I just read a pretty interesting article about how vinyl is helping kill the CD. I definitely agree whole-heartedly that vinyl is much better for music listening than CDs are. With MP3 players being much more common than discmen these days, the convenience of CDs’ smaller form factor over vinyl no longer matters anymore.
For a couple years now, my stance has been to buy albums on vinyl and download the MP3 or rip a copy from my radio station. It’s been working out great so far!
I just read a pretty interesting article about how vinyl is helping kill the CD. I definitely agree whole-heartedly that vinyl is much better for music listening than CDs are. With MP3 players being much more common than discmen these days, the convenience of CDs’ smaller form factor over vinyl no longer matters anymore.
For a couple years now, my stance has been to buy albums on vinyl and download the MP3 or rip a copy from my radio station. It’s been working out great so far!
Dan In Real Life isn’t really anything to write home about, but I guess it is something to blog about? It was a cute romantic comedy with a few laughs in it, but if you’re looking for a lotof laughs, this isn’t going to be the movie for you. The general theme of the movie is about falling in love with someone that you can’t be with. A lot of things in the movie seemed to parallel some of what I’ve been feeling lately so I guess maybe that’s why I liked it.
The thing about Steve Carrell is that he really just plays the same character with slight variations. In this movie, it was kind of a combination of his character from The Office and his character from Little Miss Sunshine. While I still enjoy what he does, I feel that it is starting to get a little old.
One thing that did surprise me a bit was that I didn’t completely hate Dane Cook in the movie. I usually can’t stand him and don’t think he’s funny at all, but I think that they kept him pretty likable in this movie. His role wasn’t too overbearing and he was pretty mild mannered.
I shaved off my beard last night and I immediately regretted it. This is awful. My face is cold as hell and I look like I’m ten!
I did it for Halloween since my costume–which no one will get anyway–kind of requires it. I thought that Halloween > beards, but I’m rethinking this now. I haven’t been beardless in over 6 years and this is why. I feel completely naked! But the good news is that I don’t plan on shaving again so it should be back in full swing in a little more than two weeks.
The process itself was actually quite painful since most of my skin isn’t used to being shaved, but I took some pictures along the way. Horrible photography since I had to do it myself with a point and shoot camera in the bathroom, but you get the point…
Last night’s show was pretty decent. A lot better than last weeks, but not quite perfect…
| World/Inferno Friendship Society, The | M Is For Morphine | Addicted To Bad Ideas |
| Black Lips | O Katrina!yes | Good Bad Not Evil |
| Jessica Hoop | Silverscreen | Kismet |
| Mass Shivers | Pacific Ash | Ecstatic Eyes Glow Glossy |
| Poison Control Center, The | Thrill | A Collage Of Impressions |
| Ben Harper & The Innocent Criminals | In The Colors | Lifeline |
| Emily King | Ain’t No Sunshine | East Side Story |
| Tiger! Tiger | How Much Can You Take | The Kind Of Goodnight |
| Castanets | Strong Animal | In The Vines |
| Belaire | Exploding Impacting | Exploding, Impacting |
| Health | Triceratops | Health |
| We Are Wolves | Magique | Total Magique |
| Lejeune | Replaced By Robots | For Club And Country |
| Animal Collective | Derek | Strawberry Jam |
| North Elementary | Just Another Sin | Berandals |
| Yarrows, The | Impossible One | Plum |
| Snmnmnm | For All I Know | Crawl Inside Your Head |
| Les Savy Fav | Slugs In The Shrubs | Let’s Stay Friends |
| Idiot Pilot | Retina In The Sky | Cruel World Enterprise |
| Jacob Berendes | Lolabrigida | Foreign Policy |
| Georgie James | Henry And Hanzy | Places |
| Good Life, The | A Little Bit More | Help Wanted Nights |
| Waylon Jennings And The Waymore Blues Band | Trouble Man | Never Say Die: The Final Concert Film |
| Patrick Park | Time For Moving On | Everyone’s In Everyone |
| Casey Neill | Chainlink Fence | Brooklyn Bridge |
| Weakerthans, The | Relative Surplus Value | Reunion Tour |
| Magik Markers | Circle | Boss |
| Cliped Beaks | Hoarse Lords | Hoarse Lords |
| Black Francis | Test Pilot Blues | Bluefinger |
| Bruce Springsteen | I’ll Work For Your Love | Magic |
I went to see The Hold Steady in Philly last night. We got there late so we didn’t see the first band and only saw half of Art Brut which was good because I saw the one song of theirs that I like and then only had to sit through a couple others. Despite only having to see a few songs of theirs, they were a little annoying at the end when they drew out the end of the last song for about three minutes for no real reason.
