Starbucks and Spirit of Eden?

I'm sitting in a Starbucks waiting for a doctor appointment. When I   first walked in the music playing was instantly familiar and soon I was in the soothing and instantly recognizable intro to Desire by Talk Talk from the eclectic album Spirit of Eden.

Spirit of Eden at Starbucks? Spirit of Eden has been in my top ten for a long time. It's one of those albums that has a rich history, which you can read about here. An interesting opinion in the Wikipedia article:

Music historian Piero Scaruffi believes that with Spirit of Eden, Talk Talk "invented a new form of music, one in which a complex atmosphere is created out of slow, inorganic, inarticulate streams of simple sounds. The six lengthy, free-form, brooding and cataleptic ruminations . . . pioneered 'slo-core'."^[28] Numerous bands and artists, ranging from Catherine Wheel to Sarah McLachlan, have praised Spirit of Eden or have cited it as an influence in their own music.^[29]

Most people I know have never heard of Talk Talk, much less Spirit of Eden. It's strange to hear it at such a mainstream place as Starbucks.

If you want to read more about music, my friend Chad has begun a new venture at Seeglow Music. Check it out.

ASUS Eee PC

A few months back I got an ASUS Eee PC. You can check out the specs here. In a nutshell, it's a cheap, ultra portable PC with Linux and a solid state hard drive (4GB). You can add more hard drive space via an SD slot.

I have been using the Eee for several months now and I really enjoy it. I use it primarily for writing and note taking, using Google Docs and Firefox as my primary applications. Once you get used to the small keyboard, it is a great little PC. It's rugged as there's no hard drive with moving parts and it's very quiet. It is no bigger than the small notepad I used to keep hand written notes in, so it doesn't take up any more room in my bag.

I don't want to write up a whole review since that has been done all over the web many, many times already, but suffice it to say I'm happy with the system. My chief complaint is not with the hardware, but with Linux in general. It has been something I've written about before, but the same issue got ugly recently. It's the difficulty with installing software.

The Eee forum has been very useful for help with installing applications. I'm trying to keep the Eee very light on applications so I can focus on writing, but I really needed my VPN software, Hamachi, and a note organizer. I looked at a couple of offerings for Linux and found Basket to be a very popular and feature rich research and note taking tool.

On the PC or Mac, Hamachi typically installs with very little  headache -- double click the installer and let it do its thing. In Linux, nothing could be further from the truth. Luckily, I found this article that shows how to do it. Twenty steps and several error messages later, it finally worked. I installed gHamachi to add a graphical front-end and now I have a working Hamachi client. It took about an hour and fifteen minutes. How is this user-friendly? Operating systems exist to run programs. If this fundamental step is complicated, do you really believe your OS is going to have wide adoption?

My version of Linux includes the "Synaptic Package Manager" that is supposed to aid in installing software. Hamachi was not in their database and Basket had an old version. Nonetheless, Basket actually installed a bit easier. I used the command "sudo apt-install Basket". I have no idea what that means, but once again I found it on the Eee forum. Once this completed, I used the command "./Basket" which installed it pretty easily, although it did take a total of twenty minutes to install. OneNote 2007 on my PC took about three minutes and is a much larger application.

Anyhow, the Eee PC is now dialed in and the software is working very well. I hope there is some strategy out there in the Linux group to make software installation easier. I know each flavor has their own "package manager" but how does that help over different platforms? In my opinion, the Linux platform is too splintered into disparate camps to make a big enough push into the Microsoft / Apple stranglehold.

Crazy Trampoline Slam Dunk

Nostalgia Tour: Coffin Banks

Here's a picture of a place I spent a lot of time at as a kid. This used to be the loading docks for Batesville Casket Company. It happened to also be one of the hottest skateboarding spots in Sacramento. I was lucky enough to live in the housing area directly behind them. One jump over a 10 ft wall and I was at Coffin Banks. It was in a lot better shape than the picture shows and it's a little sad to see it in such bad shape. Some time I'll write about a couple of adventures I had there.

Nostalgia Tour: Part 2

Here's the first apartment I lived in alone. I had to cover the rent every month (550.00!) and sometimes barely did. I ate a lot of Top Ramen noodles in those days. The apartment was in an okay neighborhood, but the apartment itself was horrible. It got very hot in the summer and cold in the winter.

Computertime

Near the corner of Fair Oaks Blvd and Greenback Lane used to exist a small computer store. If I recall correctly, it was called Computer World Computertime (Thanks, Ray!) and existed during the late 80's and early 90's. It's long gone, but I had a dream about it the other night which prompted me to go a couple miles out of my way today to take this picture of where it used to be. In the picture, it was right where the Taqueria and Subway are now.

My friends and I would go there from time to time to buy Commodore 64 and Amiga software and hardware. I remember buying a modem there. They started selling IBM XT stuff shortly before the Commodore era collapsed but went out of business not too long afterward. I found it odd to dream of such a place but I guess that's the nature of dreaming. I haven't thought about that place in a very long time.

Chevy Testing The Batteries In The New Volt

I can't wait until this car is on the road. It looks slick and has great stats for an electric car. The last article I read said it will run on a pure electric motor for roughly 40 miles and then switch to a small gasoline engine that will simply recharge the batteries real-time. I'm not sure if that's still the concept or the stats, but I'm all for it.

Ever have one of those days...

I got off work a little early today and figured I'd boot up the old 360 to play some games. I've been really busy at work lately and haven't even turned the system on in weeks. I boot up Burnout Paradise and play for a few minutes and it was just...well, bland. I figure maybe it's just the racing genre so I pop in Call Of Duty 4. Same thing -- just not interested. I just sat there on the couch staring at the 360 menus wondering, "What now?". I grabbed the COD4 disc and put it back in the Gamefly envelope. I realize I have had it almost two whole months. I looked in the queue and realized nothing looked too special there either.

Maybe it's just video games or my energy level, I don't know. It seems like nothing is going to satiate my need for relaxing distractions.

A boy's first bike...