I've been into Irish and Scottish music for years, ever since Jeff first gave me a copy of a Battlefield Band CD back in Clemson. The more I've gotten into Celtic music, the more I've wanted to play it, but you really need to have bagpipes, fiddles, and flutes to really make satisfying Celtic music. As a result, I've been wanting to learn to play one or more of the above instruments for a few years.

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Paul Van Dyk played here in Puerto Rico again last night, but this time I opted not to go. Several of our friends (Michelle, Isa) were going, so Andrés went as well, but I remembered my experience last time, where I found myself bored and wanting to go home from nearly the moment we arrived. With such loud music, it doesn't really matter how many friends you've got around you, because you can't talk with them — you're stuck with nothing to do but bob your head to the music for seven hours.

I knew I'd be bored at home too, so it wasn't a clear-cut decision, but in the end I opted for the choice that involved less effort and not spending $30. I didn't really regret it — I enjoy spending time by myself sometimes too, and when Andrés got home later that night he confirmed that there was a lot of just standing around.

I kind of felt bad that I had missed out on so much time hanging out with him on his last night here, but we did get to hang out for a bit after he got home around 4am. We prepared a feast (consisting of veggie burgers, veggie corn dogs, and veggie buffalo wings), watched Scrubs, played some more PS2, and then headed for bed around 630am. He had to get up again two hours later to pack and get ready to leave for the airport. I slept two hours longer than him, getting up just in time to ride to the airport with the family and see him off. Then, of course, it was back home for a few more hours of sleep.

Cat sent me her photos from the Christmas Party where Bryan, Matt, and I played guitar, so I thought I'd post them. She also shot a few short videos, so I put two of those online as well:

• Angels We Have Heard On High (4.3mb X-Vid video)
• Jaeden's Proto-Headbangs (2.4mb X-Vid video)

The people's talking kind of drowns it out, but you can still make out the music. Also, Jaeden is being brought up to be awesome.

Today the organization that Cat works for held a small party at a local church, and she asked Bryan and I to play music while the guests were arriving. Bryan enlisted his far more talented friend, Matt (err, no, wait, this is the picture I meant to link to) to play with us. Matt is about to graduate with a Music degree, so his skills added a lot to the ensemble.

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Speaking of Steve Vai (kind of), one song of his that I've always loved is The Audience Is Listening (7.6 MB MP3). It's such a fun song, and I think non-musicians can appreciate it too. Fun trivia fact: He tracked down his real eighth grade teacher to play the part in the song.

It's a really fun song to play along with on guitar too. I've always enjoyed sitting down with the CD and trying to keep up with him, but there's parts I always have to skip (like that fast syncopated clean part right at the beginning, and, oh, pretty much any part where there is guitar). As part of my little rediscovery of the instrument, I decided to learn the whole song. A bit ambitious, of course, but it's the same way I've gone about re-learning piano — I'd pick songs that were beyond my level (To Zanarkand, various Tori Amos songs) and just attack them slowly until I can play them. The results are usually not what I'd call "successful" — I don't think I've actually managed to learn the entirety of any of those songs — but I think it definitely does help somewhat, so it's worth trying.

In anticipation of living near Bryan and finally having someone to play music regularly with again, I pulled out and tuned up my electric guitar yesterday. I think it's been at least a year since I last played electric, and I had forgotten how enjoyable it is. I've lost the calluses on my fingers, so I was in pain after just a few minutes, but it was still enjoyable to play through some of the old songs I used to enjoy playing like Rush's YYZ and Dream Theater's Ytsejam.

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I picked up the Evo from the body shop a week after dropping it off. They did a good job. It's so nice to have the car whole again.

Amy graduated last week, so on Monday night she and Andrés planned to fly down to PR for a two-week visit before going up to Boston to find a place to live. However, their flight out of Chicago was cancelled due to bad weather, and the next flight didn't leave until the next morning, so they had to spend the night there. And apparently, the airline won't give you a hotel room for the night if the flight was cancelled due to weather, so they had to find and pay for one themselves. Fair or unfair? (All) Unfair!

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On Thursday, when I got out of work, Michelle came by to watch Wednesday's episode of Lost (I discovered that apparently I've missed several episodes — how did that happen?!). After the show was over, we hung out and jammed for a bit (I keep forgetting she plays drums). It was fun getting to play music with someone else. It reminded me of how nice it is to have someone with similar interests to spend time with. I get so used to living my life with minimal human contact, and it doesn't really feel too unpleasant after a while, but then I get to hang out with someone I like and I'm reminded of how much better life can be.

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Around the time I was finishing high school and starting college, I was getting to know a friend of Scott's named Kyle. He was a really creative guy — at the time, he was making awesome film score-like music he called Crashterpiece Theater. Sometime around my first year of college, we fell out of touch. He was on my buddy list the whole time, but for some reason we just never spoke.

