That being said, there was a lot of frustration in dealing with the crowds, the heat, the waiting, and all of the various forms of traveling it took just to get there. At times, it almost seemed like the whole trip could have been a huge mistake.

Yet when the evening headliners took the stage and played their sets, not only did I get my money’s worth, I got something greater than that. You see, all around us were several thousand teenagers and twentysomethings drinking crappy beers and smoking handrolled joints— all trying to mimic me, basking in the sensation in my head known as being naturally high. It was untouchable, my natural high was a sphere of solid metal charged with the electricity of a thunderstorm. It was something I had not felt in some time.

Sharing the natural high (since she was directly in front of me at every show) was the lovely Ms. S.Rod. Without her, the trip would have been incredibly lonely and not even a shred as fun. When asked for a comment about Lolla ’08, she said simply, “It was fricking awesome.”

As for all of the bands and what we saw them perform, there’s simply too much content for me to write about right now. Equally, there are several thousand other fans out there seeing the same shows who wrote reviews hours after everything that happened. Thus, let’s just list it as we saw it (in chronological order with the evening headliners bolded):

The Black Keys
Bloc Party
Radiohead
The Ting Tings
The Gutter Twins
Explosions In The Sky
Broken Social Scene
Wilco
The Octopus Project (partial set)
Wild Sweet Orange (partial set)
White Lies (partial set)
Office (partial set)
Tally Hall (partial set)
Newton Faulkner
Iron & Wine
Love & Rockets
Nine Inch Nails

While seeing seventeen bands over the span of two and a half days (because we played Chicago tourists on Friday AM), figure this: there were another thirteen bands or performers that we wanted to see, but could not because of conflicts. On each day, we tried different tactics of seeing bands, hence three bands on Friday, and nine on Sunday. But you have to accept at music festivals, there is just no way to have it all.

Ultimately, we scheduled our days around getting the spots we wanted for each of the headliners. It worked to our advantage because each of them played phenomenal shows. For NIN and Wilco, it was the best that we’d ever seen them play live.

If everything had worked perfectly this weekend with all of the lows I listed, perhaps we would not have appreciated the musical gifts we were graced with as much. So I will just smile, close my eyes, think of the music, cheering with S.Rod, and enjoying every moment of those natural highs. Cheers.

P.S. Photos and videos coming soon… but we’re very bad photographers, so I won’t promise much.

As the more casual fan of the Somrod duo when it comes to R.E.M., I was not disappointed in the least bit by last night’s show. It was high octane for most of the show, and I only sat down for 2 of the 27 songs (Houston and Let Me In). With such a vast catalog, R.E.M. could have played any of 70 some odd songs in their current cue, so I accepted that they didn’t play a few of my own personal favs (Circus Envy, Walk Unafraid, and Finest Worksong) nor did they engage my blind hope of debuting ‘Sing For The Submarine’ on this tour. But I walked away very satisfied with the experience. The fact that S.Rod was ecstatic made me happier, but I’ll leave her to talk about that.

Overall though, of the three R.E.M. shows I have seen (’03, ’04 and ’08—all @ MSG), this was the best in my opinion. The new material from Accelerate meshed well with the old classics, much better than when they were debuting the Around The Sun songs. I think that’s the thing that show how solid a new album is— not only do the songs sound great live, but they accent the rest of the catalog well. Cheers.

The dynamic duo that is Somrod provided song-by-song tracklist information throughout the 27-song performance. After the show, S.Rod was unable to contain her excitement enough to form complete sentences. The curmudgeonly humanitarian in me grudgingly has to admit every human being on earth deserves to feel that good at least once in their life. I’m hoping I’m even 1/10 as excited at the end of my first R.E.M. show in Atlanta tomorrow night. – Josh Hathaway; Confessions of A Fanboy

** S.Rod **

Last night’s show was incredibly fantastic it totally ROCKED! I’m very pleased at how well the new album translates live. I’m so sad that its over but I’m so happy that I was there to see and experience this show. The crowd was totally into it.

