Treasure Island Music Festival

Along with about 10,000 other people, I went to the inaugural Treasure Island Music Festival this weekend. I only went on Saturday for the (mostly) electronica day. We got there towards the beginning of the M.I.A. set, which ended up being a lot cooler than I thought it’d be. I had her first album, and given how produced it was I wasn’t sure how her live show would be, but it was pretty good.

After M.I.A. was the DJ Shadow/Cut Chemist doing 8 turntables and 4 mixers for their “Hard Sell” album. Pretty cool to see. I haven’t seen Cut Chemist since last I saw Jurassic 5 and I expected something quite a bit more hip-hop-y, but the set was a lot more of old school funk and other stuff that I hardly recognized.

Gotan Project (a group until Saturday I’d never heard of before) was nothing short of astounding. Tango + electronica + breaks. It was phenomenal. They came on stage with a full orchestra, including an accordionist, DJs, strings, horns, etc. I’ve been listening to their two CDs all morning. They had great stage presence as well.

The headliner was Thievery Corporation. I only had The Cosmic Game, and based on that I expected a super down tempo set. Au contraire, they delivered an jamming, rocking, hard hitting show with three or four singers, drums, DJs, and sitar in tow. I still think Gotan stole the show but the Thievery set was a lot more fun to listen to than I’d expected.

Goodbye meebo, Hello Pidgin

For all accounts except for Windows Live Messenger, I’ve been using meebo as my primary IM client. It was convenient, useful and generally pretty fast, especially when I switched over to using Firefox as my primary browser. While generally a good product, my computer started to bog down with Firefox eating 500+ megs of memory regularly. Running Facebook, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, and meebo all at the same time just made Firefox consume resources like there was no end in sight, and meebo was the primary consumer (as far as I could tell).

Thus last night, I downloaded and installed Pidgin (aka GAIM). It’s the first time I’ve given this open source IM client a try since 2000, when it destroyed my AIM buddy last (I have yet to find all the screennames I lost from that fiasco). Now, seven years later, the product is pretty amazing. It works with all the major IM services (I’m connecting to Yahoo, Windows Live, Google, and AIM), the UI is clean and unobtrusive, it supports features like file transfer, status updates and email notifications and best of all, it’s fast and light (only 17 megs of memory consumed).

While I love some Web 2.0 replacements for my desktop applications (e.g. Yahoo Mail and Windows Live Mail vs Outlook/Thunderbird), I think they have a way to go until they reach the level that I don’t get frustrated. In this instance, the desktop application is quicker, faster, and lighter than the web app. Until the web apps bridge that void I think desktop apps have a long life yet.

New Music: Common and Talib Kweli

Over the weekend I picked up two new albums: Common’s Finding Forever and and Talib Kweli’s Ear Drum. Finding Forever feels like a lot of the same stuff I loved from Be, and overall it continues to hold strong on Common’s delivery plus Kanye West’s beats. There’s a lot of sampling going on that flows together well, much like some old Jurassic 5. This album is the one I’ve got on repeat in the car.

The Talib album disappoints though. I don’t feel like I’ve gotten in to any Talib albums ever since Quality. The Beautiful Struggle had some great tracks on it (Black Girl Pain stands out), but Ear Drum seems to be in the same vein. I love the track with Jean Grae, but I still compare all of his work to Quality and Black Star, which is why I think I’ll probably never be impressed with what comes next.

Beijing Olympics 2008

I’m going! Brian and I have been coordinating getting tickets to the games in 2008. We both qualified for the early list of purchasers since we have (well, I had) resident permits. Today he got the email saying we’ve been selected with our list of ticket matches after we’d put our picks in three months ago.

We’ve been matched to go to Tennis, Basketball, Football/Soccer (not sure if we’ll make this one, since it’s in Shanghai and not Beijing), Athletics, Triathlon, and Beach Volleyball the week of Aug 18, 2008. How cool is that?!

Four Years at Microsoft

I just noticed that my four year anniversary at Microsoft happened over the weekend. I’m amazed how fast the time has gone by. It seems like just yesterday I was moving up from Southern California to my place in Sunnyvale, then moving up later to SF, then to China, and then back to SF. It’s been a good four years here and Microsoft has given me quite a bit in that time (crazy cool opportunities to work on cutting edge technology, travel to Helsinki, London, Tokyo, Macau, a chance to live in Shanghai). Now, it’s on to seeing what this next year will bring (I’m not dropping any hints, but we’ve got some cool new stuff coming out soon).

Earthquake in Oakland

Last Friday there was a 4.2 earthquake around 4am. I felt the rumbling in SF, and it kept me awake for the rest of the morning. It’s not like I havn’t been in my fair share of earthquakes (Loma Prieta, Northridge, etc), but it’d been a while for me and I’d almost forgotten that SF is prime earthquake territory. Things to remember about being back in California.

Facebook News Feed

I love the new feed. I heart it, with a lot of hearts. It solves a lot of problems in social networks, including problems I didn’t know existed before. But I’m frustrated with it. Why? Well, it shows me a lot of information from friends I don’t really care about (sorry guys). I know they filter stuff semi-intelligently but it seems like it doesn’t chose which friends to show more about super well.

The other, and more frustrating issue, is that things appear out of order on the feed and at random times. First example, status updates. On the right bar where the little status bar module is, I have to look there to see what my friends are statusing, since the news feed doesn’t always show them. Second example, if two friends are having a wall conversation I’ve seen it more than once put the older one higher in the feed than the old one and the conversation becomes unparsable.

The feed is incredibly useful. I just wish it made the leap to become indispensable.

Kwik-E Mart in Mountain View

The 7-11 near the office (on Pear Street) became a Kwik-E Mart today. It seems it’s the only one in the area, and it’s without a doubt one of the coolest movie promos ever. They had people in Apu’s uniform behind the counter, Radioactive Man comics for sale, Buzz Cola, crazy pink donughts, hilarous signs saying “Buy 3 for the price of 3!”and Squishes. We bought a case of Buzz Cola and some donughts back to the office after lunch, and they were gone within minutes.

Nintendo Wii and 50 Inch Plasmas

We played Wii over at my friend’s place last night, who had just bought a 50″ Samsung plasma TV. The Wii only sends out 480i/p, which really shows up as a problem when it’s on a 16:9 ratio at 50″. There’s a setting on the Wii that enables a widescreen mode so that it compensates for the 4:3 to 16:9 change, but it only helped marginally. We were playing with old school cables (not component) which made it force to 480i. Hopefully if played with 480p it’d be a lot better, but it’s still only in the 480 range. The modern games were a lot less fun to play with the poor video quality, so we ended up playing a lot of Street Fighter II.

Hybrid Muni Buses

The last few days I’ve seen new Muni buses that have “Hybrid Bus” signage on them. I’ve seen them mostly at the Caltrain station, which makes sense as they’re running on the 10-Townsend line currently. At half a million a pop, I wonder how much they save in terms of gas. They also skirt very close to the ground, which is pretty cool since it seems they’d be easy to enter versus the standard Muni buses (which let out the typical hiss as they lower at stops).