Month: October 2006

phlegm

Last Friday I went to Littleton and saw the Rhythm Devils. They are:

  • Bill Kreutzmann (Drums – Grateful Dead)
  • Mickey Hart (Drums – Grateful Dead)
  • Steve Kimock (Guitar – Steve Kimock Band)
  • Mike Gordon (Bass – Phish)
  • Sikiru Adepoju (Talking drum master)
  • Jen Durkin (Vocals – Deep Banana Blackout)

A pretty heavy-hitting list. It was a good show. Horrible venue, drunk crowd, but a good show. It makes me wish I had been born a few decades earlier to really appreciate Mickey and Billy’s drumming. Those guys have some crazy solos, and they have an amazingly synchronized style (anyone who has tried to keep 2 drumsets going at once will understand how hard that is. I think I started to develop a little bit of this with Pat after 3 years of drumline, but only in a small degree.

Not much happened this weekend. That’s OK.

But now I’m sick again. I hate dorms because they’re a complete bacteria breeding house.

What a long, strange week it’s been…

This week has been really weird. I haven’t been doing much… And I don’t feel very stressed (perhaps I should?) but I am definitely in the mid-semester going-through-the-motions. Meh.

Today all of the residence halls ditched their powdered eggs and deep-fryers for “A Taste of Colorado” – everything was homegrown in-state. And everything was really good. I had excellent pesto, chimichangas, Mexican rice, apple pie…. lots of stuff. At least nicer-restaurant quality. So tasty, mi estomago está en el cielo.

There was a local folk-rock band playing, too. It would have been bluegrass, except that they had someone playing drumset (the rare occasion where I prefer drums to be absent). Now I go to a lot of shows, as my parents are ex-deadheads  with great taste in music. At most of these jam band shows, pretty much everyone dances… But there is no specifically named style.

So you hippie-dance.

The short of the matter is that the band tonight launched into Shakedown Street for their second song. And I hippie-danced in front of about half my hall. And I didn’t care.

Usually I only feel comfortable hippie-dancing in front of people my parents’ age. Which is weirder: the fact that I hippie-danced in the first place, or that I would only feel comfortable doing it around my parents?!

Hmm…

nEw br0wz4rz!!!11one [updated]

[UPDATE: It turns out that this wasn’t the official 2.0 build of Firefox. They’re working on it, it comes out tomorrow… And this one isn’t official. Though I have a hunch that it still will have those bugs come tomorrow, so my rant is still (probably) valid. ]

So the big new versions of Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox are out… I’ve been jumping between Firefox 1.5.0.7 and Opera 9 for a while now, with heavy bias on the Firefox side.

I had to thoroughly test the beta and release of IE7 for work (Micro$oft owns my department’s soul, so no OSS for us) and I got to know it pretty well. I was mainly just excited because this means that a bunch of public terminals will finally support tabbed browsing. I spent a good part of the last two weeks at work trying to get IE to fail, and it didn’t happen. As a matter of fact, for (heavy) day-to-day browsing it has no functional difference from Firefox for me. Sure, there are some nitpicky differences, but nothing that important. So a long story short, I really like it, at least in comparison to the four-year-old IE6. It still has a couple of problems – namely, major CSS shortcomings, and resource-hoggage. I have the same three tabs open in IE7 and FF2, and IE is taking 64MB. FF is taking 32. Oh, and IE’s rendering engine hasn’t changed since IE4. That came out with, um…. Windows 98?

Firefox 2 will be great in a couple of revisions. I think it was rushed out of the door to compete with IE7’s release last week. I have the “final version” – not a release candidate – and it’s crashing as much as the beta and RC2 did. Except that it’s supposedly a final release, which shouldn’t still have those bugs. That kind of instability in a final release is unacceptable. It’s crashed twice in the last 10 minutes on me… with simple browsing.

So for now, I’ll be using Internet Explorer 7, until I can browse happy again. I feel so… dirty. But it’s amazing that IE7 is good enough to not drive me completely insane, and still feel as good as FF 1.5.0.7 did.

I like my bass LOUDY, LOUDY, LOUDER!

Teh Spearhead was awesome.

Spearhead

(Click for the whole album)

The first night had the worst crowd ever. People have no sense of common courtesy any more. But the second night I got right up on the rail and had a much better time.

The Wailers (as in Bob Marley and the Wailers) were also there on Friday night… I really enjoyed hearing that music live. They had an awesome sound, and those songs are so fun to hear live… Especially stuff like “Trenchtown Rock,” “War,” and “Jammin’.”

Yell Fire!

I’m leaving this weekend to Denver for two nights of Spearhead shows – tonight with The Wailers! Should be fun.

Next week, I get to go see The Rhythm Devils (the two drummers from the Grateful Dead)… with Steve Kimock! More Steve is always a good thing. I just REALLY want Steve Kimock Band to play more shows, but they haven’t done a thing since January 🙁

Snow (already?)

Today was the first snow of the year. In the middle of October. Fall doesn’t end for 2 more months! I don’t know how that happens.

Made a gallery… haz clic for more:

100_1949
Snow!

I have to figure out what to do about my bike. The snow’s gonna destroy it… I’ll probably have to part with Tiberius for a few months 🙁

My bike kicked my butt.

Today I tried out another church… I think it was called Timberline Old Town? It’s in a huge coffeeshop. I want to go another couple of times, because we were late and I didn’t get the best feel of it. I had said before that I am very happy with Mountain View, but I want to look around a bit more. I decided that I really, REALLY like what is preached at MVCC, but I’ve been going for like 2 months and I still feel like I don’t know anyone there.

That said, what makes a church the “right one” to attend? There are plenty. I’m never going to find one that’s completely in tune with my own beliefs, and I’m never going to find one that’s just so cool that I can’t help but want to go there- God has done a good job of working through the humble and imperfect over the past few millenia, so I don’t think he’s going to change that policy any time soon.

This afternoon I went up to Horsetooth Rock with Riley, one of the guys on my floor, on my mountain bike. I’ll tell ya what, four years of biking on flat Arizona roads does nothing for me… I was biking up this really long, steep grade, and gasping for air all the way. I was dehydrated, my lungs were about to collapse, and my poor thighs haven’t done any work since I left Colorado before high school. We turned around really early.

100_1940.JPG 100_1943.JPG 100_1944.JPG 100_1946.JPG

I’m still really glad that I went- the weather will be taking a turn for the worse very soon, but it was really nice today. I was stupid to try and conquer a mountain without doing any preconditioning… and it showed. I am embarrased of myself, so I want to spend the winter doing at least a little bit of cardio, because I have asthma that only kicks in when I’m exercising and I need to train myself to actually do physical things again.

That, and once I get some savings going, I want to spend a couple hundred bucks upgrading Tiberius, my trusty Trek 4500. He’s a great bike, but I’ve really destroyed his gears.

Ray Sings, Basie Swings

I just got another great album:


Ray Sings, Basie Swings (with the Count Basie Orchestra)

I’m not a big Ray Charles fan. But this is really good. It’s from a recording in the 1970s that had a nearly inaudible band, but Ray’s vocals came out loud and clear. The Count Basie Orchestra (minus Basie, he’s dead, too) re-recorded the instrumentation behind him.

This is musically significant because Ray Charles was in his prime in the ’70s, and there are few recordings from this era that do him justice. His spine-tingling cover of “The Long and Winding Road” is phenomenal.

If you like swing, Ray Charles, or Count Basie, get this album. (luckily I like all three, so this one has me really stoked. I miss jazz band so much!)