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Vinyl (R)Evolution Music of the Week: June 29th

It’s hard to top the purchases I made last week, which included a used copy of Prince’s Purple Rain and the new albums by The Black Keys and Broken Bells, but this week saw a couple of good albums released.

I received of Montreal’s 12″ single The Past is a Grotesque Animal, which may be the most beautiful album I’ve ever purchased. (More on it here). This was the only vinyl purchase of the week and I bought two digital albums.

On the local front, Cloud Cult released Light Chasers on their own Earthology Records and is their eighth studio album. From the email release:

…this latest full-length draws most of it’s inspiration from the joy (and worries) of rebirth – Craig (singer/songwriter) and Connie (live painter) welcomed a healthy baby boy into their lives this past fall – after a long grieving process of the loss of their first son Kaiden. Light Chasers is a concept album that interweaves stories focused on the exploration of the mysteries of the universe, life and death. It’s a 56 minute journey with no audio breaks that explores love and loss and searches for the light at the end of the tunnel. It also lends itself beautifully into Cloud Cult’s vision that albums should be seen as a whole versus the modern trend of focusing on singles.

I love the fact they focus on the whole album experience – and it shows on this album. It’s just as good as their prior two releases and is a bit more mellow. The songs seamlessly flow together (make sure you can play it back using gapless playback!) and the track titles are perfectly named. I’ll always remember Cloud Cult as it was the first MP3 album I ever bought using Amazon’s MP3 service when it first launched. If you get a chance to see them live, don’t miss it – they combine their music with a visual artist on stage and it’s a concert experience you’ve never seen before. The album is available everywhere September 14th or you can buy it digitally now directly from Cloud Cult here.

My favorite album I bought, though, is Alejandro Escovedo’s latest, Street Songs of Love. One genre of music you’ll never find me reviewing on this blog is country music – but I love what they call “alt-country” with artists such as Ryan Adams, The Jayhawks, Wilco, Drive By Truckers, and yes, Alejandro Escovedo.

You may know him better through his progeny – his son Pete plays with Carlos Santana and his daughter is Sheila E, but Alejandro Escovedo has had a long music career that started with punk rock and is still going strong.

It was his last album, 2008’s Real Animals, that introduced me to him, and if you like that album, you will love this album. Street Songs of Love is slightly more uptempo than Real Animals and starts with a bang with the first track, Anchor. Other songs of note are Down in the Bowery, with Hunter, the lead singer from Mott the Hoople; Fall Apart With You is a wonderful ballad that will stay with you for days; Bruce Springsteen guests on Faith; and the album ends with a perfect denouement, the instrumental Fort Worth Blue.

I was ecstatic when Amazon lowered the MP3 price from $10.49 to $7.99 on Wednesday and it’s been worth every penny. You can listen to the whole album as a stream on Spinner.

  • in Vinyl
  • 3 min read

of Montreal – The Past is a Grotesque Animal 12″

It’s quite fitting the day after I launched the blog that the most beautiful record I’ve purchased yet should be delivered.

of Montreal - The Past is a Grotesque Animal

of Montreal has released a 12″ album on the Polyvinyl label of The Past is a Grotesque Animal, originally recorded for Spike Jonze’s I’M HERE.  It comes on light blue vinyl with a hand screen printed design by Nina / Geminitactics.

Polyvinyl is a small label out of Champaign, Illinois and features a number of indie artists that I’ve been lucky to hear on my local radio station, 89.3 The Current.  Polyvinyl is home to of Montreal, Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, Joan of Arc and is the former home for Mates of State.  Last year they had a bit of financial trouble, and using Kickstarter they had a sale to save 10,000 records from destruction.  For only $20 I received 8 CDs that served as a great introduction to the artists on their label.

of Montreal was one of those artists I received a further introduction too, receiving their Icons, Abstract Thee CD.  Kevin Barnes is the man behind the project, having released 9 of Montreal albums, with the tenth coming out later this year (and available via pre-sale now.  And yes, I pre-ordered the limited edition red LP package).

The Past is a Grotesque record features two versions of the song, the second with The Lost Trees.  The song features of Montreal’s trademark catchiness and is also haunting in a way – but the vocals are like nothing done on an of Montreal record before.

