Category — Music

The amazing Chase Jarvis posted this video by Guy Ritchie as a nod toward point-of-view (POV) photography (he had a version off of YouTube, but this one seems of better quality). 

It especially hits home since my son and I have been playing FIFA World Cup 2006 on the XBox 360 every night this week (and keep getting handily beat by the computer - even stacking the deck by playing Brazil vs. Angola).

In case you’re wondering, the song in the video is “Don’t Speak (I Came To Make a Bang)” by Eagles of Death Metal.

There is a super high res version on Nike’s site.

UPDATE: Nike posted a longer version of the video earlier today.  Even better!

I was down at WMSE today during the lunch hour to help out a bit on the spring membership drive. I haven’t been on the air in probably 12-13 years and it brought back some memories. The station manager and I talked about the new website and all the new great content being published there.  I just got word from our video guys at About Face Media and the 50th band will be up on the video player within the next day.

If you’re a Milwaukee person and listen to WMSE, head to the website and throw them a few bones. If you’re not, tune in to the stream for a while.  The mix is eclectic and if you don’t like what you hear, wait a bit - shows turn over every three hours.

I think I’d heard about Amazon’s MP3 store a while ago (I know it is not a new service), but a co-worker was talking about it at lunch today. I had a pause in my work today and decided to check it out. I have to say that they’ve nailed the buying experience - I didn’t think anyone could beat Apple money extraction system that is iTMS, but they did it.

You install a little down loader app and then when you check out, the browser downloads an AMZ file which kicks off the the down loader.  You can tell the download where to put downloaded files and it will nicely add them to iTunes or Windows Media Play for you.

The process sort of goes like:

• See an album you’re interested in.
• Listen to the previews
• “Wow, that’s cool”  - click -
• You are now $9 poorer and one album richer
• Repeat

Those that knew me in college know I had a pretty bad music habit. Tom Crawford and I used to joke that while some people got addicted to drugs and alcohol, we had a serious music addiction.  We’d be jonzing for the latest Cargo fax of all the cool dance imports from Europe and elsewhere that the owner of Rushmor Records was kind enough to give Tom fresh off the fax machine.  During his Monday afternoon show we’d poor over it and order way too much stuff.

I distinctly remember a trip to Chicago for the day where Reckless Records, Gramaphone, and Dr. Wax (which I think is closed now) took several hundred dollars of my college student money.

I suppose if we were snorting 8-balls of coke every week, there’d be less to show for it.  Besides my health, I for have several containers of CD’s in my basement (they’ve long been digitized) along with a healthy crate of vinyl (that I want to digitized but lack a turntable). My liver can handle that.

Nonetheless, iTunes Music Store has always been pretty cool, but the DRM there has made me hesitate to buy anything.  Amazon just greased the wheels a little and now I’m having to muster massive amounts of willpower not to go on a huge music buying bender. Here’s hoping I stay on the wagon.

If you’re a fan of WMSE and been frustrated that you haven’t been able to download archives of you favorite shows, I’ve got good news for you, the Archives are fixed! (Said with my fingers crossed.) 

Ever since the launch of the new site, the station had been getting sporadic reports of errors on the archive page. None of the station staff could reproduce the error and neither could I. If you know anything about software development, it is short of impossible to fix a bug if you can’t reproduce it.

The constant stream of emails to the station told us the problem was very real. Then the school informed us they were going to be upgrading to PHP5 on the server, they setup a new environment and told us to test. Sure enough the archives didn’t work under PHP5. At least now I could reproduce a problem and I hoped solving it would solve the other problem.

Since maintaining the site is not my day job, I have do any work after my kids go to bed. I spend most of the night last Monday re-writing the page from scratch, and ultimately got it to work. I wish I could say I knew exactly what it was, but my grasp of PHP is very small. The only thing I saw out of the ordinary was a call to a Postgres database being made using some deprecated API calls. Given the actual code was several years old, I wasn’t too surprised.

Even with that fixed, I really can’t wait to get the site onto a proper CMS. The staff at the station have a ton of ideas for the site and while the new site looks great, it still isn’t flexible enough to take them where they want to go. We’ll get there eventually, but at least for now you can get at all the great shows in the archive.

Update - The state of the site is a bit in flux right now, and my announcement may have been a bit premature. Sorry for the confusion

I dropped my son off at school today. Normally I leave for work too early to do so, but I had time this morning.  On the way I was flipping through channels on XM in the car and he yelled "lets listen to this!" when I turned on XMU (the indie/college rock station).  I’ve taken pride in exposing him to music outside of the "children’s" genre and the fact that one of his favorite songs is by The New Pornographers ("Testament to Youth in Verse") is somewhat a point of pride. I think there was a Shins song on, then a break where they mentioned that channel 59 was now all Led Zeppelin.  No! Way! Asked him if he wanted to get the Led out and got no complaint.  I love my XM radio*.

I hate to admit it, but Led Zeppelin is definitely a guilty pleasure.  I’m not the type who’d be rocking out to it from the comfort of my Monte Carlo (or Camero) , nor do I have velvet blacklight posters at home, but Led Zeppelin serious kicks ass. My guess is the station is tied to an overall rise in Zep marketing - they’re doing a big reunion concert in London and re-releasing all of their recordings as a huge box set.

[* First one to leave a comment telling me how much better Sirus is since they have Howard Stern gets a boot to the head.  Why people want to listened to some dude tell a joke, then laugh at himself, or worse, have five others laugh with him for 30min before the next joke baffles me.]

The iTunes Repair Tool for Vista did the trick.  My four year old can bask in Curious George Soundtrack goodness again as well as “Testment to Youth in Verse” (better know to him as “The Bells Song”) by The New Pornographers.

I confirm the reports that iTunes doesn’t fully work on Vista. None of my iTMS purchased music works. iTunes will request that the computer be authorized, says that authorization was successful, then not play the track. This has caused a bit of friction in the household since I purchased the soundtrack to Curious George off of iTunes and my four year insists on listening to it.

I don’t get why Apple isn’t ahead of this. Granted they are probably not the biggest fans of Vista, but it’s not like they haven’t had the final Vista bits in their hands for months. Yeah, Vista just shipped to consumers last week, but it has been in the hands of corporations and more to the point, developers, since November. I’d assume that Apple has at least one MSDN subscription for the iTunes team. I really wonder if they let iTunes fall on its face to try and make Vista look bad (keyword being ‘try’). Shame on Apple for this one.

Update: Lifehacker just posted a link to a utlity to supposedly fix your library. I’ll definitely have to give that a shot tonight.

Update #2: It worked.