sawall’s blog

new order

Jul 21, 2007
Post a comment

so New Order has apparently NOT broken up... sorta: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/6909106.stm

catching up with...

Jul 13, 2007
Post a comment

Brief reviews of recent musical procurements:

Simple Things, Zero 7

I remember liking a song or two of theirs. This has not aged very well.

Notes From Thee Underground, Pigface

There's a couple good tracks on this ("Asphole" is great), but it's not nearly as good as earlier Pigface.

Formless, Gridlock

This is insanely good if you (a) like industrial, (b) like dark ambient, (c) like drum & bass, or (d) WANT ALL THREE AT ONCE. Awesome album. Reminds me a bit of the more ambient old school Skinny Puppy.

Year Zero, Nine Inch Nails

I like this pretty well, but less so after a couple listens. This may be a reaction to all the press saying it is innovative when it in fact seems extremely derivative to me. I plan to create a longer post about each song at some point. There's at least one guitar part that is ripped off from Joy Division, and a couple other songs sound like they are right off of Broken (which isn't a bad thing, since that's my favorite NIN album).

Becoming X, Sneaker Pimps

This has aged even less well for me than Zero 7. Ugh. Why did I like this?

Map of What is Effortless, Telefon Tel Aviv

Loved them live. The guy at the record shop said "DO IT" when I picked it up. I loved this album right up to the point where the singing started. AIGH. Cheesey male pop vocals with horrible lyrics. What the fuck. The music is gorgeous, but AIGH. There are some voxless tracks that are great.

iPhone review addendum

Jul 12, 2007
1 comment

Now that I've had the jesusPhone for a while, I've got a couple updates to my prior review based on using it for a while and taking it on a business trip:

You can't receive calls when you are using the Internets on EDGE! Several times early on I ran into people wondering why the hell I wasn't picking up my phone. It was usually because I was neurotically synching my email, or playing around with stuff on the Internets. I end up have to moderate my Internet use in order to make sure I can actually use the iPhone as a phone. The UI does not make it at all obvious that you're interrupting telephony support (it still appears to have voice signal, etc).
When I was on my business trip I decided to use its (very cool and easy to use) alarm feature to wake me up the next morning. I left it unplugged overnight and on the nightstand in the hotel. By the end of the next day, I was at about the 10% battery mark. This is definitely something that you need to recharge every night.
My reception seems pretty erratic. It will often drop down to one bar and then have trouble making calls. If I begin powering it down, it will usually jump up to 3 or 4 bars (it apparently responds to threats). I think there may be something wonky about the way it diverts/conserves power from the antennae. Fenchurch's Ericsson, also on AT&T, always has more or equal bars than I do.
I have gotten used to the lack of tactile feedback on the keyboard, and I also rely a lot on the automatic spelling correction. This has me typing pretty fast now. The correct mantra is "just keep typing as long as whatever you munge into the keyboard has the same number of characters as the word you're attempting to type". That's not a very catchy mantra and obviously needs work.
I don't feel like it's very slippery or that I am going to drop it anymore. Maybe I am just a bit more used to handling it.
In some places it gets a LOT of attention, and there also seems to be some built in assumptions about "the kind of person who would have an iPhone." I don't mind showing it off a little to friends, but sometimes the attention from strangers is bizarre. Hopefully this will tone down a bit. I also end up in conversations where I feel like I am defending myself along the lines of "I've been thinking about AT&T and the iPhone since February! I played with it for a while in the store before I bought it! I didn't wait in an 18 hour line for it!"

