ChrisBellini.com

It seems fitting that I end the year with a post about the only thing that it seemed that I could write about in the last 365 days - music. Honestly, to those who are able to work a hectic job, spend time with a significant other and do whatever else life requires of them and still find time to regularly blog about a variety of topics of interest to them...kudos! 2009 simply didn't now allow me that luxury, and there's no telling if 2010 will relent. The benefit to developing software in a fast-paced environment is that when I'm not in meetings or manically scrawling ideas on a whiteboard, it's "nose to the grindstone" coding and I require a soundtrack for that.

Like bygone years, I have assembled a list of albums released this year that I found to be to my liking. As per usual, here it is in alphabetical order and includes my selection for "album of the year".

...And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead - The Century of Self
Bear In Heaven - Beast Rest Forth Mouth
Built To Spill - There Is No Enemy
Cymbals Eat Guitars - Why There Are Mountains
Dan Deacon - Bromst
Dinosaur Jr. - Farm
Do Make Say Think -The Other Truths
Echo & the Bunnymen - The Fountain
The Flaming Lips - Embryonic
Fuck Buttons - Tarot Sport
Future of the Left - Travels With Myself And Another
The Horrors - Primary Colours
Idlewild - Post Electric Blues
Japandroids - Post-Nothing
Manic Street Preachers - Journal For Plague Lovers
Matthew Good - Vancouver
Metric - Fantasies
The Most Serene Republic - ...And The Ever Expanding Universe
The Pains of Being Pure of Heart - The Pains of Being Pure of Heart
Phoenix - Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
A Place To Bury Strangers - Exploding Head
Silversun Pickups - Swoon
Sonic Youth - The Eternal
Sunn O))) - Monoliths and Dimensions
Think About Life - Family
The Twilight Sad - Forget The Night Ahead
Yeah Yeah Yeahs - It's Blitz
Yo La Tengo - Popular Songs

Some honourable mentions:
The Big Pink - A Brief History Of Love
Lou Barlow - Goodnight Unknown
Muse - The Resistance
NOFX - Coaster
Pearl Jam - Backspacer
The Tragically Hip - We Are The Same
Ubiquitous Synergy Seeker - Questamation
We Were Promised Jetpacks - These Four Walls
Wilco - Wilco (The Album)

I had hoped for the best of Spiral Stairs' The Real Feel but I simply would rather see the reunited Pavement come to Toronto. And I was really anticipating Mew's follow-up to their excellent And the Glass Handed Kite album, No More Stories, but I found it quite "meh".

Finally, I'm not Pitchfork nor am I some hipster with black-rimmed glasses, skinny jeans, ironic t-shirts and an iPhone in my hand. That being said, I always try to like an Animal Collective album when it's released but I'm ultimately disappointed at how unlistenable (to me) their music is. Merriweather Post Pavilion is no exception. It'll appear at the top of all of the "cool" year end lists, and maybe even some uncool lists too. However, it won't be on mine. Yuck.

Last week, Yahoo! discontinued Geocities; the free web hosting service. Although Geocities hadn't been relevant since 1998, I'm still a bit sad at the thought of a piece of Web history coming to an end. I have fond memories of Geocities, before it was owned by Yahoo!

Back in 1995, the Internet came to my hometown of Timmins, Ontario. Vianet was the lone ISP and I signed up for an account while I was still in highschool living with my parents (yes, I myself paid for the service). With the floppy disks of tools provided by Vianet (Trumpet Winsock, Netscape Navigator, Eudora and PowWow) a new world unveiled itself to me that was far beyond the local BBS I had become accustomed to. The sheer amount of information available on the burgeoning World Wide Web fascinated me. I had to learn how websites were made.

After learning what a search engine was and how to use one (in this case, it was Altavista), I queried to find out what a web page actually was and how to make it available to the world. I learned that in order to allow people to access the web pages you create with HTML, you need someone to host them for you. In 1996, when I began to seriously experiment with HTML, Geocities was the free web host to use.

