The Musical Albatross
Posted on | August 19, 2008 at 6:56 am | 3 Comments
Pet Peeve of the Day: Too much good music to listen to.
Boo hoo! Cry for me! Cry for the whiny little baby! I have too much music! I’m not buying very many CDs anymore – heck, I’ve only bought nine in 2008 so far, and five of those were Kayak CDs. No, the problem is eMusic. When they revamped their pricing plans awhile ago, I got grandfathered into a plan that allows me to download 90 tracks a month, for which I pay $19.99 per month. That’s a little over 22 cents a track. You can’t beat that. The best plan they have these days is 75 downloads for $19.99, or about 27 cents a track.
But really, the only time I have to listen to music these days is the commute to and from work. At home, I’m too busy watching TV, watching DVDs, playing videogames, and stuff like that (not to mention writing blog entries) to listen to music. I could listen at work, but I have to be in right frame of mind for that, which I haven’t been lately. So the upshot is that pretty much all the music listening I do lately is just to keep up with my monthly eMusic downloads. Even so, I’m a month or two behind on those.
When I’m only listening to new music, and frequently only listening to an album once, it really changes the music listening experience that I’ve grown used to over the years. I’m unable to form attachments to albums like I used to. I rarely just play something because I want to hear it again, even though there are lots of albums I’ve downloaded that I really want to hear again because I know from first listen that I’ll bond with them.
I’ve thought about getting rid of my eMusic subscription, but then I wouldn’t be listening to any new music at all. And I really, really like to keep up with new stuff. It’s probably possible to downgrade my subscription, but I don’t want to lose this great deal I have. I’ve got close to 250 albums in my “Save for Later” lists, so I’ll probably never run out of stuff to download. eMusic is doing pretty good lately with acquiring new stuff, so my monthly downloads frequently don’t even dip into albums released before the current month. Those “save” lists aren’t shrinking.
I do sometimes ending up downloading albums based on friends’ recommendations or short song samples, that I end up not caring for. But surprisingly, around 75% of the albums I download end up on my “would like to listen to again” list. So that’s a pretty good ratio. Again, that makes it hard to give up or downgrade the subscription.
I guess the solution is I just need to force myself to listen more often. I do also listen while I’m jogging, though I don’t jog as much as I used to. And when I do, I prefer listening to random fast-paced songs from my entire iTunes library rather than to fixed albums. Although I sometimes will do that if I’m behind in my new music listening. And I should learn to turn on the music when I’m doing household chores or composing blog entries or whatever, but I find in my old age that any sort of divided concentration can be a bad thing and will make tasks take longer than they should. Time is at a premium!
Ah… the perils of the 21st Century… too much information to process… shutting down…
Latre.
Poignant Search Term Of The Day That Led To This Blog: “people who don’t believe in god are lost?”. (I like how the person isn’t quite sure…)
The Price Of Zoom
Posted on | August 18, 2008 at 7:07 am | 1 Comment
Pet Peeve of the Day: Bureaucracy.
This is a followup to my earlier post(s) about getting a Hybrid HOV Exemption – a permit that lets me drive my Prius in the HOV (High Occupancy Vehicle) lanes in Colorado during rush hour even though there is no one else in the car. Woo hoo! I finally finished the necessary steps to make this a reality! It was a bit of a chore though. I don’t think the State of Colorado has really got their act together on this thing yet, though they seem to be trying. I think it caught a lot of government people off guard and now they’re scrambling to handle it. Let me tell my tale, so that others may benefit from my experience.
You may recall that when we last left this topic, I had been granted the permit but would not get the decal until I signed up for and received an ExpressToll transponder. This was needed because the HOV lanes on I-25 are also HOT (High Occupancy Toll) lanes during rush hour and require a transponder to enter. I argued over the phone with a CDOT (Colorado Dept of Transportation) employee that I shouldn’t have to get that, since I was only going to use the permit for Santa Fe Drive and not I-25, which I rarely if ever use during rush hour. I balked about giving them my credit card info and paying the $35 that one must keep in the ExpressToll transponder account. My arguing did no good – if I wanted the decal, I had to get the transponder.
Okay. Fine. I went to the website and tried to sign up for the transponder. It gave me an error saying it was unable to create the account and to call customer service. I called customer service but got a busy signal. Fine. I decided to try again later in a few days. The very next day, I arrived home and checked my mail, and lo & behold someone had sent me a transponder. The documentation had an account number on it. I went to the website and logged onto that account, and it had all my information already (except my payment/credit card info). I guess that’s why it couldn’t create the account the day before – it was already there. So I entered my cc info and said they could extract that $35 from it. Then I patiently waited for them to send me the actual HOV Exemption decal to put on my car.
Weeks passed. I called customer service and actually got through to someone. Although that someone didn’t know what to do. The problem is that this whole thing is basically being administered by two different authorities: CDOT and the E-470/ExpressToll authority. And they don’t seem to talk to each other very well. The ExpressToll person told me that I should just wait and see if the decal shows up, and to call back later if it didn’t. Well, another week or so went by and there was no decal. So I called back. The person I got that time knew a little bit more about it and she told me I needed to call CDOT and talk to the person I originally talked to about the whole transponder issue.
So I called the person at CDOT and explained what was going on. She verified that I had the permit and said she would e-mail my name over to ExpressToll to check and make sure I had the transponder account setup. If that came back positive, she would send out the decal the next day. While I had her on the line, I asked how come I had gotten a transponder in the mail (and a pre-configured account for it) when I didn’t even sign up for one. She said they had so many people who were granted the permits and didn’t already have transponders and didn’t understand the whole transponder thing, that they decided to just send the transponders out without waiting for people to sign up for them on their own. Nice of them to tell us that. And so why didn’t they just send out the decals at the same time? I guess they had to make sure that the transponder account would have money in it. But obviously there was nothing in the ExpressToll system to notify CDOT once of these Hybrid HOV cars had their account finalized, even though the ExpressToll system definitely knows that the account has a Hybrid HOV exemption (the ExpressToll CSR I talked to said I was identified in the system as such).
The other thing she told me is that they had so many people who signed up for these that if anyone fails to setup their transponder account in a timely manner, they cancel the permit and award it to the next person on the waiting list. Or the next person in the exemption lottery or whatever. (There’s a finite number of permits they’re authorizing – I think it’s 2000.) Again, nice of them to tell us this. Since communication between the two departments isn’t too great, then if I had not taken matters into my own hands and kept pestering people, I would have lost my permit without even knowing it.
So, everything must have checked out okay because a few days later I finally received the decal in the mail. But here’s where it gets dumb again. The decal is a huge round red one, and the sticky part is on the back, not on the printed side like the usual window decals. The placement instructions said to put the decal on the driver’s side windshield, side mirror, or front bumper. What? The mirror and front bumper are pretty curved and I’m not sure it would stick real well. Plus it would simultaneously look too weird and be somewhat invisible, since both the sticker and my car color are reddish. So that left me with the windshield, but of course I had to put it on the outside. (Note that I also had to attach the transponder, which goes on the inside of the windshield near the rear view mirror. Yeah, I know I could’ve left it off, but what if I really did want to use I-25 during rush hour? Or take E-470 somewhere?)
So now I have this big old sticker on the outside of the window on the driver’s side, right above the emissions exception sticker, which is on the inside. It was raining today, which made me worry about the hand-written decal number on the sticker washing off. (I’ve photoshopped out the decal number in the photo, because I’m über paranoid about things like that, so that’s why it looks a little empty.) I also worried about the windshield wiper gradually peeling back the sticker, since it does make audible contact. I didn’t think about that when I put the sticker there.
