Category Archives: Music

Albums, concerts, playlists, musicians, and the joy of listening.

All Work and No Play

Meta, Music

Currently putting the final touches on two new websites, which I hope to link to here soon. One is for a single musician, the other is for a awards ceremony for a large organization, and I find the dichotomy enjoyable. For some reason when I work on projects in twos it keeps me balanced, from the manner in which the client is dealt with to the artistic freedom each project allows. One is usually a little on either side, and in the middle is me. I seem to do this with a lot of things in life.

The next two projects are lined up already, one for another musician, this time a lovely vocalist, and the other is going to be a national resource for Catholic educators teaching about the Holocaust. Links to come when they’re ready.

Catching Up

Events, Music, Travel

I’ve been basically totally preoccupied the past week, so I have a ton of catching up to do online. Most importantly Friday was Elaine’s birthday! Go send her some birthday love if you haven’t already. While your at it Kymberlie sounds like she had a wonderful anniversary, and that’s wonderful to hear. I finally got my blogroll working again, and took the opportunity to add some links that have been missing for a while. Zeldman has had more good writing lately then I can keep up with. So much content, so little time! Follow every link on his site. The Houston Wireless list has had some goings-on lately, and it should be interesting to see how things pan out. Joe Clark’s Slashdot interview is the longest I’ve seen yet, probably about 54k of text. That guy never ceases to amaze me.

People are coming into town from all over, and I am free as a bird till January, so this should be a lot of fun. Tonight I’m spending the night in Galveston, just because. Yay for Christmas break! It’s really my favorite time of the year. The music, the food, the weather—it’s just perfect. I hope everyone is having a happy holidays.

I know that as soon as I get used to this laptop I’m going to have to take it back. *sigh*

First Final

Music, Tech

I got my first final out of the way, only three more to go. I’m right now enjoying the broadband at a nice internet café called “Get Internet Café” or something like that. The salad was great, but I must get back to work now. Wish me luck!

Do You Gentoo?

Music

Well, I am currently on what I hope is the tail end of the stage one bootstrapping process for installing Gentoo. The advantage to compiling everything from source using their BSD-like Portage system. We’ll see how this turns out in a bit. Supposedly 1.4 final is coming out this month if things don’t work out for me now. In other tech news my twin 80-gig Western Digital hard drives came in today, and I got them mirroring just fine. However it got an itch going, so I’m setting up a full-fledged Linux file server using Samba to talk to Windows, ReiserFS as the file system to be stable and fast (Thanks Mat!), and it’s going to have half a terabyte of storage when all is said and done. All the computers on our network are going to do automated backups to this machine on a nightly basis.

Zero Year Reunion

Gallery, Meta, Music

Last night was great fun as a lot of the seniors who are in town for the holiday, and many who are in town anyway, met up at Diedrich’s an later Katz’s. It was really enjoyable seeing so many people who I often talk to online but haven’t seen for too long. The “Winter holidays” sometimes politically uncorrectly categorized as “Christmas” coming up should be even better. If you’re interested the pictures are now up.

Speaking of pictures, have been flooded with emails, calls, and just general in-person complaining concerning the updates to the photolog, or rather the lack thereof. The team here at Photomatt.net was experiencing some technical diffulculties, but things are under control now and I’ve caught up with a couple of the days I had missed before. We apologize for the lapse in updates. You may now return to your regularly scheduled programming.

Speaking of programming, okay, not really, but if you want a taste of how fast the new server is, browse over to mullenweg.com and click around. Isn’t that snappy? Also you may not have noticed, but the front page of this site used to take as much as two seconds to process, and now it is delivered to your browser less than half a second from request time. Other less heavy pages, like any of the jazz quotes the load time is neglibible. That just goes to show that the front page stands for quite a bit of optimization though, and I’m going to work on that a bit this weekend. Okay, that’s it!

Speaking of . . .

Hard Drive Update

Music

I mentioned the other day that I had a 120 gigabyte hard drive crash irrecoverably on my desktop, but at the time I didn’t realize everything that was on there. It was about 80 gigabytes full, and had my personal DVD rips, 25 gigabyte backup of my music collection, several years worth of documents, all of my original digital “negatives,” and my graduation pictures. This is going to be harder than I thought. Backup now!

