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Bob Mould: Body of Song

Bob Mould recently did an interview on 89.3 The Currentand after listening to the interview on-line (I only caught part of it in the car) he mentioned he had a new album coming out.

Sure enough, Googling for Bob Mould turns up his weblog with a big link to pre-order his new CD. The album comes out July 26 unless you pre-orded from Yep Rock Records in time, which I did. It shipped last Tuesday, and I received it yesterday.

The album is great. Vintage Bob Mould, he returns to his 90’s sound with guitar driven sound, and hints of his recent foray into electronica with his last album Modulate. A good example of where the guitar + minor bits of electronica is (Shine Your) Light Love Hope, which mixes both sounds very well, as does I am Vision I am Sound. The next track on the album, Paralyzed is a great example of the power guitar that made Sugar and Bob Mould’s albums so well done. Best Thing, Underneath Days and Missing You are a fewyou have to check out for the signature Bob Mould guitar sound.

A few ballads are even thrown in to mix it up – High Fidelity slows it down, while Gauze of Friendship is well done on the acoustic guitar.

I purchased the 2 disc special edition, and am happy and sad at the same time. Happy that I got the 2nd (bonus) 9 track CD, with 2 remixes of (Shine Your) Light Love Hope and a remix of Paralyzed. The 2 disc set comes in a box, with extra artwork and the second disc (photo below).

I’m disappointed in that both discs are enclosed in a paper case, rather than a nicer jewel case. The artwork, while well done, as loose sheets that are jewel case sized, will probably never see the light of day outside the special edition box. I would have preferred a slightly larger box with both discs in a hard jewel case, which would make using in the car and treating right much easier.

The price for the pre-order was right – at first I thought $25 + $4 shipping was a bit high, but looking at Amazon’s pre-order price with a $29 retail and everyday price of $26 I actually got a deal. The music is vintage Bob Mould, well done, and well worth the money spent.

Bob Mould - Body of Song

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EFF Suprise

I was surprised in the mail about a week and a half ago, when out of the blue I received:

eff-sticker

I had re-upped my membership with the EFF in May, like I have for the last few years, and I was delighted to receive the bumper sticker, especially as I wasn’t expecting it. It was a nice touch, as was the accompanying letter.

Once I get this basement finished (someday), I’m going to have Kelly build me a shadow box to put that in, along with the silver membership sticker and letter I received when I first joined. It’s probably best to frame it, as I’m looking to sell my car in the next year or so.

Fun with Flickr

As I mentioned two weeks ago, I’ve uploaded all the old photo’s I had to my Flickr.

It turned out to be just over a 1000 photo’s, with the most in the last two years. I had some good ones of Alex going back to 2001, and a ton of Zoe baby pictures.

They’re all uploaded, grouped in to sets, and I re-orded my set list to be in chronological order with all the kid photo’s.

I’ve added our Fourth of July photos, and we’re caught up in the present again.

Harry Potter

I have never read a Harry Potter book. As avid a reader as I am, once something hits the mainstream, especially so ferociously, I just have to be different and not do it. (I’ve never seen Titanic either).

With that said, I took Alex this morning to Target post-haste and we purchased Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

A number of years back when Harry Potter was just starting to become popular, my wife bought a couple of the books and read them to decide if we could read them aloud to Alex or let him read them when he was older. She loved them, and he has loved them for the past couple of years.

Which led to being a good little American consumer this morning. I figure I won’t see Alex for a day or two until he’s done reading it.

Misc. Stuff

I’m back from California, and getting caught up on misc. stuff.

I’ve updated the theme to K2 Alpha 3, added a new Flickr badge, and still don’t care that it doesn’t work in Internet Explorer. Go get Firefox already.

I mentioned the Burn It Club a while back. The summer Burn It session is now on if any of my three readers want to do it with me. I have to say I’m struggling with the theme, but I really want to participate.

