music: Miles Davis- ‘Round About Midnight
I don’t own much stuff by American standards. Besides a couple boxes and drawers full of old relics in Milwaukee, my bicycle and car, and a few assorted odds and ends, I can fit all my worldly possessions into a 9’ × 12’ bedroom. I think that’s pretty cool, as I sit in my room surrounded by pretty much everything I own. I’m rolling on a backpacker’s mentality: only carry what you need (or really, really value) and be sure to use everything you carry. I may not have that much stuff, but the stuff I have is pretty important to me. I rely on it a great deal, count on it being in working order.
I’ve recently been making efforts to take more ownership of the things I own. If at all possible I’d rather fix or build stuff on my own than take it to specialists. Part of this is simple economics. Living where I do and having the job I have doesn’t leave a lot of spare change in my pockets. The other part of this is more ideological. I’m not a big believer in leaving things on the shelf and letting them collect dust if they are meant to be used. My camping gear is worn and patched and grimy at this point (except my whisperlite stove, which is a replacement for the old and grimy one sitting somewhere in a TSA warehouse in Honolulu. Thanks for keeping us safe, guys), but I know I can rely on it because I’ve used the stuff enough times in all sorts of dramatic conditions to know it inside out. I started in on my car under Ron’s tutelage last spring. I’ve been doing my bike for a while. My bed, while creaky, is homemade. Even many of my books are all marked up with notes in the margins. All this has been coming to a head as of late, when some very important material items have been on the outs as far as proper functioning is concerned.
Sometimes we don’t have the tools necessary to do a job properly. This goes for physical tools as well as mental know-how tools. One of the things I use the most and value even more, and the one thing I’ve been afraid to work on is my guitar rig. I’m only a novice when it comes to wiring and electrical work, and only a little beyond that when it comes to woodwork.
After about a year and 3100 miles on the road, though, my guitar needed a setup. This is a mysterious ordeal to many guitarists, even the ones who give a damn about their instruments, where a technician or luthier somehow realigns the guitar to optimal playing specifications. It’s like taking your car to the shop for its 30,000 mile checkup: you aren’t completely sure what has transpired between this skilled technician and your stuff, but you get it back and you can feel the difference. I couldn’t help but think, though, that something was amiss when someone says “oh, well, your neck is out of relief and i’m gonna have to go ahead and get in there and adjust your truss rod. No, no, it’s not dangerous to the instrument but it’s a bit expensive in terms of labor, might have to charge you fifty for it.” Sounds legit, but a quick internet search will reveal that a truss rod adjustment takes no more than two minutes and is as easy as giving an allen wrench a 1/4 turn in the right direction. That someone would charge $50 for this is completely stupid. So instead of dropping off my guitar with some stranger to undergo this magical process of getting set up, I found a excellent guy named Chris on Craigslist who not only does a setup on your instrument, but also teaches you how to do the setup while you sit there. And the whole thing costs $50. Amazing turnaround time, quality work, and more valuable still, a little lesson in self-empowerment. Way cool. I was feeling so empowered that I decided to install strap locks on my Gibson this past weekend, complete with taking an electric drill to its beautifully finished wooden body. There were tense moments, downright harrowing moments for that matter, but by day’s end two small holes were drilled in exactly the right spot, the strap locks were installed, and my guitar became less of a showroom item and more of another tool that I may use in order to make music. (I say that, of course, because I took a big divot out of the back trying to get a stripped screw out of the thing.)
Two weeks ago, my mp3 player finally gave up the ghost. I use that thing almost on a daily basis, and not just for consumption of music. I use it as a portable hard drive, a medium through which I can disseminate my own music, as well as a music player. The kicker is that it was the second one to go in as many months, as the display on my trusty nomad jukebox 3 finally blinked off. As I use my mp3 players for high quality digital recording (production, not just consumption!!) my options were pretty limited as far as what I could go for. Ebay came through: I ended up getting an identical iRiver h120 to the one I had previously. And between the old and new ones, I managed to cobble together a bigger, better iRiver than I had even before, plus I saved the time and headache of transferring all the music onto my new iRiver by just popping the hard drive out of the old one and putting it into the new one. All this, of course, requires that one be willing to open the thing up and tinker a bit. Thanks to “misticriver.net” I was able to stumble through the process with very little difficulty. Add rockbox to the equation and I have ways of customizing a lot on the software end. (And as an aside to any mp3 player user, including iPod users: rockbox is amazing. Look into putting it onto your music player if you can. You’ll be very, very glad for it.)
