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‘chele made an interesting comparison upon listening to Secret Machines:

they sound like a mix between Love And Rockets, and The Jesus and Mary Chain

and I’d have to agree. Nowhere Again sounds like it could be straight off of Express.

I picked up Now Here is Nowhere from The Secret Machines this morning on the way into work. I’ve been looking for it at Target every time I’m there with the family, but the clerks there look at me like I have three heads when I ask for it.

I’m glad I finally just went and got it. It’s an amazing album. From the first track to the end is a listening ream: complex layers of fantasic music. The sticker on the package said “the next big thing”, and I hope so. I don’t buy many CDs, so when I do plunk down hard cash for one I expect it to be good. The last couple I’ve purchased have been disappointments (A.F.I. and Metallica, not to name names). I’m glad I didn’t buy the new Beastie Boys album, as I’m still not sure of it.

So, it’s refreshing when I buy a CD based on a couple of tracks and find that the rest is worthwhile as well. I don’t regret the $14 one bit.

Favorite track so far: Track1, First Wave Down. I could drown in the melodies here.

Gentoo is gone, long live Fedora.

The Gentoo experiment is done. I ran it mostly to be running the same OS on the Intel and SPARC machines. Since I’m selling off all the SPARC stuff (anyone wanna buy an Ultra 1/170E?) I don’t need to keep the OS the same. I also got very tired of the whole “I want to install this, so now I must watch 1,200 lines of compiler stuff go by.” I did that in the 80s and 90s, it doesn’t interest me now. I’ve built X11R4 more times than I can count, I’d rather run the binaries they produce. The whole idea of “USE flags, only compile in what you need” didn’t work for me. I’m a clutterhound on my laptop: if it can be there, then chances are I might need it someday so I’ll install it. My USE flag was 9 lines long, so I compiled everything in. Bah.

The cluster at work runs Fedora and I’ve run RedHat in various versions since 1997, so I grabbed the latest beta of Fedora Core and threw it on. Impressions so far:

• Evolution 2.0 kicks serious ass. I like the new “task” buttons at the bottom, as opposed to the clunky old method of listing them in the folder list.
• X.org 6.8.1 works very well on the D600’s Radeon Mobility M9. Using MergedFB with an external LCD gives me a 2680×1050 desktop. I still can’t get the attached LCD to run at anything other than 1400×1050, but I’m not complaining. As a benefit, 6.8.1 will now turn off the LCD light when the screen blanks, handy for saving power when on battery. It also has the new “DynamicClocks” support, to slow down the video processor during less intensive tasks. More battery savings foo.
• GNOME 2.8 is amazing. There’s too much to list here that is goodness. Volume manager, keyring, NetworkManager, HAL/DBUS (Ok, not GNOME exclusive), vino, just GNOME it.
• SELinux is enabled in enforcing mode by default in this beta. I’m running the ‘targeted’ profile, which only enforces policies for certain daemons and processes. I might turn on ’strict’ mode later and see what breaks.
• Firefox is included. No more adding it first thing after install.
• udev is enabled by default (no more static /dev)
• and too much more to list.

I still have to do the typical gotchas specific to this laptop: it needs ndiswrapper to use the Dell internal wireless, the smartcard reader is still useless bits, and hot plugging the CD/DVD into the bay doesn’t work. Battery life is excellent tho, much better than when gentoo was loaded on.

Long live Fedora.

Back in the late 80s, my brother-in-law Tim was in a local Detroit band named Territorial Chant. T-Chant was fronted by an amazing singer/songwriter named Matt Schellenberg. I saw the performance of their album “Ek-Kuntai” and immediately bought the tape. Many years later, I’ve since worn out that original tape as well as the others I’ve picked up along the way. The last I had heard,the members of T-Chant had parted ways when Matt and his wife became missionaries.

Fast forward to 2004: on a whim, I google’d for Territorial Chant, and was surprised to find more than a couple of hits: some music on mp3.com, bassist David Mastick’s personal site, as well as an official site for the band. To my joy, I’ve found out that T-Chant is back in the studio! I can’t wait to hear what they produce next.