A friend and I put together our first website, the Lords of Digital Consciousness. It was, by today's standard, extremely basic and horribly tacky. We abused repeating background images, the MARQUEE tag and animated GIFs. The point I'm trying to make, though, is that Geocities made it super-simple to put together a site for the entire world to see at no cost. Geocities allowed you to store your website in neighbourhoods that matched your site's theme; Area51 for sci-fi, WallStreet for business, Colosseum for sports and so on. Naturally, we parked our Lords of Digital Consciousness website in Silicon Valley - the neighbourhood for computer-related websites.

Even if Geocities becomes just another footnote in Internet history, I won't forget the impact it made on me. In 1996, while working on the Lords of Digital Consciousness in my spare time while I was in university, I wanted to improve and understand the process of creating websites by reading more. Being a pre-pharmacy major at the time, I should have had my nose in biochem and human physiology text books, instead of the HTML, JavaScript and Perl books I had been buying and reading for "fun". I eventually switched my major to Computer Science and the rest is, as they say, history. However, every once and a while - when I'm deep into modern frameworks, n-tier architectures, and enterprise design patterns, I think back to simpler times when completing a project only involved editing some HTML and JavaScript in Windows Notepad and storing it in my place in one of Geocities' neighbourhoods.

I know this blog exists, but you wouldn't believe it based on the frequency of my posts. I can honestly say that I haven't been this busy in a very long time. That's a good thing! Although it's not such a good thing if you faithfully followed this blog 'o mine (perhaps by subscribing to the RSS feed) and have seen the rate of new posts drop off like Kanye West's respectability (wow, topical!).

There's a lot of exciting tech, sports and life topics I'm hoping to write about, but until I get the chance (again, not a bad thing), we'll all have to make-do merely knowing what kind of music I'm listening to lately.

Future of the Left - Travels With Myself and Another
Like a more-accomplished mclusky, Travels With Myself and Another is an energetic and entertaining scuzz-rock record.

Manic Street Preachers - Journal for Plague Lovers
With lyrics entirely provided by notes left behind by Richey Edwards, Journal for Plague Lovers makes it look like the Manics have been reinvigorated with a sense of urgency.

Mew - No More Stories...
Even more grandiose than ...And the Glass Handed Kite and much peppier and hopeful.

Modest Mouse - No One's First and You're Next
Holding me over until we see a new Modest Mouse full-length.

Muse - The Resistance
Operatic, classical and rocking.

NOFX - Coaster
The anti-Bush sentiments are no longer required, so they boys have settled back into their old ways, with a couple of mature tricks (Example: "My Orphan Year").

Pearl Jam - Backspacer
Best PJ album since Yield.

Yo La Tengo - Popular Songs
Combines all of YLT's best fuzz-pop, drone, twee elements into a single cohesive album. My easy fave is "More Stars Than There Are In Heaven".

July is the marriage month and I have two weddings to go to; I'm the best man in one of them and wife is the maid of honour in the other. Does this mean my tunes taste has turned to wistful songs of love and devotion?

Friendly Fires - Friendly Fires
Funky and tuneful with a splash of shoegaze. Hip wedding receptions would play some tracks off this album to get people to kick off their shoes and spaz out on the dance floor; "On Board" (made famous by the original Wii Fit TV commercial) at the very least.

The Horrors - Primary Colours
The Cure + Bauhaus + My Bloody Valentine = The Horror's Primary Colours; that's the best way for me to describe it.

The Most Serene Republic - ...And the Ever Expanding Universe
Grandiose songs for a hip romantic comedy. Too bad "hip" and "romantic comedy" are mutually exclusive. With love, from Milton, ON.

The Rural Alberta Advantage - Hometowns
A friend of mine knows the folks in this band and gushed about them for so long, I gave in. Turns out, he's right. Bedroom rock with big ambitions.