Last week I noticed his away message contained a link to a little mini-game (more of a toy, really) he'd written called Big Vine. I tried it out and really liked it — very Tim Burton-esque. I messaged him to say so, and as we talked, I learned that he's now a game developer working at Maxis/EA Games — he worked on The Sims. I checked out his website and discovered that he's got all kinds of interesting projects under his belt. Unsurprising, really — it seems like a natural progression from the talented Kyle I knew back in high school.

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I was going through all my old camcorder tapes today, trying to locate the video of my brother and I almost getting hit by a plane at St. Barths. I didn't find it, but I did encounter a bunch of fun videos I had forgotten. In lieu of the propeller death video, I figured I'd put these up instead. Odds are they won't be amusing to people who weren't actually there at the time, but I figure that's probably most of you anyway.

My Xvid encoder was being obstinate, and would sometimes refuse to encode a video with anything other than the absolute lowest audio quality setting. Ah well, they're not too bad, and it's only one or two of them.

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It amazes me that the White Stripes are so popular. Jack White's lyrics are interesting and his voice is kind of cool, but Meg White is terrible at the drums. She sounds like your average ninth grader playing Eye Of The Tiger in band class, and yet she's in a famous band playing sold-out arenas to worldwide acclaim. When you've only got two instruments in the band, I'd think it'd be even less acceptable to have one of them suck a lot. Apparently not, though. Weird. That's good news for all the aspiring ninth-graders who just got their first drumset though — you've already got all the qualifications necessary to be a rock star. Now you just need to find a quirky guy in weird clothes, marry him, and claim to be brother and sister. Cover of Rolling Stone, here you come!

Ever since I first got into Dream Theater back in 1992, I've longed for them to play a concert in Puerto Rico. I remember writing a letter to the band when I was 14 begging them to come down. Finally last night they granted my wish. I guess maybe my letter fell victim to Puerto Rico's notoriosly slow postal service.

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When I was a kid I used to watch Chip 'n' Dale, Rescue Rangers religiously. It was on at 5pm, and I was mad when the bus ride home from school took too long and I didn't make it back in time to watch the show.

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Cat sent me her pictures from the trip to New Orleans two weeks ago, so this seems like a good time to finally write about it.

I arrived on Friday evening, and, after some brief discussions of geography, we immediately set to drinking.

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I've gotten really into the abominably-named Frou Frou, which I discovered on the Garden State soundtrack. I was interested in hearing more of their music, and it was suggested to me that I check out the solo albums put out by the singer, Imogen Heap. Now that's a name I can feel good about telling people I listen to.

So I found the album on Amazon and got ready to order, only to realize that the CD is copy protected.

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Dublin was fun, though not as enjoyable for me as the countryside. The high point for me, of course, was the Guinness Storehouse. But that came last.

We got up this morning at 7am (OK, it became more like 8:15am) to eat a quick breakfast and catch the "hop-on, hop-off" tour bus that stopped at our hotel at 9. We got off at the first stop, near the General Post Office where the IRA siezed the building in 1916 and declared independence from Ireland (and were subsequently shelled into submission). It also happened to be the location of the 400' Metal Spike Of Annihilation, to my glee.

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Yesterday Andrés got up and went to class while I worked on processing the pictures from the roadtrip on Sunday. At 3pm he had a one-hour break between classes, so I headed out to meet him at a park on campus. We had some coffee and I went with him to his Scottish Ethnology lecture, where they had a guest speaker giving a demonstration of Appalachian folk songs, showing how they had evolved from European folk songs as they were carried across the sea by immigrants. She accompanied her songs with a dulcimer, which sounded incredible. The sound was reminiscent of one I've enjoyed in some of Joe Satriani's songs, and I always wondered how he got his guitar to sound so soft and melodic. I know he experiments with different instruments, and has a banjo/guitar hybrid, so it wouldn't surprise me if he used a dulcimer or similar instrument on those songs.

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When I went to Charleston a few weeks ago to visit Jessie, I met a friend of hers who offered to send me a copy of his band's CD. I said sure and, true to my heritage, promptly forgot all about it.

I was quite surprised, then, to receive a semi-anonymous packag in the mail yesterday.

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Yesterday was an odd mix of crap and awesome.

A few days ago the air conditioner for the entire back half of the house broke. Which is particularly inconvenient since the entire front half of the house is currently unlivable. So there's currently no habitable place in the house that has air conditioning, and sleeping with no air conditioning in Puerto Rico is not pleasant. It's the fitful, sweaty sleep that makes you mad.

Yesterday morning I got home from work and was watching stuff on Tivo when suddenly around noon I remembered that the Béla Fleck, Jean-Luc Ponty, and Stanley Clarke concert I had paid $70 for was that night at 8pm. That meant I had about six hours to get some sleep before the concert (and after the concert I'd have to go straight to work, so that was all the sleep I was getting for the day).

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Today I stopped by Borders to pick up the new Death Cab For Cutie CD and came out with five CDs and a book. Among them is the soundtrack for Battlestar Galactica season one. With this act, it is clear that my nerdliness has apparently spread throughout the brain and is now unresectable.

The Battlestar soundtrack is so good though! It's somewhat reminiscent of Gladiator's, except without the full orchestra. And anyone who can tell me with a straight face that the Gladiator soundtrack is not incredible deserves both my admiration and my pity for their ability to cling to their misguided position in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

While doing an unrelated Google search, I came across this article about the way McDonald's is paying hip-hop artists to mention the Big Mac in their songs. The article mentions that the strategy was used earlier by Seagram's Gin, who got Petey Pablo to mention it in their song, "Freek-a-leek" (I am impressed with the thoughtful and poetic way they managed to work it into the song: "Now I got to give a shout out to Seagram's Gin/Cause I'm drinkin' it and they payin' me for it"). How can any artist retain their credibility with such overt marketing in their songs? I realize modern hip-hop tends to focus on commercial success, but in the world of rock, the artists live with the constant spectre of being branded a "sellout" looming over their heads. Changing their musical style slightly can often be enough to release the hounds. The hip-hop scene must be an alien world indeed if rappers can be as overtly commercial as that without losing their fanbase (Freek-a-leek reached #2 on the Billboard hip-hop chart, which I would not consider a scathing rejection).

The weekend with Courtney was great. Although I only took two days off (Friday and Monday nights), it felt like a more substantial vacation. The weather was uncooperative though, so I didn't get to show her many of the cool things available here.

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When Andrés got down here last Monday, he finally convinced me to start running, and we've gone running around the neighborhood nearly every day since he arrived. There is a one-mile-long loop around my block, so for now we've just been doing one lap of that each day. I'm already noticing a difference; the first day, I ended up walking most of the way, and it took us something like 15-20 minutes to make it around the block. Yesterday, we jogged nearly all of it, stopping only twice to walk and catch our breaths, and it only took about 9 minutes. It's a challenge to overcome my aversion every day and force myself to go running, but it feels good later to know that you've done something worthwhile, and it's satisfying to see the improvement in ability. It has helped a lot to have Andrés pushing me each day when I resist, and by now I think I've got the momentum required, so it should be no problem to keep it up once he leaves on Friday. Perhaps I should wire something up so that you can give me an electric shock by clicking a button on my website, so people can punish me if I start to slack off in the future :)

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I really need to pick up this book. Based on the excerpts on that page, it seems like the book speaks precisely about the hangups I've been having lately with wanting to produce music or photography but feeling like I just can't.

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Man, I've been getting behind in documenting my life. Spending too much time living it. OK, so Liz came to visit a few weeks ago, and it was an awesome week. Andres, Liz and I went to El Yunque and hiked down to the waterfall, although Liz didn't dare to jump down the first waterfall. Ah well, it was really scary my first time as well. On the way down, we stopped and ate awesome Puerto Rican food as is tradition, and then, exhausted and sated, drove down the mountain with the windows down and Sigur Rós enveloping us.

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It's wonderful to lose yourself in Sigur Rós as the convoluted mountain road of El Yunque unwinds itself under your tires.

As I've become wiser to the ways of the world, the two puzzling sections of one of my favorite songs finally fell into place.

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Weird Al is a musical genius. I know he's mostly known for his parodies, but if you listen to some of his originals, like ‘The Night Santa Went Crazy,’ ‘Since You've Been Gone,’ ‘You Don't Love Me Anymore,’ or his magnum opus, ‘Albuquerque,’ you can't help but stand in awe of the man's masterful ability to craft a song that makes you laugh while actually being very enjoyable musically.

I've always hated talking on the phone, mostly because telephonic conversation seems to consist mostly of accidentally talking over each other and having to stop and say "sorry, what?" To me this seems like a flaw inherent to the design of the telephone; you can't see the other person, so you have no indication when they are about to start talking. Online chatting lacks this feedback as well, but the software enforces serialization and cleanly puts the messages one after the other. Talking on the phone is sort of like chatting with a program that prints the messages as soon as you type them, even if the other person sent something at exactly the same time. That kind of conversation would have exactly the same problems. So with such a critical design flaw, I just don't understand how the telephone has gotten so popular. It seems like it should have been a flash in the pan invention that quickly fizzled, like the pogo ball.

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Hehe. I'm playing Rachel's — Systems/Layers at work. My coworker Fernando tried to be diplomatic: "It sounds like the soundtrack for a movie or something, how the mood changes gradually."

My boss was less so: "Bullshit! It sounds like the music my grandmother played when my grandfather died. I'll be right back, I'm going to go puke."

