A short list of things I would have written long blog posts if I wasn’t so into the whole parenting thing*.

1. The iPod Touch.  I picked this up as one-last-toy-for-me before Ted was born and can’t seem to not have it with me, ever. It’s like the iPhone, but without the phone part (and without the $60/month fees). Music, movies, Gmail and wifi internet in a tiny little package.  It’s awesome all around and has totally changed the way I think about the mobile internet and UI’s.

2. The new Portishead album called Third.  I listen to it all the time now, it’s great at-work music.  It’s been nearly a decade since they put out music, and the wait was well worth it.

3. The inevitable and long overdue demise of the giant SUV as daily driver.  Unfortunate that it comes with the price of declining economy, soaring food prices and a certain sense of dread every time I fill up.  It is exciting that the capitalism around it is spurring innovation and futurist thinking though.  Ted will no doubt fly his jetpack over homes made from recycled Tahoe’s.

4. Web technologies I’m learning about.  The past few months at work (and in freelance work) have filled my brain with new exciting knowledge about web design and the construction of websites.  I’ve spent a bunch of time learning about WordPress (the system that powers this blog), Drupal, and the jQuery javascript framework.  Learning is good, and I feel more confident about my skills with each passing week.

5. Fatherhood as subject matter.  I like writing and would like to write more about being a dad to Ted.  It’s the new highlight of my day, coming home to a family and hanging out with Ted on the weekends.  He’s high-maintenance, but every time he smiles at me I know what we’ve done is totally worth it.  I also know that its probably also diaper-change time.

Hopefully going forward there will be lots more posts on fatherhood.

* Full Disclaimer: I took a two hour nap after coming home from work today. Clearly there’s some time out there, just not as much for blogging.

Low cost music doesn’t have to be bad music. Here are some albums that have freshened up the itunes library recently for zero or low dollars.

The Foxboro Hot Tubs: Stop Drop and Roll.

They are, allegedly, Green Day performing under a different name, singing surf rock songs. It certainly sounds like Green Day, and Wikipedia (source of truth on the internet) seems to confirm it.

They released an EP on their website for free, which seem to fit in nicely with my low budget musical needs. I suspect this will be a trend for bands hoping to break out (even established bands trying to break out under a different name), where the first series of songs are released online for free in order to build up some interest, and then the band makes up the difference in touring.

Radiohead: In Rainbows.

Radiohead, like Green Day, have been around for a while. To change things up, and to celebrate their own freedom from a traditional record contract, they released their most recent album online (no longer available for some reason) before it was sold in stores and said pay whatever you want.

I ended up paying about five bucks for the album and it was well worth it. It’s good work-listening music. It reminds me a lot of OK Computer, one of their earlier discs.

Ratatat: Remixes Vol 2.

Kate and I both really dug Ratatat’s last album, Classics, so I was pretty excited to hear they were releasing another remix album, and for free to boot. Lots of excellent guitar music, mixed in with hip-hop. You can download it from their website.

While Classics is excellent for the work day (and well worth paying money for), Remixes Vol 2 has some shady hip-hop lyrics throughout, so you want to keep the headphones on for that.

So, anyone out there hear anything good lately?

More Yankee Visitors
Kate’s dad and stepmom came down from up north for a little pre-father’s-day North Carolina visiting action. We had a good time showing them around the house, our rapidly-expanding neighborhood, and also a visit to the Farmer’s Market in Raleigh. They took us out to eat at the Cleveland Draft House and then we got some very tasty bbq at McCall’s. Good eats and good-to-see-family.

Etsy
As we speak Kate is rocking some Etsy product using Adobe Illustrator. She’s quickly picked up one of the harder to learn design software programs. While I spent all sorts of time over the past few years learning the intricate details of Photoshop (Illustrator’s more photogenic cousin), I had forgotten a ton about Illustrator, so it’s been a learning (re-learning?) experience for both of us. Good stuff being done here, so be sure to check out MoseandZoe.com in the coming weeks for new stuff. Or check it out now, for slightly-less-new-but-still-very-cool hand-made crafts.

Movie Night
We watched The Pursuit of Happyness with The Fresh Prince. It was pretty good. Tonight I think we’re watching Running with Scissors.

Safari
Spent a few minutes this week playing around with the Windows version of Apple’s Safari web browser. Much like iTunes for windows, it’s just not as good when its not on the OS X platform. It certainly displays the pages quickly enough, but there’s no advantage to using it over say Firefox or Opera. Maybe someday, though.

Here are five albums I’ve been listening to in excess in the recent weeks:

The Allman Brothers Band
A Decade of Hits 1969-1979
Here I am, getting closer to thirty, and I’m just now discovering The Allman Brothers and their high quality southern rock? So good! I got hooked on the song Jessica after watching reruns of Top Gear, and was curious about the rest of their music. What a great CD all the way through. Makes me want to take a road trip.

Muse
Black Holes and Revelations
I like Muse because they sound like what I wish Radiohead might sound like without all the beeps and boops and noise. I suspect their albums are meant to be listened to in single sittings, rather then in single songs. I like this CD, although not as much as Absolution which is excellent.

Tom Petty
Highway Companion
More great solo Tom Petty. His last solo disc Wildflowers is also super good all the way through. I just noticed that the cover of this album is kinda similar to the cover of the Muse album above. Eerie?

Ratatat
Classics
Kate and I are both listening to lots of Ratatat. It’s all instrumental rock, but with lots of electronic sampling. Very distinct sounding, and easy to listen to while working.

Sleater-Kinney
The Woods
Solid rock from a recently-broken-up pacfic northwest band. I first heard of them while working for the campus radio station at FSC.

What does everyone out there like to listen to these days?

It should not take seven hundred megabytes of ram to play a song correctly. Whatever. Last weekend I reinstall Windows on a reformatted hard drive and put all the music on another drive inside the computer. Music should be playing perfectly now – clean install, music on a separate internal drive.

And it’s still not working right. I tried everything I could to get it to work, but there’s still a 3-second delay when clicking on something in the program. And then I thought is this really worth the time?. There are so many other important things going on, that this just isn’t worth it.

I dug around the internets and found exactly what I needed. A copy of version 6, left on the apple.com website. It was everything I had hoped for. Songs played, programs ran simultaneously, life is good. For any of our readers out there who downloaded version 7 and regrets their decision as much as I did, here’s a download link for version 6.

The moral of the story? Don’t upgrade on the first day, and um, your 5 year old computer might not be as fast as you think it is.

PS: We’re still in our real-estate holding pattern, but hopefully we’ll be more-in-the-know by the end of this week.

We checked out the yard post-rain storm (no muddiness or flooding) and the crawl space under the house (nice and dry) and peeked in some windows. We also tested the driveway for Celica Compatibility and that worked out well… although I think I’ll have to pull in and and back out very slowly as there’s a drop off at the end of the driveway. I fear I may leave some silver paint if I’m not careful. But it beats parking in an apartment complex where random people could ding your door.

Nerdiness
I spent some time backing up stuff to an external hard drive this weekend. I’d been using a second desktop to back up stuff, but I tend to leave it on all the time, and that tends to some dollars to our electric bill. By using a cable to plug in another hard drive, I only leave one machine on now.

For those of you who read my earlier post on iTunes, I switched back to version 6. The new features just weren’t’ worth it. All I want to do is listen to music, I shouldn’t have to fight with it.

Sunday
Today we started filling out the paper-work for our loan. There’s a lot of information that the bank wants. Luckily Kate’s on top of things in the organization department. My pre-Kate system of leaving all financial documents in a tall pile for months on end wouldn’t have worked well here. We also went up to the apartment people and gave them our “we’re moving out” notice.

Kate’s a quilting machine right now with her mad sewing skills.

Tonight I’d like to talk about a program that I think is great, and at the same time, totally drives me nuts. I’ve spoken about the music playing program in the past. The recent release of version 7 seems like a good time to talk about it.

I downloaded it on the day it came out…. which is usually asking for trouble, but the features advertised made it pretty tempting. I’ve been using the program a lot during the day, now that I’m working from home.

What is Great
A few new features of this program are great. One moderately great thing is the new way the library source list is organized. Everything is separated out in an easy to read way. The number of unlistened podcasts is now displayed, which is kind of cool.

Another great thing is the once separate program Coverflow is now built right into iTunes. Being able to flip through music like this tends to make me listen to albums that I haven’t heard in a while, adding a visual element to the listening process. When Coverflow was a separate program, I blogged about it.

One other thing that I thought was cool was iTunes showing the cover art next to the list of songs for each album. This is pretty slick, and probably should have been in the program earlier on.

The last great thing is a backup feature that’s built in. Click the menu item, and iTunes will back up all your songs to DVD-R discs. For someone like me who has all their music on a hard disk (having long since sold most of the CD’s), this is nice to have.

