Link of the Day - The French Pod Class

Learn French from a podcast!

The French Pod Class

Link of the Day - Snacksby

How about instead of just emailing random links of snazzy new web 2.0 sites, I just stick 'em on this here blog we got sittin' here?

Snacksby is a really neat recipe site. For serious!

Dancing With Myself - Day 3 - The Concretes

So last night I went to the Paradise to see the Concretes. It was...different.

The opener was this Austrailian chick who calls herself New Buffalo. Very mellow, some nice songs, some boring songs. She played keyboard sometimes, backed up by her iPod, and also played a little guitar. For a couple songs she just pressed play on the iPod and sang, and walked around the stage kinda robotically. She was nice, but had like, negative stage presence.

Next up were the Concretes (once again, yay for only one opener!). Holy shit, there are like a hundred people in this band. OK, actually there were only eight. But still! There had to be at least 15 instruments on stage. Which was impressive considering that all their guitars had been stolen the night before, and most were borrowed and a couple bought that day. It was kind of an awkward moment when the lead singer told us in her broken English about it, the crowd didn't really know how to respond, it was kind of a bummer. Anyhow, there was her, two guitarists, a bassist, a keyboard player, a drummer (I couldn't tell if she was an albino or just really fair-skinned and bleached her hair), and two dudes in the horn section. The horn section had a sax, clarinet, flute, trumpet and french horn. There was also another keyboard over by the horn section that the brass guy played from time to time. I was just fascinated by the sheer number of instruments they played. An electric uekele? I think? An autoharp? A xylephone?! The guitarists also both switched off between electric and acoustics. Don't forget the hand bells and tambourines too.

Anyway, they were kinda neat, but pretty mellow too.

The elfin lead singer asked where a good bar was near there and the crowd reaction was mixed. One guy yelled out "Great Scott" and some chick was like, "Eww no! Go to the Sillohuette!" and some other chick was like, "No, not the Silly!" I thought the best suggestion was probably the Model, since supposedly that's where people go after shows.

I was considering going to the Pretty Girls show tonight, but I'm freakin' exhausted tonight, so I'm skipping it. Two shows in one week is pretty good anyway. I wish they'd been earlier in the week though, 'cause they're definitely my favorite of all the bands I saw, but I have seen them before, so I'll live. Oh, I got their two last albums too, very different from the first one, but awesome in a totally different way.

Anyway, tonight I'm just gonna be lazy, watch some OC, and hit the sack.

Dancing With Myself - Day 2 - Russo's

No dancing today, there isn't much going on in this town tonight. Oh, except TORRENTIAL RAIN.

So I finally broke down and went grocery shopping. I'd been hearing about this big ol' produce store in Watertown called Russo & Son's on various food-related websites and then saw a post about it on this blog right here, which had pictures, and I was intrigued. Crazy selection of produce that's fresher and cheaper than Whole Foods AND Shaw's? Sounds too good to be true. So I decided to check it out and do some produce shopping there before I hit Stop n' Shop.

It's kinda outta of the way, but HOT DAMN do they have a lot of stuff. Pretty much every kind of thing that grows out of the ground that you can think of. And like three different varieties of each thing. For reals yo. I went produce-ca-razy. Some of the more interesting finds were stuff like white asaparagus, swiss chard (which I had once in a restaurant and LOVED but could never find in stores), and baby cucumbers. I had to remind myself that I only have two weeks to eat all these veggies, but I still filled up my little basket. Then I hit Stop n' Shop and got the rest of my groceries.

So I got home with all this crazy food, and I still didn't know what to eat. I browsed cookinglight.com for some ideas, and cobbled a few recipes together to come up with what just might be the tastiest thing I have ever made. Well, it might be second to that Indian chickpea dish, chana masala, I made when C's mom was here. I took a tilapia fillet and brushed it with a mixture of lemon juice and mustard, and then took some of the fresh basil and parsely I had just bought (for super cheap!) and stuck a bunch in the food processor. Then I pressed the herbs on the fish and baked it. Simple, but holy crap was that good. I also tried sauteeing some swiss chard with garlic, cayenne pepper, lemon juice and salt based on a recipe from cookinglight.com and it was pretty damn tasty. I think I would leave out the cayanne pepper next time though, it was a bit too spicy and kinda overpowered the chard.

Oh jesus. I've been reading too many food blogs. I can't believe I just wrote that paragraph. I'm sorry.

Anyway, tomorrow I'm gonna hit Central Square after work and see if I can't pick me up a ticket to Thursday's Pretty Girls show at the Middle East, come home and cook something delicious with all the vegetables I need to use up, and then head over to the Paradise for the Concretes show, where I will resume dancing by myself.

