Remembering myTunes

I've done a lot of wistful remenescing lately-- mainly because my matriculating class is graduatin' in like a week. They're all selfishly leaving me for a real world ripe with full-time, career-building opportunities while I finish up my BSEE and work part-time mining coal for wages that would upset Human Rights Watch. And while I cope (completely un-bitter, I promise) with the reality of spending one more year at Rice without the familiar faces I've known since my arrival in Houston, I can't help but think about the good ol' days...

myTunes Redux

The little piece of software pictured above, myTunes Redux, was one of the most influential facets of my freshman year. You know, besides the Seniors.

Allow me to weave a yarn: The tale of a ragtag bunch of incoming Rice University freshmen, all assigned to spend their first year in the dingiest digs offered on-campus. These kids were all trapped in Will Rice Long Hall and didn't (apparently) have much in common besides 4-point-ohs and arrogance galore. Sure: They broke the ice with grain alcohol and casual sex just like any collection of close-proximity teenagers, but real friendships started to blossom thanks to a little tool called myTunes.

myTunes allowed anyone with iTunes (Mac or PC) to share their music library across a local network (but not outside that local network). For Long Hall's purposes, that local network was Long Hall. One would simply select a user on the network, pick and choose which songs they wanted, and voila.

Music became a significant common thread along which these hallmates could establish friendships. Some users brought completely unheard genres to the table, such as Louie introducing the Hall to his collection of Houston/3rd Coast Rap. Others (such as myself) used myTunes to identify those with worthy tastes and immediately recognized that Andrew Flowers and Augusta Bartis were the coolest people in the world, ever. Whether used to share or used to judge, myTunes allowed for an expression of individuality that you couldn't find on early Facebook profiles or roommate selection forms.

...and they all lived happily ever after.

Since 2006, myTunes has been more or less defunct thanks to those bastards at Apple blocking network file-sharing in iTunes. Which is a pity, really. I can't imagine my freshman year without the advantage of swapping songs with friends and getting to know people through their respective tastes in music. Nowadays, Rice freshmen probably Tweetup after O-Week or something weird that will probably doom my entire generation forever.

That or Swine Flu in Houston.

Birthday Burger Cupcakes!

THIS IS THE BEST BIRTHDAY EVER.

Update: Cristina baked and iced these bad boys for me this afternoon, before treating me to a night of decedent churrasco. Now I'm off to watch Fringe and eat more burgers cupcakes.

Kyle's bad-for-your-body birthday, Pt. III.

Texas secession reminds me of that show "Jericho"

Jesus, this whole secession thing is funny to me.

I like how Houston becomes "Galtville," which would probably rank #5 among Houstonians if you took a poll to rename the city.

1. Swishaland
   
2. Greater Montrose
   
3. New Shiner
   
4. Bill White's House of Chicken and Waffles
   
5. Galtville
   

Guilt and Valet in Midtown Houston: A savage journey to park my car

My favorite diner-diving duchess, Katherine Shilcutt, is back at it again with a lengthy castigation of valet parking here in Houston. Despite our parting opinions on Crave and late-night sushi [in which I used some colorful, 1940's-era mobster lingo], I completely agree with her contention that valet is a plight on the Midtown dining experience.

But the valet is free! people will exclaim. No, it's not. You still have to tip a dollar or two and, if you're like me, you may not have any cash on you. And that valet service is being paid for by someone. Don't think it's been factored into the cost of your meal at the restaurant? Think again.

I, too, never seem to have the tangible cash-on-hand to tip these cretins. I spend them all on overpriced plantain chips and Chex mix during my stress-relieving spending sprees at the office snack machine. And why should I save my Washingtons for this nonsense? Why should I have to worry about loading my wallet with dollar bills for a service I never ever actually need?

Avoiding the Guilt-- that's why.

Valet Tip Guilt is the spectre that traverses the depths of your stuffed stomach after rocking a bucket of mussels at Reef, rips at your heartstrings, and commands you to fork over your small cash. It is an institution nearly as powerful and pervasive as Catholic guilt. And it's a bitch, too, when you're trying to enjoy your evening out with a lovely lady. I can't count the number of times a valet has looked up at me with a weird mix of stunned surprise and puppy-dog eyes after I indicate (with all unfortunate sincerity) that I don't have any ones to spare. The Guilt drives me to do stupid things like ask my girlfriend to pay the man. Basically, Valet Guilt is killing chivalry and my sex life and my well-being as a whole.

