the 43-year-old Flutie said.
The ageless wonder won’t be on the gridiron this coming season, and he’ll be missed. I wasn’t that into football during Doug Flutie’s college days, but I remember some of his first stint with the Patriots. Living in Buffalo in the late ’80s to late ’90s, I was certainly aware of his CFL accomplishments. And when he came to play for the Bills I was a big fan.
He will certainly be remembered for his passing, but I think he ranks among the best scrambling quarterbacks ever. He should get into the Pro Football Hall of Fame (it’s not called the NFL Hall of Fame, is it?), but would he be inducted as a Patriot? Could he be the first official CFL enshrinee? After the press conference the Patriots hosted for his announcement today, combined with his Boston heritage, there seems little reason for him not to retire a Patriot. However, he’s one of the CFL’s most accomplished players and will certainly be inducted into its Hall of Fame.
He has been active off the field as well, with his son’s foundation, his band “The Flutie Gang”, and other football-related off-season activities.
Watching him play with Buffalo, I always remember him as a class act. I never forgave Wade Phillips for benching him in favor of Rob Johnson. He showed it as the sham it was when he played a full season as San Diego’s starter after leaving Buffalo.
It’s fitting that he punctuated his pro career with a Heisman at the beginning and an extremely rare drop kick at the end. Many football fans will never forget watching Doug Flutie play. Thanks for the memories!
Update: Scott commented on this post, but weighed in more eloquently in his forums.
I watch SNL off and on now that we have the DVR, but I had missed the December episode that featured “Lazy Sunday”. And when the Internet was abuzz about it originally, I hadn’t taken the time to watch it on YouTube. For some reason I was thinking about it today, and finally found & watched it. It is a classic. ThinkGeek meets The Beastie Boys meets Weird Al Yankovic. Check it out if you haven’t yet.
WOW! Jason Pominville just scored on a HUGE reach-around shot to elevate the Sabres to the Eastern Conference Finals. Cool!
Ross turned me on to Rogue Amoeba’s beta release of Airfoil for Windows yesterday and I tried the software on three different machines: a WinXP laptop, a WinXP tower, and a Win2003 Server. I haven’t gotten it to work yet. I need to try a few more things before I fire off a message to RA.
Update: I’ve gotten it to work on the laptop by redirecting the audio device’s WaveOut to the Airport, as opposed to focusing on redirecting individual apps. It seems good. I will probably purchase it, even though it won’t help with my primary goal, which is redirecting the audio stream from my ICYG source: a Foobar2000 instance running in a RDP session, set to null output. That’s a bit outside of the scope of Airfoil, which is why I’d love a FB2K DSP or output plugin that supports AirTunes.
From what I’ve seen, Airfoil will probably have problems working with my WinXP tower, which has its onboard soundcard, an M-Audio Audiophile 2496, and an M-Audio Revolution 5.1 installed. Need I remind you I’m an audio nerd?
I’m one of Tim Bray’s thousands of subscribers (via Bloglines) and I prefer his Atom feed. Bloglines recently redirected all of Tim’s Atom feed subscribers to his RSS feed. (Tim’s take.) Bloglines would rather add marginal features like embedded YouTube applets instead of hunkering down and supporting RFC4287.
They would probably defend themselves by saying that they’re just a consumer choosing equivalent feed formats. In this case, they’re not. Tim made the decision to make his Atom feed full text a while back; his RSS feed is just summaries.
Pathetic. I suppose I could call myself that, too, for continuing to use Bloglines. I’m not prepared to jump to Newsgator Online just yet. I’m actually tempted to roll my own Planet and call it a day.
About a week ago I received an email from Pawel Kondratiuk of Poland; he had taken my RSA-704 algorithm and ported it to C++. After a brief discussion about efficiency, he’s worked up version 0.3 and has invited me to share it here. It’s a source package with a makefile and a little documentation; he’s also included a convenient startup script for Gentoo Linux. I’ve compiled it on Fedora Core 5 and have it running on one of my lab servers.
If you end up solving RSA-704 with this stuff, please think of Pawel and I when you collect your $30,000. 
OK, I’m definitely interested in Sony’s news that they will begin supporting AAC in their SonicStage application, which is the software I use to transfer audio from my computer to my Hi-MD Walkman. They already support MP3, WAV, and WMA in addition to their own ATRAC; if they would support Vorbis, they would please me even more.
However, this news combined with Ahead’s (makers of Nero) release of a free, feature-filled, command-line AAC encoder for Windows (which mates nicely with FB2K) probably spells the end of Vorbis in my music library. I’d already made the decision to do new encodes with MP3 instead of Vorbis. I will continue to prefer to stream using Vorbis, but the format just isn’t supported in enough of the tools I use currently to do otherwise with it. The main tools I use to enjoy my music are FB2K, iTunes, and to a more limited extent, SonicStage and WinAMP. Discussion about the new AAC encoder is going on at Hydrogenaudio.