We had a great setlist even though I didn’t get everything I wanted. There was a frenetic energy that carried through each of the first 10 songs which plateaued with Houston. I’m not a big fan of the song Houston but it was good and its surprisingly short. The set kicked back in with Electrolite which was a fan favorite which Stipe dedicated to Modest Mouse. Mike Mills then took center stage for Rockville…OMG the place went nuts. Everyone was singing the chorus… Roooockvillllllllle! Awesome! Driver 8 into Harborcoat and then The One I Love. I did get to hear Until the Day Is Done… which was just beautiful and then right into an acoustic version of Let Me In which was very intimate. I have changed my mind about Horse To Water; it is great live. Pretty Persuasion; so cool. Right into Orange Crush which I was dying to hear. And closing with I’m Gonna DJ, which just rocked.

Encore: Supernatural Superserious, Losing My Religion, Begin The Begin, Fall On Me, closing with Man on The Moon.

Wow, what a concert! I can’t remember being this psyched to see concert in a long time. R.E.M. put on a phenomenal show. For those of our friends seeing them in Atlanta on Saturday: I hope you get every song on your dream setlist. And even if only get one YOU WILL NOT BE DISAPPOINTED.

I discovered the music of NIN as a sophomore in high school in 1991. A girl I was dating gave me a cassette copy of their first album Pretty Hate Machine, and I was immediately hooked. After 1992′s Broken was released, I have followed bandleader and production guru Trent Reznor’s career closely ever since. Sure, there have been a couple speed bumps along the way (i.e. songs like “The Perfect Drug” or “Deep”), but NIN’s hard edged soundscape has always appealed to me.

Outside of the multi-layered textures, pulsing synths, and arrogant guitar power chords that Reznor has woven through his work, I’ve also enjoyed his frequently aggressive and angst ridden lyrics and breathy vocal delivery. So when Reznor released Ghosts I-IV, an album comprised of 36 untitled instrumentals, I was not sure what to make of it at first. I knew I had enjoyed many previous NIN instrumentals like “The Mark Has Been Made” and “La Mer” from The Fragile, or “A Warm Place” from The Downward Spiral— but nearly two hours without a single vocal? It seemed like a recipe for disaster when mixed with an experimental release format via the web only.

Luckily, despite the NIN website crashing on the first day of release, Ghosts I-IV was considered a success by most critics and fans, despite not being as groundbreaking as some of his previous records. My belief on Ghosts is that Reznor didn’t want to chance releasing his “vocal-included” material in the event that this experiment was not as profitable as hoped. However, now that it has been, I expect that in the upcoming months, he will release an EP with vocal tracks. Of course, that is purely speculative from a longtime fan. Forgive my optimism.

More importantly, Reznor had a second experiment in mind for Ghosts outside of the release structure. NIN teamed up with YouTube to host a “film festival” where fans could submit their own visual representations of the music of Ghosts. The films will be reviewed by a team (including Trent) and the “exceptional” ones will be prominently displayed as a YouTube/NIN collaborative “film festival”. As Reznor states, “This isn’t a contest and you don’t win elaborate prizes – it’s meant to be an experiment in collaboration and a chance for us to interact beyond the typical one-way artist-to-fan relationship.” The YouTube page detailing all this can be found here.

Thus, while I am not able to create quality video or anime for the film festival, I did have an opinion that all of the tracks of Ghosts segment into two distinct mixes. Each mix sonically illustrates a character as listed below:

1. Ambicaspian: the musical portrait of a suburban woman who drowned in a lake while swimming alone. Her ghost forever trapped in the lake’s surroundings, she does everything within her powers to keep others from the same fate. No one has drowned there since.

Ambicaspian track listing:
02 Ghosts I
05 Ghosts I
30 Ghosts IV
28 Ghosts IV
25 Ghosts III
34 Ghosts IV
21 Ghosts III
36 Ghosts IV
18 Ghosts II
01 Ghosts I
17 Ghosts II
22 Ghosts III
13 Ghosts II
11 Ghosts II
09 Ghosts I
15 Ghosts II
06 Ghosts I

2. Geistfearian: the musical portrait of an urban man who was double-crossed and poisoned by his best friend and his wife, who were having an affair. His ghost forever trapped in the city, he roams the street, toppling scaffolding and breaking pipes in the ground. His pain is so severe that he can never rest.

