Tuesday August 26, 2008

Outside Lands

I attended Outside Lands over the weekend. Overall I thought the event showed some cracks in the organization. For two of the headliners there were serious sound issues. The sounds boards on almost all of the stages were setup to block the stage from a good part of the fields. The overall bathroom situation seemed to run out of steam each night as the number of reasonable clean bathrooms approached 0 before the headliners were done. The drink options were limited and overpriced. Other things seemed to work well. Bands seemed to get on and off the stage on time and the sound besides the headliners was good. Their was a wide range of reasonable priced food options for such an event.

Friday evening:

• Beck - This was a mob scene. I came in the entrance right next to Beck and not being enough of a Beck fan kept on going. The bathrooms in the walkway between Lindley Meadow where Beck was playing and the Polo Fields was jam packed and a fence by the bathrooms had been knocked down just before I got there. It doesn't seem to me like this was well planned.

• Manu Chao - A little too mellow for me.

• The Black Keys - I like these guys. Maybe almost too unstructured for me? Is that possible? Seemed like everything started out as jam-noise and progressed from there.

• Lyrics Born - I like this guy. One of the better underground Hip-Hop/Rap types. He can turn a phrase nicely and the band he had rocked.

• Radiohead - I don't get these guys. I listened through their whole set. I guess they rocked. They dealt with the sound dropping out twice pretty well.

Saturday:

• Sparrow Quartet - I went to go see this band because of Bela Fleck but I think they all rocked. I think I would classify it as folk or old-time music although there are some bluegrass elements and they seemed to have been strongly influenced by Chinese folk music.

• Everest - eh? I don't get it. According to their bio 80's indie with some jam/prog influences. Seemed pretty generic to me.

• Galactic's Crescent City Soul Krewe - I like Galactic. This ended up being Galactic with part of the Dirty Dozen Brass Band part of the time and one of the Neville brothers the rest of the time. They are funky. They are good. They are fun. That fun aspect to live music is one thing I think some of the young bands miss.

• Steve Winwood - Nice set although he still comes off as too produced to me.

• Regina Spektor - I had my 16 year old niece pick out a few bands she would go see that I didn't know. Most of what she thought was cool were bands I'd seen and would probably pass on. But I like Regina Spektor. I couldn't get close enough to see her perform but I liked what I heard. Lost of tempo and crazy lyric changes with a lot of energy. I would have liked to see the show as it seemed like she was probably pretty entertaining. A conversation the next day on the bus confirmed that was true.

• Ben Harper and The Innocent Criminals - I almost didn't go see this. I'd heard them before but not seen them. This was another one of my niece's recommendations. I still am not entirely hot on Ben's music but he is a good showman. I'm glad I went to go see them.

• Primus - I've seen Primus before and really like them. Les Claypool always seems to do things I like. But this time I thought they fell flat. OTOH I was pretty tire by this time and wasn't really into it.

• Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers - Pretty standard set running through more tunes then I thought I knew of Tom Petty's. But I knew them all. Nothing over the top here. The sound dropped out twice during this set and they had to take a 5 minute break to work on the PA but it seemed like the band dealt with it well. I ended up leaving before the last few songs but the walk out was long enough that I heard the end of the set.

• The Mighty Underdogs featuring Gift of Gab, Lateef and Headnodic - I meant to start the day off with ALO but got the schedule confused. I listened to a few songs an then left. Unlike Lyrics Born this is too "rappy" for me.

• ALO - These guys hit a nice groove. They didn't blow me away but I enjoyed the part of the set I heard.

• Culver City Dub Collective - A little too ambient for me. I needed energy at this point and these guys were not providing it.

• Stars - Also too mellow for me. I did get a nice nap near the end of their set.

• Andrew Bird - This guy is cool. Very talented. I would have never guessed what a "whistler" really was until I hear him. Nice to hear the violin mixed in as he did.

• Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings - Old school fairly high energy blues was a good thing at this point. It had been a mellow morning and I needed a pick-me-up. Nice instrumentals, nice voice, nice showmanship on Sharon Jones part.

• Grace Potter and the Nocturnals - I'd hear these guys open up for Mule at the Fillmore earlier this year. I thought this set was more mellow and didn't quite meet my expectations. But they still sounded good. I didn't make much of this set as I'd heard them before.

• Widespread Panic - I first saw WSP in May '91 in LA. I've been an addict ever since. They had a 90 minute spot but they ran over by 20 minutes or so. The set is high energy from the beginning. In the middle of Henry Parson's Died is a great Green Onion's jam (Sorry to whomever I tried to convince afterwards that was a Ventures song and not Booker T. an the MGs). The later third of the set they had Ann Marie Calhoun on Violin. I thought there was some really nice interplay between Jimmy Herring an Ann Marie during several jams. WSP was the band that made me really want to come to Outside Lands and they delivered. Too bad they could only play 1/2 a show.

• Mike Gordon - Mike Gordon played a set with a keyboardist, drummer, and a guitar player. The set seemed tentative to me. But I was a little burned out from Panic an I think WSP going over might have shorted Gordon's spot (they were on opposite ends of Lindley Meadow).

• Jack Johnson - I was burned out by this point an Jack is just too mellow for me. I listened to about 1/2 of his set an then wondered on home.

Thursday August 21, 2008

iPhone 3G

I dumped my Treo 650 the other day for an iPhone 3G. The Treo was way long in the tooth and the 3G and the GPS receiver on the iPhone 3G made it irresistible to me. A few years after I graduated from college I worked for Pactel (later Airtouch) Teletrac and the concept of location tagging data has since been of interest to me.

A few things (none of them surprising) which are big hits are:

• App Store - Great idea. What a PITA it was to get applications onto the Treo.

• Use of Location - I'm somewhat surprised at how well some of the base applications use location.

• Physical properties - This phone is the perfect size for me.

• Number of free applications - Given the restrictive environment there are a lot of free applications which are more then toys. The Movies application by Jeff Grossman is a wonderful example of a fairly simple but really well done application which just rocks my world and uses location in a very natural way. The MarbleMash game by Jirbo is a neat game which uses the accelerometer nicely.

• Quality of non-free applications - With most of the prices being below $10 I was surprised there was much of a difference between the free and non-free applications. I really like Absolute Fitness by Aqua Eagle. What a nice application which dovetails with the kinds of things I want to do with my mobile platform.

• Keyboard - I'm very surprised at how well this works. I thought the lack of tactile feedback would make it really painful instead of just a learning curve.

And there are some things which are not big hits:

• Battery life - I feel like I've taken a 1/2 decade step back. I have to worry about having a charger with me on day long trips. Turning off 3G isn't really an answer in my book. First off it doesn't seem to save me much. And if I didn't want 3G then I wouldn't have bought the phone.

• Camera - A toy at best. At least as the software works at the moment it is primarily for associating pictures with contacts.

• Multitasking - The platform appears to be underpowered for some of what it attempts to do. Having the App Store exit when you start a download is an interesting way of keeping you from continuing to try to use the Internet but that is pretty much a bandaid. Let the stuff I'm focused on get the machines resources and queue up the download to happen as possible. I vaguely remember Jobs commenting on their multitasking model as being superior during the launch of this product. That is just spin.

• Visibility into failures - I just upgraded the system software to 2.0.2 (5C1) and the system seems more stable so this has taken a back seat. But before that I regularly would start an application and it would just exit. I would have no clue why. At one point I only had a few GB of storage left so I deleted a movie and one application started working again. If it was really just running out of storage somehow then it would have been nice to have been told that.

• Keyboard - yea, it works better then I thought it would but you still don't get tactile feedback. I'll get use to it.

• Lack of free applications - Above I was surprised at how many there were but there are still a lot missing. It was easy to find a free database application on the Treo. iDB Datamaster by Evince Technologies seems to me to be the closest but the list of data types supported is limited. They seem to have a bunch of complex types but not some of the simple ones I need (e.g. lists of strings). The killer to even trying to application was that when I sent them email they didn't answer.

• Ability to Demo non-free applications - I understand this is an Apple limitations. Seems like a natural feature for a closed environment like this. It would have meant I tried iDB Datamaster and if it sufficed I would have bought it.

• Programming environment - I want to write one off applications for my phone. Give me some basic scripting ability ala {Basic,Python,TCL}/TK or the like. I'll write my own specific database. I'll prototype things which I might then write natively for the platform. I'm going to San Francisco's Outside Lands this weekend and the Crowdfire concept looks neat. The capabilities of the iPhone 3G could play to trying to prototype an application around Crowdfire. But the startup cost of developing on this platform makes that impossible for me.

for those that can't last untethered

So American Airlines announced Internet for those that can't work offline while flying. Well, okay, they announce some form of expensive cripplenet:

Aircell’s Gogo will be available to customers as a fee-based service in all cabins. Aircell will charge $12.95 on flights more than three hours, which include American’s Boeing 767-200 flights. Each paid Gogo session includes full Internet access. Cell phone and Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) services are not available.

"full Internet" 'cept for those services we might wish to charge extra for later. Not sure what "Cell phone" has to do with that but being able to use VOIP is well withing the definition of "full Internet". Sadly I doubt most will realize the duplicity in AA's statement.

I wonder how many people really need to be connected for the flight time? I guess if it kept me from buying expensive drinks it might be worth the $12.95 an hour. Barely. I suspect it will be slow enough it might actually increase my tab. ( Aug 21 2008, 03:05:03 PM PDT ) Permalink