Wilco - Wilco (The Album)
Wilco, Wilco, Wilco will love you, baby. Need I say more?

Lucifer is putting on a sweater - I'm posting something technical again!

Mozilla released Firefox 3.5 last week with loads of new features like the zippy TraceMonkey JavaScript engine. It also includes another feature that I don't think I can ever warm up to - a revamped NSS module that causes ridiculously long launch times on Windows computers.

The NSS is responsible for handling encryption tasks via SSL, TLS, etc. When we're talking about encryption, random numbers are par for the course. I'm not sure how they generated random numbers in previous NSS versions, but for 3.5, Mozilla decided that using various temporary files on people's computers was a stellar way to calculate a seed for a random number generator. Generating truly random numbers on computers is hard. Hell, randomness itself is hard. Yet whatever Mozilla was doing before seemed to work well. Why they decided to use temp files now is anybody's guess. Especially given the fact that typical computer users don't even know of the existence of the various temporary folders on their systems, so we could be talking thousands of files that the NSS has to iterate over to generate a random number generator's seed. Thankfully, this issue has been logged as a Priority 1 bug, so we (hopefully) can anticipate a speedy resolution. In the meantime, if you like Firefox 3.5 on Windows but its slow startup has you at your wits' end (and you don't want to revert to a 3.0.x version), keep the following folders on your computer as clean as possible until this is fixed in a point release:

Windows 2000, XP and 2003

• C:\Documents and Settings\[user_name]\Temp\
• C:\Documents and Settings\[user_name]\Local Settings\Temp
• C:\Documents and Settings\[user_name]\My Recent Documents
• C:\Documents and Settings\[user_name]\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files
• C:\Documents and Settings\[user_name]\Local Settings\History

Windows Vista, 2008 and 7

• C:\Users\[user_name]\Temp\
• C:\Users\[user_name]\AppData\Local\Temp
• C:\Users\[user_name]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Recent
• C:\Users\[user_name]\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files
• C:\Users\[user_name]\Local Settings\History

The Pens surprised every one (including me) and won the Cup. Iran's citizens had their election stolen from them. A bunch of celebrities died. At the end of the month, I'll be attending two weddings. Combined with a heavy workload at work, I've done absolutely nothing with this website o' mine in the past few months. Yet somehow, I always find time for tunes. Here's what I've been listening to lately while I try to figure out what to do next with ChrisBellini.com:

Alexisonfire - Old Crows / Young Cardinals
Yes, I like "that screaming band". You hear screaming - I hear another texture in the wall of noise. And I don't shun noise. This time around, though, the screaming has been toned way down with Dallas and Wade sharing much more of the vocal duties. Lotsa mid-tempo numbers too, but it all sounds great to me.

Dinosaur Jr. - Farm
Album number two for the re-united J, Murph and Lou (yes, I rhymed that on purpose - I'm lame). Their ninth album takes all of Dinosaur Jr's best traits - noise, J's solos and more noise - and puts them together in a nice package. Even Lou's songs, which are traditionally mellow and introspective, are rockers. It's good to see them in fine form.

Sonic Youth - The Eternal
Contrary to many reviews, this album does not hark back to EVOL, Sister or Daydream Nation. Finely tuned out-of-tune guitars aside, this album chugs along (thanks to Mark Ibold?) with the energy of a band not showing their age.

Think About Life - Family
I don't want to say that Think About Life are Canada's version TV on the Radio, because you'd only agree with that after the initial listen. Repeated listens will reveal their upbeat nature and put you in a good frame of mind.

Winter Gloves - About A Girl
Catchy electro-rock that leaves me anticipating a new album.

I redeemed my self in the conference finals, nailing both of them. Now it all comes down to this. Do or die. And...

