MP3 Updates

So I bitched a ton previously about my MP3 player troubles. Well, I may or may not have found a solution to the oddities that I was experiencing with my Gigabeat (my main MP3 player). Apparently, after reading through some forums and such, it looks like there was a firmware upgrade that was only sent out to users who called Toshiba and requested it. It took me a while to track down a downloadable version of the firmware that someone posted out in internet land, but I got it. And if you are curious and have a Toshiba 40GB Gigabeat, you can download it here. For how long, though, I do not know.

This new firmware cleans up the interface a lot and it appears, initially, to be more stable. I'm going to go running and to the gym with it this evening to see if it does the random reset that it was previously doing. I think it may have been resetting while it was trying to read the cover art for certain albums, but I'm not totally sure. Regardless, I'm hoping that the new firmware will correct a lot of the shortcomings that this player had. If not, Rockbox is working on a firmware rewrite that I'll probably upgrade to anyways once it is finished.

Labor Day Catch Up

It's been over a week since Labor Day weekend. Wow. That's nuts. Where did the last week and a half go? On a related note, how the hell are we already half way through September? I swear there has to be some sort of crazy time vortex swirling around here in Minnesota because my brain is still stuck thinking it is the end of August. Pretty soon snow will be covering the ground and I'll be blowing any extra money I have on Christmas presents for people.

Since time is going so fast, I'm going to adamantly pretend it is still Labor Day weekend and post a couple of pictures from that weekend. The first is the family, the second is Gadget the wonder dog, and the last is... me... looking like I just woke up.

First Blood - Killafornia CD Review

Terror are a powerhouse in the hardcore genre, and rightfully so, but coming along with the status of being a powerhouse is the knowledge that your band’s name is going to be attached to anything and everything even remotely related in an attempt to get exposure. This happens to be the case with First Blood, the new home of Terror’s former bassist Carl Schwartz (who also happened to be in Sworn Vengeance back in the day as well). Unlike most Victory and Trustkill stickers, the comparison to Terror is actually a very justified one, as there is more than a passing resemblance between the two bands.

Coming off as a much more metalcore oriented hardcore band than a traditional hardcore band, First Blood doesn’t lose one ounce of the hardcore attitude, gang vocals, or breakdowns that may come from the metalcore influence. Being much more concerned with rock solid riffs (see the amazing “Conspiracy”) and a visceral vocal attack than hitting the standard hardcore staple of build-up, breakdown, build-up, breakdown, First Blood actually swims up to the upper echelon of the hardcore world. True, it might be hard to pick out the cream of the crop at times because of the striking similarities between most of the bands in the hardcore genre, so it is possible I may be off in my assessment, but there is no denying that there is aggression to spare throughout Killafornia.

What makes this CD really interesting is the fact that, on disc, this is almost an entirely one man show as Carl played all of the guitars and bass on the disc, as well as doing the vocals. This guy knows how to write a hardcore song from just about every angle and it shows on this effort. Again, this comes with the caveat that hardcore isn’t exactly the most revolutionary genre and writing a hardcore song is not exactly the same as writing the next Explosions in the Sky epic.

For hardcore enthusiasts, you owe it to yourself to pick up this CD if for no other reason than to hear the one minute and fifteen second long instrumental breakdown-a-thon “Armageddon”. Seriously, this track should be the blueprint for every tough-guy hardcore song to come out in the next decade. Just add vocals to the top of the mix and you’re totally set. The other songs on here are good too, but “Armageddon” is ridiculous in its goodness. Now get your girl pants on and start spin kicking!

Iowa

I'm in Iowa for work for the next few days. Sucktastic, I know. I'm in Mason City, which is totally not near anything even close to civilization. Sure, there's a Walmart and a Best Buy and a Starbucks here, but it's all been built here in vain. There is no fooling anyone into believing that there is anything even close to interesting that will ever happen here. So I'll be in all day meetings and then, no doubt, at business dinners until later this week so posting will be light to non-existent. Deal with it. If I have to suffer through Iowa, you can suffer without anything new and lame to read.

Frightening

I like Star Trek. I like Nine Inch Nails. I found this video, which combines the two, to be disturbing, hilarious, and artistic all at once. Go see it for yourself, especially if you were ever curious as to if there was ever some not so slightly homoerotic overtones to Kirk and Spock's interactions.