What Drives Me Nuts
The Coverflow feature is great, but it also drives me nuts. It’s much slower now that it’s built into the iTunes program. The flipping is not as fluid, and it ends up showing blank boxes for albums without cover art associated with it, and that’s kind of lame. I guess it’s a camera in a cell phone. You’ve got two things, but neither work as well as they did when they were separate units. Or something like that.

Speaking of slow, man has this software slowed down. Scrolling through the list of songs takes at least a second to start after clicking*. It’s no so bad on the iBook, but on my Windows desktop it’s almost unusable with other programs running.

Another new feature, while ambitious, seems not-quite-ready to go. iTunes will find album cover-art for your songs, which is very cool. This makes the Coverflow feature better, but iTunes often makes wild guesses on just what cover should go with what album. At one point it was downloading the covers of Beatles albums and displaying them with Black Sabbath tunes. I don’t need that kind of confusion in my life.

Another thing that drives me nuts – instead of attaching the cover art it downloads to the individual song file, it creates a separate folder on your computer and makes a file for each album cover. And, not a .jpg or .bmp file, which I can deal with. It’s an .itc file. I tried to open this album art file in Photoshop, and was promptly mocked by the software. These many extra files add unnecessary clutter to my computer, takes up more space then necessary, and if you move the music files to another computer, the album artwork doesn’t come with it. Weak.

More Great Then Nuts
iTunes is still, to me, the way to go for playing music. I guess the way its organized is the most appealing thing to me. It feels like Excel (a program I use frequently for my work, far above and beyond accounting and goofy pie charts) in the way it arranges music into columns and rows. Also it’s ability to easily stream (think “broadcast”) the music from the hard drives in my desktop to the laptop wirelessly is super sweet and super easy to use.

As for as upgrading, I’d say if you’re still using version 6, stick with it for now and wait for Apple to put out some kind of 7.xx update. Hopefully some bugs would be worked out and the program will have sped up a bit.

*Really, it doesn’t drive me nuts. It’s a slight aggrivation in my otherwise super-easy middle-class life.

The most recent podcast featured a band called The Elected. They were pretty good, and now that I’ve downloaded the podcast file, I have an mp3 file of their live recording.

I’ve got a large stash of birthday iTunes gift cards (thanks Kristen!), and new music from something like this might be a good way to spend it. Regular radio is kind of limiting when it comes to playing new music…. lots of the same old stuff (which is sometimes good) and these days rarely anything revolutionary. Local station WBRU might be an exception – they play new and different things occasionally.

The KCRW podcast page is pretty sweet, and links to a few other shows I listen to semi-regularly like Left, Right and Center, The Business, and The Treatment. All good stuff. You don’t need an iPod to listen to these shows, but the free iTunes software is a pretty easy way to get the songs and listen to them on your computer.

I like music, and have been feeling good about music lately, probably due to the iPod. Together, Kate and I have amassed quite a collection.

I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t listen to every song, but the variety and the instantness of digizited music is pretty freaking sweet. In fact, rare is the day when I pull a CD out of a case and put it into some kind of player. That leads to one of the downsides of the whole non-physical-media thing… the non-physicalness of it. Cover art and lyric sheets use to be an enjoyable part of the music listening process. Now, when you buy a song online, or rip a CD and put it away, you don’t get as much of the visual connection with an album.

As it turns out, others feel the same way. This guy made this program called CoverFlow which allows you to browse through your music based on album cover.

It loads the images of the album covers from your own music collection (and grabs them from Amazon.com’s images). You then use the right and left arrow keys to move through the images, as if you were flipping through a collection of records. Double clicking on the album loads the music in the iTunes player.

It’s still a beta program, so sometimes it loads the incorrect music, so hopefully the program creator will update it. It’s also Mac-only, so Windows users are out-of-luck I think. A helpful program when you’re not sure what to listen to.

The new version of Itunes just came out, and now it works on Windows. It now allows me to wirelessly stream music from my Mac to the laptop. So that means I don’t have to fill up the laptop with lots of music, and I can now sit outside in the cold and listen to music over the wireless waves that eminate from our living room.

In other nerd news… a demo for the PC version of Halo just came out. Halo is a mighty fine xbox game that came out a while back, and held me in it’s addictive clutches for a couple of months. Downloading it right now…

So I plan on getting my camera warmed up and posting photos of Kates’s most recent stained glass project. High Quality! Crazy skills!

Happy Weekend, Rockland-Ave viewers.