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We're heading out today for our trip down under. More than anything, I think I'm looking forward to riding a kangaroo around Sydney. Hopefully I'll get a chance to put some pictures up on Flickr while I'm away, but if I don't then it probably means that I'm busy not being busy. I'll talk to ya' when I get back.
*You can thank or blame her for the pun in the title.
Jerad posted this in Travel | Comments (1)
Jerad posted this in | Comments (1)
Right now I'm listening to one of my iTunes playlists in my living room. iTunes is running on my MacBook Pro in the study and the music is living on a hard drive connected to my Airport Extreme on the other side of the room. The music is being streamed into my home theater system through my Airport Express. The coolest part is that I'm controlling the whole thing while sitting on my couch far from my laptop. I can just tap a few buttons on my iPhone to go from song to song, and can browse my entire music library thanks to Signal. I'm just using the demo version for now. I might wait for some updates before I decide to shell out $30, but damn this is cool. I've basically set up a whole-house audio system controlled from a remote that I can use anywhere. There are some other applications that can do similar things, so I might give them a try soon.
Jerad posted this in iPhone | Comments (3)
Yeah, so I got one. I don't need to flood the internet with any more stories about how great it is, but this really is the best piece of tech I've ever used. And this is just version 1.0. Once the software upgrades and enhancements start rolling in, it'll be really fun to see how it evolves.
Anyhow, I discovered a feature while surfing around in Safari this morning. I went to Google Documents to see how well they work on the iPhone, since that site became an indispensible storehouse of all of my wedding planning information a few months ago. Apparently Google Docs is supposed to work on the iPhone, but at this point I can just view, but not edit, the docs in their standard view. Apparently Safari 2 (not specifically iPhone) is not supported by Google Docs, but it works well in version 3. So, I tried the "Edit HTML" tab in a document and found that I can type and edit there. The "wow" feature that I found here relates to moving around the document. As anyone who has a recent Apple laptop knows, you can use the trackpad with two fingers to scroll around the page or document that you're in. Out of habit, I dropped two fingers onto the iPhone screen and saw that it started to do the same thing in the editing window! This isn't just the standard drag-and-scroll on the iPhone, though. One-finger scrolling moves around the entire page, but two-finger motions just move the text within the HTML editing window on the page.
Now I don't assume that this is a Google Docs-specific feature, but it's just the first webpage where I've seen it work. Come to think of it, I could probably do this same thing within my Movable Type window if I were typing this post on the iPhone now. I plan also to submit this tip over at iphonehints, so hopefully a few more people will see it.
Jerad posted this in iPhone | Comments (0)
I'm writing this on an iphone in the Burlington Apple store. I promised my wife that I'm not buying one today but that might be the only thing keeping me from it.
Jerad posted this in Tech | Comments (1)
What's a good five-night rehearsal in Dublin without taking some time to over-analyze what was played? R.E.M.'s Open Rehearsals last week really seem to have gotten the fans pretty excited about the band again. After the first night, when I heard them playing a bunch of "olive branches," or old songs that us die-hard fans would love to hear, I was wondering how long it had been since they'd played some of these. I knew that many of these definitely hadn't been played since the 80's, but I wasn't sure if we were talking the Green Tour in '89 or some club in North Carolina in '84.
So, I headed over to the R.E.M. Timeline to figure this out for myself. Using the information there, I figured out that of the 28 old songs that they played, eight of these hadn't been performed since the 1980s. The one that had been dormant the longest is the one non-album song that they played, "Romance," which hasn't been played since 1983, right after Murmur was released. Out of all of these songs, I think I've only seen them play eight or nine of them, so I was pretty excited to hear what they played the first two nights and download the other three. Some other things that I discovered while researching this are:
Without any further commentary, here's the list, from "Romance" to "So. Central Rain," each with the date that they were last played before last week in Dublin.
Romance 7/17/83
Kohoutek 11/2/86
Second Guessing 11/25/86
Harborcoat 11/25/87
Letter Never Sent 3/13/89
1,000,000 9/27/89
Auctioneer 11/11/89
West of the Fields 11/13/89
Circus Envy 10/21/95
Carnival of Sorts 7/6/03
Feeling Gravity's Pull 9/30/03
Little America 10/3/03
Pretty Persuasion 10/7/03
Gardening at Night 10/11/03 3/12/07, thanks Michael!
