pocketsnacks

Song lyric of the day:
“Strange how you never become,
the person you see when you’re young.”
Where Would We Be
Porcupine Tree
Lightbulb Sun

Not that anyone even glances at this blog, but what the hell. I’ll post it anyways.
I’m VJing tonight (as Lux Lucidus) at Space Gallery in San Francisco.

Come check it out!

Saturday March 28, 2009
8:00pm - 1:00am

Space Gallery
1141 Polk St.
San Francisco, California 94109

It is March, slightly past the half-way point till the playa, and we have started the ball rolling on Burning Man prep.
This past weekend, former roomie and co-burner, Agent37 and I busted into our storage space, and dug out two solar panels, three gigantic heavy-ass deep cycle batteries, various wire n electronic bits and my sorry looking, dusty rusty squeeky floppy tire playa bike, and got them back to my warehouse.

The batteries need to be reconditioned, which means charging them and draining them, over and over for a long period of time, until the all drain and charge together like one big happy battery… or something like that. So we are going to have to mount a panel here at Cyclone and get em going soon.

In addition, tonight I got to go over to see the cool new-ish apartment that Agent37 and his second in command, Comptroller Jugz, live in (in Noe Valley at the top and opposite end of the exact same block we first lived in SF!) and talk and plan for all things Burning Man.
As usual we have much to do, but it is not too daunting and we are not taking on any major new projects. Mainly just repairs and a few minor upgrades. I think we have it fairly under control… if anything the main part we are lacking this year is people. I think are camp may be the smallest it has ever been. Right now it is the 3 of us, plus Mr. Jason… we may have a few stragglers breaking off from Fandango, but that is not a for sure.

After taking a year off, I am looking forward to it for sure. I am excited to do the radio station again…
If you want you can check some of our on-air antics that we recorded in 2007 and 2006. 99.1 FM The BRBC

Recently I have found myself in that awesome position of really digging into some new (at least for my ears) music. I think it sort of started with my over listening to Tripswitch’s Circuit Breaker album, which I still think is just the friggin’ bomb. Anyhow, that kind set my mood for more down tempo leaning stuff than I had been listening too.

That I think led me back to Ulrich Schnauss , who I have been a fan of for a few years now, but never really got sucked into.

Well… I inhaled deeply.

And, man it is some good shit. I even went so far as to BUY some of his CD’s online. I do realize I am some sort of freak for actually doing that, but good music made by good people on small labels deserve our money. (Oh and I was also able to find Circuit Breaker as well. Got it too)

Sticking Ulrich Schnauss into the last.fm player also got me to discover Abfahrt Hinwil and their album Links Berge Rechts Seen.

They are on the Toytronic label, which my friend mr. projectile used to be on as well.

Their music is much more idm/minimal than the other stuff I have been listening too, but still pretty nice.

And then lastly, mr. projectile shared with me a link to a song on Jon Hopkins website, and I was immediately hooked and proceeded to buy his two albums fro his labels (Just Music) site the next day.

And wow… They are great. Simply brilliant stuff. Just tasty as hell. It’s one of those discoveries where you are almost happy you never heard it before, because here it is all new for you to take in.
Contact Note and Opalescent are just amazing. Go buy them now! I will wait…

Oh and if that weren’t enough, Jon Hopkins is going to be performing live in San Francisco on March 21st @ Mezzanine with Four Tet!

I gotta say, last.fm is the shit. It continues to turn me on to new music and keep me mindful of artists I like who are performing near me.

And finally, two of those CD’s I got came from Juno Records.
They are a great online CD store for electronic music and they are FAST. I order two discs on monday night, from England, and they showed up here, in San Francisco CA, USA, on thursday the same week. WTF!? Yes i paid for the FedEx shipping, but it was only like 3 bucks more… but DAMN that is fast.

I have waited for seemingly years for some one to write a decent note taking application. I used to email myself notes, web links, task lists, pictures, whatever… from one computer to another, just so I had a digital copy of some scrap of info for later retrieval. It was a pretty crap system at best.

I tried things like 37signals Backpack and Remember The Milk, but neither really did what I wanted and just seemed a bit too confusing for a note taking, task list system. So I never stuck with them.

The along came google notebook. While not the most sleek interface, it certainly did the trick. It was just a nice simple typical google web interface to plop information and link. It also had a  browser extension to make things easier. I used it quite a bit, but then along came Evernote.