So… how does it work? Is it worth it? I tried it out Friday when I drove on Santa Fe from work to my dad’s nursing home during rush hour. It was great. I think it shaved 5-10 minutes off my drive. However, I kept waiting for a cop to show up and pull me over and make me prove to him that I could legitimately use that lane. Which would be awkward and would negate the time savings. But there weren’t any cops out there Friday. One problem I did not anticipate is my own feelings of guilt and insecurity. When speeding down that lane passing everyone, I was afraid all the people stuck in the slow right lanes would be looking at me, thinking I was in that lane illegally, and going “What an asshole!” In fact, I know they are doing that because I used to be that person, cussing out every car I saw driving in that lane in rush hour with only one passenger in it. I know I shouldn’t care what other people think about me, but that’s really going to bug me anyway. Although in some ways, it’s nice to be the asshole for once. I do hope that CDOT can get the word out about this so that I don’t have to feel so weird about it. But I think CDOT has its hands full right now.
But yeah… it was worth it.
Latre.
Ad It Up
Posted on | August 17, 2008 at 6:29 pm | 1 Comment
Movie Review Sunday!
Okay, I haven’t watched any movies this week. However, I did finally finish watching the first season of Mad Men, which I had recorded on my DVR since last summer, and the three episodes shown so far for this second season. I had actually watched the first episode last summer (twice), so I knew I wanted to keep it around to watch the whole thing. But with so much else to watch, I never caught up with it. Then, a few months ago, I finally watched the second and third episodes and liked them. But again, I just couldn’t get beyond that. Finally, over the last week or so, I did some marathon sessions and watched them all pretty much straight through. And I’m glad I did.
Yeah, there’s a lot of hype about the show, what with the Emmy nominations and all. And yeah, it’s wildly entertaining. It’s kind of like Sex And The City if everyone smoked more and didn’t wear seatbelts. It’s a little hard for me to believe that this is a representative slice of the era, as I don’t remember a lot of this at all. Granted I was just being born at the time the show is originally set in, but I have a really good memory. Yeah, my dad smoked and “brought home the bacon” and wasn’t much involved with the kid-raising (aside from being the disciplinarian), but I’m not sure how much drinking he did at the office and I kinda doubt he was fooling around with the secretaries. But I haven’t asked him. Yeah, my mom was the homemaker and devoted her life to us kids, but she didn’t go ride horses on the weekend.
The coolest thing about Mad Men is that one of the main characters has the same first name as me. That’s very rare in TV. The other retro-set show of the summer, CBS’ Swingtown (which I’m also enjoying a lot), also has a main character with that same first name. Bonus! I guess my name used to be more popular than it is now. Actually, it’s pretty interesting contrasting the two shows, one set in the 60s and one in the 70s, for how much had changed between the two eras and how much had stayed the same. The 60s shown in Mad Men (the very early 60s) seemed to have more glamour, but the 70s as shown in Swingtown were more glamorous, if you know what I mean. Wait… I don’t think even I know what I mean. But both shows feature the same sort of stereotyped gender roles that everyone thinks about when remembering those eras.
Like Don Draper, the conflicted He-Man at the center of Mad Men, I yearn for those caveman days of yore when a man was a man and a woman was a woman, and little things like morals didn’t get in the way of doing what I want. No I don’t really think that, but I thought I’d say that anyway. At any rate, it’s fun watching it all play out and wondering at just what point it became not okay to keep whiskey in your desk drawer.
So far, I have a sense that the second season of Mad Men has jumped the shark just a tiny bit, but I’ll wait to reserve judgment. Could be just a slight sophomore slump.
Latre.
Pet Peeve of the Day: I’ve tried a couple of different captcha plugins to my WordPress installation today to combat the frequent onslaught of spam, but none of them seemed to work right. If anyone has any they would like to recommend, please let me know! Thanks. The ones I’ve tried so far are myCaptcha and yacaptcha.
Poignant Search Term Of The Day That Led To This Blog: “sometimes i think that becoming a hermit would be a good idea.”.
Change Of Climate
Posted on | August 16, 2008 at 7:39 pm | 1 Comment
Pet Peeve of the Day: Having to turn the furnace on in August. I got up this morning and it was like 65° in the house, so I turned on the furnace to get it up to a toasty 69 or so. It’s been raining mostly non-stop for the past few days and has been getting down into the low 50s outside. But this is the first time I can recall when I actually had to run the furnace in the middle of August, which is usually like our second hottest month. Heck, most of September is usually A/C weather. It’s not like I mind the rain and all – we really needed it. And it’s been fairly light so I don’t think there’s been much flooding. But the cold? That’s just weird. I believe God is punishing Colorado for holding the DNC here. I’ve heard conservative bloggers are speculating that all sorts of weird weather things are going to interrupt the convention, and especially Obama’s acceptance speech. Focus on the Family is urging people to vote for a biblical deluge. So obviously this weekend’s weather is all just a prelude. God will keep St Paul warm for the Republican convention.
