Impressive Debuts

• Flobots
• The Black Ghosts
• MGMT grew on me. I didn’t like at first, glad I came back
• Justice
• The Asteroids Galaxy Tour first heard on the new iPod Video commercial

New To Me

Bands I got turned on to in 2008

• The Virgins – The Virgins
• Amy Winehouse – Back To Black

Established Awesomeness

Artists I listen to who put out strong albums in 2009.

• The Black Keys – Attack & Release, my vote for top album of 2008
• Beck – Modern Guilt
• We Are Scientists – Brain Thrust Mastery, sophomore release just as awesome as With Love and Squalor
• Radiohead – In Rainbows
• Thievery Corporation – Radio Retaliation
• Oasis – Dig Out Your Soul
• Panic at the Disco – Pretty. Odd., I’ll be first to admit I hated this album when it first came out. It completely lacked the energy and intensity that I loved in the first PATD album, but it grew on me over time. There are some excellent tracks on this disc.

The Best Tracks

Infinite Repeat

• The Tings Tings – “Shut Up And Let Me Go”
• MGMT – “Kids Oracular”
• Estelle – “American Boy Ft. Kanye West”
• Kings of Leon – “Sex On Fire”
• My Morning Jacket – “Touch Me I’m Going To Scream Part 2″, best beginning and ending to a song released in ’08
• Air France – “Collapsing At Your Doorstep”
• Justice – “Genesis”
• Grum – “Whoa”
• M83 – “Kim & Jesse”
• The Virgins – “Rich Girls”
• Hot Chip – “Ready For The Floor”
• Death Cab For Cutie – “I Will Possess Your Heart”
• Panic at the Disco – “Nine In The Afternoon”, best viewed here.
• Stars – “The Ghost Of Genova Heights”
• My Robot Friend – “Robot High School” (In Digital Form Remix
• Of Montreal – “Id Engager”

Best Albums of 2008

1 requirement – strong from start to finish, never skip a track.

• Beck – Modern Guilt
• The Black Ghosts – The Black Ghosts
• My Morning Jacket – Evil Urges
• MGMT – Oracular Spectacular
• Kings of Leon – Only By Night
• M83 – Saturdays = Youth

Let Downs

• Cold War Kids – Loyalty To Loyalty, didn’t hold my attention
• The Dears – Missiles, totally changed their sound, no good tracks. Can’t keep members together: Wikipedia.
• Fujiya & Miyagi – Lightbulbs, same sound only, nothing new, not as good
• The Presets – Apocalypso, no stand out tracks like “Girl and the Sea” or “Steamworks” on their previous album.
• Ratatat – LP3, I falls way short compared to Classics
• Dungen – Tio Bitar, doesn’t compare to Ta Det Lungt
• Taproot – Our Long Way Home, doesn’t compare to their previous releases.
• Hot Chip – Made in the Dark, I had high expectations for this album because I played “Ready For The Floor” x 100000, but the rest of the album is meh.
• Death Cab For Cutie – Narrow Stairs, maybe I’m being harsh but I was looking for an album to rival Transatlanticism and never got it.

EPIC FAIL

• The Killers – Day & Age

I’m always waiting for The Killers to bring me back to the heyday of Hot Fuss. I always leave disappointed. On the first single “Human” Brandon Flowers asks “are we human or are we dancer” a play on a Hunter S Thompson proverb. What a stupid song. The horns in “I Can’t Stay” was horrid enough to stick hot needles through my ear drums. The Epic Failure of another piece of crap album by a band I once loved is enough to turn off the dial permanently. I am never listening to The Killers again. What an EPIC waste.

Best Concerts of 2008

• The Black Keys @ The Orpheium
• VAST @ Harper’s Ferry
• Ambulance LTD @ The Middle East
• Band of Horses @ The Paradise
• Rogue Wave @ The Paradise
• The Go! Team @ The Paradise

Best Compilations

• Lounge Anthology
• Indie Rock Playlists

Where Are They?

• The Avalanches – Air France reminded me of them
• Sean Lennon, 8 years between his debut (1998) and his sophomore release (2006), I’m not holding my breath
• Muse

Rediscovered

Back from the dead. Oldies but goodies.

• 311 – 311, I still could sing along with “T&P Combo”. That surprised the hell out of me.
• VAST
• Sean Lennon – Friendly Fire
• Second Coming – Second Coming, “Soft”

Music Resources

Give a listen to some of the artists/albums/tracks I’ve mentioned on these sites.