The Hold Steady were awesome though. They played everything that I wanted to hear and had tons of energy. As per the norm, Craig Finn was all kinds of crazy. It ruled!
We left about a song early since we were pretty exhausted, but I hear that at the very end, everyone climbed over the barrier at the TLA and got up on stage. I wish I had been there for that!
Their set list:
Encore:
I went to Philly to see The Lawrence Arms at the North Star Bar last night. I’d never been to the venue before, but it was pretty cool, except for the fact that it was way too hot. It’s on the smaller side which is nice for creating a more intimate setting. There’s a balcony thing as well, but it’s practically right over the stage so you have to be in the very front row and you’re looking pretty much straight down on the bands as they play.
The lineup was pretty awesome, it was the Lawrence Arms, The Falcon, Sundowner, and American Steel. Since The Sundowner is Chris McCaughen of The Larry Arms and The Falcon is Brenden and Neil, those guys spent a lot of time on stage. Chris had Neil come out and play with him for the Sundowner and since Dan Andraino from Alkaline Trio couldn’t make the tour, Chris played with The Falcon as well. Dudes must have been tired as hell, but it was kind of neat to see the same three guys on stage most of the night. They made a lot of jokes about The Lawrence Arms and made fun of them a lot which was kind of funny, but it seemed like something that they do for every show on the tour.
The Sundowner and The Falcon were both pretty awesome, but American Steel played way too long. I had never really heard much of their stuff before, but always heard good things. They played well and the first few songs really made me want to check out their stuff, but their set started to drag a bit after a while.
The Lawrence Arms, as per the norm, didn’t really play any of the songs that I really wanted to hear. I think I could easily make a list of a dozen songs that I wanted to hear that they didn’t play, but it’s alright since I like pretty much everything they have. They played really well, which isn’t always a good thing for them. Something about playing a little sloppy makes that band sound a lot better. It’s weird how it works out. The one thing that I didn’t like was that Brenden talked way too much and they stopped after every single song for him to talk. They played a pretty good mix of stuff from all over their catalog which was cool though.
Both The Lawrence Arms and The Sundowner played Boatless Booze Cruise which was kind of silly, but they acknowledged the self-indulgence factor of it. It was kind of neat to see one version with Chris taking the lead and then another version with Brenden taking the lead.
Overall, it was a pretty good night, except for the fact that the show went until after midnight.
I would put this in my nerd blog, but since I pretty much abandoned it, I’m going to just post it here.
I finally got a new cell phone last weekend. My Sony Ericsson p910a was approaching three years old and was completely falling apart so it was definitely about time. I kept waiting because I knew what phone I wanted and the manufacturer kept delaying it. I went with the AT&T Tilt (8925) which is an AT&T rebrand of the HTC TyTN II (a.k.a. Kaiser, a.ka. p4550). The wait was worth it though. It’s an amazing phone! It’s as close to being the Holy Grail of cell phones as exists right now. I wanted to wait until I had some time with the phone before writing up my review, but I think seven days is enough.
Here’s the spec list:
Hardware
The device feels extremely solid in hand and the sliding mechanism is very smooth. The titling feature on the screen is a really nice addition over previous HTC phones. It allows for you to get a better angle on the screen while keeping your hands in a much more comfortable position. It also lets you place the phone on your desk and angle the screen up at yourself.
The scroll wheel on the side is very nice with just the right amount of resistance, but the travel when pushing it in seems a bit much. Unfortunately, I don’t think anything will top the scroll wheel on the p910a (it also tilted forward or back allowing three different clicking options). The buttons on the front face of the phone are nice and just the right size for small or medium sized hands, but if you have large fingers, some of the buttons might be a little small. The QWERTY keyboard is excellent. It’s very spacious and the buttons have just the right amount of travel and clickiness to them and do not require too much pressure. The only minor issue is that the buttons for the soft keys get to be a little hard to press when the screen is fully tilted. This doesn’t provide too much issue though because I rarely have the screen at full tilt while holding it and I can easily just touch the screen instead. The other issue with the soft keys is that they are a little close to rest of the keys and sometimes when typing an email or SMS, I’ll accidentally push the left one as I try to hit the ‘R’ or ‘T’ key. This causes my message to send before I actually want them to. To prevent this, I started typing my message before adding the recipients.
