Author: Kent

Reader, writer, arithmeticer. Proprietor of Newsome.Org, a tech, music and life blog.

My Records of the Year

I have enjoyed reading the best of 2008 lists from my favorite music sites, such as Twangville (Mayer, Tom), AWOT, Hickory Wind, Nine Bullets and Hear Ya.

I do my yearly best of lists a little differently.  Since I buy more old records than new ones, I base my lists on records that I heard for the first time this year.  Here are my picks for 2008.

Record of the Year

Hands down and without a doubt, The Avett Brothers’ Live, Vol. 2 (2005) is the best record I heard for the first time in 2008.  These guys are from Concord, NC, which is less than ninety miles away (name that song reference for extra credit) from my hometown.  I have no idea how I missed them until now.  Live, Vol. 2 is not only my record of the year for 2008, it will likely wind up in my top 10 of all time.  There are 17 songs on the record, and every one is excellent.  November Blue is without a doubt one of the best songs I have ever heard.

Smoke in Our Lights and Offering, among many others, are also excellent.  The singing, playing and writing is uniformly excellent.

Do yourself a favor and buy this record right now.

Other Great Finds

One of the many wonderful things about Pandora is its function as a music discovery tool.  A few weeks ago, I was working in my shop when an absolutely amazing song came on.  I ran over to the computer to give it the thumbs up and write down the name.  It was a song called Speed Train by J.J. Schultz from his record Something to Me (2005).

Speed Train is the best song on the record, but there are plenty of other great songs to make this a worthy addition to your collection.

I’ve been a fan of The Band for years.  Dirt Farmer (2007), the latest record by Levon Helm, reminds me why.  It won a Grammy for Best Traditional Folk album, which is great, but I wouldn’t classify this record as a traditional folk record.  It sounds like American farm music to me- which is even greater.  I would love to attend one of Levon’s Midnight Rambles.

I didn’t get all the hoopla about The Black Keys, until I heard their 2003 record, Thickfreakness, which was on Fat Possum Records, one of my favorite labels.  This is some righteous blues, and Have Love, Will Travel rocks so hard it will rattle your teeth.  If Led Zeppelin wants to tour and Robert Plant won’t come around, Dan Auerbach is the answer.  This album is a must for blues rock fans.

No other band has held my love and attention as much as the Grateful Dead.  I have a ton of their records as well as a ton of solo stuff by the members.  Somehow I missed Jerry Garcia’s records with Merl Saunders until I heard their cover of Positively 4th Street on XM a couple of months ago.  I don’t generally buy “best of” records, but this is the one I found when I went looking for that song.  It’s a mighty fine record, with the cover of Mystery Train being another highlight.

I have always loved female alt. country bands.  Freakwater is a long time favorite of mine, as were the Texas Rubies (Kelly Kessler and I co-wrote some songs back in the day).  My newest discovery is The Be Good Tanyas, particularly their record Hello Love (2006).  They do a great cover of Neil Young’s For the Turnstiles.  They even do a pretty darn good cover of Prince’s When Doves Cry.  My favorite song on the record is the beautiful A Thousand Tiny Pieces.  I played this song for my young daughters, both of whom are, to one extent or another, aspiring musicians and told them to write, play and sing just like this.

And, finally, as I predicted in a post last month, Porter Batiste Stoltz’s Moodoo, an excellent record anchored by the wonderful Funky Miracle/Sing a Simple Song/Rainy Day Women.

Those are my picks for 2008.  What are yours?

Technorati Tags: ,

Video Fun: Playing Cards

I have been experimenting with the time lapse features of my camera.  Here’s a video I made last night during a game of Pay Me with our friends.  There is a lot of iPhone action going on between plays, demonstrating the iPhone’s penetration into non-techie America.

You can do a lot of interesting things with time lapse.  Back in the nineties, it took me about 8 hours to compile a two minute time lapse animation for one of my films.  Today’s technology makes it very easy.

I expect I’ll do more stuff like this.

Link for feeds.

Evening Reading: 12/18/08

RIM calls the Storm Verizon’s best selling device.  I wonder if they called Verizon later to apologize.  RIM seems to be putting a lot of eggs in the Storm basket.

