Thanks to all who showed up at the ‘surprise party’ last nite…and those who tried 🙂 The Wife had a little trouble with directions, but after arriving and sniffing stain for 15 minutes, bowling commenced! (Stain reference: the bowling alley apparently was remodeling their bar/lounge area, and in the midst of staining the far wall; they were using a sprayer to apply it). Needless to say there was not much ventilation (the guy doing it wasn’t even wearing a mask)..)

Which reminds me I need to just buy myself a damn ball; I know the weight I need (14 lbs), but this place had what seemed like only 13 and 15 lb balls. Either pins wouldn’t fall that should have, since the ball bounced off of them, or I couldn’t control the weight of the 15er….

But present-wise, just had to give honorable mention to The Wife’s present (one of them), ‘Essential Blue Oyster Cult’ on CD; after so many mentions of it recently, she seemed to even get more of a kick out it than me…

Not much else to report…oh, wait a minute, FYI for music fans who give a rat’s behind about the music I rave about here, I finally found out what happened to AudioVent. Not surprisingly they are no more; haven’t found out the reason why, but singer Jason (Boyd, brother of Brandon from Incubus), is in film school now and the rest of the band has reformed as Agent Sparks. Seems a little different flavor than Audiovent from what I gather, haven’t listened to their demos yet….

BTW, I can pry assume the reason for AV’s breakup was that Jason got sick of the Incubus comparisons and moved on; those comparisons were so wrong anyway, it was annoying. I know they got it alot, so I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the case. Notice the slight ‘genre change’ to Agent Sparks.

Tonight, tomorrow, what’s the difference?

OK, here is an example of the very beginnings of my ‘quest to catalog my music’. I just put in a few albums, no particular order, and voila! The software I’m using is Music Collector from Collectorz.com. It was better than some of the alternatives, none of which (that I looked at) had any capability for barcode/ASIN lookup. I mean, come on, you expect me to search by artist name? No, I want to buy a $10 wedge and hook it up to my PC to scan away! Which is what I plan to do.

Plus as you can see, I can export to different file formats such as XML, Excel and HTML. Meaning I have alot of control over the final look of my export. What you see here is the default style; there are a few templates on their website or you can easily create your own via CSS, etc.

On another music-related note (ha, pun!), last nite I was picking up The Wife’s birthday gift (which is today btw, happy birthday!), and since it was electronics-based (a new iPod Mini) I went to the ol’ standby Best Buy. Here is why I loath..er, love shopping there. The person who helped me was a 16-year kid who had a lower voice than me, which considering I give thanks for mine to 10+ years of smoking, could only imagine how much he does (or maybe he just does the Reds, as I always smoked Lights). Which is not fair of me to say, I mean some kids actually were destined to have deep voices, but this kid was small and wiry and it just didn’t jive.

Anyway, back to my point, my helper, let’s call him James Earl Jones (JEJ for short), starts chatting while entering my life’s data into his checkout terminal. I had picked up a couple CDs for myself while there, and for some reason JEJ asks if I like Beck. ‘No’, I answer, ‘weak and overrated stuff’. Then he asks about Nine Inch Nails, at which point of course yesterday’s post pops into my head, when I proclaim, ‘nah, too monotonous, but I do love Filter’. Somehow I figured this kid, who was 6 years old when Filter’s first album came out, would actually know who they were. But I also figured the NIN connection could be in effect (Robert Patrick of Filter used to be in NIN before splitting out on his own). Yet nothing, the word Filter meant nothing to him (hmm, maybe he’s a Camel guy)…

Oh well, someday there’ll be radio stations with stuff like my music on for all to truly appreciate more than the drones of today, and they’ll call it ‘the classics’ and I’ll keep rocking into my old age….

The Wife said I should post more about music. Heh, I know it thrills her when I talk like that, ‘The Wife’…mmmwahahahahahahaha….just didn’t want to reveal her identity is all 😀

Anyway, so I guess I should add one of those ‘what I’m listening to’ sections to the site. That would be kind of cool I guess; I’ve also been working on getting my CD/MP3 collection logged and put up on the site. Just been somewhat slow going on that. I’ve got an example I’ll post tonite of what I’m working with, and I’ll share what the software is that I’m using (hint: I posted about a long time ago in this blog).

So until I have the new music section up, everyone’s assignment is to go listen to some Filter. If they aren’t one of the most under-the-radar bands…well, everyone knows who they are, their hook-laden songs made some noise (‘Take a Picture’, etc.), but only the true affficianados pay attention; overall, they are one of the best bands ever. And LOUD! That’s all I’ll say for now…

Been toying with Fuel again as well. ‘Sunburn’ was an awesome album, since then they got a little sappy with songs like ‘Hemorraghe…’, etc. But even listening to their latest album, I’m starting to dig them again (all their albums).

BTW, pay attention to the PC tools section as well; it’s been updated (and is ongoing)…