I think that air conditioning must be one of the greatest things mankind has ever come up with.

Yesterday I drove down to CT to see my sister, who is at my parent’s place for a few days. The extra bonus is that she brought along my newphew. He’s just over two and so funny. He’s quite a handful. My parent’s place has one problem though. No air conditioning. They have one a/c, but it was in the closet. In CT yesterday it was in the 90s and very humid. I was a bit overtired and have been coughing a little bit more then usual lately, so the humidity was just killing me. I was extremely miserable. Finally, at the end of the day, my dad put the a/c in. I have barely left the room since then :). I finally got the really good sleep that I’d needed to for the past day or so. It is really amazing what 12 hours of sleep can do.

I just got a call from work. We lost all the connectivity from our offices to the outside world. Luckily this doesn’t affect our web sites, but it does affect the ability of our finance people to be working on their end of quarter reports.

It’s great to see my sister too. We haven’t had a chance to talk much, but I think she’s glad to get up to New England, even if it is to just visit for a few days.

(This blog is going to go up to my site later on because I currently can’t get to my machine at work through the net)

Hot damn.
I just got the DAT of my set from the beach party and as I write this I’m recording it onto computer. I haven’t even really listened to it yet. I can’t wait to hear how it comes out.

I think this is going to be a mostly music related blog today. First off. I’ve been trading emails with this very cool singer/songwriter by the name of Edie Carey. I mentioned her last week as I went to see her and a few other singers perform (See my post two days ago, the one about Live From New York). A day or two after the performance I saw I got an email from her mentioning a few upcoming gigs. This kind of email is fairly common in the folk music community. Most performers have mailing lists (both snail and email) that they use to keep people updated on upcoming performances. I emailed her back to say that I really enjoyed their show and to also say that I thought it was so cool how much interaction they had with people who liked them. Since then we’ve been emailing back and forth now and then and it’s gotten me to thinking more about the similarities between that and the electronic music scene. Both groups tend to be more on the fringes of popular music. Every once in a while you’ll get a track that may break out and get some mainstream play, but for the most part the scenes exist in their own worlds. Both groups also tend to have a fairly close interaction with their fans. While some DJs I know of have mailing lists, I don’t think it is quite as common as what I’ve seen in the folk scene. Both groups release recordings of their works. DJs have mixtapes/CDs and almost every folk singer I’ve seen has CDs of their work.

I just think the whole thing is very cool. Because it is two very different types of music with very different communities of people who support them (You don’t see masses of kids dancing all night long to folk music ;)).

I spun out twice this last weekend. The first time was Saturday night. I spun at a club called Vapor in Boston. They have this cool back lounge where they have guest DJs spin. I had a great time. The sound in the booth was amazing, even if it was hot as hell there. Big thanks to everyone who came out to see me and especially to Mario, Mike, and Bree for having me out there to spin. The only thing that sucked is that the club is so damn smokey. I really have to say that my clubbing days are probably going to dwindle down to nothing as I get closer to my transplant. The smoke really drives me nuts (though sometimes it feels like as much as I cough it can’t make that much of a difference :)). Then on Sunday me and some of the other Changmian DJs spun at Hangover Easy. Hangover Easy is this weekly event that takes place at this local Howard Johnsons. Actually it’s at the restaurant at one. It takes place every sunday from noon till like 7 or so and they have local Boston DJ crews come in and spin mellow tunes and serve brunch all day. It’s quite nice. I spun mostly deep house and had quite a good time.

I’m now 30 minutes into my set and it is sounding quite good! Hopefully I should have this up and online this afternoon.

I just wanted to make a quick post letting folks know that I’ll be spinning this Saturday night in the lounge at Vapor on Stuart Street in Boston. I believe that I’m going on from 12:30-2am, and will probably be spinning a fairly housey set. I’m psyched about it because I love the venue and I think they have a really great night going on there. If you want details, please feel free to drop me a line and I’ll let you know more details as I know them.

I’m hoping to start work on a new mix CD tonight. Possibly even that I will have available next Saturday night if it all works out well. If I can swing it I will also try and have recordings of my set from the beach party the other week.

Being a DJ I tend to get fairly focused on the music i spin. I listen to various forms of electronic dance music almost exclusively. At home, in the car, at work, etc. This mostly happens because I’m always listening for new things, always seeing what I can learn from listening to other DJs, listening to new tracks, etc. As a result, when i get a chance to listen to something different I jump at the chance.

Sunday night I got to see this group of singers who go by the name Live From New York. It is Teddy Goldstein, Anne Heaton, Sam Shaber, , and Edie Carey. (Amazingly, they all have web sites made from their names!). These folks are amazing. I can’t get enough of them. I’ve seen all of them solo and a number of them together, but never all at once. Their styles all compliment each other quite wonderfully. The high point of the show for me was when they all did a round of singing each others songs. Teddy played two of my favorite songs by him, “Lucky in Love” and “Will you be my widow” (At least that’s what I’m calling it, I’m not sure what it is actually called). The other song I was really psyched to hear was “El Dorado” by Sam Shaber. Whenever I hear that song on the radio (okay, so I don’t ALWAYS listen to electronic music in the car) I can’t help but sing along. Anyways, you should check out all their web sites. They all have songs you can download.

It’s almost 8am and my pager keeps going off. Ugs. I hate being on call. Thank god my week is over once I get into work.