The phone comes with a decent sized stylus which was very welcome after using the almost microscopic one found on the p910a. I do find it a little annoying that it’s located on the bottom of the phone. This is especially annoying when I have the phone open and need to use my left hand to pull the stylus out and then have to hand it over to my right hand to actually use it. Fortunately, I find that I don’t need to use it that much. The 5-way navigation buttons on the front and scroll wheel along with my fingers take care of almost everything.
I would have liked a full sized SD slot, but since it seems that those don’t really exist on cell phones these days, I can live with the microSDHC slot. Unfortunately, the camera has no flash which sucks. It has decent low-light capabilities, but not having a flash does make it rather limiting, not to mention that an LED flash also doubles nicely as a flashlight. The camera itself is a little disappointing. For 3MP, I’d expect some better quality shots, but they are acceptable for a phone and the color isn’t too bad for what it is. If I were going out somewhere and I knew ahead of time that I wanted to take pictures, I would definitely want my digital camera with me, but this is more than acceptable for the random ad hoc shot.
The on-board GPS is really nice. This was the selling point for me as it’s the only PocketPC GPS phone with a QWERTY slider available right now. It is not a SiRFstarIII, but it gets the job done. When I first tried it, I was having a lot of trouble getting a fix and none of my apps would be able to get a reading, but an install of GPS Test did the trick and got it working. It gets a fix on satellites in anywhere from ten to thirty seconds. I don’t plan on using it much, but it’ll be nice for those few times a month that I drive to places I’ve never been to before.
I have two major gripes with the hardware though. The battery and the volume. The phone is not nearly loud enough for me. I would say that it easily needs to be twice as loud. Yesterday, I was trying to have a call while walking in NYC and the street noise made it very hard to hear the person on the other end. The call quality is very good when holding the phone up to your ear, but the speakerphone leaves a little to be desired.
The battery does not seem to last very long. At only 1350mAh, it does not carry enough power to give confidence that you will make it through the day. The GPS destroys the battery pretty quickly and about a half hour of use can easily take out 25%. I find this to be a bit expected though and I plan on plugging the phone in while in the car and using the GPS. I found that if I turned off the 3G data connection and kept my WiFi use to a minimum, I’d be alright. The phone got very heavy email and internet use all day yesterday with about a half hour of talk time and it got me through just fine, but had I not been able to charge it over night, I would not have made it through today. Do not plan on getting more than a day to a day and half out of this phone with just one battery unless you don’t ever take it out of your pocket.
Software
This is my first true experience with Windows Mobile other than messing around with some friends’ phones. My p910a had Symbian UIQ which is a very nice and aesthetically pleasing operating system, but it has a lot of limitations, especially in the syncing department. I find Windows Mobile to be a little clunky sometimes and on its own, it’s not very pretty looking, but this can be rectified with all of the tweaks and software support available online.
The integration with Windows is great, in my opinion. The syncing with Office is perfect in every way. The message handling on the phone is also great. I set it up with three personal accounts and my work email (via Exchange server) and I don’t have any real complaints about it. I love that it treats SMS/MMS messages just like emails as well. I have all of my email, contacts, tasks, and calendar entries all synced up between my phone, home computer and work computer. It doesn’t even require any effort to keep them in sync either.
The calendar, tasks, and contacts are much more robust and have many more options and fields than in Symbian.
The one thing that I didn’t like was that the phone came with AT&T’s bloated version of the ROM instead of the standard HTC one. There was a lot of bloatware and a lack of the HTC home screen plugin. I also read on a few sites that the AT&T ROM performs a bit slowly compared to the HTC one. So because of all of this, I flashed over to the HTC as soon as I got home from the AT&T store.
The black theme on the ROM is very nice and the home screen plugin is a neat addition, even though all of the functionality can be added through third party software. The HTC ROM also includes some TouchFLO elements, but I find that I hardly ever actually use the finger scro
lling.
Overall
Overall, I love the phone. I am very happy with it and it was definitely worth the wait. I would really recommend it to anyone who is looking for a full featured phone. There are a few minor quirks, but I really think it’s the best phone out there right now. When I got my p910 almost three years ago, I was excited that I could have my whole life right at my fingertips, but it never quite hit the mark for what I was looking for. With this phone, I can definitely say that I’ve got EVERYTHING I need.
