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I’ve been more or less sporadically accumulating music in my iTunes library for ages.  I’ve decided to make a point of listening to every album I have and saying something about each one.  I’m going alphabetical by album title.

The first one to come up is A. M. by Wilco.  I think I can safely say this is the least interesting, least “go to” album in the Wilco discography.  I never wake up and think “man, I wanna listen to A.M.”.  It’s basically only in my library because I love Wilco in general and I don’t want to not have one of their albums.  Isn’t that why you have Pablo Honey?  You know it is.  You never listen to it.

Anyhow, there are a few tracks on here that at least hold the potential of the Wilco music I love.  “Should’ve Been In Love” comes to mind.  “Dash 7” has a nice vibe, although it’s a little steel-guitary.  This is one of those albums that I won’t skip over when it comes up in shuffle mode but I almost never play on it’s own.

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I will shortly be heading out to a day-long game development workshop called A Day of Unity which will give me an opportunity to port Flutter HD to Windows Phone.  Flutter, if you’re unfamiliar, is the game that my buddy Travis and I recently developed, and you can check it out for most platforms, including playing for free on Facebook, at http://www.sheepshapestudio.com.

The event is hosted by Microsoft and there was a time in which that in and of itself would be sufficient to make me question the value of the event.  When I moved from Windows to Mac in 1997/98 it was kind of a big deal.  I had built and owned a succession of Windows PCs going back to Windows 3.1 in 1993, I had a Windows NT laptop at work where I developed applications for, you guessed it, Windows.  Growing up, of course, I rarely used Windows or even DOS for that matter.  I had a Commodore VIC-20, then used Radio Shack TRS-80, Commodore 64, Apple II, and occasional Macintosh machines in school.  I had a friend, Stacy Jackson, who had an IBM PC running DOS and she introduced me to Sierra’s King’s Quest series on it, but as a general rule I didn’t encounter Microsoft enough to have any opinions on them whatsoever.  When I started working with DOS/Win 3.1 at CDI, it seemed a little primitive compared to the Macintosh, but it was clearly miles ahead of a TRS-80 and to my mind, a computer was a computer.

I remember the first time I really got mad at Microsoft.  It was a little thing, in retrospect, but it nearly cost me a job.  I was early into my software development career.  I had been coding for about two years and I was working primarily in Powerbuilder and Visual Basic.  The web/Java market hadn’t really taken off yet.  I was working as a contractor at Mortenson Construction writing a time-tracking app for work crews and I had just moved from Visual Basic version 3 to version 4.  I had read about VB4, and some cool new features it was supposed to have for database manipulation.  I decided to build my app using the cool new features.  After weeks of development I ran into a major bug.  There was some code that just would not work no matter what I did even though it seemed like it was correct and there were no errors.  It was as if the method I was calling to do what I needed to do was pretending to work but silently failing.  Which made no sense.  I mean, why have a function available if it doesn’t do anything?  That would be insane.  So I read the documentation and re-read the documentation and tried over and over again to get my code to do what it needed to do and one day, with my manager getting more and more annoyed with my “wheel spinning” every day, I went back to the documentation for about the 45th time and this time I read it top to bottom and found a footnote, tiny print, that I had overlooked.  You know what it said?  It said that this feature hadn’t been complete in time for the release so, while the method was still there, IT DIDN’T DO ANYTHING.  The insane option, the “we shipped this product knowing it was impossible to use the major feature we promoted in all our marketing material” option, was the truth.  Microsoft had promoted, as the reason to move to version 4, a great new feature that they had then failed to actually finish building.  Instead of waiting until they finished the job, they put a footnote in the documentation telling unfortunate developers like me not to use the new functionality because it didn’t work.  This nearly cost me my job. I showed the whole thing to my manager and explained I would have to re-write the majority of the application.  All in all, their marketing first, functionality second, approach cost me a few months of wasted effort, gave me a serious black eye with my manager, and made me doubt every claim they ever made from then on.