Geistfearian track listing:
03 Ghosts I
24 Ghosts III
16 Ghosts II
26 Ghosts III
14 Ghosts II
29 Ghosts IV
07 Ghosts I
32 Ghosts IV
23 Ghosts III
27 Ghosts III
31 Ghosts IV
12 Ghosts II
20 Ghosts III
08 Ghosts I
33 Ghosts IV
19 Ghosts III
35 Ghosts IV
04 Ghosts I
10 Ghosts II

In closing, I can only hope that Nine Inch Nails continues to experiment with music and media, a trait not often found in an artist who has already spanned a generation. Cheers.

After dining on sandwiches and home-brewed lagers at the Heartland Brewery in Union Square, we made our way down to get in line. To our surprise, the bouncers divided out all of the Will-Call ticketholders, putting us only ten people down once the doors opened. We walked in, proceeded directly to the metal barrier that was three feet from the stage edge, and basked in our amazement. Sure, we had to wait another hour until the opening act, but the sacrifice to the concert gods would yield a shower of musical bliss later on.

Of course, depending on the band, first-row-center-stage could be a death wish for your eardrums if feedback is a heavy component. Luckily it wasn’t a part of Zero 7′s sonic arsenal. It also helped that the crowd was the age range of 20 to 30 — and we would not have to worry about being trampled by pre-pubescent teens.

For those not familiar with Zero 7— the downtempo and primarily electronic band is the brainchild of Brit musicians Henry Binns and Sam Hardaker. Since neither of these two are vocalists, they have employed a handful of singers over their 7 year and 3 album career, that has included Sia Furler, Mozez, Tina Dico, Sophie Barker, and José González.

Similar to the style that Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails employs, Zero 7 has a live band that reinterprets most of the electronic beats and riffs. Like Reznor, Binns and Hardaker play a major part of the onstage performance, each switching between pianos, synths, and percussion— most times in the middle of the songs! Throw in a drummer, bassist, guitarist, and additional keyboardist, and the stage had a lot of action going on.

Like their most recent album The Garden, the vocalists for the show were Sia Furler and Jose Gonzalez. The band maintained a very nice pace, switching between a cluster of Sia’s vocal tracks, then some of Jose’s. While Zero 7 is the marquee name, this show was also about celebrating the talents of these two vocalists.

Sia was absolutely magnetic— when you weren’t in awe of her vocal talents, you were enjoying her eclectic dancing, or her humorous commentary between songs. She even performed her solo breakthrough Breathe Me as an encore, a track most people might recall as the backdrop music during the finale of the HBO show Six Feet Under.

While Sia got to close up shop, Jose Gonzalez was the one to get things started. As the opening act, Gonzalez played an elegantly crafted acoustic set from his solo debut Veneer that yielded many cheers from the crowd. At times, he seemed embarrassed at all of the applause, an aspect that worked as a perfect compliment to the very outgoing Sia.

Whenever either of the vocalists was not singing, they hung out with a dancing and percussion playing Hardaker at a mini-bar at the back of the stage. I chuckled when I saw a roadie set a few bottles of rum and mixers on a back console before the show started. But it made sense if they were coming back onstage in a couple songs.

While I expected that the show would be 75% downtempo songs (others must have thought this as well, as the scent of burnt marijuana was omnipresent), the live band brought most of the songs to new and energetic levels. The group tore through new singles like You’re My Flame, Crosses and Throw It All Away, yet also treated the crowd with fan favorites like Destiny, Distractions, and Somersault.

Normally I have a head-nod going on to most live beats, yet I almost felt like during a couple songs, I was a few shades off of a head-bang. Yes, at a Zero 7 concert. No kidding. Whatever version of Seeing Things you may have heard pales in comparison to the live one. Such a moment impressed me even more about this band. Ms. S. Rod and I expected to walk out of the Zero 7 concert as if we were just at a relaxation seminar. Instead, we emerged invigorated and with even more respect for a talented band and vocalists than we had going in.

Like I said, sometimes you just get lucky. Cheers.

So enter GarageBand 2: The Missing Manual by David Pogue, which I began reading in hopes of salvaging my fractured skills. Suddenly, fifteen pages in, I heard my own voice from five months ago yelling at me, “You fool! Why didn’t you get this earlier?” In other words, I found that David Pogue had written a clear and concise guide that makes GarageBand accessible to both gurus and nimrods alike. For me, there were enough “Aha! So THAT’s how you do that!” moments in reading this, that if knowledge was a debt, I’d owe Pogue my first-born son.

