adrian is rad

I’ve arrived. The two days on planes wasn’t all that horrible, actually.

I’m pretty sure I’m going to rock this jetlag thing. I am multitalented, after all.

Incidentally, The Queen is good. The Guardian is not.

Alright, I’m heading off to the airport in a few hours here.

Have a good few weeks and remember: life is not about fear; life is about love.

I’m a pack rat. I keep everything, though at time (when I’m moving, particularly) I get ruthless and throw everything out.

I am also disorganized. Most people looking at my desk or closet would wonder how I could find anything.

I also have good spatial skills and spatial memory.

Somehow these all work well together. My last trip to South Africa was a bit over two years ago. This morning I reached onto my desk and found 2 R20 notes and one R10 note without searching around at all. They were just in a middle of a pile. I also found about R10 in coins in my everyday shoulder bag which I was repacking it as my carry on.

I’m totally going to be able to buy myself a coke at the airport.

Somehow I missed this: Pitchfork publishes a weekly list of bands and artists on TV that week.

For example, this week’s:

Monday, January 22:

ABC: “Jimmy Kimmel Live”: Nas (rerun)
CBS: “Late Show With David Letterman”: Nellie McKay with the Brooklyn Philharmonic
CBS: “Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson”: Lady Sovereign (rerun)

Tuesday, January 23:

CBS: “Late Show With David Letterman”: the Shins [1]
NBC: “Late Night With Conan O’Brien”: Cheap Trick (rerun)

Thursday, January 25:

CBS: “Late Show With David Letterman”: Gwen Stefani (rerun)
NBC: “Late Night With Conan O’Brien”: New York Dolls (rerun)

Friday, January 26:

NBC: “Last Call With Carson Daly”: Young Jeezy (rerun)

Saturday, January 27:

NBC: “Saturday Night Live”: Ludacris (rerun)

Monday, January 29:

MTV2: “Subterranean”: the Shins

Now you can totally be up on that stuff. Set your Tivos!

[Update:] [1] Did anyone else catch this? Did you see Gibbard playing with them? That man’s everywhere!

Grab the January mix tape while you can; I’ll be moving it to a password protected folder tomorrow (or Wednesday).

Apparently the Steelers will name Mike Tomlin their new head coach. Who’s this Tomlin guy?

Is this a good or bad choice over Grimm? (The Whiz is going to Arizona).

Also, go Bears?

I’m leaving for South Africa (and possibly Swaziland) on Wednesday for a few weeks. I then get back and go to Mexico for five days. I’ll be back in the States ‘full time’ the third week in February. I won’t be blogging much during that period, though I’ll try to write some periodic updates (and also update my lifestats).

It’s a duel-activity trip. Road trip with friends (Jon, Helene and Dug) and family stuff in Cape Town. I’m flying into Jo’burg and spending a couple days there before the rest arrive. From there we go to Blyde River Canyon (including God’s Window). We may stop in the Kruger Park before driving through Swaziland to Ingwavuma. From there we drive to Durban for a couple days before flying to Cape Town. I’ll be in Cape town a little bit less than a week this time. (I was in Cape Town two weeks last time.)

After being home for less than a day, I’ll be heading to Playa del Carmen for a long weekend.

If you need to contact me, email will probably be best, just the same email address as always. If it’s urgent, my parents will have my full itinerary.

Notice anything new about the page?

Look to the right over there…

After Randy’s comment on my post about being inspired to keep track of some life stats for 2007, I was further inspired to put up some of the stats in more or less real time. So there they are. Are there any other stats you want to see? The full list of stats that I’m tracking:

• emails sent (home/ work)
• miles travelled
• wikipedia pages read
• beers consumed
• work days
• photos taken (digital/ film)
• albums purchased
• concerts attended
• books read
• movies seen (theater/ netflix)
• hours of TV
• haircuts
• shaves
• miles biked
• miles ran
• miles swam

Originally I was going to do this literally updating every time you loaded the page, but that made the page really slowly (even slower than it loads already), so I decided to write up a caching system where it only loads the new data every six hours. I might adjust this if it makes sense to.

The script checks to see if the cache is older than 6 hours old and if so pulls some data from a google spreadsheet. Otherwise, it writes the old data into the html that you see on the right. I’ll probably write up a full post or a instructable of how I did all this sometime when I have more time.

I’m going Web2.0 all over this place!@

Here’s the playlist for tonight’s show.

NEWSPECIALFUN:
I Once was Canadian 1 -18-07 (mp3)

I am genius at coming up with band names. I don’t usually tell people because I may some day need 1,027 band names for my various bands, but tonight I’m feeling generous.

You want to know it?

Alright, here it is: Frick! Paper Cut!

No, no need to thank me.

I’m almost hitting mid-month on this one. It’s a bit hard to believe that this is the seventh online mixtape already. I hope you’re enjoying them. In a way, they’re a lot of work, but a lot of it (finding the music, making the playlist) has become part of my routine.

You can download the zip file with the following:
1. mp3s of the songs
2. liner notes
3. playlist files (iTunes txt file and an m3u file)

(for the iTunes file, simply import all the songs to your library and then go to file->import and then select the song list. you should now have the 2007january playlist in your iTunes with all the songs in the correct order).

If you want to read the liner notes before downloading the whole thing, they’re here. It’s mostly smaller indie bands this month, with a couple bigger names thrown in and one Motown song.

Adrian’s January 2007 mix tape [zip file]

This’ll be up for a limited time (~1 week) before being moved to a password protected folder.

If you like the artists or songs, I suggest supporting them by buying their music, going to a show, buying merchandise from them or at least telling other people about them.

I like all the mixtapes I make. I like the songs on this one.

February’s mix tape (to be released valentines day-ish) is going to be mostly love songs of various sorts. Let me know if you have any suggestions.

[Update:] I once again messed up the m3u file. Jesse fixed it (m3u file).

There are a few links I’ve been meaning to put up. Things I find interesting but I don’t want to add to the sidebar on the right.

Random links:

• designverb: a blog about design related topics, largely product design and the like. fairly interesting stuff.
• rbally has a nice Cat Power show from Berlin for download [update: rbally seems to have taken this down/ broken]
• youtube has a great chemistry lab safety video explosion. (dylan, are you seeing this?)
• bitsandpieces silly college humor, but sometimes entertaining
• wikipedia has a list of African countries by GDP (adjusted for purchasing power parity) per capita. South Africa’s on top, but barely. For reference, the US is 3rd in the world for GDP (PPP) per capita at about $42,000.
• oregon trail is it possible you haven’t played this game? there are even shirts about it. And you can download an emulated version
• Tom Wilson I feel like I should add him to my list of best producers. He did Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, Velvet Underground and more

[This was going to be one post with the above part 1 and below part 3, but it was too much, so I split them up]
There was recently the kottke best links of 2006. Here are some of my favorites from that list (including some I’ve seen/ linked to before):

• How to Care for your Introvert (from 2003; describes a lot of people I know and, well, me) and a current interview with the author
• David Copperfield gets mugged but doesn’t lose any property because of…slight of hand!
• old timey (WWII-era) color photographs of America
• the JFK assassination Zapruder film, stabilized even stranger and freakier
• songtapper tap a rhythm, it tells you the song. didn’t work as well as I wanted, but still interesting
• shiny mud balls only from Japan…and a how-to!
• Amateur a non-piano player or drummer makes a music video with himself playing those two instruments with clever editting
• a photo essay of female soldier in Iraq
• free historical sounds (as mp3s) “I Have a Dream”(MLK) to “Luckiest Man on the face of the Earth” (Lou Gehrig)
• Sheep Market 10,000 sheep drawn by online workers via Amazon’s odd Mechanical Turk service
• crazy aerial photos that look like tiny model cities
• Lake Peigneur disappears a 14″ drill bit made a lake and much of an island disappear
• 1964 New Yorker article on Dylan
• hilariously bad movie pitches
  

  Idea #1:
  What if the Internet Turned into a Were-Wolf

• Photos of European football (soccer) fields very diverse and often in gorgeous settings

There were a number of the links on that kottke best links of 2006 list that I had already seen, but I’d enjoyed.

