Shawn

Happy New Year!

I thought American Hustle was brilliant filmmaking; energetic, hilarious, engrossing and FUN! I thought the running time was fine, the direction assured and the entire cast was great. The film had so much LIFE to it that it made me realize how dead most movies really are these days. Wolf Of Wall Street I have very little interest in though I will eventually watch it once it comes to home video. Honestly I'm just tired of Marty and Leo working together and the subject matter I could care less about.

There are a few really good episodes, especially the "Sophie B. Hawkins Dance" and the rest are entertaining enough. I like the cast so much and admire how well they held everything together despite the insane behind the scenes drama.

Winter Wonderland from the album All Kinds of Weather by Red Garland.

Really enjoyed season 1 but so far season 2 is feeling like a pale imitation. The show made the same mistake as The Gilmore Girls in the later seasons, it stopped focusing primarily on the main characters (the father and daughter) and instead spends way too much screen time with the zany peripheral characters and their antics. Hopefully the upcoming season 3 (Jan. 15th) will be an improvement, the cast is good they just need better material to work with.

When you are broke Christmas shopping is much less stressful.

Spotify has become invaluable to me in making purchase decisions. I no longer feel the need to own an album unless I can tell it's something that will get played frequently throughout the year. If an album strikes me as "nice, but I'll probably only play it once a year if that" then I don't need to own it. That one time a year I can listen to it on Spotify. I buy less albums overall (probably only about 13 titles in 2013) but it's nice to not have any purchase regrets.

Not jazz, but for what it's worth... Top 10: 1. Steven Wilson - The Raven That Refused To Sing (and other stories) 2. Purson - The Circle and the Blue Door 3. Laura Marling - Once I Was An Eagle 4. Haken - The Mountain 5. Riverside - Shrine Of New Generation Slaves 6. Black Sabbath - 13 7. Deep Purple - Now What?! 8. Sound Of Contact - Dimensionaut 9. Big Big Train - English Electric: Part Two 10. Queens Of The Stone Age - ...Like Clockwork Archival releases: King Crimson - The Road To Red Jethro Tull - Benefit (Steven Wilson remix) Flash - In Public (unreleased live recording from 1973) Rush - Vapor Trails Remixed Yes - Close To The Edge (Steven Wilson remix)

Not strictly a Christmas album but does have a nice winter/holiday vibe to it. All instrumental (with some backing wordless choir vocals on some tracks), mellow progressive rock album featuring some beautiful guitar playing by Andrew Latimer. Camel - The Snow Goose (1975)

Also, The Move, E.L.O. (who did a song called Birmingham Blues) and much later Duran Duran.

This was my favorite show when I was 6 years old... Still great fun to watch Lynda run around in that outfit...but man, Lyle Waggoner was BAD.

I doubt most Americans could even FIND the UK on a map let alone name the counties. If someone showed me a map of Europe and asked me to name countries I'd probably score pretty poorly myself.

Listening on Spotify, sounds good. Looks like my favorite song (Latona) didn't make the cut though.

Finally finished up Luther season 2. It's a crime this series is so short, just fabulous. Getting ready to start Ripper Street next.

My Mother owned this record and played it all the time when I was a kid, I loved it then and I love it now.

It was recorded either the day before or the day after "Full House" at Tsubo, it was recorded during the day in the empty club.

Damn. R.I.P. I had the pleasure of seeing Wess back in the 90s, he made a surprise appearance at a Hank Crawford & Jimmy McGriff performance at Jazz Alley in Seattle. Great player.

It usually takes a couple weeks for the Printer manufacturers to make new drivers compatible with an OS release. I was working at Apple when Snow Leopard launched and it was just around 10 days before HP and the other printer manufactures provided updated drivers. What software do you use to access the complete New Yorker? It is / was a Power PC program - same as the Nikon - no longer recognized. Ah, that makes sense.

It usually takes a couple weeks for the Printer manufacturers to make new drivers compatible with an OS release. I was working at Apple when Snow Leopard launched and it was just around 10 days before HP and the other printer manufactures provided updated drivers. What software do you use to access the complete New Yorker?

My Mac Mini is a 2010 model and I've seen significant improvement in memory usage and overall performance since I upgraded from Snow Leopard. After a couple days using the new OS I'm really enjoying it and it also allows me to use iTunes Radio for the first time since that wasn't possible under Snow Leopard. The only issue I had was Pro Tools will require an update from the manufacturer to be compatible, but I generally use Logic instead so it's not really that big of a deal.

Been listening to that one the last few days, on your recommendation. Awesome! Thanks, Shawn. This is a cool thread. Rock on! rockonjim.jpg Cool! Glad you liked it. I would also recommend checking out the new Haken album "The Mountain".

Washington Clusterfucks

I installed it late last night and finished up the application updates (for iWork, iLife) this morning. My little mini is underpowered in the RAM department and had become quite sluggish on Snow Leopard after a few years, but it's working much better under Mavericks. Not just better performance in Safari but also better memory performance with multiple applications running. I'm a happy camper.