Web: Desktop Zen

I followed the instructions on AJ's Blog to achieve "Desktop Zen" by ditching all of the icons from my Windows XP desktop. They're still accessible from an organized taskbar menu rather than all over the place.

Next I grabbed an ocean view photo from my Flickr favorites to use as the wallpaper (click through to the photo page and then select "All Sizes" to get the large version). Now it is nice and calm.

[via Digg]

Category: Web

Music: My Music Podcast Selections

When I chose an iPod over a new Archos MP3 player, it was for the user interface and small size. I had no idea that podcasts were going to consume so much of my use of the player. It has been a welcome surprise. While most of the podcasts I follow are technology or Lost related, below are the free music podcasts to which I subscribe.

If you'd like to try one out, drag and drop the "subscribe" link to your iTunes podcast page or right-click and copy the "subscribe" URL to use Protein's instructions. If you don't use iTunes, you could subscribe by adding the URL to your Netvibes homepage ("Add Content" and then "Add My Feed") to listen through their slick browser-based player.

illJazz Podcast: subscribe or visit the website, which describes this great one as "a podcast providing you with soulful sounds from the past and present. It's all about funk, breaks, old school hip hop, afro beat, disco, and house." Episode #2 is my favorite, featuring some great old school hip hop.

Solid Steel Podcast: subscribe or visit the website. As I've posted about before, I'm a big fan of the Solid Steel radio show. This podcast is a thiry minute excerpt of the weekly show. Great stuff.

DJ Connor Podcast: subscribe or visit the website. DJ Connor has "eclectic musical tastes, including hiphop, electronic, house, dnb, techno, trance, breakbeat, and triphop." I found this one on Podzinger when I was searching for podcasts with DJ Shadow tracks.

Coldcut Podcast: subscribe or visit the website. I've followed these guys since I heard the "Seven Minutes of Madness" remix of Eric B & Rakim's "Paid In Full" in the late 1980s and they're still kickin'.

Pete Tong Tongcast: subscribe or visit the website. Pete Tong is a long time club DJ throwing down the techno and trance (or whatever the kids call it these days).

Protein Podcast: subscribe or visit the website. They say their podcast "takes you on a musical mystery tour that travels the entire sonic spectrum. Soulwax to Snoop Dogg, Daft Punk to DJ Shadow." My favorite episode is the Andy Compton mix, "Floppy Disco '05."

Category: Music

Misc: Redefining Adulthood

There is a brilliant article in New York Magazine titled Up With Grups that put into words something that was becoming more and more apparent to me:

He owns eleven pairs of sneakers, hasn’t worn anything but jeans in a year, and won’t shut up about the latest Death Cab for Cutie CD. But he is no kid. He is among the ascendant breed of grown-up who has redefined adulthood as we once knew it and killed off the generation gap.

I'm in my mid-thirties and was recently wearing a pair of Vans, khaki-camo cargo shorts, and a Threadless t-shirt thinking I'm certainly not the only one resisting the traditional definition of growing up. The clothes, the music, the state of mind: I have no intention of moving on to more mature things.

On the flip side, it is somewhat off-putting that my natural inclination has now been summarized into a stereotype for news anchors to toss around on the local morning show.

[New York Magazine article via Design Observer]

Music: Remembering Pretty Hate Machine

I remember the first time I heard the Nine Inch Nails track "Down In It" from the album Pretty Hate Machine. The year was 1989 and I was in the DJ booth of a club called Rick's Place. DJ Eric 7 was kind enough to let me drop a blank cassette tape in the deck to record his set that night. The club was on the edge of the UNT campus in Denton, Texas along with other hangouts like the Flying Tomato and Otays (where Mike Cina and Jason Douglas used to spin).

After Rick's that night, my future wife and I stopped at a fast food place whose name inspired us to call the new tape Whatabeat. A few months later we saw Nine Inch Nails perform live when they opened for Jesus and the Mary Chain at the Arcadia Theater. I still love the NIN album Pretty Hate Machine more than fifteen years later, not that nostalgia colors my opinion at all.

Category: Music

Art: James Dalglish

Leslie Stuart Curtis reviews James Dalglish: Infinite Harvest:

Dalglish has found a number of reasons to be happy about painting -- mark-making, spontaneity and even the critical dialogue that once centered around such activities. This work forms a nexus between continuation of tradition and a glimpse at what painting might be like in the next millennium. John Ash once said that Dalglish might be seen as one of 'the last of the heroic American abstractionists' or, alternatively, 'the first of an entirely new mystico-televisual breed.'

Category: Art