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i’m no nike shill

I just liked the colors, that's all.
Home from work, 6:30pm. Off with the shoes and shirt and pants, on with the fuzzy slippers, t-shirt, and sweats. Around 8:30pm I decide to run. For some reason, having an iPod makes me want to run – more time to listen to music on that little gem of modern technology. The hard drive takes my puny strides without missing a beat; I hate running, but I’m trying to do it three times a week – maybe Keaton won’t have to look quite as far back as my high school pictures to ask, “Daddy, you were skinny?” I don’t think I’ll ever get off on running like those people on the sneaker commercials seem to, but if it’ll keep me from an early, artery-clogged, grave whatever… I’ll give it a shot.

Well, not to tread over and over and over again on the same theme – but I really am having trouble keeping the “appropriate” focus on work these days. It’s a mixture of some form of “senioritis,” the inevitable winding-down that overcomes most people when they know a big break from the grind is coming, and a general sense of work seeming less-than-important. I find my mind distracted by all things baby. Thing is, we’re now pretty much ready, nursery-wise, for Lil’ Chino’s arrival. The room’s painted, the crib, changing-table-dresser thing, and glider/rocker are all set up, waiting. Out registries are, for the most part, depleted – for which I consider us to be very lucky, babies are not cheap to welcome home. But, I catch myself letting work pile up, slip, and fall off… I sit in front of the screen and work on things of little importance, but things that keep me engaged. Writing Visual Basic for scripts for Excel… sure, it’s valuable – but it’s nowhere near as high as the things on the priorities list I’m shirking while doing it. Right now, nothing’s more important than this fetus.

Y’know, funny things happen when you look at your budget under a microscope as part of a simulated-Chino re-budgeting analysis. Thing like discovering that you spend $35 a month on Starbucks coffee at work, and that’s just one a morning each morning. That’s too much to spend on coffee, methinks. So, you head to the local-economy-ruining Wal Mart and buy a buy of Verona for $6, then you spend 5min each night telling the coffee maker you got in college to make you a fresh brimming mug right before you leave for work. Throw that in a travel mug, kiss the morning ritual of “going down for coffee” goodbye, and save $30 a month. Sure, $30 may seem petty… but it’s funny how making simple trades like that can add up if you really need them to. Me, I’m not going to mind the extra $30 one bit. $30 a month on dang coffee!! Stupid Starbucks.

Time to link you up a bit. If you’re a music nut like me, you’ll surely appreciate this outstanding blog I recently discovered: coolfer. With a keen eye and ear for industry news and other music-related info, it reminds me of my days working retail and reading Billboard or ICE weekly – solid music news on a daily basis. Also, snagged from a God-blog I read from time to time, I found this quick “God plausibility” test kinda cool. You’re presented with a list of checkboxes and told to mark as many or as few attributes which the God you believe in has. Then, a team of “metaphysical engineers” tell you how plausible your conception of God is based on the combination you choose. Frivolous, but kinda neat. My God? 0.9; plausible.

I shaved my beard. Just when it was getting nice and shaggy. I also left a sweat-towel from last week’s inaugural gym visits in my truck over the weekend, now the whole thing reeks of football locker room. Goodnight my friends.

Posted on

iTunes is crap

Mmm...
I have a massively boring entry all about iPods. I considered not even posting it, or double posting it along with a more respectable entry (I wrote both Thursday and Friday last week, but was up late playing iPod each night and just forwent posting). Well, you’ve been warned… tech-babble ahead.

“The Timetable,” or, “Looking that horse in its mouth”: Sharaun wins iPod in radio call-in contest, tells me it’s a gift to me. She picks it up the same day, and it’s awesome, black and 30 gigs. I’m up late loading songs on it, it’s filled to capacity by 1am. The next day, I put it on Ebay, where it sells in under 5hrs for $275. Next afternoon, I use the leveraged Ebay cash to pickup a 60GB instead. Sharaun’s OK with it, after I explain. I stay up late loading songs on it, and am satisfied with the canon at around 50GB and 2am. That brings us up to date.

Saturday morning (not too early, we slept late) I set about installing my new Alpine-to-iPod interface thing (Alpine’s KCA-420i) in the Ford. Turns out the deck came out with zero effort, and the proprietary Alpine AiNet interface was just plug-and-go. I cleaned out the glove box, mounted the unit inside with velcro and ran the wires from behind the deck. Under 15min of work and the thing was discretely installed and I was browsing my iPod with the Alpine deck’s analog wheel, scrolling through artists like I was on the iPod (albeit slower than running through the list on the iPod itself). Sound is line-quality and the unit charges the iPod while it’s plugged in. I was initially impressed, and happy.

