J Larsen

And here I am wanting to get away for a while...

I've been going back to books I haven't read since high school to see how my attitude towards them has changed. I still really like Catcher in the Rye, though not quite as much as I did 13 years ago. I love The Great Gatsby, which I despised in high school (must have been in a bad mood that week, because it's an amazing book). Next up: Go Tell it on the Mountain.

Who gets to decide this? When I stayed with a friend briefly in Harlem, I heard a hell of a lot more Nelly and Eminem being blasted at the late-night street parties than anything else. I have an enormous hip-hop vinyl collection (and Nelly is most certainly NOT featured in it), but I'm 0% hip hop and the guys throwing those parties are definitely 100% hip hop. Sometimes things just aren't what we want them to be...

If you go to Jamaica sometime, you should try one of the Chinese restaurants. The indigenous Asian-Carribean fusion cuisine can be pretty interesting - though I get the impression that they dumb it down a little since the Chinese restaurants seem to draw mostly travelers.

I like Propeller best by FAR, but that's also the album where I jumped on the bandwagon so that COULD be the reason I like it so much better than the others.

Okay, I like Prince, I like Leo Kottke, I love Van Morrison, and I'm not too offended by Norah Jones BUT... I think it's getting to the point where it's silly to call BN a jazz label anymore.

In my controversial opinion, Wu only had one good album as a group. The first one was a classic. The rest were piles of crap. They've had a lot of good "solo" records, though, so the "break up" may be a good thing...

This seems totally irrelevant to me - you know, a rose by any other name and all.

I've heard a few good musicians in the subway, but I'm far more likely to get the froggy-voiced elderly man who sings his barely recognizable version of "It's Getting Hot in Here" or the 30-year old long-haired well-dressed white guy doing his lame whitewashed folk-rock version of "What's Going On", which really doesn't come across the right way when sung by a person who isn't a member of an opressed group, IMO.

I can go along with that - it's probably their weakest record (though I never liked Let it Be much, either). The first few songs on Beatles for Sale are pretty good, though. I am glad that John got off the Dylan trip quick, though.

I'll Be on My Way?

Help is a great album!! The first few songs on "For Sale" are all great, then it gets spotty. Rubber Sole was a 1965 record, and a damn good album IMO. How did this dissing on '65 thing get started?

Born in the USA and Raspberry Beret are good calls. So is Burning Down the House - not a great Heads song IMO, but great for an 80s top 40 tune.

I don't mind Revolution #9 at all. I never have - even when I was a small child. I mind Mr. Moonlight very much. What a piece of crap! I'm also not too into the McCartney songs on Let it Be (although the title track is okay). Oh La Di was a pretty bad attempt at ska, but it was no Mr. Moonlight.

"Once in a Lifetime" - Talking Heads. I think that was popular enough to qualify.

I have a video of their first concert. Pretty intense stuff. Guy wasn't playing guitar - he just jumped on stage to do a little singing. Sorry, I can't make copies for anyone - I'd like to say I would but I know that in practice I would never actually get around to doing it. I have videos of a few other DC shows too - one where they had a woman singing for a few songs, another that was their first anniversary show (I believe), and another that was outside on a very cold day, near the White House from the time of the first Gulf War. They were all great concerts. I've seen them in person a few times as well. They're good performers. They never seem to get tired.

Was that REM song really a radio hit? I thought it was more popular on an "indie rock" level. Just curious, not questioning.

Off the top of my head, 1) "Don't Stop 'till You Get Enough" Michael Jackson (you could probably sub any of his other singles from Off the Wall or Thriller) 2) "Little Red Corvette" Prince 3) "Walk this Way" Run-DMC (there are 100s of other rap tunes from the 80s I'd put ahead of this one, but I think this is probably the only one popular enough to qualify)

On the other hand, I have always had profound hatred for... 40. I Wanna Sex You Up ... Color Me Badd ... 1991 That song is SO incredibly annoying it's hard to describe.

Where's "Owner of a Lonely Heart"? Where's that damn Savage Garden song I couldn't esape a few years ago? Where's "Oops I Did it Again"? I'd listen to the Beatles trying to do ska all day before listening to those tunes.

South side of east 6th Street, between First and Second Avenues ] D'oh!!!!! Thanks for the catch!

For that matter, if you're in to Indian it's not all that far of a walk over to E 7th St (Indian Row - almost everything on the block is an Indian restaurant).

There are plenty of excellent restaurants in the West Village, but they're mostly expensive (Babbo, Il Mulino, One if by Land) or pizza (Joe's, Nick's). The only moderately priced yet fairly good place I can think of off the top of my head is the Cornelia St. Cafe (which has live jazz in the basement, BTW). It's on Cornelia just off Sixth Ave, about two blocks from the Blue Note. They serve mostly New American. Not the city's best, but decent enough and <$25.

Brandon, the iBook should actually run cooler than the PowerBook. Most of the heat generated by your computer comes from the CPU. Higher-grade CPUs use smaller and fast electronics. The smaller and faster you make the transistors, the more heat they dissipate - it's just a fact of life in microelectronics (which happens to be my field). This is also the reason you don't see G5 books, BTW. If you included enough cooling elements, it wouldn't be very portable anymore. Evidently they're going to try to release one with a reduced clock speed within a year or so.

Fair enough on the "6 years" issue. On the software, I often run all of these programs simultaneously: Project Developer, Terminal, Mathematica (often with add-on packages), StatView (not a great program but it exports to Origin), Excel (for quick-and-dirty checks), and TeXShop, along with some proprietary stuff. The new version of Mathematica is what eats up a lot of my processing power, but the trend towards bigger software is not limited to my field. It amazes me how big regular operating systems are now - a few years ago you'd be hard-pressed to just boot up a contemporary OS on even a high-end personal computer! One amazing result of the G5 is how fast the price of traditional workstations dropped after its introduction. You can get a high-end Sun workstation for around ten grand now! The top model in '99 was around 60 grand! I think that tells you a lot about the quality of the G5.