I’m going to try and have a regular feature on raishad.com. We’ll see how long this lasts. Anyways…
An Elliptical Record is an album I listen to while using my elliptical. Since I only use my elliptical for 30 minutes at a time, I will listen to the album in 30 minute blocks. A great Elliptical Record will make the 30 minutes fly by. A terrible Elliptical Record will have me checking the clock constantly and consider just giving up.
The first Elliptical Record is Dear Catastrophe Waitress by Belle & Sebastian. Why Belle & Sebastian and not some pumped up dance music? Well, the best Belle & Sebastian album is If You’re Feeling Sister. Long disagrees. His favorite is Dear Catastrophe Waitress. I needed to listen and compare.
So how was Dear Catastrophe Waitress on the elliptical? Pretty good. The first 30 minutes was amazing. The combination of “Step Into My Office, Baby”, “Dear Catastrophe Waitress”, and “If She Wants Me” is killer. The second 30 minutes started off pretty slow. “Lord Anthony” just doesn’t get you moving. But, the album is only 49 minutes long. So it wraps around and you finish strongly.
Suprisingly, I think it works. That’s why I’m giving
Dear Catastrophe Waitress: 270º
It was only last week ago that I was in Austin for Austin City Limits 2010. It seems so far away now. Now, that I’m back to my humdrum life. I miss ACL.
Sadly, it looks like I won’t be returning to Austin for Austin City Limits 2011. I’m not getting old, it’s just that I’ve been to ACL for 3 out of the past 4 years and it’s time for something new. Also, they’ve moved it to the middle of September. Why? I think C3 likes to play a game where they see how many concert goers suffer from heat stroke each day. The weather was perfect this time around. 2007 was a scorcher and 2009 was wet. 2010 was mild.
So what did I enjoy? A lot of it. My favorite show is between Spoon and Vampire Weekend. I wish they weren’t right after each other, so I could’ve gotten closer to Vampire Weekend. Spoon surprised me. I saw them in 2007, and I didn’t really think they were that great. It probably didn’t help that I was exhausted. I remember taking a nap during their set. But this year, they played and everything connected.
Early on Friday, I saw the Mountain Goats. And it was such a brilliant moment. I was sitting under a tree, drinking a Bud, the breeze was blowing, and there was hardly anyone in Zilker Park. I wanted that moment to last forever.
On Saturday, my favorite show was LCD Soundsystem. It was also this person’s favorite show as well.
I also saw Muse on Saturday. They were good, but not great. I was led to believe they used lasers in exciting ways, but it was just normal lasers. Nothing mind blowing. I mean lasers, c’mon. Would have I enjoyed M.I.A. more? I dunno. Maybe the crowd would’ve been nicer at M.I.A. The crowd at Muse were dicks.
The National was the last show on Sunday I saw, and what a show to end on. I’ve liked The National for a while now and thought they were alright, but wouldn’t say I loved them. But that changed after I saw them perform. They were amazing. They should’ve ended ACL, instead of The Eagles.
I finally saw The Flaming Lips on Sunday as well. I’ve been wanting to see them for a long time, just to experience the zaniness and confetti of Wayne Coyne. And it was more spectacle than concert. I only knew 2 songs, ‘She Don’t Use Jelly’ and ‘Do You Realize?’ out of their set. But, I was glad I saw them. You know, checkbox checked.
I missed a few bands I wanted to see, but that’s always the case. If you try to do everything, you end up tired, rushing from one stage to the next, not getting a chance to enjoy yourself. Also, The Verve Pipe didn’t play ‘The Freshman’ which was supremely lame. Yes, I understand they were there for ‘Austin Kiddie Limits’, but c’mon.
Also on this trip, I finally went to The Salt Lick. This is a place I’ve been meaning to check out for what seemed like years. It was looking like I’ll never go, cause each trip to Austin, something would always come up. So the anticipation was building. Could it live up to it? No, it couldn’t. It was okay. I had ribs for the first time, like an American. That was probably the best thing – the experience of eating ribs.
Really, the food highlight of this trip was stopping by Spicy Pickle on the walk back from Zilker Park. There I had a pizza that was so amazing. It ranks with the first time I had the BBQ Chicken Pizza at Macaroni Grill. If you know me, you know that’s special. I could be greatly exaggerating the greatness of this pizza, considering it was at the end of the night and I was tired and hungry. But still, this pizza satisfied me. And that counts a lot.
So if not ACL in 2011, what then? Well, I’m thinking about Sasquatch.
I finally finished Microserfs. It’s been on my “To Read” list for years. It’s a terribly sad book. But then I found this after the last page, and it made me happy.
And on the back of that receipt, Jessica’s phone number
I love finding little pieces of history like this.
This weekend was QuakeCon. I usually go every year to get free stuff. Never to play in the BYOC (Bring Your Own Computer) LAN. But this year, I decided to give it a go. I have a laptop that can play TF2 and Starcraft 2. I’m tooled up and ready to play.
But if only QuakeCon was tooled up and ready to play.
I was planning to go Thursday – Saturday. Thursday was going to be my Carmack keynote and get free stuff day. Friday and Saturday were going to be for LAN.
On Thursday, things started off poorly. I missed Carmack’s videogame keynote, because I was in line to get my stuff checked in. But I was able to catch his rocket keynote. John Carmack and Richard Garriott talking about rockets for 2.5 hours. It was fascinating. This year, the free swag wasn’t overflowing. Compared to ComicCon, QuakeCon was a barren wasteland. There was some cool stuff, but only in very limited quantities. Nvidia were giving away a snuggie that I really wanted, but failed to grab. In the end, I got nothing. Kian got a free hat. I had also previewed the LAN and found out that there was no internet connection. This was going to be a problem. But the staff did say that they were working on it. And after all, it was the first day. On Friday it should be fixed.
On Friday, it wasn’t fixed. But luckily, I had made sure offline mode in Steam was working before I left the house. I have all my games on Steam. Steam is wonderful. But if you can’t login or get into offline mode, you can’t play anything. But during the course of events, I messed up my offline mode in Windows. So I had to switch over to MacOS Steam. Where really the only games I can play are Altitude and Civ IV. TF2, DOD, CS are all too slow on MacOS. And did I mention that the BYOC was packed? I had trouble finding a seat. In fact, I had inadvertently stolen a guy’s spot. But, he didn’t mark it, so it was his own fault. I offered to give it back, but he was nice enough to acknowledge that I got his spot fairly. My first BYOC was not going well.
On Saturday, I didn’t bother going. The network problems and the crowding were the big issues. Long and Surren were planning to go as well. And if we couldn’t sit together, it would be kind of pointless. So instead, Long came over, and we played Starcraft 2. Long will tell you he’s no good. But that’s the Long Con.
So what did I learn from this QuakeCon?
Not having a LAN mode in your game is frustrating. Depending on an internet connection to authenticate is a nice way to deter piracy, but it really sucks when you’re in a LAN and have no internet access.
Those 4G Hotspots are pretty awesome. They were the only way you could get a reliable internet connection.
Starcraft 2 came out last week on both the Mac and Windows simultaneously. Great news! (If you don’t know, I hate rebooting into Windows for the games I barely play.)
Aside from the performance disparity between platforms, Blizzard needs to polish off the rough edges on the MacOS version.
If you got the game from Battle.net, you’ll have found that the Installer for Mac doesn’t work, unless you chmod a few files. That is pretty sloppy. And I didn’t find the solution to why I couldn’t get the installer working on the known issues list, a giant oversight.
Also, they didn’t include proper strings for their Updater program
And the window controls on the launcher is kind of a joke. (The little chiclets on the middle top left of the window)
But the good news is that they’re using Growl. Steam doesn’t use Growl. Instead it’s some terrible Growl-like notification system.
Earlier this week, I needed to make an animated gif. Needed. If you have ImageReady, it is pretty easy to do. But what do you do if you don’t have ImageReady?
This last week I was out in Sunny California for Comic-Con 2010. I created 2 playlists. One sort of about California and a more general road trip mix.
The first playlist, I put some thought in to it. I imagined I was a guest on Adam Buxton’s Big Mixtape and I would have to talk about/justify my tracks. For the second playlist, I just threw some stuff together out of the cast offs from the first playlist and stuff that would be fun to listen to while driving.
