Rough Draft

New Beginnings

I've been back at Case for about a week now and I'm finally getting around to updating this blog. I'm just taking 4 EECS classes (Programming Language Concepts, Distributed Systems, Computer Networking, and Intelligent Systems) and racquetball this semester, and I don't think any of them are going to be too hard. Thankfully, Professor Beer is teaching Programming Language Concepts and it seems like this is actually going to be a useful class. He's using a Keynote slide show to present material in class, but it doesn't seem like it's just going to a be a read through as many slides as possible type of lecture. I'm also looking forward to learning Smalltalk, since there are many similarities between Smalltalk and Objective-C.

Enough with talk about classes. We've already hit quite a few restaurants in this last week including Phnom Penh, Chipotle, Tommy's for milkshakes, Aladdins, and a 3 am trip to Denny's.

All in all, I think it's going to be a fun year, and I'm looking forward to just enjoying being around my friends and having a great time.

The Tension and The Terror

Straylight Run posted another mp3 on their page called The Tension And The Terror. It's quite good, just like the rest of their songs. According to their webpage, a couple more songs should be posted very soon. Also, I love the fact that they post the lyrics to all of their songs as well. I really can't wait until their show in Cleveland on September 13.

40 Hour Train Back to Penn

The Movielife are playing a show at Peabody's on September 23 and tickets are only $5. I saw The Movielife last February with Finch and they were pretty good. I've never been to Peabody's and $5 is a nice cheap concert, so I'm definitely thinking about going to this show.

While I'm posting about concerts, Something Corporate will be at Tower City with Mest and Good Charlotte on Sep. 28. As great as SoCo is, I think I'll pass on this concert. Amphitheaters aren't as fun for concerts and SoCo and Mest are opening for Good Charlotte, so they probably won't play long sets. Something Corporate is set to tour with RX Bandits and Mae in the November/December time frame, so I can wait until then to see them. It'll be interesting to see the RX Bandits, I wasn't a fan of their stuff on the Drive Thru DVD, but I've heard good things about their new album.

The Cuckoo

I just got back from seeing The Cuckoo with some Apple interns. The story focuses on three people, a condemned Finnish sniper (cuckoo), a Russian solider, and a Lapp woman. The most interesting thing about the movie is that none of those three characters speak the same language, so that leads to many interesting scenes. A couple scenes were a little long, but overall it was an enjoyable film. I'd recommend seeing it if you get the chance, especially if you're looking for something a little different.

Yellowcard Rock

Yellowcard will be at the Agora Ballroom on Thursday, September 11. Yet another can't miss show. Two amazing concerts in 3 days (the other being Straylight Run on the 13th). I can't wait for that week.

Straylight Run

Straylight Run posted three mp3s on their webpage today. I highly recommend you check them out. After hearing them, I'm even more excited to see them at the Grog Shop next month.

Recent Tunes Update

After packing earlier today, I spent a good amount of time working on Recent Tunes. It handles creating a file for the current tune, a file for an arbitrary number of recent tunes, and and idle message. I made a couple improvements to the status item menu. The biggest one being that selecting a song from the menu now plays the the track by database id rather than index. This fixes a problem where, say, you had a smart playlist of songs not played in the last day, once you listened to a song, it would be removed from the playlist and then Recent Tunes wouldn't be able to find it.

Hopefully tomorrow I can finish adding the code that will actually upload the files. That'll about finish up the blog integration features I wanted to add. The other main feature I want to add before releasing is reassignable global hot keys.

Mostly Packed Up

I spent this morning and early afternoon packing most of my stuff up. I've got 5 boxes of stuff to send home(G4 tower, monitor, Powerbook box, ReplayTV, and box with random stuff), and one box to send to Erik (Gamecube). I packed a bunch of stuff in my 2 suitcases also, to make sure I could fit everything I'm not sending home now. My room's looking pretty empty now. I can't believe I'm only out here for one more week.

More Blog Changes

I wasn't tired tonight, so I spent a little time working on my blog. I've added links to individual categories in the sidebar, mainly because I want to keep track of how many entries I have for each category. (Only 2 video game entries?! I need to start playing more video games!) I still need to update the category template, so the category pages actually have a sidebar.

I also saw that Jeff updated his archive paths to be more meaningful. I've been meaning to do this, every since I read about doing that on Erik's blog. So, I finally joined the crowd and updated my archive paths to be /blog/archive/Year/Month/Day/EntryTitle.php. I like having the more meaningful links, and this blog entry that I found in a comment on Erik's blog helped me easily set up a .htaccess file that should redirect all the old links to the new links.

I'm not sure why exactly, but I'm finally starting to get into this blog. For a while it was just a place for me to write stuff occasionally, but now I'm starting to actually want to work on site (both backend stuff and CSS/XHTML/PHP stuff). I think there's two main reasons why I'm getting into it. First, it gives me a chance to learn a bunch of stuff I don't know, but want to. Second, it's a nice change of pace from coding. I seem to be in a different frame of thinking when I'm working on the blog from when I'm coding. So anyway, excpect continued updates to the site both in content and design/layout.

