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This week in the Cowon

I’ve loaded up the little flac player with some tasty new music this week.  The first two I’ve done some pretty steady listening to, the latter two just hit the player today.  All of these were purchased on CD and then ripped as flacs before being put on the little guy.

Bonnie “Prince” Billy

Beware

Drag City

Will is pulling a little Neil Young on us with the cover art, huh? This is a good album. It’s exactly what you’d expect from this eccentric guy, but moreso. I like the instrumentation. It sounds a bit like he’s heading towards Devendra Banhart via Kentucky.

Kanye West

808s & Heartbreak

Roc-A-Fella

I am, admittedly, extremely late on the uptake, here. Man. This is such a great record. I was pretty sick of voice modification. But, when it sounds this good and its appropriate for the content. How can one complain. I think I’ve cycled through this record 50x this week. Even had the little ones jumping around to Love Lockdown.

__________________________

Next week:

Mt. St. Helens Vietnam Band

Mt. St. Helens Vietnam Band

Dead Oceans

Pearl Jam

Ten(Remix)

Sony Music Entertainment

Posted in Uncategorized.

bespoke

I was doing some web research when I encountered a company that does ‘bespoke’ solutions. This reminded me of bespoke suits, which brought me to this link:

http://www.bownsbespoke.com/bespokesuits.htm

with the following quote:

Each cuff should have four buttons. As with all the visible buttons on the suit, they must be made of real horn. (At a Savile Row tailor, real horn buttons will be used automatically; at other tailors it will probably be necessary to buy them at one of the cloth shops in Regent Street and take them with you when you make your first visit.) I like all the cuff buttonholes to be working. You will need to ask for this. Some tailors like to make two real buttonholes and two sham ones on each cuff, to facilitate future alteration of the sleeve length. This spoils the appearance.

While you will be wearing cuff buttons which work, it is not proper – indeed, it is the height of vulgarity – to leave any of them open in public.

I recently came across an article in a German magazine which advocated this abominable practice. I reproduce the picture which accompanied this dispiriting message, so that you can cringe at your leisure.

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furthur still

Phish’s resurgence saw me grabbing some CDRs out of cold storage for some listening.   I’ve been slowly building some shelves in the basement that, when finished, will hold all or most of the CDRs that I have collected over the years of live concert recordings.  I’m jumping the gun a little bit by opening the boxes up, but I realized that I miss them.

For a bunch of reasons, the live music archive cannot completely satisfy my jones.  I mentioned picking up a new HDD a little while ago to give me well over a TB in storage within the ol’ PC (not counting external storage drives).  So, I’ve begun grabbing a handful of shows at random and ripping them from the CDRs on the PC as flacs.  Flac seems like a good compromise.  To accompany this venture, I had some amazon dollars from christmas sitting around so I picked up one of these:

A Cowon D2+.  This image is probably about life-size.  It is a nifty little player.  I chose this one because nearly every site I visited suggested that Cowon’s digital players have, by far, the best sound quality.  I was led to believe that the D2+, and other Cowon products, are the choice of audiophiles.

Well, I’ve had it long enough to say that those reviews seem to be spot-on.  The sound quality is far better than my iPod and the D2+ has no trouble driving my Grado’s.  One big issue that I wasn’t aware of, but which may be getting fixed someday thanks to a firmware update, is the lack of gapless playback.  Is there any player that handles flac that also has gapless playback?  It also has to feature drag-and-drop file transfer because of the way I am doing this project.  This one has some nice little features but the overall experience is a bit lacking.  It is a touch-screen player but the GUI is a bit mysterious.  I have to say, however, that the overall effect is somewhat similar to my old, beloved Karma.  It also features a nice suite of EQ and audio enhancement features that are extremely customizable.  I am having some fun tweaking these with my various environments: car stereo, Grado, in-ear Shure’s (at work).

I got the cheapest version, 8GB, but I added a 16GB SD card to it for a total of 24GB.  It’s not enormous, but I don’t want it to hold my library.  What I really want to do with it is load it up with a number of shows from my collection — to incentivize me to dig them out of the basement, rip them to flac and then listen to them.   It will not permanently hold these shows, but rather feature a rotation.   I’d also like to work in a new CD here and there, also.  i.e. a CD that isn’t Dead/Phish/etc.  But, rather a new, contemporary release.  Force myself to spend some time with this stuff and get myself off shuffle a little bit.  I’ll still use my iPod/iPhone for impulse listening, as well as family car rides, etc.  This is more for my solo listening and when I am particularly in the mood for the Dead, etc.