I employed the same ethic towards truing my rear bike wheel a couple months back. I managed to get it fairly straight, but realized that some spokes were wrenched very tight and others not at all. That all caught up with me this week when I popped two spokes on my back wheel and completely taco’ed the thing. That one, given the tools at hand, was beyond my capabilities and I had to bite the bullet and buy a new wheel. I’ll be giving my bike an overhaul some time soon when I have a minute, adjusting the breaks to be a little tighter on the new rim.
Lesson learned, though: if you’re going to do a job yourself, you need the proper tools. The actual physical tools you use are important, but more than that is the knowledge of what to do with them. Thanks to resources like Chris up in Petaluma, I’m able to take more ownership of the few important things I own. Too often we Americans outsource the care and feeding of all that is important to us, so much so that we lose the ability to deal with it all personally. It gets harder to personally deal with all your stuff in this manner as the amount of stuff you have increases, but it’s very much worth it. Or else, as the line goes, the things you own end up owning you. This sort of education began in earnest at Chowdahaus in Boston, and continues in full force to the present moment. The battle against entropy continues, but not without some of the necessary tools. As always, gettin’ there.
music: Radiohead- OK Computer
Computers are ubiquitous. This much should be obvious to anyone reading these words. But for all their utility and application to all aspects of our lives, computers have become fairly transparent. Perhaps people who use computers on a daily basis don’t realize just how much they depend on them. I didn’t until my computer crashed on me three or so weeks ago. For the first time since I was eight or nine years old (minus extended travelling sans computer), I had no personal machine. I’d like to think that my life didn’t come to a screeching halt, but the day-to-day did change a great deal.
I realize how much I’ve started to do assuming use of my computer, how much data relevant to me as a human being is contained and processed by the machine in front of me. Never mind virtual reality; at every turn I was stuck with the realization that my computer is the most indespensible tool in navigating actual reality. My banking and bills are all handled on computer, as well as much of my shopping. I write, record, and document music as well as words on my computer. I commuincate professionally and with friends and family over my computer. I make social plans over the computer, maintain a schedule over the computer, transmit documents of all kinds over the computer, listen to my music collection through the computer, keep extensive photo galleries in my computer. I found a place to live on the computer, a job on the computer, band mates on the computer. I have bought and sold things using the computer. Short of going gargoyle and strapping a computer to my body or implanting wireless interface chips into my brain, I’m fully integrated.
And it’s not just me; as anyone reading these words knows computers have taken or are taking the place of technological and cultural artifacts left and right. The printing press, the calculator, the postal service, the post-it note, the bulletin board, the radio, the newspaper, the drafting table, the safe deposit box, and the home entertainment center are just the beginning. People’s computers have become the record store down the street, the video rental store next to it, the library, store fronts and office departments, and even serve social functions much like the high school lunch table or the watercooler at work. And all of it is on a staggering, ever-expanding scale. To this, then, it seems that the personal computer is indespensible.
When my computer bit the dust I was immediately concerned that I lost data of some kind. Old papers from college, content from the Live Live website, recordings from band practice, photos from some of my travels in realspace, binders upon binders upon binders of LPs. Luckily no data was lost (and I’m in the process of backing up my backups) but I’d need a new machine to host the hard drive that has become the crates that most people keep in their basement. The catch-22 was, of course, that I’d need a computer to find a new computer. So for three weeks I stopped by the library to use the internet there (and picked up some new books to read in the process), and visited friends down the block to jump on their computers (and spent some quality time with them in the process). I biked around town, popped in on some cool coffee shops, read some books, played some guitar, listened to a lot of NPR, and after getting over the initial loss felt pretty good. (The flip side is that I let my phone bill and credit card bill hang, missed out on some fun events that I never heard about in time, and couldn’t listen to nearly as much music.) By the end of the third week I could almost envision weaning myself off my computer, making do with friends and libraries and guitar and the radio. I spent more time cooking. I used my hands a lot more. I checked the weather by walking outside.
All that has subsided, taken a back seat to the task of getting my new computer up and running. It arrived last Tuesday in the mail (courtesy of computer transactions), and I skipped a friend’s concert that night to start getting things back to how they were before my computer fried itself. As I type, my 280 gb music collection is migrating to a 750 gb drive, my backups are being backed up, I’m answering emails that have been hanging, listening to music, monitoring the news, generally getting glazed over staring at this screen, getting lost in the bits and bytes, and I’m blogging about it all the while. i’m plugged in, fully integrated, and after a breath of what it must have been like 20 years ago, I don’t think I’m alone.
The computer in front of me allows me to think I’m not alone, at least.
music: Paul Simon- One Trick Pony
Tracing the sociology of music recording is better left for other anize’ers. Suffice it to say that I’ve been up past my eyeballs with my own issues of archiving the music i’ve amassed over the years. 10 years ago organizing a music collection would have been somewhat similar to baseball cards, taking little discrete packages containing portable media and alphabetizing: Lastname, Firstname. Perhaps sorting by genre, although certain problems (Bela Fleck, Beastie Boys, Beck) arise when you start doing that. (I’ve even heard of collections being sorted by principal instrument, but this was mostly a Jazz collection. Still, when Kind of Blue is filed under “Trumpet” you aren’t accounting for the fact that Cannonball Adderly, John Coltrane, and BIll Evans played on it, and then you have the opposite problem for Miles on Adderly’s Something Else). But the time of tapes and even CDs is behind us, everything is now done with little digital files that live on hard drives of computers, portable hard drives, and portable music players that effectively render the classic “desert island” music question obsolete for generations ever more. The current project is to rip each of my CDs into .ogg files, and then — the hard part — label them all correctly. Seeing this project to fruition will makes transferring and sharing music much easier, and browsing such a big collection very fast (it also ensures that you will never make a mix tape whose last song gets cut off 20 seconds from the end). It also saves an amazing amount of shelf space-an entire wall of music in tape and CD cases can fit onto one hard drive.
The rules of labelling and archiving, however, have changed with this more flexible media. Maxell XL-II J-Cards and CD Jewel cases have gone the way of the card catalog. Even older conventions such as “Lastname, Firstname” are done. There are standards — there must be standards — for digital music libraries, but i’m still largely unaware of the good ones, and largely unsaisfied with the ones corporate America has forced many of us to use.
Yesterday I maxed out on my 300 GB hard drive. There is no official count, but there’s probably between 2,500 and 3,000 complete albums there, along with other oddities and assorted tracks. This music thing is quite an addiction, but it’s a good one as far as addictions go. Beyond the problem of whether I’ll ever get to listen to all of it, and whether i’ll be able to pick out the stuff I haven’t listened to as appropriate, there’s the problem of whether I’ll easily be able to find what I want to listen to. The basics are in place: It’s currently organized by artist, “Firstname, Lastname” where applicable, with albums nested in folders within each artist folder. There isn’t a great deal of cross-indexing, though (again, searching “Miles Davis” would not turn up Adderly’s Something Else) which is something to work towards in the future. The key to that, and the present challenge, is tagging everything. This is made much, much easier by little pieces of software that tap into the database of, say, Amazon.com to pull tags for albums, but is taken to the next level by moderated data repositories such as musicbrainz, an ingenious program that uses the “acoustic fingerprint” of the track to determine what it is. While musicbrainz is enormously helpful there is still room for errors if contributors submit erroneous tags, and I’ve often found that there are no tags submitted for those hard-to-find EPs by, say, your college roommate who is now a professional rock musician. Downloading tags (even just the basics: artist, title, track #, album) is still frought with problems, and musicbrainz works really well for identifying single tracks as well as stuff you have very little information on. But if you already have the album identified and just need to save yourself the work of manually typing in tags from the CD liner notes, musicbrainz can be more frustrating than not, partially due to the peer contributor model. There are some other music databases out there that software enlists for tagging purposes, such as freedb and cddb, but what I’d really like to see is AMG step up and offer downloadable tags for every album in its catalog. Ideally the basics would be there (artist, title, album, track #) but it would also include fields for the names of all artists that contribute, year made, certain genre tags (see the list of adjectives on the left hand side of artist pages on AMG, or Pandora’s Music Genome), and the like so cross-indexing could start to happen. One of DJ 1ey’s goals is to be able to do searches like “bluegrass mandolin female vocals” or “ambient dance saxophone” and have all the stuff that fits these simple descriptions come up. It’s possible, i think, but to realistically make it happen I think we’d need to be able to download tags from sites like AMG and Pandora.
Tagging, cataloging, and archiving the official releases is peanuts compared to managing a library of live recordings. Here there is less precedent, because it is far less organized, but those that have stepped up have some good stuff to offer. Naming files has been standardized, more or less, to “artist_YYYY-MM-DD_dAtB, with d meaning disc, t meaning track, and the date referring to the day the concert was played. Unfortunately, there are rarely tags beyond this simple naming scheme. This works well for two populations: those who can rattle off setlists and venues given a random date, and computer geek types who deal with enormous data sets and grew up using operating systems like MS-DOS.. For the rest of us, mostly using Windows and Mac’s OS, we’d be better suited to use tags for live shows in the same way tags are used for studio releases. The problem is one of time: there is usually a simple text file that comes with each live concert that contains specifics on artist, date, venue, track listing, and other technical stuff like the equipmemt used to record the show. This is very helpful, really it is, but when the tracks appear on your media player as “gsph20020521d2t1” it takes a trained eye to decipher that this refers to that Tuesday Night at Matt Murphy’s in May of 2002 that blew my head clean off.
So the task has been put in front of me to start tagging the live shows I’ve amassed (and there are plenty). Manually naming folders is the easy way to start up, and this begins just like studio releases: by artist “Firstname, Lastname,” then chronologically by date within each artist folder. Some choices as to artists still are unclear (does Paul Simon go in the same folder as Simon and Garfunkel? Bela Fleck and the Flecktones go in the same folder as Bela Fleck’s Acoustic All-Stars? Again with Bela Fleck giving me problems…I think he needs his own team of librarians) but this often boils down to a question of volume. Regardless, the big issue is now how to standardize tagging for live shows, as well as avoid entering in things manually. Again, it’s rarely a problem of identifying the show, and more of a problem of avoiding the manual entry of tags, as well as a problem of standardizing tags so there is consistency between collections.
The players most able to get the ball rolling on this could be websites that focus on live music. Sites like setlist.com and JamBase have the potential to start concerning themselves with tags, but these sites are more about the show itself and less about the recording of the show. Archive.org Audio Live Music Archive is a mind-boggling resource that centrally hosts tens of thousands of live recordings, and in doing so has been forced to give considerable thought to issues of standardizing file names and tags. They, if anyone, are in a position to start requiring tags for their content, even requiring contributers to start submitting files that have already been tagged. There may be a technical and historical snag to this, though: the most popular file format for live music archiving for a long time was shorten, which did not allow tagging. Since lossless audio file archiving is done predominantly in FLAC which is much more tag friendly. But if the archive.org audio archives, or better yet it’s parent organization, the grandaddy database for live recordings could throw in a little musicbrainz-style tagger program a standardized way to tag live recordings would catch on and spread like a hot first generation bootleg did just 5 years ago.
Granted, opening a text file and using that as a reference for live recordings isn’t that hard. And when you are listening to something do you really care about how it is tagged? Not really. The tagging thing has gotten me all twisted for two reasons. The first is being able to identify and find music in very large collections. Thanks to Live Live and other parties I’m sitting on a collection whose contents are probably about 5-10% listened to, and thanks to Archive.org and Etree’s Bit Torrent is continually growing. The second, and more immediate, reason, is the recent discovery of Last.fm.
Last.fm is primarily a way to keep data on what you have listened to on your computer. Every time something plays, last.fm “scrobbles” or records the artist and track name. You can then over time track your listening habits. This can become quite addictive, especially when you add the networking aspect to last.fm-your listening habits are compared to all other users and you can browse their listening habits to pick up new and cool recommendations. Moreover, for paid users, last.fm sets up a Pandora-style “recommended radio” stream you can listen to. To the scientist in me, I think this type of data collection is way cool, and I want to be sure that last.fm receives accurate data. However, last.fm works completely off the tags given to any track. Therefore, if a song is inaccurately tagged, or not tagged at all, it is not scrobbled and you get a faulty data set. This is bothersome from a purely empirical standpoint — no scientist wants unreliable or incomplete data sets — but takes on dual importance when you realize that last.fm actually changes your behavior! Talking with friends about it over the weekend, we agree that the feedback we get from last.fm changes the way we listen to music. For me it helps me spread my listening around a little more, makes me realize how many times I’ve listened to that one Grateful Dead show this past week. But it’s to the point of ridiculousness — there are thoughts like the music we listen to on our portable mp3 players “doesn’t count” because it isn’t scrobbled. Or music that we have playing but don’t really listen do is a “false positive.” I too would think it is ridiculous but the truth of the matter is that last.fm, and by extension tagging, does affect listening behavior. The experimental psychologist in me is brimming with ideas and theories here, but before any of that starts to play out I need to properly tag my collection, including the live shows. Technology is intended to make our lives easier, and once the infrastructure is in place I think it will, but at this point there are more difficulties than answers. I wish I knew more about computer programming here, and maybe it’s a good excuse to learn. Either way, though, ripping, organizing, and tagging my music collection has become a pretty enormous project. I have a feeling that it will be an ongoing one-a 750 GB hard drive has been ordered and is on its way. That should allow me to feed my habit, and spend far too much time at the computer organizing and tagging, for some time to come.
music: Michael Franti and Spearhead- Yell Fire!