...it pains me to say it, but I think Detroit is going to win - again! Ugh. At least this time, I wouldn't be annoyed as I usually would. Detroit and Michigan have fallen on some serious hard times - have you seen the empty seats at the Wings' home games during these playoffs? Maybe winning it all would make this financial meltdown a little bit more bearable for those in Detroit.

Someday, I'll remember how to write a proper blog post complete with content worth reading. But until that day comes, here's what I'm listening to lately.

Crippled Black Phoenix - 200 Tons of Bad Luck
A Love of Shared Disasters prepared us for the apocalypse and 200 Tons of Bad Luck is the traveling carnival you visit on the way out.

Isis - Wavering Radiant
Still drone-y, but Isis have added a few new instruments to their toolbox (organs!).

Japandroids - Post-Nothing
If No Age were more tuneful or if Death From Above 1979 stuck around long enough to record new albums, they might sound like Japandroids. Fuzzed out and catchy pop songs.

Junior Boys - Begone Dull Care
Synth pop minimalists just got a little less minimal.

Metric - Fantasies
Every Metric album up to this point has always sounded like something to kill the time in between Broken Social Scene albums. Now that BSS is on hiatus, Metric has finally recorded a full-fledged album with all the trimmings.

Silversun Pickups - Swoon
Rocks with the familiarity of Carnavas but with the expected sophomore album touches like overdubs and strings.

Yeah Yeah Yeahs - It's Blitz
It's Blitz has me chair disco dancin' in my cubicle.

Wow, I was I way off, going 1-3 in round two's predictions. Let's see if I can redeem myself in the Conference Finals:

East
Pittsburgh vs Carolina

West
Detroit vs Chicago

I'm really unsure about that Pens-'Canes series. Carolina aren't called the "Cardiac 'Canes" for nothing. They definitely have the ability to surprise everybody.

In the first round, I went 6-2; stupid Devils and Rangers. At any rate, it's the second round and these are my predictions.

East
Vancouver vs Chicago
Detroit vs Anaheim

West
Boston vs Carolina
Washington vs Pittsburgh (although I'd rather see the Pens win)

I love this time of year. Here’s the first round matchups and my predictions are in bold.

East
Boston vs Montreal
New Jersey vs Carolina
Pittsburgh vs Philadelphia
Washington vs New York Rangers

West
San Jose vs Anaheim
Detroit vs Columbus
Vancouver vs St. Louis
Chicago vs Calgary (still hoping for the Flames to win)

It's been a couple of months since I've posted one of these, so it'll have a few more entries than usual:

• ...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead - The Century of Self
  Easily their best album since Source Tags and Codes.
• Asobi Seksu - Hush
  Instead of drawing from the My Bloody Valentine chapter of the shoegazing bible, they've flipped the pages to the beginning of the book where the Cocteau Twins' chapter can be found.
• Cymbals Eat Guitars - Why There Are Mountains
  Equal parts Built To Spill, Modest Mouse, Pavement and Sonic Youth; these are good touchstones for this young band's first album. I'm looking forward to how they'll mature by taking these influences and turning them into something unique.
• Dan Deacon - Bromst
  This fun collage of sounds makes for great background music at work.
• The Decemberists - The Hazards of Love
  A grand, sweeping rock opera of epic proportion.
• Marnie Stern - This Is It and I Am It and You Are It and So Is That and He Is It and She Is It and It Is It and That Is That
  Wow, can she play guitar. If any of these songs were included in Guitar Hero or Rock Band, your hands would explode trying to out-Fake Plastic Rock her.
• Mastodon - Crack the Skye
  For those unfamiliar with Mastodon, think of a more aggressive version of Yes! or Rush. Crack the Skye catch quite touch Leviathan but it comes close. And if Mastodon's loud 'n' heavy concept albums either frighten you or are beneath you, then Airhead's Joe Mantegna's character's quip about "if it's too loud, you're too old" holds true.
• The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart - The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart
  Bubblegum pop run through a My Bloody Valentine filter.