Here’s the first batch, covering 20 years from ‘71 to ‘91 — It should be relatively obvious that this isn’t systematic at all.  I just reached into the box and grabbed a handful of shows:

  • 04/05/1971
  • 02/22/1973
  • 06/18/1974
  • 06/17/1975
  • 11/17/1978a (Loyola Rambler Room)
  • 04/21/1984
  • 06/30/1986
  • 04/22/1987
  • 07/17-19/1989
  • 06/20/1991

A nice little smorgasbord, I think.  More later.

–  edit:  if there is a theme to the above shows, maybe it’s ‘Second Set Surprise Splits of Bobby Songs’.  There’s the famous Sugar Mag from the Alpine Valley shows and the strange Throwing Stones from the 91 Pine Knob show.

Posted in tech. Tagged with , , , .

songbird

I’ve been messing around with a couple of iTunes alternatives, mostly MediaMonkey and Songbird(pictured below, click image for hi-res):

As you may be able to tell I’ve been messing around with a lightbox plugin, too.  Mainly for the family blog to build slideshows but it comes in handy here, too. Maybe handier, actually.

Songbird seems very promising.  It functions a lot like Firefox, if Firefox was a media player.  It has a lot of nice add-ons to customize both its functionality and its appearance.  It, unlike MediaMonkey, also has an iPhone/Pod remote control app, which comes in handy for me and makes it an even more appealing alternative to iTunes.  

I’m sure you might be scratching your head wondering why I’d be looking for an iTunes alternative and the answer is predominantly the ability to play flac, shn, or ogg lossless media files.  iTunes spurns these formats and as a result my live concert collection languishes unplayed.  I also upgraded the HDD in the PC recently to give me >1.5TB of storage.  So, I’m beginning to wonder if ripping my CDs in a lossless format may be finally possible.  

One thing holding me back right now is the fantastic XMod product from Creative Labs.  I’m using it to shuttle music from the main PC to the stereo in the basement.  I had to iron out some wifi conflicts with it but now that those are settled it is working very well.  It has two ’sounds-to-good-to-be-true’ features: X-Fi Crystalizer and X-Fi CMSS-3D.  The first is supposed to intelligently improve the sound quality of mp3s.  The literature says it does so by ‘intelligently’ enhancing the high and low end and increasing the dynamic range.  It sounds like a dynamic EQ, but it seems to work pretty well.  I’ve been happy with the sound quality and you can easily turn it off to hear the difference.  It doesn’t blow me away but it does make music sound better.  

The latter feature improves the ’surround’ soundstage of the stereo output for use while watching movies and recorded TV.  Our PC audio upstairs is connected to our main ent. center so I gave this a test-ride with a little bit of Finding Nemo and the effect was nice.  It tended to dampen the dialoque/center channel a bit (relative to the ‘ambient’ sounds).   I think with a little fussing, I had no time this eve, it can be set-up right to sound real nice.  This is a nice development since I bought RealDVD while it was being sold and have ripped a number of our regular DVD lineup to the PC for on-demand viewing.  

While cleaning out things a couple weekends ago, we came across our wedding DVDs.  These were long ago stashed away because none of our DVD players would play them.  I put them into our current DVD player and DVD-RW drive and both played them perfectly.  So they were archived with RealDVD, too.  We watched a little bit with Cara on that day, which was fun.  I had forgotten about the ‘I Feel Good > Sex Machine (I came here to party-breakdown) > Iko Iko’ that was the highlight of the dancing for the evening.

Posted in tech. Tagged with , , , .

ecosans

This is such a great idea. And like many good ideas, it is so simple. I think this alone may have contributed to me picking up a new printer (wifi) for the house. I’m pretty glad to tuck the printer away in our upstairs office away from the kiddos and where there is actually space. Configuring the printer was easy and it seems to be working very well. Lord knows, it will see its fair share of ecosans moving forward.

Posted in Uncategorized.

water rumblings

“Fifty years ago the hydrogen bond angle in water was 108° and you rarely heard of 
anyone with cancer. Today, it’s only 104° and, as a result, cancer is an epidemic!! By 
using our machine you can increase the bond angle to 114° and, unlike any other water, 
doctors can see an immediate change in the red blood cells under a microscope! It’s 
truly amazing!!” [http://www.chem1.com/CQ/johnellisbunk.html]

Is one of the funniest things I’ve read all day. Drink your pentawater!!

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big weekend

A very busy weekend in these parts. As part of the lineup we went to Binny’s yesterday and I was able to get my hands on some beers I’ve been itching to try.

Managed to track down the 120-minute IPA from Dogfish. I really enjoy the 90-minute and I’ve been very curious about the 120-minute. At 4x the price of the 90-minute I can’t say that it delivers from a value perspective.  This is a 12oz. beer that is meant to be shared.  It is a bit sweeter than I was expecting, which definitely swings it more to the balanced side of things considering the massive hoppiness.    But it is pretty hard to envision drinking an entire one of these much less several.