However, one trip downtown in the evening for dinner, and the unit’s drawbacks became pretty apparent: All the iPod’s controls are disabled when it’s plugged into the deck, forcing you to control it through the deck. It’s frustrating to have to learn the Alpine deck’s way of emulating the iPod’s controls (and, it’s dog-slow refreshing the on-screen text). What’s worse, the interface only supports a maximum of 255 albums or songs per playlist. Wanna listen to Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy? Press ‘3’, ‘FUNC’, ‘3’ and then use the rotary wheel to scroll to ‘L’ (allow ~3min scrolling time, no joke). Then you advance song by song until you get to song #1 on the album you’re after. The process is slow, ridiculous, and conducive to running off the road for staring at the deck. Anyway, who doesn’t have more than 255 albums on a dang 60GB iPod?

So, I took back the KCA-420i and returned it for a AiNet-to-RCA adapter and 3mm-to-RCA cable. This way, I can control the iPod from its brilliantly simple click wheel, with awesome speed and ease, and I still get line sound. The drawbacks?: No ID3 info displayed on the head unit – something I can live without. Also, no charging while plugged in – also not a huge deal since there plenty of cheap cigarette lighter iPod chargers. So, it’s not as neat of a wiring scheme, but it’s overall better since you can use the iPod’s user-friendly interface and controls manage tunes. And, don’t forget the whole thing is less than half the price of the 420i.

In other iPod news, also on Saturday night the thing decided to completely flake out. Under every video sub-menu, (movies/music videos/etc.) my entire song list would show up – with the videos mixed right in. And, if I scrolled to and tried to play an actual video (all of which played fine previously) I’d get nothing but audio, just as if it were a song.

To preface the following, I need to mention that I’ve been using the 3rd-party iPod management software, EphPod, to load songs. I like the interface better than iTunes, and it seemed more “PC” and less “Mac” to me… so I felt more at home using it. However, as it stands now, you can only use iTunes to load video content – so I was switching back and forth between the two apps to load songs and videos. OK, read on.

The whole “video” part of the iPod and, especially, iTunes is kinda buggy to me. I had noticed, when first trying to get some test videos on, that iTunes seemed to add them as songs instead of videos. For that matter, adding videos is completely unintuitive. How the eff are you supposed to figure out how to get them on? I settled for dragging them to the iPod icon and dropping, seemed to work, although iTunes still said “updating songs” as the video copied over. Unplugging the iPod, the videos were under “movies,” and seemed to play OK – but the whole deal was flaky; sometimes the videos were there, sometimes they weren’t. I don’t know if this is EphPod’s doing, but I suspected as much.

Plugging it into iTunes, I got the message: iTunes cannot read the contents of the iPod. Use the iPod software updater application to restore the iPod to factory settings. Great; WTF? Running the iPod Updater would, of course, wipe all ~50GBs of music I painstakingly added just one evening prior, and it takes a damn-long time to comb through my >60GB library on disk picking-and-choosing which ones get to go on the ‘Pod. Close iTunes, fire up EphPod – all my music is there and checks out fine. Being new to this, I’m freaking out; I don’t want to lose all my music. I try a few things in EphPod: verifying the database (removed some songs whose “file size didn’t match,” whatever that means) and deleting the existing videos that had added as songs. Still getting the “cannot read” error from iTunes. Fire up EphPod again, and for some random reason decide to try and “delete all playlists,” done. I also followed some instructions on the net and renamed my active iTunesDB file to iTunesDB.old and made the .backup file the active one. Just to be safe, I also hard-reset the thing several times.

Back to iTunes, I can now see my iPod again… so one of the tricks above must’ve worked. Great! However, all the “play counts” are now set to insanely high values (most of them at 16794634, some even higher). WTF? So, I select all my songs and right-click “reset play count.” This seems to work, but every song’s “last played” value is still set to some random date in 1970… crazy; at least I can access the iPod at all using iTunes. After fiddling around some more, I narrowed the error down to a repeatable situation: if I’d added videos using iTunes, then loaded my database into EphPod and messed around before saving, the video list would get all screwy and full of songs – and iTunes would complain it couldn’t read the iPod. The solution was also always the same: load the thing in EphPod and “delete all playlists.” This enabled iTunes to again access the iPod, and loading a single video through iTunes would fix the video-showing-songs problem. Crazy.

Interestingly enough, I’d seen an article on Digg the other day entitled iPod Update Causing Major Headache for Some Video Owners, which mentioned that the v1.1 firmware was hosing some video iPods (60GB models in particular). In the Digg comments, someone posted a link to a utility that can be used to “downgrade the iPod firmware to the previous v1.0 – without losing your data. Thankfully, I didn’t have to go that route – as the palylist trick above fixed everything for me.