Dancing With Myself - Day 1 - The curse of the dig this! (Phoenix, La Rocca)

So there is a phenomenon that happens among hipsters in boston every week that has even been complained about in letters to the editor at the dig. See, when the dig lists something as dig this! in their event listings, aaaaallll the hipsters and wannabe-hipsters to come out to see it. I don't know if I've ever seen T.T.'s that packed.

Despite the retarded number of hipsters (I hope I didn't get any of it on me) the show was pretty damn awesome. The opener was La Rocca, a band from Dublin with cute accents and catchy tunes. Cristina, I think these guys are right up your alley - you should check them out. Although, you'll probably come back and be all "dude, I told you about these guys in November."

Phoenix was up next (yay for only one opener!) and rocked the house. They were actually a lot more rockin' than I had expected, given how dance-y and electronic-y their albums are. At one point, I was slightly concerned they wouldn't play my favorite song, If I Ever Feel Better. I started to wonder, what if that's not actually a popular song, and it's just the random one I picked as my favorite? It's hard to tell sometimes when bands aren't on the radio and don't have singles and such. But no. Ohhhhh, no. As it turns out, that is everybody's favorite song. The lead singer even did the thing where they don't sing the chorus and let the crowd sing it, and it worked! In T.T.'s! I know! Weird!

The merch guy was pre-selling their new album for 10 bucks and it came with a little bonus CD with some remixes. I figured what the hell, why not. So I got the bonus CD and this weird card I have to take into Strawberries when the album comes out and pick it up.

So it was pretty good night, until I got home to a 75-thousand-page-long email from Nick, who apparently doesn't speak English because he doesn't seem to understand simple phrases like "It's over," or "No, it's really over," or "For the last time, we are not going to get back together. Ever." Jesus.

...and reality has a well-known liberal bias.

So, when they booked Stephen Colbert for the White House Correspondent's Dinner, do you think they realized that the Colbert Report is like, you know, satire? Or did they think he was just a really hardcore republican?

Colbert Roasts Bush 1-3

part1
part2
part3

Here's a transcript if you are in an environment that would prevent you from watching videos.

Mmmm, smells like gasoline.

So there was this gas explosion in Needham today.

Just to give you an idea, here is how far this is from my job.

Yeah, we all wandered outside to look at the 6 or so helicopters that appeared to be directly over the building...and then we wander back inside and the power is out...which for everyone else means party time since they can't use their computers. Meanwhile, the IT folks are running around like chickens with our heads cut off trying to get DNS switched over before the generator gives out (we didn't) and then trying to walk one of our Wisconsinites how to switch it over (fun!).

And just when you think you might be able to go home an hour early, the power goes back on.

Well, at least I still get to leave at 4. Since I got here at SEVEN.

Computer Geekery Update: 4/27/06

Some people have album updates, some people have concert updates. All I gots is nerdy updates. Hope ya like it.

• Google Calendar - Oh, Gcal, where have you been all my life, you wonderous purple, pink, green & teal thing. I am waiting patiently for proper Outlook/Exchange Integration so I can have my work calendar in that bad boy too. Meanwhile, geeks are thinking of all sorts of wacky things to do with it from monitoring medical conditions to network outages.

• In other google news, Gmaps now includes all of Europe. Which is useful for people going to, say, Europe.
  
  
• Yahoo Go! - So at first I'm like "Ya-who? No one comes between me and my Google." But this could actually be interesting. It's a program meant for viewing on TV screens (yes, you can actually read the text off the screen), that lets you view your video, music and picture files. It also has some snazzy features like flickr integration and a DVR (TiVo). The DVR is what caught my attention. It's a free DVR program using the computer equipment you already own. I read the requirements and realize we already have a leg up on everyone because we
  1. already have a computer hooked up to our tv
  2. own a tv tuner card
  Free TiVo? Sounds hot right? However, when I tried to set it up, it was not all puppy dogs and flowers. It seems my old TV Tuner card from 1999 is not, in fact supported. Damn. Also, I was hoping we could stream things over the network so I wouldn't have to give up my TV Tuner card in my room, but it doesn't appear to support that either. Additionally, it doesn't seem to be compatible with iTunes (not surprising), which is weak. But I'm going to keep my eyes peeled for a cheap tuner card and maybe a bigger hard drive to see if I can make something happen. It looks promising.
  
  
• OurTunes - So we can see eachother's iTunes Libraries and stream music to each other, which is all fine and dandy. But if I actually want that damn hospital song Cristina got stuck in my head in MY Library (and thusly, my iPod) it's a big ol' pain in the ass. From what I gather, this program alleviates that problem. I have yet to test it out, but I think it might be sort of awesome.