Save Your Money, Don't Go to the Show

I spent the weekend down in Milwaukee for Summerfest. The trip was a lot of fun, although the fest itself was somewhat of a disappointment. I planned to go Thursday through Saturday to see Rise Against, The Offspring, and Barenaked Ladies, but ended up only going on Thursday for Rise Against. The festgrounds are huge, but at least there are a lot of places to get food and water unlike some other fests I've been to. And every year Summerfest boasts an impressive line-up--but that's where the positives stop.

As a venue, Summerfest is the worst I've ever been to. Several stages had benches all the way up to the front of the stage, and everyone stood up on those benches during the shows. This meant that the only people who had any chance to even see the stage where those standing. It also meant fewer people who could fit into the same sized space. Most importantly, it meant that there was no moshing or dancing of any kind. Just half-assed hops on the benches, which were claimed early on so the only people who could watch the bands where those who'd been guarding them the past six hours. To quote Rise Against's lead singer Tim McIlrath, nobody should have to spend a Rancid show on fucking benches. And the same goes for openers Riverboat Gamblers and Rise Against themselves. These are not sit-down bands. These are get sweaty bands.

But if anything, the show at least increased my respect for Rise Against. They put on an amazing show despite the venue, and McIlrath denounced the benches and the changing, corporate-sponsored face of Summerfest from the "Harley-Davidson Roadhouse" stage. (I'm probably misquoting here) "This isn't about motorcycles, or beer companies, or the fucking military recruitment booth that's trying to send you off to war. This is about music." If only it were true--maybe if I'd been a hardcore enough fan to spend the whole night staking out a place on the benches, I wouldn't have felt this way, but I could never find a place in the crowd where I felt like I was experiencing the concert. And that's not how a person should feel watching their favorite band.

I ended up bailing out of the crowd altogether and sat back with Melissa and Sarah, watching it all on the large screen. Like I said, they put on a great show nonetheless, but the Summerfest experience left me feeling empty. If I'm going to end up watching the performance on a screen, there's no point in paying $15 to park and $10 on food and drinks at Summerfest when I could just as well stay home and do the same more comfortably. It simply wasn't worth our time to go back.

That being said, the highlight of the day ended up coming after Summerfest. Sarah took us to the Safehouse, a spy-themed Milwaukee bar that wins the "coolest place ever" award. We didn't know the password, so we had to prove our secret agent status to get in--but I won't say anything more about that. It's something that needs to be experienced (like a great concert). We explored the bar (it's surprisngly large) and even found a secret exit (not to mention the best vodka lemonade I've ever had). If you ever find yourself in Milwaukee in the summer, skip Summerfest, but don't even think about skipping the Safehouse.

We spent most of the rest of our time in Milwaukee just enjoying the fact that we didn't have anywhere to be--we watched the first 5 or 6 episodes of Dexter and still haven't decided what we think of the show (but we can't stop watching). We tried to stop at a cafe just down the block from Sarah's apartment, but they were just closing as we got there. All in all, Milwaukee was a good time--just not for the reasons I'd expected it would be.

Confession Time:

I haven’t been reading like I said I would.  I did finally read An Abundance of Katherines, which was a fantastic read.  It’s one of those books marketed as “young adult” that actually is enjoyable for everyone (although it seems a lot of those books have that ability).  But I’ve been pretty lazy in the reading department otherwise—I never finished Mindfulness (I like it, but nonfiction is always harder for me to finish for some reason).  I am about halfway through The Dharma Bums, which to be very general is a book about hippies.  This is the next book I need to finish, although I picked up a book at a used book sale a few weeks ago called The Well of Lost Plots that derailed me for a bit.

The Well of Lost Plots takes place in a world where an FBI-like agency exists to patrol fiction to prevent characters from escaping their books.  The Well of Lost Plots is where unpublished fiction goes to die—some of it is high-quality stuff that was just never read, but most of it is poorly written drivel.  The main character is hiding out in the Well and on a day-to-day basis has to deal with incomplete settings, flat characters, and world-destroying grammivores.  It’s essentially a book written for English majors or grammar nerds and some of the gags and references are downright brilliant.  It’s actually the third in a series, and I managed to find the first, The Eyre Affair, on BookMooch so I’ll start at the beginning of the series.  AFTER I finish The Dharma Bums. 

