Category: tunes

Music. Bands. Songs. Concerts.

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the doctor is dead


Stayed home sick, slept most of the day, tended work e-mail over VPN when awake. Went to the doctor around noon, which of course means went to the “nurse practitioner.” Not that I have anything against RNs, but why even call it a doctor’s office if you can never see the dang doctor? In the imagined past that lives in my head, I remember when doctors used to come over to your house with their little black bags. You had a family doctor, he knew your history, knew your family, you could go see him if something wasn’t right. Nowadays, I have no doctor. Sure, there’s a name on my insurance card, but I’ve never even met the guy. Five years and I’ve only ever seen different RNs. They get the job done I suppose, but it seems like the notion of the “family doctor” may be dead. Anyway, I got a standard antibiotic so it went pretty much as I’d expected.

What is it with the doctor’s office and waiting? I got there, I’m the sole guy in there, and I’m still left sitting in the lobby reading some article about Wal Mart’s risky gamble in expansion into China. Fifteen minutes later, I’m taken back, weighed, and transfered to a little room where I’m once again waiting – this time for twenty minutes. I know no one else is in the whole place, when they walked me back to my room I passed the open doors of empty rooms, saw scrub-wearing lackeys eating lunch. It was just me and an office full of people who were making me wait. I hate that, bugs me.

I’m way up in the double-digits on the times I’ve spun Neon Bible now, and I must say it’s held up well. I was a bit worried that the here-and-there style leaks may have ruined the whole “flow” of the album, but not so. It’s good, really good, can’t wait to get an proper rip (the full leak was still a dodgy 160Kbps max) and eventually the real disc. Sharaun and I agreed we’ll likely break our concert moratorium when the ‘Fire comes to San Francisco. Yeah. Get a babysitter, convene the crew, and go see them live in the city. Damn, I’m old.

Goodnight.

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so little rain


Damn, the new auto-save feature of WordPress 2.1 screwed me. I had this entry open on two computers, wrote a bunch on one, which was subsequently erased by the auto-save of the still-open entry on the other PC. Anyway, it’s Sunday and I’m feeling sick – the same congestion crap I’ve been dealing with for a couple weeks at least now. The TheraFlu seems to be working now though, thankfully. I felt so bad earlier today, I considered not going into work tomorrow, but then I figured that may have been a little premature.

We’ve had so little rain thus far this winter. I miss a good rainy week. Usually, the rains start around Halloween, I know this because they’ve often hampered my don’t-wanna-grow-up decoration efforts. The usually stick around, making the colder months here somewhat expectant of gray skies and showers. This year, though, we’ve had so little. Maybe it rained while we were in Florida for Christmas, I don’t know – but I kinda wish it would rain a little now. I mean, I had to turn on my sprinklers, something I’ve never done in winter since being here, because my lawn was looking a little bit too much to the “dead” side of it’s winter hibernation browning. But, I do love the sun, and something about a chilly day that’s sunny makes me want to use adjectives like “crisp” and “bracing.” Those adjectives, right? If it’s not going to rain, I wish someone would let me know – I mean, I could pull the hammock out and take a nap in the “crisp” sunshine… or something similarly literary.

There’s a little pile of tiny dead ants on the floor in our guest bathroom, there’s another pile in the shower, on the edge of the tub. I killed them, sprayed them with death-spray – you can buy it at Wal Mart. Anyway, the pile of long-dead ants is a like a lesion, an outward sign of the terrible state of our house right now. Ant lay in waste on the bathroom floor, clothes litter the bedroom, the scraps and drips of past lunches mark the floor below Keaton’s highchair. We gotta get our act together, we gotta clean this place up. I go onto Sharaun the other day, gave her the same old, “You have to change this, Keaton’s going to learn by what you do, and then I’ll have to pickup after two slobs.” You’d think that was a paraphrase and that I might’ve applied a bit more tact in reality, but no, it’s relatively faithful to the dialog. Anyway, I have to do my part too – but starting from less-than-spotless, it’s hard to strive to maintain spotless. If things could just stay clean, I’m convinced Sharaun could learn to maintain. But, alas, there’s a pile of dead ants on the bathroom floor and I’m here typing.

Man, the Fratellis sure are blowing up lately. Looks like the advertising firms must read my blog, 9th place on my list apparently gets you Safeway and an iTunes ad. Get the album though, you’ll love it. Oh, and man, how on Earth did the Band of Horses album not make my Top 10 for 2006?! I call fraud, who made that damn list?

Hey, it’s clouding over, maybe it’ll rain.

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ready for the weekend


8pm and Keaton’s in bed so the laptop came out. Or, the laptop came out because Keaton’s in bed. My domain seems to be completely down, so I’m writing in EditPad in the hopes it’ll be up later and I can post. I could go on and put down my standard sentence about how busy work was today, using words like “whirlwind” and “crushing,” because it was – but I wont. Oh, just did. Anyway, I’ve got a glass of nice wine and have already done the dishes, and I’ve got a glass of nice wine. I did? Oh, must be the wine.

Recently, I traded in my Maxim subscription for a Newsweek subscription. This was partly instigated by Sharaun, although I don’t think it was any sort of edict. More of a suggestion, I think. Her logic being that Maxim may not be the right magazine to have around the house for baby Keaton. I’m not so alarmist, but do see the logic. I’d much rather Keaton see her dad perusing a Newsweek instead of a Maxim (actually, in order to see me perusing either, she’d likely have to catch me on the john… and that’s just undesirable all around). I sometimes think it’s silly to think of those kinda things when she’s not even one, but then again right now she’s learning action-for-action and word-for-word from us. So, I suppose sacrificing soft-porn ain’t such a bad idea. I mean, I’ve still got the internet for the real-deal.

Three more Arcade Fire tracks leaked tonight, that makes it just two shy of the entire thing. Thing is, the tracks are of varying quality and source. I’ve never seen anything leak like this, the randomness seems almost deliberate. Makes a guy wonder if it might not be the work of some savvy PR guy with a knowledge of the internets. Maybe leak a track every week or so in passable quality, something like a buffet of free-appetizers that always has a really long line and is only a front to sucker you into buying a full-price dinner at the end of your drawn-out, unsatisfied wait. Whatever, I’m happy to have what I have – I just want a proper!

Also in music news, the rumor mill is abuzz about the iTunes/Beatles deal. Apparently, it will be announced during the Super Bowl that all the original studio albums will be available, and remastered at that. The Beatles catalog finally remastered and available digitally… wow. I can only hope it won’t be some iTunes “exclusive” that’s not released on physical discs – I’d hate to be stuck with M4As.

I want tomorrow to go fast. I want it to be over before I know it. I’m ready for the weekend.

Goodnight.

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haaaaumpph!


Been battling this sinus thing for more than a week now, my nose stuffs up at night and drains down the back of my throat. The snot makes its way down into my chest, and I’m still unsure what series of “tubes” in me it slithers down to get just where it lodges, but it gets there and sets up camp. Entrenched in whatever pocket it ends up in, I feel it there and am wont to hack and cough and “haaaaumpph!” it up. I stand in the shower every morning and cough and

Well, I’m now comfortable moving out of the realm of speculation and declaring that “hi” is indeed Keaton’s 1st word. Based on the context in which she uses it, and her little “hello” handwave that goes with it, I’m 99% positive she’s mimicking our own hi’s to her. I was telling Pat this weekend how, the first time I actually realized she was waving in response to my own “hi” or “bye,” it was pretty amazing. May seem simple, but to me it was confirmed comprehension and communication – it was the first time my own daughter had “spoken” to me, even though she didn’t use words (at the time), and I was thrilled.

