timcfanelli: the fake plant in my office died
timcfanelli: apparently it was real :(.
Entries from October 2005 ↓
One more reason he shouldn’t have kids.
October 26th, 2005 — quotes
The glove compartment is inaccurately named
October 21st, 2005 — music
Wednesday night Mike, Marie, Lisa, and I went down to NYC to see Deathcab for Cutie play.
the team
It was a great time, we met the ladies at the poughkeepsie train station and began the adventure. Buzzco and I put back a fair amount of whiskey on the train and the girls had their share of vodka. We got into grand central with time to spare so we grabbed some pizza and beer. Lisa and I had a run in with some rude gay dudes but we survived. We got some more whiskey and got in a cab to get the rest of the way there. At that point I was in no state to navigate and there was a dispute over which direction to go in. (I think buzzco had it right). Turns out drinking in cabs is fun. I had a stupid conversation with the cabbie (I got stuck in the front seat. Marie’s a whimp.) There was a huge line but a big pretzel and not having any idea what was going on made things go faster.
drunk o vision
Our seats were up in the mezannine. At first I was worried it wouldn’t be great but we had a good view of things and the lights looked damn cool from up there. I didn’t capture it well on the camera phone but the lighting kept shooting these 50 foot tall shadows of the band while they played. Plus we got to sit and the bar was damn close.
the band
The opener was Youth Group. I was almost expecting a Sunday school chorus, turns out they were just some dudes. They were ok but it didn’t seem like their hearts were really in it. If they stick around they may be solid in a couple more years. I spent most of the time drinking and having a very long conversation with Marie, both of us only partially remember what was said but I’m pretty sure we solved the problems of the universe. Anyway. Deathcab was freaking great. They played well, hit every song I wanted to hear (although they played an abridged version of the sound of settling). As you may have guessed I was a little lit so for most of the show Ben had a twin standing next to him playing along. He also kept switching to the keyboards and every time it took me a second to find him.
the crowd
We hit a bar on the way back, accidentally ordered too many drinks and shot the shit. I saw some movie trailer (i think jennifer aniston is in it) with this terrible line in it: ‘I bet I can kiss you without touching your lips’ then you kiss the girl and say you’re glad you lost. At some point I decided it was time to bust it out. I ended up making out with some girl in the drinks like and I kissed Marie, Lisa, and the waitress. I’m thinking the key to it is to ignore the horror in the random girls eyes as you just kiss her. So that happened.
In all it was a great time. Good music and good friends and all that. I look forward to doing it again.
Wicked Cool Free Stuff
October 18th, 2005 — general
Day 2 of vacation is a success. I got a lot of important sitting around done AND I beat a level in Incredible Hulk for the xbox. Pantloads of fun were had by all. (me).
I also got around to checking through my bookmarks putting the important stuff in delicious and deleting the rest. When digging through those bookmarks I ran into the Internet Archive for music. It’s done in a collaboration with etree and they have some solid bands in there that allow taping. I thought I might point out some good shows they have available. Today’s selection is a Spoon concert. You may know them from their song ‘I turn my camera on’. I like them a lot. As far as an indie band goes they are solid musicians and their work sounds as good live as it does on their albums. This concert is recorded very well, sounds like it might even be right off the board. Anyway, here are the details:
July 15th, 2003
Band/Artist: Spoon
Date: July 15th, 2003
Venue: The Fillmore
Location: San Francisco, CA
You can get the shn files (shorten) here Unfortuantely the shn format is pretty much completely unfriendly for iPod toting hipsters like buzzco. So I took the time to convert them to mp3’s and even tag them. You can get the fruits of my labor here If you want to check them out try this track .
The conversion from shn files to mp3s is kinda crummy, this is how I did it.
First install shntool from universe
Next you need the actual shorten binary for shntool to use, you can find it here . I put the binary in /usr/bin.
Lame to convert from wav to mp3
Finally cowbell to tag it.
Ok, shnconv * on the downloaded tracks gives you mp3’s. Next a little find magic with lame converts them to mp3’s.
find . -name \*.wav -exec lame -b 256 -h -m s {} \;
Finally I imported the tracks to Muine and used cowbell (an awesome app) to tag it and rename the files. If anyone has a better way to do it let me know.
When fortune calls, offer her a chair
October 17th, 2005 — general
This week is the start of my vacation, I don’t have any big plans. I’m going to see Deathcab in NYC on weds with Mike, Marie, and Lisa. Thursday I plan on going up to Burlington to hang out with Tristram. Other than that I’m just hoping to get through a bunch of crap I’ve been meaning to do around the house and hopefully finish up my mambo component for the ZN website.
Along the lines of finishing up crap around the house I’m cleaning out my room and I plan on putting a ton of shit of ebay and just clearing out the pile of
stuff that’s just sat in my closet for the past year. In said closet I found an old tapestery that I got in college and haven’t seemed to find a place for since I started in the real world. Rather than just toss it I decided to use it to cover my old office chair which was looking pretty foul after having it for five or six years.
It was pretty easy to do I basically took it apart and cut a couple sections to size of the seat and back and then stapled it on. It took like a half hour and I was pretty happy with the results.