So I’m not doing so hot on the reading side.  As far as writing goes, though, I’m doing pretty well (for me).  Despite some setbacks, I’m still updating By Riverside weekly at the very least, and now that the summer’s beginning to fall into a rhythm I’m making time for some other projects I’ve been putting off.

Musically, nothing much to report.  I haven’t had a chance to hang out with John since last week, so it’s hard to say if anything will come of it.  But I am working on becoming a better guitarist and actually learning entire songs instead of introductions, and getting rid of my performance anxiety.  Also, I should pull my sax out and play it one of these days.  It’s been over a year, which is longer than I’ve gone without playing it since fourth grade.  Crazy.

Catching Up

Alright. So here's where we're at.

This summer, I'm doing an independent project that will go towards my English major called By Riverside. I'm going to be heading down to Riverside Park 2-3 times a week and interviewing people to get a feel for the community and share stories that may otherwise never be told. The profiles will be posted blog-style at By Riverside, and it'll even be updated regularly, unlike this personal blog. This is the biggest project I've ever taken on, and so far everyone's been extremely supportive. If you haven't checked the site out yet, please do--although, if you're not from the area, it won't really have much significance to you. My hope is that by the end of the summer I can build up some sort of readership--I've got a handful so far, and I'm hoping the group will expand.

I had the idea last summer, actually, and toyed with it all winter long before realizing that I could probably use it for college credit (it's officially listed on my transcript as "New Media Production"), but that's only extra incentive--I wanted to do the blog anyway, and this ensures that I'll actually stick to a posting schedule. So check out the site and let me know what you think.

In addition to that, I'm also starting some kind of musical project with my friend John, so that should be fun. Between that, the site, and working 40 hours a week, so far my summer has been busier than my semester. Which is kind of strange for me. And there's also that whole wedding planning thing.

On top of it all, I finally gave up laptops and built myself a desktop a couple weeks ago, and promptly got addicted to Mass Effect. Plus I still have this blog to deal with, and I was hoping to get some fiction done this summer as well. September's coming too quickly.

I accidentally broke my blog last week. Sorry about that, blog.

Crazy update coming later this week.

Required Reading

I love Bookmooch.  Give old books.  Get new books.  Keep the post office busy.  Everybody wins!

Except that
a) I am very bad at remembering to send out books and
b) I am very bad at reading the books that I get.

The front page of I Should Be Writing has a list of links on the side called "What I've Read in '09" and I believe in a podcast earlier in the year she mentioned that the point of the list was to keep her honest and keep her reading.  I think it's a great plan, because currently there are 33 books I've read and 34 that I have not, excluding reference-style books.  So I've read almost exactly half of them.

But thanks to BookMooch the half that I have not read is a continually growing stack, and I read (off-line) less and less these days, which is something I should really be mending.  It's already halfway through the third month of 2009, and I'm only halfway through my second book of the year.

The first of the year was Chuck Klosterman's Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, a novel--well, more like a collection of essays--viewing the world through pop-culture-colored lenses.  Oddly I can't blame BookMooch on this one.  A friend accidentally bought two copies (I am not sure how this happens) and gave me the extra, figuring (correctly) that I'd like it.

The second that I am just over 50% through is Ellen J. Langer's Mindfulness which is actually a psychology book about how mindlessness turns otherwise smart, reasonable people into complete idiots.  Some of the details of the individual experiments get a little dry, but otherwise it's a very interesting read.  This was actually in the free books section of the English department...a bookshelf which is slowly fighting BookMooch as a source of free books I haven't read.

I rarely read non-fiction.  It's kind of weird that it's all I've read book-wise so far this year, but that'll be changing soon, since the next book will be An Abundance of Katherines which Melissa is making me read because it needs to go back to textbook rental by the end of the semester.  Sigh.  Always with the deadlines.

The Planning Stage

Originally, I had planned on writing this entry from the Cellar, so that I could comment on how once-upon-a-time I frequently (okay, occasionally) posted from there but according to my archives, the last time I did was December of 2007.  But the wireless internet there hated me, so instead, I'm coming to you live from an empty auditorium where I'll be taking an exam in about an hour.

Things are changing.  In just over a year, I'll be married.  Yesterday I reconnected with a friend who bought a house a year ago.  My primary mode of communication with many of my friends is Facebook.

I'm still in school.  That doesn't seem like it'll ever be changing.

This summer I'll be starting up another writing project.  But this too, will be different.  Mostly because I'll be going through with it (and this will largely be due to the fact that I will be doing it for class credits as an independent project).  I'm not going to go over the details here, but it'll essentially be a human interest column that I'll be writing, editing, and publishing online.  Most importantly of all, it'll be a nice test to see if I really could be cut out for the writerly life.

I have two smaller projects that I hope to finish by the time summer hits--nothing quite so far-reaching as my silly idea to write a novel last summer.  The first is the War on Procrastination saga I've been putting up on Facebook; I try to update it at least every two weeks, and another one will be going up tonight or tomorrow.  The second is a short story that I would like to finish and submit to a podcast.  At this point with my writing, I'm more concerned with getting my writing to a level that it could be published (in some form) than getting payment for it.  If I'm lucky, that part will come later. 

In closing, blah blah changing blah blah write more blah blah more posting blah blah blah.

Windows 7 – First Impressions

I know I said this was going to stop being sort of like a tech blog, but the release of the Windows 7 beta happened to coincide with my return to the blogosphere, so I’m writing about it.  If you do not care about computers, you may want to just stop reading and come back later this week when I complain some more; those are the posts you’re more used to.

Anyway, a few months ago I bought a Toshiba Portege M200 tablet for a pretty good deal on eBay.  My reasoning: netbooks (cheap, low-powered notebooks) are popular and I sort of want one, but it’s cheaper just to get an old laptop that ends up having about the same specs.  Plus, I wanted a tablet PC for editing purposes—the next best thing to writing on paper, without a tablet, is the “comment” feature in Word, and it’s clunky at best.  This way I can do actual pen editing without wasting all the paper.  And the price was fantastic, since even old tablets still fetch a decent price most of the time.

Originally, I had intended on giving Linux another try, since it has a pretty good reputation for doing well on older hardware.  I put Ubuntu (and OpenSUSE, and Fedora) on it, and always ran into a problem with the video drivers—the nVidia Linux drivers have terrible support, and screen rotation (a really, really useful feature in a tablet) ends up eating all the system memory and making it completely unusable.

So I figured I’d try the Windows 7 beta.  This particular tablet runs on a 1.5ghz Centrino processor with 1 GB of RAM and a 20GB 4200 RPM hard disk.  It’s designed for XP, and while it can run Vista, you’d pretty much want to shoot yourself if you had to use Vista on it for more than a few minutes.  In other words, it’s the perfect PC to see if Windows 7 really lives up to the hype.

Here’s the surprising thing—it does.

The installation didn’t take long at all (less than half the time of Vista) and startup was snappy—less so after installing the software I wanted, but still very reasonable considering the hardware.  Shutting down—which occasionally takes ages on my Vista laptop—is also very quick.

I had some trouble getting things up and running, since 7 is based off the Vista architecture and Toshiba never actually released Vista drivers for the M200 [in America].  With a little digging, I finally managed to find a video driver that didn’t crash when running any kind of acceleration (like Solitaire.  Yes, Solitaire.) and while it’s no powerhouse, it’s great for typical netbook tasks and it runs Crayon Physics decently enough.  And the tablet features are very well supported in 7.

I thought the new (more dock-like) taskbar would take some getting used to, but surprisingly, it didn’t take me long to adjust, though having a “show desktop” feature in the bottom right rather than left is still a little off for me.

So far, Windows 7 seems pretty compatible—it had some issues with XP drivers (it took a lot of digging to find a wireless driver) but other than that, it seems to have handled everything I’ve thrown at it, which so far has been Opera, Thunderbird, Office XP, OpenOffice, Trillian, Windows Live Writer, and the Crayon Physics demo.  It’s a beta build, but it’s already more stable than Vista, and I could easily use this as my primary computer.

There’s still just one problem.  Windows Journal, the built-in program that allows you to annotate files, crashes whenever I try to import a file.  In other words, the one thing I still can’t do with my tablet is edit things, which was sort of the point.  Lovely.

Where Tech Meets Take Your Own Advice

Author/podcaster extraordinaire Mur Lafferty just posted a video podcast about the tools every writer should have, and one of the things she mentioned was an external backup drive.  A flash drive, external hard drive, Google Docs--it's not important what you use, so long as you're backing up everything.  Most writers know this, and all techies know it.  But here's the dirty little secret:

Most of us don't do it.