Clocking in at 272 pages, with hundreds of full color screenshots, Pogue writes from the perspective that you are opening GarageBand as a blank slate: that if you don’t even know how to drag and drop a file to a window, he lists that. But don’t believe for a second that GB2:TMM is a dull instruction manual— it’s filled with quips on music, the computer industry and even GB itself. Pogue does not shy away from pointing out anything that might confuse the mere novice, or conflict a trained musician’s knowledge. While Pogue keeps an optimistic outlook on your GB potential, he remains honest to the reader. “GarageBand 2 may be simple,” he says, “but it isn’t simplistic.”

Aside from explaining the true nature of Apple Loops, recording both live and MIDI instruments, and then editing and enhancing the collective lot, Pogue seasons each section with quick tips, FAQ’s, troubleshooting, and of course, every possible keyboard shortcut. After you have followed every lesson on composing your own soundtrack, there’s a chapter on how and where to publish your finished work.

My lone negative on the book is that since I don’t play an instrument or have a music background, I am not able to utilize a few of the instructional sections in GB2:TMM. But that’s no fault of the author. This is all part of making the manual more universal. Nevertheless, for music neophytes like me, Pogue has included a “Music Crash Course” on grasping the basics, as well as sections on reading notation and tuning your instrument with GB.

On the whole, David Pogue’s writing reminds me of a good teacher from high school: one who was not only genuinely committed to you learning the material, but enjoyed it themselves. I believe that comes through in his writing. Combined with the infinite possibilities and practical interface of GarageBand, I’ve found a book that will never be more than an arm’s length away from my computer setup.

If you’re an aspiring musician, podcaster, or just looking to try something new, GarageBand and David Pogue’s Missing Manual are an affordable and fun combination that can make things happen.

While traveling on my honeymoon this month, I had the ‘good‘ fortune of experiencing three of the four forms of motion sickness and emerged unscathed. Okay, perhaps the memory remains, but the nausea did not humble me like a college freshman’s first keg stand. The ‘good‘ element to it was I had a small window of time to compare them directly. Your grandma told you knowledge comes from mysterious teachers, and she wasn’t lying.

For those who don’t travel much (which included me until this month), here’s some trivia to bubble the acid in your gut. As defined by Wikipedia, motion sickness is “a condition in which the endolymph (the fluid found in the semicircular canals of the inner ears) becomes ‘stirred up’, causing confusion between the difference between apparent perceived movement (none or very little), and actual movement.” Take a deep breath now, that was the bad part.

Motion sickness occurs while traveling via sea, air, car, or in outer space. Since I can only assume that my marriage upset the gods, I experienced the first three forms to a degree that I never had before. (As for the fourth, NASA has yet to return my calls). Most of the air and sea motion on my trip was due to the outer effects of Tropical Storm Gamma, which was passing through at the time. See the diagram below that compares my travel path to Gamma’s.

Since I have stomach ailments while on solid ground, such a trip appeared to be a gastrointestinal death wish for me. But I planned ahead and packed a Ziploc sandwich bag of remedies like Johnny Depp’s suitcase from ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas‘. It contained the pill form of Pepto Bismol, Rolaids, Ginger extract, digestive enzyme supplements, and of course Dramamine. Lots of pretty colored tabs that luckily raised no eyebrows from U.S. Customs.

Here was my week of motion sickness:

(1) AIR – I traveled from New York to Tampa (and back) via plane. The ride down was fine (apart from the fact that I ingested a pound of strawberries, whipped cream, and champagne the night before). But the return trip was a little rough leaving Tampa. The turbulence began as ‘choppy’—small bumps that made the plane appear to rumble— and escalated to ‘wavy’, where the plane seems to bounce in a huge arc causing the sensation that most of your major organs migrated to the bottom of your throat. In my opinion, air motion sickness is more about fear, since I’ve seen one too many dramatizations (LOST, Fight Club, etc.), and is usually able to be overcome mentally.
- – - I give it a Nausea-O-Meter rating of 7 of 10.