I read the other day about how Nine Inch Nails is giving away a multitrack audio file of their latest single online. It's in Apple GarageBand format, so anyone with a Mac can open it up and do whatever they want with it.

...Drag the file over to your hard disk and double click it. Hit the space bar. Listen. Change the tempo. Add new loops. Chop up the vocals. Turn me into a woman. Replay the guitar. Anything you'd like.

...I've now heard a country version of the track as well as an abstract Latin interpretation (thanks, Leo). There are some copyright issues involved, so read the notice that pops up. Giving this away is an experiment. I'm interested to see what comes of it, what issues are raised and what the results are.

--Trent Reznor

I think that's cool as hell, and I wish more bands would do that. Of course, with all the fear that record companies have these days about MP3s, I can imagine how they cringe at the thought of giving away a multitrack recording.

Some bands or albums are inextricably linked to places, and usually cars, in my memory. Bad Religion - Stranger Than Fiction is driving in the Bonneville with Andrés and Bryan. NOFX - Punk In Drublic is hanging out with Bryan and Andrés when we were living in Estancias (particularly, all of us harmonizing along with Linoleum in the Bonneville while leaving the neighborhood). Goldfinger is driving around in PR in the Camry when I was in high school (particularly, passing by that no-name pizza place on Esmeralda). Snake River Conspiracy is driving around in Clemson in the Camry (particularly, looking for parking in the Calhoun Courts parking lot). Hole is pulling into the CVS parking lot in Ohio with Cat. OSI is walking along the waterway between my host family's house and the subway station in Japan. Cafe Tacuba is riding the subway in Japan on my way to class. The Cranberries is driving to El Yunque in Papi's Lexus with Andrés, Meg, and Amy last Christmas. Godspeed, Rachel's, and Thornley all bring to mind working at Xapiens, but we'll have to let them settle a while to see if they will become distilled down to a singular image like the rest.

Am I the only one who has such specific memories associated with music?

There's some 14-year-old girl named Katie who lives in Pompano Beach, FL and really really wants to know what my favortie band is. And apparently she thinks my tastes change often, because she asks me again every few months. I'm seldom here, so often she just gets my away message, but this doesn't deter her. Really, her persistence is touching. I'm glad knowledge of my current musical taste is so desperately desired.

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In a fit of nostalgia, I was watching old home videos and rediscovered one Andrés and I recorded around 1997 of ourselves playing music. We were tasked with watching Natalia, who was about 2 years old at the time. So she was walking around the room, apparently diaperless, and occasionally yelling out her babytalk backup vocals. However, our playing was interrupted by this event (5mb Xvid video). Babies are so lovably not in control of their body parts.

Yeah, so she's going to hate me. We mentioned the existence of this video to her a few months ago on our trip to DisneyWorld, and her embarassment was obvious; she demanded I destroy the tape. I tried to console her by explaining that we all have our embarassing moments; Andy ate poop, for example. She was not mollified. Oh well, hopefully by the time she is old enough to use the internet, this will have been posted so long ago that I can say, "it was a different time then!" as I shakily fend off her attacks with my cane.

Today was fun. So many people remembered my birthday. Weird. I woke up to find like eight or nine IMs from people, and throughout the day Bryan, Meg, and Jenn called. Although I've always felt the whole "ackowledging a birthday" thing is a bit hackneyed and overrated, I have to admit it is nice when people remember of their own accord :)

I met up with Michelle and David, and we tried to go bowling but were deterred by traffic. We found ourselves near San Patricio, so we ducked out of the dilatory morass and decided to watch Million Dollar Baby. Great movie, but not an uplifting experience. So to lift our spirits, from there we returned to my house and ate delicious brownies that Natalia and Mami had made to serve as my birthday cake. Michelle went over to her boyfriend Billy's house to say hi, since it's nearby, and David and I played a little music.

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I'm going to try out reviving this old feature. Just an occasional sampling of songs I think are good, with links to MP3s for each.

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It seems that Brian "Head" Welch, former guitarist for KoRn, has found Christ, quit the band, and is now proselytizing quite fervently. He's got a new website, Head To Christ, and is planning on recording a new solo record and selling it directly from his website, then "[giving the money] back to my people by building something positive, like a skatepark or something." This seems to be big news because everyone finds the transformation so unexpected, but I really don't find it very shocking. I'm not really familiar with any of their newer stuff, but KoRn's older songs were not particularly outspoken against religion. The most common subject matter was pain and unhappiness. If anything, people going through what KoRn's songs describe are prime candidates for discovering religion and the relief and hope that it can provide. Of course, Jonathan Davis is the one that wrote most of their lyrics, so in fact KoRn's music doesn't even provide us that little insight into Brian's life, but the fact remains that KoRn doesn't seem like a particularly un-christian band. Now, if Kerry King of Slayer were to suddenly convert...