Movie review time!
Movie: Atlantis
Place: Fenway General Cinemas, 2:30 showing

I wasn’t sure what to expect from this movie. Mostly because I haven’t been real thrilled with the Disney movies I’ve seen recently (I saw the one before this and can’t even remember the name of it). That being said, I really enjoyed Atlantis. It didn’t feel anything like a typical Disney movie. The pacing was a little on the slow side, but I actually think it really fit for the story being told. I thought the animation was quite amazing as was the voice acting (part of the fun for me is trying to figure out who is doing each voice before seeing the credits. I did pretty good on one). The story was a fairly typical search for lost treasure kind of story. I won’t say too much about the story beyond that because I hate reviews that tell you half the story before you ever get to see the movie. I give the movie a B+.

Tonight I’m on my way out to see Live From New York. I’ll comment on that later.

I love my new cell phone. For a while I’d had a Sprint Thin Phone, made by Qualcomm. All in all it was a pretty damn good phone, but with a few issues. The first being that it wasn’t really well equipped for hands free operation. You had to plug an adapter into the bottom of the phone and THEN plug in the handsfree unit. Basicly (IMHO) too much stuff. The battery was also starting to get a little flakey and since it was kind of built in, replacing it wasn’t trivial. (This actually seemed like a cool idea when I first bought it, but I’ve revised my opinion on that). So I finally went out and bought a new phone. After reading a number of reviews I decided to go with the Sanyo SCP-4500. The selection of features on it is quite nice. My current favorite being the speakerphone. Last night I had to have a machine rebooted at work and while I was waiting for the callback I was playing Dark Cloud and when the call came I just hit the speaker button and took the call while still playing. Quite nice! The sound quality also feels better then the thin phone. And the battery life seems to be much much better also.

This morning I also typed up a track listing from my set at the beach. I’m hoping to have a copy of the DAT of it within the next day or so. And if I like how it sounds I’ll be putting it online at my site. So, here’s the listing:

. Tomcraft & Eniac – All I Got (Eniac Vocal Mix)
. Mutiny – Secrets (Ian Wilkie’s C-Bit Dub)
. G. Pal – Decadence
. Luzon – The Baguio Track (Bedrock Remix)
. Sean Cusick/Rogue Audio – Fire Escape
. H-Foundation – da sounds of now (x-tra large)
. Eddy Grant – Electric Avenue (ringbang remix)
. Blue Beat Production – Swift
. NATO – Music Box
. Thermobee & Stratosphere – Stoned Trance (Tall Paul Remix)
. Ian Wilkie – Guten Morgen (Dub Mix)
. ASAP – Firebird
. Chiapet – Westworld (Medieval Funk Mix)
. Thomas P. heckman & Marc Romboy – Ultra Vixens

I’m actually fairly happy with the set. It is definitely more on the housey side, but will still a bit of trancey stuff in there. And everyone seemed to like it a lot (especially the Electric Avenue mix that I threw in. People went CRAZY when they heard it).

So yesterday I got my pictures developed from the beach party. I think they came out pretty good. This was my first time using my new Lomo, so I wasn’t really sure how they would come out at all. So, here they are:

Phew! That’s a lot of pics.

I’ll also put these up in my gallary later today, but I wanted to make them all available here for people to view… at least for the time being.

The Beach. One of my favorite places in the world. This last weekend changmian had a beach party. We throw at least one of these a year on a secluded beach on Cape Cod. This one ended up being possibly our best one yet. It was definitely our biggest yet, possibly our wildest even.

The night started at around 7pm when we all arrived at the beach and hung out while we waited for the sound and generator to arrive. Things finally got all set up and at around 10:30. I was actually up top helping with traffic some and keeping an eye on things. Which kept coming very close to getting out of control. The parking lot itself was filled up by probably around 11:30 and we had to park people along the road coming in. I finally made it down to the beach itself about 2 hours before I had to spin and got to see Dave West spin .

After him was Hugh Sharpe, who also spun a great set. And then, right during his last song, came the moment I always wait for. The sunrise. AND, that was the moment I went on. I spun probably one of my best sets. My mixes were fairly tight, but I think I did really well with the track selection. I hope to have the track listing posted by sometime later this week, with possibly a recording of the set.
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All in all, it looks like just about everyone had a good time. It took quite a bit to get everything cleaned up the next morning, but from the sound of it we did quite a good job with it all. I slept for about 14 hours afterwards and finally feel somewhat rested.

My next gig is on June 23rd, at Vapor. I’ll be spinning with Dave West and I think it will be quite an amazing night!

So this morning I’ve been doing some small updates to my web site. I redid my DJ page, changing the text of it and reorganizing it some. I also made my blog archive available. PHP was definitely useful in the archive project, since I made it so that my archives are wrapped in the look and feel of my site.

So this has been a fairly relaxing weekend so far. I went to a folk music festival yesterday at Club Passim in Harvard Square yesterday, and will probably be going back today also. It was very relaxing. I could feel myself slowly relaxing and the stress of the last week sliding away. I think it will help me to focus on the things to get done in the near future. I’ve also been catching up on all my unwatched DVDs. I seem to have too many of them.

I also feel another mix coming on, so I think tomorrow might be the day to work on that.

Testing from IE on the mac again…