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…

First off, I’m testing out my new machine that I moved my web page to. I think it should be working pretty seamlessly.

Next, if you would like to be added to my lung announcement list, you can subscribe to it by sending a blank email to glung-subscribe@yahoogroups.com. I’ll then approve your request and you’ll be on the list. Until I get my transplant I will probably be posting there once in a great while. Once I get the transplant I hope that my parents can take over posting for me on a regular basis until I have a computer all set up to do it from the hospital.

Things are still kind of quiet right now. I’m taking this weekend to really resettle myself. I’m still a bit unnerved by everything that’s been going on, but I’m determined not to let it beat me.

That’s all for today I think.

This has certainly been the week from hell. I’ve had a lot of stress recently concerning my lung transplant.

Tuesday night, after a long 13 hour day, I got a phone call that they had a lung and I was the backup to receive it. They didn’t want me to come down to the hospital though, they wanted me to wait at home till I heard something. Honestly, My immeadiate response was, “wow! It is really happening.” The problem was, I had to wait. And as I waited I got more freaked out. I called my parents right away and told them I might be going in. I then called my friend Emily and talked to her for a bit. As time went on I found myself getting more and more emotional, agitated, scared. Especially scared. Time passed. It was three am now, I was talking to some friends online about it. I tried to spin records for a while. All the while just getting more freaked out about the whole thing. By the time they called back at 5am I was a wreck. I have no idea how I must have sounded to the doctor on the other end, but I felt like I had just lost touch with everything around me. I’d never felt so terrified and alone.

Needless to say, I told them I couldn’t do it. In case folks out there don’t know, this is something they DO NOT like you to do. So it was a VERY big deal for me to do this. I’m still very torn about it and have a hard time talking about it. What this whole situation did do for me is to really make me think about things to do with my transplant. First off. I can’t do this alone. I usually have a hard time admitting to myself that I need help. But this made me realize how much I do need it. I should have been on the phone with friends and had someone come over and be with me, to keep me calm. Because that is what did me in. If they had called at midnight and said “come on down” I would have been out of the house as soon as a cab could arrive at my house. On the other hand, I think there are parts of me that still haven’t fully accepted this. When I look back it is all still very overwhelming. It was under a year ago that my doctor even suggested that I needed to have a transplant (or maybe just about a year ago). And now, just a few months after being listed I come up. Honestly, I thought I had a longer wait. That really shouldn’t make a difference, but I think it just all added to the unrealness of it in my head.

There is another issue too. My life keeps changing and right now the thought of putting it on hold scares me. So much has changed in my situation since I got on the list. I have my own team at work now. I’m running the IT group, and even the role of my department is growing. I have more responsibilities and I feel like I am doing a really good job with the job (and the feedback I’ve been getting seems to agree with this). My DJing is taking off. I feel like I’m getting better and better. I’ve gotten a lot of good feedback on my CD which seems to indicate I’ve made tons of progress (and still have more). So, all of a sudden, I have started to realize that the thought of putting all that on hold scares me. Back when I was first going through the transplant stuff, none of this was an issue.

So, I have a lot to think about, and quickly. I am currently inactive on the transplant list, which means they won’t call me if there is a match. I need to really assure myself in my head that this is what I want. And also I need to not let myself get the better of me. Ask for help from friends. Learn as much as I can from this. I was very suprised at my reaction to the whole thing. I truely believed that I would be able to handle it.

So that’s where I am right now. Kind of in a state of limbo. I’m waiting to hear back from my social worker. And writing this. My hope is that writing all this down will help to let me get out all the icky stuff in my head surrounding this so that I can talk about it a little bit better and work towards focusing on what is important, getting healthy again.

Ugs,
Nothing ruins a weekend more then waking up at 2am to your pager going off. Thank god I’m only on call once every 4 weeks. On the plus side, I didn’t get any pages between Thursday night and then, so I guess that is a good thing.

I’ve been getting really really good reviews on my latest mix. Which has definitely helped to put me in a great mood. I kind of went whole hog this time around and made CD labels and covers for the whole thing. I also found these great blank CDs that are black (like PSX discs). I’m psyched that I found them because I figure I’ll be one of the first people who puts out a demo with them. Also, I like how you have a CDR that doesn’t look like one (it doesn’t have that greenish blue color on the bottom).

Also, once again, the power of music blows me away. On my drive in this morning I was listening to this new CD which was just rocking my world. It’s the new Global Underground nubreed CD. This time around mixed by Sander Kleinenberg, one of my favorite producers. It’s amazing. I was on my way in this morning, in a crappy mood, and suddenly there was this groovy track playing and I was hooked, bopping around in my car. Thank god there aren’t that many people on the road at that hour or I would have gotten some pretty weird looks. But it just completely picked me up, so that even though I’m exhausted, I’m smiling.