octavius.org

Last Saturday Susannah and I spent the afternoon and most of the evening in DC with some friends of ours.  We went to the National Zoo, then walked into Adams Morgan to have some dinner and hang out some more.  On our way in, we decided we did not want to drive the whole way, so we parked at my office building and took the metro into the city.  From the moment we stepped on the train we were surrounded by old and fat white people wearing red, white, and blue clothing.  Why, you might ask?  Because Saturday was the day that everyone's favorite fucktard, Glenn Beck, held his rally on the mall.  Everywhere we went, and I mean everywhere, we saw remnants of this "event".

But I don't want this post to be about the absurdity of wearing a tri-corner hat in public.  After dinner, as we wandered up and down 18th Street, we came across a used record (as in the vinyl kind) called Crooked Beat Records. The store is pretty much what you would expect: it's in the basement of what was once a row house, and is full of all sorts of vintage music stuff.  They also had a surprising selection of new vinyl, as in both "made recently" and "new music".  I've seen new vinyl albums for sale in Best Buy recently, but I assumed it was some sort of gimic, and mostly ignored them.  It probably is a gimic, but it turns out that vinyl is popular enough that labels are still releaseing music in that format.  I walked out of the store with two cool items: a re-issue of Exile on Main Street by the Rolling Stones, and American Slang, the newest release from The Gaslight Anthem which was released a few months back. 

This is the first time in my life I've ever bought new vinyl, and I think I can really get into it.  I have a bunch of old records that I've acquired over the years, and a turntable that was a gift from my in-laws a few years back.  These records sound pretty cool, but I have digital copies of just about all of them that I'm much more likely to listen to.  Seriously, this might change.  My new records are pristine: there are no scratches, clicks, or pops, and minimal crackling.  And they sound great.

As I was paying for my records, I asked the guy behind the counter (who owns the store, I think) about the new releases, and he told me that there is enough interest in vinyl nowadays that there is a steady stream of new product.  In addition, the records are made of a heavier-weight vinyl than what was typical in the years before CDs asserted their dominance, and as a result the quality of the new records tends to be very good.  He made the argument that albums that were produced in the days before CDs were created with the intent of being played on record players, and as a result sound better in that medium.  This isn't a new or even controversial argument, and I've always suspected it to be true, but this is the first time I got to really test it.  I am certainly not a stranger to the mojo and mystique of old audio technology.  My guitar amp, a Vox AC-30 inspired rig that I built myself, is all tube, and sounds a whole order of magnitude better than any solid state amp I've ever owned.  I just never made any attempt to get serous about vinyl.  I think this might change, especially if what the store owner says is true and the entire Beatles catalogue is the next big re-issue.

I'm also not opposed to the new stuff, either, and I spend more hours listening to music on my Android phone through headphones than I do using a stereo.  So perhaps the best part of this story is that American Slang came with a card that allowed me to download a digital copy of the album, in a loss-less format to boot.  So, I got both the CD and the vinyl for $15.99.  If this is how it's going to be, I can totally see my record collection growing.

I am a big fan of open source software, and use Linux whenever not required by my job to do otherwise.  I'm also a musician.  It shouldn't be a surprise to learn that I use open source software in my studio[1].

Recently I decided to try using AV Linux, a Linux distribution aimed at providing a stable recording environment without a ton of extra software that comes with a typical Fedora or Ubuntu installation.  The result is a computer aimed at making music and movies, and nothing else.  Tongiht I used the new installation to mix an impromptu project I did with my wife a few weeks ago, and the results were great.  Low latency, excellent system performance, and stability.  It was the first time in quite a while that I got through a complete editing session without my PC locking up.  If you're into making art and Linux, I suggest you give AV Linux a shot.

[1] You know, the corner of the basement next to the hot water heater where my guitars live.

I usually get about 6 months out of a pair of running shoes.  Somewhere around the end of that time I start to get aches and pains in places that I don't usually get them, such as my heel, ankle, or calves, and that's a sign to me that I need new sneakers.  A week with the new sneakers is what it usually takes for the pains to disappear.

Last May I bought a new pair of stability trainers by New Balance, but the pain never went away.  I used this, along with a busy work schedule, the heat, humidity, school work, and a bunch of other irelevant facts as justification for letting my training schedule dwindle to a pathetic 3 miles every other day.  This past Sunday, however, I finally decided to do something about this, so I bought a new pair of shoes a few months earlier than normal.

Monday's run was the best I've had in a long, long time, and I let myself believe that I'd solved the problem.  Then Tuesday morning came and my knees were killing me.  I did an easy 2.5 mile run that morning, and started to develop a blister on my right foot.  That sometimes happens when I'm breaking in a new pair of shoes, although I don't understand why that didn't happen on Monday.  I decided to take Wednesday (today) off.  Tomorrow I try again.  Man, I hope this is a temporary problem.