On a somewhat related note, I was marveling the other night to Sharaun about how amazing I think it is that babies just learn how to talk. I mean, just by virtue of being around people who are speaking, their brains 1st memorize words and then start putting them together. It’s hard for me to think about learning something from complete scratch like that. It’s so different from, say, me signing up for a course in classical sculpture at the local community college. There, I’d have a teacher telling me things, a book to study from, tests to gauge my absorption and comprehension of the new things I’d added to my brain. For Keaton, though, she just learns by being immersed in it. I think about me being plopped down in the studio with a professional drummer, and doubt I’d be drumming myself in less than a year. So yeah, that she says “hi” is fairly awesome to me.

If you couldn’t tell by all my talk of “leaks” and “trackers” and whatnot, I’ve become completely engrossed with BitTorrent. And, believe it or not, I’m talking primarily about “legal” torrent activity. There are several trackers, both members-only and “open,” which enforce strict “no copyrighted material” rules and don’t accept illegal material. The better of these trackers trade only in live and unreleased material. Material previously known as, and only available as, bootlegs. Back in the day, I was obsessed with this type of material – obsessed with bootlegs. I’d pay up to $30 a disc for the rarest and most intriguing. But now, with BitTorrent, material not even available to high-dollar bootleggers (who were mostly funded by various international mafia) is all over the ‘net.

Private collectors are either getting savvy, or passing years and years of lovingly cared-for master tapes to savvier friends, and live and unreleased gems are showing up all over the place. Over the past couple months, I’ve been scouring these trackers and I’ve found some simply astounding material. Insanely amazing live shows from Neil Young, Santana, Hendrix, Zeppelin. Studio outtakes and sessions from Derek & the Dominos, the Allman Brothers band. I’m talking unbelievable stuff here, stuff that’s never been heard before, stuff that’s brand new, just unleashed on the world’s ears. And ohh… am I addicted; I’m sooo addicted. Only problem I see is when all these FLAC beauties fill up my 3/40-terabyte drive and I have to upgrade… but for now I’m just a-downloadin’ away.

BitTorrent is surely the future of filetrading, and I think it’s already bringing tapes long collecting dust on collectors’ shelves to the masses, and will only continue to do so at in increased level as time goes on. Great sites like etree and dime and tradersden, these places are doing wonders for the ease of obtaining uber-rare and exciting performances, and I’m fully on-board and keeping my ratio high for good karma.

One of the folks I work with recently brought me some honest-to-goodness saffron from Iran (yes, I know it’s illegal, but I find I enjoy it with my cuban cigars). So, tonight, I decided to try and use this “most exotic” of all spices and cook for Sharaun. I called another Persian coworker of mine to get a recipe for saffron chicken and rice. It turned out OK, needed more onions and salt, but it was pretty good. I’m actually very fond of the saffron taste, it’s super unique to me – Sharaun’s not so smitten. Anyway, I’m not sure I cooked it right – but it was quite palatable with a little salt. I don’t know, sometimes, why I write paragraphs like this… booooring…

Mischa, your fans care about you, please stop smoking.

Goodnight.

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liveblogging the leak


Work is busy… stoopid busy like cauliflower. Hey, did Tuesday’s blog ever go public?! I noticed last night that it was marked “private,” and wondered if anyone even got to read it… Damn, that makes me mad. I was proud of Tuesday’s entry and I effed it up. And, I was under the impression that people might be thinking, “Dave’s on a roll this week.” Instead, they were thinking, “Dave let us down again.” Damn damn – go read it, please?. Anyway for today, I had this huge story written thinking it would have an awesome ending, but I was wrong. So here it is, endingless, because I didn’t write anything else and, besides, I kinda liked it.

