September 2007 Archives

I just installed the new plugin for Movable Type that allows you to blog straight from your iPhone. I'm impressed. This is an app built for the device (ala Facebook's iPhone app) and it's a great user experience so far. Does Wordpress have this plugin also? If there was ever a time to switch back to MT, I'd say now's the time to try it.

YouTube is like MTV for me. MTV when it was like...good. I can find all these music videos that I would have never seen otherwise, because I really don't spend any TiVo time on recording the would-be "music" channels that we have on satellite. Every video search usually drums up some fan-made shots at a recent concert, so you get to really get into what the band has done lately, too.

And they let you build custom playlists based on what you want to revisit in the future, and you can ever share that with your blog mates. Check it out...

Beastie Boys at Sasquatch 2007: Electric Worm [YouTube]

One of the standout moments from last night's Beastie Boys show in Chicago (as performed earlier this summer at the 2007 Sasquatch Music Festival) -- awesome, awesome, awesome stuff.

One thing I did take issue with was the fact that they went from this tune to "Tough Guy." Too many elbows to report, indeed.

Have a good weekend, ya'll. Stay up.

The Strip in Las Vegas

I'm in a sunglasses sort of mood this morning after a late night at the Beastie Boys concert here in Chicago.

Tortoise - Live at Werchter [YouTube]

I've watched this video earlier today and thoroughly enjoyed it. So much so that I've probably listened to it all the way two more times today as a result. Maybe I'll listen to it two more times. In fact, I'm listening to it right now while I write this post.

Their music is just so original to me, and still to this day they have a sound that no one does. It's so unique to actually be able to produce an original sound, and it still blows me away that bands are really able to retain it over the years.

Do yourself a favor and throw it on in the background while you're at work. You'll be hooked by the first two songs and then they venture off to their electronic/indie/funk freakout and then you'll be all, "uhm -- seriously?" Just push right through it. You'll come out fine on the other end.

Now I think I'll put on this one for the second time today...

The broadcast lineup for the upcoming season of Austin City Limits was just announced. It's one of my favorite shows on television these days and one that I hope never goes away. I even have an ACL t-shirt to prove just how much I love it.

Peep the schedule below; I've emphasized the ones I'm most excited about, and all the rest will be good primers and intros for a bunch of artists I'm not too familiar with.

Austin City Limits TV Schedule:

10-06 Norah Jones
10-13 The Decemberists/Explosions in the Sky10-20 Femi Kuti
10-27 Jimmy Reed Highway: Jimmie Vaughan and Friends
11-03 Wilco
11-10 Arcade Fire
11-17 Brad Paisley/Dierks Bentley
11-24 Van Morrison (Encore)
12-01 Gretchen Wilson/Miranda Lambert (Encore)
12-08 Ladysmith Black Mambazo (Encore)
12-15 John Mayer
12-22 Lucinda Williams/Old Crow Medicine Show
12-29 Bloc Party/Ghostland Observatory
01-05 Crowded House/Grupo Fantasma
01-12 Regina Spektor /Paolo Nutini
01-19 Roky Erickson/Kings of Leon
01-26 ACL PRESENTS: The Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival
(via Pitchfork)

Awesomeness.

For some reason I felt like searching back through my photos a bit. And whenever I do that, I remember how much I enjoy looking at the Kraftwerk photos from their last tour through Chicago (early '06). This stood out as concert of the year for me. It was incredible. The whole set is here on Flickr; I took half and the Mrs. took half. Enjoy.

And why not load up this video below and listen to some tunes while checking out those photos?

Kraftwerk - ELEKTRO KARDIOGRAMM [from Minimum-Maximum]

A couple weeks ago during our FeedBurner Ping-Pong Tournament, a photographer from the Redeye was being walked about and being given a tour of the office. Turns out they were doing a piece on how employers are starting to offer advanced perks for their employees and a photo of me playing ping-pong was sensational enough to make it in their Monday, Sept. 24 edition. Dude...where's my backhand?!?!

I got all sorts of emails as a result, which had that odd effect of making me feel pretty special. Even though the article was entitled "Spoiled At Work," it certainly painted Google in a positive light given all the perks they offer their employees. I'm glad I could help them prove their journalistic assignments. Here's the link to the piece they put up on their site.

Amazon.com just unveiled their new music download service -- Amazon MP3. OMG.

