Beer, Music, and Hifi

After having a nice meal of Trader Joe's mexican food, I have proceeded to polish off a 750ml bottle of Good Beer. At 8.5% ABV, it's a bit like drinking a whole bottle of wine.

Given my warm fuzzy state, I decided to listen to some new music. I picked up the new Shins album this week and I've been liking it quite a bit, it will probably be up there with their previous ones, maybe even better. As I was listening to Phantom Limb today at work something about his voice really struck me. Holy crap, this song sounds exactly like a Beach Boys song. Brian Wilson could do a cover and you would be hard to pressed to tell them apart. Maybe that's why I like their stuff more than a lot of other recent bands with similar sounds. I challenge you to listen to Pet Sounds along side Phantom Limb or Turn on me and tell me they're not the same. Reading a few reviews online after listening to it, I'm not alone in that thought.

Since it's late and Molly would probably wake up if I played the CD on the stereo downstairs, I'm here at the table with my headphones. These days I don't use my headphones much, which I think I miss sometimes. They give a really interesting nuanced representation of things, much different than either my Tannoys at work (very controlled, very acurate, not very interesting) and my JBLs at home (huge, booming, peel-back-the-carpet sound.) I prefer the JBLs' sound because it's much more musical and recreates a big sound better, although I rarely get to listen to them at a volume that does them justice. I remember sitting in Matt Morgan's basement listening to Pearl Jam tracks on his JBL 4343s backed by 400W of Mcintosh power, and that is what I want to hear downstairs on mine. The headphones give a beautiful sound up until about 50% of the peak volume I like. You can hear every breath and finger on a guitar string, but when you start to turn it up you can't feel the music. The headphones run out of stream, there's no substitute for a couple big 12" drivers actually pushing air around.

With that, I'm going to get some rest.

Night Photos from Lake Chelan

Two photos from our trip to Chelan:


Canon 20D with Canon EF-S 17-85mm (@ 26mm), 30 seconds @ f/6.0, ISO 1600.


Canon 20D with Canon 50mm f/1.8, 20 seconds @ f/2.0, ISO 800.

Might not look too impressive, but if you were there and looked up in that direction you would have seen pitch black. Even after my eyes had adjusted to the dark I couldn't make out even an outline of the mountain. All the light is from the lights of the city, 1500 feet below. I think I'm going to be rather addicted to night photography, I just wish there wasn't so much light from the city here in Seattle.

Hey Look! A Blog!

Figured it was a good time to start my own personal blog, since there are a number of things I wanted to write about that don't fit on MacMojo, or elsewhere.

Lets start off with a music project I'm working on. Rolling stone did a list of the Top 500 Albums of all time in 2003. I agree with just about all their selections, it's a pretty definitive list that spans all of the genres I would care about. Being a huge Beatles fan, I already own a whole bunch of the top 25, and altogether I probably have about 25-30% of the top 100. I think that's far too small of a number, so I'm going to make an effort to get every single one of the top 100 list. As time/money allows, I'll try to get all 500, but that could be long quest. I'm tracking my effort on a spreadsheet (of course) but the only copy of it is on my machine at work, for now. Once I get ahold of that, I can get an actual count.

I had a $20 Amazon gift card, so I took care of a few on the list, picking up #2, 6, and 13: Pet Sounds, What's Going On, and Velvet Underground and Nico. I thought I had Pet Sounds already, but I couldn't find it anywhere. So for the gift card + $10, I knocked a few off the list.

I decided to rip them all using AIFF, for a couple reasons. 1) This is the greatest music ever recorded, so whatever I used had to be lossless. 2) I've been burned a few times by using proprietary lossless formats, so Apple Lossless was right out. AIFF is obviously inefficient, but at least I know I will always be able to access it. I'm going to re-rip any of the other Top 500 albums I already have the same way once I get around to it.

The next 5 albums on my list to get will be a few from artists that I don't own much of yet:#11, 15, 38, 45, and 95: The Sun Sessions, Elvis Presley; Are You Experienced?, The Jimi Hendrix Experience; The Anthology, 1947 - 1972, Muddy Waters; The Band, The Band; and Green River, Creedence Clearwater Revival.

EDIT: I created an amazon list with a few of the top 100 Here

Thanks for reading! More to come on Mac/Microsoft stuff, car parts, music, antiques, and much much more!