Back in December Suburban Home Records put out a mixtape. When you ordered it, paying only shipping and handling, you got five copies of the damn thing! Virgil’s idea was for you to give them out to your friends and it was a great idea. Well the gang over there has just released Volume 2 of the mixtape series with the same deal. I went with Priority Mail and spent $5.01 to get five copies of the CD. Not only does Suburban Home put out great music they are really promoting their artists. You can stream most of their released on the site so you aren’t buy site unseen, so to speak, and they give away music to get their artists noticed. Couple all that with cool stuff like shot glasses, coozies, and maybe even oven mitts (who knows, maybe Virgil will like the idea) and you have what think is the coolest label around.
So with the released of the second installment in their mixtape series SBHR has asked us blogger type folks to help get the word out about the mixtapes, offer the first one for download, and pretty much pimp this all we can. Since they give us so much, even on top of my Suburban Home For Life membership, I thought it would be cool to offer the Raisin’ Hell and Livin’ Cheap (Volume 1) for you all to listen to and download. So here it is, without further ado…
Enjoy…and go order the second volume right now. You won’t regret it. And while you are there make sure to shell out the jack and get Tim Barry’s new release 28th and Stonewall.
I know it’s been a lot longer than it should have been since I wrote anything. I keep meaning to and then life gets in the way. I have a few minutes right now while some benchmarks are running so I thought I’d talk about my boys for some of that time. Now girls, don’t worry, there’s a post for you coming up. I assume most of you know I have eleventy-three kids and four of them are boys. So I don’t need to ’splain my large family. What you may not know is that I don’t think I spend enough time with them and have been trying to fix that and mostly failing. However weekend before last I succeeded.
My boys, being boys, don’t care of their stuff like they should. Maybe the garage could be cleaned out and maybe the covered porch wouldn’t have been good enough but bikes that are left out in the weather for nigh on a year don’t tend to work well. So I set out, two weekends ago, to fix this issue after being prompted by Seamus. So out came the tools and we gathered on the driveway for a quick rejuvenation of their bikes. I soon discovered I had no idea why the front wheel of a bike would seize up nor the know-how to fix the problem. I took a quick assessment of my available tools, helpers, and our collective skill set and had to admit to myself that I don’t know enough about bikes or fixing stuff or mechanical things in general. So I did the only thing I could in that situation: I called my brother.
Well we loaded up of the bed of the truck with toolboxes and bikes, squeezed the three oldest boys into the cab, cranked the Social Distortion and headed down I-10 to Uncle Kelly’s house where there were more tools and more knowledge. My brother was working on his truck so I actually got to work on the bikes instead of the usual which usually involves me watching and trying to learn while he fixes stuff. The front wheel of the bike was seized up because the bearings were shot and at least one was gone and I couldn’t do much about it since we didn’t have any bearings. I had to move on to the chains which were also seized up from rust. Apparently PB Blaster is good stuff but it still couldn’t break all the links free. While I worked on this I had Aoghdan cleaning up the rim that needed new bearings and working whichever chain I wasn’t actively beating on with a hammer and Seamus holding frames up while I tried to unscrew rusted bolts or tighten down parts and Hamish handing me tools when I remembered to ask him.
We worked for three hours on these bikes with me learning more all the time and sometimes forgetting to have the boys help me as much as I should have. Hamish’s bike was done first but by far the hardest. We ended up using a Benz-o-matic torch to break the chain loose enough to get on the sprockets, tightened it down, and sent it off to be ridden by Seamus since Hamish didn’t know how to ride a bike yet. After much complaining from Seamus about not being to ride a bike that small, and Aoghdan’s bike getting finished up I put down the tools and started helping Hamish learn to ride his bike but it was getting late and I didn’t have much time left and I wanted to try and finish Seamus’ bike. Meanwhile Aoghdan, after being told to stop sliding to a stop, slid to stop and blew out his rear tire. So I stowed those two bikes and talked to my brother about bearings. I learned that BBs can be substituted if they are the right size. We packed up the last bike, the boys, and the tools and headed home with my back screaming at me for sitting on the ground while working for hours but with some pride that I had fixed my boys’ bikes and could do it again without my brother. And yes once we got home I re-packed the bearings in the front wheel of Seamus’ bike and aside from him claiming the front brake is too tight it is working properly now. All I have left to do is tires and tubes where they are needed.
Hamish is now bugging me every day to come see how good he is at riding at his bike alone. The problem is I get home at dusk, or am leaving for work, or it’s raining. I feel so Cat’s In The Cradle about this. I will be making time to see him ride. All I have to do is get up an hour earlier and then I’ll have time in the evening to get with my boys and have some real time with them. We have a copy of The Dangerous Book For Boys just waiting to be cracked open and fun to be had. Now you may be thinking that I didn’t mention a fourth boy yet and you’d be right. You see Diarmuid is just baby and can’t come along for thing like a bike repair adventure. But he is a Daddy’s boy without excuse. When he doesn’t feel good he wants me. When I get home from work he’s the most excited and God forbid I put him down. He’s at the word-a-day stage right now and is using some sentences already. Most of his noise is still babble but he’s really starting to get his point across. When I start making it home early enough to spend time with the boys he’s going outside with us for sure!
I didn’t take the pictures I used here. That’s all the wife. I gotta give credit where it’s due. You can find her gallery over on her site. She’s doing Project 365 so there’s a new shot every day on her blog. If you like these pics you’ll love her other work. Make sure to stop by and tell her so.
P.S. there’s a big field at the end our street that needs exploring. Maybe I’ll steal my wife’s camera for that adventure.