I have a ton of stuff do this weekend, more as my muse wills later.

The Truth Behind Apple's Switch

Ars Technica does a deep dive into the real truth behind Apple’s switch from IBM to Intel.

Focusing on how Apple has shot itself in the foot in regards to it’s relationship with IBM, and what Intel stands to gain in the iPod arena, it covers some things I hadn’t thought of until now.

One of the major factors in the switch was something that’s often been discussed here at Ars and elsewhere: Apple’s mercurial and high-handed relationship with its chip suppliers.

And the iPod:

For the real reason behind the switch, you have to look to the fact that it’s the iPod and iTMS—not the Mac—that are now driving Apple’s revenues and stock price. As I stated in my previous article on the switch, Apple is more concerned with scoring Intel’s famous volume discounts on the Pentium (with its attendant feature-rich chipsets) and XScale lines than it is about the performance, or even the performance per Watt, of the Mac.

It’s critical to understanding the switch that you not underestimate the importance of Intel’s XScale to Apple’s decision to leave IBM. The current iPods use an ARM chip from Texas Instruments, but we can expect to see Intel inside future versions of the iPod line. So because Apple is going to become an all-Intel shop like Dell, with Intel providing the processors that power both the Mac and the iPod, Apple will get the same kinds of steep volume discounts across its entire product line that keep Dell from even glancing AMD’s way.

Silwenae.com

Yes, I know silwenae.com is down.

I received an email from my hosting company that silwenae.com executed a denial of service attack approaching 100 Mb/s this morning resulting in the hosting company shutting my site down.

This is the second time my site has been exploited in the last 60 days. I’m starting to lose my patience.

I’m waiting for the hosting company to respond, and hopefuly re-activate my site.

More blog programming

I’m playing with the newest release of the Kubrick theme, K2, which is in an early alpha.

It doesn’t work in Internet Explorer correctly on Windows XP (the right hand sidebar is off significantly), but I really don’t care anymore. I’m sick of tinkering with themes because IE doesn’t render CSS properly.

If you are still using IE (and why are you?) please switch to Mozilla’s Firefox.

I’m going to leave the default colors up for now, maybe tinker with the sidebar, and when it’s final, I’ll apply a black style / CSS (maybe from the old theme by neuro).

50 Songs for 50 States

On the Fourth of July, 89.3 The Current did a special, 50 Songs for 50 States, from 2pm until midnight.

Our timing driving back from Milwaukee was perfect, as the Rochester signal came in about quarter to 2, and we listened to it for the last few hours of the drive home, and I listened to it over the web for most of the night after that.

What a great mix of music – picking anywhere from 1-3 songs per state, either with the state’s name in the song / title, or an artist known for that state (like the Ramones for New York). It wasn’t just one song – it was over 150 songs, including some deep dives into specific cities in the U.S., including Athens, GA, Minneapolis, Chicago, Austin, New York and Detroit.

You can see and listen to the entire playlist (by hour) here.

William Gibson gets it

William Gibson is another one who gets the remix culture.

In an article on Wired, Gibson writes of some of his early influences, including William S. Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, one of the first authors to use sampling in literature.

Later, attempting to understand this impact, I discovered that Burroughs had incorporated snippets of other writers’ texts into his work, an action I knew my teachers would have called plagiarism. Some of these borrowings had been lifted from American science fiction of the ’40s and ’50s, adding a secondary shock of recognition for me.

By then I knew that this “cut-up method,” as Burroughs called it, was central to whatever it was he thought he was doing, and that he quite literally believed it to be akin to magic. When he wrote about his process, the hairs on my neck stood up, so palpable was the excitement. Experiments with audiotape inspired him in a similar vein: “God’s little toy,” his friend Brion Gysin called their reel-to-reel machine.

It will be interesting to see if Mr. Gibson follows up on what he says he believes here, and introduces any type of Creative Commons licenses on his books or how it affects him going forward.