I, like everyone else, got an iPhone

Jul 1, 2007
2 comments

I've been unhappy with T-Mobile for a long time, but ever since I heard about the iPhone coming out, I decided I would wait until it came out to decide on my transition. I was also eyeing the Sony Ericsson S500i, which is out in limited release. I decided I'd get the iPhone if it met a lot of requirements I came up with, and then wait for the Sony if not. I got a chance to play with the iPhone in Palo Alto for a few minutes and almost immediately fell in love, so I went down to the Valley Fair store and picked one up yesterday with no fuss (ha ha, all you people who stood in line for 12 hours). Here's a quick rundown on the pros and cons for me after a few hours of using it:

I think the killer feature that nobody pays much lip service to is the screen resolution. The fact that the resolution is crazy-good makes all the apps really work. Safari and Google Maps would be crap without the great resolution of the iPhone.
The touchscreen UI is super-intuitive. When you're scrolling, you can 'flick' the screen and it will keep going until you stop it by tapping it when you get where you want to. Think the iPod scrollwheel in terms of intuitiveness, but even more so.
I didn't even realize it had 802.11 until the day before I bought mine. That was something that helped clinch the deal. The transition between 802.11 and EDGE is pretty seamless for web browsing. EDGE is also still pretty fast - I'm not sure what people have been complaining about it in regard to it not being 3G.
Killer apps. For example, I was out of the house and reading a book which made a reference to a painting. In about 30 seconds I was able to have the Wikipedia image of that painting on my screen. Another great app is Google Maps which has integration with Address Book and can show traffic.
The activation was pretty easy. It was all based out of iTunes, and I was able to move my phone number from T-Mobile to Cingular without having to talk to anyone. It did take several hours for AT&T to process, but since I was sleeping during most of those hours it wasn't a big issue.
It's a little wide and tall, but it's thin. It feels a lot less bulky in my pocket than my prior phone (Sony Ericsson t637) which actually looks smaller.
Audio quality and reception seem great. I'll be able to evaluate that better after I have it for a few days and use it in a few different situations and try to use it with the headset that came with it.

Here's a couple [what I think are] legitimate design complaints:

For some reason there's no AIM. SMS is iChat-style, but Apple didn't provide AIM and Jabber. I can only assume that this was because AT&T wants people to pay for additional SMS messages and Apple intentionally didn't port iChat completely. Current cell phone AIM clients that I am aware of bill to your SMS plan per message, and I'm sure the cell providers don't want people getting around that. I'll be checking to see if I can get Meebo to work on my iPhone soon, which will make this moot, but a native client would be nice.
Using the touchscreen as a keyboard is awkward - there's no tactile feedback. I do realize that the trade-off was between screen real-estate and having a physical keyboard, and I think they made the right choice. The one thing I would suggest they fix is to allow one to use the landscape keyboard in any application - currently only some applications support typing with a 'wide' keyboard. I find that I fumble a lot in the portrait width keyboard due to large thumbs.
The earbud jack is recessed to the point where I need an extension to use my good headphones. This makes no sense whatsoever. I got the stupid extender, but blech.
I feel like I'm going to drop it when I use it as a camera. It's a little slippery, and there's nothing to really hold on to. I think it would feel more secure if you could use one of the physical buttons to take a photo rather than a button on the touchscreen.

And finally, a couple pointless "engineer who is never happy" nits:

This may be a bug: the 802.11 MAC address was totally missing when I first checked for it. It appeared when I was trying to connect to some networks. I noticed this because I filter MACs on my WiFi so I was trying to figure out the MAC before I ever bothered connecting. It showed up after I tried to connect to a couple nets, so no big deal.
Given that activation can take a while, it seems silly that they don't let you use everything else on the iPhone until AT&T figures out how to activate you.

Overall, I am extremely happy with the purchase, and a lot of my complaints should be fixable with software updates... I hope.

coffee bliss

Jun 13, 2007
1 comment

I recently got a Toddy Coffee Maker. It's the best thing evah. No, really. It is a cold brew system where you make a pound of coffee all at once into a concentrate that you can then use to reconstitute into other coffee drinks. It's basically just a plastic bucket with a filter at the bottom. You let it sit for 12 hours with water and coffee in it, and then drain it into a pitcher that you can then put in the fridge. It lasts for two weeks or so. The bucket is extremely easy to clean since, well, it's a plastic bucket.

