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2009:08:06:08:24. Thursday. LEAVING TOWN.
As of yesterday, we've left Madison and now live in Carbondale, IL. I updated my Where I've Lived on Facebook and everything, which makes it really official. I'm starting on the faculty at Southern Illinois University in a couple weeks and I think we're going to find it much harder to go to shows down here, so things with the blog and the podcast will probably be changing quite a bit. With any luck I'll be able to coax my friends from Madison, Milwaukee and Chicago down here to play once in a while, but that's just a possibility at this point. I have one more podcast episode to post, and we'll be posting updates somewhere about the work we do on the house we bought. Keep your eyes pealed for what's next.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2009:04:21:18:54. Tuesday. BLAH BLAH BLAH. Clearly, I'm going into blog quasi-hibernation. I'll be continuing to update the podcast (Death Cab clips coming soon!) but that's on and off as we've been going to fewer shows lately. And, I'll soon be unveiling a new blog where Emily and I will post about our new house. In the meantime I'll be rethinking (and renovating) this site and figuring out what I want to do with it once faculty life begins in the fall. Maybe a full service Carbondale music blog? We'll see. If nothing else, I'll get comments back up and running soon.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2009:01:16:19:07. Friday. MORE BLOG. My department has instituted a new blogging system on the revamped website, and since I've got nothing going on here I thought I'd start using it to do a bit of journalism and politics and education commentary. You can check it out here. I will plan to continue this once I'm settled at my new institution, hopefully on a platform that allows me to name it something other than "asveenstra's blog."
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2008:12:13:11:35. Saturday. DEEP THOUGHT. Journalism is listening. Rick Sanchez should shut up and go home. (Also, I have two job offers and will be posting about my future plans and what they might mean for this site soon.)
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2008:12:01:13:11. Monday. FAVORITES BLOGGING. With the podcast in a lull and needing an occasional distraction from job applications and interviewing, I've decided to jump from a recent discussion at the Isthmus forum and figure out what my favorite song is. Naturally, I'm doing so in a series of head-to-head competitions that I will blog about. You can follow it (and read the longer explanation) here.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2008:07:21:15:20. Monday. CONSTRUCTIVE SUMMER. We're going to Mexico for a week, leaving tonight immediately after what is sure to be an awesome show from the Hold Steady. I'll be posting some videos from it after we get back, along with hopefully getting TypeKey up and going fairly quickly. If we have Internet access while we're there I'll be putting some pictures up.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2008:07:13:13:25. Sunday. TO HELL WITH THIS. Comments are turned off for the time being because I'm getting destroyed by spam. Sometime in the near future I'll enable TypeKey logins, which should solve the problem.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2008:04:03:11:49. Thursday. POD PROBLEMS. In between the Gutter Twins show and last week's Heligoats show I upgraded to Leopard; now Final Cut insists on putting a thick black border around every video I export. Hopefully I'll get this figured out soon-ish -- I've got Heligoats clips, stuff from last night's Headlights/Evangelicals show, and two shows to go to tomorrow night.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2008:03:04:12:24. Tuesday. FREE. For the first couple years of the podcast, I got maybe three requests from publicity people to do this or that, and I think only one of them involved going to a live show. The others were essentially cold e-mail requests to review or talk about some record I'd never heard of, interview some band I'd never heard of, etc. This is not what I do, clearly; I post videos from live shows and, to a lesser extent, talk about local music. In addition to that, my interests fit into a pretty identifiable set of genres -- in other words, I am not interested in interviewing the Fresno bluegrass band that you represent. Somehow, these requests have suddenly spiked in the last few months. Perhaps somebody's compiled a new list of "music bloggers" to seek out and they've got me on it; whatever it is, most of the requests are the same old thing and I've ignored them. But I've also gotten some requests from people who seemed to have paid attention to my format and my interests, and those I've taken up. The upshot of this is that some bands are now keeping me up to date about their Madison-related tour plans, and others are sending me free stuff. Indeed, I got put on the list for the German Art Students/Wrong Ways show I'm posting about this week (thanks, Kirk!). I say all this by way of getting to Northern Room, a Milwaukee band who sent me a copy of their album, Last Embrace. First of all, it doesn't sound like Milwaukee. The scene there is kind of dirty and ramshackle, living in basements and divey venues like the Cactus Club; these guys are shiny, which might explain why they're on a Japanese label. This was the route taken by their fellow non-dirty Milwaukeeans in Maritime with their second record, so they're in good company to be sure. Nonetheless, the only simple way for Americans to get the album is to get it from the band themselves. It's got a strongly anthemic sound and it's worth checking out, or at least checking the band out live. They remind me more of Mute Math than anybody else, but there's also a clear mid-period Coldplay or Joshua Tree vibe in there. Opener "We're on Fire" and "Dutch Radio" probably embody this amalgamation most clearly, though the influences are clear throughout the tapestry of bright tones that makes up the album. It's not life-changing and I don't think I'd travel just to see them, but I'll probably give them a look the next time they play Madison. I think they could fit well here given the recent local development of bands like Paris, Texas and System and Station, and the tendency for the Madison scene to go for melodic pop. I'd love to see more Madison-Milwaukee crossover anyway, so hopefully they'll be stopping over soon.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2007:03:10:09:24. Saturday. DROUGHT. In the past week and a half I've had seven shows on my calendar and as of tonight I'll have skipped all seven (March is too busy!), so no new videos until after next week's OK Go show. Beyond that I won't be doing much of any updates until early April, when I plan to make the switch from Movable Type to Wordpress, and unveil a new site design.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2006:07:30:21:27. Sunday. SFO, THE TIME AND PRICE. We're heading to San Francisco tomorrow for this year's AEJMC convention and various other fun-related activities. The podcast will continue apace, however, with three clips from Margot & the Nuclear So and So's. I'll also try to post some pictures and videos during the trip -- we're seeing at least two shows, including Bloc Party, Broken Social Scene and Mew.