In related news,  PC World has a list of 7 free “must-have” Storm apps.  The eighth would presumably be the receipt, so you can return it.

Dave Taylor on getting noticed online.  I need some advice on that.  Since I’ve been blogging again, I feel like this blog has the traction of a marble on ice.

There’s a new post at the Adios Lounge.  This one on Clarence White of the Byrds.  If you have any interest in classic country rock music, the Adios Lounge should be at the very top of your reading list.  Want another reason why?  How about a story and full mp3 set from a Doug Sahm, Jerry Garcia and Leon Russell show from 1972?  These posts are like encyclopedia entries, only a hundred times more interesting.  Here’s the RSS feed.

Some folks are squawking about Mobile Spy for the iPhone.  All this means is that my kids may actually get iPhones one day.  It’s easy (and critically important) to “protect” your kids (yes, even from themselves) on their computers.  We need similar tools for mobile phones.

Speaking of iPhones, I’d pay $50 for a good version of Odyssey: The Compleat Apventure on the iPhone.  Shoot, I’d pay $100 for Starflight.

12Seconds looks like a very interesting app (iTunes link).  The iPhone needs a native video camera function, but this looks like a good interim solution.  The iPhone also needs a flash.

I think it’s pretty clear that the iPhone is, in fact, the next big mobile gaming platform.  I think it is not quite an acceptable netbook substitute.  If I were Steve Jobs, I’d direct Apple to develop a device you insert your iPhone into that would give you a regular keyboard, a bigger screen and extra battery life.  Apple would own the netbook space from the first minute.

Granny J on some fancy gingerbread houses.  I love to watch my kids make their houses every Christmas.

I have always been interested in game theory.  Mind Your Decisions shows us why Toyota wants GM to be saved.

Technorati Tags:

Classic Sci-Fi Book Reviews: Edmond Hamilton (Part 1)

My wife gave me a Kindle for our anniversary this past summer.  The short review is that I like the technology a lot, but since I’m not interested in much new fiction outside of Cormac McCarthy and William Gay, my use of the Kindle will depend largely on how many older books are released in the Kindle format.  I was pleasantly surprised to find quite a few vintage science fiction books in the Kindle store, many of them priced at just a dollar or two.  For example, I found some Andre Norton books.  Her Star Man’s Son, retitled Daybreak 2250 AD, was the first science fiction book I read, and is still one of my favorites.

I also found several books by one of the founders of the science fiction genre, Edmond Hamilton.  I read a few of his books on the Kindle, and then bought several more on eBay and read them.  In the first of a new series of posts, I’ll briefly review some of these books.  Other books by other authors will follow.

My vintage science fiction interest lies generally in books from the fifties through the seventies.  There may be a few outside that range, but they will be the exception, not the rule.

The first Edmond Hamilton book I read was City at World’s End (1950), a book about a city that is blown far into the future by an atomic bomb.   

It’s a good read.  I enjoyed the story.  The character development was good, certainly by pulp sci-fi standards.  The book is the equivalent of a Saturday afternoon B-Movie on AMC or Turner Classics.  Not one of my favorites, but worth a read.

Things got significantly more interesting with the next book: The Star Kings (1947).  This one is about a man named John Gordon, who is mentally contacted by a man from the far future and, out of boredom, agrees to a mind transfer.  Gordon finds himself in the far future, in the body of a  prince and in the middle of a galactic war.  It is a great read.  I liked it so much I bought the sequel, Return to the Stars (1970, 23 years later), on eBay.  The sequel is interesting, but not nearly as good as the first book.  Highly recommended.

Next, I read The Three Planeteers, accurately described on Amazon as the “science fiction pulp classic.”  It’s a short but interesting space opera about three outlaws who are called upon to save the galaxy from the evil League of Cold Worlds.  The writing is similar to The Star Kings, and it is my second favorite of the Hamilton books I have read so far.  It’s a good book in 2008.  When you consider it was written in 1940, it’s even more amazing.

I also read A Yank at Valhalla (1950), an odd book about a guy on an Arctic expedition who winds up in the middle of Norse mythology.  I didn’t like it at all at first, but by the time I finished, I thought it was worth a read.  Lastly, I read The Haunted Stars (1960) (boring, and my least favorite) and The Star of Life (1959) (not great, but worth a read).  There are lots of other Edmond Hamilton books out there, but they are not easy to find.  I continue to monitor eBay and will buy others as the opportunity arises.