• Hypem, check out their 2008 Zeitgiest
• delicious.com/somedirection17/music
• The Yellow Stereo
• Aurgasm
• Last.fm
• Pitchfork Top Albums of 2008, Pitchfork Best Tracks of 2008
• Tune Muncher

What’d I miss? Let me know in the comments!

I’ve been with Sprint since 2005, before that I had Nextel (which was later bought by Sprint). We got the phones for a now extinct development company I ran with my buddy Dan.

On 7/11/08 during the iPhone craziness I logged onto my Sprint account and saw you could check your end date. I’ve been lusting for an iPhone for quite some time and the 3G release broke the metaphorical camel’s back. Here’s a transcript of my session with Sprint on 7/11 for your entertainment.

If you read that transcript you would think that the issue was resolved and they rolled back my service so I wasn’t required to keep my contract until 12/23/2008 right? You’d be mistaken.

Today I had a followup conversation, just to validate my success getting my plan rolled back. What I learned was this: THEY CANCELED MY ACCOUNT effective 8/1/2008. Hole in one Sprint.

I’m very frustrated I lost the text conversation from today because I tried to view the frame source and Sprint knocked me out. I was speaking to a friendly fellow named "Oliver". Note: a text based online support allows for easy outsourcing. There were some good quotes like:

Oliver:

you line is cancelled. did you pay the $200 cancellation fee?

Me:

I NEVER SAID TO CANCEL MY ACCOUNT

And when I said "hell no" I got this prompt reply:

To ensure that we have a productive chat session, I ask that you please refrain from using profane/vulgar language during our chat. Thank you in advance.

You’d think I said something like "Suck My Ass Sprint" which upon reflection, might not have been such a bad idea.

Needless to say my tenure as a Sprint Customer is coming to a close. Unfortunately Sprint-Really-Sucks.com was already taken. I might’ve been able to capitalize on Sprints cesspool service for profit, maybe I still will!

Maybe I should look into this lawsuit.

I’ll change my strategy and try again, this time following this great advice.

UPDATE 7/20

I was so livid with Sprint on Friday (7/18) that I got an iPhone that very day, it’s badass. I used this service to check availability. The whole process of buying the phone (16GB Black), transferring my number, and taking calls took a total of 15 minutes. A far cry of the trials and frustrations I heard from people who waited in line and got it on 7/11. This phone kicks ass. I’m still figuring out my way around it, but as of right now I’m very happy I jumped ship.

IN OTHER NEWS

My old phone is up on eBay the sale of which should put a good dent in my cancellation fee from Sprint. Send the link to someone you hate that has Sprint.

UPDATE 7/28

My HTC Mogul sold on eBay Saturday. The final price was $183.90 + $15.95 shipping = $199.85. Total shipping costs were $12.10 to ship via USPS which leaves me with $187.75 total for resale of my HTC Mogul phone.

The Sprint cancellation fee is $200. So it essentially cost me $12.25 to up and leave Sprint. For all the headaches and stress they caused they should be paying me to leave **them** in my opinion.

Another thing that made it so much easier on the wallet was that my company is paying for my new iPhone. I love my job. All is well that ends well.

Ever the music aficionado myself I took the time to make a simple list of some of the tunes that have been occupying my airwaves lately. Give somedirection.muxtape.com a spin, let me know what you think.

I love muxtape for its simplicity. It’s the kind of app that as a web developer you say to yourself – why didn’t I think of that?

Here’s a service that’s just begging for a widget you can embed on your blog/social network.

Looks like S3 is leveraged for file hosting – smart move.

I’m always looking for new music to discover and although Last.fm has your standard “related artists”/”if you like this you might like this” hype machine is solely built upon discovering new music. Last.fm tries to do everything, Hype Machine knows what it is and doesn’t try to be anything it’s not.

from Hype Machine

The Hype Machine tracks a variety of MP3 blogs. If a post contains MP3 links, it adds those links to its database and displays them on the front page.

Some of the frequently accessed tracks are cached by the Hype Machine server, much like Google Search caches web pages, to reduce load on the bloggers’ servers and protect their bandwidth.

And the way Hype Machine works is downright genius. It leverages the blogosphere to feed its appetite. If you have a music blog you want to be in hype machine’s swarm because they give you credit boosting your own traffic and exposure in the process.

Plus, you’ve gotta respect the way these guys are making their money. I don’t know what their bandwidth/labor costs are so I’m going out on a limb here but I think Hype Machine is a cash machine. There’s advertising, and they’re also leveraging affiliate programs from eMusic, Amazon, and Apple to capture sales on catchy new singles. It’s a great business model to boot.

Other notable awesomeness

• It streams music fast and never buffers mid-stream
• It’s current and always changing
• I can always find that “latest track” in its entirety with excellent quality
• The site itself is minimal, looks sharp, and is easy to use – big brownie points (from a web developer)
• You can’t download the tracks – only stream them, so they sidestep any piracy issues

You can favorite tracks as you go along and then listen to them straight through. Give Somedirection Radio a listen and let me know what you think. Of course my radio station is a bit thin right now. Hype Machine has their own “official” radio stream which offers a good mix. I’ve found myself going to it when I get bored with my library and don’t know what to play.

Improvements can be made

Nothing’s perfect. I always want another feature my main qualm being w/ the favorites streaming player. It would be great to favorite a bunch of tracks and be able to use it as a legit music player w/ controls like shuffle/repeat etc. Also, being able to create multiple listening playlists would be sweet. Last.fm has their downloadable music player client that I’ve used – if Hype Machine came up with a downloadable OS X App or iTunes integration with their favorites/playlist feature that’d be awesome.

If you haven’t heard of it before check it out, let me know what you think. If you have, let me know whether you agree or my assessment is way off.

When I used Firefox I’d use the faviconize plugin which helped somewhat, but now I only use Firefox when I develop so I have the same issues with Camino.

But just recently, Scott showed me he found something better.. Fluid is an OS X application that will let you create custom Site Specific Browsers (SSBs).

Fluid utilizes Safari’s WebKit rendering engine and is a native Cocoa OS X application. Essentially you can think of it as a site-specific custom Safari browser.

One thing I immediately wanted to do was separate my Google Apps into 1 SSB with Fluid. But, by default every new instance does not have tabbing enabled, but you can easily enable tabs via the application’s Preferences. Now all the Google Apps I use daily – gmail, calendar, reader, docs, and analytics are separated out and saves me from tab-salad-hell.

Another good use for Fluid is to create applications for 37signals products. I spend a lot of time daily in Campfire and Basecamp. It was only a logical move I should create an app for each. 37signals went so far as to provide icons just for this use so your dock can stay pretty.

Previously I used Pyro which was a less-than-stable wrapper for Campfire around the same idea. The jury is out as to which is better, but since it’s essentially just a Safari browser tab – I’m pretty certain Pyro has seen its day on my desktop.

Fluid even handles notifications from the various apps. Check out the Fluid icons Flickr group to keep that dock sexy.

I was pretty impressed, and I’m glad I run a Mac so I can enjoy all the goodness Fluid has to offer. Bye bye tab-salad, this is the end of web browsers as we know them.

Update (a couple days later)

So I’ve been using Fluid based SSB’s for Basecamp, Campfire, and Gmail for the last couple days and wanted to air out a few annoyances.

• I’m back on Pyro. Growl notifications for Campfire are just too important and are not available in the Campfire Fluid-based SSB. I found myself checking Campfire for no reason frequently because I got no notification like I used to. I didn’t realize how reliant I was on them.
• Basecamp as an SSB is good enough for me right now – I’ll probably stick with it.
• Gmail & Google Apps work okay, not great. Camino is my browser by default, and usually if you open a link from Gmail it will fire that url in another tab – however with Gmail as a Fluid-based SSB a blank window (not a tab) is created, and then the link is opened in Camino in a new tab (if it’s open). This is a pretty big annoyance, although I’m trying to stick it out, but when I remember to avoid the blank window from opening I find that I’m copy and pasting the link itself into Camino which is pretty lame.

That’s it. I’ve only had it a couple days and already an update was pushed out to me, hopefully these minor annoyances will get fixed promptly and I can continue the SSB goodness!

Update 3/30/08

2+ months out I’m now ONLY using Fluid for Basecamp.The other services (like gmail) were just odd to work with and felt like a pain more than anything. I’ve since installed the Google Notifier so I can be alerted there’s a queue of email backup before I even bother to check. This method seems to be working best.

10. The Rakes – Ten New Messages This is a great album that I can listen to straight through w/o skipping a beat. It’s high energy and really gets my blood pumping. Plus, it’s got the best song title of 2007 – “The World Was A Mess But His Hair Was Perfect”

9. The Arcade Fire – Neon Bible Great musicians and a great spice of instruments make this album one of my top picks this year. I’ve read that they recorded it in an old church. It definitely has an airy feel.

8. Devendra Banhart – Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon This Devendra album is my “weirdo/bizarro” pick of 2007. I gave a listen after he was featured in an interview in Rolling Stone where he came off as a real weirdo. Surprisingly, weird as he is as a person his music is really mellow and easy to listen to.

7. Arctic Monkeys – Favourite Worst Nightmare I was a huge fan of Arctic Monkeys when they first stormed the interweb and enjoyed listening to them before their record deal. Their sophomore effort is just as good as their freshman release. The lyrics are tight, the music is tighter.

6. Band Of Horses – Cease To Begin A late comer that really snuck up on me. I didn’t hate the album at first, but I didn’t fully appreciate it either until maybe the 3th or 4th time through. It’s become my go-to album when I have a splitting headache. With a track titled “Detlef Schrempf” (of Indiana Pacers fame) on the album how can you go wrong? I’m going to see them in late January here in Boston, I suggest you join me.

5. Kings Of Leon – Because Of The Times “Because Of The Times” is a really mature album for Kings Of Leon and it’s a welcome change from the usual thick mid-western-southern-twang I had to translate in my head on their previous albums. These guys can make great music. Checkout “Knocked Up” to fully appreciate them.

4. The Shins – Wincing The Night Away Clever lyrics, relaxing music. The Shins keep me level.

3. The Bees – Octopus The Bees have a really unique sound. To be honest, I have no idea how to categorize this band. Give them a listen and let me know how you’d categorize them.

2. The Go! Team – Proof Of Youth The Go! Team has such a unique sound as well. They’re hard to miss and they absolutely rock. I caught them in concert at the Paradise and the show was high energy and totally blew me away. [pictures]

1. Spoon – Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga I got hooked on Spoon back on their previous release “Gimmie Fiction” and “Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga” certainly didn’t disappoint me. I went to see them at an intimate show at the Museum of Fine Arts here in Boston and it was hands down the best concert I’ve ever been to.

* under the radar – a true gem

• Spoon – Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
• The Bees – Octopus
• Interpol – Our Love To Admire
• Ulrich Schnauss – Goodbye
• The Thrills – Teenager
• Tegan & Sara – The Con
• Taken By Trees – Open Field
• Stereophonics – Pull The Pin
• Sigur Ros – Hvarf-Heim
• The Shins – Wincing The Night Away
• Rogue Wave – Asleep At Heaven’s Gate
• The Rakes – Ten New Messages
• Radiohead – In Rainbows
• Of Montreal – Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?
• New Young Pony Club – Fantastic Playroom
• LCD Soundsystem – Sound Of Silver
• Kings Of Leon – Because Of The Times
• Kanye West – Graduation
• Kaiser Chiefs – Yours Truly, Angry Mob
• The Good, The Bad, & The Queen (Self Titled)
• Foo Fighters – Echoes, Silence, Patience and Grace
• Explosions In The Sky – All Of A Sudden I Miss Everyone
• Devendra Banhart – Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon
• Black Rebel Motorcycle Club – Baby 81
• Band Of Horses – Cease To Begin
• Arctic Monkeys – Favourite Worst Nightmare
• The Arcade Fire – Neon Bible
• The Go! Team – Proof Of Youth

Albums from 2006 that had heavy rotation in 2007

• Camera Obscura – Let’s Get Out Of This Country
• The Rifles – No Love Lost
• Koop – Koop Island
• We Are Scientists – With Love And Squalor

Want to see my listening habits? Check out my Last.fm profile.

Of course if you want to give a quick listen to any band mentioned above I recommend Hype Machine.

Did I forget anything? Feel free to comment to add anything I may have missed! (Although I may disagree.)

1. The extent of my PHP knowledge is minimal – what I know of PHP is what I’ve done when tinkering with WordPress
2. My knowledge of backend web development is also minimal. I’ve been a frontend guy my whole web career. I pwn xhtml/css/javascript, but server-side dev is completely new to me (I’m finally nipping that knowledge-gap in the butt).
3. I do have knowledge of template engines. When I worked on Quibblo.com full time, we used the Perl Catalyst Framework and I got savvy with Template Toolkit which allowed me to dive into Smarty fairly quickly.

• The {debug} function. At the drop of a hat I can see everything available to me and integrate it on the front end (.tpl files).
• Plugins. I needed a way to paginate, and with minimal knowledge I was able to leverage SmartyPaginate to get the job done.
• I was productive day 1. It’s PHP (which is not a challenging language to begin with) and there’s a separation of code and presentation. I’ve dabbled with ROR, and the learning curve of doing something productive, interesting, and unique is just so much easier, because you don’t have to worry “am I doing this the way they want me to?”.
• Smarty documentation is awesome. It’s brief and concise with really world useful examples. When I do get tripped up with something Smarty related it’s a matter of referencing the documentation and in a couple minutes I’m on my way.

The very few things that I’ve gotten stuck on have been mostly due to a lack of my PHP knowledge and not so much a result of issues with Smarty so far. And unique to my situation, I had Scott right there to bounce questions off of when I hit a wall which was also great.

All in all it’s a great to leverage a templating engine like Smarty when you’re beginning to learn more about backend web development. I’ve always shied away from it because I was always working with other programmers that were more than capable in that area and my talents were always restricted to the front-side of the glorious interweb.

I was never interested much in PHP. I always felt like the future of the web was with a framework like Ruby On Rails, but I am pleasantly surprised with my Smarty experience so far and it’s made me excited to develop with PHP more down the road.

Currently, I’m developing with ROR and Smarty and I hope to compare and contrast the two in the future, stay tuned.

Among those nasty things – there are these “negatives”

1. Weird shape of keys
2. Keys lack “throw” aka key travel
3. Keys lack tactile feedback and require little pressure to press
4. Keys are “flush with the casing”

It’s ironic that everything these writers over at zdnet didn’t like about the keyboard I found absolutely awesome/amazing/killer. My dad first got the new wired Apple Keyboard and when I was home doing the laundry a couple Sundays ago I tried it out and immediately fell in love with it. I’m a pretty fast typer and home row is my friend. I’ve spent the last week telling all of my geeky mac user friends about how much I love this keyboard and so far two have also made the leap.

If you’re on a computer a lot. A keyboard & mouse are things that you’re going to use constantly. When one of the peripherals gets a big time update for the better – making the investment in the new one is almost a no-brainer. Here is a list of benefits that I’ve found using the new Apple Keyboard

The Good

1. The shape of the keys.

   It’s essentially the same key-type as a Mac Book. The fact that they are flat makes the striking area much bigger, cutting DOWN on typos. I’m much more accurate with the new keyboard

2. The lack of “throw” or key travel is actually a GOOD thing.

   I was talking to my Dad about this and put it in terms I think accurately describe the key travel.

   The tactile feedback of the new keyboard is very similar to this guitarist metaphor: It’s the difference between a beginner on a $150 Fender Stratocaster and a custom Ibanez in the hands of Joe Satriani. If your fingers are fast enough. You can fly.

3. The keys are not flush with the casing, they’re raised about 2mm off the casing.

4. There are new Leopard specific hotkeys, but they will work with Tiger if you run a system software update after you get it.

5. Typing is significantly quieter. If I had a decibel meter I’d do my own scientific comparison complete with fancy charts and all, but I don’t so you’ll have to take my word for it.

6. Bye bye carpal tunnel

   The angle of the keyboard itself is very flush with the surface it’s resting on. About 5mm off the surface in the front and 18mm at the back. The angle is much more natural and the font “lip” of the keyboard is virtually non-existent so it won’t cause the wrist strain many keyboards promote. Keyboard Wrist Gel Rest manufacturers are somewhere quietly sobbing.

The Annoying

1. Why the difference between the wired and the wireless versions Apple?

   No numberpad, no dice.

2. How do I clean this thing?

   Like all Apple products lately, there are no visible screws to get at. There’s “nothing” to this thing (with the aluminum casing it could probably slice watermelons)

3. White top keys have gotten some grime on the surface.

   But it was easily rubbed off with some TLC.

4. Some keys got moved around / replaced.

   No more Help key :*(. It was removed and others got shuffled around (big deal)

5. Now I’m stuck with 2 oldschool Apple Keyboards – any takers?