Archive for April, 2006

Concert Review - The Appleseed Cast

Published by brandon 2 years, 7 months ago in Music. 0 Comments

Last night, 4/16/06, Dana and I went to Baltimore’s The Ottobar, to see Lawrence, Kansas’ The Appleseed Cast. I’ve been a big fan of The Appleseed Cast now for about four years. Unfortunately, they do not tour often, and this is only the second time I’ve seen them. Once before, at The Triple Rock Social Club in Minneapolis, MN. It was a great show then, but I think they’ve definitely improved over the years.

The Cast came out looking ready to rock and didn’t disappoint. “Ceremony” lead off their show with a bang…and I mean a bang. At the point where the song kicks in, the walls shook. I wouldn’t say they were Mogwai-esque loud, but it was definitely one of the less-quiet shows I’ve seen in recent years. Following up “Ceremony,” was one of my favorites off their new record Peregrine, “Song 3.” They rocked this song equally well, and then moved quite far backwards in their catalog to “Forever Longing the Golden Sunsets” from Mare Vitalis, which remains one of my favorite records. One of my favorite parts of the show was when they played “Steps & Numbers,” unfortunately, the only song they played off the amazing double-album, Low Level Owl.

The Cast also only broke out one track from Two Conversations, “Fight Song.” One of my favorite things about the Appleseed Cast is their ability to make songs (and entire records!) flow together seamlessly, and I think it would have been really cool to see them melt a few songs together. Also, they played for only a little over an hour, which is rather disappointing from a band that has 5 very strong records they can pull songs from. Granted, several of those would not translate live very well, but there certainly seemed like there could have been more rockers played from their catalog as well.

All in all, it was an awesome show, and I’m thankful I went. I’ve not been to The Ottobar before, and it’s a really cool club. Similar in size to the Triple Rock in Minneapolis, but with a larger backroom and an upstairs (which we didn’t go to).

Setlist:

  1. Ceremony
  2. Song 3
  3. Forever Longing the Golden Sunsets
  4. February
  5. Here We Are (Family In the Hallways)
  6. Steps & Numbers
  7. An Orange and a Blue
  8. Fight Song
  9. Woodland Hunter (Part 1)
  10. The Clock and the Storm

Encore Break

Closer: Fishing the Sky

Good times and people

Published by brandon 2 years, 7 months ago in peanut butter. 0 Comments

We had a great night last night.  A few of our friends came over and we grilled some burgers and brats and had a few beers.  We watched a little Pearl Jam movie, and chilled for awhile.  It was great!

The Boards of Canada - Dayvan Cowboy

Published by brandon 2 years, 7 months ago in Music. 0 Comments

Here’s a link to a cool video, by the group, Boards of Canada that I really enjoy listneing to.

PJ Video With Interviews

Published by brandon 2 years, 7 months ago in Music and Politics. 0 Comments

GetYourFix.com has a cool video with some interviews of the band Pearl Jam, and a few sneak peaks at tracks of their upcoming record, Pearl Jam.

Enjoy!

Interweb 2.0

Published by brandon 2 years, 7 months ago in Music, Politics and technology. 0 Comments

Let me start by saying, I hate the term “Web 2.0,” but since that’s the buzz-word, that’s what people recognize (if anything). The New York Times did an interesting piece on upcoming internet technologies.

Web 2.0 is most frequently used to refer to websites like del.icio.us, MySpace.com, flickr, etc…However, the more important pieces of Web 2.0 are the tecnologies running sites like this: XML, RSS, and DHTML, among others.

These technologies allow web developers to write dynamic websites, that are content rich, and also allow for other web developers to exchange information easily. For example, the “Recently Played” items you see to the right of this post. The website last.fm, provides a program that I attach to the programs I listen to music with, that reports those songs to the last.fm database. I write a little web page code, with the help of a language PHP, that can see the RSS feed from last.fm, and outputs that RSS feed into the plain text you see at the right.

This is probably kind of confusing, but it’s really cool stuff!

The important part about these technologies is this: There is an enormous economic importance behind allowing different internet communities to exchange information. The free-exchange of electronic information allows web developers to create modular programs. Ironically, this makes for a great free-market argument: Allowing websites to freely exchange information creates better competition in the electronic marketplace. Which is great for small companies, and bad for biggies, like Micro$oft.

Hell Is Other People’s Music

Published by brandon 2 years, 7 months ago in Music and technology. 0 Comments

I enjoyed this article from Wired magazine.

The author starts talking about how natural sound can be music, but then proceeds to discuss how music is infiltrating every part of our lives, and that in order to truly appreciate music, we need to have times when there is no music.

A quick read, but I thought he had some interesting points.

More Copy Protection Technologies On the Way

Published by brandon 2 years, 7 months ago in Music, Politics and technology. 2 Comments

PCWorld.com has an interesting article about the music business’ plan to implement new technologies to prevent CDs from being played on computers, or DVD players.

Coincidently, I am forcasting that my CD purchasing will be decreasing at the same time that these CDs hit the market. And people wonder why I buy vinyl:

This audio CD is protected by SunnComm MediaCloQ Ver 1.0. It is designed to play in standard audio CD players only and is not intended for use in DVD players. Licensed copies of all music on this CD are available for downloading. Simply insert CD into your computer to begin.

Well, that’s ok if you have a CD player to play your CDs on. In my case, I don’t own a CD player, all of my CDs are played on my DVD player, or my computer through my stereo. There’s no reason for me to buy another piece of equipment to play CDs when a DVD player (until now) does so perfectly fine.

I strongly urge anyone who reads this to not buy CDs with this type of copy protection on them. (thanks to Jer for the article)

Some changes around here…

Published by brandon 2 years, 7 months ago in peanut butter. 0 Comments

You may have noticed that you tried going to our old home page, http://www.brandonhirsch.com, and came immediately here. Don’t worry that’s on purpose. It’s become too time-consuming to keep both places running, so for now, everything is going to happen here.

Good quote

Published by brandon 2 years, 7 months ago in peanut butter. 0 Comments

When President Bush was in Mexico talking about trade policies with Mexican President Vicente Fox and Canadian Prime Minister Harper, he said:

If you have robust trade like we have there are issues that come up. One way to look at it is if we had no trade, we’d have no issues.

Really? Ya don’t say, Mr. Bush.

Bush was set on the path to war

Published by brandon 2 years, 7 months ago in Politics. 3 Comments

I’ve really tried to not write about politics, but I cannot help myself this time. I really would like to hear some input on this, especially if you disagree with me.

So, I’m writing about this a little late, but I cannot believe that a bigger deal has not been made of the private meeting between British Prime Minister Tony Blair and President Bush on Jan. 31, 2003 detailing how Bush was set on invading Iraq with or without new UN Resolutions, or finding WMD. The New York Times broke a story on March 27th detailing these memos. (The BBC has a free link if you don’t have a New York Times account).

From the memo:

Our diplomatic strategy had to be arranged around the military planning.” ~ David Manning, Mr. Blair’s chief foreign policy adviser at the time

Also from the memo:

The start date for the military campaign was now penciled in for 10 March. This was when the bombing would begin.

Please, someone explain to me why this is not grounds for impeachment? Over 2,000 men & women have died in Iraq, and our President lied to us. Ok, sure he’s not doing something absolutely horrible, like having oral sex with an intern (gasp!), so we should probably just let this one slide. Seriously, this is unreal.