Entries from December 2007 ↓

I might at some point embed this player or change it to an MP3 or something, but for right now, here’s what I have.

Adam and Becky’s Holiday Star Party Extravaganza

There’s a possibility that if you have this site’s RSS feed in your Podcasts, you’ll get this automatically - I thought FeedBurner did something like that but I can’t say.

43 posts. (This’ll be 44.) I thought when I started counting that we might be looking at 10-20, but 43 is respectable. I do have a job. The longest gap between posts looks like 7 weeks. As usual: sorry about that.

I am generally inspired on Sunday mornings, when I’m going through my GTD lists, and I start feeling better about what I’m accomplishing and getting done, and I start whipping up a post. Unfortunately, I’m also peaking off my once-a-week 16 oz. coffee, so after about 20 minutes I have an incomprehensible, tangled yarn of narrative detours, asides and Wikipedia links. Google ads served up by those post fragments would probably have headlines like “Dan, take it down a notch. Christ.”

The framework’s been stable, mostly, for the year. I still do most of my writing in TextMate and then use fancy Quicksilver shortcuts to send my posts to the blog, but the downside of that is that upgrading WordPress or TextMate can actually break the whole awesome, calibrated, customized, zero maintenance system, and then I get frustrated. That’s what happened to the tag system, by the way - I stopped caring, it never exactly worked, and I don’t have enough output to really justify anything more complicated than simple search. I like the idea of tags - they make it possible to split this one blog into its tech / kid-picture / poker / music / current-events areas of interest, but I can’t say for sure it’d be worth the effort. (Same with categories. If a lack of categories is harshing your vibe, let me know, but I’ve been lazy about that this year, and it doesn’t seem to matter a whole lot.)

I have thought about getting more fractured here - splitting out a new blog for any of those above mentioned interests, but again, I don’t really write enough here to worry about maintaining more than one version of myself. I think sometimes about spinning off into various online identities, but I don’t have a whole lot to hide. Basically, I’ve found a ton of quality writers (and communities around that writing) and I feel like I could contribute, but from where I stand, I’m dragging eight years of internet whining (this site) with me wherever I go.

I’m trying not to take it personally (snif) but I’ve had thirteen real comments this year, compared to 30,000 spam comments. Some commenters from years past appear to have hung it up, but they might have been scared off by the “email (req’d)” field in the form. I am not sure if I have options about that - it helps the spam filter filter spam, but it would of course be nice to have a robust commenting community. Then again, when I take two month sabbaticals without any kind of warning, those of you clicking your bookmarks every day end up disappointed and may resolve never to return. Not much I can do about that (except recommend Google Reader - add my RSS feed along with everyone else’s, and reclaim your morning).

I’m mostly getting back what I put into this venture, and that’s fine. I’m having higher yields over at twitter - a handful of friends (including you, soon, I hope) keep in touch and quickly status the rest of the world on “what we’re doing”. It lets everyone’s quickest thoughts and comments go out into the world with almost zero friction. The twitter folks certainly seem to think it’s a bigger deal than that (replaces IM! gives meaning to your cell phone! revolutionizes publishing! disrupts the information ecosystem!), but whatever it eventually means, it’s displacing a larger and larger part of what used to appear here: cracking wise about current events, thinking out loud, bitching about dudes in lines, etc.

Oh, and sharing links, which is something I almost never do on twitter. I’ve posted 271 links on del.icio.us this year, received several from friends, and read about a zillion from various tags I follow, That is, in a way, at the expense of posting links with commentary here, but I hope anyone interested in that can follow me over there.

And the photos do keep coming, about three months late, over at Flickr. If you’re on there, and we know each other, I continue to apologize about not tending to that overgrown garden. Your photos, on the other hand, are great.

Thad was over Friday night. As happened the last two or three times he was over, we ended up passing a stereo jack between us to trade songs on the night’s party playlist. This is fun - sort of like making a live mix-tape for someone. What I’d really love to do is record the next “session” and make it a podcast - even if it went an hour, there’s a ton of useful information and (mostly) friendly chat. It wouldn’t even have to be me and Thad - any two people, trading tracks, one-upping each other or reinterpreting the direction the night is going - I’m calling it MP3 Tennis.

Here’s what I played:

1. Battles - Atlas. Might as well start with the most-played song from my music library in 2007. Adam played it a ton, my mom had me burn her a copy, seriously - you don’t want to miss out on this band.
2. Tomahawk - Cradle Song. Not sure how essential this is, but I was working from shuffle at this point and thought this might pique his interest. I tell people that Mike Patton’s in a band, and their ears go up, and then I say that their last record is all absolutely authentic Native American music painstakingly rearranged (and seamlessly - brilliantly) into a hard rock / alternative style, their eyes glaze over.
3. Ween - Friends (the techno version, from the EP). Terribly disappointing that La Cucaracha isn’t as inspired and crazy as this. I shared the story that Dean Ween told over the Onion AV Club - that’s worth a read. (Thad wasn’t familiar with Crazy Frog, so it’s mostly a wash.)
4. Nellie McKay - Pounce. Nelly is a talented songwriter and performer, but she will win a Grammy as soon as they announce that category for Cat-Related Composition Under One Minute With Fantastic Meyowling. (At under a minute, I’m letting Thad control the ball maybe a bit too long, but this was the first formalized bout of MP3 Tennis of all time, so we’ll see what the conventions become.)
5. Black Francis - Captain Pasty. Thad’s a friend from college, and you’ll remember that in college, I wouldn’t shut up about Frank Black. Frank’s Black again, and Thad was unaware of the soaring intro to his newest record.
6. Common - Drivin’ Me Wild. I threw this one on because I was pretty sure that it was the Common song that referenced OK Go, and Thad had just thrown on “Here It Goes Again“. Thad missed the reference because he was running to the bathroom, and when he came back, I rewinded it and we argued about Chicago or something.
7. Queens of the Stone Age - 3’s and 7’s. This song is on your hard rock radio right now. I wish I liked the rest of this album as much as the top two or three tracks, but that’s QotSA for you these days.
8. Britney Spears - Sugarfall. I could have sworn Thad was into Neptunes and Pharrell, but apparently not. The whole room turned on me here, but I like throwing a track in that you’ll never hear outside of my house (this is an unreleased demo that didn’t make the record). Perhaps my Achilles Heel as an MP3 Tennis athlete.
9. Paramore - Misery Business. This is another top-ten track for the year. Awesome stuff. We got to talk about how this band was from Tennessee and how they kind of sound like Damone and Coheed and Cambria at the same time.
10. Timbaland - Apologize (feat. One Republic). This is ruling Billboard right now - it just came up in shuffle and I thought I’d give it a shot. It’s singer-songwritery and Timbalandy at the same time.
11. The Ran Dells - Martian Hop. This would be a much-discussed chestnut of anthropological interest, unless future historians read these words - I don’t really know what I was thinking. Thad must have said something like “you’re on in 10 seconds” and I maybe panicked.
12. Ween - Your Party. Most controversial song of 2007 in my house - I think it’s a perfectly good snapshot of mild party-funk, and Christie is pretty sure it’s way crossing the line of “semi-intentionally dumb” into “actually very dumb no matter what was intended.” It makes me happy that people are hearing this on 89.3.
13. Coheed and Cambria - The Running Free. We’ve been over this on the blog already. Rule.
14. Jay-Z - Blue Magic (feat. Pharrell). Thad had just played Jay’s 99 Problems (from the Gray Album) a few song earlier and I thought I would school him American Gangster-style, but that didn’t end up happening. Ah well.

Things wound down after this - as we headed for the upstairs, I threw on Acidjazzed Evening, that song from the demo scene that got Timbaland into trouble. There’s a good story there, but I didn’t get to tell it. Go ahead and read.

So yeah, we were basically playing MP3s back and forth for over two hours - the podcast would obviously be shorter. I’d also want to maybe cut the songs off at the first chorus or sometime before halfway - that might let us claim fair use for editorial content, but maybe not. Who knows. And we might have a few more rules, but if you want to play, can send me a few MP3s, and have acess to Skype, let me know.