I enjoy listening to music immensely. I used to fancy myself a collector, and having a Tower Records employee for a roommate didn’t really help that situation. When I happened to travel to other towns I would lookup the used music shops and spends more time than I really should have flipping through CDs and vinyl. There was a brief period of time when I thought I could make a nice chunk of change going around buying up rarities and selling them online. This was, of course, before the days of eBay, Amazon, and every other interweb outlet for used music. To further carbon date myself, CDNow still existed and had a telnet interface. Normally this is when I would yell at the kids to get off my internet and then regale them with stories about how we used to have modems and resumable downloads with Z-Term.
But, I digress…as I am want to do.
My intake of new music has certainly slowed down. As with all people growing older, I attribute this to the crop of bands “today” being mostly crap. Luckily for me, this is a timeless truth. So now even when I venture into the realm of “new” music, it almost has to pass a litmus test of sounding vaguely like a band that I already like. As a for instance, Joy Division leads me to Interpol, which in turns leads me to the Editors. Unfortunately, none of these bands had an album release in 2008 (Joy Division “Best Of” doesn’t count, Interpol’s Our Love to Admire and Editors’ An End Has A Start were both 2007).
The good news is that technology is getting close to that point where it almost seems like magic. I use the soundamus service to find new releases based on music that I already like. It takes the bands that I’ve told last.fm that I like/listen to and runs that through Amazon to give me a calendar of releases that I’m probably going to be interested in, be it bands I already listen to or ones that Amazon thinks I’ll like. This is incredibly cool, even when it only tells me about bands I already like (see: Oasis, James, Flogging Molly, The Killers, etc.)
The following list are the albums that I bought in 2008. Yes, I know that 2008 isn’t over yet, but my soundamus calendar tells me that there aren’t any interesting releases (not counting singles or EPs) coming out in December. This isn’t a review and they aren’t ranked, although I hope to write more about the music of 2008 that I really liked next month. The band links are to last.fm pages and the album links are to Amazon MP3, with the lone exception of Chinese Democracy.
- Bloc Party - Intimacy
- Bomb The Bass - Future Chaos
- The Charlatans - You Cross My Path
- Flogging Molly - Float
- Gnarls Barkley - The Odd Couple
- Guns N’ Roses - Chinese Democracy (iTunes)
- James - Hey Ma
- Kaiser Chiefs - Off With Their Heads
- Keane - Perfect Symmetry
- The Killers - Day & Age
- KMFDM - Brimborium
- The Kooks - Konk
- Ladytron - Velocifero
- Meat Beat Manifesto - Autoimmune
- Moby - Last Night
- Nine Inch Nails - Ghosts I-IV
- Nine Inch Nails - The Slip
- Oasis - Dig Out Your Soul
- Ok Go & Bonerama - You’re Not ALone
- The Raconteurs - Consolers Of The Lonely
- Thievery Corporation - Radio Retaliation
- The Ting Tings - We Started Nothing
- TV On The Radio - Dear Science
- Vampire Weekend - Vampire Weekend
- The Verve - Forth
- We Are Scientists - Brain Thrust Mastery
- Weezer - Weezer (Red Album)
So, there it is.
The short version:
The house got finished in April and I haven't bothered to update this site. Let's just say the backyard doesn't look like this anymore.
It was a pretty scary way to start the day.
Kat was in bed when the tree came crashing in. She got a bump on her head and on he knee, but that was all. Oh, and the scare of her life — and mine.
Offers of assistance have come flooding in, and for that we will be eternally grateful.
We are in a holding pattern right now as nothing can really be done until the tree is completely removed from the house, and that will hopefully happen tomorrow. Then the “fun” will begin. I’ll try and keep the progress updates coming. But you can count on updates on Flickr and Twitter.
It’s been a very quiet year on Vertical Hold. For those that only know me or follow my adventures via this site it must have seemed like 2007 was a year of quiet introspection, or something. Not really.
Movable Type is a good platform for writing. I just don’t do a whole lot of writing these days. I think that I should, but when I take time to sit down and try and say something, the ideas evaporate. I also feel that I have nothing original to add. There are 18 quadtrillion sites out there saying things. I’m sure at least one of them covered what I was going to say.
Maybe 2007 is the year I concede defeat. I am not an information producer, only a consumer.
The year was good for making new friends and strengthening bonds with existing friends. For that, I’m very grateful.
I hope it was a good year for you as well. Here’s to making 2008 even better. /drinks
Here at Pat and Kat central we try to be sustainable. We recycle, although not as thorough as some. We try to keep energy consumption down, although not as much as others. The point is that we try to do the right thing.
The other day our cheap-o Panasonic DVD player stopped working. The power light would blink and that was it. No eject. No nothing. Just blinking. Less than optimal for a DVD player. The good news is that if you google for the model and the problem you find out that you have a blown capacitor. If you, or a good friend, have a soldiering iron, you are about $0.10 away from fixing your DVD player and saving some space in a landfill.
The good news is that our DVD player is fixed. The bad news is that I bet a lot of these relatively easy to fix problems are going unfixed due to the disposable nature of electronics today.
At one point, McCain promised if elected to hold weekly televised briefings to the nation on Iraq as long as there are U.S. combat troops there, “even if only C-SPAN carries it.”
That may not rank with Dwight D. Eisenhower’s pledge to go to Korea to end that war. But it does underline McCain’s determination to break with what he repeatedly described as “four years of failed strategy” in Iraq by the Bush administration. He believes that the 2007 “surge” tactics long resisted by Bush have put Iraq in position to achieve a modest goal of no longer being “a killing ground for young Americans.” As a decorated war hero, McCain has the credibility to settle for modest goals that a New York mayor, or a Texas governor, might not have.
Jim Hoagland
Republican Role Reversal
The Washington Post
Senator and Republican presidential candidate John McCain reiterated his support for the war in Iraq on Monday when he spoke to a crowd of about 200 at Blackstone’s Café in downtown Beaufort.
“Despite what you may see from other sources, we are winning in Iraq,” he said.
McCain: ‘We are winning in Iraq’
Jeremy Hsieh
The Beaufort Gazette
Mark Pilgrim used to like helping people. Then Movable Type pissed him off and he went to Wordpress, and the world went on without any general acknowledgement of the event. Then Apple pissed him off, and he eventually made his way to Ubuntu, and the world went on without any general acknowledgement of the event. Then OS X Leopard (10.5) came out and a bunch of people like it, bought it, installed it, and the world…you get the idea.
Mark thought these people were fucking stupid. Hell, he was using Ubuntu and it worked for him. He had his Freedom 0 and that’s all that mattered. What more could anybody want? He even made a video once using Ubuntu and it had captions! Mark was still confused at how people could like getting fucked by companies so much.
Then one day Dan Benjamin wrote a guide on how to compile and install MySQL on 10.5 just in case they couldn’t wait for the official installer from MySQL. Mark seemed to think that anybody who needed that guide was fucking stupid. Only stupid people compile software these days! Even though compiling software is probably part of Freedom 0, you shouldn’t do it because you’re fucking stupid. At least, that’s the impression I get from Mark. I think you’re awesome and amazingly intelligent. Even if you do like paying for an operating system that makes it hard to make movies with captions.
I wonder if too many people threw rocks at Mark when he used to help people? Maybe Steve Jobs kicked his puppy?
