Sleep Spent

WOW.

I saw Glen tonight with Nickel Creek and John Paul Jones (of Led Zeppelin fame) and the drummer from Los Lobos.

What a fantastic show!

I even bought the album after Glen refused to take a $20 with the understanding that I’d burn a copy of the CD Jason bought. He said he couldn’t accept the money because there were songwriters credited on the album (like Randy Newman) that wouldn’t get paid otherwise. Understandable; so I bought the record. My first major label transgression since my boycott began. But at least I bought the CD at a show --- maybe they’ll get some more out of it from that. shrugs

Did I mention how great the show was?!? They covered “Tax Man” and “La Lune” and “Going to California” and “Gallows Pole.” And they played “All I Want” and “Dam Would Break,” the latter of which was one of my first Toad favorites. And of course they played “Let It Fall,” which is still, I think, my favorite Glen/Creek collaboration.

The best thing about these guys is you could tell just how much FUN they were having! Glen jumped off the drum platform and fell down; everyone laughed really hard. Chris Thile, Nickel Creek’s mandolin player went crazy on nearly every song---he’s a ton of fun to watch. He had a whole almost-rap set of alternate lyrics in the middle of “The Fox Went Out on a Chilly Night” that were impressive for their speed. And Sarah, the violinist, played a really funny song on what I think was a ukulele about this boy Anthony who was running away from her because she’d professed her undying love to him. The best part about that song was that it was just her, the ukulele, and John Paul Jones, Glen and Chris singing harmonies.

Brilliant!

So, yeah. Somehow I’m going to have to sleep now. g But I have this CD and a singles sampler they were handing out at the show to listen to tomorrow. PLUS the new Atticus Finch CD Everywhen came in the mail today, so I’m gonna be all over that tomorrow.

Times are good, and I’ll have a new song of the week or two up before Monday. :-)

Ever since my parents came through with $5000 for me when I needed it in London, I have expected to pay them back. I wasn’t sure how long it would take; turns out to have been just shy of a year.

It’s done! DAMN does it feel good to not owe them anything. They said they weren’t even expecting to be paid back; even better. :-)

Next target: student loans.

So I called Hurricane and they helped me out to the tune of over a grand. (Great people over there.) The total I’ll be paying will come to something like $250---a much more manageable sum.

I haven’t been completely soured on the Song of the Week idea. In looking at the traffic patterns, I discovered that several things contributed to the explosion of traffic. One was the Internet Explorer factor, which I examined at length in a previous entry. But even more important was the fact that I was hosting two or three songs that many people wanted to hear, and hosting them for considerable periods of time. The fact that people downloaded them repetitively didn’t help matters, but the fact remains that if I hadn’t been hosting several highly popular songs, the overrun wouldn’t have happened, or would have been much more modest.

With that in mind, I’m bringing the Song of the Week back. The next song is now up, and it’s really, really good. :-)

I’m also taking everything I had been hosting down. I won’t be leaving things up for longer than four weeks. And I’m going to see if I can’t write some software to cut off repeated downloads from the same IP. (That won’t be happening too quickly, though. I’ll be keeping an eye on monthly bandwidth in the meantime.)

So there you have it. Enjoy... but not too much, m’kay?

Well, well, well. It appears that Office Depot has just become a Mac reseller. But not only that, they’ve also hatched a great program that will help all those new Switchers take care of their old PCs: they’re running a computer recycling program until September.

Hop to it! There’s never been a better, or more convenient, time to Switch.

I’ve been listening to a lot of Internet radio lately, mostly KCRW and the BBC. I happened to go to the main BBC webpage today, and saw the end of a really neat photo contest run by the h2g2 folks. Note particularly the winning photo.

If I had known about the contest before it ended (I didn’t) and if I were a British subject (I’m not), I would have submitted this picture I took while in London last year. Regardless, I think the ones that won were even better, so it wouldn’t have mattered.

When people ask me why I don’t like Microsoft, I have a bunch of default gripes. “Their software sucks.” “They are monopolistic.” “They don’t obey standards.” Not the sort of things that get people riled up, by and large. You need to be a pretty big geek to feel deeply about something like web standards, right?

But what if, by abusing web standards, Microsoft managed to do something worse than break CSS Zen Garden? What if they caused more harm than just some incompatibility and a few broken links?

What if they cost people a whole shitload of money?