Getting Colder

Music, Travel

Well I think it’s appropriate that Winter has finally deemed to visit Houston, after flirting for so long. Monday was hot and I dressed in kind, apparently so much so that Alex remarked to me that “Summer is over!” However the next day when I headed out in my shorts and short sleeve shirt, I was blasted at the door by cold cold air. Even colder than was in my house, which is saying a lot. Today is similarly cold an it’s forcing me to dig out all my cold-weather clothes that haven’t seen the light of day since early January last year, when it got hot again. I absolutely love cold weather and the month we have it here is usually my favorite part of the year. Don’t tell anyone, but I’m a sucker for Christmas music too.

The other day as I topped out the first hill getting on to the freeway my car died, and I managed to roll to the shoulder to await a tow back home. My car is in the good hands of the mechanic right now, so hopefully I’ll be back in the Mattmobile any day now.

Dave Holland Concert

Events, Meta, Music

Last night was wonderful; I got to attend the Da Camera Dave Holland concert I had been wanting to see with Sarah thanks to some last-minute tickets from my uncle. The concert was really great, and as an added bonus I got to see Joe, who I haven’t seen in a bit. Afterward we had some great BBQ at Harlon’s, where they also had some good music. Anyway my day thus far has mostly consisted of getting everything moved over to the new server. Actually there is only one account left on the old server, and you’re looking at it. Because of its size (over two gigabytes), PhotoMatt.net is simply too big to move over the way I moved everything else over. I might just have to do it the old fashioned way. Actually, if you can read this you’re already on the new server. Howdy.

New Server

Music

I’m extremely excited because I found a wonderful deal on a new dedicated server and I’m faxing in the contract finalizing everything today. The company worked with me getting exactly the specs I wanted, even though they were a little strange. The new server is going to be at a much nicer datacenter as well with higher quality bandwidth (not Cogent). Also I’m going to be working with Mat of HLUG to lock the box down pretty tightly. Mat was on News.com yesterday along with HLUG for their discovery of the Tcpdump trojan. Also on Slashdot here.

Anyway I’m trying to think of a good hostname for the box. Right now I’m leaning towards “Plato” but I’m open to suggestions. It’s hard though, like naming a child. Of course I would never call a human child Plato. 😉

Finally Paid

Music

Yesterday I finally got my first check from the Musicians Performance Trust Fund, even though I should have been getting checks from them for almost three years now. The MPTF is a union thing that sends out the checks for “green sheet” gigs where the money comes through the union. I play with a group called Young Sounds which is a union band and I’ve been signing the green sheet for years. What I think precpitated this first check is that before, for whatever reason, I had never given them my social security number, because I’m hestitant to give that out very often, and I think that’s why they had never sent a check before. Of course the money has to be somewhere, I should probably check to see if any of it is still there. Chris said I should frame this, and I think I will. Here’s a picture for its full glory:

MPFT check, finally!

Weekend Roundup

Gallery, Meta, Music

Well, now that it’s officially over, I must say that was a really excellent weekend that even the amazonian weather couldn’t dampen. It got started strong on Friday with a little car dancing, good food, a sarcastic ATM, and a trampoline.

Saturday got a late start, and it turned out the gig I was looking forward to got rained out. However I did get to meet some new people out in Spring Valley and had a wonderful homemade dinner. There are pictures too but someone *cough*Sarah*cough* absconded with my digital camera, so I’ll have to wait to see if any of them came out. Also got to help someone with their computer, which is always a good feeling. Sometimes I have bad streaks where people seem to come to me with the strangest problems that I really don’t have a clue how to take care of. Then I drove through the rain to hear “the group Mike sings with,” otherwise known as Lager Rhythms. The show was really technically excellent and entertaining, and I got to sit by Christine which was excellent because I got the feeling we both had been similarly exposed to Schoolhouse Rock, we were cracking up at the same times. Afterward I tagged along with Kathy, Elaine and Kenny, Hanna, Robert, and the blog-less Joe and Mandy to a neat place called Catbirds, where they had really excellent music. They were playing really classic jazz stuff, mostly stuff I had heard before but a few gems that were new to me, including one I know was Ella Fitzgerald but I forgot to ask the DJ what album it was off of. Our relatively large group was seated outside, which was fine for the cool weather but a little inconvenient once it started pouring again. I’d like to see them some more but unfortunately I won’t be able to make it out to the Renaissance Festival next weekend because of HPUG. However, if you are going to be in town though, be sure to check out the meeting at 1 PM next Saturday because we’re going to have almost every kind of Treo known to man and a ton of cool Bluetooth gadgets that Jason is bringing.

Where does that leave Sunday? Recovering. And it’s already almost four in the morning!

