Recent CD Reviews

I've picked up a few CDs since the last time I posted a review ...

Snow Patrol -- Eyes Open
I completely dug Snow Patrol's last album (Final Straw), and this one starts out like my fave song from that disc ("Spitting Games"). "Hands Open" is pretty darn great. Then it devolves into an attempt to make a bunch of songs that sound like "Run" and it just gets a bit boring. Not bad, just boring.

Nada Surf -- Let Go
Liz recommended I check this one out when I mentioned that I really liked The Weight is a Gift. This is really good too. Not as thoroughly good as TWIAG, but definitely good. The only thing keeping it from being fantastic is two missteps ("Fruit Fly", "La Pour Ca"). The rest --- solllidddd.

Guster -- Ganging Up on the Sun
Probably my least favorite Guster album. Not because of the lack of hand percussion, but simply because it's got so little energy. It's a good poppy album, but it just lacks any sharp edges. "The New Underground" might be the best little indie rock song they've ever done though.

Mr. Lif -- Mo' Mega
Adding some hip-hop to the mix. I love Mr. Lif. He's always got ridiculously complex lyrics, beats that support the rhymes, and a the closest thing to the mind of Chuck D. Except on this album. "Fries" would have fit in on any album he's ever done. "Murz Is My Manager" has the tightest beats and is probably the most fun song Lif's ever done. "Washitup!" is the worst song he's ever done. Lif went away from politics on this album, and while it's good, it's just not as good (that seems to be a theme ...).

Mittens -- Fools on a Holiday
Mittens is a local band that sounds a bit like if The Shins holed up and listened to Elvis Costello and Jonathan Richman, and then turned up the folk dial a bit too much. They're light and easy and great live, but not quite as good on disc (or iPod). I actually dig this one a bit more than their self-titled debut. It's just a bit grander.

As Fast As -- Open Letter to the Damned
I picked this up because I heard "Florida Sunshine" and think it's the fucking rock song of the summer. It's probably the best power poppish stuff I've heard in a while. It's not a fantastic album, but it was cheap at Newbury Comics, so I grabbed it and it was worth the dough. There's maybe one back track on the whole disc.

There you have it. A bunch of mildly disappointing discs, with one real winner. I'm not really sure what CDs are coming out soon, but I'm thinking about picking up some older stuff from an online source cheapish, so the next set of reviews might be of some older Sufjan Stevens or The Smiths or something equally silly.

Random Things You May Already Know About Me

• I'm about 5'8" tall.
• I weigh somewhere between 140-150 lbs.
• I'm 28 and I've had 3 jobs since college (the first lasted 3.5 years, the second lasted 1.5 years, the third about 10 months to this point).
• I'm very glad I don't work at the second place anymore. In retrospect, one of the sketchiest companies I've ever seen.
• I really like the first company, but I need closure and wish they'd either become big and successful or go out of business.
• I've got a Friendster profile that I never update.
• I have an Orkut profile that I haven't even looked at in over a year. Ok, I've looked at it now.
• I've never really had the urge to set up a MySpace account. Mostly because I'm not sure I could deal with adding another ugly web site to the world.
• I went to Virginia Tech. When Michael Vick was there.
• My 10th High School reunion is this year.
• I'm learning more and more that I don't like Woody Allen films.
• I hated Napoleon Dynamite and have considered making a site about how I hated Napoleon Dynamite.
• I liked Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle.
• The only movies I've nearly walked out on in the theater are Celtic Pride and Cold Mountain.
• I watch a lot of TV.
• I've got 2 DVRs with 3 tuners so I can potentially record 3 shows at once. It has come into play.
• I also read a lot, though I need to make a trip to the bookstore to pick up Feeding the Monster.
• I post at the Sons of Sam Horn. So does Seth Mnookin, the author of Feeding the Monster. So does Bill Simmons, who I've argued with about the Celtics.
• I listen to a lot of music. Possibly too much.
• I really like power pop. I really like anthemic rock. For some reason, I don't like U2 that much.
• I wish I could play the guitar.
• I wish I could sing like Aaron Perrino.
• I'm jealous of my friend Liz for being very funny and writing for PopMatters.
• I've listened to The New Pornographers more than anything over the past couple of years, yet wouldn't call them my favorite band.
• I haven't been to a live show in over a month. I need to go see some live music.
• I'm running out of "interesting" things about myself.

I need to write more

I do. When I write more, my brain works better, and the random cruft that gets stuck in my head gets jarred loose, spilling out and letting the good stuff percolate a bit more in there. That means I'm more cogent, less grumpy, and just a generally cooler guy*. Also, maybe I'll figure out what it is that's got me stuck in the general malaise that's permeated my life for the last couple of months. Again, I think I've just got some random gunk stuck in the brain that's keeping the good stuff out (there's a good scientific explanation for ya).

So, more music discussion. More web discussion (since that's what I do for a living a billion little things happen each day that I probably should write down so I can remember them later). More TV discussion. More movie discussion. More discussion.

