Speedkill

It just slips out occasionally:

So I just bought Dark Tranquillity’s Fiction (an excellent CD, by the way). There seems to be a problem, however: I can’t rip the CD. Well, I can, but it’s sort of odd. In Sound Juicer everything pops up and rips just fine, but there’s a crackling sound in the background of every song. Weird. My normal ripping set up, Grip and cdparanoia, refuse to rip the CD; each track hangs at 99%. Same with KAudioCreator.

I’m able to play the CD in Amarok, though it takes forever to load. Nothing looks particularly suspicious on the packaging, aside from a copyright notice saying “© 2007 Copyright Control.” I don’t really know what that means.

Is this some kind of copy protection scheme? I haven’t tried this in Windows yet, so maybe it’s a Linux thing. Still, seems weird.

This is fascinating. Your musical preferences reflect your personality to a significant degree. Perhaps not the most surprising result, but interesting nonetheless.

The STOMP results were fed into a factor analysis, which yielded four factors, or dimensions, of musical preferences. Rentfrow and Gosling labeled these dimensions “Reflective and Complex,” which included the genres blues, jazz, classical, and folk; “Intense and Rebellious,” which included rock, alternative, and heavy metal; “Upbeat and Conventional,” including country, sound tracks, religious, and pop; and “Energetic and Rhythmic,” including rap and hip/hop, soul and funk, as well as electronica and dance. The correlations between these factors from the first testing and the retesting were high (between .77 and .82), indicating that STOMP and its resulting factors were reliable. Subsequent testing with more diverse samples (the original sample was comprised entirely of university undergrads) indicated that the factors were generalizable as well.

…

• Reflective and Complex: positively correlated with openness to experience, “self-perceived intelligence,” verbal ability, emotional stability, and political liberalism. Negatively correlated with “social dominance orientation,” political conservatism, wealth, and athleticism.
• Intense and Rebellious: positively correlated with openness to experience, extroversion, athleticism, “self-perceived intelligence,”"social dominance orientation,” and verbal ability.
• Upbeat and Conventional: positively correlated with extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, self-esteem, political conservatism, physical attractiveness (self-perceived), wealth, and athleticism. Negatively correlated with emotional stability, openness to experience, “social dominance orientation,” depression, political liberalism, intelligence, and verbal ability.
• Energetic and Rhythmic: Positively correlated with extraversion, agreeableness, political liberalism, physical attractiveness, and athleticism. Negatively correlated with “social dominance orientation” and political conservatism.

You have to guess genres like rock and heavy metal are associated with rebellion and intensity, but I know I’m not like that. I’m one of the most laid back people you’ll ever meet. Then again, I do listen to a lot of post-rock, which I suppose goes into the reflective and complex category. I wouldn’t say I’m particularly complex, either, though.

Interesting stuff, in any case.

I’m trying not to listen to the two leaked Porcupine Tree songs on my hard drive. It’s working so far.

Obviously, I’m not holding out once the whole thing leaks.

If you think this is strange, check out PT’s lead on my top artists list and go listen to them here.

It seems like we’ve been here before. The RIAA can continue to blame piracy for declining sales, but it just ain’t so. Perhaps if they released better music, their sales would be better. Actually, the article suggests a different explanation, but I’d rather mock the RIAA. They definitely deserve it.

Man, with all this Explosions in the Sky, Do Make Say Think, and Mogwai I’ve been listening to I had forgotten how good Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s Yanqui U.X.O is. How can you not like a band so pretentious they moved the exclamation point at the end of their name to a random place in the middle?

Python regexes are slow. Really slow. Actually, it’s kind of odd. Doing some comparisons with Perl on my box at home, there’s not a huge difference. On one of our boxes at work, holy hell. I forget the actual numbers. A system call to grep cuts the processing time from a few minutes to a few seconds for the script I was writing.

You know, I can sort of understand laws against drugs, prostitution, and some other “crimes” involving consenting adults. Laws on gambling? Aside from industry regulations regarding fraud, I don’t get it. I mean, really. Gambling? I’m a bit mystified as to how that became taboo to the point of some states having laws against it.

Top Ten

The Decemberists: The Crane Wife

Isis: In the Absence of Truth

Russian Circles: Enter

Agalloch: Ashes Against the Grain

Pineapple Thief: Little Man

Novembre: Materia

Clogs: Lantern

Calexico: Garden Ruin

Daylight Dies: Dismantling Devotion

Tool: 10,000 Days

Most Disappointing:

Evergrey: Monday Morning Apocalypse

The Mars Volta: Amputechture

Katatonia: The Great Cold Distance

Need More Listens

Mastodon: Blood Mountain

Zombi: Surface to Air

The “I’ve really not done this in a while” edition.

Kayo Dot – [Choirs of the Eye #02] A Pitcher of Summer
King Crimson – [Larks' Tongues In Aspic #03] Exiles
Audioslave – [Audioslave #14] The Last Remaining Light
Porcupine Tree – [Up The Downstair #02] Synesthesia
System of a Down – [System of a Down #01] Suite-pee
Radiohead – [Kid A #03] The National Anthem
Slayer – [Hell Awaits #04] Praise of Death
Led Zeppelin – [Led Zeppelin II #05] Heartbreaker
Porcupine Tree – [In Absentia #05] Gravity Eyelids
Nevermore – [Dead Heart, in a Dead World #01] Narcosynthesis

The concert on Thursday was excellent. Alasdair Roberts, a Scottish folk singer, opened. He was better than I thought he was going to be after listening to a few clips on Amazon.

Of course, everyone was there for The Decemberists. They opened with The Crane Wife 3, the opening track from their new album. After that I was reminded that I really haven’t heard that much of their catalog (I have their last two albums), as they played two songs I hadn’t heard before. Neither was all that great, though the crowd seemed to know/like them. They played all but two songs off of The Crane Wife, which was just fine by me. Granted, the two songs they left out were two songs I really liked from the new album, and would have chosen them over a couple of the ones they did play (Shankill Butchers and O, Valencia!), but I can’t complain. They were all flawlessly played. The Island…, a 12 minute epic, was easily the highlight of the night. I can’t imagine anyone not liking that song and it was just as incredible live. The other two highlights were The Perfect Crime 2 and 16 Military Wives. For 16 Military Wives the lead singer had the crowd divide in two (I couldn’t see how well that worked out) and compete with each other over who could sing a line from the song the loudest. Quite entertaining. The encore gave us more entertaining antics, as three of the band members ventured into the crowd for a “skit” about Lewis and Clark.

All in all it was great fun. I would have liked to see a little more from Picaresque (The Mariner’s Revenge Song, chiefly), but I really can’t complain. The Crane Wife is probably my favorite album so far this year, so the emphasis was quite welcome.

I get to go see The Decemberists tomorrow in Missoula, which should be a lot of fun. I hope our conspiracy theorist friend doesn’t come back while I’m gone and go on a rampage about getting trapped in my spam filter again.

In case you were wondering, Craig and I are betting on the Cat-Griz game again. Will he have to suffer through another week of displaying the colors of the best university in the state? Or will I debase this blog with the colors of the hippie school to the west? I guess we’ll find out on Saturday.