A while back Lee clued me into eMusic, a cool indie music mp3 site (subscription based, but their high-quality, mp3s unencumberd by any crappy drm). Managed to stumble over Angie Heaton who has a few albums out. Was listening to her when Amanda asked me who that was… when I told her, she said Rachel had listened to her. I took that as a cue to ask Rachel what she listened to next time I saw her. She clued me into the fact Angie’s local and also recommended another local act, Sarge. Loved their 3 albums, and found the lead singer Elizabeth Elmore is currently in The Reputation up in Chicago. All good stuff, but like all good things I hungered for more.
Found out the bassist from Sarge, Rachel Switzky (turns out she played with Sarge while in grad school at UIUC), had also played in Corndolly… that also happened to feature Angie on drums. This was the first item I’d run across that wasn’t available on eMusic, but was available from Parasol Records. Richy had mentioned they had a brick & mortar shop over in Urbana, so I checked their website and noticed Liquorette, another band featuring Angie. Headed on over there after work and part way through checking out it came out that the person helping me was in fact Angie herself. Very cool. She was even nice enough to walk around with me and make recommendations… suggested her albums, which I already had, and Sarge’s albums, which I also already had… :). Very cool though.
I suppose that while I’m at it, I should mention that CU has traditionally been an indie-pop hotbed. You’ve got the aformentioned artists, Red Hot Valentines, Fiery Furnace, Wofie, The Blackouts (now The Living Blue), Beezus, and who knows how many more. Oh, and REO Speedwagon was from here too, for what that’s worth.
Was just down to the basement in CSL to buy a soda only to find they’ve jacked the 20oz price up to $1.25. Lame. They don’t provide us with free espresso-based beverages, they don’t provide us with a convenient places to buy espresso-based beverages, and now they’re mugging us on the sodas. How are grad students supposed to work into the wee hours without a cheap source of caffeine? 
Might have to just start bringing my own.
Amanda’s Cingular contract finally ran out on Monday, so we ran out and switched to Verizon last night. I’d always been pretty happy with my Cingular service, but I was using their old CDMA network (that they stopped selling new phones for over 2 years ago) and a carefully selected phone. And my phone was getting pretty long in the tooth… I was largely content with the feature set but the battery could get 3 days or so on standby (pretty darned good for a 3+ year old phone I’d say). While I may well have been able to get a GSM phone with good reception/call quality, Amanda’s gone through 2 crummy phones that Cingular refused to do anything about (aside from possibly sell her yet another replacement in exchange for 2 more years of suckitude).
First phone she had suffered major battery issues after a year or so (connector didn’t seat properly with the phone so it frequently turned off suddenly). Second phone had poor reception (couldn’t reliably make calls in our old apartment) and had this obnoxious habit of screeching at an ear-splitting level (regardless of what you had the phone volume set at) at random when you were on the phone, and would routinely drop calls. Basically your typical bad cellphone stuff aside from the screeching which I’d never heard of. Oh, and I think it may have caused weird audio interference on our TV sometimes… Simply put, after the wonderful phone experiences she’d had, and the piss-poor customer service she’d received from the Cingular folk (their response to the whole screeching issue was that she had battery problems and removing/reinserting the battery would solve all her problems), Cingular was history. Oh, and of course when she called to confirm her contract end date last night they gave her a huge run around (”oh you had bad service??? well what’s your address I’ll look up the towers. looks like you should get like 2-3 bars there” nope, more like 0-1), tried to schmooze with her, tried to convince her to get a new phone (”oh don’t you want a camera in your phone???”), and after much persistence would eventually admit her contract had already expired. (Did I mention that Cingular sucks?!?!)
So we ran down to CC to port our numbers over to Verizon and set up a family plan… were tacking on her sister Katie since it’d be cheaper than feeding her prepaid cards, and another phone for her folk so they’d finally have a cellphone :). Getting 4 phones on one account was cheaper than the combination of Amanda’s and my individual plans with Cingular plus Katie’s prepaids and gives us more minutes. And that’s with 4 lines. And all calls between us (or any other Verizon phone) don’t count toward our minutes. And Verizon appears to actually give a rats ass about signal quality/coverage. Hard to beat really.
We went with 4 LG VX3300 phones that should cost us a total of $60 and appear to be pretty solid phones as far as I can tell. Will have to see how they fare over the next couple of weeks (we have a 15 day satisfaction guarantee during which we can cancel or switch to different phones for just the cost of the price difference between the phones).
I hate stupid people. I can accept that the population at large is generally clueless about all things tech, and so I have a fairly high tolerance level when they do annoying newb things. The people that really tick me off are the ones who are clearly in a technical field (say, a whole bunch of people in academia on a FPGA research/education mailing list), and are clearly clueless about very basic concepts such as email…
The trouble all started this morning when some Computer Science and Engineering associate prof at Penn State (funnily enough he got his PhD from a Florida institution…) accidently tacked the address for the aforementioned massive FPGA-related mailing list as a CC on a email intended for some prof about his proposal for an upcoming conference. This email was clearly intended for members of the program committee, but ended up being sent out to I don’t know how many hundreds of people. I can forgive that as a relatively honest mistake (not sure how he managed to tack on a completely unrelated address, but I suppose it could happen if you weren’t careful). The real problem is the flood of idiots on the mailing list that feel the need to reply to the entire list asking why they’ve received this email… Someone a few hours ago posted “hey, this guy screwed up, not meant for this list, please stop replying about it.” But it keeps on coming. And there’s this stupid .gov address that keeps marking some of the messages as quarantined and proceeds to send yet another email to the list letting everyone know that it didn’t like that email…
Now if I can only figure out how to get off this damn list… I didn’t actually subscribe to it… went to a conference with the guy that runs it and he automatically added all the attendees, and I think it’s more of an old school distribution list than a full-on automated mailing list. Hasn’t been too bad in the past, but this is just ridiculous.
Well, I’ve uploaded bits and pieces of the Chicago photos (still not quite done sifting through the stuff from the Field Museum or any of my skyline/downtown shots or those in Millenium Park). You can check them out here.