• Simpson’s beginning, in live action (British made)
• when indie yuppie took off (a term/ concept created by Vice records honcho Adam Shore and pushed by stereogum
• Wes Andersen’s odd AmEx add don’t leave home without it
• how to get a human customer service representative at a lot of companies
• a Henri Cartier-Bresson photo gets trashed on flickr
• a picture of eyes above an honor-system drink payment box makes people more honest
• easily mispronounced domain names whorepresents.com? still hilarious
• Jimmy Kimmel’s hilarious ‘Unnecessary Censorship’ video put bleeps where there weren’t any before and it makes things very funny
• devastating photo of a homeless heroin addict in the Tenderloin (where I often go to the Great American
• Aries Spears rap impressions
• Noah takes a self-portrait everyday for 6 years and makes a video of it interesting, haunting eyes

This is one guy’s report of 2006, with stats about all sorts of things, from how many beers he drank to how many emails he sent.

I’m inspired. I’ve started a spreadsheet and I’ll be keeping track of the following per day:

• emails sent
• miles travelled
• wikipedia pages read
• beers consumed
• work day?
• photos taken (digital/ film)
• albums purchased
• concerts attended
• movies seen (theater/ netflix)
• hours of TV
• haircut
• shave
• miles biked
• miles ran
• miles swam

Andy (not andyl) is also inspired. He’s keeping track of mostly the same list of things.

I didn’t talk much tonight on my show because I’m tired and lethargic. Here’s the playlist.

Also, I once have the NEWSPECIALFUN, in mp3 form (for a limited amount of time):
I Once was Canadian - 01/10/07 (mp3)

People listen to the Beatles, maybe the Beach Boys, but not a lot else from the first half of the 60s and certainly not (usually) from decades earlier.

There are reasons to dig further back. Most of this is from emails to some KZSU list over the past few days.

50’s: the start (for all intents and purposes) of Rock N Roll, Motown, Phil Spector, R&B coming out of gospel as a twinkle
in Sam Cooke’s voice, folk as a traditionalist revival (and the release of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music), folk as a mainstream genre, cool jazz, hard bop, classic country, one of the only reasonable periods of musical theater, etc.

30’s and 40’s: perhaps one of the two most important collection of traditional folk music from the American South, the Lomax field recordings. the turning period of jazz from a dance genre to essentially an art music genre, the signature American sound in classical music and theater (in the Copland and Gershwin sense).

(As with all broad sweeping statements, these can be argued with, but they’re generally accurate)

For my upcoming South Africa trip:

• 3 X 2GB SD cards (in addition to the 2 I already have)
• 6 X Velvia 100 color slide film, 6 X Tri-X 400 black and white negative film

Just because:

• One Kiss Can Lead To Another: Girl Group Sounds Lost & Found
• one CD not to be named due to its embarassing nature (I’ll chalk it up to comfort music) [update: oh fine, it might be this]

[another update:] I also bought a few tickets to this year’s Noise Pop:

• Feb 28: Sebadoh (orignal line up) at the Great American Music Hall
• March 2: Ted Leo and the Pharmacists at the GAMH

I hope you’re paying attention, because this is really exciting; I’m a little giddy.

Possibly the second of many.

a conversation between an engineer and an alumnus of KZSU while having a problem printing from a laptop:

alumnus: why won’t this work?
engineer: it’s be simple on a mac
alumnus: but 2/3 of the world uses windows
engineer: 2/3 of the world also shits in bushes and eats bugs

that’s one argument for macs, yes.

Everyone knows that Cowher retired (or stepped down or whatever), but no one seems to have noticed that Dick Hoak retired a few days earlier.

