amazing new music

My dear friend, Miguel Espinoza has recently finished mastering his latest cd. You owe it to yourself to surf out to his myspace page and have a listen:
http://www.myspace.com/miguelespinozaguitar

Miguel is a guitarist extraordinaire. His first flamenco performance was when he was just 9. His music has a lot of flamenco influences, but also a good dose of latin and jazz.

I know once upon a time you could find his cds at various stores around town. Apparently you can download the tracts from his first two cds off several online sites, including itunes and napster. His previous two cds are under the band name Curandero and are well worth searching out.

Go check it out!

Roslindale library closing for a couple weeks in January

News flash:

"Roslindale Branch Library will close from January 5, 2009 to replace the
boiler. The branch is scheduled to reopen, Tuesday, January 20, 2009."

I just can't wait until we get word on when Mattapan can close to move into our new digs!

end of 26.2

wow, I believe that's it. Thanks for running with me. I look forward to reading everyone's blogs next and meeting folks on Tuesday. I'll post when I find more things worth blogging about - thanks Jennifer for pushing me to experience and express. I always thought I needed completely original content to bother blogging, but now I'm more comfortable rambling and just doing it for myself. I hope someone else benefits, but just as a self-centered exercise its been useful.

recipes

Tonight I was invited to our next door neighbors' annual Thanksgiving feast. I didn't know one of our neighbors is vegan - as I've been since 1991, s0 it was a wonderful surprise and I've now enjoyed two nights in a row of awesome, vegan, thanksgiving inspired fare. With that in mind, here's a link to a recipe on my favorite vegan recipe site, the post-punk kitchen for what looks like a great gravy. Its not actually what we had either time - search out the punk chickpea gravy in Vegan with a Vengeance for the BEST, but I'm sure this is good too.

For a great list of vegan blogs, I haven't found a source better than Wheeler's site. If you haven't tried Wheeler's yet, they make pretty great frozen desserts and are selling them out of a store over by the Symphony Hall / T-stop. One vegan blog of note, vegan lunchbox, is a great example of how someone used a blog to develop an idea and a following that has since turned into a published book. If you've ever wanted ideas on what to feed a vegan child, this author has some amazing, innovative ideas - plus she's the first person I've heard of to ever make vegan Twinkies.

micro-bloggiing

At least one good friend of mine regularly uses Twitter - I know because he integrated it with his Facebook account so I see it there, plus as a sidebar on his blog. I never really understood the point, but on Wednesday night I was listening to all tech considered and heard a great short piece about some people using a private application of the same idea: yammer.

What I remember is basically:
(I'm paraphrasing now) "Email is old, yucky technology. Its fine for one-0n-one communications (although there are better options here too). You have to spend too much time figuring out who to address, what order to list people in for your addresses lists, and people talk too much (like this blog I bet you're thinking)". Twitter's great, but if you have private things you want to share (trade secrets, etc.) its public nature is a deal-killer. So - companies get a private twitter - yammer. When you have a question, ask the group. The first person to reply will let everyone know. Likely someone else will benefit, and time has been optimized. People originally feared that employees would waste too much time if given access to this technology, but experience has shown that while there are some abusers, the advantages WAY outshine the potential troubles.

I'm sure we'll see lots more of this style of communication - both among each other and with technologically connected patrons.

social tunes

I've been using the internet to grab radio stations probably since I first heard a radio station mention that it was available to stream online. When I need want to be reminded of home I tune in The Oasis in the City, Denver's KUVO - the best jazz station I've ever heard. For years I carried around a tape of a show DJ Scotty did with his young son in the studio on Miles Davis' birthday. A truly subliminal show. I love listening to his "Origins, orgy in rhythm. Music from the Black Diaspora" show too. However, this is purely old school radio streamed over the web. I can't skip songs I'm not so into, and I have to tune in at the right time - something I'm increasing less likely to do.

In Denver I also liked to listen to CU Boulder's college station, 1190. It was widely eclectic and always something I wasn't familiar with. Its online too - and was often easier to hear online than actually tune in on the AM dial. In Boston of course I tune into WERS from Emerson College. Of the three so far its the only one that streams online without a third party player (surely using a plug in I previously downloaded, but somehow cleaner & easier than choosing one of my many music players).

Another station with a fun local flavor that I'm pleased to see has gone to online streaming (you used to have to download and install a funky player just to tune them in) is the fully solar radio station out of Angel Fire, New Mexico - KTAO. I fond emmories of listening to the morning show and being totally transported to the big open San Louis valley and the canyons up to Angel Fire, Red River...... ahhh, the perennial question - red or green? (since 1996 the official state question of New Mexico).


Lately for me its been all about Pandora (as readers of this blog on the actual page, not via RSS know from the plugin). I've found a vast majority of want I want to listen to represented on Pandora, but this afternoon I realized that last.fm and Seeqpod have deeper catalogs for at least one type of music popular with urban teens - krunk. Looking up the group j-squad I came up with nothing on Pandora but lots on the other two. One frustration I had with Seeqpod though - I couldn't easily see what it was that was playing and at one point one page seemed to be playing two different streams at the same time. I think I'll start checking last.fm out more....

archives

Since a link to BPL's first site was in the original guiding post on this subject, let me lead you to the first archived page of my first library - Denver Public Library from Jan 27, 2003. Um, the graphics really don't work... oh well. Looks a bit like one of my earliest sites: Myogen.com from August 16, 2000.

One of my favorite things to do with the live music archive is to look up concerts on a friend's birthday (I often just start with the link for finding shows on today's date and then change some text in the address bar to get the date I want) . I can usually find something significant - I found a cool Dead show in Telluride performed on my wife's 16th birthday for example (at the time you could download a lot more Dead content). Then I download the show and make a set of CDs as a gift. Another cool date to check - new year's eve. I have great shows of Yonder Mountain String Band in 1999 and then in 2000. One word of caution - diving into this archive can consume MASSIVE ammounts of your time. You'll also come across major audiophiles who are very anti-MP3 and other lossless compression formats. Read up on ogg vorbis and flac to really enjoy your time here!