Category Archives: General Chaos

General Chaos, Music

Guess we’ll never see poor Madeline again…

My new favorite band of the moment :The Decemberists. Any band that names itself after an ill-conceived 1825 democratic uprising by young members of the aristocracy in Czarist Russia inspired by the American Revoluion (gee, I knew that bit of knowledge from studying Russian history and literature in translation in college would come in handy for something some day), is guaranteed to at least get a listen from me, and these guys fall somewhere on the spectrum between the Polyphonic Spree and The Shins (or maybe the Weakerthans).


The Decemberists

My instant favorite song is a track off their 2001 5 Songs EP, “Apology Song”–a song lamenting the theft of a bicycle named Madeline.

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General Chaos, work

The Basement Tapes

I really have to do something about my work lighting. Fast.

OK, it’s not like I’m going blind or anything. But since I moved my office to the basement, I’ve been getting hit by a lot fewer photons, and my mood has suffered.

Or maybe it’s the lack of sleep, due to a daughter crying out for guidance to the bathroom at 2:45 am and a new cat dancing across my face at 3:30. Maybe it’s that my wife is rising at zero-dark-thiry to get to her new teaching job after said sleep interruptions. Whatever.

On the bright side, so to speak, my new iMac arrived yesterday. Its flat LCD display makes the one on my old PowerBook and IBM Thinkpad look muddy. And I now (with the dual monitor rig on the powerbook) have FOUR monitors and three keyboards on my desk.

And, coincidentally, Apple tells me they’re sending me iLife ’05, iWork ’05 and the latest GarageBand plugins for review. I only really needed to look at iWork, but I’ll find some way to work the other two into my battery of software tests, I’m sure.

Maybe I can get one of those guitar-to-Mac cables at the Apple store this weekend and cut an album in my basement–to fund some additional lighting.

But all those monitors are not helping my body create vitamin D. I need some full-spectrum something in this dungeon, pronto.

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