Hamilton takes his place as my second favorite vintage sci-fi writer (behind Andre Norton), for now.

As always, I encourage other book recommendations via the Comments.

Next time: a vintage Arthur C. Clarke book that bored me to tears.

I Just Heard It!

I just saw a reference on Twitter to Just Hear It, an on demand music discovery service.  According to the “About” page, Just Hear It was created by two college students and pays for licenses from the PROs.  The web page says it’s in private beta, but it worked for me and I have not been invited.

Based on some limited tests, this thing looks like it has legs.  I did my typical music search spectrum:

Easy: The Byrds (lots of songs)
Medium: Dillard and Clark (4 songs, plus more from the Dillards)
Hard: The Allisons ( 3 songs)

It even has some, but not all, of my songs indexed.

Some songs display album covers.

I don’t know much about this service, but assuming it’s legitimate (and the web page indicates that it is), it could revolutionize the way we search for music on the web.

Technorati Tags: ,

Evening Reading: 12/15/08

There’s a lot to talk about tonight.  Let’s dive right in.

AppCraver talks about iPhone app development.  This description of the app industry sounds like the music industry from a songwriter’s perspective: “with the hit-driven mentality behind the App Store that unless an app quickly gets pushed into the top 50-either by being featured on iTunes or by word of mouth-it’s doomed to only break even or lose money.”  I love browsing the App Store, but my advice to app developers is the same as it is to songwriters and auto makers: if you want people to buy your stuff, either make better stuff or make a lot of stuff and cross your fingers.  I’d pay way more than 99 cents for a really fun or helpful application.  I think others would too.

Ed Bott on the Windows Live Essentials programs.  I can’t put my finger on it, but something about Microsoft’s internet-related applications seems significantly less elegant and user-friendly than the various alternatives.  I say seems, because it may be a marketing problem more than a technical problem.  I’m using Live Writer right now.  Movie Maker is an easy yet powerful application.  The best of the bunch used to be Photo Story.  I used it all the time.  Why is it not part of this package?  Is it dead?  Anyone remember the Microsoft application from the nineties that let you create songs, sort of like Band in a Box?  It was really cool, and then it disappeared.  Microsoft’s ancillary products are like television shows- you’re afraid to get hooked because they may not be around for long.

Here’s a Christmas present recommendation for the hard to buy for lion in your family.

There’s been lots of talk about whether brands belong on Twitter.  I tend to agree with Lon in theory, although I think email is still the new phone company.  Twitter is the new chat line.  The problem with turning brands loose on Twitter is that corporate America has absolutely no idea how to use the web in a mutually beneficial way.  Until they figure it out, Twitter will be just another advertising medium, at best.  Still, since Twitter is opt-in, the noise can be easily filtered.

Maybe soon we’ll see ads like this on Twitter.

Now you can toss your shoes at President Bush without getting tossed from the news conference after a minute or so.  How did that dude get a second try?  Where were the Secret Service guys?  I’m not a big President Bush fan, but I don’t like the event or the game.

Fresh off the less than fulfilling conversation on the “Semantic Web,” Read/Write/Web takes on “Cloud Computing.”  After shaking off what, I think, was a tongue in cheek prologue about jigsaw puzzles and splendor and whatnot, I tried to assimilate the first paragraph of the article:

Not merely some game of buzzword bingo on an unprecedented scale, cloud computing is coming into its own, and it is becoming increasingly easy to see the opportunities for a significant shift in the way we access computational resources and to recognize that the walls separating organizations from their peers, partners, competitors, and customers will become ever-more permeable to the flow of data through which those distant machines will compute.

Oh boy.  Off to Wikipedia, which was slightly more helpful than it was during my “Semantic Web” quest:

Cloud computing is a general concept that incorporates software as a service (SaaS), Web 2.0 and other recent, well-known technology trends, in which the common theme is reliance on the Internet for satisfying the computing needs of the users. For example, Google Apps provides common business applications online that are accessed from a web browser, while the software and data are stored on the servers.