Before homelessness meant carrying a backpack through the woods with all your stuff in it. Now homelessness is more conventional, although I’m lucky enough to have friends to put me up while I’m looking for a more permanent place. I’m doing well with it, but couchsurfing is always a strain. For me and, potentially, for my hosts as well. But here is something that makes couchsurfing into a lifestyle. Pretty cool. Maybe I’ll do like my college buddy Dave Ramsey and go rent-free this year, couchsurfing around the country…or maybe not.
UPDATE: 9/7/2006
I’ve signed on to the couchsurfing project, made a profile, and all that. Not because I need couches to crash on (my friends are incredibly generous and gracious hosts), but rather I think it would be cool to host travellers if they pass through town. Then, one day when I get my travel on again, the favor could hopefully be returned. The couchsurfing community: best idea I’ve run across in a long, long time.
music: Freshies on the Brink: 6/14/2006
We humans have come to rely very heavily upon complicated machines that we don’t understand in the least. Take this computer in front of me: I can put things into it and get things out of it but have absolutely no idea what happens in between. I’d guess that computers like this are by far the most complicated pieces of machinery that people use on a daily basis. Considering that we as a society rely on computers so much it’s pretty mind-boggling that the average computer user has absoluetly no idea how a computer works. I consider myself to be pretty educated but still couldn’t even get past a very elementary explanation of the insides of a computer. Truth be told, I don’t have much interest in learning; I’m perfectly content to type things, let the magic happen, and get some sort of verification on the screen or from the printer that I’ve done something of worth. I’m content to let the black box remain a mytery, that is, until something goes wrong.
Computers are far too complicated for everyone to realistically become proficient in fixing them. Ideally, of course, if one were to own a computer one would also be able to take the thing apart and fix it. For the sake of argument and practicality, let’s think instead about some things that people rely on perhaps even more than computers and to a large extent have no idea how or what is going on inside: cars. Blessings to those who ride bikes (and know how to fix them even a little) and those who take public transportation; congratulations to the few who own and drive cars and do all their own maintnence. To the rest of us who own cars: apologies. We are caught, completely dependent on such machines for our daily functioning, but also completely dependent on those who know how to fix them. The last time I took my car in for its 60,000 mile tune-up it cost me $1600. I can’t help but feel taken advantage of, even though a lot of work and parts were done. But still…it was enough to spur me to investigate a little and try to teach myself some basic car repair.
The first step is to go to an auto parts store and pick up a repair manual. Then perhaps a little poking around under the hood — nothing serious, just poking and prodding and investigating and getting your hands dirty. Then, when little stuff comes up, instead of dropping the car off to get serviced, see what the book has to say and if you can have a go at it yourself. Since April I’ve replaced a turn signal bulb, changed the oil, and today replaced the rear oxygen sensor, which resulted in the “check engine light” (owner’s manual says: take car to dealer) finally going off after three years. Success. It, of course, helps to have friends with electronic diagnostic computers and roommates with a complete mechanic’s set of tools and a world of car know-how. This is a major stumbling block: even if they wanted to, the general population doesn’t have the requisite tools needed to really get into projects like this and open up those black boxes.
I’ve also been poking around my guitar amplifiers, having taken great care and time in selecting new tubes for the vibrolux (Electro-Harmonix for the preamp, phase inverter, and rectifier; Sovtek for the power tubes). In researching my amplifier I’ve had to do some quick studying of basic electricity and circuits (amperes, watts, volts, ohms, and the like). Electrical schematics are a bit daunting for amps, but definitely attainable.I’m still not there, and still rely on outside help for a lot of it, but I’m getting closer to being able to open up that (literal) black box and tweak things to my heart’s content in the relentless search for perfect tone. It’s a new dimension on a near-obsessive hobby, a grand education, and most importantly, a way to assume an active ownership of the mysterious contraptions upon which I rely on a daily basis. In the name of self-reliance, I think that we who rely on such complicated contraptions should at least make some effort in opening up the black boxes in our lives, learning how they work, and learning how to fix them.
music: Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers with Thelonious Monk
Way to go, Someday Cafe. Your genius new year’s resolution was to install a widescreen plasma television?? That plays nothing but advertisements?? I can’t think of a worse way to kill a good coffee shop atmosphere. Yours is an establishment that should stand for the exact opposite of stuff like that. I guess there’s two things to do now.
1. Test out the TV-B-Gone on your newly installed obscenity
2. Go to Diesel
music: Pandora.com
One of the hallmarks of science is the propensity to quantify everything. It is also one of science’s pitfalls, I think. And science, taken in a broad sense, is quantifying everything. A while back I found some blurb about a computer algorithm that claimed to predict the success of a pop song. This one is similar, but has more practical applications to my reality.
Pandora.com, and its philosophical parent, the music genome project, claims to “capture the essence of music at its most fundamental level.” In practice, this results in a music jukebox that takes a short list of artists or songs, and predicts other types of music that you will enjoy based on the characteristics of the artists or songs you’ve identified. You can also give a thumbs-up-thumbs-down to any track on the fly, so the algorithm seems to be adaptive. One of the best parts about it is that pandora streams directly from the web browser in high quality and plays every track in full.
The underlying assumption is that music has traits, much like people have traits, and that musical traits can be traced back to ‘genes.’ The people at Pandora say they’ve identified about 100 musical genes, which are things like “sublte vocal harmonies,” “minor key tonality,” “organ solo,” “mild syncopation,” “acoustic instrumentation,” “mid-tempo rhythm,” or “jazz influences.”
I have a bunch of questions about how it works, like: who makes the decisions about each song’s traits or genes? How do they pick who goes into the database? Which genes are weighed more heavily? If more than one musician is entered, does the program try to find an overlap between the two? How can it account for unofficial releases and live recordings? And so on.
There have been more misses than hits so far, but my first impression is a good one. Intruiging, at the very least, Definitely worthy of some attention and time from the music addict. And I know a couple of those…
music: Spaghetti Western- Do Right By People
The advent of the digital music player is without question changing the way people listen and even the way artists create music. We are quickly becoming an iPod nation; the number of white earphones I see in my classes increases every week. I haven’t jumped on the iPod bandwagon (and Nick’s roundabout link to iPod’s Dirty Secret hasn’t further encouraged me). iPods are great for what they do, but they are a consumer-level device that does not allow for much more than listening to music. Great for most people, yes, but I need a little more.
I’m a nomad guy. Solo trip to the Outback aside, I’ve actually been using a Nomad Jukebox 3, for the better part of three years. It is a bulky beast by industry standards, but the extra features more than make up for it: .wav playback in addition to .mp3, two line level outs, and best of all, lossless analog and optical recording at line and mic levels. The last feature was the real selling point. I could take the thing to a show, plug into a taper or the soundboard, and come away with a cd-quality recording. Now that I’m making music myself that is (sometimes) worthy of recording, the thing has become indespensible. I’ve recored all of our biosphere sessions as well as the acoustic side-project stuff on my Nomad JB3 and it’s come out perfectly. (The recordings, not the playing.) Now that I think about it, I interact with that little piece of electronics on almost a daily basis.
Yesterday I turned on the Nomad to find the LCD screen half blank. There’s now a big horizontal strip running across the top third of the screen that is completely blank. None of the music is lost on it, and I’m pretty sure everything else works perfectly, but now it’s really hard to navigate the menus and playlists. It’s almost like that old Twilight Zone episode where the man is transported to a world with an infinite number of books and all the time he wants to read them and then breaks his reading glasses. The music is still there and I can still record (I think), it’s just going to be a problem getting to it.
This isn’t the first mishap with said Nomad. The line-in jack popped loose about two months ago so I opened the thing up to investigate and tmo did a handy job of soldering that seemed to fix everything. After this last mishap, I think it’s time to start thinking about a replacement Nomad. The thing is pushing three years, which isn’t too bad for technology these days.