 

I was also able to get my hands on some of the Palo Santo that was featured, somewhat, in the New Yorker article about Dogfish Head.  When that article was written the brewery was in the process of acquiring this particular wood to use in the construction of barrels for the brewing of this beer.  I haven’t tried it yet.  Am very interested, though.  

I grabbed a Heineken-style mini-keg of Yellow Snow Pale Ale from Rogue for good measure. Mainly out of curiousity. I had a draw of it last evening and it was pretty tasty, though it has a bit of muskiness that is either intentional or perhaps a lack of freshness related to the keg? It isn’t entirely unpleasent but I’m not 100% sure that it is supposed to be there.

In other exciting news, I had the pleasure of giving Starbucks’ new instant coffee a try last evening. It was delicious. Last week, I’d read a Trib article which was a companion to another story about its impending release in Chicagoland. It isn’t my father’s instant, that’s for sure. I went through a few different instants while in grad school and all were unsatisfactory. This is far better. One of the additions to the coffee is what Starbucks is calling ‘microgrinds’ which are little insoluble grinds to improve mouthfeel. I’ve tried the Colombian (light roast) and the Dark Italian Roast. The Colombian suits my taste more but both were tasty. I don’t see this being a regular coffee for me, but in certain situations while at work these are going to be very tempting.

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kitchen news

We got some new stuff recently. At work I’ve been rockin’ the newest addition to the Chemex family:

It’s been a great addition to the day.   I am currently brewing some fresh roast from Blue Max (thx fulminator) and some of the Komodo Dragon from SBUX.  The ‘bucks blend is pretty nice.  It still has a touch of the burn that their roasts are so (in)famous for but it is a bit understated in this one and I think the Chemex helps.  The Blue Max bean is their Yellow Bourbon (Brazil) and it is very nice.  The Komodo is only back up for when my ziploc of morning grind runs out — i.e. I grind two pots-worth at home before I leave and put it in a ziploc.  

I am trying to get some fresh roast from a co-worker who roasts all of her own beans to try.  If I do, I’ll be sure to share the results.

In the home kitchen we took delivery today of a 14″ cast iron wok from Lodge.  I love my Lodge skillet and I’ve been shopping for a new wok for quite some time.  This bad boy is awesome:

Wok by Lodge

Wok by Lodge

There it is gettin’ all warmed up.  

For its first task, I decided to try a little Asian/Italian fusion: beef, tomatoes, asparagus, basil, garlic.  It worked out real nice.  I eliminated the cooking oil and replaced it with short bursts of Trader Joe’s Sir PAM-a-lot.  Seared the beef first, removed.  Stir-fried the ‘gus. Removed.  Added the garlic, shortly followed by the tomatoes and spices (sans basil).  A splash of sauvignon blanc then let simmer after adding the ‘gus back to the ‘upper rim’ of the wok, covered for 15 minutes.   Then upped the heat and re-added the meat to warm through.  Put the basil on just before plating.  Accompanied by a generous heap of Arborio rice cooked in a traditional (non-risotto) manner.  It was yummy.  

Here’s my mise (the basil got cut off, it is south of the garlic):

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the invention of air

The Invention of Air The Invention of Air by Steven Johnson

some quick thoughts….

rating: 3 of 5 stars
An easy to read and relatively short offering from SBJ. I didn’t enjoy it as much as The Ghost Map. He mentions Kuhn’s paradigm model of science too often for me to not discount it. While it is unclear if SBJ really believes it, he often prefaces mentioning it as ‘if Kuhn’s model is to be believed’ or some such wording, the fact that it is constantly brought up bothered me. Kuhn’s model makes great buzzwords and Psych 101 lessons but I don’t believe it at all. Anyone who really buys into it should read Pais’ biography of Einstein. Quantum Mechanics is often taught to Chemists and Physicists as this great leap forward and it is used emblematically by the Kuhn-crowd. But reading Pais one is put in the seats of the physicists on both sides of the supposed paradigm and it becomes clear that there was no great ‘leap’ to speak of. It’s all been created post facto by historians. Close readings of the scientific literature of the age bears this out. What we’ve always been taught as a great ’step’ is polished and sanded down. That’s when I stopped believing in Kuhn’s model for scientific progress.

View all my reviews.  

more along thes lines here. (Science After Sunclipse)

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programming note

Quick note: No Reservations in Chicago on Travel Channel tonite. Word is that windy city folks teach Tony a thing or two about Hot Dogs. 8 CST.

Posted in Food/Drink. Tagged with .