PLEASE Stop Rockin'

As a few of my friends already know, I use Shazam on my iPhone not necessarily to identify good songs, but usually to identify a shitty song that I hear while in a restaurant or store (some place I am forced to listen to top 40).

While at Pepperjax for a quick dinner with Beth, I heard another horrible song.

"God this song sucks. Who is this?"

Beth didn't know, so I pulled out my iPhone and started up Shazam, not expecting Shazam to identify the song over the din in the restaurant during our din din. I was amazed Shazam identified it. I was even more amazed that it was a collaboration between arguably the all-time worst top 40 band (REO Speedwagon) and a nearly equally awful band, Styx (with Journey, et al, it is hard to know if they are the two worst bands ever).

While calling up the song for more info, I found the bands are touring together this summer.

Ugh. I feel sick to my stomach. I hope I don't barf up my dinner...

Intelliscanner

I have never bothered to catalog my CD collection, nor my vinyl collection, for that matter. Unfortunately, most of the vinyl was ruined some years ago due to water damage during years of storage. So sad. Basically, I've never catalogued everything simply because it seemed like such a colossal waste of time. I lamented to my Dad that I wished there was a cheap product out there which would make cataloging my collection easy.

Well, recently my Dad decided to buy a handheld barcode scanner to scan what was in his own collection (music, movies, etc).

Here is the device in action:


Although it didn't end up being the cheap solution I had hoped for, I told him if it worked I would pay him for half.

There were some initial problems. For example, it wouldn't scan nearly 1/3 of my collection apparently due to age, rarity of items, or simply because so many CDs did not have barcodes. However, it turns out that if I grab the ASIN code from Amazon (available on 99.9% of the searchable items), I could cut & paste the code into the Intelliscan software and it would almost always come up with the item.

Pretty slick.

I still have to enter many by hand because the database doesn’t have some of the CDs or vinyl albums. I don't have much vinyl that survived the water damage, but I am trying to also scan the surviving odd vinyl - with mixed results.

The collection looks odd. I can post it on the web for all to see (there is an export option) but all that would accomplish is to reveal too much of the bad choices I have made over the years. After all, everyone has SOMETHING to hate in someone else's collection. Add to that the fact that since my collection must be nearly 2,000 records (not counting MP3s) there are simply more things for each viewer to loathe.

On a side note:

I've found some fun gems I haven't listened to in ages. The odd thing is the water damage destroyed tons of my college vinyl, but somehow spared some of my bad high school purchases. It was very random what was lost and what survived. Most of my Kate Bush vinyl was spared, yet a very cool marbled vinyl collectable copy of Hounds of Love was ruined. Some lame Beatles collections (best of) were spared, but my collectable White Album on white vinyl on the Apple label was ruined. Nearly all of my XTC vinyl was ruined (some very rare EPs), yet my copy of Neil Young's Reactor was spared. Obviously I had not alphabetized my collection.

As quick as scanning 2/3rds of my collection might be, hand entering the other 1/3 is slow. It could take days before I finish. I am sure I could be spending that time more wisely, but after all these years, at least it is finally getting done.

Plus, it is taking me away from playing Wii games. That can't be all bad.

SXSW, part 1

There could be several days of this kind of post, but I will only submit a couple days. This is just some random stuff.

Here is a short list of a few of bands caught while at SXSW:

Red Red Meat, A Hawk and a Hacksaw, Efterklang, Camera Obscura, Benjy Ferree and too many free bands to name, seemingly surrounding us at all times. Most of the time I had no idea who I was listening to. We didn’t want to run from place to place simply to catch bands, so we casually saw what we happened to see (with the exception of standing in a very slow line for Red Red Meat, which made us realize standing in line was not for us).

I wanted to see Okkervil River and several other bands, but we decided to hang and drink a lot, and of course that’s a good thing to do with good company and it was definitely good to see Tim and David, again, and meet their amigos.

One night I was stuck in the back of Tim's pickup with David and John as we jumped from one venue to another.



We also checked out some films (including shorts) but notably we caught the world premier of the film Still Bill. It is a fantastic documentary about Bill Withers that was literally finished only a few days before the screening in order to premier at SXSW.



Here is Tim and David outside the theater where we could order Guinness on tap and a pizza to eat (instead of popcorn)



And here are the directors of Still Bill in a Q&A session after the film.



Gundy (my Beaker-eyed guest writer for Sunday) apparently knows one of these directors, but I am not sure which one.

Andrew Bird redux

I promised Kevin I would post another video, but I haven't had the time. This is an image I took when he played at Slowdown in Omaha.



Another. You can see his sock monkey in the background and the cool speaker whirly-gig thing in action behind him.



I had him sign a vinyl copy of The Mysterious Production of Eggs. His signature is so sloppy and fake looking that I don't think anyone would ever believe he actually signed it. Still, cool to meet him and shake the talented bastard's hand. Seriously, no one should be capable of possessing that much talent. Not fair. Sheesh.

Andrew Bird at Slowdown

I went to the Andrew Bird show at Slowdown in Omaha with Kevin Marx. The last time I saw Bird live he opened for Wilco. Best opening act, ever.

There are lots of videos out there of Andrew Bird playing "Masterfade" and many of them are surely much better than this (I shot this on my Canon G10 which cannot shoot HD, sadly). This is a handheld point-and-shoot capture with no external mic.

Still, if you watch closely, you can see him play a sequence, capturing it in a loop, then play more over that loop, and so on. After several loops are playing over each other, he starts singing and whistling for the last elements of the song. It sounds like an orchestra, all coming from one guy. This guy astonishes me and I love his music. This is amazing to watch, even if this isn't your style of music.