I’ve listened to it a few times, and while it may not be my favorite song by of Montreal, it’s probably the favorite record I’ve purchased so far.  The record is a beautiful sky blue and the picture below doesn’t do it justice.

sdc10169.jpg

This is the first vinyl record I’ve purchased from Polyvinyl, but it won’t be the last.  I already have pre-orders in for of Montreal’s next album, False Priest, and Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin’s August release Let it Sway.  Polyvinyl, and more importantly, their artists get how the music industry is changing – you can order the CD or LP – both with the album in MP3 available on release date,  as well as packages containing t-shirts, buttons or stickers.  It’s good to see at least one label who understands CwF + RtB (Connect with Fans) + (Reason to Buy).  And they sent me some bonus items with my of Montreal purchase:  The ZZZZ’s latest album, a poster and a pink lemonade Airheads!

sdc10164.jpg

Vinyl (R)Evolution

Note: This is reposted from my main blog and seems fitting to kick off my Vinyl Music blog with.

When I was 17 or18 years old, I wanted to be a DJ with a friend of mine. I grabbed all of my parents vinyl records, trucked them over to my friend’s house and then… we didn’t do anything. He and I eventually had a falling out and a couple years later when I inquired about getting the records back, I was dismayed to learn that his basement had flooded and they were trashed.

I don’t think my father has forgiven me to this day.

I grew up heavily influenced by music, including my parents listening to their records and favorite artists such as ABBA, Billy Joel and Elton John. I remember periods of my life based on the music I was listening to at the time and if I hear a specific song it can take me back right to that moment.

I’ve been thinking about buying a turntable for the last few years and re-creating some of those memories. I participated in Record Store Day last year shopping at a local store and picking up a number of CDs and this year on Record Store Day I went out and this time picked up some used and new vinyl records and then bought a turntable off Craigslist. (An early 80s Pioneer direct-drive).

img_5174.jpg

I’m one of growing number of people getting back into vinyl – just visit The Future of Vinyl blog for non-stop media coverage of the growth of vinyl over the last couple years – it’s now the fastest growing segment of the (dying) music industry. Even large retailers like Best Buy are getting in on it. (Though I found their selection disappointing – very few new records, just 180g re-issues of older material, and for the same prices as the local stores, who I would rather support).

I own more CDs than I can count, and even if it’s in my head, I do think vinyl sounds better. There is something to be said for the crackle and hiss of a well worn and loved album playing on a stereo.

I don’t know what’s more fun – listening to the albums or shopping for them. I’ve already bought over 60 records in the last 6 weeks, the bulk of them at two events. The first was a private collector who put an ad in Craigslist and was selling over 5000 records with most of them going for 3 for a dollar. The second sale was today at the Minnesota Record Show which is held four times a year and features a number of dealers selling records for a few bucks each to rare albums worth hundreds of dollars. On average at an event like this or in the local record stores, used albums are about $3 each. I have bought a few re-issues on 180 gram vinyl of some of my favorite albums of all time, such as Depeche Mode’s Music for the Masses. (Most albums are 120 grams – the thicker the album the higher the fidelity).

img_5171.jpg

But what impresses me the most is the resurgence in current artists releasing vinyl day and date with CD – and including MP3 or FLAC downloads for free when you purchase the vinyl record. I’ve picked up some great new albums, including the latest from The Hold Steady, The New Pornographers and Broken Bells.

My wife laughs at me every time I say “I’m going downstairs to listen to some records” but I’m enjoying the experience immensely. She also says I’m done collecting for a while, but don’t tell her, I have my eyes on some more new releases and I heard about another upcoming show…

Collaboration Across Borders

I’ve been a bit of a distro-hopper over the last year, but as I started interviewing at Novell earlier this year I started using openSUSE so I could pretend to know what I was talking about if it came up during the interview process.

I’ve been really happy with openSUSE – each distro has their quirks but there’s a number of things (especially the openSUSE Build Service!) it does well.

I’ve also enjoyed lurking in the openSUSE GNOME community. When I’ve been stuck with something I’ve gotten quick answers and they’ve been very welcoming. (Well, except Vincent – he took one look at what I did to my laptop at the Marketing hackfest and ran away. Ok, that’s not true, he fixed it as he usually does).

One of the cool things the openSUSE community is doing is organizing the second annual openSUSE conference later this year from October 21st – 23rd in Nuremberg, Germany.

The theme is “Collaboration Across Borders” and this goes beyond just openSUSE – one of the tracks being tentatively planned is called “Cross Pollination” and the goal is to have multiple distributions and upstream projects under one roof. There will be open discussions and meetings, presentations and maybe even some hacking together. (For those of you hoping for a cagematch fight, sorry!)

Potential topics could include anything from accessibility to how to handle zealots in your community to what holds a project back to brainstorming about how closed competition might do better and how our projects can improve.

If this sounds like something you may be interested in presenting at – no matter what distribution you may use or support – distributions and upstream projects welcome! – email cfp@opensuse.org to propose a talk.

Thanks to FunkyPenguin aka awafaa for passing this along.

GNOME Docs Team meeting tomorrow

What’s that? You follow planet.gnome.org but not news.gnome.org? For shame – we have a blog for the GNOME Documentation team but I guess this once I can cross-post for you.

We’re having a meeting tomorrow at 19:00 UTC in #docs on irc.gimp.org to start planning the topics and task for GNOME 3.0. We have big things (like GNOME Shell) to document and lots of little topics to tackle as we break up the old GNOME User Guide and organize it better.

As the post on the Docs blog says – now is a great time to get involved – even if you don’t know Docbook or Mallard, the important thing is to write the new user help and we’re here to help you learn.

See you there!

What my dad taught me about tech

Gizmodo and Lifehacker’s Kevin Purdy both have blog posts on Father’s Day today talking about what their dads taught them about technology. Building on that theme, I can thank my dad for getting me interested in computers at a young age.

I was 9 years old when my dad bought the family its first computer, the Timex Sinclair 1000 (the American version of the Sinclair ZX81). Small and compact with a whopping 2KiB of RAM, we hooked it up to an old black and white television and used a tape deck to load and save programs. My dad also bought the 16K ram expansion module and later the TS1500 which had 16K ram of built-in and was slightly bigger with a better keyboard. I remember spending hours copying machine code from computer magazines and hoping I didn’t make a mistake so I could play a game like Breakout or loading pre-bought tapes with games to play. A few years ago when my dad came to visit, he surprised me and brought me both computers (in their original boxes!), manuals and a bunch of tapes.

Timex Sinclair

A few years later he bought an Apple //c and I spent probably thousands of hours with it over the years. I remember playing games like Choplifter to The Bards Tale, programming BASIC and Logo and later, having a modem and finding the wonderful world of BBSes. I remember we had Compuserve briefly (it was expensive!) and I think I spent a few hours playing one of their RPGs, but I don’t remember if I got yelled at for the hourly fee. I remember that we had an early modem and when we upgraded (to maybe 1200 baud?) how excited I was because how much faster it was. A number of years ago I bought an Apple //c and accompanying monitor. I never did find the space in the house to set it up and there it sits in its box…

I don’t remember my dad using any of the computers all that much – probably because I was hogging them every minute I could. I think he did some home finance stuff, but I wouldn’t say my dad is a computer expert by any means. I look at my son today who sit on his PC and play games for hours at a time, and now that summer is here, I think to myself he should get outside and get some exercise and fresh air – and now I’ve officially turned into my father.

A few years later we would get a 286 running GeoS, not MS-DOS. I remember being at Sears, and being smart-mouthed and opinionated like any teenager, telling my dad to invest the money in the 386. We got the 286 and a year or two later I still remember vividly getting Wing Commander – but I needed MS-DOS 5 to use the himem command so I could play it and talking my dad in to taking me to Babbages and buying it for me.

That computer lived in my room and I don’t have any memories of my father using it. I’m sure I’ve never said it, but thanks dad for buying these computers for me as a kid, it played a large part in forming who I am today.

Last summer my son and I talked about using some of his free time to constructively use his computer (rather than all the games he loves to play). Just this morning we were talking on the way home from breakfast about carving some time out every day on a consistent basis and going through Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python. Between that and Snake Wrangling for Kids he may pick up some programming skills this summer, something I never did.

My daughter has one of my old laptops, and plays GCompris on it, and I downloaded Sugar on a Stick last week for her to try out too. I hope my kids can look back someday, as I am today, and remember the experiences of using their first computer as fondly as I do today.

  • in music
  • 3 min read

Vinyl (R)Evolution

When I was 17 or18 years old, I wanted to be a DJ with a friend of mine. I grabbed all of my parents vinyl records, trucked them over to my friend’s house and then… we didn’t do anything. He and I eventually had a falling out and a couple years later when I inquired about getting the records back, I was dismayed to learn that his basement had flooded and they were trashed.

I don’t think my father has forgiven me to this day.

I grew up heavily influenced by music, including my parents listening to their records and favorite artists such as ABBA, Billy Joel and Elton John. I remember periods of my life based on the music I was listening to at the time and if I hear a specific song it can take me back right to that moment.

I’ve been thinking about buying a turntable for the last few years and re-creating some of those memories. I participated in Record Store Day last year shopping at a local store and picking up a number of CDs and this year on Record Store Day I went out and this time picked up some used and new vinyl records and then bought a turntable off Craigslist. (An early 80s Pioneer direct-drive).

img_5174.jpg

I’m one of growing number of people getting back into vinyl – just visit The Future of Vinyl blog for non-stop media coverage of the growth of vinyl over the last couple years – it’s now the fastest growing segment of the (dying) music industry. Even large retailers like Best Buy are getting in on it. (Though I found their selection disappointing – very few new records, just 180g re-issues of older material, and for the same prices as the local stores, who I would rather support).

I own more CDs than I can count, and even if it’s in my head, I do think vinyl sounds better. There is something to be said for the crackle and hiss of a well worn and loved album playing on a stereo.

I don’t know what’s more fun – listening to the albums or shopping for them. I’ve already bought over 60 records in the last 6 weeks, the bulk of them at two events. The first was a private collector who put an ad in Craigslist and was selling over 5000 records with most of them going for 3 for a dollar. The second sale was today at the Minnesota Record Show which is held four times a year and features a number of dealers selling records for a few bucks each to rare albums worth hundreds of dollars. On average at an event like this or in the local record stores, used albums are about $3 each. I have bought a few re-issues on 180 gram vinyl of some of my favorite albums of all time, such as Depeche Mode’s Music for the Masses. (Most albums are 120 grams – the thicker the album the higher the fidelity).

img_5171.jpg

But what impresses me the most is the resurgence in current artists releasing vinyl day and date with CD – and including MP3 or FLAC downloads for free when you purchase the vinyl record. I’ve picked up some great new albums, including the latest from The Hold Steady, The New Pornographers and Broken Bells.

My wife laughs at me every time I say “I’m going downstairs to listen to some records” but I’m enjoying the experience immensely. She also says I’m done collecting for a while, but don’t tell her, I have my eyes on some more new releases and I heard about another upcoming show…

  • in GNOME
  • 4 min read

A Peek Under the Covers

It’s been two months since I was appointed to the GNOME Foundation Board of Directors to replace Behdad. (And those are some pretty big shoes to fill!)

With Foundation Board elections quickly approaching, we discussed at the last Board meeting this past Thursday sharing some of our experiences on the Board. We would like to encourage anyone with an interest in running for the Board to do so and I thought I’d share some of my experiences over the last 2 months and I believe other Board members will be sharing theirs as well.

Being the newest member of the Board, I have to say the experience has been eye opening and humbling. I do not consider myself a developer or progammer and I enjoy the other aspects of being involved with free software projects, including project management. I thought this would help prepare me for being on the Board, especially as the Board does not set technical direction for GNOME, but I am constantly amazed at the number of things the Board is involved in.

These things range from little things such as registering or transferring a domain to following up with a booth organizer on how a conference went to big things like GNOME’s finances, GUADEC planning or the hiring and payroll of GNOME’s employees and everything in-between.

There is a lot of work around GNOME’s finances. German, as Treasurer, has a huge task in helping managing and tracking GNOME’s income and expenses. Stormy and Rosanna also spend a significant amount of time in dealing with the administrative side of this in managing the bank accounts, wire transfers and more.

A lot of what we do is interacting with the various project teams. Things like getting an update from the Release Team on how the next release is coming or the challenges ahead or asking the Marketing team to help with fundraising ideas. And there is the follow-up – being a free software project powered by developers there can be a lot of follow-up in both just getting a response or update as well as progress on any given project or task. I don’t know how we’d do it without Brian’s (as Secretary) attention to detail in keeping the meeting minutes. (You are reading the meeting minutes after Brian sends them to the Foundation list every two weeks, aren’t you?)

There is also a focus on events. From planning GUADEC (did you know we’re aleady working on the Desktop Summit for 2011 to be co-hosted with KDE?) to hackfests we are constantly working on planning future events and following-up to see how past events went and what their accomplishments were.

We also work with external partners. Examples include companies or organizations who want to work together, journalists, government organizations or our Advisory Board partners. We meet with the Advisory Board monthly and have a two-way discussion on how we can work together better. This past Tuesday’s meeting Stormy and German gave an update on GNOME’s finances as we are half way through our fiscal year.

Doing a very, very rough estimate, I would say we average about 50 emails a week (just doing a quick count over the past few weeks). Some of it is conversation between Board members to make a decision, some of it just votes on a decision (+1, 0 or -1) and some it is discussions with projects or partners. Everyone on the Board has a voice and we have a good discussion and dialog as we build consensus. If you think about it, it’s only 5-10 emails per day – not as many as you think!

If you are good at communication, have knowlege about GNOME, are comfortable in taking on action items and following through, have some time you can donate each week, and most importantly, want to see the GNOME Foundation grow and succeed, you should consider running for the Board.

This blog post isn’t supposed to scare you off – if you’re choosing to run you should be aware of the administrative tasks and time involved but the work is deeply rewarding. Being a part of the Board has given me a broader vision to all the great things GNOME does around the world and I am thankful for the opportunity.

With that said, the elections process kicked off a week ago. I’ll be the first to put my hand up this election cycle and announce my candidacy. I’ve sent in my email to the Foundation-Announce and Elections lists and it should be moderated and appear soon. I would be honored and humbled to serve the GNOME community on the Board for the next year.

You should run too. Help make GNOME better. Yes, you.

Quack – An update on GNOME 3.0 Help

One of the big improvements for GNOME 3.0 is new user help.  The Documentation Team is using Mallard to re-write the GNOME User Guide and a number of applications help files as well.

In GNOME today, most help files are written in a very linear structure by chapter using Docbook XML.  If you’re a user looking for help, it’s not always easy to find the right chapter that contains the topic you’re looking for help with.

Topic based help aims to fix that.  And to write topic based help, the GNOME Docs team will be using Mallard, a new XML language written by Shaun McCance aka the GNOME Documentation Project’s Fearless Leader.

The hardest part about writing good help (in any markup) is planning, planning, planning.  What feature might the user need help with? Where will they get stuck? How should the topics be organized?

From there, you write help that’s in the second person in a conversational tone to help the user.  (And choosing the right words is important as well to help the localization teams out, too).

Let’s use Tomboy’s help to compare.

Tomboy help in GNOME 2.30 using Docbook:

Tomboy 2.30 Help

Tomboy help re-written into topic based help for GNOME 3.0:

Tomboy Help for GNOME 3.0

Tomboy help re-written in Mallard

(And there are a number of topics you can’t see in the screenshot such as Common Problems, Advanced Actions and What’s New.)

The goal is to help users get to the help they need fast.  There’s always been a bit of an in-joke that users don’t read the help.  We’re aiming to change that.  When they need help, we need to present it quickly and easily.  (Which also ties in to the work Shaun is doing in Yelp 3.0).

For GNOME 3.0, we are going to re-write the GNOME User Guide.  This will be a difficult challenge due to the amount of information currently in the guide as well as GNOME Shell and the user interface being in development and we need for it to stabilize before writing the docs.  Shaun, Milo and Phil did a lot of planning around the user guide at the Desktop Help Summit this past April in Chicago.

