Still going after all these years.
Esta asks about the asterisks showing up on my blogroll. I finally got the active blogroll religion with Blogrolling.com. The asterisks mean that the Blogrolling.com server shows that blog as being updated in the last 24 hours. I think as long as you ping Weblogs.com, Blogrolling picks it up.
I’m thinking about doing a complete site redesign, but I’m too lazy to do it right, so you might see things change in drips and drabs over the next month or so.
…contrary to what my slack posting over the last couple of days might indicate. Twelve-hour recording sessions are no fun, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. I won’t know how it all went until they do the post production and I get a chance to listen to the final product, but from the in progress recordings we heard it sounded good.
The engineer used an interesting recording technique: analog mics into a D to A converter, then fed simultaneously to a DAT and a CD recorder. The DAT never has to be rewound; you just have to cue up the CD if you want to hear something after you recorded it. I say “interesting” but for all I know it’s completely standard practice. The last time I recorded (with the E52s) it was being fed directly to a PC and mixed on a Mac; the time before that (with the Cheeselords) it was going to a portable MiniDisc recorder.
The best Elvis box set around is now (mostly) online at the iTunes Music Store. That would be Elvis Presley: The King of Rock‘n’Roll: The Complete 1950s Masters. It’s only available by the song, but there are some great tunes on that set that are only available there, as far as I know, such as a full disc of a live performance from the 50s.
I also have to confess that I have in the past bought two albums by Dread Zeppelin, the short-lived reggae Led Zep cover band fronted by an Elvis impersonator, whose octave-lower version of Robert Plant sounds uncannily like the real thing. Dread Zeppelin’s first album, including their Elvis-meets-Zep “Heartbreaker (at the End of Lonely Street), is available at the iTunes store.
And, to rectify my embarrassing admission of lack of taste, let me point out that eMusic has lots of early Sonic Youth rarities, including b-sides and live performances.
Got to give thanks to Lisa, who has been very forgiving about my recording commitments this weekend. Our first session last night went until 1 and I got home after 1:30, but today is a day off. We are recording the commissioned works that both the full Chorale and the chamber group have done over the past few years, many by local composer Bern Herbolsheimer, who is also effectively co-producing the sessions. Fun, though if Sunday has as many cars and other random noises as last night did it’ll be a long day. (There’s nothing more frustrating than doing vocally perfect take after take only to hear “Redo! Car!”)
At least Lisa can relax knowing she’ll have the new Harry Potter book to fill her day tomorrow. It arrived this morning in a custom package from Amazon, labeled “Carrier: Please deliver on June 21. Do not under any circumstances deliver before June 21!”
If you’re not into discovering mind shattering classical recordings you may want to skip this post.
Okay, now that everyone but my family has stopped reading: A few weeks ago I did something unusual—I bought a few CDs. Since the advent of online music purchases the physical article has seemed unnecessary, but what the hey, I was waiting for the Sears across the street to replace Lisa’s tires and I had nothing better to do. I listened to the Big Star disc and liked it a lot, but forgot about one of the others until yesterday, when I played it—and got crazy excited.
On the surface the disc is nothing special: an unfamiliar label budget two-disc set called “Music of the Gothic Era.” When I looked at the liner notes, though, I started realizing I had hit gold. The conductor, David Munrow, had revolutionized early music in the late 60s and the 70s by hiring top notch musicians, particularly vocalists, who were able to bring top performance quality to these ancient (in some cases 800 year old) works and make them sound like music to modern ears. And the group? Well, I had never heard of the Early Music Consort of London, but I had heard of some of the vocalists, among whom were David James, Rogers Covey-Crump, Paul Elliott, and John Potter. These are guys who were also in a little group called the Hilliard Ensemble—still one of the superstar groups of early music for their vocal performances which are so astounding they’re almost superhuman. And this recording has them before the Hilliard Ensemble took off, covering some of the same material for which the Hilliard Ensemble later became famous, under a director who had very different ideas about performance.
Very different. If this were a Hilliard Ensemble disc, it would probably have been recorded only with voices in accordance with modern understanding of medieval performance practices. Instead, in the pieces attributed to Léonin (the legendary founder of the Notre Dame school of sacred music, in which for the first time in documented history chant was augmented with harmony), the voices are accompanied by bells. In some of the anonymous fourteenth century motets (including a recording of “Alle, psallite cum luya,” which I sang as a Christmas processional—and sometime drinking song—with the Virginia Glee Club), a shawm and tabor are added. Other pieces have lute, fiddle, portative organ, and slide trumpet. But regardless of the amount of extra baggage added, the sound of the voices is still thrilling, bringing this ancient music alive.
Music of the Gothic Era stays my “Current Listening” today as I work my way through Disc 2. It’s definitely recommended—a two-disc overview of some of the most unusual and rewarding vocal music around.
Okay, this one is entirely my fault for partitioning a 30GB hard drive two and a half years ago, and letting it get to the point that the boot partition has less than 250 MB free and the other has less than 60.
But why is it that some apps are so VM hungry that they can actually chew up almost 200 MB of free disk space in a session? It’s probably me. I am in the habit of leaving NetNewsWire open for days at a time, and I think the app archives all the RSS bits that it receives so it knows whether you’ve read them or not. Last night I couldn’t print from Chimera. I then started quitting apps, thinking I might need to reboot, and got told by iTunes that it couldn’t save my library file because I was out of disk space. I cursed, quit NNW and Mail, and logged out and back in.
When I restarted iTunes my library was fine. But NNW was another story—all my subscriptions were lost and so were my weblog settings.
I’m not sure about the moral of the story: don’t bother partitioning your hard drive? Don’t leave NNW running for days? Or maybe, don’t build up an MP3 collection that’s almost 14 GB on a 30 GB hard drive.
It’s been a while since I’ve done a QTN (Quick Tasting Note), but this Flemish ale drove me to it. The ale is a golden Belgian, 9% ABV (alcohol by volume), and pours with a thick creamy head that stays tall for at least ten minutes. Nose is, true to the name, wild, with hints of clove and peach. Taste is astonishing: sweet up front with more spice and fruit flavor, great bready yeast coming through, and a slightly bitter finish from the hops. Fabulous late spring or early summer beer, probably too heavy for a really hot day but refreshing on a mid-June cloudy 60° Seattle day.
I missed the blog meetup last night; wish I could have been there. But I’m going to be tied up Friday night and all day Sunday with a recording project with the Cascadian Singers, and I need all the time at home this week I can get.
I was surprised to see traffic from Jenny the Shifted Librarian this morning. She follows up my thoughts about the iTunes Music Store and eMusic, noting,
I’m fascinated that this surge of supply to meet the pent-up demand for quality, online music downloads is resulting in lists of “finds.” By that, I mean posts by people who can’t believe they found a place to legally download their favorite bands’ music. We’re posting lists that express our disbelief, and those posts are what I’d like to aggregate.
This could be huge—a searchable list of artists that is annotated with the online stores that carry their music. I wonder whether such a project would cause the hoary cry of “no deep linking” to rear its ugly head. Probably not, I think, as long as the download sites still make money. But IANAL.
And in the spirit of Jenny’s post about stuff she’s found at Rhapsody, here are some of my other finds from eMusic and the iTunes Store:
Found on Blogdex: In this month’s Popular Science, Theodore Gray (of Mathematica fame) gives the recipe for liquid nitrogen ice cream. Damn. Wish I had thought of that when I was freezing bananas in the lab after hours to amuse and impress friends. (Disclaimer: I only did that once, and it was a bitch to clean up. Fellow smart-ass physics undergrads, you’ll try it once and then curse me out.)
A follow up to my thoughts about the acceptability of inserting arbitrary markup into RSS feeds to measure usage. Some RSS “readers” just display headlines (such as the Radio and Manila RSS Box), meaning that the tracking code would have to be in the title element of the RSS to measure exposure successfully.
But Mark Pilgrim’s experiment last week has awakened the authoring community to the danger of arbitrary markup in RSS, and it appears the community has quickly decided that titles aren’t for markup.
Why did we go down this thought road in the first place? So we could track page views of RSS content. Why? To get clickthroughs (total clicks divided by total pageviews, for each RSS exposure). But we can’t get clickthroughs that way.
How about this: the most effective way to measure RSS usage is to put a tracking URL in your RSS feed, one that’s distinct from the one you expose through your navigation. This should be trivial with a good content management system (which all blogging engines are), and you needn’t even make the tracking URL hop through a redirect. On the landing page you can count unique users and all that fun stuff, and if the RSS link has been posted to other pages for discussion and people click through there you’ll be able to track the spread by watching referrers.
It can’t be that bad a system—after all CNet uses it. All links in their feeds include the parameters “part=rss&tag=feed,” and some even are directed to a special host, rss.com.com (oddly, the home page for this redirects to download.com).
In short, we don’t get reach and we don’t get clickthrough rates. But we get something that can empirically measure the effectiveness of RSS against other content promotion technologies.
A quick sweep of the blogosphere and a ton of interesting stuff this morning:
A confession: I wasn’t an online music buyer until Apple’s iTunes Music Store came along. Too many of the stores seemed to offer music in proprietary formats which only proprietary clients could play. All seemed to have a crawlingly limited selection.
Of course, I realized after a week or so happily downloading stuff from the ’Store, the same is true of Apple’s offering. Proprietary format? Close—AAC appears to be supported by a very small constellation of players (fortunately including both iTunes and the iPod). And limited selection? Well, no Radiohead, Sigur Ros, or Beatles, and (at least for now) no indie labels. But, I decided, I was still having a good time with the service.
But what to do about all the indie music? As a loyal KEXP listener, I yearned for something beyond the major labels. Then Scott Rosenberg wrote about eMusic: “If your musical taste runs to obscurities anyway, this is one of the best bargains on the Net.” Encouraged, I gave it a try. And Scott was right: eMusic rocks. MP3 downloads, lots of indie labels, and (bonus) enormous swaths of the Fantasy back catalog, including Prestige and Riverside recordings (think Monk, 50s era Miles and Trane, and hundreds of other key jazz records). Over the last week (during my trial membership) I’ve downloaded the Pernice Brothers, Yo La Tengo, Kristin Hersh, Daniel Lanois’ latest (oh well, always at least one clinker), an EP of My Morning Jacket, and some oddities to round out old reconstructed mix tapes, like Peter Murphy. Plus the cover of “You and Your Sister” by This Mortal Coil with Kim and Kelley Deal on vocals.
So that unanticipated side effect? All of a sudden, after Apple’s breakthrough, buying music on line seems like the most natural thing in the world—regardless of who’s selling. I wouldn’t be surprised if eMusic and other online stores get a big lift over the next few months.
Of course, leisure is relative. Sometimes it means discovering a new restaurant. Sometimes it involves digging rocks into a slope and planting rudbeckia. Sometimes it involves a cookout with friends, brined chicken in a lime, fish sauce, mint, and hot pepper marinade sauce. Sometimes it even involves a beer festival. This weekend was all of the above.
The gardening is almost self explanatory—it spanned Friday night through Sunday afternoon, with breaks for the other activities. Friday night we went to Restaurant Zoë, which rocked our worlds. Lisa had king salmon with a blood orange sauce over lentils and fennel. I had veal cheeks with prosciutto. We shared a lamb carpaccio that was to die for.
Saturday—after gardening, and putting teak oil on our new patio furniture—we headed over with Ed and Gina to the Northwest Brew Fest. Lots of fun, as it was two summers ago (this year I was smart enough to wear sunscreen). There was a keg toss this year again, and I got photos with the Nokia, though none of them came out super well.
Sunday’s cookout was a lot of fun. In addition to the chicken, which was brined all day and cooked bone in on the grill before tossing it in the marinade sauce, I grilled some asparagus on the top rack and tossed it in olive oil, salt, pepper, and lemon juice. It was really nice just to sit back and enjoy the evening.