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2006:06:26:21:23. Monday. MOVIN' ON UP. I just upgraded everything to Movable Type 3.2, so some things (particularly comments) may not work right just at the moment.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2006:06:22:10:26. Thursday. THE SWITCH. Our hosting service switch, which was supposed to take up to two days, took about four hours, which means I frontloaded this week's clips for nothing. So, rather than just let the site sit idle until Monday I figured I'd cover some well-worn ground and talk about my concurrent switch to Gmail. I haven't switched completely over -- I'm still using my same etchouse.com address -- but I am using the interface to coordinate all my accounts. Our new domain host has a nice e-mail administration interface, which makes it very easy to forward from one account to another, and I discovered that my wisc.edu account has the same thing if you look hard enough. I made the move primarily because it allows me to not have my old mail client, Entourage, running all the time on my underpowered laptop, and I'm already noticing the difference in performance in other applications. I also like having everything in one place and universally accessible. When I put the video clips together, for instance, I'm working on a desktop machine where I didn't previously have access to my mail, calendar or address book. Now I can get all that stuff from here, there or anywhere else. It's also amazing on blocking spam. I've had two slip through so far, whereas on a normal day it would've been about 50 or so before. There are some downsides, though. One is Google Calendar, which just kind of smells. It works much better under Firefox XP than it does under Safari (where it really doesn't work at all) but it's still pretty featureless compared to Entourage. The address book is similar -- other than name and e-mail address, all the rest of a person's contact info just goes into a plain textbox, rather than into individual database entries. This is the big UI problem with Google's "keep everything" philosophy. While the Google search engine is certainly fine-grained and powerful enough to easily find the things I'm looking for at any given time, that's no reason to supercede my existing skill in putting things where I know I'm going to want them to be later. For example, mail can be "archived" but there's no apparent way to create folders to store things in, or to sort by category. What you get is a big mess of mail with a few simple ways to separate it (inbox vs. archived, "starred" vs. "unstarred") and a big Google search box on top. I have no plans to switch back at this point, and I have the rest of the summer to get used to it before I have to deal with a lot of e-mail again, but I do hope they start to crank up the features a little bit and start thinking about getting it out of beta.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2005:09:08:14:55. Thursday. EVENTS. I've just added a list of upcoming events on interest in the Madison area (courtesy of Upcoming.org and Greg Knauss), which I hope will make those of you in crappier cities jealous. Also, it will help me remember what I need to get tickets for, etc.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2005:05:26:08:39. Thursday. MAKE IT THERE. We're leaving for New York tomorrow morning; if we can find Internet access there'll probably be pictures and stuff during the trip, otherwise not until next Wednesday.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2005:01:16:17:21. Sunday. YOU BUY IT! I've finally finished it and have it ready for you to view (and buy from): Go to www.etchouse.com/EKRA for the all new EMILY KIRCHER RECYCLING ARTIST site! Do it now! Right now!
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2005:01:14:21:23. Friday. HERE IT COMES. Emily's new site is launching this weekend. Get your credit cards ready!
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2004:12:27:11:35. Monday. ROAD TRIP. We're heading to Detroit for the rest of the year to watch hockey, drink and enjoy cheap Canadian entertainment. I don't know if there'll be any 'net access available, but if not I'll post up pictures when we get back, along with a series of 2004-in-review posts.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2004:12:05:17:35. Sunday. COMMENTS ARE BACK. I'm turning comments back on for new posts but probably won't go through the hassle of turning them back on for old ones. From now on, you'll have to type in a security code (that requires a human to read, not a spam script) to post any comments.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2004:12:02:22:11. Thursday. SHUT THE FUCK UP! I've turned off comments after 300 spam posts showed up today. If I can find a reasonable way to deal with this problem (possibly in Movable Type 3.0), they may get turned back on.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2004:11:10:23:43. Wednesday. PURCHASING POWER. Looking for terrific holiday gifts? Look no further! Now, at CafePress, clothing and merchandise bearing this image:
Get 'em before nine-hour voting lines become passé!
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2004:10:05:12:37. Tuesday. GRRRMDKELKJF:LRK!!!!!. My laptop's hard drive appears to have died, so everything's on hold for the moment. I don't know why it is that my computer equipment keeps dying, but I do know I'm a little worried about the old desktop machine's monitor at this point. I'll be trying a mysterious "tilt the computer to 30 degrees" method when I get home, otherwise all hope is lost.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2004:09:24:12:53. Friday. THE HARDEST PART. Still waiting on that replacement router; calling Belkin tonight to bitch them out. Will hopefully have pictures of Kerry rally up later. Trying to launch a side-project blog to discuss political communication research.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2004:08:15:19:09. Sunday. MOVE. Moving tomorrow. DSL down until Thursday. See you soon.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2004:05:18:15:34. Tuesday. MALFEASANCE. I've been having some server problems, which is why I wasn't able to discuss Colin Powell's attempt to flee the interview on Meet the Press, or any other salient issues over the past several days. Things will normalize soon.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra 2004:03:12:16:39. Friday. HELLO WORLD. So, what the hell is this, anyway? This is an experiment. I'm trying to meld the zine style of the old etchouse.com with some more traditional blogging elements. All the old stuff will still be around, but in new forms. Instead of a 1500-word Capital Ideas, for instance, you may get a series of short vignettes. You'll also get a lot more infofiltering action as I and others direct you to fun stuff elsewhere on the interweb. Plus, you get to play along, as I have acceded to the wiles of Movable Type, which means commenting is now available. Everybody wins! And as I continue to learn about MT, CSS and RSS, things can only get better!
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra |
