We’ve been watching and greatly enjoying the John Adams mini-series, which prompted me to finally photograph the Captain William Smith House along the Battle Road in the Minute Man National Historic Park. I’ve always liked where it sits, and was looking for a subject to experiment with HDR techniques.
The Drive-By Truckers played a fantastic, sold-out show at the Paradise on Saturday. A two hour set of their southern rock “three axe attack”, capped with a long encore, included a lot off Brighter Than Creation’s Dark like the great “Righteous Path” and some older ones like “Sink Hole”, “Hell No, I Ain’t Happy”, “Marry Me” and “Let There Be Rock”. It was enough to restore the Globe’s faith in rock n’ roll, complete with drinking Jack Daniel’s on stage and smoking despite Boston’s ban (which passes for modern day rebellion). And I heard a less cleaned-up version of what the Herald quotes Cooley as saying,
“Or you can just burn it [their new album] for all your friends…Hell, we don’t care.”
The crowd loved it all — singing along while throwing up the devil horns and spilling drinks.
The Sigur Rós concert film Heima is now available on YouTube (via). The film follows the band playing shows around their native Iceland in the summer of 2006. I caught the screening at the Kendall in Decemeber and was glad I saw it. The interviews were alright, but their music set to the beautiful cinematography was fantastic. They close the film with my favorite song of theirs, “untitled #8” from the untitled album () (starts at 1:19), which always gives me chills.
Grindstone is a Greasemonkey script to help avoid distracting websites when trying to be productive. Maybe others can avoid thrashing, but the web is an endless series of interesting pieces of information. A little, quick research on the beautiful Blue Mosque in Turkey ends up leading to reading about: Istanabul (maybe we’ll visit), the Ottoman Empire, the Crimean War (which one was that?), the Crimean Peninsula, the Yalta Conference (chilling with Stalin), F.D.R. and to Harry S. Truman’s middle initial (there is a period). Suddenly a 30 second break has become a 15 minute tangent. And then there are sites like Facebook or Google Reader that addict people to keep checking them constantly.
Grindstone can help provide some self control when the web tempts you to stop getting things done. It only blocks the sites you specify at the times you configure. And you can always tell Grindstone to let you past for a visit. I wrote it for myself and have found it useful so I thought I’d share it.
To install it into FireFox or watch the 60 second screencast, head over to the main Grindstone page.
Grindstone providing a reminder to stay focused
In the past I’d been a skeptic of converging functions (email, web, mp3 player, etc.) on a mobile phone. I thought it would end up with a device that did nothing well. I was wrong.
This weekend we made a short trip to Philly (photos) and the iPhone was a perfect companion for traveling light. Email, SMS, phone, music, web, of course. I watched In the Valley of Elah on the plane and was impressed (despite lame 24hr DRM rule), listened to part of Better on audiobook, used the “Locate Me” plus Google Maps directions (our rental car didn’t have GPS). The camera is okay, but I tend to mainly use it if there is something to quickly capture and share (instead the G9 came along this trip). Now if it could just print boarding passes.
