Brad Barrish

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.

Your Backpack data can now be used offline with PackRat. AND it can sync with your online data. I just re-created my account.

At the beginning of the year I made the decision that I would try and move as much of my life online as I could using web-based apps. Most of these apps are either beta or really new, but they offer one particularly attractive advantage over their desktop competitors - the ability to access my info wherever I am (assuming I have a computer and connectivity). There were some desktop applications that I couldn't move away from and ultimately (as of this morning) I'm moving back to a desktop-based life for everything except email.

I'm a Mac user, and a die-hard one at that. At the center of my digital life is email, calendar, my contacts and my GTD system. I've enjoyed the advantages of Entourage, but always hated the speed of the application. In short, it's so slow I can't figure out why anyone uses it unless they need access to their email on an Exchange server. Since Panther I've been using iCal and Address Book as much as possible. I didn't really start using Apple's Mail.app until just before Tiger came out. Because I had to use Entourage  for work (or so I thought), I was syncing my calendar and contacts back and forth between Entourage, iCal and Address Book using Paul Berkowitz's awesome software. Great software, but what a pain in the ass. Add to the equation that I started using a PowerMac at work, but still wanted to keep everything centralized on my PowerBook. .Mac was a decent solution, but the problem was (and still is) that I lose ALL of my contacts at least once every couple months. I don't know why or what causes it, but it's maddening when it happens. I do keep good backups, so it's more of a pain in the ass than anything else. I needed a solution that was web-based, but that could sync with everything. I came up empty. I tried Yahoo! calendar and lately a bunch of great Web 2.0 apps like 30 Boxes and CalendarHub, but those apps separated my life even more.

As for email, I have personal and work email. Mail.app is great, but it doesn't handle IMAP very gracefully. One thing I did discover when I started using it was that I could add the company Exchange server as an IMAP account and have everything come in to Mail.app. It didn't look pretty, but at least I could search for email. If you've ever tried to find an email in Entourage, then you know my frustration. The frustration got compounded when Tiger came out with Spotlight. Why can't Spotlight index Entourage emails?! (I know the answer, I'm just frustrated). I started using gmail full-time as a test and now I can't go back. The biggest thing for me is the single inbox with labels and awesome search capabilities. It's unmatched in a desktop application, even with the help of a couple third-party apps. The biggest con for using gmail full-time is that when someone receives your email, despite using your own email address to send, it comes from gmail. Work especially hates this, and understandably so, but I still convinced our IT guy to have all of my work email redirect to my gmail account. I still get my email on my Blackberry, but can access it via gmail as well. Of course they don't sync up, which also sucks, but I just have to go into my Exchange account and clear out emails with large attachments every once in a while. I can live with that for now.

Ever since I started using GTD to keep my life in order, I've been more productive in pretty much every corner of life. I had been skipping from one application to another, trying to find something that worked well for me. When Kinkless GTD (kGTD) was released, I was all set. It's gorgeous to look at and it works very well for me. The only problem was that I used it on two computers, which had to share the same file. I needed an online app that I could use and be equally productive. I had been looking for an excuse to try out Backpack and this was the opportunity. It worked fairly well, but ultimately it was too simple and didn't have some whistles and bells I needed, so this morning I cancelled my account.

Apple's applications are great and I'm now back to using iCal and Address Book full-time. Gmail is still my main email application and kGTD is the best GTD implementation I have come across. The bottom line is this... As much as I love living life on the bleeding edge, there's only so many sacrifices I will make. If it comes at a hefty cost to my productivity, it's not worth it.

Last night's show with Nada Surf, Rogue Wave and The King of France was awesome! We really couldn't have worked with a greater grouping of three bands. They each brought their own uniqueness to the show, but it really felt like a continuous performance of solid music.

I got to the venue around 6pm, met a lot of the people that I had been dealing with for the last several weeks to make this show come together. I was especially excited about meeting Michael Azerrad, who pens some of the greatest music journalism of our time. Oh, and he's the drummer for The King of France too. We talked a lot about music, specifically his work at eMusic and discovering new bands. Enough gushing about Michael though. I had read about The King of France in Salon magazine, but didn't know much more about them. Seeing them play sealed the deal though. They put on an awesome show and their songs were fantastic. I think every Network LIVE employee in attendance was impressed. I heard, 'i really like these guys' a few times.

I wandered downstairs to our operations area. It's where the magic happens. Lot's of video monitors, people buzzing all over and you realize things are really happening. It all starts coming together, quite literally, before your eyes. I've been a music fan for a long time and have worked in and around music for quite a while as well. When I'm at our shows, I'm an excited fan just as much as I am a Network LIVE employee. I'm proud of what we do and it's cool to see it happen. When I talk to managers, label people and bands, everyone realizes that despite the fact that what we do may sometimes feel big and impersonal, there are real music fans, excited about what we do, behind the scenes. I'm always taking people to watch the monitors so they can see how it works and end up talking about how cool it is.

Rogue Wave climbs the stairs from the basement of the Henry Fonda Theatre and take their places on stage. I decide to hang out on the side of the stage for their performance. The curtain goes up and reveals the packed, sold out audience. I got chills. Yeah, there were only 1200 people, but it looked like 12,000 from where I was standing. Network LIVE's name was on the far wall and everything just felt good. The sound was awesome. People kept saying how great it sounded in the audience. I wandered out for a few songs and then went back downstairs to catch the last song on the monitors.

I've been a Nada Surf fan for a number of years. I'll come clean about not liking them when "Popular" was released. Someone handed me a copy of Proximity Effect, which was released in 2000 and I have been a fan ever since. Their last couple of albums have been some of my favorites. There was a funny moment with Matthew (lead singer) before the show. I was standing around talking to Van Riker from their label, and Ben Weber, their manager. He came right up to me and started talking to me like we'd been friends for years. He thought I was Rocky Votolato (another Barsuk artist) as it turned out. Maybe it was the lighting... Rocky happened to be playing at the Troubadour last night, but I digress... Nada Surf played for like 4 hours... okay, it was more like 90 minutes, but they played a lot of songs and the crowd was really into it, especially when everyone jumped on stage for "Blankest Year" and when they played "Popular." I was totally impressed by their show and only solidified my fandom.

Last night's show was fantastic and only seemed to solidify what I already know... the S.R.O. series is going to be an awesome way for people to discover new music and give the underexposed more exposure. I think Filter says it best - Good music will prevail.

If you’re into space music and all things sonically trippy, turn off the lights, turn up your speakers and run Sound Of Traffic.

Another trip to Ikea this weekend resulted in a bit of a change. I decided to go with the media racks so I wouldn’t have to add another shelf. The only bad thing is that it’s not as easy I’d like it to be to get at all the CDs since I stacked the shelves. Really though, it’s pretty much for show. I keep recently purchased CDs somewhere else. I’m a little further than this photo shows, but I’ve got a ways to go before I’m done. It feels good to be making progress though.