I would get another Jukebox 3 in a heartbeat, except I hear that Nomad has discontinued making them. I’m not sure why, as the recording features are really unique. I guess nobody cares about that and everyone is just interested in listening to their dumpy quality mp3’s. But I think it’s worth shopping around a little. If there is another digital music player out there that can record into .wav (and record optical!), can play .ogg, and isn’t limited to proprietary software for transferring between computer and device, I’m all over it. Possibly the iRiver H140? Meanwhile, I’ll blindly stumble through my music collection and hope I hit the right buttons.
music: Cake- Fashion Nugget
I strongly believe that of all our culture’s products, television is one of the worst. Yes, it can be an effective means of communication and a viable source of information. I know this. TV, however, is used more for the powers of evil than good. It is, as Franti puts it, ‘the drug of the nation.’ When reduced to its most essential form, television is simply a series of flashing lights and sounds that keep people’s attention long just effectively enough to ensure their brains are shut off and they are content to sit in a comfortable chair. It pacifies people, distracts them from the world around them, keeps them from getting too outraged. Yes, there are some good things on the tube, but when taken in its gestalt there is so much garbage floating over the electromagnetic spectrum and into people’s living rooms that a complete sacrifice of TV is more than worth it. I’ve personally made a choice to eliminate as much TV from my life as I can, and encourage those with whom I surround myself to do the same. Every week on Live Live I used to plead with listeners to turn off their televisions, get out of their houses, and go meet other like minded people at a concert. I preach the evils of television to my students every chance I get. (“what about the discovery channel,” they say..) The elimination of television from our society is one of my personal revolutions. Think, then, of the potential of my latest material acquisition: I received a TV-B-Gone from tmo yesterday.
It’s a keychain sized remote control with one button: off. And it works on almost any TV out there. Genius.
I tried it, with great success, on the TV in the downstairs apartment. We went to Radio Shack and tried it out-success on the TV we pointed it at. The effects aren’t instantaneous; sometimes you have to wait for a couple seconds before the TV shuts off. Blockbuster has apparently shielded their sets or doesn’t use remote control sets. Same with Bally’s health club. I think that you have to be fairly close in order to use the thing, and you have to have it out, pointed at the TV you want to turn off. Stealth in-the-pocket usage doesn’t seem to be an option, but all things considered, the thing is great.
This is just one more tool used in the war against the idiocy of society dubbed culturejamming. I figure if we can get people to shut off their televisions long enough to wake up and smell the garbage then things might actually start to change for the better. Or we’ll have a mob of really angry and no longer pacified citizens on our hands, which might not be that bad of a thing. It doesn’t matter. Television has to go. With this new tool, I’m going to do my part and infringe on people’s personal liberties by turning off their televisions as much and as often as I can. And I’m gonna start with the meatheads next door. The nation may be safely bathed in that off-blue flicker for now, but thanks to the TV-B-Gone the good people of this country will soon snap out of their reality-tv-and-sitcom induced stupor and be forced to confront real people: their friends, their neighbors, and perhaps worst of all, themselves.
music: John Scofield- A Go Go
We don’t realize how much we use certain things until they break or stop working. The basics are pretty much taken care of: electricity, running water. We don’t even think twice when we flip a lightswich or turn on the faucet. The smaller things we depend on follow the same transparent trend; we use stuff without thinking twice. We take for granted that all these little gadgets that make our lives what they are continue to work. It is only when something breaks down when we realize just how much we’ve invested in it. I say all this because my external hard drive stopped working yesterday. And it really, really, really sucks.
The good news is that most of it is replacable. I used the drive as a data repository, predominantly for audio files. The drive housed the entirety of DJ 1ey’s ogg collection, a sizable collection of live shows in shorten and FLAC (including several pay-per-download Phish shows), archives of performances at Murphy’s, archives of some original work, as well as backup files of everything I typed for college and grad school, backups and older versions of the Live Live website, backups of some photos, and backups of this weblog. 1ey’s collection is replacable, as are many of the live shows. I luckily dumped everything I edited and tracked out for Murphy’s back onto Jason’s computer at the bar, so that is safe. I still have originals of all the backups, except for the earlier versions of the Live Live site. The only thing that is gone forever are the master archive recordings of some original work. The highlights have been saved and made into a CD, but the raw cuts are somewhere out there in the digital ether.
It’s true that all may not be lost. There is such thing as data recovery, but I haven’t looked into it yet. I don’t really feel like paying too much for all this to be recovered seeing as though not much was permanently lost, but to get it all back the way it was would be great. I think it’s a hardware thing, which makes me worry a little more. Software I could deal with more comfortably, but after re-installing drivers, checking for viruses, checking to make sure the USB port was working, and checking to see that communication between drive and computer was good, I think it’s pretty clear that the problem lies in the physical. The amber “drive working” light now remains on except for quarter-second blips every two seconds whenever I try to access the drive. The thing hums nicely, doesn’t sound bad, but things aren’t connecting. But it’s not like I can open the thing up and repair anything manually, like when my bike breaks. This is the proverbial black box (it’s blue actually). Any tech-savvy anize’ers (or anyone else) out there who has some ideas?