I think there is something to Cloud Computing (unlike the “Semantic Web,” which I think is either an inside joke or complete nonsense), but if its proponents want people to care, they have to learn how to explain and discuss it in a way that doesn’t read like something on The Onion.  I am dead serious when I say that I believe at least some of the people writing about this stuff are messing with the rest of the devotees.  In a Borat sort of way.

All 10 of us corporate iPhone users desperately need a way to exchange vCards.  I tried Snapdat, but it didn’t work on my phone.  When I tried to add or edit a SnapCard, the app just closed.  Anything tied to a network or platform won’t work in a corporate setting.  Few corporate users have iPhones and none have the same application you have.  We need a cross-platform, email based system.  I’d pay way more than 99 cents for that.

I’m still putting Technorati tags in some of my posts, even though Technorati no longer picks them up and doesn’t seem to be indexing my blog at all.  I think I’m about to pull the plug on Technorati.  Too bad Dave Sifry isn’t still there to help me out.

Three iPhone apps that every corporate user should have: Note2Self, Evernote and RTM (I could make RTM the perfect application with 3 tweaks).

Technorati Tags:

More Pandora Goodness: Kent’s Hand-Crafted Blues Mix

pandoraI’ve had an alternative country oriented Pandora radio station for years.  A lot of thumbs up and thumbs down have mapped a pretty specific genome: mid-tempo alternative country (not Americana, which generally bores me to tears) songs.  I love that station and listen to it regularly.

But it was time to diversify.

Over the weekend, I created my second station.  Kent’s Hand-Crafted Blues Mix.  If you know these names, you’ll love it:  Junior Kimbrough, Otis Rush, Byther Smith, Jimmy Reed, Otis Spann, Luther Allison and Pee Wee Crayton.  Give it a listen!

Not Digital Luddites, Busy Grownups

nosocialmediaDwight Silverman asks why some people have elected not to use social media, having received some decidedly anti-social media comments on his blog.  Before I answer that question, let me point out something Dwight said that bears repeating.  Many social media haters already use some form of social media: message boards, comments on blogs, etc.  I’ll go one step further.  What about group email?  Text messages?  What about Amazon?  The best thing about Amazon is the user reviews.  There is a difference, however, between social media as a way to manage your existing network, and social media as your network.

Take Amazon, for example, Amazon helps you evaluate a purchase, make that purchase and have that purchase delivered.  That’s a time saving benefit you can’t get anywhere else.  Email also serves a distinct purpose that helps you efficiently manage your network.  So does texting.  While these things help you navigate through your real-world network, they are less concerned with helping you create a network.  If you’re interested in communicating with strangers, denoting some of them as cyber-friends, and nurturing the most promising of those ephemeral relationships into something tangible, there are real friends to be made through some of the social media applications.  Friends and the resulting transitive connections make a network.  There’s value in that, and in no way am I denigrating those who do this.  But at that point, the social media applications, either singly or in the aggregate, have become your network.  To the profit of the developers, but that’s another story.

And then there’s the troublesome problem of separating those who want to be your friend from those who want your money.  It’s much harder to evaluate the motives of online friendship, where the barrier for entry is low, the anonymity is high and just about everyone is out to make a buck.

There are billions of us out here who don’t want to create our networks online.  We simply want help in managing our existing, real-world networks.  I’d rather have dinner with someone than read his Facebook page or hear what he ate via Twitter.  And, to be honest, I think there is a collective feeling out here that a lot of these applications are toys, to be left for kids.  I share a little of that.  No matter how hard I try, I continue to think of Facebook as a place for young people.  When I’m there, I feel like I’m playing with a GI Joe or something.  MySpace is the Geocities for this generation: ugly, free web sites, with ads.  Twitter is semi-interesting, but the majority of the traffic is people talking over each other or thinly disguised spam.  There’s little there that can’t be handled via email.

Additionally, I think human nature prefers order over chaos.  And content bits spread all over the various social networks is chaotic.  Which is why I think aggregating sites like FriendFeed may get legs faster than the 112th Facebook clone.

In the end, I agree with Dwight.  People who don’t use social media are not digital Luddites.  Many of them are just busy grownups.

Technorati Tags: