Big Wheel

Ah, but I'm still only 23. Seems like my weight hovers between 150 and 155 without exercising, ballooning to around 160 when my diet is shitty for long periods. I bet if I went to the gym every day I would drop to about 140-145--and would be so godawfully hungry all the time that I could put away half of that giant burger, no sweat.

True, but Kobayashi also has his special technique, and that helps his speed dramatically. Although he can put away a pretty ridiculous quantity, too. I wonder if my metabolism is still what it used to be. When I was a kid my mom used to joke that I had a hollow leg--because I couldn't possibly have put all that food anywhere else!

They all have their charms and there's no way I could pick a favorite. I think my most lasting impression of each country, strangely, is just a mental snapshot of scenery, often from some high place: --The commanding view from Shirley Heights, English Harbour, Antigua; --Standing atop Chichen Itza, in Mexico; --The valleys of the Bernese Oberland, Switzerland; --Looking down from the hill temple of Wat Doi Suthep, northern Thailand, as a monk calmly tosses water on worshippers; --The endless turquoise of the South China Sea, off Sabah, Malaysian Borneo, as well as the gorgeous foothills of Mt. Kinabalu (someday I will climb it!) I wish I had pictures to do all of these justice...

I've always found the Mr. Cranky review enlightening: Four words: hot naked lesbian sex

Maybe for copying, but I've never had any playback problems with them.

What's odd is that this disc is, at least as far as I can tell, cleaner than most of the others I've ripped so far. There is one one scratch running along the radius of the disc but it's very faint and doesn't appear deep at all. There's also some dust on the surface, but no more than on other CDs I own...guess I'll experiment and make sure that not everything is taking this long.

That thought just occurred to me also. How much did yours run you? Fortunately, EAC has a "cool down drive" feature, so I've set it to cool down for 15 minutes after every hour of ripping. But it's still an awful amount of use for the drive.

Arggghhh....I'm trying to rip Jessica Williams's Live at Maybeck disc right now and it's taking FOREVER with EAC--about an hour per track. At this rate I'll burn out my notebook's CD drive before long. Has anyone experimented with higher speeds and tested for quality? Or should I just suck it up and clean the disc as best I can before copying?

Cool! Thanks. Right now it's running with "%l--alt-preset 128%l%h--alt-preset standard%h %s %d" in the command line. Is that similar? It looks like UNITY didn't rip at one bitrate, so I'm assuming it's also on variable bitrate right now.

Thanks for the tip! I now have EAC and LAME going as well and am listening to a nice clean rip of UNITY right now. I do have a couple of questions: What does that "alt--preset--standard" line do? I sort of sped through the LAME installation and don't really have a good handle on how it works. If the dust and dirt on my CDs causes read errors when ripping, why don't I have similar audible problems when I play the CDs on a CD player? Is there any way to optimize speed without sacrificing too much accuracy? The first CD took about a half hour. At that rate it'll take forever to rip all my discs.

Wow, that site shut down linking to that first pic real quick--it actually displayed not five minutes ago. Random trivia: Though Kirstie Alley played Saavik in The Wrath of Khan, Kim Cattrall was actually the director's first choice for the role.

Try that in a union-friendly environment and see what happens.

Clearly any record called THINK is out of the question in a post 9/11 America, for obvious reasons...

Hal Galper--The Guerrilla Band (Mainstream) James Moody--Never Again, Feelin' it Together Joe Chambers/Larry Young--Double Exposure

Since I got an mp3 player for my birthday, I've been ripping a lot of CDs to mp3 and toting them around with me. It's mostly a great little gadget, with one problem: some of the mp3s come out with sonic problems. Occasionally a few of the tracks will be completely unlistenable, with a regular, rhythmic "skipping"; more frequently there are brief bursts of static/fuzzy noise that definitely don't occur on the original CDs. Is the problem that: 1) my sound card is crappy (I'm ripping from a Dell notebook--obviously great sound isn't a priority with the overwhelming majority of notebook sound setups); 2) the sampling rate isn't high enough (I think right now it's at 128 KBps); 3) something else entirely? I've tried to be better about not doing anything on the computer while tracks are ripping, in the event that running lots of tasks does weird things to the reading from the CD or the writing to the hard drive. Thanks for the help!

Reissued on CD, but not in the US. Thanks for reminding me--I must have forgotten to pack my JRVG copies when I moved back to Boston (damn cardboard sleeves, screwing up my binder system).

That was fun! But WTF is that about? See here for origins.

Or do the reverse out of spite: call up ASCAP and see if they'll send a representative to check out the gig. Then play just the heads of 140 different ASCAP tunes in a night, and watch the fees skyrocket! (I dunno if the billing is actually on a per-song basis, but it would be hilarious)

That's my beef. It's typical wonderful Blue Note quality control. Why was this not hashed out a long long time ago? Presumably the CDs and covers have been already printed, right? Now they have to scrap everything. I wonder how much La Roca even knew about the city of Basra when he made the record. What if he just picked the name of a random Middle Eastern city since it evoked the same vibe as the tune?

With all the extra tracks this may be the first time I go the upgrade route. My '80s copy has another quirk: it's the thinnest cut CD in my collection. The edge of that thing is sharp!

Michael Gerber, my former teacher

Isn't it just that by intolerance we mean an inability to digest (aka an inability to produce the enzyme lactase) while by allergy we mean some more complicated chemical problem that sets off the immune system?

This tune is the only one of Maria's I've had the chance to play. The piano part may be the toughest big band chart I've ever had to read.

Is Jimmy kicking bass on this one, though? I thought there was a bass player, at least on this track.

Both, if possible. I realize that's not much at all to spend but I'm not exactly raking it in at 23 years old here.