It's simple.  It doesn't take long.  But we don't do it.

And now the obligatory horror story:  It's the Fall 2007 semester.  Midterm week.  I'm almost finished with my final projects.  My hard drive has been flaky for about a week, but I keep putting off backing it up until after midterms when I have more time.  I'm in the middle of copying the files onto a flash drive so I can print them off in a computer lab, and that's when the computer blue screens and dies.  Shit.

Figuring that not all is lost, I buy an adapter and hook it up to Melissa's computer.  The hard drive is detected!  Fantastic.  Maybe it'll be okay.

File type: RAW.  As far as Windows is concerned, this means: "oh man, there sure are a lot of ones and zeroes on this thing.  But what does it all mean?"  In other words, all is lost.

Luckily, I was saved by a small miracle--the drive was partitioned, and all my music was on the D: partition, which I was able to rescue through the magic of chkdsk.  I found a program called Zero Authority Recovery that claimed to be able to recover the gibberish in the other partition, and it was able to save only one folder--Documents and Settings.  It didn't get everything, but it got most of the important stuff.  I made it through the wreck with some minor cuts and bruises, but I was okay.

The experience was an awakening.  I have an external 80 gig drive that's just been sitting around, so I pledged to back up religiously when I got my new laptop.  Take a guess at how many times I've updated my backup since I got this one over a year ago.

That's right.  Not-a-once.  A mistake I plan to remedy.

And for the rest of you: if you haven't already started keeping a backup, start.  And if the words of Mur, myself, and the countless others who have suffered hard drive crashes (chances are, you know a few of them) fail to get through to you, you're a hopeless case.  Which is probably okay.  Hard drive crashes are pretty rare to begin with, and with storage tech getting more and more reliable (some flash drives are nigh indestructible) it's possible that you'll never deal with a crash that will destroy everything you've worked on.

If you're okay with the risk, fair enough.  But fellow writers--and especially fellow college students--I beg you.  Back up your files.

Because I won't feel sorry for you later if you lose everything.  And I won't fix your computer, either.

Slow Going

Alas, my glorious return to blogging has been interrupted largely by Final Fantasy XII, the first video game in quite some time to completely take over my life.  To tell the truth, I'm really only making this post to test out Windows Live Writer, some blogging software that came with Live Messenger but surprisingly has gotten some good press.  So far it looks decent--it was slow to load, but this was the first time I've used it, and it quickly and automatically detected all the settings to post to Blogger.

In writing news, I'm making an attempt at getting an honest-to-goodness writing group going, but like my writing itself, it's been slow going.  My hope was that I could get some people together and meet in person, as it would be a lot more motivating than a forum-style group on-line with no credibility, but it's beginning to look like it might not work out.   I have projects that need to be worked on regardless of whether or not I can get others involved, but I think it would have helped deal with the often anti-social nature of writing.

In other news, since switching my major to English at the start of my fourth year in college, I made the Dean's list for the first time.  I'd say that's a good sign.  Maybe I'll actually keep a major for a whole year!

Blagh.  Head spinny.  I'm coming off a major caffeine binge and my head isn't appreciating it.  Ability to be coherent failing.  Sentences getting shorter.  Must.  Get.  Caffeine...

Five Months Later...

It's hard to believe that it's been almost half a year since I posted here. I'd like to say there was a good reason for the absence--I'd like to blame a busy semester that included three English classes and thus, more than enough opportunities to write. I'd like to blame a desire to have a social life and spend more time hanging out with friends and fiance. I'd really, really like to blame dedication to more important creative projects--but so far the only thing to come out of that category can only be described as a Facebook-exlusive serial short story which is updated roughly twice a month.

But as I (recently, if you ignore the dates on the posts) pledged, I will not make excuses. Basically, I stopped posting because I stopped wanting to. Plain and simple.

But I don't plan on giving up the blog just yet. With the semester finally almost over, I really will have more free time, some of which will be going towards a writing group some friends and I are trying to start over the break. My hope is that the group moral will inspire all of us lazy writer-types to actually get some productive work done over the winter break--but even if that fails, I do want to finally start taking advantage of this blog as a writing outlet.

I mean, once I get a good posting rhythm going, every post can stop being about my whiny coming of age bullshit, right?

This post has been a long time coming, and probably shouldn't have been written at almost 4 in the morning. Alas; goodnight, internet.