The drive will go into hibernation for the summer, and as such I’m not really scrambling to save the data. Rather, it will fall into tmo’s care for July and August, which might mean that problem will work itself out by the time I get back into town. But it also means that the majority of my intended projects for Murphy’s are coming to a screeching halt, and some of the music I wanted to bring across the country isn’t going to make it. It also means that I am down 160 gigs of storage and some original recorded music. Which really, really, really sucks.
music: Altitude Music- 1/28/03
I enlisted a new ally in my battle against headaches this week. After a quick trip to the University Health Services, I came out armed with a little orange vial of very small pills, which, taken once a day, should prevent migraines for as long as I wish to remain on the pills.
The drug is called Propanolol, slang being “beta-blocker.” Its main effect and use is to reduce blood pressure via vasodilation, which has therapeutic effects for conditions related to hypertension, angina, even tremor and heart attack. Since migraine is believed to be related to swollen blood vessels in the cranium, it works for migraines as well. The recommended beginning dose is 40 mg BID, I am starting out taking 10mg only once a day. Today is day two, and so far, no headaches. Which might not be saying much.
I won’t say that I’m not a little bit relieved at such a potentially simple solution to this extraordinarily painful problem that I’ve had for the better part of my life, now that I think about it (and i’m able to think about it, having no headache). There is, of course, a big ‘but’ here. The first is that if I decide to stick with the beta-blocker, I will be chained to a pill-popping regiment indefinitely. Which really, really sucks. But for the time being, I’m willing to give it a shot. I’ve decided to make a science project out of the experience, subjecting myself to an ABAB design in terms of the intervention of taking a pill. Too bad I don’t have a fellow migraine sufferer who is taking placebo pills unknowingly…regardless, my plan is to try the beta-blocker for a month, then discontinue them for a month and reinstate them during the third month, all the while keeping meticulous notes on the presence of migraines, as well as any potential triggers I may have encountered. My rough baseline mean is 1-2 migraines per two week period, usually occurring in the afternoon/evening, and usually on consecutive days. At the end of the three months I will be in a better position to make a decision about the drug.
This, luckily, is not the only weapon supplied to me by the good doctors of UHS. I also have a PRN pill called Maxalt-MLT that I may take if the migraines defeat the first line of pharmacological defense. I’m not planning on relying on these, but it’s nice to have in the arsenal. And yet, there’s something more psychologically appealing about taking a pill as needed, as in, when I actually have a headache, instead of every day regardless of whether I have a headache or not.
It surprised me how quickly the doctor was willing to prescribe, and how little effort it took on my part to secure a prescription. The clinical procedure was nothing more than me describing symptoms and history of my headaches for about 10 minutes, and I walked out with some drugs. It worries me a little more than slightly that health care has come down to that, although I could be speaking from my psychologist sensibilities. This is a personal trial of my faith in science, to some extent.
I am left thinking that I could still control the maintaining conditions of my migraines, even though recent episodes have proved them quite idiopathic. I’m still resistant to this idea of pill popping, but for the time being, in the name of science, I’m willing to give it a shot. More to come as the data pours in.
music: Steve Kimock Electric Band- 10/31/02
Three ingredients have just made thousands of hours of quality live music very, very accessible. One: this here computer. Two: archive.org. Three: Harvard’s superfast network. I have been in the library for the past 5 or so hours reading, and all the while setting up my FTP client to download, download, download. Talk about immediate gratification; it used to take weeks to send blanks through the mail and wait for someone to find time to spin copies out and mail them back. Plus the recording quality is much, much better. Computers are neat.
Average downloading speed here is something to the tune of 600 kbps. That averages out to a complete show in shorten format in about half an hour. This afternoon, I’ve pulled down two Kimock, shows, a Motet show, a fine evening from d’Elf at the Lizard Lounge from last March, Tea Leaf Green from High Sierra this past summer, and Keller Williams from Chicago last fall. I also pulled down Sector 9’s set from Bonnaroo ‘03 but the recording quality wasn’t all that great so I trashed it.
Not bad, considering I concurrently knocked off a good chunk of reading. Still more to go, of course, but I’m going to unplug for a minute. The stomach’s growling and my concentration is waning, which means it’s dinnertime.
