1. Dental care is important, but sometimes shit in your mouth breaks for no good reason
2. The worst criteria for finding a professional (say, the dentist that opens the earliest in the Palo Alto area) can also lead you to the best*
3. Women’s Fast-Pitch Softball is incredible and infinitely more interesting than Baseball
4. Applesauce (natural/unsweetened) is still pretty awesome
5. Root canals are virtually painless and it is probably a better idea for me not to be able to see what is going on
6. Everything happens at once

• Intel stock heatsinks are a pain in the ass to install, and you only get one shot since the thermal paste is pre-applied. You can buy more thermal paste, but I ended up buying a new (really, really large) heatsink at Frys which was only a little easier to install.
• The arrows on the pegs for the heatsink are full of lies, the screwdriver slot should be pointing at the heatsink, not parallel to it.
• Intel processors will shut off if they get too hot, which is nice.
• Windows XP cannot be installed on a SATA drive without either a floppy drive (which I do not have) or slipstreaming the drivers onto the install CD (which is probably as fun as it sounds). I ended up using a spare IDE drive I had lying around
• Windows XP would not install when I had 4GB of RAM plugged in, it would hang at the “Setup is starting Windows” prompt. I pulled my second 2GB RAM chip out and it installed just fine (well, after I addressed the overheating issues as well)
• Installing new USB device drivers may turn off your existing USB support, which is great if you are using a USB keyboard and mouse
• New graphics cards are really, really large.
• Your motherboard’s on-board ethernet may not have a driver available on an XP SP1 install, you probably need to use the CD that came with it.
• Microsoft seemingly has gotten lax with Windows XP activation.
• I finally see why everyone went ga ga (ga ga ga) over Spoon’s album last year.
• I have to apologize for that last bullet point. That was bad and I am ashamed.

In case anyone is curious about the new machine, here is another unordered list just for you:

• Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.40 Ghz
• Biostar TP45 Motherboard
• Diamond ATI 4870PE5512 512MB GDDR5 Video Card
• 4GB 1066 DDR2 SDRAM
• 750W Power Supply (with ten million power connectors)
• Antec Three Hundred ATX Mid-Tower case (very nice but not flashy)
• 500 GB SATA drive (which is sitting nice and unpartitioned)
• DVD-RW drive

If you do not know what half of those things mean, it is okay, I do not either. I do know that this is by far the most powerful computer I have ever owned, and it still cost me less than a Macbook (and just Macbook, not Pro or Air) would have.

• Video editing is fun. Before I had neither the software to do it correctly or the hardware to run said software with usable performance. Now I have a laptop which can run Adobe Premiere(!) and do all kinds of amazing stuff right there in the editor.
• Doing all kinds of fun things in the video editor means you look up and there is daylight coming through the blinds again.
• If you want to remove audio from a stream in Premiere, you need to right-click on it, select “Unlink” and then delete the audio stream the normal way.
• Video encoding continues to be a giant clusterfuck and annoying headache*
• It is a shame that a license for Premiere costs $800 cause this would be an awesome hobby. I guess I need to finish this project in the next 30 days.
• I need a bigger bandwidth pipe at my apartment.

Hopefully I will post the results of tonight’s efforts if it ever finishes uploading.

Foals - Antidotes
It might be a good idea to stop buying CDs based on listening to five second samples on Last.fm. I find it incredible how quickly I discovered, fell in love with and then subsequently got very sick of dance-punk in such a short period of time.

Jaymay - Autumn Fallin’
This one was bought after I read an interview in which Jamie said her literary equivalent was Midori from Norwegian Wood. I am of the opinion that the world needs more people like Midori. Not knowing what to expect when I got the CD itself, I was very surprised when I got it. Her voice is very clear and it just jumps off the track. The music is all right as well, and I especially like the jazz/lounge interlude “Hard To Say”.

Colin Meloy - Colin Meloy Sings Live!
There is a live Colin Meloy show which is virtually the same as this album and available to stream on the NPR All Songs Considered site, so if you want to save $10 go ahead and listen to that. You will not get the aborted song “Dracula’s Daughter” and a mixed bag of banter but nothing tastes quite like value. That said, the music here (that song excepted) is really great and the solo acoustic guitar really brings out the melodies in the songs. The banter is okay, though I feel as if Meloy is trying too hard to get the crowd to break out of their shells and play along. My favorite moment is when the crowd picks up the last refrain in “The Engine Driver,” I was truly surprised when I first heard it and it felt more genuine than any other point on the album. Also the version of “California One/Youth and Beauty Brigade” is probably the best I have heard.

Heroes Original Soundtrack
Reading the liner notes for this album makes it sound much less like a real soundtrack and more of a compilation of songs the people who work on Heroes really like. This is fine, I like a lot of the songs, though overall the album feels like there is no cohesion to it at all. And the Bowie inclusion is both cheesy and left a bad taste in my mouth when the album was over.

The Raveonettes - Lust Lust Lust
After a few listens I am not sure what to think of this album as a whole. Some songs really grab me and get stuck in my head, others just go by as the washed out fuzzy blur that they are. Another review suggested this was an album to be played loud so I tried that, and it does help but not to a great degree.

The Emeralds - Love is Rolling
These guys certainly put on the liveliest of the sets at Japan Nite, and that is clearly reflected in the album. While watching their set, they reached the point where I wanted them to stop talking to the audience and just play another fucking song. That is not an issue here, though something is lost between the live set and the recorded material.

The Beaches - The Beaches
The Beaches - HANA HOU
My thoughts when they came on last were, “Oh they are sort of reggae or dance hall… oh god my feet hurt, I want to go to sleep already.” I was sure that I would have enjoyed them had they not been at the end of a four hour show and sure enough, their albums are both catchy and a fun listen.

Detroit7 - Special Sampler For Japan Nite
Detroit7 - Third Star From The Sun
Maybe it was due to my spending most of their set trying not to get pulled into a mosh pit, but I did not realize the singer’s voice was so deep! I mean, I recognized she did not have a high-pitched female idol pop voice, especially given that they performed after Ketchup Mania who had a singer just like that, but this is beyond belief. Otherwise only a few songs really caught my interest and overall I felt their songs worked better live.

Scandal - Space Ranger (single)
A fairly catchy song, the arrangement seems a lot more complex than I remember when they were playing.

Pizzicato Five R.I.P. Edition

When I realized that both members of Pizzicato Five probably had solo projects since their breakup, I ordered both of these CDs right away.

Nomiya Maki - Party People
Nomoto Karia - Dance Music
It is curious that I find both of these albums to be very similar to one another. I guess between the two we can get an idea of where Pizzicato Five would have gone had they not broken up. It might not be fair to compare, although the arrangement on “Big Bang Romance” (from Party People) sounds exactly like it could have been on a P5 album, and Karia does an outright P5 cover (of “東京は夜の七時/The Night Is Still Young”) on her album so the legacy is definitely there. The cover is actually a pretty good point of reference to compare the two, and I found some distinct differences between Maki and Karia’s singing. Maki comes off as more talented and confident, while Karia has an almost childish side to her singing in comparison. Anyway, overall Party People is fairly weak even with Maki’s vocals, and the production on Dance Music wins out overall.