New Test Leper 3/26/05
Maps and Legends 3/31/05
Worst Joke Ever 4/6/05
Disturbance at the Heron House 6/28/05
I've Been High 7/5/05
Welcome to the Occupation 7/5/05
Driver 8 7/6/05
These Days 7/10/05
Cuyahoga 7/16/05
Drive 7/16/05
Electrolite 7/16/05
Sitting Still 10/8/05
Wolves, Lower 10/8/05
So. Central Rain 9/12/06
Thanks to the R.E.M. Timeline and user Belisha Beacon (good Radiohead name!) who started this thread over at the Murmurs forums, which I used to confirm that my list of olive branches was complete.
Jerad posted this in Live | Comments (2)
Last week's project was to build a drill press table so that I can comfortably and more accurately use my drill press for woodworking. Having received my unfinished guitar neck from Warmoth yesterday, this means that I'm all ready to really start on my guitar.
This design was found at Bob's Plans and I just modified it to make it a bit wider. It was a pretty easy project, since I had all of the wood and MDF already, and just needed to buy the hardware (t-track and bolts). I was able to find all of this at my local Woodcraft store. Next week, it's time to start painting and finishing the Jazzuar. I'm chronicling the process in photos over at Flickr.
Jerad posted this in Woodworking | Comments (0)
Jerad posted this in Photo | Comments (0)
Jerad posted this in Photo | Comments (0)
Picking up where I just left off a few hours ago...
We left our hotel to find some dinner, but decided that we weren't actually too hungry. So, we settled for a good Irish liquid dinner before the show and just found a Thai place around the theater afterwards. It made a little difference when we arrived for today's show because we just had general admission tickets instead of balcony seats. We were in probably the first 100-150 people in line, so our spot on the floor ended up being pretty good (20-25 feet from the stage). Being downstairs really showed how small this theater was. The general admission floor area was quite small, so even someone in the very back would have a pretty good view. Also, interestingly, I noticed right away that there was a gentle slope on the floor rising towards the back. This meant that even some shorter people have a fighting chance to see over the heads of the taller people crowded up front.
R.E.M. made it on stage again around 9:15 and busted right into the same song they opened with yesterday, although I still couldn't figure out a title for it. The old songs were almost all different until the encore, so everybody who had been there the night before got a good new mix of old stuff. By a show of hands, it looked like that this was the second show for quite a few of us. The old stuff that they played tonight started with "Drive," and then (again from a fuzzy memory) "Wolves, Lower" (the song I would've requested from Scott had I thought of it!!), "Disturbance at the Heron House," "Second Guessing," "These Days," "Electrolite," "I've Been High" (a brilliant acoustic guitar/piano version)...and I feel like I'm forgetting one. Anyhow, the second time around I'm getting a better feel for the new ones. I think the best way to describe them is to look at the old songs that they've been playing...and these fit in really well. I think that it's telling that on all of the electric guitar-driven new songs (and that's most of them), Peter is playing his trusty black Rickenbacker. I guess the songs just really have a great Rickenbacker-into-overdriven-AC30 sound, and if that idea excites you then you're going to love the new album. Also, speaking of the album, someone yelled out to Michael asking when it would be out, and he just replied "We're still writing the songs!" so don't expect to see anything on the shelves soon.
Tomorrow we're leaving Dublin and heading back across the country to meet some friends in Limerick. Yes, this means that we're going to only two of the five shows here, but I'll leave it to my torrenting friends to fill in the gaps of the next three shows that I'll miss in person. Before I go to bed I'm going to get some pictures uploaded from my camera, so I'll have a lot to show on Flickr soon. I probably took over 100 photos tonight, since the theater didn't seem to mind cameras at all so I just brought in my D70 with the 18-200 VR lens. Wow, I got some great shots, especially since I was so close. Anyhow, goodnight.
Jerad posted this in Live | Comments (2)
Pour yourself a Guinness and get comfortable - this is a long one.
We're just three days into our Ireland trip and it already seems like we've been going for a week. We started in Galway on Friday, where Maura showed me around her old stomping ground. It was a fun city, but we were completely wiped out after dinner, so we just retired early and got a good night's sleep.
