Goodrobot reports that The Blacks have reformed, and provides photographic evidence that Gina, Danny and not one but two Emanneggers (James on drums and Branko Ramone on fan driven water bottle) were on stage at taste of Randolph. The Blacks transcend their chosen genre, and be sure to catch them live, there is this whole synergistic interplay thingy going on, dontcha know.
Archive for June, 2006
Flock is the browser for blogers. It’s geared towards the mythical everyman. It’s open source, built out of Firefox, has a built in news/feedreader, bloging tool, social bookmark sharing support, photosharing support, photobloging support and is extendable with extensions already availible. It’s really simple, really easy, drag photos into it to upload them to Flickr or Photobucket, drag them into the blog editor to upload. It autodiscovers your blog settings. Everything is simple and smooth, has one of the best setup wizards I’ve seen to date, the level of integration between features, the online services and bloging software supported is amazing. And frustrating as all hell to a power user, frankly this early in the adoption curve only power-users are doing RSS, bloging photosharing and social bookmarking. Some of the gotchas are deal killers for me. You can only set one category for your post, you can’t edit previous posts-except to replace a previous post when you publish your new post. Likewise you can only assign one photo sharing service or one bookmark service. Firefox plugins don’t seem to work. One or two of the default settings are weird and insecure. It tries hard, it really is simple enough for the layperson to set up and use (but turn off history sharing). With a little bit of work it would be killer for the early adopter crowd as well.
Ok, I missed this, Vienna, an free open source news/feedreader for OS X. I’ve paired down and pruned all my RSS news subscriptions to the point that that I’m missing stuff. Vienna is spartan in features, very fast and under heavy development. The current version is 2.0.4, and they have a 2.1 beta out. In testing, it feels faster and more responsive then NetNewsWire Lite with the same amount of subscriptions using the same 3 pane view, but has no where near the amount of features of the full version of NNN. It does have a widescreen 3 pane view that NNN lacks, and does do smart folders, filtering and flaging of articles (all of which NNN Lite lacks). The 2.1 beta has a single pane with sidebar view that I prefer, similar to the “River of News” view which dave Winer champions. And it adds the Sparkle framework for automated updating of the app.
I’ll be honest, if I had the money I’d pay for for the full version of NetNewsWire. Despite it’s sluggish response, it’s integration with my social bookmarking service and offline storage works better with my weird never online workflow (one of these days I’ll finish writing up the workflow article). But for now i’m using the Vienna 2.1 beta, just for the responsiveness. Now if only they’d integrate with Cocoalicious.
If’n you really want your World Cup to runneth over, Check out Jamie Trecker’s blog over at the evil empires. Jamie is Fox’s senior soccer writer, has a column over on their soccer website but good luck finding it. Rather then trying to navigate the site, use this link for his articles.
That said, I will admit to having watched the Togo-Korea, Brasil-Croatia, France-Switzerland, Spain-Ukraine and Tunisia-Saudi games. I’m watching via Chicago’s Univision in spanish, which beats listening to most american sportscasters. American sportscasters don’t say anything loudly and do so in loud over emphasized midrangy voices, I don’t understand enough of what the Univision guys are saying but they sound like humans.
It saddens me that Vince Welnick committed suicide last week. While most of the obits go into length about his keyboard playing with the Grateful Dead, he first came to fame in The Tubes, the preeminent over the top theatrical/satirical/snarky almost but not quite the next big thing rock band. Their 70’s studio albums suffered from a production standpoint but their live performances were legendary. I consider their double live LP “What Do You Want From Live?” to be one of the greatest rock and roll albums of all time, Welnick usually buried in the mix really shines on it. It works on all levels, content, package and performance. They satirized and ridiculed everything, including themselves. One of the few bands to ever hire Captain Beefheart as a session man. In the 80’s they sacrificed some of their musicality for chart success, then imploded from internal pressures, although there is a reformed version of the band with some original members still troding the boards. I’ll be honest, most of the 80’s stuff didn’t move me, but get The live set, try and find the VHS tape of their first farewell show, if your a jam band fiend head over to Welnick’s site for live Missing Man Formation MP3s, finally, Dead Heads (shudder) should head over to Archive.org and download a Dead show from 90-95 (no, i’m not going to facilitate dead consumption by giving you a link). Or wait for The Tubes documentary to be released.
Mine host, the inestimable Ben has been having phone line trouble, hence DSL trouble, hence my website has been down. Not his fault, he’s been living with a temporary phone line since he moved in to the new place, and the wires got corroded.
It’s second Friday openings time! Be sure to take in all the exceptional art goodness on south Halsted and 18th street, especially 4Art (the group show featuring sculpture by Ned Broderick and maybe even Kenneth Morrison) and EXP for PPG member Michael Wasniowski’s photography.
Joe Camarillo, drummer for the Waco Brothers and the Hushdrops (among others) was involved in a car accident recently. On top of painful injuries that will take months to heal, Joe has no health insurance. Please come see this GREAT line up and help Joe pay his bills.
Monday, June 5th 7:00 PM $10
at the Hideout www.hideoutchicago.com
1354 W. Wabansia (one block east of Elston)
featuring
The Waco Brothers
Nora O’Connor
The KatJonBand
(Kat from the Ex with Jon Langford)
Two of Us (Beatles covers featuring John San Juan- Joe’s partner in the Hushdrops)
The fabulous, fabulous, fabulous
Scott Ligon (w/ Kelly Hogan)
Important!!! We have no idea who will play at what time, so come early if you don’t want to miss anything!
(yeah, well, i post ‘em when i get ‘em. sorry for the short notice.)