Moved Blog

I just finished moving my blog from my tower to my PowerBook. Leave me a comment if you find anything that's broken.

New Concert Alert #2

Finally! I just checked The Starting Line's homepage and they finally have a Cleveland date for the Drive Thru Invasion Tour. It's Saturday October 4th, the day after the Columbus show I thought I was going to end up going to. There are supposed to be "special guests" on most if not all of the dates. If I had to pick the special guest, I'd definitely choose Finch. They're so good live.

CSS, XHTML, PHP

One last trackback to Jeff for today. Like Jeff, I don't know any CSS or XHTML and feel like I should. Since CWRU affiliates have access to Safari I'm planning to spend the weekend reading up on CSS, XHTML, and PHP. Hopefully I can spiff up the site a little visually. I'm using PHP to generate the various media tables I have, so hopefully I can do some cool things with those also. Looks like this is going to be a fun, tech heavy weekend. I'm also planning to go to the Computer History Museum that's less than 3 miles from my apartment. Should be lots of fun, and Andrew says they have an exhibit dedicated to Apple.

Moving

I guess this is trackback to Jeff day. He writes about the annoyances of moving. I fly home a week from Sunday, so I've been dreading the same thing. I really need to start packing up the things I need to FedEx home, so they get there in time for me to take them back to CWRU with me. I'm planning to send stuff home this Saturday, though I have yet to box anything up. Oh well, that's what Friday night will be good for. *Note to self, watch roast of Denis Leary on Comedy Central on Sunday since my Replay won't be here.* Anyway, my moving out process won't be nearly as bad as Jeff's for 2 reasons. First, I don't have to worry about cancelling utilities and other services. And second, since I flew out here, I don't have that much stuff to deal with. Still though, flying home a week Sunday, taking my brother to college at Westchester (near Philly) on that Friday, and going back to CWRU on Saturday isn't going to be fun. And even though working at Apple beats the hell out of classes, I am looking forward to going back to CWRU and seeing all my friends. It'll be nice to have people around and to hang out with all the time. Living far from the corporate housing and not having a car made it a little difficult to hang out with people here as much as I would have liked.

Blogs and Wiki

Jeff writes about combining blogs and wiki. His example to Erik and I was he writes about various restaurants he's been to and it would be cool to have individual posts about specific trips to the restaurant that could all autolink to a single page that has various general information about the restaurant. Interesting. I like that idea, and can definitely see using it on my site. In a similar way, since I post so much about various bands, it would be nice to have a pages for individual bands with things like recommended songs, links to the band's website, upcoming concert dates, etc. This page looks like it has some blog/wiki combination solutions. Maybe I'll get a chance to take a look at them this weekend.

New Concert Alert

Saturday September 13th at the Grog Shop - Straylight Run (new band started by John Nolan formerly of Taking Back Sunday) and Jamison/Parker. These are both brand new bands, and this will be the first tour for both of them. I don't want to miss this because it's going to be a great show.

Update: Just read this interview with John and Shaun of Straylight Run. Sounds like piano is a big part of their songs. W00t, more piano rock. Says Shaun: "I would just like to say that it’s the perfect blend between Thursday, Saves The Day, Dashboard Confessional, and Jimmy Eat World." Sounds good to me, can't wait to hear their stuff. They said they're going to try and have stuff available for download soon.

Steve Writes to Creators of Sealab

While I was eating dinner tonight, I decided to watch last night's episode of Sealab. It was the Radio Free episode, which is one of the funnier ones. However, these two screens that followed the show where even funnier.

Another Sunny Day in California

Christy, Mary, and I went to the Valley Fair Mall this afternoon. Erik and I went there back in June, but we didn't stop in the Apple Store there. I checked that out, and of course checked to see if they had Soundtrack in yet, but they didn't. They lady I asked was all, you can preorder it though. I just smiled and said no thanks.

Then I went to Sam Goody in hopes of getting Ocean Avenue. They were sold out and said they'd have some in on Monday. Bah. I did pick up Brand New's previous album Your Favorite Weapon and Motion City Soundtrack's I Am The Movie. Motion City Soundtrack's single The Future Freaks Me Out is quite catcy, so since their album was on sale, I figured I'd pick it up. I'm listening to the third song now, and so far its quite good. I also very nearly bought The Ataris Live DVD and The Used Maybe Memories CD/DVD, but convinced myself not to.

After that I was wondering around for a bit and passed a Hot Topic. I thought, I guess there's a chance they'll have Ocean Ave, so I go in, past all the goth workers, and sure enough they had about 10 copies of it. Of course they were selling it for $15, even though it's $12 or less most other places. It's so good though, I'm just glad I finally have it.

The only other place of interest I went to was a book store. They had Snow Crash which Jeff recommended to me, and someone that went to the Ben Folds concert also said it was good. I thought about buying it, but I'm sure I can get it cheaper online somewhere, even with shipping.