My story about “the night Neon Bible leaked” is pretty good. It may sound silly, but I literally felt like a small piece of a larger organism. It all started Tuesday night (well, started getting good). I was sitting on the couch refreshing a thread on a popular music messageboard over and over and over again. One poster said his French-speaking buddy got an IM from another buddy saying he had the album, that buddy would pass it on to the frog who’d in turn pass it along to the poster who’d in turn leak it to the masses. The only reason mass “bullshit” wasn’t called on said poster was his good repute with past leaky matters. Later, he confirmed the truity of the friend-of-a-friend story by upping a high-quality rip of a track that was, up until that point, only available as a shit 96Kbps rip (trust me, sounded awful on the iPod in the car). Hearing the song in good quality only got me refreshing more tabs in sequence. Load ’em all up: hipster forums, insider blogs, trackers public and private; load ’em all up and do the Control-Tab -> F5 -> Control-Tab -> F5 tango…

Real-looking item appears on a well-known public tracker-tracker, I decide to wait until it hits a more reputable source or someone confirms it as the real deal… try to stay away from public trackers, especially with something of this magnitude… screams RIAA honeypot. Refresh. Refresh. Refresh. Check the trackers, public and private. Refresh. Trackers. Refresh. Trackers. Firefox begins to lumber under the load, having been open all day its notorious memory leak has it consuming a whopping 123,000K of my available RAM – but I don’t dare close it and waste potential precious time. Back in the forum, the “this many readers are reading this post” count kept climbing and climbing as word began to trickle out. Original leakster returned to say he had to hit the sack, must have been bedtime where he was – no leak, hopes dwindle.

Three hours have gone by since this started, I’ve pretty much been buzzing around the laptop every five minutes to F5 my sources. In between, I’m writing yesterday’s (and this) blog, and half watching people make fools of themselves on American Idol. Man, time flies, I can remember thinking how long it would be until the next American Idol when the last one ended. I’m going to switch to present-tense now, as I’ve caught this entry up to real time. I’m still waiting for word back about the one on the well-known public-tracker… people on the boards are dutifully opening themselves to lawsuits in the spirit of keeping the rest of us informed. But now it’s too late, I have to go to bed… Sixish hours of sleep later and no leak. Off to work.

At work it was me and the boarders again, on the collective edge of our collective seats, watching the lead downloaders of the publicly-tracked (and widely assumed fake) file post their “percent completes.” I would keep the thread open in Firefox and F5 every few minutes, since I can’t load up the “questionable” sites here at work (well, I guess I can, but I’m not gonna) – I have to rely on the forums and blogs for news. I’ve already briefed Sharaun on how to kickoff the download at home if something budges. I feel like a man obsessed, getting worried about the buildup. It’s just… I’m waiting on the followup to what I personally think was the best rock album in the past ten, fifteen, twenty years (sorry Nevermind… and, when was Joshua Tree again?)… I’m a bit excited.

Work goes by, 8am to 5pm, meetings and phone calls and e-mails and meetings and phone calls. Work was stoopid busy like cauliflower. But, all the while I kept the internets in the taskbar, refreshing when I could. Nothing still. At home, I laid off a little… realizing now that most of the promises were bunk… and that we were no closer to a leak than when the first tracks trickled out weeks ago.

If you’re a praying person, I’d appreciate your petitions on behalf of the leak. Goodnight people.

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workforce of me


It’s now about twenty till eight on Tuesday night, and the message boards are once again alive with rumors of a Neon Bible leak before 11pm Eastern (about 40min from now, my time). These days though, with anticipation running higher than Paula Abdul on a Monday morning, everyone’s pulling the old “zOMG it leaked!!!” gag – so I remain cautiously optimistic. Ehhh… the waiting. I should know for sure by the denouement here, so let’s get down to brass tacks (what the hell does that mean?).

In the coming days you may be surprised to see some newish looking content on the Sounds Familiar frontpage. That’s right, I’ve integrated some minimal Google AdSense text-advertisements into the entry loop near the bottom. Hopefully, these won’t detract much from the glory of my writing, or pigeonhole my blog as a simple front to make ducats. I just figured, why not try and make some cash from page impressions… if I’m getting them and all, the ads are pretty non-intrusive to me, and really don’t bother me much (especially if I get a check every month). Pat joked that I’d get a whopping $2.53 a month, and he’s probably right – but I want to at least give a shot and see what happens. So, in short – I’m selling out and I don’t care. Maybe the ads’ll stay, maybe they won’t. But for now, watch for ’em.

Sometimes, at work, I wonder what it would be like if all the people I managed were me. I mean, if they were all clones of me. At first the idea seems sort of good, all moral aspects of cloning aside, because I know and trust myself to do things right. You know what they say, “If you want something done right…” Unfortunately, that’s largely true for me – I really do think I do a good job on most things, so why wouldn’t my me-cloned workforce do just as good? Maybe they would. Often times I catch myself thinking that I could do things faster and better if I just did them myself. This notion is one part asshole, one part bravado, and one part truth. That’s not to say that I’ve been unsatisfied with things I’ve owned at work before, but I knew as I was working on them that I’d ultimately be less-than beaming with pride over them in the end. I also knew I could change that, but deemed the means unjustifiable based on the ends. But, back to the workforce-of-me…

As rosy as the me-workforce may look at first glance, the more I think about it the more I realize how much it would suck. For instance, if I were managing a bunch of mes, there’d be all sorts of limitations: I’d have an entire group working to only about 70% of their potential; I’d have no way to overcome the limitations of the group (like the long ramp-time before they possess enough self-confidence to be truly effective, and their on-again/off-again motivation); and their inherent laziness and favor of flight over fight when things get unpleasant. I’d always wonder if the tasks given to them ended up falling in the 80% “give my all” bucket or the 20% “half-ass it” bucket, and worse always know that division is purely arbitrary. See, I’m an opportunistic procrastinator who’s good at hand-waving and smoke and mirrors. But, maybe, when you get down to it, every workforce is a sometimes-motivated workforce. Hell, there’s even procrastination science, check it:

Desire to Complete Task (U) = Expectation of Success (E) x Value of Completion (V) / Immediacy of Task (I) x Personal Sensitivity to Delay (D), or U=ExV/IxD

Sooo… by that logic, my desire to complete the work I was doing this morning would stackup something like this (I have no idea how to use the equation, so I’m assigning everything a value between 0-10):

Desire to Complete Task (U) = (10 x 10) / (8 x 3) = 4.17

I guess that means I less than half-fully wanted to do the task. Hmmm….

Lot of news around the internet about Sen. Obama’s continuing lean towards casting his lot into the ’08 race, but it’s still just a “strong maybe” as far as I can tell. The hopes of the partisan-disenfranchised moderates are running high though, as Mr. Obama seems to exude some sort of middle-of-the-road intelligent sensibilities and charisma that draws folks in. Personally, my positive feelings for the guy were based pretty much solely on his patriotic, impassioned and eloquent public speaking – but I admittedly know little about his true “stance” on many things (funny how good public speaking can make you just want to “assume” that because he seems like a “nice, logical guy” he’s got sensible positions and ideas – the power of charisma). So, I took to the internets to see what the deal is. One of my favorite sites to visit for a quick idea on where a politician stands on the issues is onthissues.org. While their site design is craptacular, their Obama page is a good point of reference. It’ll be interesting to see if he can keep the warm fuzzy going through to when then herd really starts to thin – what a job for his PR guy(s).

I read this story on off-grid.net the other day (off-grid is a great place to keep up-to-date on the whole, well, off-grid movement – which I’ve fantasized about many times before). How cool would it it be to have a machine that just “makes” water from the air? Now, if I could only figure out how to run that machine hydro-power, and using its own water for the hydro part…hey, I just invented a perpetual motion machine! Please line up to my right for Nobel Prize votes.

