Isaac in DC, 2006

Here are some pictures from my nephew Isaac's visit to DC in August 2006.

Guitar tabs shut down!

Apparently, all guitar tab sites have been shut down due to pending lawsuits from ... the suits, maaan. Kinda sucks because I've used them often. But apparently, you can still find stuff on either usenet newsgroups rec.music.makers.guitar.tablature and alt.guitar.tab.

Trip to the National Building Museum

Liz and I recently went to the National Building Museum. It was my first time there. The building itself is very cool -- amazing space inside. We took in two different exhibits. The first was an exhibit on eco-friendly houses and building materials. It was actually very cool. I was skeptical about it, thinking it would be just a bunch of solar panels and stuff like that. But it was actually interesting and the materials they recommended -- recycled stuff mostly -- were actually pretty nice looking. Turns out the counter tops in our condo are eco-approved material called Richlite. They used the same counter tops in the demo house in the exhibit. Richlite makes counter tops out of paper mixed with resin. It's sustainable because it's made out of paper. That's right, we're green.

The other exhibit was about a Frank Lloyd Wright apartment/office tower, the Price Tower, in Oklahoma. That was pretty good too. I'd count myself as a FLW fan, although a fairly unknowledgable fan. Anyway, it was a good day trip, good city thing to do, and a beautiful day too.

The Raconteurs with Lou Reed

This is a pretty great clip from the MTV VMA 2006 of the Raconteurs and Lou Reed doing White Light/White Heat by the Velvet Underground.

harDCore

Check out one harDCore (and one hardcore) related item that has popped up. The first is a cell phone-delivered tour of DC punk rock sites... Pretty cool idea: you send a text a message and then get a "guided" tour via text messages on yr phone about each building/place on the tour. They have 10 (?) tours in DC covering different neighborhoods. Also, go to follow the links in the DCist.com post below to the yellowarrow.net site to see videos of interviews w/ the hardDCore elders. Pretty cool. I drive by the old Wilson Center everyday while going to/coming home from work. Here's the info as posted on DCist.com.

And while reading the comments in that DCist.com post, I saw a link to an upcoming movie about the national hardcore scene called American Hardcore (from Sony Picture Classics!?). This looks pretty interesting, although I hope they have some good old footage.

Virgin Fest

We got our tix for the Virgin Festival in the mail this past weekend. I'm actually pretty stoked to go... it was a pretty pricey ticket, but the line up looks pretty solid. And even The Who is gonna be there! Didn't they have at least 6 or 7 farewell tours?? Sarcasm aside, I've never seen 'em, and even though Keith Moon and John Entwhistle are dead, I'm looking forward to it. Can't say I'm all that excited for the Chili Peppers tho. We may bolt before they come on to beat the traffic.

But with the New Pornographers, Drive By Truckers, and Raconteurs there, it should be fun. I'm also kinda interested to see/hear Gnarls Barkley, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, and Kasabian. Plus it sounds like a bunch of other people we know will be going, including a few from work, Travis & Rosana, and the Shooks. At least we won't be the only oldsters in the crowd...

New pictures

Fourth of July pics from the Columbia picnic, from James's BBQ, and from the fireworks in Columbia Heights.

Pics from a visit to Liz's mom's house with our nephew Braeden and our neice Abigail. They might look a little dark because the camera was inadvertently set to the "Twilight" setting.

Pics from our vacation on the shores of Delaware at Rehoboth Beach.

X and Rollins Band

Greg, Pete, and I went to go see Rollins Band and X (Riverboat Gamblers opened -- we missed 'em) last night at the 9:30. Good show. X was great, I thought, and better than the last time I saw 'em. They were tight, played great songs, and looked to be enjoying themselves a lot. Two small complaints: John Doe's comments about DC and the sound. It always gets a bit old whenever someone comes to town and then all they can do it make comments about the government and politics, like nothing else is going on around here. The sound was a bit shoddy I thought -- guitars and vocals could've been higher in the mix. But hey, maybe I'm just losing my hearing. Aside from that, they rocked.

Rollins Band was cool. I was never that into them that much when they were current, but watching Henry Rollins perform is pretty wild. The guy is just intense. He means it (man). I was a pretty big Black Flag fan... well, before stuff like My War, but I never really got into Rollins Band, so it was interesting to see them. It was their original line up too, same as X. The music was pretty good, but man was it LOUD. The bass drum was so loud, all of my clothes were vibrating. Had to stuff some napkins in my ears. Gotta remember to bring/use earplugs more often! Interesting thing: there was an old couple sitting up in the balcony where performers wait and watch other bands perform. We were wondering if they were Henry's parents?? He is a local guy... Dunno. During Rollins' set, Exene from X came through the crowd to go backstage and had her hands covering her ears! A little bit funny. Guess she wasn't into it.