I've decided to give wheatblog a chance as my blogging platform of choice. Good idea? We'll find out, I guess. I'm really not crazy about the stock templates, so I'll have to create my own. At least I'm online again.

What is the point of this blog? Hell if I know. My original intention was to use it as place here I could express my opinions about my interests. I guess that's what it is, but I thought that (1) I would be inspired to write a lot more than I do, and (2) that my writing would be much more interesting than it has turned out to be. I wonder what I should do about that?

My wife has managed to turn her blog into an online journal of her (sometimes out) daily life, and is beginning to attract some regular readers who are not friends or family. That's pretty cool. Part of me thinks that I should want that, too, but I don't. It's enough for me to make these posts, as infrequent as they are, without the need for feedback from strangers, or anyone else for that matter.

Which brings me back to this: why have a blog at all? I still don't know.

The Washington, DC area has had record snow fall in the past week and as a result, I've been worked from home every day this week except for Tuesday. I'm starting to get a little antsy being in the house all day without being able to drive down the street safely. I've wished I could work from home for a long time, and I still wish I could do this every day, but I think I've learned my limit for how long I can go without leaving my house. After 3 days, I start feeling rather wonky.

In any case, this afternoon Susannah and I took a walk around the neighborhood to get some fresh air and survey the damage. I had my camera with me, and took some pictures that put the snow into perspective. You can see them in the photo section.

It's about time that I add some of my pictures to this site, so I added a photo gallery manager called plogger. You can access it here . Plogger automates the creation of thumbnails, which is really convenient. The second gallery (or album, in plogger parlance) contains the pictures I took at Jess and Chuck's wedding. There are 315 pictures in all, and it took a few tries to import them all. Plogger gave me a couple of "500 internal server error messages" while trying to import all of the pictures. It worked after a few tries, though. I guess 315 pictures is a lot. My other galleries are not likely to have that many. This issue aside, I think plogger will serve the site well.

Lately I've been listening to Guns 'n' Roses Appetite for Destruction quite a bit, and I'm surprised to find that I like it every bit as much as I always have. Like lots of other people, I consider it to be among the greatest rock albums of all time, so this shouldn't surprise me. But lately a lot of the music that I was into as a teenager just doesn't have the same appeal as it used to. This shouldn't surprise me either; after all, I'm no longer a teenager.

In my mind, though, music is different than a book or TV show that I no longer obsess over. About the time I was in junior I really wanted to be a fighter pilot, and I watched Top Gun endlessly. Now it's been years since I've seen that movie, and the last time I did I thought it was a little stupid. This doesn't bother me. i was into jets, and then I wasn't, no big deal. With music, though, it's different: so much of how I see myself is tied to the music I was listening to as I grew up. I remember the exhilaration of discovering Van Halen for the first time while making mix tapes from my uncle's music collection. It made me feel so alive, a feeling that transcended just about any other I had had up until that point. Now, 15 or so years later, it saddens me when I find that the same music no longer does it for me in the same way.

Appetite, though, still rocks. Despite being an '80s album, it sounds as raw and fresh as it did for me back in 1993 when I heard it for the first time. (Yes, I know the album came out in 1987, but since I was only 9 at the time, I think I can be forgiven for not discovering it until later.)

I just spent the past hour and a half helping my wife update her blog, and two things occurred to me:

1- I am glad that this blog is coded by hand, as hacking Word Press is not all that much fun. The various CSS and template files have a lot of stuff in them, and I can't help feel that the added features of the software (a pretty admin section and lots of bells and whistles) are not worth the extra overhead.

2- It's been months since my last update. I don't want this to be a blog where each entry is an apology for a lack of updates, so I won't apologize here. I'll just try to do better in 2009.

These past few weeks have been insanely busy. Now that classes have started, my life consists of getting up at 6 am, running, getting to work around 9:30, working until 6, then either going to a guitar lesson (Monday), going straight to class from 7:00 to 9:45 (Tuesday or Wednesday), or reading/doing homework until I can't keep my eyes open (Thursday and Friday). It's an intense schedule, but I think I like it. When I am really busy like this, I am forced to stay focused and on top of everything or run the risk of falling behind. I find that the work I have to do fills the time in which I have to do it. When I don't have that much to do, it takes forever to get it done. When I'm super-busy, like I am now, I get things done faster. Go figure.

Of course, this only applies to the big things that I have to get done. Little things, like updating this blog and expanding its capabilities, tend to get neglected. But a lot more is coming: now that I am up to my eye balls studying an area in which I hope to be considered an expert one day, I should be generating papers and projects that hopefully have value beyond the classes for which they were written. These will all be posted on this website. My hope is that someday this site will actually be a valuable resource to others, and provide something more interesting than my random thoughts.