20
Jan
I was bumming around on last.fm today and started to wonderin’ about a couple issues involved in organizing large music collections and I thought I’d pose some questions to my three readers. I am up in the air about these three questions so following in each question is my current thoughts and dilemma.
1. How do you handle tagging multi-artist albums?
For instance I have a bunch of split albums and the artists don’t necessarily collaborate on the songs. So I think I should put which artist did the recording in the Artist tag but then sorting by artist ends up with a bunch of weird half albums but I am not sure that matters. And then there’s the question of songs that have other artists on them like Billy Joe Shaver’s “Get Thee Behind Me Satan” with John Michael Montgomery. If I add in John Michael’s name then I have a new “Artist” with one song and not an accurate Artist to boot. So I am thinking that the Comments field might be the place for this sort of information but I don’t know. And then there’s compilation albums. Maybe the answer to my question is to sort by Album but so many music players don’t allow a tag for compilation anywhere and I end up with seventeen albums with the same name and one song each.
2. How anal retentive are you about genre tags?
Another one I am torn on. Do I care about the difference between Red Dirt, Texas Country, Outlaw Country, Country, Classic Country, Alt Country, and probably a few more that I haven’t even thought to include? I do use the Genre tag in sorting and sometimes in smart playlists but how granular should I be? And are genres arbitrary or is it easier than I am making it? Is Tim Barry Alt Country, Americana, Folk, Rock, or some other sub-genre I missed. And what is the difference between Americana and Folk, and can a Canadian artist be Americana?
3. If you use Linux what do you use for your music player/organizer?
I am currently using gmusicbrowser and miss Amarok but the new version sucks balls. No player since has matched the smart capability, the options, and the sheer usability of the old Amarok. I think gmusicbrowser could catch up as it’s a young project and the maintainer is active and considers suggestions but it lacks some of my favorite features. So if you have a suggestion that’s not Amarok, Banshee, or Rhythmbox then please let me know. On a side note I think I’ll review gmusicbrowser this week, like with screenshots and everything. Oh and if you use Windows or Mac and get an urge to suggest iTunes for organizing a large music collection then I reserve the right to mock you for iTunes and for using Windows.
So there you have it. If any of the three you want to weigh in I would appreciate it. Meanwhile I’ll suffer through inaccurate tag information as best I can.
I am a dyed in a wool Ubuntu user as far as desktop systems go but I haven’t always been. I used to use Mandriva, and before that SuSE, and before that Slackware but I happened onto Ubuntu and my “I may be a geek but I am a lazy geek” streak kicked in. I have been very satisfied with apt and the Synaptic interface. In face other than for my love of tweaking my OS I would have the most stable desktop/laptop of anyone I know…after an Ubuntu install of course. Now don’t get me wrong Ubuntu took getting used to. I was a KDE fanatic for the longest time and KUbuntu is the red-headed stepchild of the Ubuntu family. But then the KDE folks went and crapped out the 4.x line and killed my love for KDE so Ubuntu was just about perfect. Not was – is. I still love it. Which is why I cannot answer the question: Why did I spend hours trying to get OpenSuSE 11.2 running on a Dell M4400 over the past couple of days?
First off everything didn’t work out of the box. The resolution for the install isn’t supported all the way through so a black screen and multiple reboots didn’t help me fall in love. Well I got past that and since I am a Linux nerd I won’t let a little install weirdness stop me. Then I went to set up my development environment and the version of Eclipse in the repos is Ganymede…ARGH! I won’t bore you with the details but I need Galileo for what I am doing. A manual install worked of course but for the repo to be that out of date on a brand new release is upsetting. Now I went with the defaults during install in hopes that a properly integrated KDE 4.x wouldn’t suck. I was wrong. The first time it tried to update it was a morass of pop-ups telling me the update widget had, for all intents and purposes, dropped a deuce all over itself. Nothing I did would drag the desktop out of what looked a pornado minus the porn. Pop-up after pop-up after pop-up after pop-up…well you get the picture. Still soldiering on I rebooted and did the initial update via YAST which worked. Of course none of this takes into account the fact I have to allow KWallet to be opened twice, even with remember password checked, just to connect to my passwordless WIFI which is an annoyance I don’t feel like troubleshooting at this point.
Now all of this would be alright if the KDE 4.x widgets didn’t randomly crash and I do mean randomly. Then today after all of that I was home sick from the office. I wanted to surf the web just a little bit, maybe watch the video of Barney Frank mouth off about changing the Senate rules so they can cram health care down our throats, but that wasn’t in the cards. Flash simply refused to work at all. I googled and found various solutions but none that made sense or addressed the issue of flash, from the official OpenSuSE blessed install source, not freaking working out of the box on a fully updated system. I went to install my favorite terminal program, Terminator, to try and fix the problem and it wasn’t in the repos at all. Well after so many straws a camel’s back will give in and so I gave up.
If you want to know why Ubuntu is the apparent flagship of the Linux world, why it has so many fanboys running amok, why end users and nerds alike use it without shame then you have your answer. It works. Period. Of course there are quirks but the issues you could run into are no more than getting Windows 7 to the point where you like it. Sure the answers are different than Windows answers but the problems are no more numerous. If you want to build a distro that can compete in the desktop space, kernel scheduler aside, then build one that works. So as of hitting submit on this post, burning the iso that just finished downloading, I am done with OpenSuSE. Period. I want an OS that works thank you very much.
Tune in tomorrow to watch my head explode trying to explain modules and classes in Ruby….
… the Module class of module is the superclass of the Class class of class…
Yeah so…be seeing you from an actual function OS shortly.
18
Jan
Some days are just rough and some folks have a hard row to hoe. This is one for one of those days. Grab the headphones, dig the whiskey out of your bottom drawer, hunker down and press play. It’ll all be over soon.