Dick Hoak was the Steelers’ running backs coach for 45 35 years, going back to 1972. Pittsburgh has been a running team all of those years and Dick Hoak was the reason that usually worked. Franco Harris was coached by Hoak. Barry Foster had 12 100 yard games in a season under Hoak. Jerome Bettis was transformed from a good, but faltering running back to a Hall-of-Fame runner under Hoak. Willie Parker had two 200 yard games this season (the record for a career is six) under Hoak. I wonder how Parker will continue to develop without him.

Here’s a bio and nice article about him from 2004.

1963 and 1964 were some of the best years in music. Today I got to devote an hour to each as part of the KZSU 60th Anniversary Marathon.

1963’s playlist had a lot of Motown and Phil Spector songs.

1964’s playlist had some of the same, some Beatles and some main stream rock hits.

I grabbed the stream (the NEWSPECIALFUN (mp3)) of it starting only about half an hour in. You can still check out some great music for the rest of it, though.

I was pretty distracted tonight so I didn’t plan and just put on what I felt like it. It actually worked out pretty well.

Playlist

KZSU’s 60 hour 60th Anniversary Marathon starts tomorrow at noon PST and runs through Saturday night at midnight PST. It’s even doubly famous (and a small blurb here. You can listen online.

There’s an hour for each year from 1947 to 2006. I’ll be DJing 1963 and 1964 which will run from 4-6am PST (7-9am EST!) on Friday morning. I’m really about all the music that is from those years that I’m going to play. Tune in.

There will also be 25 or so alumni DJs that will be coming back on the air for the first time, in some cases, in 58 years. Some of them went on to professional careers in radio and media.

My New Year’s Eve activities included seeing Pan’s Labyrinth and later the Light Footwork at the Hotel Utah.

I was intrigued by Pan’s Labyrinth because it had one of the highest ratings I’d seen for a movie on metacritic. It also has a pretty interesting description in some of the reviews: it’s a fantasy movie and a war movie and a love story and… It seems like there’d be a lot going on but while you’re watching it, it doesn’t. It’s a fairy tale of sorts, but it’s possibly the most gruesome fairy tale you’ll see this year.

Post-Spanish civil war, mid-World War II, Ofelia and her very pregnant mother travel to the mountains of Spain to join the new husband/ step-father. He is a captain whose mission is to eliminate the remaining resistance in the area. We quickly learn that he’s not a nice guy. Ofelia is fascinated with fairy tales. During her first night at the mill, a fairy comes and leads her to a labyrinth on the premises. A faun explains to her that she is the long lost daughter of the underground king and that to return to her throne she must complete three tasks before the full moon (in a few days).

The rest of the movie is her trying to complete these tasks, the struggle of the resistance, a love story between one of the resistors and one of the people working under the captain, the struggle between her and the captain, etc.

I still don’t know quite what to make of it. It’s still swimming around in my head. It’s a light fairy tail and, yet, it’s heavy and affecting.

Later in the evening, Gumbeaux and I went over to the Hotel Utah. I’ve known the guys from the Light Footwork for a while and recently heard them live for the first time. They were playing their first gig “out”. The Hotel Utah is small venue which has apparently been around forever.

They put on a fun set full of their signature indie pop songs. Lots of energy. The one area I think they could work on is the banter. (Without some talented DJ leading the banter, it fell a little flat.) Gums and I weren’t in the mood for more, so we left after the Light Footwork.

organizing this

Happy New Year’s.

I don’t know if you’re like me. Maybe you went out and had a blast…NYE (as they call it in the business) is particularly geared, it seems, towards large parties. I’m not a huge fan of huge parties so that’s one reason I have a feeling of dread as NYE approaches.

The other thing about New Year’s is that pesky reminder that time is passing. I’d like to say it hasn’t always been this way, but I think that’d it’d be a lie; I’ve always been too ambitious, had too many goals, to enjoy the fact that time is passing and that I have less time to accomplish them. (Birthdays also remind one of time passing, but somehow I mostly avoid that same dread with my birthdays and instead I meet them largely with joy.)

Another thought: Weezer’s Weezer (the first one) is a dang good album throughout.