Goodnight. (Oh, 11pm now and still no leak. Sharaun says I’m the only one who wakes up every two hours to check… I doubt that… right?…. Want in on the fun? This blog is surprisingly “tied in.” Enjoy.)

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foolish faith


Monday night and I finally gave into this sickness I’ve been trying to shake the past week or so, coming home after noon to try and get some rest (didn’t work, ended up on the phone or e-mail the entire time). Monday night and Neon Bible still hasn’t leaked (the new Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! did though, so that helps a little). I really though it’d be soon after those five tracks dribbled out last week… I think they’re just messing with me now. Hurry! Up! Arcade! Fire! Let’s write now.

I wanted to start these next few paragraphs with an impactful, attention-grabbing sentence: In this day and age in America, religion, Christianity in particular, I fear, is headed for the same fate as the Southern accent.

If you haven’t noticed, in recent times the Southern accent has, quite unfairly, been associated with ignorance. I’m not sure where this stereotype actually came from, but you can pick up on it from just about any piece of pop culture from the last 70 years or so: look at Gomer Pyle, who was famous for his idiocy, and had the most pronounced twang in Mayberry; there’s Cleetus, the “slack-jawed” yokel from the Simpsons; the entire premise of the backwoods hillbilly Clampett family being misplaced in the modern world. Yeah sure, those shows are serving to foster the image, and maybe it’s unfair to use them as examples – but for more proof you don’t have to look much further than Saturday Night Live’s President Bush caricature. When did having a Southerly drawl automatically lower your perceived IQ? I’m not claiming it’s ubiquitous, not everyone is shallow enough to pigeonhole someone by their accent, but still – it’s there.

When I was a kid, we used to this incredibly mean and insensitive thing when we wanted to ape an idiot. We’d let our hand hang limp at the wrist, and then repeatedly thump it against our breast while making “Der, der, duh, der” sounds. This was an imitation of a “Jerry’s Kid.” Crazy thing was, as a kid I really didn’t even know what I was doing. I mean, I knew I was somehow making fun of retarded kids, who apparently beat their own broken wrists against their chests on the Jerry Lewis Telethon – but I had no idea how mean it really was. We were just calling each other stupid. Make a dumbass comment, and I’m gonna tease you by thumping my chest and doing my best “Uhhh, derrr, oohhhuhh.” See, I didn’t really know any retarded kids (that’s not entirely true, but mostly so) – but I assumed they were all stupid (OK, strict definition of “retarded” aside) and therefore a good point of reference when calling out someone else as such. Hicks, yokels, Okies, hillbillies, rednecks, Johnny Rebs. And I think Christians are headed the same way. Instead of tomorrow’s kids beating their chests with limp wrists, maybe they’ll thump and imaginary Bible or fold their hands in mock prayer.

Being religious is is turning into being stupid, and it’s happening fast. Oh sure, throughout history people have always been “too smart” to have faith, the whole science vs. faith thing has been around for eons, but I think it’s different these days. Today, the loudest voice is not longer the church and it’s various supporters installed as kings and queens. Today, the voice heard above the most is that of media and celebrity. And that is, more often than not, not the church’s voice (some might say it’s the voice of reason, others the voice of Satan). Regardless, if the believing collective don’t get their act together soon and do a major PR campaign, they risk being forever viewed as the Flat Earth Society – the new Jerry’s Kids, the new Cleetuses. Plenty of smart people believe in God, right? Doesn’t matter – who’s going to willingly join a organization of dinosaurs futilely holding onto the old ways? You may think that, as everyone gets dumber, everything will balance out – but I disagree. Everyone being dumb just means it’s easier for those who aren’t to convince the masses their way is correct.

I’m rambling now. Let’s sum it up: Christians in danger of being recast as simpletons, need to come up with plan of action before this fate unfairly befalls them. Stereotypes are bad, but they’re also powerful as hell and take centuries to overcome.

I wrote fast, probably full of typos, omissions, and things I didn’t mean. Goodnight bitches.