I mentioned last night in yesterday’s entry that I would probably stay up after that and write today’s entry. I did do that, but it turned out to be such a long, detailed entry that I think I’ll save it for when more people are “tuning in”. No one reads blogs on Saturday. So this is all you get for today, you few brave souls with nothing better to do. I will try to be more entertaining when the sun is shining.
Latre.
Almost Got Me
Posted on | August 15, 2008 at 11:26 pm | 2 Comments
Pet Peeve of the Day: Server malfunctions.
Yesterday, the streak came very close to ending. “The streak”, of course, refers to the number of consecutive days of blog posting. I’ve been doing it every day since 10/30/07, which by my reckoning makes this the 291st daily post in a row. Originally, I was in a race with Steve, who also started consecutive posting on the same day, to see who would skip a day first. I won that one because Steve visited Europe, which is notoriously backwards technology-wise. I’m surprised they even have Internet access there at all across the sea.
But I digress. Last night, it almost came to an end. If I had followed by usual blogging pattern, the streak would be toast. As anyone who tried to view the site today (outside of the RSS feed) realized, the website was inaccessible for most of the day. It stopped working about 8pm MDT on the 14th and didn’t come back until around 3pm on the 15th. Lately, I’ve been posting my entries near the end of the day, between 10pm and midnight. But yesterday, I posted it around 7pm. That was because I had written most of the entry the night before, even before the entry for that day. That was very lucky. When I went to bed last night, I noticed that the site wasn’t working – I was getting a 403 error: “Forbidden Access”. It didn’t concern me much at the time, largely because I had already posted the entry, but also because this kind of thing happens from time to time and then the site is back up in few minutes. I went to bed feeling secure that it would be up again in the morning.
So the first thing I did when I got up this morning was check the website. Usually I would go running first thing in the morning, but it was raining. And it still was giving the same error. I checked the forum and support sections on my webhost’s website and there was nothing there about an outage. I started to get worried and wondered if I’d be able to post an entry today. I called up their support line and the first tier person said she didn’t know what was going on and would have to bump it up to the second tier. It didn’t sound like anyone else was having a problem. They opened a ticket. I kept checking the site throughout the day and kept getting the same error. I called support again to see if there was any new info, and there wasn’t. I was also worried that this was a serious problem and that I might lose the blog data and WordPress setup from the site if they didn’t have proper backups. Although luckily I did a few database backups during the weekend for the WordPress upgrade, so at least I wouldn’t have lost much. And the recent posts were still available in the RSS feed, so I saved those off. Just as I was starting to get really worried, the error message in the browser changed. And then it changed again. As a software engineer in real life, I know that’s a good sign. It at least means that someone is trying something. I was very relived when the site came back to life around mid-afternoon.
This was definitely the longest outage I’ve experienced with this webhost (PowWeb), and I’ve been with them for a couple of years at least. I know they must be a pretty big outfit these days, since they obviously outsourced their support help desk overseas. But it sure took them a long time to fix the problem. All I know is that it was some kind of issue with the server. Was I the only one on that server? I don’t know. I’ve been pretty happy with their webhosting services and support, so I’ll give them a pass on this one.
Sue says that Steve and I are the iron men of blogging. But really, all it takes is a lack of a life. I’m not sure what my intention of keeping up the streak is. I have a vague notion that I’m going to do a year of daily posts and take a breather on 10/30/08. I know I definitely didn’t want to sign up for Blog365 because I didn’t want the pressure. And yet I put all this pressure on myself anyway. It’s a really strange thing, because the daily posting regimen is simultaneously one of the most stressful things in my life and one of the most enjoyable and fulfilling. Look back at this post from a month into an earlier try at a daily posting streak, where I talk about what it’s like to post daily and some of the tricks I use. Most of that still applies. It still usually takes a half-hour to an hour and a half a day to do these things, although I’ve learned to do some shorter entries in less time. Strangely, it seems like editing and proofreading an entry takes longer than actually writing one, most of the time.
