Well, we saw The Lord of The Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, finally. I'm not gonna launch into some big-ass review, here. It's worth the hype, though.
I've decided to read The Silmarillion, again, since I uh.. didn't get entirely through it the first time. I am enjoying it tremendously this time. I think I was just far too distracted the first time.
In an earlier post I pasted a link to this horrendous article written by this woman, Ann Coulter.
Check it out. She got canned.
But I was reading some other articles by this woman. She can't be for real. The way her articles read, you'd think you were reading a Dave Barry piece, or The Onion, or something. Check out this quote, from this article:
"If this is a war against terrorism and not a Eurocentric war against Islam, the conclusion is ineluctable: We must attack France. What are they going to do? Fight us?"
I mean, come on. That's funny.How can this be real? Is she a genius of mega subtle facetiousness that is so well-played that its crept into mainstream journalism? Occam's razor, I know. But still.
Well, I decided to transition at least the "news" portion of my webpage to its new home here at http://chris.agenteight.com/
The rest will follow, once I figure out how I want to sortof merge them into one thing.
So, when you're at home, you have 60 gigs of MP3s, indexed by artist and album -- your entire CD collection, in fact.
But, when you're at work, all you've got is a few crappy CDs, and the mp3s of Michael Bolton your coworker keeps forcing on you.
You could set up a web browser and just stream your MP3s at their encoded bitrate, using something like andromeda, but you'll likely have an angry network admin asking you why you are using a 128 kbit stream 8 hours a day. They don't like that sort of thing.
So what do you do? Resort to listening to NPR, or random radio stations on shoutcast.com, or .. *gasp* WORKING?!? NEVER!
There is an answer!
First, you go to shoutcast.com and download the shoutcast server and plugin for winamp onto your PC at home. You get that all set up to stream your MP3s. Great! One problem -- short of VNCing into your computer, how do you control it?
Enter SnowCrash. The wonder-plugin. It lets you control winamp remotely from a web browser, using IP address authentication to determine if you can administrate it or just view.
Now you can listen to your shoutcast server, which streams your MP3s at a bitrate you choose (I usually use 56kbit, unless the network weather is shitty, in which case I usually go for 24kbit), and control what it's playing remotely from your machine at work, using snowcrash via the web.
Cool, huh?
You know, what irks me about every review I've read so far of this album is that it compares it to the likes of Three Feet High & Rising, or De La Soul is Dead, as if Stakes Is High never existed.
So, before I get into this new album, I'm gonna use this review to rant a little about Stakes Is High.
Stakes Is High seems to be largely ignored by critics, these days, and sometimes even by De La Soul fans. (www.allmusic.com gives it like a 2.5 out of 5 stars?!?) But I love it. It's the album that made me love hiphop again. And I know I'll probably catch a lot of flak for this one, but I think it was one of the more revolutionary albums of the decade. The year was '96, and in the face of a 2pac crazed generation, they picked up the fizzled-out remnants of the Tribe Called Quest-led movement we all knew and loved and took it a step further.. They made something a little more honest, serious, and composed.. A little more grown-up.
I loved it.
Anyways, that said, I don't know why people bother comparing this album to Three Feet High and Rising, because the real benchmark is Stakes Is High.
AOI: Bionix is the second installment of De La Soul's much-anticipated and perhaps overly-prolonged comeback. While I think the first installment, Mosaic Thump, was overproduced and underinspired, this album has a much more fun and enjoyable feel to it. It flows. It bodes well for the future of these hip-hop veterans.
It's hard for me to put my finger on what it is, but this record has a little more of the heart and soul that was in Stakes Is High, but seemed to be missing from the first AOI.
My favorite tracks are some of the first ones.. "Baby Phat" and "Simply" both have solid, fun grooves. They're definitely not shy about making dance-able tracks (a trend that Jungle Brothers have since practically made their MO). These songs make you wanna dance -- or if you're shy (or too cool), you wanna at least nod your head.
I'm not sure what to think of the "Peer Pressure" track (which features Cypress Hill's B-Real in a post-church weed-smoking peer pressure dialogue). At first listen it seems maybe a little trite, but De La is definitely known for occasionally throwing out there some pretty subtle (and some not so subtle) facetiousness. (see "Kicked Out of the House" on De La Soul Is Dead).
If De La Soul Is Dead was the record where they proved to the world that they were to be taken seriously, and Stakes Is High proved to the world that they were here to stay, then I'd say this record proves that they still know how to have fun.
Anyways, all in all, it's very listenable. Where I found myself getting rapidly tired of AOI: Mosaic Thump, I find myself putting this record on repeat.
While I don't think it's as jaw-droppingly lovable as Stakes Is High, it's indicative at least that these guys aren't stagnating, and are definitely maturing and evolving their sound.
I have been screwing around with this little console-mode web browser called w3m. It's pretty sweet. It renders frames, and does cookies, and all that stuff.
I am actually using it to update my blog right now. Pretty impressive, if you ask me.
It's been a while since I've updated.
A lot of stuff has happened in the past month. Both the transmission and clutch went, on my car, resulting in about $2300 worth of repairs, leaving me broker than an Enron-employee.
The REALLY fun part was when, after spending all that money on repairs, my shifter linkage (the cable the connects the shifter to the transmission, basically) broke off, leaving me stuck in 4th gear. When did this happen, you ask? Why, about 10 minutes outside of Louisville on the way to Nashville back from Pennsylvania. So, I managed to drive the car all the way back to Nashville in 4th gear without shredding up my clutch TOO much.
Of course, since it was stuck in 4th gear, I knew there was no way I'd get it out of my parking lot at my apartment complex if I left it there, so we dropped off our stuff at the apartment and then I drove it straight to the shop, thinking I'd leave it there overnight to get fixed in the morning.
Bad move. I should have known better. I did know better. But lack of sleep and a long-ass roadtrip can really affect your better judgement.
So, of course, in a cruel, final blow, my car was broken into over night. They busted out the rear window. As far as I can tell, all they did was rip off the cover of my center console, and steal: my leather gloves, and my CD changer. I loved those gloves. But, the CD changer was busted. The joke's on them.
Oh, yeah, they also stole my title, registration, and car manual. Why? I don't know. But it's a huge pain in my ass.
The moral of this story is: god hates me.
Cool Things