Over-reaction?  Maybe.  But it was the first time I ever had an experience like that.  When you are a software developer there are so many thousands and thousands of methods and functions and libraries and language features that you could never store them all in your head.  One of the primary skills of a software developer is knowing how to navigate dense collections of API (application programming interface) documentation to find the information you need.  Building software is like assembling the mechanism of a complex watch but instead of gears and springs you work with ideas and words and logic.  The behavior of a statement in code like makeMeASandwich() needs to be trustworthy.  Let’s just say the documentation says “The function makeMeASandwich() takes the parameter SandwichType and returns an instance of the specified type of sandwich or the value ‘null’ if no ingredients are available for that sandwich”.  When you put makeMeASandwich(SandwichType.PB_AND_J) in your code and receive no sandwich, you assume that you are out of peanut butter and/or jelly and your code may then call the checkCupboard() and goShopping() methods.  What you do not assume is that the method is lazy and will always return null no matter how many ingredients are available because the company that wrote the documentation never bothered to write the method.  This is a betrayal of the highest order and was serious enough that I actually decided then and there I didn’t want to base my career on a company that would do that.  Again, maybe an over-reaction, but hey, I was 23 years old at the time and my brand loyalty was not that strong.  Yeah, I bought Windows 95 the first day it came out but it wasn’t like I thought it was cool.

I toyed around with other operating systems.  A friend gave me a book with a free operating system called Linux on a CD in the back and I messed around with that.  You wanna talk primitive, a Linux distro in 1997, now THAT was primitive.  I installed OS/2 Warp at one point, and it was fine, but it was clearly dead in the water.  Apple wasn’t really an option.  Jobs hadn’t returned yet, their stock was trading at $7 a share and people were taking bets on how long it would be before they just collapsed.  I looked around for options and all I found was that there was something wrong with every option I could see.  After that initial experience with VB4, I started to notice that Microsoft demonstrated over and over that they couldn’t be trusted.  I got into Java and web development because I hoped that one day platform-neutral and standards-based coding practices and technologies would take over (I was right, woot!).  Then I had my first Apple experience, and it was so the opposite of my Microsoft experience I was hooked.

It was simple enough.  The company I was working for (doing Java for the first time!) had bought a Mac at my insistence for the purpose of testing our web apps on the Mac platform.  Nobody knew what to do with the thing.  This was still pre-Jobs.  It was a PowerMac 7200 and they dumped it in my cubicle.  I didn’t know how to set it up or anything.  Hadn’t used a Mac since writing lab in high school and that was an 1980’s-era compact.  I managed to plug everything in thanks to the extremely simple documentation in the box.  I started it up and it smiled at me, which was friendly.  When I got to the desktop I realized I needed to get it on our network but didn’t know how.  Getting a computer on the Internet or a corporate network at this time in history was rather complicated and usually involved a lot of configuration.  It wasn’t like “pick the right WIFI network from the drop down”.  There was no WIFI yet.  Our network guys had no clue and figured it would take them “a few days” to figure it out.  So, I clicked on Help and typed “TCP/IP Network” and an amazing thing happened.  The Help turned out to be interactive.  A red circle was drawn around the place I was supposed to click and when I clicked there, another circle was drawn around the next spot.  In 30 seconds I had it on our corporate network and the Internet.  Mind.  Blown.  I started gravitating to using it when I didn’t really need to.  When Jobs came back and then the iMac appeared, I bought one.  I never really looked back…  Until now.

Now the world is very different.  Apple has conquered, commercially.  Platform neutral development platforms are everywhere.  The Win32 API exists but most people are writing apps for iPhones and Android phones and HTML5 and Microsoft is in the dog house and everybody hates Windows 8 and tons of people are still clinging to Windows XP.  The worm has turned.  Microsoft is now the underdog.  And I’ve always been a fan of the underdog and I’m discovering that I kinda want them to succeed.  I kinda want Windows 9 or whatever to be really great.  I kinda want Apple to get down off it’s $500/share price and it’s hipster bullshit advertising and it’s thinner and thinner and thinner devices that all seem to come with major limitations and restrictions on your freedom to use them and start to Think Different again.  I got what I wanted in 1997/98, but now I’m finding that I have slightly more fun with my MacBook when I boot it into Windows 8 instead of OSX Mavericks.  I have had three iPhones and two iPads and I’m kind of excited to have an excuse to get a Windows Phone just because it’s different.  Sometimes it’s fun to mix it up a bit.  It’s not as if Microsoft hasn’t been a major part of my life all these years.  Of course it has.  I have a home-build Windows PC in my recording studio and that thing has been upgraded and maintained for a decade or so.  I work on Windows every single day professionally.  The only Windows flavors I don’t think I’ve ever run are ME and Vista.  But one of the great things about Windows 8 is that I don’t use is every day professionally.  Companies are not rolling it out.  It’s a minority platform and it’s quirky and slightly buggy, and has some bizarre design decisions, kinda like Linux.  It is maybe not as good, but it’s a little more fun than the solid, staid, predictable, Mac.

And that’s where I sit today.  About to get in my car and spend they day doing the unthinkable…  porting my personal work to Microsoft’s mobile platform using a Mac that is booted up in Windows.  The event is called A Day of Unity because of the Unity game development engine but maybe it’s also a day of unity for former Microsoft users who turned to Apple to re-unite with the stupid marketing-driven company with the weird, stupid, technology.  Let ’em back into my life a little more, give them a chance to put some pressure on Apple.  Maybe something good will come out of it.

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This past weekend was a pretty productive one.  We have had a leaky faucet in our kitchen for some time now.  The garbage disposal under our kitchen sink had a crack in it that the previous occupants had “repaired” with duct tape which had also begun leaking.  When we had a professional plumber out here to look at the situation, he balked at even touching it without bringing it up to code.  Nothing in our house is up to code.  The house was built decades before such codes existed.

So, after much procrastinating of my own, The Kitchen Sink Project could no longer be put off.  Esther’s brother Clint came over and evaluated things and we talked.  Esther and I talked.  Finally, Esther and I went to Menards with a list of things to buy.  We knew we wanted to replace the trap under the sink but we read that s-traps were no longer code.  We couldn’t use a p-trap because the drain pipe went into the floor instead of the wall.  Also, none of our plumbing is vented.  A book we found on plumbing offered a solution which involved building a small locally vented riser that you could drain into with a p-trap.  It looked like a good solution so I bought the stuff required to do it.  I had never worked with PVC and solvent welds before but it looked easy enough.  We looked at new faucets and picked a Moen that was one of the pricier models there.  We figured that last time we went a little on the cheap side and regretted it so we held out hope that the new faucet wouldn’t leak or have low water flow (two problems that plagued the old faucet).  We went with a 3/4 HP Barracuda garbage disposal which, to me, seemed like a minor bit of overkill.  We don’t put much down the disposal and that thing looks like you could use it to dispose of a body.  But, as became clear later, much of it’s bulk is because it’s nicely sound proofed to run quieter.

There was metal drain pipe coming up from the floor under the sink and I wasn’t positive how best to connect to it so I bought two options.  When I got home and started removing the old pipes it became clear that the metal pipe was just sort of jammed into a plastic drain pipe downstairs and therefore was completely pointless.  I removed it and wound up just connecting the PVC to the black plastic stuff in the basement.  Also, I found an elbow that was not welded together properly in the basement and fixed that.  The disgusting muck that was in that pipe will haunt my dreams until the end of my days.

By the time everything had been removed from under the sink, the new drain pipe (with vent!) was solvent welded together, the new garbage disposal was installed, a new sink drain was installed and a new faucet was installed, it was pushing 10:00.  I had made a few runs to Menards to return this or pick up that but I had basically done a good job with the initial pick list of parts.  Things were looking solid.  It was the moment of truth.  Esther turned on the faucet and, lo and behold, no leak!  Excellent water pressure!  Lots of flow!  The pipes didn’t fall apart!  The disposal ran!  Everything worked as planned!  Much rejoicing ensued.

The following morning I went downstairs to inspect my handiwork.  It felt good to have accomplished a task like that, something I had previously considered to be beyond me.  I looked under the sink.  Uh oh.  Drip.  Drip.  Drip.  The p-trap was leaking.  Out came the wrenches and some teflon tape and 10 minutes later, no more leak.  No leak the next day, or the next.  I guess that shouldn’t have been too shocking.  Nothing is ever perfect.

Riding high on my success as a Mario Brother, I decided Sunday was a perfect day to make sounds in the Nuclear Gopher so I headed downstairs with some coffee and started playing the guitar a bit.  I had an idea in mind that I would record an Abbey Road style medley of a bunch of songs that I’ve partially written in the last 3-5 years but never recorded.  I wrote down a list of titles.  I can’t remember how many there were.   13 or 14, I think.  I started figuring out the chords for one of them and then got distracted playing with a silly little toy synth I have called a Korg Monotron.  My god that thing is great.  Noisy, spacey, delay and feedback and woop woop woop,  Before I knew it I was hitting record and 20 minutes later I had a bed of crazy synth sounds to play with.  I’m not sure why I thought the next thing to do was to take this little stereo-condenser microphone I have that connects to an iPhone and walk around the house and the neighborhood for 20 minutes recording whatever sounds took place.  So, that’s what I did.  Went out to the driveway, walked around the street, came back in the house, played with the dogs in the yard, made some coffee, basically recorded a bunch of found audio trivia.  At one point the dogs barked really loud.

I pulled that audio off the iPhone and put it on my laptop and overlaid it with the synth.  Then I duplicated it and offset the copy by a minute or so.  Then I applied two very different delay effects to each track.  One generated low, droning, scary movie style sounds and the other high, weird, jarring sounds.  I put the low delay track into automation write mode and did a track of playing with the feedback and delay time knobs, essentially performing the delay plugin as a synth instrument.

By this point I was thinking, hey, RPM Challenge is this month and I need 35 minutes of music.  This is 20 minutes of sound (I hesitate to call it “music”).  It just needs to be 15 minutes longer.  So, naturally, I slowed it down until it was 15 minutes longer.  Voila!

Now I really had something.  35/36 minutes of droning space synths, insane delay effects, coffee grinders, traffic, and dog barks.  Perfect.  Miley Cyrus will want to record a cover, no doubt.  What else could I do?  The obvious next step was to grab a guitar, plug it into my trusty Pod HD500X effects unit, and record start playing with the looper.  OK, so, that wasn’t the obvious next step.  I thought I was done with the thing and thought I was moving on to playing guitar for fun, but when I found some chords and a little riff I liked and was having a good time with the looper I thought, hey, let’s try all this together and see.  I liked it.  So, I went ahead and recorded that.  A bit later I noticed that there were parts of it where something almost like a song appeared briefly and laid down some drums.  At this point I was tired and that was a good excuse to stop.  Applied a little phaser and delay and reverb to the drums, a little AX to the master channel, rendered stem tracks, put them on GDrive and invited Michael and Ben to contribute to the mess if they felt so inclined.  I called it Nininger after the Minnesota ghost town near Hastings, which was a failed city planned by the charming but slightly daffy Ignatius Donnelly back in the 1800’s.

That, my friends, is a weekend.

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Tonight I am making my debut on stage with the band Robots from the Future.  The first time I heard about RFTF I formed the mistaken impression that the band consisted of Keith Lodermeier, Reynold Kissling and Mitch Miller, played new wave nerd art rock, and had been around for a few years playing shows and putting out CDs.  I believed that the description of the band at http://robomofos.com was mere marketing hype:

Robots from the Future is a group of pan-sexual, shape-shifting android butlers, born in the future, residing in the present (your present) in Minneapolis, MN, and they love run-on sentences, and running on sentences. You’d think that beings with the ability to travel great distances in space and time wouldn’t have a primary location but robots get lazy. Just think of all the crazy implications they’d have to deal with once they got back to their own time. They can engage in coitus with their ancestors and not have to deal with having never been born—or being born more than once—if they just stay put in the past. That’s how it works.

Clearly absurd.

It was not until I saw them perform at Cause a while ago that the truth was revealed to me.  After their set I spent some time speaking to Keith and told him that I enjoyed their performance.  Keith politely inquired if I would be interested in performing with the band on keyboards.  Seeing as how I was the proud owner of not one, but two (music) keyboards, ten fingers, and a fairly decent amount of alcohol in my bloodstream I said “sure!”.  Little did I know what would next befall me.

It started innocently enough.  An email, a list of songs, a couple of CDs, then a practice with Keith to go over the parts.  But the second practice is when things got weird.  I arrived as I normally would, keyboards and gear in tow, and knocked on the door to the practice space.  The door opened but it was no longer the practice space I remembered from the first visit.  The room was at least three times too large and there was a tennis court that had definitely not been there previously.  Keith was nowhere to be seen, but his hair was there, shining silver and moving as if attached to an unseen body.  Suddenly the room reverted to a more typical practice space and there stood Keith as if nothing had happened.

“Oh.  Ryan.  You, ah, weren’t supposed to see all that quite yet,” he said.

“What was all that?  The room!  The tennis!  Your hair!”

Keith let out a long sigh and said, “Transdimensional room, tennis is the official sport of the future we come from, and my cloaking system doesn’t work on my hair.  I was trying to fix that.  Look, if you’re going to join this band, I will have let you in on all of our band secrets, eventually, but there is something you must first do.”