Pros:
Cons:
And here is a list of all the 3rd party apps that I have installed so far:
And all of this software is on internal memory except where noted. I still have plenty of space left.
I would put this in my nerd blog, but since I pretty much abandoned it, I’m going to just post it here.
I finally got a new cell phone last weekend. My Sony Ericsson p910a was approaching three years old and was completely falling apart so it was definitely about time. I kept waiting because I knew what phone I wanted and the manufacturer kept delaying it. I went with the AT&T Tilt (8925) which is an AT&T rebrand of the HTC TyTN II (a.k.a. Kaiser, a.ka. p4550). The wait was worth it though. It’s an amazing phone! It’s as close to being the Holy Grail of cell phones as exists right now. I wanted to wait until I had some time with the phone before writing up my review, but I think seven days is enough.
Here’s the spec list:
Hardware
The device feels extremely solid in hand and the sliding mechanism is very smooth. The titling feature on the screen is a really nice addition over previous HTC phones. It allows for you to get a better angle on the screen while keeping your hands in a much more comfortable position. It also lets you place the phone on your desk and angle the screen up at yourself.
The scroll wheel on the side is very nice with just the right amount of resistance, but the travel when pushing it in seems a bit much. Unfortunately, I don’t think anything will top the scroll wheel on the p910a (it also tilted forward or back allowing three different clicking options). The buttons on the front face of the phone are nice and just the right size for small or medium sized hands, but if you have large fingers, some of the buttons might be a little small. The QWERTY keyboard is excellent. It’s very spacious and the buttons have just the right amount of travel and clickiness to them and do not require too much pressure. The only minor issue is that the buttons for the soft keys get to be a little hard to press when the screen is fully tilted. This doesn’t provide too much issue though because I rarely have the screen at full tilt while holding it and I can easily just touch the screen instead. The other issue with the soft keys is that they are a little close to rest of the keys and sometimes when typing an email or SMS, I’ll accidentally push the left one as I try to hit the ‘R’ or ‘T’ key. This causes my message to send before I actually want them to. To prevent this, I started typing my message before adding the recipients.
The phone comes with a decent sized stylus which was very welcome after using the almost microscopic one found on the p910a. I do find it a little annoying that it’s located on the bottom of the phone. This is especially annoying when I have the phone open and need to use my left hand to pull the stylus out and then have to hand it over to my right hand to actually use it. Fortunately, I find that I don’t need to use it that much. The 5-way navigation buttons on the front and scroll wheel along with my fingers take care of almost everything.
I would have liked a full sized SD slot, but since it seems that those don’t really exist on cell phones these days, I can live with the microSDHC slot. Unfortunately, the camera has no flash which sucks. It has decent low-light capabilities, but not having a flash does make it rather limiting, not to mention that an LED flash also doubles nicely as a flashlight. The camera itself is a little disappointing. For 3MP, I’d expect some better quality shots, but they are acceptable for a phone and the color isn’t too bad for what it is. If I were going out somewhere and I knew ahead of time that I wanted to take pictures, I would definitely want my digital camera with me, but this is more than acceptable for the random ad hoc shot.
The on-board GPS is really nice. This was the selling point for me as it’s the only PocketPC GPS phone with a QWERTY slider available right now. It is not a SiRFstarIII, but it gets the job done. When I first tried it, I was having a lot of trouble getting a fix and none of my apps would be able to get a reading, but an install of GPS Test did the trick and got it working. It gets a fix on satellites in anywhere from ten to thirty seconds. I don’t plan on using it much, but it’ll be nice for those few times a month that I drive to places I’ve never been to before.
I have two major gripes with the hardware though. The battery and the volume. The phone is not nearly loud enough for me. I would say that it easily needs to be twice as loud. Yesterday, I was trying to have a call while walking in NYC and the street noise made it very hard to hear the person on the other end. The call quality is very good when holding the phone up to your ear, but the speakerphone leaves a little to be desired.
