Brad Barrish

Ars Technica has a cool profile of eMusic up on their site. I'm a subscriber and emusic enthusiast. I had a great conversation with Michael Azerrad when The King of France opened for Nada Surf. He's one of the greats.

I have no idea what the hell this is or where it airs, but I want to see more. A small crowd gathered around this one. Thanks Mara.

I am so gonna buy some Hosoi Vans.

I have watched this video several times and sent it to everyone I know.

Business Week has a great article on Ethanol, which apparently is partially to blame for the astronomical fuel prices in Los Angeles. It cost me over $45 to fill up my tank on Friday. Audrey can't stomach filling up her Land Rover Discovery all the way so she only fills it up half way.

WARNING: Extreme Geek Link - Best YouTube video I’ve seen in a while.

Ray LaMontagne covers Gnarls [MP3 link via Stereogum]

50 years ago Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” was published. I read it for the first time while I was in high school. I picked up some sort of beat poetry book and it was one of the poems that had a pretty big impact on me and my writing. It also solidified my intentions to study American literature in college and work on my own writing. I read everything I could by and about the Beat Generation of writers.

I attended the University of Kansas and was fortunate enough to have spent some time with William S. Burroughs, thanks to James Grauerholz. At some point I had shared with James my desire to meet Ginsberg and already had a trip planned to visit New York in May of 1997. James said he would help set it up and then Ginsberg passed away shortly thereafter.

Less than a year later, I’m living in Los Angeles. I have a friend called Rose. I had met her years before in New York while attending CMJ. I knew she made jewelry with Sylvia Plath’s words, but I wanted desperately to make me a ring with words from “Howl.” After some negotiating, she agreed to make it if she could pick out the words. Several weeks later, I had a ring. It’s one of my most prized possessions, not just because it’s one of a kind, but because it was handmade by someone I know. I run into Rose every once in a while and always flash her the ring to make her smile.

You've probably read everything about Apple's new Boot Camp technology. It's been generating more buzz than Britney Spears, but not as much as Iraq. Of course I couldn't wait for some time over the weekend to play with it. As of this afternoon I am running Windows XP Pro on my Intel Core Duo Mac Mini. While I won't be using it full time, it's nice to be able to switch back and forth. I have to say, XP is running very smooth and quite fast. No major kinks yet, but that seems to be the overall consensus as well.

Audrey got me a Mac Mini Intel Core Duo last weekend. No special occasion, she’s just sweet like that. After doing the initial setup and running a few apps, I noticed that it was slow as hell with the included (and paltry) 512MB of RAM. The graphics system takes up 64MB, which doesn’t leave much for the OS and apps. after opening a few, I got the spinning beach ball pretty often.

I wanted to upgrade the RAM, but didn’t have time for the operation until today. I picked up 2 512MB DIMMS and a putty knife. I was a little nervous, but always look forward to the fun of cracking open a new computer to examine all the cool new things. It was a tremendous pain in the ass. I was getting a little worried about the putty knife technique, so I gave the ethernet wire technique, which I abandoned after about 10 minutes of trying to loop the wire around the tabs. I went back to the putty knife with the help of a nice instructional and very geeky video. After about 15 minutes of trying my best not to break the Mini, I got it open. The Mini was PACKED. It’s pretty crazy how they get everything in that tiny enclosure. I upgraded the RAM to 1GB of RAM. I’m not using it as my main computer, so I didn’t want to spend the extra money on 2GB of RAM.

The additional RAM made a world of difference and it’s now a pretty fast little machine. It’s gonna be a media and file server for the house. I may end up installing a mail server on it in the not-to-distant future as well.