Musings and cars and errata

First of all, to continue the last post (which I seriously messed up the comments for... I haven't gotten the hang of comments yet) the more I hear the finished Smile, the more I like it. I REALLY can't wait for the official release in September! As a note: Brian Wilson's last release (released last month) was pretty good, but not great. Much of it is culled from earlier recordings rerecorded (maybe 4-5 new songs written for the album) and as a rule, I like the earlier versions of the songs. The songs rerecorded seem subdued compared to the original versions (example: Soul Searching and the title track Gettin' In Over My Head both have more "edge" in the original mid-90s recordings). Still, it's Brian Wilson, and it's him sounding much more like himself than he has in ages. Imagination, his previous solo album of original work had the Brian Wilson vocal sound finally restored, but had very very generic adult-pop/musak instrumentation that held back most of the songs. This album has real instruments, and at moments sounds like it's an actual Rock and Roll album... just not as often as one would hope. (and if those links do not work, I'm not surprised, the new AMG is not 100% there)

Second of all, I found out a way to avoid a midterm.. have one's car entirely fail on them on the way to school. In the process I also found out that driving on the 405 freeway is no more difficult when the engine is dead than under normal circumstances (certainly you go no faster with a working engine). Most likely it was a dead battery that caused my car to die 20 minutes after being jumped by the AAA, but it did lead to the 2nd time in my life I was on the 405 freeway noticing that the accelerator pedal was not working. (the first was at 5am driving home from Berkeley when my sleeping cousin accidentally shifted the car into neutral) In case you are wondering, no one was hurt, so maybe having my car die is a way to improve my so-called driving skills... Also, I will have to take the midterm tomorrow, so after this I have 3 semesters of Calculus I need to relearn along with all of the statistics & probability from this class I need to know... Though this is STILL easier than teaching. (yay for retirement!)

Third of all, I wasn't able to catch the actual speeches, but so far so good from what I can tell. We're growing some discipline. Now to program my computer to record the others nights worth, because this actually seems watchable. (and to find a CSPAN repeat of the speeches from today... would like to see Carter, Gore & Clinton completely and not the 5-second sound bites) Hopefully Kerry can live up to the build up. Now when will the Daily Show have new shows????

Now back to studying, doing paperwork, updating my resume, and working on my current project: fix my server (backing up all the data in the process) then getting a new 250 gig hard drive (#5) and putting together a nice 1 terabyte RAID-5 array for my closet server. Yay for Linux!

So in conclusion: Linux and retirement == good. Dead battery on the 405 == driving on the 405. DNC convention == suspiciously good. Smile > Brian Wilson's newer material. C > Java > C++ > Scheme >= coding by resoldering the circuit paths.