The next day we worked our way east across the country towards Dublin. On the way, we stopped at Clonmacnoise, the ruins of an old monastary on the banks of the Shannon river. The ruins there included three Irish high crosses, which have been brought out of the Irish rain into their own building.
After that, we got back on the narrow Irish roads (I don't think Maura liked the bushes swiping the side of the car too much), found the highway and made it to Dublin around 4:00. There were some issues with parking and finding the hotel, and the lift here is a bit creaky, but once settled in everything was fine.
At this point, it was time to explore the Temple Bar area and find something for dinner before the first show. We settled on a nice-looking Italian place and got a good table looking out on the street, which was great for people-watching. The people-watching proved to be quite good, as about five minutes after we sat down Peter Buck walked in with three girls. There was my answer to whether we'd catch any of the band wandering around while we were in town. We saw the girls later at the show sitting in one of the Statler & Waldorf boxes on the side of the stage, so they were probably relatives or some of R.E.M.'s Athens office, all of whom were there. Well, we decided that we didn't need to stalk him and wait for them to finish dinner, so we made our way over to the Olympia Theater and found ourselves sitting in the third row of the first balcony. The theater really was as small and beautiful as I'd been told - I could tell that this was going to be a great place to see the band.
I chatted with the guy next to me, who had come from Nottingham to see the first two of the five shows, just like us. He had seen them first on the Reckoning tour in 1984, which of course made me a bit jealous. Anyhow, we got along great and had a lot of good music chats during the evening. The opener wasn't too spectacular, but I don't think that anyone was really there to see him. After he was finished, a projector started to flash "THIS IS NOT A SHOW" on the screen behind the stage. They were making it very clear to us that these were the band's "open rehearsals" and as Michael Stipe pointed out to us at the end of the show, they were doing this as much so they could get a reaction to playing these live in front of an audience as they were for our entertainment.
R.E.M. made their way onto the stage at about 9:15 and launched right into two brand new songs. If these are any indication of how the new album will sound, as it should be, we'll get to hear another rocker. It's not a Monster-type rock, but rather a modern-sounding classic R.E.M, if that makes any sense. They didn't introduce any of the new ones with titles, but Michael always had something to say about the old songs. I was hoping that they might pull out some gems that a fanclub audience would get really excited about, but I wasn't prepared for what they hit us with. Along with the 10-12 new songs, we heard (in somewhat of an order, as best I can remember) "Second Guessing," "1,000,000," "Letter Never Sent" (how about that, Jess!?), "Little America" (quite a Reckoning theme early in the show), "Maps and Legends" ("We didn't even bother to rehearse this one"), "These Days," "New Test Leper," "Electrolite"...I think that's all of them. I was blown away by the selection of songs that we heard. They didn't even play something I'd heard them play before until the end of the encore, which is quite an accomplishment with this being my tenth show. The last note about this first show was that, although I didn't see them, Michael made a point to specifically thank Bono and The Edge, who were somewhere in the house.
After the show we ended up at a pub around the corner who were advertising an R.E.M. afterparty, playing lots of good indie and R.E.M. tunes. We stayed there for a while and Maura told me some good stories about having been in this pub before. We tried one or two more places after that before making it back to the room for a good night's sleep, which we did until 11 a.m.
On Sunday we got a slow start, but made it out for some shopping around noon. Maura located the Denby stuff she was on a mission to find, and we made our way across town to the Old Jamesons Distillery for a tour and a drink. On our way back from there, I wanted to poke into the Clarence Hotel and see what it was like. There wasn't much to see on the ground floor, but on our way out, we passed Scott McCaughey, who's all but a member of R.E.M. by now, in the hall. I said hi and complimented him on the show (oops, should've been "rehearsal") the night before, especially the selection of old ones. He told us that he was on his way back to the theater and they were hoping to give us a different selection tonight. Which brings us to now...it's time to head to dinner and go back to the theater for night #2. My only regret so far is that I didn't put in a request with Scott ("Wolves, Lower," if I woulda thought of it), not that I expect to need any help in enjoying what they play again. So, time to get back out of the hotel room...more reports later.
Jerad posted this in Music | Comments (0)
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