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November 2, 2006
Music and Computers
All your dreams are made. Now you're chained to the mirror with your razor blade
First of all, for those of you catching the link to my site from the various Dem/Liberal/Political blogs – I talk about stuff besides politics. I don’t consider myself a political blogger even though I work in politics. The freedom of not being a political blogger means that if I want to post a cool picture I took, I am free to do so. Observe:
See? Those are the fountains outside the IMF. And no, I’m not making any kind of statement by showing IMF fountains.
Since the last 24 hours of the news cycle has been about a stupid joke gone awry, I’m going to take this time to talk about 2 things I love – music and computers.
On a whim the other week, I decided to load Ubuntu Linux onto a partition on my laptop. After carefully backing up all my data, I used Ubuntu’s partition tool to slice off about 15 gigs or so of my harddrive. A few driver loads later (and learning su, sudo, etc…) and I was in mostly good shape. Except I couldn’t seem to get the damned wireless to work. It seems that Acer has a special hardware switch for the wireless card – and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get specific information about it from the their tech support staff. At one point they said they’d only do support for the OEM-load to which I responded that I’d be happy to write about my experience here. That quickly got a response of a technical sheet that I may be able to use to investigate why I can’t get the thing to flip on, but we’ll see. In the meantime, I am not able to look awesomely l33t when surfing at coffeehouses.
Musically, it’s been an interesting week. On Saturday night I went and saw The Wrens with my friend Tanya and her friend Ben. Talk about an awesome live act – these guys were incredibly energetic and humorous during their show. And the execution was phenomenal.
Earlier that day I purchased the Decemberists new album The Crane Wife. It wasn’t until the next morning that I really started listening to it however. Had this album already sunk in at that point, I would’ve been scouring Craigslist for tickets to their show that night at the 9:30 Club. Instead, the album reached nominal saturation and listening yesterday. And it is INCREDIBLE!!!! There is nary a miss on the record – just songs I like, and songs I REALLY like. The first two tracks – Crane Wife 3 and The Island – hook you in right away, with The Island being both epic and yet immediate. When the War Came has an infectious rhythm that when combined with reverberated vocals which create a song that is haunting at times. But the highlight of the album, for me, is the second to last track – Sons and Daughters. Earlier this week I quoted this song in a post about electoral optimism. Some have said that this song has an anti-war element to it, which may be true. But for me, this song is about looking forward and thinking that perhaps tomorrow will be a better day. It also has the coolest harmony round in any song I’ve ever heard. Period. And I’ve heard a LOT of songs.
Now what would a post about music and technology be without talking about musical technology? Recently, Apple released iTunes 7 to critical acclaim and system crap-outage. Release 7.0 was TERRIBLE – full of bugs, problems, etc. 7.0.1 fixed some issues, but songs would still skip and hang – unacceptable for a CD player let alone a MP3 player on a pretty decent system. So I rolled back to the final release of iTunes 6. Well, tonight I reupped to iTunes 7.0.2 – and it seems like, knock on wood, they actually corrected the issues that plagued the last two releases. There’s still the occasional bit of distortion in playback – but it’s far better than when it would skip and act like a bad Aiwa CD Player.
Posted by MikeSager at November 2, 2006 12:55 AM
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