Oh yeah, and we ate at Panda Express for lunch. It had been a while since I had Chinese food, and you can't complain about chow mein, fried rice, orange chicken, and beef with broccoli for just $5.

Time to listen to some new music and continue work on Recent Tunes. I hope to have all the file creation stuff done today, so after that I'll just have to write the code for uploading files, which should be pretty easy. I also want to add Global Hot Key support like in Synergy. There's some sample code for using the Carbon Hot Key API on Apple's developer sample code page, so that should be pretty easy as well.

Concert Trip Conversations

This is a continuation of the Ben Folds post, but it's about the various things we talked about while going to/from the concert. You know you're with a fun bunch of people when you're talking about Adult Swim and quoting Sealab one minute and the next minute you're talking about software design.

Damn, I wanted to write this up sooner, so I could remember the details of our various conversations. We'll see how this goes.

We had a fun discussion about song lyrics, their meanings, and the fun in figuring out what the song writer meant, and taking the lyrics to mean something personally. And it was during this conversation that I found out Nick (one of the interns with us) is a fellow indie rock fan of bands, specifically Death Cab for Cutie and The Postal Service. We're probably going to trade some music at some point, because he hasn't heard Brand New or Yellowcard and I'm sure he has a bunch of stuff I haven't head.

After the concert while we were waiting for the BART train, Nick asked if anyone watched Adult Swim. This of course turned into quoting Sealab episodes, as well as some Harvey Birdman.

There were a couple Cocoa programmers in the group, and there were 2 people that didn't know what Objective-C was, so we had some good discussions about Cocoa. It was great when 2 of us at the same time responded that "Objective-C is C with brackets."

That's all I can think of for now, but if I think of other details I'll add them later.

Rockin' The Suburbs

Ok, I'm finally getting around to blogging about the Ben Folds concert last Tuesday. The concert was up in Concord, which is in the northern East Bay. Five of us (all interns) left Apple around 4 and drove to the BART station in Freemont. There's a BART station in Concord and they had free shuttles running to the pavilion where the concert was. The one problem with the shuttles were they apparently only left after a BART train arrived. After we got to Concord, we grabbed some food from Burger King and then got on the shuttle. Unfortunately, it waited at least 15 minutes before leaving, so we ended up missing one or two of Ben's songs, so that kind of sucked. We were really surprised there wasn't an opening band. The one cool part about coming in late is that just as we were walking in Ben said "And this next song you can get on the iTunes Music Store."

Ben put on a great show. It was just him and a piano, like when he performed at CWRU. He's so good at getting the crowd involved. He played a couple new songs off of Speed Graphic that were quite good, so I'll need to download that from the ITMS here soon. He also played Brick, which I don't think he played at CWRU. When he was introducing Brick, he said he hadn't played it in a long time, but he was ok with playing it now. He also did an impression of Radiohead's lead singer Thom Yorke. I think it was in reference to Thom saying a similar thing about Creep.

After Ben's set was over, we walked around for a bit. We walked past this one girl with spiky hair that looked at us and yelled "Fuck Tori Amos, YEAAAAHH." We couldn't help laughing.

There's not much to say about the Tori Amos portion of the concert. She's an excellent singer, but not much of a performer. By the time the 4th song hit, I was wondering if she was going to say anything at all to the crowd. She did talk all of twice throughout the concert. She did the whole encore thing, but most bands/artists that do that say something before the "last song", but she didn't. So she just kind of left for a few minutes and it got dark, and then she came back. Kinda strange. Even given all that, I still enjoyed her singing.

Space and Down

I decided to write down there lyrics to SoCo's new songs, Space and Down, so here they are. Classic SoCo sound and songwriting. Actually, let me take that back. I said, classic SoCo, but after thinking about it for a few minutes, I couldn't actually compare them to any of their other songs and yet there's no doubt they are SoCo songs, if that makes sense. So, it's the SoCo sound, only much more refined and so, so good.

Space

Home, is this a quiet place where you should be alone? Is this where the tortured and the troubled find their own?

I don't know, but I can tell this isn't you, your cover's blown.
Oh no, don't you dare hang up this phone.

Hey! Give me space so I can breathe.
Give me space so I can sleep.
Give me space so you can drown in this with me.

In this place, a lonely escapade in outerspace,
There's no antidote for irony.
You say that you have, when you know that you don't.
And you'll say that you care when you know that you won't.

Down

Let's get drunk you can drive us to the harbor.
Wish upon a star, but do you know what stars are?
Balls of fire burning up the black space.
Falling from the landscape.
Exploding in the face of God.

Lets get crazy, talk about our big plans,
Places that you're going, places that I haven't been.
Build my walls up, concrete castle.
Keep this kingdom free of hassle.

Yeah, yeah, yeah

*Chorus*
But are you sad?
Echo in the emptiness, all around.
But you can't change his loneliness.
Look what you found, I'm falling down.

Taste the saline rolling down your cheekbone.
Tell me that your alone.
Tell me on the telephone.
Feel your heartache,
Breaks within your chest now.
Try to get some rest now,
Sleep's not coming easy for a while, child, child.

Chorus