“What?”, I asked.

Keith replied by placing his right hand around his left wrist and with a fluid motion, twisting his hand off.  He held the disembodied hand out towards me, it’s finger pointing at my forehead.  Circuits and electricity glimmered in the stump of the left wrist.

“You must be transformed as we have been transformed from the flesh of man to a robot.  Only then will you be able to truly comprehend the scale of our mission to this time.”

I froze.  The room began to change again.  I turned for the door but it had disappeared.  Behind me, two lights shimmered and Reynold and Mitch appeared brandishing laser rifles.  There was no escape.  I was trapped.  I wanted to play with the band.  I had my keyboards with me.  I had learned most of the parts.  And I was curious about these strange alien beings.  But I did not wish to be transformed into an actual robot.  For me, the price was simply too high.

“You never said anything about being turned into a robot!”, I protested.

“It’s right there on our website.  Are you saying we are liars?” Keith’s eyes blazing with a cold blue light.

“No, no,” I stammered.  What to do?  I had to think fast.  I turned and looked to Mitch and Reynold for some sort of salvation, but they had laid down their lasers and were now engaged in playing some sort of robo-tennis and seemed entirely disinterested in the proceedings.  Then, an idea struck me.  I had seen enough Futurama.  Could I?

“I brought beer!”, I said, and hoisted a 12-pack.  The robo-tennis stopped.  The blue light faded from Keith’s eyes.  All three robots said, “Cool”, in unison and each extruded a bottle-opening appendage from a different location on their bodies.  Practice resumed and they agreed to allow me to retain my human form under two conditions.  First, I let them replace my mushy organic brain with a shiny new metal positronic one.  Second, that I let them upgrade all my internal organs and bodily structure with new indestructible robotanium pieces.  These seemed reasonable enough concessions to me.  At least they weren’t making me into a robot.  Thank god for compromises.  Who says robots from the future are unreasonable?  You should see my new bottle opener.  Very convenient.

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It’s Saturday morning, around 9:15, as I write this.  My morning so far consists of coffee, the Internet, dogs, spinning old Springsteen vinyl, wearing my TARDIS robe, and a little reading and writing.  The conspicuous thing missing from my situation is guilt over the fact that I’m NOT out in a beige minivan, dressed in a moderately-priced suit and tie, carrying a book bag filled with Watchtower publications, with 4-5 of my “brothers” and “sisters”, looking for doors to knock on.  It’s been nearly 10 years since my Watchtower de-conversion.  Nearly 10 years since I tore my old life down and built a new one.  Nearly 10 years since I last knocked on a strangers door to offer them the Good News about the New Order.

I would be lying if I said I didn’t sometimes (rarely) miss the door to door bit.  I know, I know, crazy right?  If you met me in the last 10 years, or if you were never a Witness of Jehovah, you might think I’m a loon.  Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t miss being a Witness in general.  And I would never again want to give away my blissful-coffee-laden-sunshine-through-the-living-room-window relaxing Saturday mornings to a publishing company with delusions of granduer, but door to door was a very interesting experience.  It was the sort of thing that sucks as an obligation but is so weird and unique that when you stop doing it you basically will never have an experience like it again.

If I had never gone door to door I would never have encountered my first conspiracy theorist kook, a lovely old man with shining eyes who Freaked.  Me.  The.  Fuck.  Out.  Raving about which countries on earth today were descended from which of the 12 tribes of Israel, telling me about how Satan was appearing to world leaders under the guise Matreiya and you couldn’t take his picture but then offering to show me a pic 10 minutes later.  Connected via pre-Internet BBS systems to an underground community of pre-X-Files wackaloons and just dying to share all of his intel with two teenage Jehovah’s Witness kids to open their eyes.  I still don’t know how the dude figured out where I lived and left me a book on my front step the next day.  Probably used his spy network.

If I had never gone door to door I would never have seen how so many people live.  It’s amazing how more accepting of the lifestyles and economic circumstances of other people you become when you sit in as many strange living rooms as a Witness does.  Trailer parks and apartment buildings, McMansions and laundromats, anything on the territory card is fare game for a car group to “work”.  It’s like having permission and an excuse (albeit a lame one) to peek in everybody’s house and satisfy your curiousity.  Of course you begin to see patterns, you look for them.  Signs of children, signs of pets, signs of the personality of the householder, anything that might give you a chance to have a good conversation with them.  An opening, an “in”.  

