Category: musings

A friend of friends from Ashland, Oregon named Random Rab was playing nearby last week so I grabbed a buddy and headed out on a Thursday night. The crowd was a bit small, but enthusiastic and the place had a good vibe overall. Rab went on at about midnight starting out with a sort of hip-hop techno song with his own vocals in parts. It was a lot of fun and set things off well. He continued through a set varying from the hip-hop style to breakbeat, techno house, and maybe even a touch of trance at times. The songs varied quite a bit in tempo, but the basic sets of sounds and structures were similar. He did a good job of building energy throughout a song by layering different complementary parts and the dancing crowd seemed to have a good time all around. Overall, Random Rab plays a good energetic live set and is worth checking out if he’s playing in your area. He has a full length cd available as well.

On the way to work this morning, I walked by a homeless woman holding a $100 bill. She had it in her left hand and was busy writing in some sort of journal with the other. I didn’t get a good look at what she was writing, but it looked like it might have been some sort of accounting register. I assumed that because she was holding the money out right there on the street and from that I assumed she must be saving up for something. She may not have really been homeless but she was standing next to a shopping cart full on nondescript stuff and using it as her writing table. She was also dressed in the sort of random manner that you expect to see on a homeless person. Yeah, so I guess the lesson learned is save those pennies and look to the future.

DreamHost is having a crazy sale for our 7th Birthday (I started it with some friends way back when so I have more than a passing interest). If you sign up with Promo code ‘777’, you can get our Crazy Domain Insane plan for only $0.77/mnth. You have to sign up using a credit card and you have to sign up for a full year to get the sale price. Oh, and we’re only giving this sale price to the first 777 people who sign up. Yay!

Tonight I was out and I saw a guy named Kid Beyond perform. He started out with a fun bit of multi-genre beatboxing including some breakbeats, some drum n bass, some techno, and a cover of Nine Inch Nail’s “Closer”. Then he incorporated a multitrack audio looper into the performance and did a cover of a Portishead song that sounded surprisingly close to the original. He also did a few of his own original songs and they were all pretty good to very good. He has an album coming out next year, too. Overall, he’s a really entertaining performer and worth checking out if he plays near you.

I went to see the Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow movie on Friday night. It’s very cool looking and has a great period feel to it. I love anything that’s retro futuristic and you can’t go wrong with giant robots. The movie was not full of deep moments or multi-faceted characters, but I had fun watching it nonetheless.

On Saturday night I saw the Pixies play a show at the Greek Theater in Berkeley. I was a relatively late-comer to the world of the Pixies so it was great to have a chance to see them play. The crowd knew every word to every song for the most part so it felt like a big sing-along at times. Overall, it was lots of fun and the Pixies definitely still have that special magic that makes them great.

On the way to work this morning, I started thinking about the line between ‘growing up’ and ‘growing old’, and how thin it really is. That time of your life is when you are best able to realize your dreams and actualize anything you can think of. Before then you are still learning too much about the way things ‘are’ to really put all of the information to use. After then you are too concerned with everything going on (family, career, etc) to have much time left to do anything new. This is all generalizations and simplifications, of course. The main theme is to enjoy whatever life brings you for what it is and don’t worry about the little things. Well, maybe that theme wasn’t in there, but it’s a good thought anyway. Have a nice weekend!

I signed up for Vonage Voice over IP (VoIP) service last week and the package arrived this weekend. I set it up and got us up and going within about an hour. The only sort of technical part was setting up port forwarding on my DSL router. Most people wouldn’t have to do that as the VoIP box is supposed to go between the DSL/Cable modem and any consumer router you have so it can do Quality of Service (QoS) on your network traffic to make sure there’s always enough bandwidth for phone calls. In my case, the DSL box is also a router/firewall so I had to forward a number of ports to the VoIP box (which I gave a static internal IP). Right now it’s not set up in a way that lets it do the QoS but we haven’t had a problem so far… we don’t really do a lot of large downloads most of the time and it works fine along with normal web browsing and email. Anyway, I have to re-arrange the home network a little but I probably won’t bother until our old home phone number is switched over in about a month. I picked Vonage because they had our home area code available as an option so we could keep our existing phone number. So far it’s working well! For the average DSL/cable user (it requires something better than dial-up) the set up is pretty easy. Best of all the VoIP service comes with all the goodies (voice mail, caller id, call waiting, 3-way, etc) for free and we’re getting 500 ‘anywhere’ minutes (local or long distance) for 15 bucks a month. My favorite feature: As a $5/month add-on service you can get a ‘virtual’ phone number in any US area code. Any calls to the virtual number count as local calls from that area code so you can help other people avoid long distance charges, too. It’s a nice gift for the folks … “Call us for free!”

The Submodern album Art and I were working on for about half of this year is now fully done and available. It’s called Object Oriented Mood Management and has 10 original tracks totaling about 50 minutes. We’re happy with it on the whole and the feedback we’ve gotten so far has been very positive. It feels really good to be done with such a large project. We’re now planning on working on some more songs to release as a short EP online. We also have a live set we’ll be putting up on the site soon. Get on the mailing list to find out when that’s up. Also, let me know if you’d like a copy of the CD.

Eating while pooping gives one an interesting holistic sort of feeling. When the fresh fuel in, spent fuel out cycle is happening all at once, you can more easily visualize it and in doing so feel a sense of inner peace and overall completeness. I thought this was a joke until I found myself doing it (by necessity, fresh bowl of cereal right when nature called) the other day. So yeah, words of wisdom.

I’ve been a little slow on the site updates lately due to general life busyness. In the last month or so, I have moved my work setup into an office (which entailed dismantling my whole studio), researched and purchased a new studio desk for home, started reassembling the studio (still in progress), helped to finish up the Submodern album and artwork and get it into the cd people (we’ll have the CDs in about a week), and a had a birthday, whoo.

I’ve been convinced to get a scanner and scan in the old Fuckumm zine silliness I did about 10 years ago. I’ll hopefully be working on that soon!