DSO concert

I went with my girlfriend to see the Dallas Symphony last night. I managed to get cheap student tickets for a bunch of concerts this year. We saw them play Mahler's First Symphony (which I'm currently playing in orchestra at school) last fall which was amazing. If you have the chance to see a good orchestra play this you should take it.


Last night they played Smetana's "My Fatherland" with a European guest conductor. I have to say it was not the best I've heard the orchestra play. The strings seemed out of touch and had no dynamic range, the horns played too loud, and the ensemble wasn't together at times. Hopefully the next concert will be better (Shostakovich 7 which is a pretty sweet piece).

This is a video of the third movement which they played well yesterday (though not as well as this video which is the Czech National Orchestra playing a Czech masterpiece). It portrays in a very followable fashion the story of a girl (Sarka) who becomes a raging manhating feminist after being betrayed by a lover. She fake ties herself to a tree and a prince appears with his army and "saves" her. You can hear the dialogue between clarinet (Sarka) and the cellos (the prince). Then they have a party (dancing music). Sarka then starts slipping stuff into the drinks that makes the army fall asleep (slowing music, snoring by the bassoon). Then Sarka calls out to her Amazonian women army (horn calls and clarninet again) and they slaughter the male army.

The Journey of my music

So here's the very long back story before I get to the reason for my post. Way back last spring my bro in law's truck, which I was driving, was stolen in a Joe's Crab Shack parking lot.

This was crappy. The truck was later found on the side of the road but stripped of all the wheels, seats, battery and most importantly, my case of CD's. I think it was a 48 case and overfilled, so like 55 cds or so- the result of years of buying.

Luckily I had all of that music (I think I had it all...) on my computer and on my Ipod. But then a few months later my computer took the opportunity to get a virus and fizzled. It's like six years old and my dad managed to reinstall Windows and now works fine, not as well as it used to, but well enough for my purposes. This incident required a lot of work to get all the files off. I bought an external hard drive but my computer wouldn't recognize it so I had to transfer all the files on a small usb key and then put them on the harddrive through my family's computer (a huge pain in the ass. I spent probably 5 hours doing this one night because my computer was so freakin slow).

So I had my files on an external hard drive, and my music on the Ipod and then nothing on my computer after it was reformatted. Then this fall I was extremely stupid and unfortunate to leave my harddrive in the computer lab at school and it was stolen. I permanently lost all my files- old papers, letters, recipes, guitar stuff, pictures. Still the music was on the Ipod, but how to get it off should I lose the Ipod (stupid Apple not letting you upload things off an Ipod)....

So yesterday I bought a new external harddrive (it's insane how much memory these things have now. There was one for $80 w/ a terrabyte. Who the hell needs a terrabyte of memory
? what can you possibly fill that up with?). And after searching and trying for a while I stumbled upon this program: Sharepod. It worked amazingly and was simple to use. I read a lot about programs that didn't work for the Ipod touch (mine) or the Iphone, but this one didn't have any problems. So highly recommended if you are stuck in a similar situation. I still don't have any old non-music files but at least I have two copies of my music should something happen to one.

The morale of the story- don't eat at Joe's Crab Shack.

Michigan Trip Beer Review #3

This is the last in my MI trip series. I bought a Shorts Brewing IPA that I was really excited about, but couldn't get to. And I also had Sundog, an amber from New Holland Brewing, but I didn't write a review- a good session beer though as far as I can remember. I'm going to a tasting this weekend which should be fairly epic. We're splitting a bottle of Sam Adams Utopias, which is ungodly expensive and holds the world record for strongest beer (27%), so I'll do a write up of that at some point.

Michigan Brewing Spiced Pumpkin Ale

Pumpkin beers are one of my favorite styles. During my first fall in Dallas I had a Dogfish Head Pumpkin' and couldn't stop thinking about how much like "fall" it tasted. That experience really sealed the deal, but I was a big fan of pumpkin beers before that too. This was my first time trying this one and I have to say it was way too spiced and sweet for my taste. In the aroma I smelled cinnamon, cloves, honey, and ginger. There was some remnants of pumpkin to go along with the spice but not enough to really support them. The taste was better, still sweet and highly spiced but with more graham cracker flavor. The pumpkin came out a bit. This beer really washes your throat off. I think it would be a great accompaniment to some plain cheesecake or maybe a do a vanilla ice cream float with it, but alone it was too sweet and spiced for my taste.