Still, video functionality seems flaky, and I’ve decided that I hate iTunes as a application in general. It’s bloated, loaded with BS like QuickTime, and is completely convoluted and hard to use.

And, in my last iPod-related topic, since getting the iPod and obsessing over loading it with tunes (oh, the joys of tag-cleanup), I’ve been sharply re-focused on finishing my Great Digital Migration project. I finally went through and cleaned up my master project spreadsheet, making a concise list of what discs still need to be archived. Doing so was a bit of a surprise, as I realized I’m actually farther along than I’d been thinking – basically having only live, various artists, and bootlegs left to rip (all the nasty items that won’t auto-tag and require manual work). In addition to finishing up the ripping, I’ve been trawling the music scene for new and exciting items. One of the new techniques I’ve developed is searching on the keyword “remaster,” which turns up all the newest “deluxe,” “expanded,” and “remastered” editions of classic albums. Usually, you can stumble across some great albums that’ve received the expanded treatment, and grab better sounding copies of stuff you may have or maybe even score some previously unreleased tracks.

That’s it folks, one big iPod entry. I have some more “charismatic” stuff canned from last week – y’know, the baby bit and all that – which I’ll be rolling out Tuesday and Wednesday.

Until then, love ya.

Posted on

crumbelievable

Crumbelievable.
Sharaun asked me if I was going to shave my beard before Lil’ Chino comes. I said that I had thought about it, but hadn’t decided. “But,” she said, “You don’t want to have a beard in our first pictures with the baby, do you? It’s the first time you’ve ever had a beard in your whole life, and you probably won’t have it forever; do you really want that in your first pictures with her? It’s not you.” Don’t think I hadn’t considered this very thing. My real goal with this beard was to grow it bushy and wild. So, maybe I can just grow it until Sharaun goes into labor – and then shave… or something. Who knows. I think she’s kind of right, though, I’m not sure I want this thing in those very special pictures. Then again, I actually like it, and think I might even like it more the bushier it gets. We’ll see.

I saw a commercial for a new kind of Kraft cheese the other day that used EMF’s 90s anthem “Unbelievable” to hawk curds. You know what they changed the song to? “They’re crumbelievable.” Oh. My. Crap. That’s possibly the worst, worst-worst-worst commercial sellout I’ve ever heard. “Crumbelievable?!” EMF… for shame. I hope they don’t own the rights to that song, because that would mean they came together as a band and listened to a pitch that may have gone something like this:

Kraft goes:
“EMF, we here at Kraft would like to use a reinterpretation of your classic song, ‘Unbelievable’ to market our exciting new line of cheese. We think we can give your work the respect it deserves as iconic 90s dancepop, while simultaneously utilizing its near-universal genY appeal to give our new Kraft Crumbles an edgy edge with the extremely cynical late-20s demo.”

EMF goes:
“Uh, OK… how were you planning on ‘reinterpreting’ it?”

Kraft goes:
“I’m glad you asked! We are actually planning to change the hook from “it’s unbelievable” to “they’re crumbbelievable.” “They” being in reference to the actual cheese crumbles, which are, indeed, unbelievable. Here, we’ve brought some for you, EMF, to sample.

EMF goes:
“Oh. Wow. That’s… Wow. And we get how much now?

Kraft pushes a piece of paper across the table, past the untouched glass bowl of Crumbles, towards EMF. Band members pass the paper around, one to the next. They put their heads together in a brief whispering conference. EMF turns to Kraft.

EMF goes:
We, EMF, accept your offer of money in exchange for our artistic integrity. We will use said money to clutch, if only fleetingly, at memories of our one-hit-wonder, drug and women-filled heyday of 1990s psuedo-stardom. Thanks in advance for the humiliation.

As a postscript, turns out that iPod I mentioned Sharaun winning on the radio yesterday is only 30GB. Oh, and it’s laser-etched with the Discovery Channel logo on the back. Odd, but hey – don’t mistake it for complaints, it’s 30GB and one laser-etched Discovery Channel logo better than the iPod I had before it. Anyway, I filled it to the brim last night and couldn’t be more in love with it.

Goodnight peoples, I be lovin’ you all.

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all the way to the horizon

Never coming down.
Today on the way home for lunch (baby-budget, remember), I was listening to Menomena’s new three-track (thematic, if not full-blown “concept”) EP/album, Under An Hour (which it is, just barely, at 54min). Of the three tracks, which are each near the 20min mark, I’ve rarely gotten to the final one. So… liking the first two tracks so much, I decided to flip direct to the last track. Turns out, the third track begins with a buzzy droning sound, completely unaccompanied; something like a small plane sounds like from inside the cockpit.

Wait, if you skipped that last paragraph because it started out about music, go back – I’m actually going somewhere with this and needed the music to set it up. Go ahead, I’ll give you a second…

Anyway, with the windows down and that drone droning on in my ears, I started to imagine I was in a plane. Flying over the same roads I was driving, watching myself down there. If you’re having a hard time picturing this, pop in Kubrick’s The Shining DVD and watch the opening sequence as the Torrances make their way up to the lodge, shot from a helicopter tracing their winding path up the wooded road.

Suddenly, being up in the sky and far above the me driving down below, I felt all at once alone and free. I could just keep flying, stay airborne, take it to the mountains or even over the ocean. Stay up in the cold thin air with nothing but the drone of the engines outside. I could look down on little people like me and their purposed motions, heading home for a quick sandwich because they’re about to have a baby and a pound of deli meat is cheaper than a pre-fab sandwich at the cafeteria. But not me. I’m up here in the sky where there’s no turn I can’t take, no direction I can’t point myself in. Aimed into the blue all the way to the horizon.

When I was a kid, in 5th grade or so, I used to daydream about jumping out of my swing at the very top of the arc. I’d spread my arms and fly away, circling above the playground looking down at the upturned heads of my amazed classmates. That, or the one where I could walk on the ceilings, my feet stuck to the top of the walkway coverings – just out of reach of the kids below. Oh, and there was the one where I could walk through walls… that one was mostly used to get into closets other such places where I could spy on girls undressing. So, aside from the pervert one, I guess flying away type escapist fantasies have been with me from a young age. There’s something alluring about looking down on everything, as a supreme being would on his creation. They’re down there, you’re up here – and they can’t even throw a rock and hit you. Money.

Finally, and added early this morning after I’d already auto-published at midnight, some non-abstract writing (and darn good news). Sharaun, who wins so much stuff on the radio that we get W2s from Infinity and ClearChannel, this morning won a 60GB video iPod. She promptly called and told me to get out of bed and tune in for the call-in contest responsible. Oh yeah, and she won some Globetrotter tickets too, which I’m actually pretty pumped about… but the iPod I’ve been dreaming of, and it’s within the baby-budget… free-ninety-free. How she does it, I have no idea.

Goodnight.

Posted on

a troll in the stork’s workshop

Gasp!
Probably a boring entry today, in play-by-play style but at least spiced up with some photographs to make you think it’s meatier than it really is.

Lately I feel something like an elf in Santa’s workshop – working tirelessly day and night to make toys for all the good boys and girls of the world. But… I’m not an elf; I’m taller and rounder and much hairier, a little more like a troll. And… I’m not in Santa’s workshop; I’m in my home – working tirelessly day and night to make things ready for Lil’ Chino’s arrival. OK, not quite tirelessly, but I’ve at least been working (at times with the assistance of others) for four days or so. Oh but folks, the hard work has definitely paid off. With the addition of the glider we got on the cheap off Craigslist, a new white-rimmed light fixture, and some new white shelves, it’s just about perfect.

Friday night… we opted to stay in, beat-down as we are from last evening’s late ending. Sharaun did her day on an hour and a half of sleep, and is now sawing logs on the couch. She’s got her shirt hiked up above her bulging belly and every once and a while I can see the whole mass squirm and writhe like I’d imagine it would were an octopus coiled inside. No ocean-life here though, just our little girl; she’s getting bigger, stronger, and making herself more apparent everyday. Not just by trying to push her way out Sharaun’s belly, either, just by… permeating. Saturating my thoughts more and more every day. And… I love it; I really do. I’m ready for her to be the center of my world.

Sunday was Sharaun’s final baby shower, and we once again came away with armloads of loot. Sharaun’s friends threw one of the most thoughtful and well-lain showers I’ve seen (not that I’m some kinda baby shower aficionado, but it just makes you realize what good friends do). While the ladies were brokebacking it up over at the house, I haded over to Pat’s for some football with all the abandoned dudes, only to come back later for a look at the plunder. Without going down the list, we did manage to score (between this and her other showers) most all the “big ticket” items on our registry – which is more awesome than I can even say.

But, out of all the gifts we got, there was one that I loved sooo much, I had to take pictures and show the world. Given to us by one of sounds familiar’s devoted readers, maygsters, were these awesome handmade onsies (as I’ve been told they are called) and hand-knitted little booties (lots of baby things end with Gollum-esque “ies”). It’s hard to make out in the picture below, but if you click you can see a larger version that’s more legible.

If you can’t read ’em, there’s: Daddy drinks because I cry, a Justin Tenderlegs (must be for Sharaun), the blog logo, Been on the inside for 9 months, and, needless to say, my absolute favorite – the “Lil’ Chino” logo’d tee (in realistic Latino streetgang typeface!). I seriously can’t wait to get her into it.

Goodnight.

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it all happened at the wolf parade show

Burning bird.
Who says you cant lateblog on Fridays? No one I know! Anyway, here it is, late, since we didn’t make it home from the Wolf Parade show until 3am last night. About the show… I was underwhelmed. Unbeknownst to me, we caught the very last show on the tour, right before the band was heading back north for two months rest. That meant a very drunken band, and a pretty burned out vocal performance from the lead-guitar singer guy (not to be confused with the keyboard singer guy, neither of whom’s name I know). Can you say “whom’s?” Anyway, the show wasn’t very enjoyable for 8-months-pregnant Sharaun, and worrying over her hampered my experience a little too. Basically, I saw my hipster life die a slow death last night, while my family life phoenix began to flutter under the pile of ashes – and it all happened over an hour and half at a Wolf Parade show. Now some crap I wrote yesterday.

I wanted to thank stereogum for bringing my attention to Bill O’Reilly’s appearance on the Letterman show this week, as I found Dave’s conviction in the interview pretty out-of-character – yet a welcomed taking-on of Mr. O’Reilly. Hopefully the WMV link sticks around long enough for you to check it out as well. I’m still surprised that it’s taken criticism of this war this long to become this public, but I suppose that you could argue that criticism will inevitably grow in proportion to the length of the engagement and, more importantly, number of lives lost. Regardless of time and lives, I think it’s past-due. Knowing we can’t just pull out and nut on Iraq’s stomach at this point, one can make a fair projection of the pro-war curve – and so can the GOP. I’d imagine it’ll go something like this:

hawkism.jpg

Of course, there will be outliers – those who will support the decision to go to war until the very end. You’ll find some of these people to be very intelligent, sensible, well-versed, and extremely convicted; you’ll also find some of these people to be ignorant, blindly accepting of authority, and willing to swallow a live grenade were it marketed to them correctly (likely wrapped in an American flag, affixed with J. Christ’s seal of approval, or heavily advertised during NASCAR). Likewise, you’ll find those who wouldn’t vote for war were an Iraqi-sanctioned team of terrorists in their living room slitting the throats of their family with dull wooden knives made from felled-for-sport 300 year old American redwoods. I am none of these, and I hope that I am among the growing majority; a growing majority that wants to know. If not for WMD… then what for? If not for 9/11… then what for? If not for proof of state-sponsored terrorism… then what for? What the heck for? To make the world a better place, of course! Yay! We’re all rainbows and kittens.

That’s it, weekend time. See ya.

Posted on

pinks

Would look sweet on the side of a van.
Happy Thursday to you, this week is going fast. To start: some pictures, as I finally got around to taking some of the nearly-done nursery, in all its two-tone pink glory. I’ve added them to my media page, and attentive readers may also find the online debut of Lil’ Chino’s real name (it’s a big thing).

Tonight is the Wolf Parade show in San Francisco; it kinda snuck up on me, and it’s a late one too… doors at 8:30pm and there’s three, count ’em, three opening acts… meaning the Wolf likely won’t even start parading until like 11pm. Looks like it’s going to be a late one, current pillow-ETA estimates coming in at approximately 3:30am. Of course, the show is sold out – two nights actually, so it should be fairly well-attended and, hopefully, high-energy.

I had to replace the headlight on my truck; I’ve done it before and remember it being dead-easy. So, I bought a headlight, and flipped open the manual to the headlight maintenance section to jog my memory. This time though, the burned out headlight was on the driver’s side, previously it was on the passenger. Turns out the driver’s side assembly is a good deal tighter, and not really made for fat hands. Replacing a bulb couldn’t be easier in theory: unplug it, twist the locking ring to the right, pull out the bulb, put in the new one, twist the ring to the left, plug it back in. I failed at the “twist the locking ring to the right” step, as my fat hands couldn’t fit in the tight space well enough to give me sufficient twisting power. Why do things I’m bad at have to be so hard? Anyway, I got smarter than the tight space and went to the trouble of removing the entire battery so I could approach the twisty thing from the rear – that did it, twisted that defiant mofo right off and had the new bulb in lickety-split. Plus, as a bonus, after the hood was closed and tools put away, my hands were stained with suet and grease – to the casual observer I could’ve passed for someone who works on his car because he knows how. Pretend-skills… I got tons of ’em.

G’nite friends.