Monthly Archives: January 2006
gimp talk at ncsu lug
This Wednesday, I’ll be giving a talk on/about gimp at the Linux Users Group at NCSU.
music thoughts
finally got around to syncing the mp3player/workstash/homestash to be consistent, and was thinking about cd’s I’ve bought over the last little while
The good:
Red Sparrowes/At The Soundless Dawn: really cool post-rock/post-metal/whatever. In the vein of Isis, Explosions in The Sky, GYBE, etc. Long cinematic[1] instrumentals. Very cool. High recommended.
Adrian Belew/Side B: second part of a triology. I like this one better than Side A, even though Side A features Les Claypool and Danny Carey. This cd is very low key, with a bit of a kraftwerk/80’s electro/new wave sound to it. And of course, plenty of odd lyrics and off kilter guitar sounds.
Jesu/Jesu: Jesu is Justin K. Brodricks new band. Broadrick is mr Godflesh. This album pretty much sounds just like Godflesh. In other words, it freaking rules. Utterly massive plodding machine provided drumbeats, walls of heavy droning feedback drenched guitars. This is the part where I throw a metal hand gesture and start looking for a goat to sacrifice.
Sunn 0))/Grimrobe Demos: Walls of heavy droning feedback drenched guitars. No drums. Still heavy as all get out. I like it. Too bad I’m out of goats now.
Fripp & Eno/The Equatorial Stars: Pretty good, pretty much what you’d expect from these two. Heavily processed soundscapes for the most part.
Drums & Tuba/Vinyl Killer: drums, tuba, and guitar driven math rock. Lots of looping. Tuba makes a surprisingly good bass in a rock context.
Zoe Keating/Once Cello x 16: heavily layered acoustic cello. Very driving and cool. Zoe is 1/3 of Rasputina.
Other Random Stuff:
The Swans/Children Of God/World of Skin: eh. About one in three songs are really amazing. The rest are kind of boring. But they all have _way_ too many vocals in them. Not really my thing I suppose.
Arcade Fire/Funeral: Yawn-tastic. Why did I buy this? Mediocre over produced lifeless indy pop. I’ll gladly give up one hipster point to not have to hear this.
[1] I say cinematic, meaning what I would like movie scores to sound like. But lets face it, 99.999% of all movie scores are horrendous cliche ridden coma inducing symphonic piles of worthless glurge[2]. Hans Zimmer, I’m looking at you. I sometimes wonder what it would be like to see a movie with a good score. How am I supposed to “suspend disbelief” when your blasting the tritest freaking orchestral bs at me in dolby 9.13 sound at 130db.
[2] glurge is not a word. Thats how bad movie scores are. At least there not musicals.
year
So, things I want to do this year. Resolutions of sort, I suppose.
Take a sabbatical from work. I’m not entirely sure thats an option, so we’ll see. Three months sounds about right.
Take a wandering cross country road trip. Maybe by motorcycle. Maybe by car if theres some reason for that. Or maybe just fly around to the places that look cool. In that aforementioned sabbatical perhaps.
Buy a house. I really need to buy a house. I keep saying that.
Buy a new car.
Reclaim my Jaded Bastard status. I used to be opinionated. But man, thats a lot of work sometimes. I’m much more interesting when I’m opinionated though.
Learning at least rudiments of a another language. For no particular reason, ASL or spanish perhaps. I don’t watch enough/any anime to want to learn japanese.
Watched “Serinity”. Wasn’t familar with “Firefly” the series, and I couldn’t figure out where I recongnized the “Jayne” character from. Turns out it’s “animal mother” from Full Metal Jacket. Thank you IMDB.
destro
Computers are wrong.
They must be stopped.
They shall be destroyed.
Protected: fooood?
Protected:
huh. How about that.
Apparently, part of the sounds for Microsoft Windows Vista is going to be by…
Robert Fripp.
See here.
That makes my brain hurt. I suppose Eno did do the win95 startup sound, so theres at least some precedent
of sorts. But still. One of my favorite guitarists… doing the windows sound? Weird.
Of course, if I had to hire someone to make a sound that represents a crash, I’d say fripp would be high on the list.
holidays
So, I had about 2 1/2 weeks off for the holidays. I have to admit, as much as I don’t like working, I was getting really bored for a while. Maybe I should of planned my break a little better to have something to do.
So, what did I do? Visited some relatives for christmas. Got and gave some presents. Gave my nephew even more toys even though he already has 5 times more than he needs. They make Tonka trucks out of steel again, so he had to have one of those right?
Got some toolboxes for christmas, and assorted Triumph branded clothing. The toolboxes are actually a pretty big craftsman rolling set, so should be handy, since I’m already out of space in my other one.
Got home, and hung out with various folks that were back in town for a while. Namely, Nalin and Matt.
Went to a couple parties, including a geek filled New Years party. Matt, katzj, deviant_, elliot, saspenguin, wilee, etc.
Got bored and installed rockbox on my iriver player as inspired by katzj. Seems to work pretty well so far, and boots quicker,
has gapless playback, and improved recording support.
I’m already tired of winter.
I suppose at some point I should make some resolutions. Or maybe some anti-resolutions. Or more likely, just forget about it.
I don’t want to go back to work. But I don’t have anything better to do.