If I had never gone door to door I would have a harder time dealing with rejection and disillusionment.  Imagine that every day you spend a few hours trying to convince random strangers of something that you think is the single most important thing in the world, a thing that will save their lives, and you fail at it every time.  100%.  Total and complete failure.  99% of the time you are told “I’m not interested” or “I have my own religion”.  The other 1% you get a flicker of interest, they take a set of magazines, or they’re bored and agree to talk to you for a few minutes.  You get your hopes up a little, but the tiny flicker never once turns into a new disciple.  What do you do?  Do you feel like a failure?  No.  You learn the Edison trick.  You learn that you have not failed, you’ve successfully discovered 10000 ways that don’t work.  You’re out there to discover if people have the right heart condition to join God’s People.  If they do not, you’ve successfully illustrated that fact.  It’s a win every day.  Talk about an experience that will help you develop resilience.  I had mornings where I sat in the car at the end of service and everyone in the car joked about how “at least no dogs/hoses/baseball bats were used on us today like that one incident with Brother/Sister So-and-So” and “we visited a lot of people today, left some magazines, you never know if a seed was planted”.  

Since I stopped going door to door I have occasionally daydreamed about going door to door as a normal person with no message to sell.  Altering my presentation from something like “Hello, my name is Ryan and this is my friend <Friendy> and we’ve been out this lovely morning visiting people in your neighborhood to ask them their thoughts on pollution.  Do you think mankind will ever find a solution?” to something more like “Hi, my name is Ryan.  I represent nobody and am selling nothing.  I’m not religious, political, or commercial.  I’m just here because people are interesting to me and I wanted to say hi.  If you ever feel like having a casual conversation about the total weirdness that is being a sentient being in an uncaring universe, or, I don’t know, cars or food or peregrine falcons or whatever you think is interesting, here’s my email.  Could be fun.  BTW, I love what you’ve done with the Elvis commemorative plate collection.”  I mean seriously, how could you respond with “Not interested” or “I have my own ____”?  Nobody does that.  Nobody meets random people for no reason with no agenda.  It’s too bad.  If we all went door to door for literally no reason, the people who go door to door selling candy bars or magazines or vacuum cleaners or soap or politcians or religions wouldn’t be the only ones who get to meet everybody.  

Will I show up randomly at your door some Saturday morning to talk about shoes?  It’s unlikely, but it doesn’t mean I won’t sometimes think about how sweet ass that would be.  Tell you what, if you ever want to form a “car group” and work “territory” going door to door for absolutely no reason other than to say Hi, lemme know.  We may never do it, but it would still be fun to chat about.

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My first encounter with Neutral Milk Hotel took place in 1997.  I was working at Mortenson Construction as a contract software developer writing a time-tracking application in Visual Basic.  I really wanted to be doing Java work but the language was too new and nobody had any jobs available.  I was 23 and in my third year working as a software developer.  On the day in question, I was sitting at my desk, listening to a streaming Internet radio station (which was quite a big deal at the time).  “Song Against Sex” from the album On Avery Island started to play and immediately grabbed my attention.  I wrote down the artist and the album name and as soon as I could I bought the CD.  I wasn’t disappointed but it wasn’t earth shattering either.  The remainder of the album, while good, didn’t grab me as much as “Song Against Sex”.  Still, when I heard a new album was coming out the following year, I picked it up right away.  That album was, of course, “In The Aeroplane Over the Sea”, and I thought it was perfect from beginning to end.  I had a new favorite band.

As you may or may not be aware, the Neutral Milk Hotel story then got weird.  The album got off to a slow start commercially, but started to gain a reputation and following and the more popular NMH got, the more band leader Jeff Mangum was kinda freaked out by it.  It reached a point where the band went on hiatus and that seemed to basically be the end of them.  Over the years the influence of the album grew and people waited and waited.  In 2011 an EP of “new” NMH material (recorded between 1992-1995) was released as part of a box set.  In 2012-2013 Jeff played his first tour since NMH went on hiatus and I saw him play at the State Theater, and it was really great, but, it wasn’t Neutral Milk Hotel.  Last night, however, I finally saw Neutral Milk Hotel perform for the first time.  I was not disappointed.  It was a great night, a great show, a lot of fun.

But here’s the thing…  I’m 40 now.  Mangum is 43.  As fun as it is to see this band play after the long wait, they were playing music almost exclusively written when Jeff was between 24-28 years old.  I know he’s been very busy in the intervening years and I sincerely hope he’s happy and healthy, but I will confess to a slight bit of disappointment over the fact that instead of getting new music from the band, they basically spent the night on nostalgia.  All the cool lo-fi/indie/junk-rock stuff was up there on stage.  Quaint old acoustic guitars, singing saws, Moogs, a lamb lamp, outfits that looked hand sewed or knitted, banjo played with a violin bow, toy electric saxophone, lots o’ brass instruments, and the whole zany lo-fi freak folk vibe was exactly what one would expect from a NMH show circa 1998.  Jeff even had a great big huge beard that pretty much fit the current hipster scene perfectly.  Truth is, in many ways NMH is the Velvet Underground of today’s alt music, the progenitor, the band that influenced a thousand bands with their one groundbreaking album.  NMH belongs with bands like The Velvet Underground, New York Dolls, and Modern Lovers as artists who came and went and then became hugely influential.  So maybe, I am saying to myself, just maybe, it’s better that they don’t tour.  When they recorded Aeroplane, the world wasn’t ready for them.  If they dropped a new album today, the world would be waiting.  A different world, with a musical landscape shaped by their music.  Could they even put out an album that could make people happy?  If it didn’t sound like Aeroplane, if it ventured into new territory, people would reject it because it was different.  If it did sound like Aeroplane, people would compare it to that album and it would pale in comparison because they’ve spent over a decade playing and replaying that one.  The hiatus wouldn’t have had to hurt NMH if their last album didn’t turn into such a legendary thing, but it did and the longer time goes by the more they have to deal with the shadow of that album.  I personally wouldn’t want to have to deal with the shadow of something I made when I was in my mid-20’s for the rest of my life.

I think the solution is obvious, but I doubt it will happen.  A new album or two, fresh material, then a tour in which they don’t play all the favorites.  One or two for fan service, fine, but challenge their audience to accept them today, for who they are, and leave the nostalgia bit in the past where it belongs.  Divide some of the audience.  Do a Dylan and go electric.  Whatever.  Just, as Eno says, “discover your formulas and abandon them” or as the writers say “murder your darlings”.  If they were to do that, I would be with them every step.  They could do a 7-inch with Daft Punk feat. Beyonce and I would be OK with it.  I don’t want to live in my 20’s forever.  I don’t want to look backwards too much.  A little nostalgia now and then to remember the journey is fine, but the past can be a trap and I only hope that Jeff and the gang get bored with playing Two-Headed Boy and find out what they have to say today and then start to say it to their new audience.

 

My fingers are crossed and I’m pulling for them because, dammit, they’re still one of my favorite bands.

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I recently acquired a Google Chromecast device. I didn’t know what I planned to do with it, because I wasn’t even sure what it could do, but at $35 I had to play with it.

Turns out, it’s a pretty sweet little addition to the old home entertainment center although I’ve had to solve a few issues to put it to best use.

Connection Issues (ports/audio): My HDTV has two HDMI ports on it. The easiest way to plug it in was to use one of those, but unfortunately this meant no ability to run the audio out to my older, non-HDMI equipped, surround sound receiver. When I bought my TV, I neglected to check for audio output and (thanks Samsung) there is none, so how to get the sound to my receiver?

Solution: I bought two things on Amazon, an HDMI switcher and an HDMI audio extractor box. The switcher gave me three HDMI ports, which when connected to one of the two I already had, moved me up to a total of four ports. I hooked the Chromecast and my DVR up to the switcher so now I have a spare HDMI input on the TV and one on the switcher if I want to plug my laptop in. The audio extractor box takes an HDMI input and sends just the audio out to an optical Dolby 5.1 connection on my receiver. The signal then passes through to the TV. So, video on the TV, digital audio to the receiver, problem solved.

Once everything was connected there was the question of what to do with it. The obvious stuff, Netflix and YouTube, were no-brainers, but I started wondering what was the best way to accomplish local video streaming. I get a video file, say this week’s Formula 1 qualifying session as an MP4 file on my hard drive. I want to watch it on the TV, not the laptop.  I figured I’d need a video server or something.  Turns out, I can open Chrome, open a video file with “File->Open…”, and click the “Cast This Tab” button and it works.  Pretty effing cool.  I have a DLink router that can serve up media files to a web browser so that’s an even nicer solution, but not totally necessary.  The only glitches I’ve run into with the local video streaming are occasional audio synchronization slips.  They seem to self-correct after a minute or two at the most.

All in all, I’m pretty stoked about the Chromecast.  Downloaded video files, Netflix, YouTube, and web video like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are all now being happily watched via Chromecast.  I’d say it is a worthwhile addition to my home theater.  I recommend it.  🙂

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Re-reading things I wrote 5-10 years ago is a fairly humbling experience. I find that is don’t like how I sound much of the time. I don’t like how I wrote about my mother, I don’t like how I came across much of the time, actually.  Oh well, look forward I say…

Last night went to the Apple Store and picked up one of the new MacBook Pro laptops.  I got a 13-inch Retina display model.  I had really not been excited about getting this machine because of a number of factors.  First, it looks nearly identical to the 2008 model it’s replacing.  A little thinner, but other than that, it seems like there has been no progress on the form factor or design.  Second, there is no optical drive.  I don’t use optical disks all that terribly regularly anymore, but it still is mildly annoying.  Not the end of the world, as I have a couple of external USB drives I can use if I need to.  Third, no touch screen.  This is significantly more annoying.  I think touch screens on laptops are very nice.  Apple disagrees.  They’re wrong.  But, the screen it does have, with the Retina display, was another annoyance for me.  I felt like it added too much cost to the machine with too little value.  That is, until I spent a few hours using it and then turned to look at my standard-definition computer monitor and realized that everything suddenly looked like crap.  Retina displays are one of those things that you don’t know you want until you have ’em, I guess.  Final annoyance: non-upgradable RAM.  This is a PITA, but honestly these days 8GB of RAM (which is what I have in it) really does allow you to do just about anything you want.  There is very little reason to upgrade that over the lifespan (4-6 years) of a machine like this.

So, what do I think?  I named it WeeBeastie already because it’s so ridiculously fast.  I don’t want to look at the screen of my other computer because it looks so good, and I no longer feel like I want to carry my iPad around at work because it’s thin enough and light enough to be casually carried along with a notepad.  First impressions, then, are favorable.  Looking forward to putting it through more paces than just installing software on it.

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Long, long, ago (2001) in a galaxy far, far, away (DiaryLand.com) I started journaling online. A little later I moved to LiveJournal (remember that one?) and somebody changed the name to “blogging” at some point and I eventually had a WordPress blog at ryansutter.net. Continue reading →

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Last night, Esther and I setup a projector in the yard and a blanket and had an outdoor movie night. We listened to fireworks, traffic, dogs barking, and saw the occasional bat, while enjoying the cool evening air and Boardwalk Empire. I woke up at 7:30 this morning to let the dogs out. They were well-behaved in the yard as they took their morning constitutionals. I set a blue camping chair out under one of our maple trees and resumed reading “Sometimes a Great Notion” by Ken Kesey. At some point I went online, wrote a post on Facebook about Rhett, caught up with the latest status updates of my friends, and then I took to the green jungle that had previously passed as my garden. I weeded, I raked, I spread compost. I then started a fire in the fire-pit to burn the brush pile that had been lingering since last fall. Soon, Esther awoke and joined me in the yard on a second camp chair and started reading. After clearing the raised beds of weeds and grass, it seemed only fitting that I plant something there, so I transplanted two tomato plants and a Thai basil plant that I had been keeping in containers on the front step. I caged the tomatoes and gave treats of fertilizer stakes all around. A healthy watering and fingers crossed. I am confident the Brandywine will be fine, but the basil and the Better Bush are looking wilty.

My jalapeño and bell pepper plants are looking fantastic, young peppers forming on each. The raspberry canes, hazelnut bushes, and two of the three apple trees are all enthusiastically producing fruit and nuts. White lilacs have appeared atop the Japanese lilac tree. All eight maple trees are making helicopter seeds like they’re going out of style. I’ve seen jays, a woodpecker, and the usual robins and chickadees at the bird feeder, as well as an acrobatic squirrel. The breeze has been perfect all day, and the maple has provided the perfect shade to compliment it. I’ve eaten when I felt like it, read comics and Kesey interchangeably, had a couple beers, and basically found as much peace in my own yard as I typically find on a secluded trail. A dragonfly the size of a hummingbird just paid me a visit. Light blue and gorgeous. So far, this is the day I needed.