I'm going to aim to type something every day ... just because that seems like a good aim. Let's see how long I can keep it up.

I also think I'm going to try to work up a new Wordpress template. Something my own. That'll take some time, and since I completely lack creativity, if you've got ideas, leave them in a comment and I'll take them into consideration. In other words, if you're more creative than me, I'll gank your idea. But I'll give you credit and maybe send you something cool like a 1987 Mike Greenwell Topps card. With the fake wood border!

(*definition of cool on a relative scale of Orville Redenbacher to Miles Davis.)

Old and Fragile

I'm not sure at what point you cross that line from getting hurt/immediately recovering to getting hurt/having injuries last for weeks, but it's apparently happened to me. I've been having minor knee issues for a while. Nothing major, except that once or twice in spring (usually when I start to run distances again outside) one of my knees will just decide that it doesn't like running. No swelling, nothing jarring, just simply the inability to do anything more than walking.

A little over a week ago, I was playing softball and decided to run into a fence. I thought it would be the normal pain for a day, fine the next injury. Except it looks like I pretty severely sprained my ankle and did something to my wrist/arm.

The ankle's just down to about normal size now (probably still about 5-10% bigger than normal), but the bruising has mostly receded. It no longer looks like this:

The big dark line below my ankle is the black bruise that's lasted about a week. It got prettier as the swelling receded and actually made the bruise visible. A week of ice, wraps, heat, and advil have gotten me to the point where it's only sore in the morning before it gets loosened up.

Of course, favoring my ankle for a week has caused my knee to start to act up, feeling sore and generally making all sorts of noise when I go from sitting to standing. I assume that'll go away in the next few days, but given the way my body has been healing, maybe not.

Making things worse, I also slammed my wrist when I ran into the fence. It doesn't hurt a ton, but enough to be uncomfortable. Somehow, in the midst of all this, I did something to my incredibly underwhelming biceps. It doesn't hurt normally, only when doing something like pulling or pushing ... you know, using the muscles in my arm. I end up with a pain running from my shoulder down into my biceps.

I wish I knew at what point you start to become frail. It's apparently happened to me, but had I seen it coming, I think I could have at least started to be a little more careful (vitamins, advil, whatever). Or maybe I should just stop bitching and be happy that I can still get by with a wrapped ankle and some ibuprofen.

The Greatest NBA Draft in History

The 2006 NBA Draft is going to go down as the most entertaining draft in NBA history. A weak draft, without a player who's assured to make a significant impact, and on ESPN rather than TNT, this draft could have been a disaster.

Instead, ESPN and the NBA got together and made it the most entertaining 4 hours of TV ever. Here's a couple of real-time recaps to check out:

Chairchuckers.com
Sons of Sam Horn
(The latter link might not work unless you have an account.)

I don't think I can possibly do it justice. Here are just some of the highlights:

• A million random trades, including 400 by Portland
• 4 Year Duke scholar Shelden Williams giving an interview in mumbleese
• The Wolves/Blazers swap the 6th and 7th picks in one of the sketchiest deals in memory
• Centers Sene and Armstrong go in the lottery
• Rudy Gay miked up
• Jay Bilas, Stephen A. Smith, and Greg Anthony ripping everyone -- while their commentary is being broadcast live in the arena to all of the draftees present
• Dan Patrick and David Stern go at it live on the air
• Dick Vitale verbally fellates J.J. Reddick and then asks him for tickets
• Dick Vitale, who's never said a bad word about a player, disses Celtics' pick Rajon Rondo as the equivalent of a .220 hitter
• Jay Bilas says Noah Lowry could beat up Rondo
• Isiah Thomas spends his 1st pick on Renaldo Blackman, expected by many to go undrafted
• Marc Jones getting accosted by Knick fans both times he was forced to venture into the stands

Just a stellar night. I'm sure Bill Simmons will have a lot to say about it.

Online Working Stiff Seems To Be Working

So, Working Stiff just keeps on plugging along. Greg Joyce's attempt to get his movie some visibility online is working.

10000 views of the trailer. That's a lot. You can make it 10001.

I'm interested in this for a few reasons:

1. Greg's an awesome guy.
2. Working Stiff is a funny movie (really! I have it on DVD and have even seen it in a theater. And I actually did some advertising for it .... which I'll link to someday).
3. I'm utterly interested in the idea of turning conventional media on its head by leveraging the internet. Here's a movie that played a few times in the Boston area and I think once out in LA. It's a small, independent film with out a single name attached. It's not uber-trendy, nor shocking. It's a straight up romantic/workplace comedy. It's better than 90% of the Nora Ephron-esque tripe that gets released. But, it simply will never get seen via conventional means. But now, via the 'net, it's viewable online. You can subscribe and get chunks of it automatically downloaded to your computer or iPod to watch when you want. I have no idea how many people are actually viewing the movie via the Podcast, but anyone who's subscribed is getting a chance to see a movie they never would have otherwise. That's pretty cool.