Evernote is pretty much perfect. You can have unlimited different “notebooks” and within those, as many notes as you want. A note can be a link, or something written, or a snippet from a web page (text, images, or a whole chunk of a page). You can get stuff in there via email, or a txt message, or iPhone (or other mobile thingies). There is an awesome iPhoine app, a standalone app, and a browser interface. All pretty great. Oh and it does text recignition in images! Damn! When google announced they were stopping development on notebook, a flood of people when to Evernote, and within weeks, Evernote made a tool to import your stuff from google notebook.

Now although I love Evernote, it is a bit overkill for somethings, like just a simple link and possibly a map link you want to have access to mobily. This is where Shifd comes in!
Shifd is a super simple, minimal and clean system for basic notes, links and places. You cannot upload images or anything like that, but that’s not what it is for.
I have found it very handy for just getting a link to something I see at work, to me at home later.
I have also used it to for googlemap links and addresses for when I am heading out somewhere new.
Honestly there is nothig shitd.com does that Evernote doesn’t, but it’s simplicity lends its to be very useful in it’s own way.

This long rambling post really just reveals that I am still a pack-rat, even in the digital sense. I seem to like to keep little bits of things orbiting thru my universe, at arms reach.

I have a new idea on how to use this blog better and here it is.

This will be the dumping ground, if you will. The spot to post things posted elsewhere, be they tribe.net, last.fm, livejournal and even possibly stuff posted to luxlucidus.com. Not that there is anyone reading any of that stuff when it is posted to those various places, but I figure maybe one common place is that way to go.

Now if I could only figure how to automate that process better, so things cross-post on their own. I’m not the type of mind that can make that stuff happen, but I certainly can flesh out the idea.

Anyhow… It is yet another idea to attempt. Here goes!

Here is one of those things floating around (often called a meme) called “Random Album”.

Follow a few links, follow the instructions, put it all together and you have an album cover. The one I got is pretty weird looking, but seems quite plausible.

Make It Good - Know When You

Oh, and here is where it al came from:
And here is what I got for answers:

Band Name:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_It_Good

Album title (full quote):
“Doing nothing is very hard to do … you never know when you’re finished.” - Leslie Nielsen (1926 - )

and then the album art:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/34219144@N08/3285934822/

The photo is just some weird combo of fake, cute, creepy, and then the eyes remind me of weird fish flesh or gollum or who knows what…

so yeah… there is my album.

There is a site called “8tracks” that lets you upload mp3’s and the assemble them into an 8 track mix. Kind of like one side of a mix-tape*, which is no doubt a historically brief art form which has been mostly lost and replaced with mix CD’s (not the same at all) and play lists. Personally I don’t do the play list thing much.

So this is just a few tracks, uploaded and arranged, that I thought I would use to test this thing.

*I think one of the great aspect of a mix-tape over a CD (or playlist) is the fact that you get two sides. You get to come up with an opening track for both sides, as well as a closer for both. And if you were into the art the the mix-tape, then you understand how important it can be to seek out and place the right songs there.

I have been using last.fm since about april of 2005. So for almost 4 years it has been tracking what I listen to, making charts based on that, as well as recommending me new bands, finding neighbors with similar musical tastes, and also creating a number of radio stations for me, based on my listening habits, tracks I have “liked”, etc.  I know lot of people use Pandora, which I did try out way back when it was new, but I just didn’t like what it spewed out at me, plus I just really dig having my own personal charts made out of what I listen to.

Anyhow, the point of this blurp was that recently last.fm held a hack day to see what developers could build in a day using last.fm’s api. One of the cool ones to come out of it was something called songcolours which analyzes your charts and spits out a colored pie graph, a phrase and some songs, broken down by color.

Honestly I have no idea what it all represents, but I found it cool. My phrase was “sky lucy diamonds world river sun”. Admittedly I have been listening to various versions of “Lucy in The Sky With Diamonds” recently.

I assume this with change as newer songs get into my charts, but here is mine.

It has been two years since being back in Minnesota, and now I have returned.
I didn’t intent to stay away for so long, but I was broke last Xmas, in the middle of a desperate job hunt and for some other silly reasons, ended up not going home and not spending the holidays with my family for the first time in my life!
I don’t intend to make that a habit.
Quite the opposite. Family is awesome and important and I don’t keep in touch with mine as well as I should.

Ok. And now some photos from my iPhone!
For some reason, the color on them looks a bit washed and makes them seem like some polaroid from the 70’s, but I am cool with that.

Snowy runway:

Plane to plane:

Frozen McKusick Lake: