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Sorry for the sparseness of posts lately, but there’s been a lot going on for me, personally and professionally. All will be revealed in due time. Before any rumors fester into fact: no, I’m not going to Google and Kelly is not pregnant.

Anyway, if you want to catch up with me it looks like I’ll be speding a good amount of time in “the city” (New York, natch) this summer. Here are a few places you can find me:

July 4th - Belle and Sebastian @ Battery Park

What a way to spend the 4th, if I can get tickets of course.

July 6th - Jeremy Keith on DOM Scripting and AJAX @ Digital Sandbox

Mr. Keith is making the trek across the pond to school us Yanks on how to work some DOM magic. This has all the makings of a great workshop… I’m really looking forward to it.

July 10-11 - An Event Apart @ Scandinavia House

An Event Apart had to expand to two days to accomodate all the talent: Zeldman, Meyer, Santa Maria, Vihn, Çelik, and now zefrank. If I wasn’t also on the bill, I’d still be going.

July 28 - Editors @ Irving Plaza

I missed the presale tix on this one, but I’m gonna keep an eye on eBay.

August 10 - RJD2 & Lyrics Born @ Pier 54

Two of my favorite hip-hop artists on one stage… and it’s free!

I have spent the last four months (at least) trying to rate the 16,000+ songs I have in iTunes at present and found it really annoying that I couldn’t provide a rating to podcasts from my iPod to get them out of my smart playlist of unrated material. Eventually, I stumbled upon this little trick to make it work (and perhaps someone else has already written on this—I didn’t bother looking). I have the 4G U2 Edition, but I assume this works on all clickwheel iPod varients (and possibly even the older models).

1. While listening to a podcast you want to rate, pause it;
2. Click to advance to the next track;
3. Provided that is a song (and not another podcast), click to the rating screen;
4. Quickly hit the back button until you are on the hidden rating screen for the podcast;
5. Provide your rating (quickly) and then hit pause again to resume playing the podcast (which will resume where you left off).

It’s a wierd little hack, but it works.

While waiting for a large Photoshop file to save today, I decided to play around on Technorati for a little bit. When doing a search for my name, I stumbled upon a music show called After the Polka, based down in Tampa, Florida. Apparently, in observence of Valentine’s Day, they decided to play “Composition for a Relationship,” a song I “wrote” during the height of my interest in experimental and avant garde music while attending New College, in neighboring Sarasota. The song can be found on the 1996 CD New College - A Compilation and, though I’m not really that enamoured of the track, it was nice to take a little trip down memory lane. If you’re interested, you can download an MP3 of the show.

Well, I’ve slowly begun the major task of selling off a lot of the CDs I own. At one point I had over 3,000 disks, but over the years I’d sold off quite a few and gotten it down to around 1,200 as of last year. Then began the major task of ripping them all to iTunes. 54 gigabytes later…

I sold off the majority of the pedestrian stuff to the local record shops, but I held on to the really good stuff to sell on Half.com and Amazon. This weekend, I made a solid dent in the list and was floored by how many CDs I have that are worth a bunch of money (being that they are out of print, imports, etc.). Some surprises:

• Shane MacGowan & The Popes - Rock and Roll Paddy EP was selling for $59.95-89.95;
• Sonic Youth (the self-titled EP on SST) was selling for $49.98-79.99;
• the original release of the Revenge of the Nerds soundtrack was selling for $89.99;
  
• The Chameleons UK - Strip was selling for $69.95; and
• The soundtrack to Psycho Beach Party was selling for nearly $50.

My Half.com shop is pretty packed with good stuff, most of which I kept pretty reasonable. My Amazon “z-Shop” has some interesting stuff in it as well (more of the import singles, etc.). For those interested in what’s out there:

• A slew of import singles from Ben Fold Five, Placebo, Portishead, Space and Skunk Anansie;
• some autographed disks from Goo Goo Dolls, Meat Beat Manifesto and Alec Empire (of Atari Teenage Riot); and
• assorted They Might Be Giants, Pixies, XTC, Komeda, and others.

There’s also a lot of miscellaneous exotica stuff like the Beat at Cinecitta CDs, Vampyros Lesbos, The Sound Gallery, etc. I love it all, but am trying to make room for a new office and need the shelf space.

If any of that is to your liking, enjoy, whether you buy from me or not. Also, I still have a lot of rare stuff I couldn’t find listings for on Half or Amazon. Do you know anywhere else I could look to sell them (apart form eBay… it takes way too long to list an item)?

I knew things had taken a turn for the worse when DMCA passed and media owners were discussing their desire to spy on consumers’ computers in search of illicit media, but who knew it had gotten this bad?