In addition to this herculean task, a number of applications are in process of getting new help or replacing their old help with topic based help, including:

  • Banshee
  • Brasero
  • Cheese
  • F-Spot
  • gLabels
  • Rhythmbox
  • Tomboy

On a personal note, I finished Tomboy’s help and started Banshee’s help this weekend on the plane coming back from the Marketing hackfest.  I’d also like to thank Harold Schreckengost who just joined the docs team last month and has already started, if not finished, topic based help for Brasero and F-Spot.  (I committed the F-Spot help tonight on his behalf in a new branch – docs).

If you’re an application developer and you know of your help being written or re-written in Mallard, please add it to the list on the wiki.  App maintainers also may need to re-work the way help is called from the menu and help the doc writers review any new documentation for accuracy.  (Thanks in advance!)

If you’re a documentation writer, please visit the page above as well for examples on how we plan our writing for help and the Docs wiki has a lot of other great information for getting started too.  Take it from me, writing in Mallard is much easier than Docbook, and now is a great time to get involved with the Docs team and writing new user help as we’re all learning the new language and we can make a big impact on GNOME 3.0.

Marketing Hackfest – Participating and Interacting in Communities

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A handful of us are waiting in the hotel lobby to catch a cab to the train station as the Marketing Hackfest has come to an end. Andreas has inspired me to stop procrastinating and write another blog post (hopefully it’s not the last one about the hackfest!)

Our trip here was sponsored and organized by multiple groups including ASOLIF, Technological Institute of Aragón, CESLA, the city of Zaragosa and the regional government Aragón.  (See the Hackfest page for more details under organizers).  I would personally like to thank Agustin for taking such good care of us and making sure we got from one place to another.

Our days were very structured – start hacking at 9 until 2:00 when we would break for lunch, then start again at 4:00 (or at least that’s when we were supposed to start – Spain is very relaxed and have long lunches) and then hack some more until 8:30 or so when the facility closed.  Walk back to the hotel and then meet for dinner and walk to a location around 9:30.  Agustin was kind enough to explain some of the cultural significance in why this is and it was a good learning experience.

Being your typical American this took some getting used to!

We spent our time hacking in the “Water Library” or Bibliotecha de Agua (I hope I got that right as I don’t speak Spanish).  The library was converted from a convent (if I remember correctly) and the picture above is the room just outside our conference room.    Walking through the library some rooms had display cases explaining the history of the building and the city.

Each day after lunch Stormy, Vincent and myself would meet with officials from the local or regional government, the university or businesses in Spain who are using free software and are interested in growing their community and giving back.  The city of Zaragoza is marketing itself as an Open Source City and is building infrastructure to retain and attract technology companies and startups as well as helping its citizens through things like free Wifi.  (More on Zaragoza in another post – it deserves it’s own blog post for all the cool things they’re doing).

Some of the business leaders we met with traveled hours by train to meet with us and we were honored to learn about what they’re doing in and with free software and how they want to give back to the community.  We were able to share our knowledge of working within free software communities and I’m excited to see these companies grow and expand.

One local example is eBox.  From their website:

eBox Platform can act as a Gateway, Infrastructure Manager, Unified Threat Manager, Office Server, Unified Communication Server or a combination of them. One single, easy-to-use platform to manage all your network services.

Ignacio, eBox’s CEO, spent a significant amount of time with us joining us for lunch and dinner every single day.  We were also able to get a tour of their offices after the session on Friday.  Heidi, their Chief Marketing Officer also joined us for dinner one night and on Friday.

On Friday, the government hosted a day of talks that included local businesses and other free software speakers, including Rodrigo Moya from GNOME Hispano, and Stormy, Vincent and myself each gave talks.  It was a fantastic opportunity to participate with such a diverse group and being able to represent GNOME.

Thank you to everyone in and around Zaragoza for spending time us and sharing the exciting things you’re doing and the goals you have in building free software and communities.  It was definitely a learning experience and one I’m thankful for.

Sponsored by GNOME