Tweak Tweak

Gallery, Music, Tech

Well a little bird whispered in my ear that Google was starting its monthly crawl again, the major one, not just the update one, and so I thought it would be a good opportunity to tweak some of the more egregious errors on this site. The URL system throughout the site is now more consistent, and the header stuff has been optimized a bit. TODO: fix login system, jazzquotes, add “new photos” thing, update MTCurly.

Performance Today

Music

For those of you who may be interesting, I’m playing a big band gig today at 2:00 PM at Saint Christopher Episcopal Church at 1656 Blalock. I think it’s some sort of festival or something, so it should be fun. We’re doing an interesting alto feature called “Harlem Nocturne” which yours truly will be playing. Sorry for the short notice though! I hope everyone has a wonderful Saturday.

New Alarm

Music

Those of you who have lived with me before know that sometimes I have trouble waking up. Anyway it what may be the biggest waste of sophisticated hardware ever, my fancy desktop machine has graduated from playing music to also being an alarm. This works on a number of levels, because I can wake up to the music I want to rather than whatever is on the radio. Also while my normal stereo can do an alarm, I was having to change it every night because my schedule is different on Tuesdays and Thursdays than the rest of the week, and I would often forget to set it to the earlier time. The stereo being by my bed was also a problem because sometimes I would just hit the power button without even opening an eye. I found a nice plugin for Winamp 2 that does just what I need, although it looks like it is going to bug me to pay for it in a bit. It has all the features I need, and doesn’t look to bad either.

Hey Ma

Music

Hey Ma by Cam’ron featuring Juelz Santana is the song of the day:

Now I was downtown clubbin’, ladies night
Seen shorty she was crazy right
And I approached baby like
“Ma, what’s your age and type?”
She looked at me and said “You’s a baby right”
I told her,
I’m 18 and live a crazy life
Plus I’ll tell you what the ’80s like
And i know what the ladies like
Need a man that’s polite,
listens, and takes advice
I can be all three . . .

Buy the CD, PressPlay it, listen to the radio for five minutes (they’re playing it all the time), or whatever.

I’m Wired

Food, Music, Tech, Travel

Have you ever looked at your server logs and gone “Whoa s—“? Neither have I, but there has been a considerable spike in traffic from this article on Wired.com. The article deals with Apple’s viral marketing where they include a number of stickers or decals with every new Mac sold. The article is worth reading but if you’d like you can skip straight to the picture. I’d like to offer an extended caption: I’m sad to say that it is not my car, currently my car has a jazz sticker, a Free the Mouse! sticker, and a Redhat hat sticker. The picture was actually taken at my constant hangout House of Pies on Shepard, where I was eating with Julie, Rachel, and Josh. (Pictures) The car with that sticker was parked right outside of our window and my mind immediately went to my friend Alex who is an Apple enthusist, and how much he’d like it. So I snapped a picture (actually two) through the window. Leander Kahney found the picture through a Google search I mentioned recently. And there you have it. I just noticed that a thumbnail of the picture is on the front page!

More Hidden Treasures

Meta, Music

I just found a list that summarizes everything I possibly wanted circa 1997.

  • U2 CDs
  • 64 megs of memory
  • Awe 64 Sound card or USB speakers
  • Mark 6 alto saxophone
  • Stereo:
    • Radio turner and mixer
    • CD Changer
    • Turntable with stereo output
    • Double tape deck
  • Books: anything by Isaac Asimov
  • Cool mousepad
  • Flatbed color scanner
  • 3D video card
  • Computer games
    • Quake II
    • Starcraft
    • Command and Conquer II: Red Alert
  • Fast CD-ROM with digital support
  • Cool speakers for Dolby 4-channel surround sound
  • Big Monitor
  • Caller ID
  • USB Port

By the metric of this list, I’ve achieved almost 100% success. It’s remarkable how the material things we want can change so much over the years, and how material things in and of themselves can become so much less important. I wonder if I made a list now, how would I look at it in five years?

8 Ball, Corner Pocket

Music, Travel

Just got back from Cue and Cushion, a nice pool hall on Shepard. Tonight was especially nice because I actually won. The music was good, thanks to Jaime, and everything was fun. Alex was making some really nice shots, but luck seemed to turn in my favor towards the end of every game. I’ve put some cool pictures from the pool hall, as well as a frog that lives at my house that I see sometimes. I’ve always heard stories about how my grandfather was very good at billiards and played it all throughout college, and part of me wants to emulate him and get really good at it. This night was definitely a big improvement, but I haven’t quite nailed down what I was doing different. Oh well, practice makes perfect.