Again… why do I do it? As I state in that entry, I’m afraid that if I miss even one day that I’m going to go back to my extremely irregular posting schedule, even potentially taking whole weeks off. At this point, it’s such a part of my daily routine that I can’t imagine not doing it. I have to give props to my wonderful girlfriend for not getting freaked out when I concentrate on getting an entry done when I should be paying attention to her. It’s a strange compulsion, but I feel it’s something I have to do in order for my life to have some kind of meaning. I totally stress out about it, yet I’m always really glad I took the time to do it and I like seeing the result. It’s really tied in with my sense of pride and my sense of self-worth. I know no one would think any less of me if I skipped some days, yet I feel I’d be letting someone down if I didn’t do it. Or maybe just letting myself down.
One of the morals of this story is that I need to get back to posting in the morning instead of at night. When I do that, I still write the entries at night, I just don’t post them until the morning. One of the things I don’t like about that is it doesn’t seem as fresh. I somehow prefer writing about things that happened to me that day rather than the day before. But I guess that’s better than potentially not posting anything at all due to a late night webhost glitch or a PC malfunction or family emergency or anything at all spontaneous. So one of these nights I’ll have to write two entries and post one at night and the next one the next morning. I don’t like having such a short time between postings, because then I think the first one gets ignored or short-shrifted by my vast legion of loyal readers. Poor little orphan blog post! But that’s less of a problem on weekends, since readership drops off a lot on Saturday and Sunday. That’s why I usually make those post “less essential”. Yes, I know that nothing I write is essential, just please leave me with my sorry delusions.
Okay, time to wrap this one up. There’s more I could say – like my tips for prolific blogging, but it’s getting late, and who knows what could happen. I need to save some material for a dry day anyway.
Although maybe I’ll stay up awhile longer and write tomorrow’s entry. Heck, I already know what it’s going to be about and have already taken the picture for it…
Latre.
An Incomplete Guide To Kayaking: Part 7
Posted on | August 14, 2008 at 7:00 pm | 2 Comments
The wait is over! It’s a been a such a long, long time since the last one and I know you’ve missed these something fierce! This is a continuation of my series of blog entries on the albums of the Dutch progressive rock band Kayak. To see the previous entries, do a blog search (that little box on the top right) for the word “kayaking”.
I’m sure that one of the problems people are having with these entries is that I don’t supply any song samples or anything, so it’s hard to get a feeling about the music from my meager, lame, repetitive descriptions. I’ve always had trouble writing about music, unlike some people I know. So with this entry, I’m going to rectify things a bit. I’ve put the first song from today’s album as the first song on my brand-spanking new muxtape. I wish I could fill the mux with Kayak songs, but it appears to be against the muxtape rules to use the same artist for more than one song. So the theme of the mux is “My 80s” and it features some of my favorite bands/songs from that spectacular, indelible era. My apologies to People Of The Future who stumbled onto this blog entry long after the mux has changed. You must get your Kayak tuneage from elsewhere.
Phase 3 (continued): Pop Prog (1978-1981)
Merlin
Kayak’s eighth album Merlin featured the same lineup as the previous two albums, Phantom Of The Night and Periscope Life. I think. More or less. But this time, instead of going for the radio-friendly pop sound of those two albums, they decided to try an experiment hearkening back to their roots: a slight return to Prog. Side 1 of the album (yes, this came out before the CD Age, barely) was a five song mini-rock opera about the Arthurian legend, hence the album title. Side 2 consists of five unrelated songs that are in more of a pop vein. I suppose its purpose is to show the two sides of Kayak in one album, though the pop side is not very representative of their better pop stuff. Note the awful cover art.