The show was also *very* punctual, which I appreciate when I have to go to work the next day. Rollins: on at 9pm on the nose. X: on at 10:30. Show over before midnight, home by midnight, buzzing and ringing.

StumbleUpon

I've been using the Firefox browser at home for a little while now, and I checked out some of the extensions you can get for the browser. One of the ones I've tried is called StumbleUpon, and it's pretty addictive. It suggests Web sites that you might like based on categories that you select when you sign up. Yea, you have to sign up, but it's free and a pretty cool service, I think.

Firefox has a set up where you install a toolbar in your browser and then you can just click the Stumble button and you be redirected to a random site that has been rated as one you'll like by other people (ie, tagged).

OK GO Treadmill Dance

This is pretty impressive if you ask me.

Second place in contest

A few months back, I entered a contest on emusic.com to try to ID as many musicians in two TV commercials as possible. Well, turns out I tied 2 other people for second place! So I won a 4GB Nano (etched w/ "From your friends at emusic.com" on the back...) plus a free one year subscription to the emusic.com site. Pretty cool, I must say. I got my Nano just in time to take it to beach but only put a few podcasts on it for Liz. She loves NPR. Thanks emusic.com!

The Hold Steady - Your Little Hoodrat Friend

Check out this video from Hold Steady...

Vacation time!

We're heading down to Rehoboth on Friday for a week. Really looking forward to it -- sun, beach, beer, relaxin', a little golf perhaps. Hope to have some pics posted after we get back.

New post, old pics

I've uploaded some pics from earlier in the year from a few trips/events.

Here are pics from Shelley's college graduation from Ohio Wesleyan.

Here are pics from our trip to Las Vegas.

Here are pics from Joe's visit to DC.

Enjoy!

Geekin' out w/ my music collection

So as Liz is fully aware, I've been working on entering all my music into a database for the last, oh, year/year and a half. This includes all vinyl (12" and 7") plus CDs and MP3 albums (but not all random MP3s). This has been a big undertaking, and now I am finally done! The software I used is called CATraxx, and it made things really easy -- it pulled CD info from the CDDB, downloaded artwork (when available). And it is a full-on database so I could add track names, credits (songwriters, producers, band members, etc) -- all good info. So with a few clicks I can see all the Johnny Cash covers I have. Or I can see all credits attributed to Elvis Costello, for example. Cool stuff.

I used allmusic.com a lot to find original artists for covers that I wasn't sure of. I also used Yahoo and Google to find some of the more obscure artwork that CATraxx couldn't find. So, since everyone is now frothy with excitement, I've posted the PDFs of the full collection. I had to break it up into 2 separate PDFs -- one for all various artists and one for all but V/A. Oh, and the first one is a fairly big file too. There are definitely some embarrassing moments in the collection...

No V/A here (PDF 18 MB)
V/A here (PDF 2.5 MB)

Catching up

My idea here is to replace the News page on my site with this blog. So, in order to synch up the two sites (and in the future I will merge them, I hope) I am posting here the info that last appeared on the News section as of 04/08/06. Here goes:

Photos, video, etc. from the Pogues show 3/10/06, 9:30 Club, DC here.

The latest excitement: Dena and Greg had their baby son, Mason Gregory Fisher, on February 7, 2006. Exciting stuff! There are pictures here.

Otherwise some other new stuff... the Pogues reunion show was a lot of fun. Liz got a promotion which she definitely deserves. And, we've planned a trip to Las Vegas in May.

This past month was also a busy show month (aside from the Pogues). I went to see the Hellacopters (Black Cat), Arctic Monkeys (9:30), and Yeah Yeah Yeahs (9:30).

My Hit List (what I'm digging at the moment)
Some new CD purchases/gifts:

• Arctic Monkeys: Whatever People Say I Am, I'm Not


• Yeah Yeah Yeahs: Show Your Bones


• The Black Keys: thickfreakness


• Spoon: Gimme Fiction


• Drive By Truckers: The Dirty South

Some other stuff...

• Popmatters.com is a site for all things pop culture.

I am blogger...

...Hear me type! I've joined the blogging world with this new Fish Tank blog. I'm going to use this to take the place of the News section of thefishtank.org. Using a blog to post updates about what Liz and I are up to is much easier than updating the regular site. So, we'll see how it works out, and I'll probably make some tweaks along the way, but... here 'tis!