Terrible MP3 Player Luck

Lately I've gone through a little bit of an MP3 player fiasco and I've managed to come out the other side losing one MP3 player, having one old one (that's the size of a small house) sitting around unused (maybe not for long), and spending $200 on two MP3 players that are frustrating the hell out of me.

If you look over to your right, you will see the Toshiba 40 GB Gigabeat MP3 player that I recently purchased to replace my old RCA Lyra 40 GB which was getting a little long in the tooth and I was getting sick of running with a 2 pound, oversized brick in my hands. The Gigabeat is about the size of a 30 GB iPod and about as light, but it only cost me $160, which is about half of what a 30 gig iPod would have cost me.

The interface is intuitive. The shuffle algorithm is decent. The screen is great. The dock works perfectly. The battery life is so-so (about 4-6 hours on a full charge). All in all I thought it was a wonderful MP3 player... except for one small snag--it resets all the time.

Without fail, about once a run the Gigabeat stops playing and resets itself. In doing so, all of my settings (backlight time off, the time, play mode, volume, equalizer, etc.) are lost. I'm stuck waiting for it to boot back up, then I go through the setup screens (quickly), set the play mode to shuffle, and get back to listening. It is utterly frustrating to hear the music cut out and then go through this stupid process at least once a run.

I don't know if it is because it doesn't like how my MP3s are ripped or if somehow there's something corrupted or what, but there seems to be no rhyme or reason as to when it'll quit. I've been toying about going back to the old MP3 player, but I don't want to haul that huge thing around. But then I'm stuck with the Gigabeat that randomly quits on me. It's a lose-lose situation.

Now besides listening to music I also listen to audiobooks and have had a separate MP3 player dedicated to listening to audiobooks. I used a small Creative Zen 128 MB player in the past and it worked ok. It doesn't support Audible format so I'd have to convert the Audible files to MP3 first, but it worked out ok. Somehow, however, I lost it so I needed to get a new player. Being cheap and knowing I'd only use this MP3 player for audiobooks, I just looked for the cheapest Audible compatible player and picked up the RCA Lyra you see to the left.

When I got it and put on my first audiobook, I sadly found out that it doesn't have a resume feature. Considering audiobooks are anywhere from 3 to 8 hours long in most cases, or at least the pieces you get from Audible are, it's totally inconvenient to start playing from the beginning each time you turn it on. I'll have to get used to the fast forward button and remembering exactly what time I was at because I'm going to be doing a lot of it. Lame.

I suppose since most Audible books are broken into 3-10 pieces, I could just block out big time chunks for listening to books instead of the usual 15-20 minutes that I would on the bus or walking. It's just so damn frustrating, but I guess that's what I get for picking up a $30 MP3 player for this.

It makes me wonder a little bit as to if I should have just spent the extra money and bought an iPod despite my hate for them. I despise iTunes. I hate the fact that iPods keep their firmware on the hard drive instead of a separate chip. The iPod shuffle algorithm blows. Despite these things, however, from what I've seen iPods at least work and have the features I want. I guess maybe this is what I deserve for trying to buck the mainstream. Stupid Rick, I know.

The Static Age - Blank Screens CD Review

You know all of those Joy Division, Depeche Mode, The Police and mid-career David Bowie albums you have sitting around your house? You know how you love them to death, but you wished that the songs didn’t sound quite so cheesy at times? Yeah, admit it, you know the songs are great, but at times the cheese factor of the 80’s ended up overriding the positive qualities of some of the songs. Wouldn’t it be nice if, somehow, you could get those albums de-cheese-ified so that they sounded a lot more modern? The kick ass songs would be so much more kick ass and the blah songs would actually be good. Obviously this isn’t going to ever happen, but in place of cheese-less reissues, you can listen to Blank Screens, the sophomore effort from The Static Age.

Listening to the beautiful, yet melancholy, first three tracks of the album will bring back all of the feelings you had when you first started listening to New Order and The Cure back when you were a kid. And if you’re too young to remember who the heck they are, imagine the glam oriented songs from AFI’s Decemberunderground slowed down to a crawl and the volume turned from 10 to 7. Or, hell, I’d hope you’d have heard of The Killers and can imagine them with more synth, less tempo, and five times more talent in the songwriting department.