The battery does not seem to last very long. At only 1350mAh, it does not carry enough power to give confidence that you will make it through the day. The GPS destroys the battery pretty quickly and about a half hour of use can easily take out 25%. I find this to be a bit expected though and I plan on plugging the phone in while in the car and using the GPS. I found that if I turned off the 3G data connection and kept my WiFi use to a minimum, I’d be alright. The phone got very heavy email and internet use all day yesterday with about a half hour of talk time and it got me through just fine, but had I not been able to charge it over night, I would not have made it through today. Do not plan on getting more than a day to a day and half out of this phone with just one battery unless you don’t ever take it out of your pocket.
Software
This is my first true experience with Windows Mobile other than messing around with some friends’ phones. My p910a had Symbian UIQ which is a very nice and aesthetically pleasing operating system, but it has a lot of limitations, especially in the syncing department. I find Windows Mobile to be a little clunky sometimes and on its own, it’s not very pretty looking, but this can be rectified with all of the tweaks and software support available online.
The integration with Windows is great, in my opinion. The syncing with Office is perfect in every way. The message handling on the phone is also great. I set it up with three personal accounts and my work email (via Exchange server) and I don’t have any real complaints about it. I love that it treats SMS/MMS messages just like emails as well. I have all of my email, contacts, tasks, and calendar entries all synced up between my phone, home computer and work computer. It doesn’t even require any effort to keep them in sync either.
The calendar, tasks, and contacts are much more robust and have many more options and fields than in Symbian.
The one thing that I didn’t like was that the phone came with AT&T’s bloated version of the ROM instead of the standard HTC one. There was a lot of bloatware and a lack of the HTC home screen plugin. I also read on a few sites that the AT&T ROM performs a bit slowly compared to the HTC one. So because of all of this, I flashed over to the HTC as soon as I got home from the AT&T store.
The black theme on the ROM is very nice and the home screen plugin is a neat addition, even though all of the functionality can be added through third party software. The HTC ROM also includes some TouchFLO elements, but I find that I hardly ever actually use the finger scro
lling.
Overall
Overall, I love the phone. I am very happy with it and it was definitely worth the wait. I would really recommend it to anyone who is looking for a full featured phone. There are a few minor quirks, but I really think it’s the best phone out there right now. When I got my p910 almost three years ago, I was excited that I could have my whole life right at my fingertips, but it never quite hit the mark for what I was looking for. With this phone, I can definitely say that I’ve got EVERYTHING I need.
Pros:
Cons:
And here is a list of all the 3rd party apps that I have installed so far:
And all of this software is on internal memory except where noted. I still have plenty of space left.
I went to see 30 Days of Night in the city for free last night at the AMC on Second Ave. Before I get into the movie, I want to say just how much the experience at the theater sucked. First, as we were walking in, they had a table set up collecting cell phones and digital cameras. This was absolutely ridiculous. I figured I’d just throw my phone in my back pocket and when they checked my bag (yeah, they were doing this too), I would just say that I didn’t have a phone. That worked until we saw that they also had metal detectors. At that point I just said screw it and handed over my phone, only to find out that the guy with the metal detector didn’t really care much and I could have totally gone through with my phone still in my pocket. I guess they were really trying to curb any possible bootlegging of the movie since it wasn’t released until today. Though, it makes no sense, tons of people got through with stuff anyway and the movie was opening today anyway. Getting our stuff back was a ridiculous mess. A couple hundred people were crowded around a small table as they called out numbers for bags. It was awful.
When we got into the theater, it was pretty much completely full so we got stuck in the second row on the very far left side. The seats were awful and I’m pretty sure that when I see this movie again sometime, it’s going to seem like a completely different movie since I’ll actually be able to see what’s going on in the faster, jumpier scenes.
And on top of all of that, there was pretty much a constant white noise of people in the theater talking the whole time.
Now, onto the movie…
I don’t even like vampire movies. I love horror flicks and there are very few subgenres that I’m not that into, but vampires have just never done it for me. They’re always whiny pussies, but this definitely was not the case with 30 Days of Night. These vampires were bad ass and fucked shit up. Quite excellent. I really loved the hell out of this movie.
There were a few really good death scenes, including someone getting thrown in this giant grinder. There was also a lot of decapitation which I loved. In one scene when all hell completely breaks loose, they have an overhead shot going down the main road of the town as the vampires are just killing everyone. It was really an amazing shot.
I never read the comics so I can’t compare, but I really liked almost everything about this movie. The ending was super awesome too, but I’m not going to ruin it for anyone who doesn’t know how it ends yet.
Highly recommended.
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