I've long waited for someone to successfully compete with iTunes by offering up MP3 downloads free of DRM restrictions, the sticking point for most serious music fans that understand that purchasing music should not come with "rules" attached. Amazon looks to have knocked the friggin' ball out of the friggin' park by leveraging their massive selection and already offering over 2 million tracks for download FREE OF DIGITAL RIGHTS MANAGEMENT RESTRICTIONS. Let me say that again...FREE OF DRM, people!

If they keep their bitrates up (with the default being VBR 256kbps) and keep adding to their selection quickly, they're going to win the battle for supremacy in the digital download space, something that iTunes has won by default thanks to the iPod.

More on this once I dig in and take a closer look (and maybe purchase an album or two). Kudos to the boys in Seattle on this one; I'm already impressed.

I must have forgotten this until my trusty employer helped me out with some searchizzles...

The Bad Plus have a blog called Do The Math. These guys are like math-jazz, so the moniker makes sense.

The Bad Plus - Film! [YouTube]

Last night I caught The Bad Plus show at the Old Town School of Folk Music right in my 'hood.  In a word, I was floored.

These guys play jazz that just looks like so much fun.  They're laughing and smiling the whole time as they run through some of their "pieces," and they banter between songs to intro the next songs like any nervous songwriters love to do.  I suspect they laugh because they know that the crowd can hardly follow along with their time signatures -- you'd have to be a composer yourself to follow along on some of their tracks -- and they played with enthusiasm and heart that you don't see many musicians bring to the table these days.  At least jazz cats.  (not that I'm a jazz fiend enough to know how some people perform).

At any rate, I was happy to get out with some friends last night.  I ran into my cousin, Andrew; he came out from the 'burbs with a friend of his and he loves The Bad Plus.  Who knew.  I haven't seen him in months and I know he's about to head off to school to study music himself, so catching a fantastic jazz show in Chicago seems quite logical now that I think about it.

And honestly -- who wouldn't love this shit?  This is just incredible.


The Bad Plus - Anthem for the Earnest [YouTube]

On Friday night, a bunch of the Googlers on the FeedBurner team went out to have a few drinks to celebrate Eric's move to New York City to be a part of BuzzFeed.  Mucho cervesas were consumed.  And many stayed out much, much longer than I did; I heard something about a party in Lincoln Park with a Ouija board and the inevitable late-night burrito binge.

Part of me was glad I went home when I did, but it sure sounds like the night capped off with plenty of fun for everyone involved.  We need to get out as a group more.

As for Eric's departure, we're all wishing him the best of luck as he moves back East to start helping BuzzFeed's business grow out of their stealth operation mode.  Eric was the first person I talked to at FeedBurner, and he was definitely the helper in getting me and my resume into the right inbox to get my job there.  It was when I staying at home full-time to work on Live Music Blog after a nice separation "bonus" from R.R. Donnelley bought me some time before I had to figure out my next move.  Eric helped me join the FeedBurner Ad Network as one of their first publishers in the Arts & Entertainment channel.

I remember grilling Eric hard about how much money I was going to make, most notably due to the fact that I didn't really understand anything about CPM-based advertising.  "Wait - so I make money when people click, right?"  I was too trained on Google AdSense, but luckily that training was everything that I talked about during my interviews and it got me in the door.  If it wasn't for Eric, I probably never would have gotten the job at FeedBurner or Google, so I'll always remember that about him.  And we'll definitely be staying in touch on future ventures and social engagements whenever I make it out to New York or whenever he's back in Chicago.  I'm hugely confident of that fact, so while we're wishing him well and it's a little sad to see a friend move, I'm sure we'll keep close.

I got to help him slack nicely on his last day; I think we ended up playing about two hours worth of ping-pong in the office between lunch and before heading out to the bar after work.  Raise a glass.  Here's to looking forward to our next rematch!  Cheers, man!

Yesterday was the first chance in a while for me to play drums.  My friend that hosts my set in her basement is out of town, so I got over there yesterday and proceeded to rock out for a good half hour or so.  I want to start recording the "sessions," (if you could call it that) as I think it'd be fun to share them on the blog.  It can be hard to capture what sort of stuff I'm working on creatively that's totally separate and never connected to the web.  I don't have the best in A/V equipment so we'll see what I can whip up the next time I get to play.

In the meantime, enjoy what I used as a major inspiration while playing...


Glenn Kotche - Modern Drummer demo [YouTube]

Agreed.

For some reason that I would never want to try and figure out, Six Apart packages Movable Type 4 with default RSS templates that only give you partial feed items for all of your blog posts.  We folks at FeedBurner know a thing or two about partial vs. full feeds -- by now we could have published our own book on the subject -- and I tend to be a reader and publisher that prefers to allow people to read full blog content vs. partial content.

So there you have it.  You should be seeing the full items now if you're subscribed already, and if you're not, here's my feed address.  Subscribe and enjoy, and please drop a comment if it still looks wonky.

Chicagoist thinks that the new logo is slightly "meh" but I actually enjoy the new look. I did like the old one better, but I understand that there were rules that governed the design of the applicant logos vs. the officially awarded city's logos. Or something like that.

I think it's pretty, though. The Chicago star is represented as the centerpiece and the colors of the rainbow representing Chicago's waterways, lakes, parks, humidity, skyscrapers, random city smells, bikes, lack of ability to see stars in the city, etc. You know, all the stuff we know and love about the city proper. I really want us to win it, and this logo is going to help!

My buddy Eric came in yesterday morning and pointed me over to the latest TechCrunch headline declaring that -- surprise, surprise -- there's a new company on the web that seems to have nailed something that traditional software companies are no longer nailing due to their drudgingly slow development cycles: personal finance management.  The product is called Mint, and it just took home the top honors as "Top Company" from the first TechCrunch40 Conference.

I've been pretty stuck using Microsoft Money for the past couple years, because it's been pretty simple to install the software and keep a constant, running download of my transactions as they post to my various bank accounts.  Simple, that is, until I got a MacBook.  So I got stuck on using it on my media PC, which is still fine in that I just put all of our bills down on the office desk right in front of the PC.  I'm good to go...but not really.

So with MS Money, bill-pay is integrated, so I can pay bills right from that interface as opposed to logging onto my bank every time I need to send a bill.  I don't do that thing where I aggregate all my bills and pay them in batch; I pay them as they come in.  But Mint doesn't support bill-pay yet but I have to assume that it'll come soon enough.

Throwing all concerns for privacy aside, it'd be pretty killer to manage my money from any computer.  More and more as I learn Apple products and continue to switch my digital life from PC-based computing to Mac computing, I'm realizing that I'll want to live a lot of my life from the web if I'm not doing so already.  I already rely completely on email, calendar, banking, purchasing, reading, blogging, etc. on the web; why wouldn't I put all my trust in a brand-new web startup to handle all of my financial management responsibilities?  Well, for one, I couldn't when I tried yesterday.

They call it the Digg Effect (harkening back to the 'ol days where it was called the Slashdot Effect).  Or you've been Crunched.  Two sites that send so much traffic your way (if you're lucky enough to get mentioned) that inevitably your web server crashes.  It's a good problem to have, and hopefully your boss doesn't hold you accountable for the data connections in and out.  I wouldn't want that job.

I tried to get started on Mint but I guess I'll just have to wait.  For all those that have given it a try already -- what are your early takeaways?  Worth it?  Powerful enough?  Pretty logo?

Today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day.

Uhm...okay...

Last Wednesday was a fun night. I was lucky enough to snag two tickets and attend one of the hottest concerts in Chicago this season -- Wilco and Dr. Dog at the Pritzker Pavilion at Millennium Park. To say I was anticipating this would have been an understatement; I was beyond thrilled to finally take in a concert at the park that just so happened to be one of my favorite touring band's first time playing there (and hopefully not their last).

The concert was amazing, by the way.

© kelsey mae

My Morning Jacket performed amidst a background set to "Tropical" at their 2008 Austin City Limits Festival set, and Stereogum has tons of photos along with some commentary about how much they love the band.  I concur.

And the real takeaway is that there's definitely excitement that comes from a band coming out and doing the unexpected.  That's the lure of jambands, man.  They like...come out...and just...woah...go with it, brah.

But truly, this is the stuff that music festivals are made of.  If bands aren't willing to take chances at a festival where people are there to take in the whole scene and not the standard, festival-set run-through, why the hell are these festivals becoming so popular?

I'd like to formally encourage every single band that I enjoy to take a lesson from My Morning Jacket and get your head out of your rut and start changing things up when you play live.  You'll find a whole lotta fans that weren't there before (if done right, of course).

Google has announced an offshoot of AdSense called AdSense for Mobile.  It's the same contextual ad platform that many have come to know and love (or hate), and it'll be tailored and optimized for mobile versions of websites.  Can't wait to see my first one in the wild...

I haven't been as vocal as anyone else on the subject -- I've seen a lot of debate on this on the blogs I read -- but I have never been of a fan of any website that offers a subscription-based plan to access their content.  I'm also never a fan of any website that has music automatically loaded in the background, but I digress.

At any rate, the New York Times made news late last night when it announced -- on NYTimes.com, of course -- that they were going away with their TimesSelect product.  It was a walled-garden of high-end journalism and magazine-like content that many, many people wanted to be able to dig into, but given that you had to sign up for something and agree to pay for something that most kids think should be free these days, I've never really gotten a chance to sample it out myself.  No longer, my friends.

The move comes two years to the day after The Times began the subscription program, TimesSelect, which has charged $49.95 a year, or $7.95 a month, for online access to the work of its columnists and to the newspaper's archives. TimesSelect has been free to print subscribers to The Times and to some students and educators.

Good news for bloggers, too.  There's some juicy content up there that just deserves rebuttal blog posts.  Lots of new stuff to link to in the near future.

One of the largest pet peeves of mine is when I'm in a public bathroom and I notice other people not washing their hands after they use the toilet.  What irks me more are those people that just rinse their hands off without using soap; it's an odd behavior that allows them to feel better that they sorta washed their hands while they transfer all those germs they didn't wash off right to the doorknobs on their way out of the lavatory.  I just think it's gross.

It turns out that men are apparently worse than women at maintaining clean hands after using the head, or so the Tribune says.

"Guys need to step up to the sink," said Brian Sansoni, spokesman for the Soap and Detergent Association, which co-sponsors the survey and related education campaigns.

See -- the spokesman for the Soap and Detergent Association says men don't wash their hands.  You just have to trust such an objective source!

In all seriousness, though, dudes should be washing their hands.  I don't want other people's junk germs all over my hands, and I'm sure there are others that are with me on that note.

Lucas came in and hung out with me this morning while I was jamming out a new blog template on my computer in the office. He sits on top of one of the couch cushions and just slowly smashes it down to be a nice little hammock-like spot. He used to do this all the time...

I got tired of looking at the Movable Type standard templates so I decided to heavily modify the set that ships.  Full credit is certainly due to the original designers, which reminds me that I should proudly write up a colophon page showing where all this magic comes from.  At any rate, click-on-through from the feed if you want to get a feel for how the site will look by the end of today.  I've got some other changes that still need to get implemented, but for now -- enjoy.

Feist - 1 2 3 4 [YouTube]

I can't believe I have never gotten into Feist before. This song and video combo gave me chills. She also brought the tune to Letterman with a choir to accompany, which is no small feat for network television. It's just an incredible song; it just screams "indie rock anthem" and I happen to be obsessed with any music that could ever fall under that category.

I was cruising around in River North the other night after work for some errands and a nice, little stop at the Apple store to check out the iPhones. As I went walking towards the EL to find my way home, I noticed that the lighting/cloud combination at the top of the Hancock Center looked pretty damn ominous. The photo in blue was one taken without any lighting or anything, and the photo in orange was taken using my cameraphone's night mode with a small flash. I thought the before and after looked pretty cool.

And now that I'm a proud owner of my very own iPhone, these are probably the last cameraphone photos from the Sony W810i that will get posted here. Moment of silence, please.

The blog is back and now running Movable Type 4.0.  And I'm back, too.

Both things feel nice to me right now.

Call me a skeptic, but I just happen to think that the VMA's partnering with Twitter is kinda lame. But I also think I'm probably wrong about that if you were to think about this in terms of smart, business partnering. I'm right and I'm wrong.

MTV is beyond irrelevant to me these days, and I think that I'm probably in a good minority there. The audience that loves MTV is surely the audience that also loves text messaging. And Twitter is looking to bring text messaging to the forefront to prove that it can be a very valuable and usable medium for people to express themselves these days.

I don't know. I guess I just think MTV is lame now. And I like Twitter...and I don't want Twitter to be lame. So there.

I think I was meant to read this... (via)

The background noise theory is quite simple: stupid people, violent people, and people who are emotionally damaged need to have background noise in their lives at all times to drown out their internal critical dialogue. Have you ever been to a bad part of town and listened? You hear shouting, children screaming or crying, car horns, excessively loud music, sirens, all on top of each other. It's more than ordinary city noise, is people creating more noise for the sake of more noise.

Seems like common sense once you read it. Or maybe, like me, this speaks to you and what might be troubling you about your own personality at the moment. Interesting thought, nonetheless. Read the whole comment to get the full picture.