(In what has to be one of the weirdest rock music moves ever, the reformed “Phase 4″ Kayak redid the Merlin opera for the 2003 album Merlin, Bard Of The Unseen. They re-recorded the five songs from the original album, and added nine new songs to the cycle for a total of fourteen. But we’ll get to that later. Note: I prefer these original versions of the five songs from this album.)
The Merlin rock opera starts out with the title track. This may be my favorite Kayak song. It encapsulates everything I like about them in one tasty morsel. It’s longer than I like songs to be, but there’s a lot that happens in its seven minutes. There’s the usual loud/soft, slow/fast dynamics – the song starts off slow and sparse and then explodes. Johan Slager’s rapturous guitar tone is all over the place. Edward Reekers really comes into his own as a vocalist, almost making me forget about Max Werner. I think in some ways the prog material fits Reekers better than the pop stuff does – probably because of that warbly, tremelo-y voice he has.
The lyrics are all historical/mythological/fantasy epic, as expected:
Though my face is a mask yet I know what’s my task
I’ll be guardian of Arthur, the regent, the future king
The fire of wisdom reveals me everything
The mirror flashed, a vision passed
As I heard voices sing…
But what really hits me over the head is the instrumental section and the riffs therein. The first time it appears is just before the 2 minute mark with a piano riff. And then when the lead guitar comes in: nirvana! I love that solo more than my own mama. The same riff is repeated later in the song by wordless vocals instead of guitar – a nice touch. The instrumental section has got a real “MacArthur’s Park” vibe to it (in a good way). Ironic… get it… “MacArthur’s Park”. (Remember: You can hear this great song on my muxtape.)
The second song in the opera cycle is “Tintagel”, a fairly boring ballad. The third song is a rocker, “The Sword In The Stone”, with some medieval sounding synth-flutes. I like it. Song number four is a short rocker, “The King’s Enchanter”. More synth-flutes. Good stuff. The concluding song of the opera is “Niniane (Lady Of The Lake)”. It’s very… ummm… operatic. Symphonic. And a bit bombastic. A good wrap-up to the opera, and it has some nice melodies. It’s bit too long and slow for me, but the Slager solo redeems it somewhat.
The song order for the second side of the album as listed on the Kayak website is different from what’s on my CD of the album, so I’ll go by what I’m used to. I don’t think I ever owned the vinyl of Merlin.
Side 2, the “pop” side, starts off with “Seagull”, which I think was the single. It sounds very “American” to my ears, especially the guitars. Mid-tempo with a big chorus. Almost John Denver-y or something. Catchy but not really essential. “Boogie Heart” is well… a boogie number. Fairly atypical for Kayak and not quite successful, though the organ solo is a nice touch and the simplistic melody is not without its charms. The weird compressed background vocals help to generate interest too. “Now That We’ve Come This Far” is a ballad in the typical Kayak vein. Sounds like something from one of the earlier albums. Nice chorus melody. “Can’t Afford To Lose” is a rocker. The intro reminds me a bit of the disco-fied “Want You To Be Mine” from Starlight Dancer. This is my favorite of the Side 2 songs, even though Reekers sounds like he’s straining a bit on the chorus. The album closer is “Love’s Aglow”, a six minute ballad that’s actually quite pleasant and not too plodding. Lots of instrumental bits in this one. No real chorus. Nice use of acoustic rhythm guitar to drive the later half of the song. Catchy synth riff, lovely background vocals. I like the way it just fades out.
So there you have it. Merlin is kind of a mixed bag, even a failed experiment in some ways, but it’s a worthy addition to the Kayak canon. The first song makes the whole thing worthwhile for me. I think my problem with Side 2 in general is not enough lead Johan Slager guitar. Gimme my Slager! Unfortunately, this was to be the last (real/studio) album that Slager played on. In fact, this is the last studio album before the band reformed in the 21st century. This third phase of the band does have a coda, which I’ll be getting to in the next installment.
Favorite Songs: “Merlin”, “The Sword In The Stone”, “The King’s Enchanter”, “Can’t Afford To Lose”, “Love’s Aglow”.
Latre.
Worrisome Search Term Of The Day That Led To This Blog: “steven colbert bodyguard”.