The album loses a little steam in the middle, however, as the pace starts to pick up, but thankfully the lyrics still deal with longing for love, failed romantic endeavors, and pining for meaning in this horrible world so you won’t feel bad lying on your bed, alone in your room, crying about how your friends don’t understand you and how you wish that cute goth chick from bio class would just give you a chance because you know you’d treat her like a queen.

Actually, it’s probably a good thing that “Trauma” and “Cherry Red” have a more post-dance-punk (yeah, that's right, I just said post-dance-punk) with a synth feel to them so that there is at least a little upbeat energy to be found on this album, or else you'd feel overwhelmingly suicidal by the time you’re done listening to the entire album. Truth be told, though, that ability to make you feel good about suicide is the beauty of this CD -– much like modern melancholic pseudo-indie movies such as Garden State, Closer, or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind you find yourself feeling tragically good about the characters. It is this sense of tragic happiness that you feel emanating in waves from Blank Screens.

How often do you find a good new wave, post-punk, emotionally charged band in today’s metalcore and pop-punk dominated scene? Not very often, if at all, which makes this release so much more important than your usual run of the mill garbage being churned out on a daily basis. So go grab your mascara and get into the mellow beauty of The Static Age.

I'm Moving to Vermont

You want to know how you can get more people to move to your state? Just let people run around naked. Vermont just recently shot down a ban on public nudity which continues to make it just fine to be topless, bottomless, or just plain ol' nekkid wherever and whenever you want. Sure, some towns may have banned nudity, but you just don't go visit those towns.

So who wants to take a trip to Vermont with me?

I Need Another Long Weekend

Four day work weeks totally rule!  

Well, unless you work for an international company and the people you work with on a daily basis are internationally based and the reason you have a four day work week is because of a US specific holiday... then you just have double the amount of work to do on Tuesday.  You pretty much get everything that came in on Monday along with whatever comes in on Tuesday all to do in the 8 or so hours of Tuesday.  So, yes, today has been busy, but not too busy to take a quick break to type away at something not work related (I needed a break lest my brain explode and cover my office's pristine walls with sticky, goopy brain matter).

At least my weekend was a good one.  Like most people it was time to spend with family, so I headed home to my parents' place to spend Saturday and Sunday.  Unfortunately Mother Nature decided to let the rain flow on Saturday making for a somewhat uneventful day.  Although my family did discover the awesomeness of the game Apples to Apples.  We successfully blew away countless hours playing it and sharing countless laughs, mostly at our ability to find totally offensive or totally mismatched adjective and noun combinations.

There was also a bon fire and fireworks on Sunday night to celebrate having the family all together.  It doesn't happen as often any more with my living in the Minneapolis area, my brother Randy being in Boise for his internship, now going to Ames for his final college semester, and then moving back out to Boise for a job, and then there's little (or not so little) Ryan heading into his senior year of high school so he'll be heading out of my parents' house before they know it as well.  

So I hope everyone else out there in cyberspace-land that somehow stumbled across, or routinely stumble across, this site had a good long weekend.  I'm playing catch up today, but it sure was good to have that extra time off.

See Ya Later, Fourth Rail

One of the few comics reviews sites that I read... well, actually come to think of it, the only comics reviews site I read, has decided to close up shop after a solid five year run. The Fourth Rail was alwasy an interesting place to visit as I found that my tastes often times lined up with both reviewers there. Sadly, their reviews never really made me go out to buy a new series, since I pre-order everything, but it would often validate some of my picks that I'd make on a whim, usually based on nothing more than looking at a quick preview, noting the artist or writer on a title, or wanting to give a certain concept a chance.

The thing I enjoyed about The Fourth Rail most, however, was their overview of each month's Previews catalog. For those outside of the comics world, this was a massive 500+ page catalog that came out monthly that listed everything that would be coming out in 2 months time. I would then pre-order from this catalog, using DCBService, to save myself on average about 35% off of what cover price.

The Fourth Rail would go through the catalog and point out things that should be of notice. Many times, these would be graphic novels or comic series that I would have passed over if nothing would have been mentioned. It helped turn me onto a lot of interesting books so it'll be sad to see it go.

So if you know of any good comics reviews sites or anyone else that does a Previews overview type thing each month, let me know because I have an open bookmarks slot in Opera (that's right, I switched from Firefox to Opera - go me!)