Restaurateurs argue that it's not their fault these useless services are taking over Midtown. Rather they're forced by landlords who cut shady deals with the valet companies and drive up rent (ergo, food prices) accordingly. Whether or not it's technically the restaurant's fault is moot to patrons. I always associate the crushing guilt of being unable to tip a valet with the restaurant, not the poor schmuck trying to make ends meet by parking cars.

Katherine, I'll echo your call to arms: Next time you're out and see that telltale "Free Valet" sign, balls up and say no. Park your own car and end this useless, expanding racket.

[Houston - Eating Our Words - The Valet Problem]

Cold readings from comic strip characters

It all started innocently enough: I posted one of those weird Garfield googly-eyed comics to Cristina's Facebook wall two weeks ago, and she replied in turn with a customized Garfield-minus-Garfield.

But that was just the beginning. We then started to reach deep into our repository of morbid quotes from film and television and recklessly juxtaposed them against Sunday's finest comic strips. I've reproduced the results below, in good faith, because I know how much comic strip publishers love parody.

See if you can identify the different movies and shows we used. There's a handy little link under each comic in case you become tortured

Image by me, source here.

Image by Cristina, source here.

Image by me, source here.

Image by Cristina, source here.

Image by me, source here.

Image by Cristina, source here.

Image by me, source here.

Image by me, source here.

Image by me, source here.

Image by Cristina, source here.

Image by me, source here.

Image by Cristina, source here.

Image by me, source here.

Image by Cristina, source here.

Only one week of high-stakes shopping until my birthday

I require sweet, sweet stress relief in the form of bullet-point blogging and nicknack posting.

• Last night's show was interesting but not unfun. No one expected The Faint to take stage until after Ladytron (since the show was billed as "The Faint with Ladytron") so you can imagine the chagrin on the muted faces of all those tween-punkers and tiny, tatted-up scene girls who were still galloping to the show when Todd Fink took the stage. April 20th isn't exactly the best day for a dance-punk band to expect thrashing and skanking from the disaffected stoner youth: Most of the crowd was deathly still until the end of The Faint's set. Despite all this, I had a rip-roaringly good time watching all this musical nonsense unfold. I heard "Destroy Everything You Touch" and "I Disappear" live: That's all I needed. And The Faint's animated backdrops were pretty entertaining to watch.
  
• I got free ice cream today. Okay, fine, not free-- the aroma of baking batter assaulted my smellbuds and forced me to splurge on a $1.50-after-discount Cherry Garcia waffle cone. I figure if you're going to enjoy America's finest ice cream flavor, you might as well commit to a sweet, crisp waffle cone over the cardboard-based sugar cones they were peddling. I work next door to Ben & Jerry's but hardly ever visit. It's part of my "at least do one thing to avoid early onset heart disease" life plan.
• Still no word on a place to live come May. I'm still sticking to the guidelines I set for myself earlier this year, but I'm now open to house designs besides modern-neo-deco-rary. If you're moving out and need a tenant in the Rice Village area come May, give me a shout.
• I'm giving Twitter a chance. There, I said it. When I become incredibly engrossed into the whole idea and give up real-blogging entirely, you'll know why.
  

Finally, the best thing I've seen from SNL in years.

photo c/o Cristina

Ladytron!

OMG OMG OMG

The Faint

Need more mémoire magnétique

The knuckles of my greedy, nimble, download-hungry fingers are painfully scraping up against the Iron Curtain of available hard drive space.


After years of Torrenting discographies of obscure electro bands and blues legends for no-good-reason, my 160GB laptop hard drive is just about full. I've resorted to cramming senseless data in the nooks and crannies of my dedicated Windows partition. After all, deleting things is not an option.

My 60BG external laptop drive now waffles between 1BG and 0GB free depending on which disposable episode-of-the-night I've thrown onto it. I need a few more cobalt-alloy platters. The question is where they will live, and how I'll be utilizing them.

