here’s an mp3 of wataru uchida, scott schaeffer and myself playing “bye bye blackbird” at the end of our gig at room 18 this tuesday. recorded with my new zoom H2 recorder, which records wavs or mp3s. we are playing at room 18 every tuesday from 9pm-12, so swing on by if you’re in the neighborhood!

I just found out the patent I got is no longer pending. although the idea is nothing groundbreaking, it’s pretty cool to have it on the books.

having lived in brooklyn for 7 years and trained for 2 marathons here, you would think I would have figured out the optimal time to run around outdoors in brooklyn. until 6 months ago, I used to go right after I got home from work (6:30-7ish), which is right when everyone and their mother is walking the dog, jogging, watching the sunset, driving somewhere, etc. a great time of day for sure, especially if you are lucky enough to be watching the sunset from the promenade, but not the best time for running unless you like running into people and almost getting hit by cars.

many runners swear by the morning, which I agree is a great time to run if you are not a fundamentally morning challenged person, as I am.

I submit that the best time to run around brooklyn is past 11pm. there is a whole different sort of quiet after 10 or so, when most of the shops are closed and most people are making their way towards the bed. I am putting in more miles in this calm, cool early autumn weather than I ever have before, and it’s almost purely out of enjoying the surroundings instead of worrying about all the things you have to worry about when you are running on the street in the city.

so sarah cox’s very cool food blog, a saturday trip to the greenmarket, and the passing of another monday inspired me to make and write about a nice dinner yesterday. the raw goods, from the borough hall green market:

heirloom tomato and arugula salad, dressed with blood orange/avocado oil and sea salt:

a thai red vegetable curry with basmati rice. vegetables involved are chocolate bell peppers, zucchini, onion, eggplant, and garlic. sauteed in a little oil, briefly simmered with coconut milk and thai red curry paste, finished with black sea salt. this was good, but could have used a few chilis!

berry cakes topped with greek yogurt. the cakes were kind of dry, but the berries and greek yogurt was very good:

here’s a transcription I just did of pete bernstein’s solo on “who can I turn to?” from his criss cross record “earth tones”. you can also listen here, but if you don’t have the cd you should pick it up, it’s awesome.

pete double times a fair amount in this solo, which is not something he often does. also, pete rarely uses his left hand pinky and moves along the fretboard vertically for a lot of his lines. the A diminished walk up and the A augmented licks are both classic pete.

I used to use osx at my day job, but at my new job most everyone drinks the MS kool aid. I try to keep an open mind and figured it wouldn’t be that big of a deal, windows isn’t so bad and everyone uses it, etc. now, after spending a month on the dark side, a few thoughts:

1) I really miss expose. I used it constantly, it is by far the best screen switching tool I have ever used. I still hit F9 on my keyboard, and cry a little inside when nothing happens. if anyone out there can recommend a similar utility for windows I will love you forever.

2) outlook is infinitely better than mail.app. I used to think mail.app was pretty nice, and it’s fine for personal use, but oh man does outlook destroy it in terms of everything else.

3) I really miss terminal. I have a love/hate relationship with terminal due to its lack of tabs, but having a unix prompt easily accessible is great and I miss having a unix based operating system. cygwin sucks, dos is horrible and there are no symlinks.

all in all, windows has made some improvements since I last used it, but I’m still an osx fan at heart and windows just feels like a junky OS to me. it’s clunky, fonts look weird, DOS scares the hell out of me, and I have to download precompiled binaries of open source stuff.

all of these taken this summer

we just got back from a mostly awesome weekend of camping, hiking and whitewater rafting in the adirondacks. I say mostly awesome because we got off to a pretty rough start rafting, the put-in was right at the beginning of a long rapid and sarah and I both got thrown out of the boat pretty quickly. the rapid was about a quarter mile long and I was in the water, but was hanging on to the kayak in front of me. this was somewhat unfortunate because I couldn’t see anything in front of me, which is a big problem since rapids are rapids because of a lot of large rocks. I took some pretty good hits on my legs and smashed my back against a rock, I now have a large bruise to show for it. the rest of the day was fun once we got some practice in calmer waters.

the rest of the time was spent hiking, cooking good food and drinking beer by the fire. it was cold enough to enjoy the fire and see our breath but not freezing. the stars were some of the best I have ever seen on the east coast, weather was just perfect the entire time. cool in the shade, warm in the sun. the picture is from a hike we did up crane mountain. it was a very good hike, about 1.4 miles straight up and then 3 or 4 miles the long way down. we went with our friends nick and beth and everyone had a great time, really a perfect end to summer.