I’ve started a slow cull through my digital music morass to try to reorganize (especially through superior tagging), trash, and also delete & re-encode the inferior-sounding stuff that I want to keep online. Some of my Vorbis Q3 & Q4 encodes really sound like crap, but so did 128kbps MP3 at the time I made those decisions. The stuff I re-encode will not be Vorbis, but now I want to decide if Nero’s AAC encoder is superior in quality, flexibility, and compatibility as they pertain to my tastes and use versus LAME MP3.
As I’m approaching this I’m realizing that it’s nicer to have a smaller amount of nicer-sounding music that I actually listen to versus a bunch of badly-encoded stuff that I don’t like or never listen to. My collection will be higher-quality as a result, and will be more fun to jack into and play with in the various ways I do.
As with most weekends we do a Manolas craft show appearance, my parents came up for the weekend. On Friday night we watched the high-scoring game one of the Sabres/Senators series, which the Sabres just barely nudged to a tie and quickly ended in OT.
Yesterday Melissa and I were in Lebanon for a craft show and my parents and Ryan spent the day together. We were disappointed with the lack of business we did; lower than any of our previous craft shows. This was the second time we participated in that particular craft show; it may have been our last. It was curious because Melissa couldn’t find another all-soap vendor with products similar to ours. I’m sure the food vendors did well…
Last night we went to El Rodeo at my parents’ request. We hadn’t ever gone there as a family but had been talking about doing so for a while now. It was great; I had my first Corona with lime in a number of years and we all enjoyed our food.
My dad and I rode about 19 miles early this morning in preparation for the Tour de Cure (please sponsor my ride!). My legs felt great. After that we ate a quick lunch and went down to Rocky Ridge County Park to navigate a trail sponsored by the Susquehanna Valley Orienteering group. It was a first for Ryan and I, and we all enjoyed it. We did the easy route in the second-best time.
It’s now Sunday afternoon and I’m pooped!
Manolas Handmade Soaps is participating in the Spring Crafts Festival on Cumberland Street in downtown Lebanon, PA today from 9am-4pm. If you’re in the area, please come and see us!
Without having done much research on the subject, I’ll just say that I think any reform having to do with increasing legal immigration has to envolve punishing the companies that hire illegal immigrants, whether knowingly or not. A parallel step would be raising the minimum wage and making sure that that’s being followed. I agree with Brian’s point; shifting resources to increase the deportation rate of illegal immigrants is not an attempt to fix the problems that enticed and enabled them to skirt the system. And enabling “common-law” naturalization after a certain length of time discourages honesty.
Businesses in certain markets have already proven they’ll rely on workers willing to take low-wage jobs. I doubt they’ll reform in the absense of public scrutiny and government action.
OK, Michael was back on last night’s Lost; if you even dreamed of the ending of that episode, I’d be amazed. I won’t spoil it here, but his action is probably the biggest kick in the pants the series has ever had. Can’t wait for next week.
Looking at the semifinals schedule I couldn’t help but notice that the Sabres/Senators series is the only one that features a pair of games on successive nights. Looking at the HSBC Arena events, it’s apparent that someone didn’t anticipate the Sabres’ (and Bandits‘) success.
To be fair, there’s quite a bit going on at Scotiabank Place as well. Ooh, INXS and Our Lady Peace shows!
OK, now Marc (you know who you are) and I will have some jawing to do about this series… he’s an Ottawan.
Update: I just found out that I do have OLN. Cool. Watching game one…
by O.S.I.
OK, I’ve been listening to OSI’s Free a few weeks now and just received the special edition from Burning Shed today, so it’s time to review. The album is great. Is it better than the debut release? No, it’s different. There’s not a song on here that strikes me the way “Head” does, but that’s OK. My favorite tracks right now are “Free”, “Go”, “All Gone Now”, and “Kicking”. The weakest track for me so far is “Bigger Wave”. Gotta love the banjo on the acoustic closing track “Our Town”.
Jim Matheos and Kevin Moore have put together another solid album. It’s got enough riffs, groove, and vocal effects to keep your ears busy. The songs are so layered that there’s lots of sound to discover with each listen. Highly recommended.
OK, so the Sabres didn’t close out their opening-round playoff series in five games like I predicted; they took it in six. One of the things I’m noticing about this team now that I’m getting a chance to really watch them (I saw games 5 and 6): they are fast and have great puck handling. Can’t wait to see who they’ll face next.
21.6MB 64kbps Stereo MP3 47m (Courtesy of Nitevilla.net.)
This is a special pre-2006-season Brutal Deluxe football podcast. Scott and I review the NFL draft and some of the related free agent moves and attempt to gauge their fantasy football impact. Will there be any rookies to draft in your 2006 fantasy football league? Listen to see what we think.
Please keep us subscribed in your podcatcher; we will be back near the beginning of the NFL preseason.
Links:
- My Odeo Channel (odeo/7d2ff8e710040137)
- Want a free iPod? Help Scott out!
- SportPodcasts.com
- Email us text or audio comments!: BrutalDeluxe at gmail.com.
Credits:
- Mixed, recorded, edited and mastered by me.
- Music: “One Big Holiday” by My Morning Jacket from the Wired CD.
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