So just buy more, you say. I dread buying an external hard drive-- I really do. I begrudgingly bought an enclosure for my old 60GB laptop hard drive back when I upgraded to 160GB internal (because having 60GB of potential storage gathering dust is the dumber of two dumbs). Now it serves to hold all the obscure TV shows I downloaded once-upon-a-time and have no intention of watching again anytime soon along with ISO backups of my software, big movie project files, and some other critical backup shit. But even with my one external drive holding almost nothing of significance, I sometimes find myself on-campus or at-work wishing I had easy access to them.

See, I believe that humankind is too far along its technological renaissance to justify carrying around anything except a laptop with a network connection and a power cord. Some may argue that this isn't necessarily convenient if I don't have an Internet connection, but I can get a connection more often than I would ever want to carry around an external drive. Also, I break things.

What I want/need is remote storage. Rice affords me a measly gig of network storage and, honestly, I could do with another 499. But Rice's servers aren't, you know, a long-term solution for me. If I owned both a desktop and a laptop I could buy external drives and turn my desktop into a file host and do all of this myself but, unfortunately, I live in the one computer per Kyle third world. I don't need another computer: I need GIGZ.

Anyone out there have the perfect storage solution they want to tell me about? Or am I doomed to live in hard disk hell, constantly choosing between some 1980's-era Eric Clapton live album and a cliche freshman-year film to delete?

Please destroy me this way

Ladytron. The Faint. Get excited.

Ride all night yeah through heaven and hell

Remember Moby? He's that guy who was making highly-accessible dance(-ish) music with R&B samples and guitars and drum machines back when you were kickin' it to the Chicken Dance at the spring debutante. My long and strange decent into the world of 4-to-the-floor started back in 2000 when I bought a copy of Play at a CD shop in Sandestin. Before I knew it I was rocking di.fm and playing way too much Counter-Strike because that's all a 14-year-old kid can do with a head full of techno. Interestingly enough, my Moby intrigue eventually lead me to that other New York music act I've been known to love.

Ah, those were the days.

Moby is back again with "Shot In The Back Of The Head," and an accompanying video directed by David Lynch. And you know how much I love that guy. Goddamn Eraserhead is still giving me nightmares. This video, not so much. New album out in June.


Shot In The Back Of The Head from Moby on Vimeo.

[if:mv: Moby - "Shot In The Back Of The Head"]

Who has time for morals?

It feels like the media is grasping at straws in its attempts to talk about Twitter these days. First it was a caricature of our high-speed society, then suddenly it was the hip playground for those with an overinflated sense of self-importance. As if blogs weren't bad enough, now you don't even have to write to be popular. Please, God, either foresake me for having an account or call me up to glorious electro-heaven where video bloggers drink Sparkz with Kevin Rose and fist-pump to mashups by the next Girl Talk.

A little technophobic writeup on CNN.com decries fast-paced, 140-character Tweets as the mental equivalent of TMI. According to the article, downing nibbles of information every hour of every day doesn't give us enough time to digest the moral implications of what we're reading.

Seriously? I think that's a stretch.

I think that (for the most part) Tweets are very fire-and-forget, dull happenings in peoples' lives. Sure, there's an occasional "my heart is sad" interspersed among the more familiar "I just ate a burrito at Cafe Adobe" and "@tfaust dicks," but is our generation really becoming so shallow that we use Twitter as anything more than a jumping-off point for a real conversation?

Twitter is a tool used by the Houston Chowhounds to find and felate each other during downtown lunchtime. It's used by readers of Houstonist so that they can throw a technological buzzword into their pub crawl. But is it really causing us to become a demoralized society?

You tell me.

[Scientists warn of Twitter dangers - CNN.com]

Forget fishsticks, I've got a McBLT

Care of Jason Alexander.

This isn't the story I promised! It's pre-Seinfeld Jason Alexander singing and dancing! Lucky for you, I tore my knee up doing stupid things in boots Friday night so I've had plenty of time this weekend to craft my prose. It ended up being about twenty times longer than I had originally anticipated but, eh, these things happen. Now the question is whether to throw the entire thing up or post it as a series of Twitter updates.

Just kidding.

Double Fortune

You do not have to worry about your future. If you've got it, flaunt it. Two fortunes in one cookie does not mean double insight.