The concentrate is about the same strength as espresso. If you take three parts water and one part concentrate, you get something about the same strength as regular coffee. Then you can nuke or ice it to make a hot or a cold drink.

Here's a few things that I love about it:
- No clean up every morning (the French press is particularly irritating to clean)
- No waiting for espresso machine/kettle to heat up
- The coffee is less acidic so easier on my tummy and tastes smoother
- I can make espresso and coffee drinks the same morning without having to use two different machines

No

May 11, 2007
1 comment

I am really glad I got a chance to see New Order a couple times before they split.

SOTL

Apr 20, 2007
Post a comment

Stars of the Lid is HOT THROBBING ambient. Why did I not bother picking up a disc from them until now?! All this time, wasted...

James

Apr 9, 2007
Post a comment

James is apparently back together again and is doing a small tour of the U.K. this month! Apparently, it's sold out. I am hoping that this means new material and a North American tour.

buena vista social club made me fall asleep. twice.

Mar 12, 2007
2 comments

The Buena Vista Social Club is a film about the struggles of a group of fantastic musicians who remained unknown for most of their lives in Cuba under Castro's leadership. They were "discovered" when they were quite old, and released a CD that won a Grammy in 1998, finally achieving the recognition that they deserved.

I was looking forward to a film featuring aforementioned fantastic music, peppered with a few stories. Instead, there was little music, and what there was was often spoken over. No songs played the whole way through. The camera work in every interview was virtually identical. Some of the stories were interesting, but very little of it was about the music.

It made me fall asleep. Twice. I feel like a bad person for not liking a film about these dear old men. I feel doubly bad for not liking a Wim Wenders film, since he made Wings of Desire and one of my all-time favorites, Until the End of the World. But there it is.

The only thing that makes me feel slightly better is that Roger Ebert, in a move that put him opposed to almost every single other major film reviewer, agreed with me.

I greatly prefer getting my Latin music fix by playing Tropico. That has good Latin music, and you get to be a dictator to boot! That said, I might try out the Buena Vista Social Club album one of these days.

etymotic 6i out, audio-technica ATH-A900 in!

Mar 9, 2007
1 comment

When I first heard the Etymotic 6i in-ear monitor (IEM) headphones, I was blown away. The sheer clarity of music was staggering. I heard details in albums I had been listening to for ten years that I had never noticed before. I can only imagine how good the Etymotic 4 series are, but the cost is a bit staff.

Unfortunately, I appear to have an overabundance of ear wax. This is apparently an issue for some people who use IEMs. This finally culminated in my ears getting totally stuffed up at one point - I could barely hear anything one morning when I woke up. To make things even more complicated, I was on a business trip at the time and had a flight that night. Luckily I was in Los Angeles so had an old doctor to go to, who send me to the ear specialist who used a VACUUM on my ears to suck out the excess wax.

I started tentatively using the Etymotic headphones again, but found my ears getting a little bit more stuffed up. At that point I knew that I needed to replace my perfect headphones.

I highly recommend Head Fi if you want to see a load of audiophiles trade differences between different headphones. One issue that was pretty quickly evident is that most high-end headphones require a separate amp to be driven properly. So that narrowed the playing field considerably. My top two choices were the cans I got, and the Sennheiser HD 595's.

I'm very happy with my final decision. They sound slightly muddier to me than the Etymotics, but they make up for that with being super-comfortable. Even though they are relatively huge, I barely notice them at all. They're Audio-Technica ATH-A900's. Even at low volumes, I can hear a lot of detail. They also block out surrounding noises so that I can focus on the music well, but not so much that I can't hear if something important is happening nearby.

They may also sound a little better after some "burn in" time, so I'll report it if they do.

I don't buy into the burn-in concept for amps and cables, but it makes sense for speakers since they have moving parts. We'll see how it goes...