Rough Draft

So Much Music Goodness

Lot's of music news for me today. Seems like music is mostly what I post about in this blog, but oh well. First up, new tour I just found out about: Fall Out Boy, Rufio, Mae, Motion City Soundtrack, and Northstar will be at the Grog Shop October 14th. I'm definitely going to this show, and I actually have mp3s or CDs of all the bands. Mae sounds a bit like Jimmy Eat World, and has several very catchy songs. Motion City Soundtrack I just found out about less than a week ago. Their song, The Future Freaks Me Out, has been getting a fair amount of play on my iPod. I have a couple Northstar mp3s, though I haven't listened to them much yet. Also, Saves The Day and Taking Back Sunday are at the Agora September 24. I missed Taking Back Sunday at least twice last year, so I'd kind of like to catch this concert too.

Something Corporate posted previews of two new songs, Space and Down, on their website today. Here's a direct link to the Real Media stream. There are also Windows Media streams available on their site, but you need to register to be able to listen to the streams from the site. I'm really looking forward to this album, which is supposed to be out Oct 21.

Finally, Mike has a bit of webspace for "songs of the moment". I reccomend everything there of course. :-) But if you have limited bandwith definitely grab the Brand New and Yellowcard mp3s first. The new Dashboard song, Hands Down, is also excellent. It's on the ITMS as a single, so I bought it the other week. I'd agree with Mike that it's my favorite DC song. The Hum song, is one Finch covered when they were on Jimmy Kimmel a month or so ago. Hadn't heard of them before, so I'm glad to hear the original version. Anyway, I think he's going to be updating it pretty regularly, so keep checking back for new stuff.

Ok, I lied that wasn't the last thing. I bought the new Thrice album, The Artist in the Ambulance, from the ITMS last night. Once again Mike was telling me how good it was, so I figured what the hell, I'm going to buy it at some point, so it might as well be now. It's a lot heavier than a lot of the other bands I've been listening to lately, so it was a good change of pace, and makes excellent biking music. Highly recommended.

That's the music news for today, at some point over the weekend I'll post about the Ben Folds concert.

Quick Post

So much to write about, but this is just a placeholder because I have to get up in 4 hours for the Elk Grove Factory tour. Ben Folds was great, and this was one of the most fun nights I've had out here. Hopefully I can remember all the good bits of conversation from tonight that I want to blog about.

ITMS Purchases

I added my iTunes Music Store purchases to the CDs media page. I've only bought one album so far, but there's already 2 more album purchases I'm considering and will probaby make as soon as I'm ready for some new music to listen to. The future purchases are the Ben Folds' Speed Graphic EP (which is only available digitally) and Thrice's The Artist in the Ambulance, which Mike told me is "really, really good" and from the 30 second previews I heard I'd have to agree.

Recent Tunes, Media Collections

With the concert page done, hopefully I can now start working on Recent Tunes again. (I know, Erik, I was supposed to start working on it a month ago.) The main functionality I'm looking to add to it is to allow uploading of the list of recent tunes to my blog, much like Kung-Tunes does. I've used Kung Tunes, but it has a tendency to randomly stop working. I'm also throwing together a quick little app that will make updating my various media collections lists a lot faster for me. So maybe I'll actually update those soon too. I need to add a new table to the CDs section for songs purchased through the iTunes Music Store.

Concerts

I finally got around to creating my concerts page. It lists the concerts I've been to and links to my blog entries about them as well as upcoming concerts I want to/am planning to attend. Anyone interested in the upcoming concerts I've listed should contact me. Of course feel free to leave comments about upcoming concerts I don't know about yet, and I'll add them to the list. I especially want to see Brand New and Yellowcard, so if they're coming to Cleveland, let me know.

Something Corporate and ITMS

More intersection between the websites of bands I like and Apple. I was looking at Something Corporate's new website and in their downloads section they links to purchase their single Forget December. Specifically, there is a link to the iTunes Music Store. The link simply conducts a search in the ITMS for "Forget December" and "Something Corporate". The song itself is not currently available there, but their full length Leaving Through the Window is. I think the sight is brand new today, so maybe the track is going to be added to the store on Tuesday. Even if it's not, I like seeing the various lesser known bands I like mentioning and working with Apple.

Fall Out Boy and Apple Store

No one except me is going to care about this, but I was just looking at the Fall Out Boy website and they posted one of their updates from the Apple Store in Houston. Cool.

Concerts

First, I'm planning on creating a concerts page to list upcoming concerts I want to go to, as well as bands I want to see in concert. There's a couple concerts in San Francisco this week that are going to be good, but were sold out by the time I found out about them. Tonight is Brand New and Senses Fail at Slim's and on the 17th Midtown and Reggie and the Full Effect are there. I just found out that Midtown and Reggie will be in Cleveland at the Agora on Wednesday Aug 27, which is 2 days after school starts, so I'll definitely be going to that show.

Some dates have been posted for the Drive Thru Records tour in September/October. No Cleveland date has been posted, but hopefully the tour will be stopping there. If not I'll have to try and get to the one in Columbus. The bands on the tour are The Starting Line, Allister (one of the best live bands I've seen), Eary November (another excellent live band), and Senes Fail. I haven't seen TSL or Senses Fail live yet. I have some live videos of Senes Fail and it looks like they put on a kick ass show.

The Warped Tour is in San Francisco tomorrow and a few interns from Apple are heading up there. I'm not going to go, but I am going to see Ben Folds and Tori Amos on the 26th with a few fellow interns.

The last bit of concert info I want to post is Something Corporate will be touring around October/November in support of their new album, North. I can't wait to hear the new album and see them in concert again.

And that's my concert round up. :)

Powerbook

This is my first post to my blog from my new 12" Powerbook. It's such a perfect machine. I spent the week reformatting the drive (partions for Jaguar, Panther, and Users), transferring files from desktop, and reinstalling all my apps. Now that the Powerbook is all setup, I moved my tower out to the living room and connected it to the TV. Now I'll try getting around to watching all the anime I have left to watch. I think I'll start with Serial Experiments Lain, since I've been meaning to watch that for a while.

4th of July Weekend

I'm heading to Los Angeles and Anaheim after work tomorrow for 4th of July weekend. My uncle and family are flying into LA on Thursday, and going to Disneyland on the 4th. Christy was planning to go to San Diego to visit her Mom, so I'm catching a ride with her to LA, staying there overnight on Wednesday and meeting my aunt, uncle, and cousins at the airport on Thursday. It should be a fun weekend and will give me a chance to make good use of the digital camera I bought from Anand. Like my uncle said, 2 months ago I didn't even know there was a possibility I'd be working out here, and now I'm meeting up with them in LA (they're from Maryland) for a weekend. Crazy.

TiVo upgrade

I installed a new hard drive in Mary's TiVo last night. It only took about an hour and probably the hardest part was getting the TiVo's case off. There's a utility called Mac TiVo Blesser which formats the drive for the TiVo. The upgrade went smoothly and it worked the first time we turned it back on. Her TiVo is one of the original ones and only had a 13 GB drive in it and we added a 120 GB drive. The drive we added is 7200 RPM though, so hopefully it won't cause any overheating problems.

Flat Tire

Blah, coming home from work yesterday I got a flat tire on my bike and had to walk my bike about a mile and a half back to the house. I rode Christy's bike to work today. It's kind of small for me, and is a mountain bike, so it wasn't as easy to ride, but it worked. Since I'm leaving for LA/Anaheim tomorrow after work, I probably won't be able to get it fixed until sometime early next week.