Michigan Trip Beer Review #2

The second beer I tried on my trip in Michigan was from Bells Brewery. I drank quite a few Bells in my time at Michigan. They are very well known in Michigan even among non-Beer Geeks- you can almost always find a Bells tap at even the skeeziest of bars. So although this particular variety was new to me, it brought me back to college days in some ways...

Bell's Rye Stout

Bell's line of stouts is pretty impressive- Kalamazoo, Java, Double Cream, Expedition, Cherry to name a few. Without checking I would guess they make the most stout varieties of any US brewery. This one is good, though I wouldn't say it's the best. The smell was like moist raisins over coffee. Roasty and somewhat sweet. The taste was more complex. Though I couldn't really pick out a rye character there were notes of coffee, maple syrup, and straw. And like some of it's brothers, especially the Expedition and Kalamazoo, this stout had an excellent mouthfeel- silky and sat on my tongue for just the right amount of time. All in all it's good, complex enough really sit and enjoy, but not so mind blowing that you couldn't have a couple of these.

Michigan Trip Beer Review #1

I took a short trip over MLK weekend to Michigan to see family and I made sure to drink some good Michigan beer there. The Texas beer scene is nothing compared to Michigan (Ithaca for that matter). I managed to find a store a quarter mile from our hotel in East Lansing and picked up a mixed pack of great stuff. Here's a review of the first one I drank:

Goose Island Bourbon County Stout

This is a beer I've been wanting to try since I started drinking good beer. Early in my beer drinking career I was fortunate to try barrel aged beers, and I liked them very much, already having an affinity for bourbon. So I was incredibly surprised and excited to finally find this one. The next day I even saw they had bombers of it! (too bad I had elected not to check a bag, or I definitely would have taken a bottle home).

And I'm happy to say that it meet my high expectations. It poured totally black and silky and deliciously velvet looking. I had to drink out of highball glass (the only thing available in the hotel) instead of a snifter (both traditional and recommended) so the aroma did suffer a tad, but was still great. A strong and complex smell with bourbon, oaky, vanilly. Booze notes of unrefined vodka and corn whiskey. Then bursts of chocolate- creamy and milky- rounding out a very complex smell.

The taste was sweeter and more boozy, but just as delicious and complex. It actually reminded me of Baileys in terms of the creamy sweet alcohol to it.

This beer really made the trip for me, and rates in my top 10 (not sure where yet...). If you have the chance (like you live in Chicago...) you should go out and find this beer.

Thoughts on the Max-Ipad

I've been reading about the hype about Apple's souped up tablet for a while and it occured to me during my first week of classes this semester that a tablet would be a pretty cool thing to have in class- you could write notes on it, look things up on the web, screw around if you're bored, and it would be easy to carry around and wouldn't need to be plugged in.

But then I saw what Apple actually released- a giant Ipod touch.



I'm not even going to mention the issues with the name or the lack of Flash or multifunctionality, but my biggest beef is that there's no mention of being able to write on it. I thought that was the whole point of tablet pcs? Isn't that what the UPS guy has been carrying around for years so you can write your signature on it? You should be able to write on you tablet PC and convert that into a word document. Seems like a simple concept to me. Apple missed a major marketing opportunity to sell thousands of these to schools and students to replace their last major blunder- the Newton.

Starting Out

Welcome to the blog. After spending too long passively reading my friends rants about music, sports, girls and life, I decided to start my own rant. My plans for posts include:

-beer reviews- more in depth and artistic than just my BA reviews (I have a couple from Michigan I'll put up in early posts)

-music stuff- probably more classical related as that is my expertise but we'll see what comes up.

-environmental news- the Ithacan inside me comes out.

-Dallas related stories.

The title is shared by a song I wrote recently about environment, but I also thought it just sounded cool and unique. Hope you all enjoy.