(2) SEA – Part A – After arriving in Tampa, we boarded our cruise ship for a loop of excursions around the West Caribbean (as shown above). The waters were most choppy at Grand Cayman, and near Costa Maya. Overall, the motion was not too bad when you were doing something active. But anytime we were still (either dining or lying in bed), we had the sensation of a buoy, bobbing from side to side in rhythm to the ocean. I didn’t think this motion was as unexpected or jarring as air turbulence, but it was more about the repetition just gnawing at you. Like Chinese water torture. But there are lots of remedies to combat this annoyance (see the link at the bottom).
- – - I give it a Nausea-O-Meter rating of 6 of 10.

SEA – Part B – Just when we thought we had the ocean under control, my wife and I boarded a tender going from our cruise ship to Playa Del Carmen, Mexico. While the cruise ship was steady in its motion, this boat was like an amusement park ride that had a couple bolts missing from the stabilizers. The motion was a combination of the unexpectedness of the air turbulence ‘wave’ combined with the sway of the sea. The dozens of people around me all had the same thought balloon of strangling the captain— that is, when we weren’t having Dorothy’s heel-clicking “There’s no place like home” moment.
- – - I give it a Nausea-O-Meter rating of 9 of 10.

(3) CAR – While traveling to an off-boat excursion in Belize, my wife and I boarded an old school Blue Bird bus (similar to one I used to take to grade school). Despite the tour guide’s boast that the driver had a Ph.D. (a Doctorate in Pothole Driving), driving 15-30 mph down a dirt road near a rainforest is not kind to the morning’s extra serving of bacon. Nevertheless, it paled in comparison to the plane and boats.
- – - I give it a Nausea-O-Meter rating of 5 of 10.

- – - – - – - – - -
In summary, apart from our cruise ship being unable to dock at Costa Maya (which happened to be our designated ‘beach laziness’ day), the weather and subsequent motion sickness did not affect our honeymoon too much. We swam with sting rays, saw Mayan ruins, and got to zipline James Bond style down a mountainside— so we won’t complain.

As always, experiences vary—as I’m sure some cruises and flights are motion sickness free, while others were much worse than ours. But just in case, I recommend doing some light research and preparation before your trip. For some treatments and remedies, check out WedMD’s page on motion sickness. You might just keep your lunch too. Happy traveling!

- – - – - – - – - –
While the charcoals of my frustration have cooled since then, I now had in engage in damage control for the ticket. The fees were begrudgingly paid via credit card, so all that remained were those two points on my license. As most of you know, insurance companies aren’t too fond of points, and will hike up your rates or even drop your coverage at their holy discretion. Indeed, I had no wish to see if the gecko could be a poison spitting serpent.

So I went in search of a defensive driving class to reduce my points and insurance. I was lucky enough to find one about half a mile away. On a nice day like last Sunday, I could walk there. Such a thing could come in handy if I get caught in another speed trap or two. But let me knock on wood for that thought.

Anyway, I had been to a defensive driving class twice before, in 1999 and 2002. Both times, it was for the 10% discount. In your twenties, 10% is usually a nice chunk of change over a three-year span (which is how long the DD class is good for). So this would be the first time I actually had to use the point reduction option.

When you attend a DD class, you’ll quickly learn that it is not offered by the Department of Motor Vehicles, but through an independent contractor or driving school. The contractor then mails your proof of attendance in to the DMV, who will confirm your reductions in a few weeks.

In my three experiences, the classes all consisted of three identical elements: handouts, videos, and discussion.

The handout is half workbook/half factsheet. It’s filled with DMV statistics, common sense advice, and recommendations on avoiding road rage, cell phone use, etc. Are there any kind of magic factoids, where you leave and can suddenly drive like the car chase from Ronin or French Connection ? No. But it is a good refresher of everything you skimmed over when getting ready to take your driver’s test at 17.

The videos are usually either a recording of a TV story from 20/20 or PrimeTime Live, or a cheesy made-for-driving school short. The recording I saw had Sam Donaldson traveling with Delaware state troopers in an undercover car, then interviewing the violators the trooper pulled over. The short was actually an instructional video geared towards teens, which the driving school was getting double mileage from. But the basic information was there.

The discussion was as expected: a room full of people who don’t really want to be there, but will participate for the sake of getting their discounts. We shared traffic stories, discussed our own driving weaknesses, and reviewed ways to compensate for bad conditions (including mental ones). Feel free to talk about anything that bothers you about our traffic system to the instructor. That’s why they are there.

