Saturday, September 24th, 2005

Bringing It All Back Home

Someone asked what I had been listening to whilst on vacation – okay, I’ll bite. I only loaded up one CD wallet with 24 discs (trips are the only thing that make me wish for an iPod. Trips and moving houses). I’ve brought more on trips before but never ended up getting through a fraction of them so I kept it a little more economical this time. As it ended up, I went through most of them as reading and listening to music on the deck is how I spent most of our time at sea. No real surprises in the rotation – American Music Club, The Concretes, Crooked Fingers, Jens Lekman, My Morning Jacket, The National, The Radio Dept, Sigur Ros, Wilco, amongst others. Yeah, I actually just went through my CD wallet alphabetically.

And lots of Bob Dylan. In addition to the No Direction Home soundtrack, I picked up the September issue of Uncut in Helsinki which came with Highway 61 Revisited Revisited, a compilation disc with different artists covering te whole of Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited. The MP3 of the Drive-By Truckers doing “Like A Rolling Stone” has been kicking around but I was most keen on getting AMC’s “Queen Jane Approximately”. That track is actually a bit of a disappointment but on the whole the disc is enjoyable. Certainly makes me want to listen to the original, though.

The European media is in a bit of a Dylan tizzy themselves, what with the simultaneous release of the No Direction Home soundtrack and film, the softcover release of Chronicles, Volume 1 and The Bob Dylan Scrapbook. It was sheer luck that on the day I passed through Heathrow, The Independent ran a special Dylan section that compiled a number of excellent articles. I picked up a discarded copy in the departure lounge. For those of you not so fortunate as to be able to pick up other peoples’ refuse, they’ve got all the articles online:

  • The cross-generational appeal of Dylan

  • The stories behind the songs

  • His top 20 albums

  • The story of the man who yelled, “Judas!”

  • A critical analysis of the man behind the myth

  • Recollections from Donovan and journalist David Hepworth

    All good stuff and it got me through the wait in the lounge and almost until we lifted off from Heathrow. What with the documentary having been released on DVD last week and airing on television this coming Monday and Tuesday, the interweb is awash with more reviews and Dylan pieces – finding and linking them all would be an exercise in futility. There’s lots.

    So I’m back home and am trying to figure out how to fit back into my life. I have many things to do, many things to take care of, but am not entirely sure where to begin. Doing laundry was definitely a good start. Looking for work will also begin in earnest. I have emails to reply to and will try to get to those soon. Ish. Same for review items. Also, I am seeking new webhosting – moving my site to Hostony has been an unmitigated disaster. I don’t know if it’s been evident from the user end, but from my end it’s been shit. I am seeking new digs and if anyone has any suggestions for reliable, affordable hosting that can handle 50-100 GB of traffic a month, let me know. And support staff that can speak English is also a plus.

    Oh yeah, has anyone been noticing pop-up ads or such on this site lately? I haven’t done anything but it’s been mentioned that stuff I certainly don’t want has been showing up intermittently. Please advise.

    np – Mark Eitzel / Demos Before Love Songs

    By : Frank Yang at 9:38 am
    Category: Uncategorized
    • RSS Feed for this postNo Responses.

    1. 9/24/05 10:43 am

       Neil says:

      the popups are probably coming from one of the ad services you use (I noticed Adjuggler and Blogads in your source). Adjuggler gets my vote, though who knows – Blogads could be doing it, too. I haven’t seen them, but I’ve been using popup blocking for ages now.

      On a slightly related note: is there any reason why you have *three* site tracking services for this site? I see Javascript for Sitemeter, nedstatbasic (WebStats4U), and Reinvigorate? Sorry to peek "under the sheets", but it did seem a bit strange to have so many overlapping services…

    2. 9/24/05 11:07 am

       Frank says:

      adjuggler? Where is the adjuggler coming from? Is that the ProjectDU thing? I will have to talk to them about it. I don’t think it’s BlogAds, enough sites run them that I think it’s benign.

      Re the trackers – I only really use sitemeter. Nedstat was the first one I ever used, and I’ve just left it there. Reinvigorate has been down for so long, I should just take it out.

    3. 9/24/05 12:57 pm

       kathryn says:

      myself and a slew of friends are huge huge fans of dreamhost.

      <a href="http://…/ are their hosting plans</a>. as you can see, even the lowest level allows 120 GB of bandwidth a month, and increases by 1 GB a week. that, and an absurd amount of alloted disk space. i love them. and yes, they speak english.

      (and if you sign up using <a href="http://…/ link</a> i get a little kickback via their referral program. just saying.)

    4. 9/24/05 12:58 pm

       kathryn says:

      i think i just mucked up those links. whoops.

      here are dreamhost’s hosting plans:

      http://…/

      and here’s my signup link:

      http://…/

    5. 9/24/05 2:15 pm

       elva says:

      welcome back frank! i’ve enjoyed reading about your travels. see you at the shows.

    6. 9/24/05 10:38 pm

       Jacksonville City Nights says:

      Ryan Adams and his band the Cardinals create some beautiful

      honky tonk on their new album. It’s pretty much a straight foward

      old school type country album. Jacksonville City Nights isn’t great,

      but still it’s a solid effort from the best songwriter since Westerberg.

    7. 9/25/05 5:08 pm

       david says:

      I’m moving to Dreamhost soon, too, Frank. Check around for online coupons to get a discount on hosting through them.

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