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Saturday, January 28, 2006

Enter sand, man

Oh, and if you're curious about what I've been doing as I recoup, look no further than the Falling Sand Game. And if you're wondering what my soundtrack has been, wonder no longer. Please don't judge me.

Create your iTunes signature in less than two minutes

My back isn't back to normal. I should be in Chennai, India right now but I'm not. I think I made the best decision to postpone my voyage and not take on the 17-hour flight. It seems I'm slowly improving though. I've been walking around much of the day so far, but sitting is another story. Lots of rest, lots of ice, and lots of ibuprofen seem to be gradually helping my back. We'll see what the next couple weeks bring.

In other news, Mr. Murky Words unearthed a fun free app that will excavate your iTunes library and confirm something you already know: You have an idiotic music collection. The iTunes Signature Maker takes moments to create a personalized signature audio file, and you can even customize a few settings before it spits out your music clip.

My signature came out relatively tame. No sign of southeastern Asia insect electronica. No indication of any shortwave numbers stations, or Robert Mitchum calaypso. Nope, relatively tame considering what it could've pulled from my library. (And remember kids, too much music causes apathy.)

Anyway, for a rundown of what you do get in this 17-second audio file, here's the tracklisting:

My iTunes Signature (.wav, 2.3MB)

Depeche Mode "Policy Of Truth"
Marsen Jules "Fanes D'Automne"
Architecture in Helsinki "Souvenirs"
Mice Parade "Two, Three, Fall"
Brian Jonestown Massacre "Going To Hell"
Thievery Corporation "Revolution Solution"
Boards of Canada "Dayvan Cowboy"
Cannonball Adderley "Somethin' Else"
Broken Social Scene "I Slept With Bonhomme At The C"
Sonny Clark "Somethin' Special"
Devendra Banhart "Heard Somebody Say"
Montag "Temps d'Observer Les Voies Ouvertes"
Keren Ann "Not Going Anywhere"
Melchior Productions "Que Pasa"
Nick Drake "One Of These Things First"
Triola "Neuland"
Loscil "Lucy Dub"
Jamie Lidell "When I Come Back Around"

See? A stupid mix, but it certainly could've been much worse. What does your signature sound like?

Friday, January 20, 2006

Back-to-back troubles

As I type this, I'm laying on the bed staring at the ceiling and listening to my cat's nose whstle as she sleeps soundly next to me. Why am I doing this on a beautiful Friday afternoon? Frankly, because I'm in pain. After the biblical rainstorms we had here on Wednesday, our basement filled with water for the second time in one week (the first being last weekend after Friday's heavy rains). So we've spent the greater part of the last week dealing with our basement woes.

We had a service team come in last weekend and vaccuum out the water and turn on a huge dehumidifier and fans to dry things out. This worked well until Wednesday when it started all over again. In the meantime our builder arranged to install a sump pump, but with our luck the earliest the foundation cutter and plumber could arrive was Thursday morning.

So there I was, Wednesday night, vaccuuming up gallons upon gallons of water with our new trusty shop vac. On one of the trips (the sixteenth?) out the bulkhead stairs to dump the water (mind you, far from the foundation) I slipped on a step and wrenched my back.

Cut to two days later, and here I lay on a heating pad, plenty of meds, and trying my best to catch up on work emails as they continue to flood in (pun intended). But soon it will be the weekend, and I'll have time to rest. Maybe play around a little more with Last.fm so you can see what I've been listening to.

As long as I recouperate over the next couple days, I'll be happy. Next week will be crazy for me because I'm preparing for the longest journey of my life. On Thursday night, I'm off to India for ten days for work. My colleagues in Chennai may need to prop me up in the corner, but at least I'll be there laying the groundwork for what will be a very intense year of software projects. When I'm back, I hope to make the second podcast available and share some photos of the southern coast of India. Goodbye for now.

Sunday, January 15, 2006

Nervous Music Podcast 001

R.I.P. Tracks of the Week. It was a good year. Now on to other things. My first stab at podcasting. It's a bit rough, but I hope to improve with each show. My plan is to offer a new show each month. I'm not really sure where this will take me, but to kick things off, I've decided to present my Best of 2005 in audio format and do away with the Top Ten List with reviews. Try not to laugh at me too hard and enjoy the show.

Nervous Music Podcast 001 (30 min, 34.5 MB)

Saturday, January 14, 2006

Podcasting

1. From Wikipedia: "Podcasting, a portmanteau of Apple's "iPod" and "broadcasting", is a method of publishing files to the Internet, allowing users to subscribe to a feed and receive new files automatically by subscription, usually at no cost."
2. Portmanteau. Now that's a word you don't hear every day.
3. Internet. Are we still capitalizing this word? No seriously, are we? Should I be saying we just bought a new House and I'm driving my Car to work. It's Technology. It's Been Around For A Good Long While Now. Let's Lowercase It.
4. Oh yeah, back on point, "podcasting." Stay tuned for my first podcast tomorrow.

Wednesday, January 11, 2006

All the music in the world, in a tiny box

I'm convinced that one day data storage will catch up with the volume of music worth listening to and it'll all co-exist on one device (hopefully not like these). That is the ultimate goal, isn't it?

With all the mp3 players and backup drives, more and more folks are going digital with their music. I'd say for every 30 albums I hear on my computer, I pop just 1 CD into my stereo now. My CD shelves are beginning to look strange to me. Like some antiquated way of storing collectibles, or a conduit for just moving the music from the physical to the digital. But I still love my CD collection - and you can always make the argument that the physicality of the CD plus artwork and packaging are superior to digital - but most of my CDs are starting to become wallflowers. No, not The Wallflowers. Ick.

Anyway, what fueled my thoughts about this came from browsing the comments of Todd Dominey's post about ripping his entire music collection. People shared some good ideas about how best to rip, store, and backup music. It's astounding what some people have done to organize their collections (like scanning liner notes using optical character recognition in order to store and retrieve information using a homegrown database. Sheesh!)

Meanwhile I am far from a perfect solution. Some of my collection is just on CD, some just digital, and others both. Of the digital collection, some are in mp3 format (ripped using my PC), while others are in AAC format (now that I have a PowerBook). One day though, it'll all come together, and I'll be able to fit the entirety of my music obsession into the tiny change pocket of my jeans.

Saturday, January 07, 2006

Our first home! (part 2)

I finally got the chance to take some more photos of our new place. So now you can see our upstairs. I guess we have some book-arrangin' to do!

Friday, January 06, 2006

What a week

It certainly wasn't the smoothest process in the world, but we did it. We finally closed last night. Woo hoo!

Monday, January 02, 2006

Our first snow angel!

We're all moved in now, but we have loads of unpacking to do. Plenty of time for that of course, but I'll have to wait a bit because I return to work tomorrow. I'll get some photos of our second floor up here once we settle in. In the meantime, here's another picture of our back deck -- this time with a small-headed snow angel.