All of the instructors I’ve had were ‘gruff laymen’, for lack of a better description. I’m sure they were certified, but it’s not like they had a Master’s of DMV. My feeling was that the course itself is such a cookiecutter format, that almost anyone could assemble and conduct a class. I noticed that all of the materials come prepared by yet another contractor. All three of mine were done by the NTSI.

The driving school charged $50 for a six-hour course, which may vary by state. With an average of 16 people between all of the classes I’ve been at, that’s $800 a class. Offer two classes a week for a year and the gross earnings are $83,200. While I’m sure there are fees and tests to be an instructor, that’s still a nice pull. At least it is in my starving artist handbook.

- – - – - – - – - -
Before you go to a defensive driving class for a violation, here’s some tips:
- Bring a pen, because you’ll have forms to fill out. Those 3-inch pencils that they have on hand never cut it.
- Get there on time. A guy came in 30 minutes late to my class, and got turned away. Read the fine print on your class registration too. Some places might not give you a full refund if you have to come back.
- If it’s for a DWI-related violation, the DD course will not help you. DWI has its own special course. Check with your state DMV.
- If you got your ticket in another state, double check whether your state DMV counts points from an out-of-state violation. I learned while researching this post that my state does not. Ironic to my plight, since I got caught only three miles from the state border. But you might fare better.

In conclusion, the defensive driving class was a positive experience. While some of the material is tedious and boring, the refresher of getting those traffic reminders back in your head is golden. Besides that, figure out how much 10% off of your annual insurance fees would be. You’ll find that fifty bucks and six hours is not only a worthy sacrifice, but also a good cleanser of any previous guilt.

Read all about it here, and be sure that no matter what— promise me— you keep reading the review past the first paragraph.

Sith, in my mind, was meant to do three main things: explain what it takes for Anakin to become Vader, show how all of the mighty Jedi get killed, and bridge the gap to the original trilogy. For those goals, I think Sith succeeded. While I knew 98% percent of what would happen because I read a trite too many spoilers, Sith still gets the job done in explanation for the common folk.

With Lucas writing and directing the film, you cannot go into a Star Wars movie expecting Shakespearean lines of poetry and grace from the dialogue. It just won’t happen. The guy constructed an elaborate and imaginative sci-fi universe, that is his calling card. Most reviewers expect too much out of his movies, that they’ll somehow miraculously have a grand emotional depth that was missing before. I do wish, however, that Lucas could have gotten away from recycling some of the classic lines like he did in Episode I & II. But he didn’t, and those lines often felt like a square peg being forced into a circular hole. Oh well.

On the other hand, if you go into Sith expecting crazy space battle scenes, mindblowing lightsaber duels, and awesome digital characters, then you shall be rewarded. General Grievous, Yoda and R2D2 (when he flies) are totally CGI, yet probably give some of the best performances of the film. There were even a few sequences when everyone in the crowd started clapping after something happened, which is always a positive.

Overall, knowing Lucas is too old to compose Episodes 7 through 9, and too egotistical to hand them off, Revenge of the Sith will be the last of the Star Wars movies that I’ll probably see in my lifetime. But that’s okay. It’s been a great ride growing up with the original trilogy, and then defining my twenties with the prequels. Sith is a worthy closure to the whole cinematic space opera, and a good movie to catch this summer for the sheer value of eyecandy.

Luckily, after waiting patiently, my OS X Tiger CDs (5 total) arrived in the mail yesterday via the Apple Media Exchange. All in all, it cost me $10 extra and 10 extra days from my original purchase.

Moving on, I’ve been a Mac user since 1991, so I’ve seen the various upgrades over the years and OSX is, obviously, the most substantial of them all. While it took a couple of years to get every program converted over from Classic mode, the positives have steadily increased.

While this 4th ‘level’ of OS X has made some moderate improvement on its predecessors, it depends from what version you are upgrading from on how drastic your changes will be.

I installed OS X Tiger on a single processor 733 mhz G4 (Quicksilver) with 1GB of RAM, which falls processor-wise in the middle of the requirements Apple recommends. Installation from CD’s took 50 minutes to do the Easy Install. Set-up from there took about 5 minutes.

When I restarted my Mac, I was pleased to see that everything looked exactly the same. Tiger had, as promised, retained all of my previous settings. In fact, it looked exactly like v10.3 Panther.

But as I explored the landscape, I started finding the changes, so let’s move on to the highlighted features of the OS X Tiger update:

1. Spotlight (the upgraded Find option) Depending on the size your HD, Spotlight has to index your drive first before it can work. Understandable. I have a 40 GB primary drive, and an 80 GB slave drive. Indexing took 2 hours. Once it was finished though, Spotlight is a great improvement from the previous version. It is very Google-like in efficiency… going as far as finding a single word in a 300 page Word doc I wrote 2 years ago.

2. Dashboard (the collection of Widgets) If you’re a Classic Mac person, you’ll recall that a bunch of little applications used to live in the Apple menu in the upper right corner. When OSX came along, Apple got rid of that. Dashboard, however, is that classic Apple menu with OSX sensibilities. With a click, all of the widgets launch instantaneously on your screen. Address Book, Dictionary, Thesaurus, Live Weather for your zip, Calculator, and it goes on. Download many other free widgets online… which makes this a valuable tool.

3. Safari RSS – I’ve been alternating between Safari and Firefox for web usage over the past 6 months, and this version of Safari has fixed a few bugs. At least, so far. But nothing drastically changed.

4. iChat AV – Unless you have a digicam (which I don’t), this update is no different from the previous version.

5. Automator – Setting this up is a rainy day project. Automating tasks is nothing new, but is quite useful. It’s just the matter of stopping your life and setting up the tasks.

6. Quicktime 7 – I played a few MPEG’s and the options have improved from v6.5. Definitely a better media player than Windows Media or RealPlayer.

OVERALL: I liked the upgrades that OS X Tiger provided, but whether or not it’s worth the $129 price tag depends on where you’re coming from:

- If you are currently on OS X v10.2 or lower, I recommend upgrading to Tiger, because it will definitely increase your productivity and ease of usage.

- If you are currently on OS X v10.3 (Panther), you can probably hold off on upgrading until Apple cuts the price down a bit, or if you require it to run a vital program.

But times change, and like cell phones or PDA’s before them, I now see the iPod in the hands of people everywhere when I walk the streets of Manhattan, or on the train. But like their technogadget predecessors, new users often are missing some unwritten rules of public iPod usage. So, here’s a few tips:

1. You leave your iPod sitting on your work desk, in your cubicle, or in your car. While this may be what you used to do with your old Walkman, you have to remember you paid 5x as much for this. RULE: If the white case was personified, it would say “Steal Me!” Now that every thief in the country knows how much an iPod is worth and there’s no way to trace your iPod, be sure to keep it concealed as much as possible.

2. You keep your iPod concealed, but your white earphones are a dead giveaway that you have one. RULE: Ditch the factory issued phones, and pick up a black or color pair that could go with another music device. In addition, most other earphones sound a lot better anyway.

3. Just because the in-ear phones are IN your ears does not mean people around you cannot hear your music. RULE: Turn it down when you’re in close quarters with others in public, like a train vestibule, elevator, or waiting in line in a store or restaurant.

4. You have your music playing, but you’re spinning the iPod wheel through some alternate selections. By default, the iPod is set to make a clicking noise while you browse, which again is heard by all around you. RULE: Remember to set the Clicker to ‘Off’ or ‘Headphones’.

5. Your iPod crashes or the battery dies. But the place you bought it from tells you that you’re not under warranty. RULE: If you’re still able to do so, make sure to get the Apple Insurance for your iPod before an accident happens. It may seem like a waste at $60, but trust me— this is a godsend if it breaks down.

If anyone else has some tips for new users, please add them. Until then, happy listening.

The thing that made the meal bloggable was that live jazz was playing while we ate. Well, that and I like to imagine the giant crab sculpture they have perched over the door would come alive every night at midnight and dance around like the chickens from the Peter Gabriel Sledgehammer video.

Alas, this is really a mental note to myself, but I truly enjoyed the idea of having brunch to live music… and recommend it to others (just don’t sit too close or otherwise you cannot have a well-heard conversation.) It’s nice to think that when I melt out of bed on a Sunday morning, I could throw on the robe and slippers and have a bowl of Jazzy Brunch Crunch. Or something closely resembling that. You get the point. Peace.