Birthday Wishes, Thanks, Apologies, and Links

A belated "Happy Birthday" to Mindy for turning old.

A belated "thanks" to Liz for pointing out that I should get Nada Surf's "Let Go", which is very good.

A belated "my bad" to my comrades over at Dewey's House for not gracing them with my Red Sox thoughts recently. Sully's been picking up the slack and doing a stellar job.

A belated "sorry" to you for shirking my entertainment duties and allowing you to grow bored while I wrestled with things such as "work" and "sleep."

My New Crappy Business Idea

When I was running the other day, I think I figured out one of those silly business ideas that people come up with and then other people go "that's a really dumb idea ... I bet people will pay for it."

With the prevelence of social networking websites on the web, particularly the big three of MySpace, Friendster, and Orkut (or maybe LinkedIn), it seems like people are always encouraging you to the join the one they're a member of. That usually means you start with like a Friendster account, get convinced to join Orkut (leaving your Friendster setup wilting ...), then you move to MySpace (and they both wilt). Then one day you remember your Friendster setup, and you go back in there to find now there's a bunch more people there.

Or at least I assume that's what people do. I don't have a MySpace account, but I do have an Orkut account (I don't think I've logged in for over a year) and a Friendster account (which I check maybe once a month). But, if you really cared about these networks and keeping your data up-to-date, wouldn't it be handy if you could update it in one place and have it magically update the rest?

That's my idea: to build MyFriendKut.com (I should probably removes some vowels to make it very Web 2.0). You'd setup your account on the site, and then give the logins to your social networking accounts (yeah, privacy issues, but whatever, it's all about convenience). The site would have a bunch of settings that are common to most of those sites. When you want to change something, you change it at the MyFriendKut.com site, and the site pushes it out. So then you keep all of your sites up to date through one interface, saving you time to stalk people on MySpace. Fun!

Better yet, maybe the site also throws up a tabbed interface or something that authenticates you to the social networking sites so that it's one-login-shopping. See! Amazing idea!

Now I just have to get motivated and build it. And probably check to see that no one has already built it. Then figure out how to make money off it. Sell out and become a millionaire. Just like the Underpants Gnomes.

Nearing 200 Netflix Rentals

Thanks to a little tool called FlixQueue, I'm able to see at a glance that I've returned 195 movies to Netflix since I signed up.

The first movie I returned was Underworld, on January 19, 2004. Sure, not the most amazing movie to have at #1, but sometimes you need some cheesy action (2 and 3 were The 25th Hour and Rashomon, slightly more upscale). The last movie I returned was Hustle & Flow on May 31, 2006.

In between I've returned 193 other movies for my grand total of 195. Making the math easy, I started in January 2004 and last returned a movie in May 2006, which is 29 months. 195 movies over 29 months is about 6.7 movies per month. Not too bad -- I'm on the 3 out/$18 plan, which means I'm at about $2.70/movie. That's far less than I'd pay at Blockbuster (I think ... I haven't walked into a Blockbuster in over a year), so I think I'm getting my money's worth.

Over the weekend, since my DVRs are pretty much empty (nothing new on TV), I cleared out the three movies I had out (#196 = Bubble, 197 = The Devil's Backbone, 198 = All the Real Girls). If all goes well, I should be getting my next 2 or 3 movies on Tuesday. That means that rental #200 will either be Good Night, and Good Luck or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

This isn't really a milestone ... but it felt interesting to write about. Plus, given that I'll get through 200 movies in approximately 29 months, it means I'll get to the end of my Netflix Queue, assuming I don't add any more movies, sometime in 2008.

Maybe I should be more selective ...

Making WordPress 2.0 Permalink Rewrite Rules Work

I work for a web hosting company, and we're currently monkeying around with an installer for WordPress. In testing it, I fully expected custom permalink rules to break--I'd heard rumblings from looking through our support queues that it might not work. Sure enough, custom permalink rewrite rules did not work.

WordPress 2.0 does some nifty stuff with rewrite rules. Rather than do what older versions did and generate a big .htaccess file with 50-odd lines, it instead generates a compact, sub-10 line .htaccess file. These rules basically let WordPress handle all of the rewrites internally. In many cases, this is a cool thing (it's what I use here on my blog). However, it's not universally compatible--a quick search on Google shows a bunch of people running into a problem with this new system.

I dug around for a bit, trying to find a solution for our customers. And I found one. In the wp-includes/classes.php file, there's a variable called use_verbose_rules. By default, it is set to false, which triggers WordPress to use the new, compact rules. Setting it to true causes WordPress to generate the old-style big .htaccess file. Sure enough, as these are pretty normal, generic rewrite rules, *everything* *just* *works*.

I'm sure I'm not the first person to stumble upon the solution, but since I didn't find it mentioned anywhere before, I thought I'd share it. Plus, my memory isn't what it used to be, so this'll be helpful in making sure I don't forget how to fix this, should the need arise again.

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