My brother called earlier this week to let me know that the Pat McGee Band, a band he introduced me to, has a new album “Save Me” and a new EP “Drive By Romance” with four live tracks. I picked up both on Napster last week. Also, they will be in Seattle on May 4th. Most of the bands my brother introduces me too are local to the east coast, so I rarely get to see them.

If you want to know how good Pat McGee is live, you can head over to the Internet Archive where they have archived about 140 live shows of Pat with and without his band. Pat McGee is “trade friendly” which means he lets his fans tape and trade his live concerts. Other artists up on the Live Music Archive include the Grateful Dead (over 300 shows!), Little Feat and Toad the Wet Sprocket.

The only issue with the the Live Music Archive is that the songs are mostly in a lossless compression format called “shorten”. Unfortunately, there’s no way to play shorten files in Windows Media Player (as far as I know – there is a plugin for WinAmp). What I really want is to convert these files to Windows Media format using the Lossless codec. No such utility exists, though I did find a free command-line utility to convert shorten files to uncompressed wav files. So I hacked up a little batch program to convert each file from shorten to wav and then to WMA lossless. Turns out that the WMA lossless versions of the files are about half the size of the shorten versions, so I get both playback convenience as well as a non-trivial space savings. I’d post the batch file, except that when I said I hacked it up, I really mean it. Hard-coded paths, implicit assumptions, bad code, the works. I’m going to take another pass at it, then I’ll post it.

After several weeks of using NewsGator’s online services to read blogs, I’m finally got app reinstalled (machine switching and paving – you know the drill). While the web-based reader is nice in a pinch, it’s not as convient as the Outlook-based reader, so I got way behind on blog reading (which is partly why I’ve been behind on blog writing). So there may be a few things that made the rounds in the past few weeks that I’m only getting to now. Like this.

True.

I was excited about Al Franken’s new show – “The O’Franken Factor” – which launched Air America Radio today. I got to the office a bit early so I could listen online (they don’t have a Seattle station yet). Apparently, even though Al was on the cover of the NYTimes magazine a few weeks ago, they were surprised by the volume of listeners and the experience has been pretty bad. I couldn’t even connect for the first 45 minutes. Now, either they’ve added more servers or enought people have given up that I can at least listen. However, I can only listen for about a few minutes at a time before the connection drops and I have to manually press play to (hopefully) reconnect. I hope Air America Radio and their hosting partner get this fixed so I can enjoy the shows until it comes to Seattle.

Update: I was able to listen to most of the last hour without constant interuption, though I’m guessing that was primarily due to people dropping off more than anything Air America or their hosting partner did. Also, Franken’s show replays from 8pm-11pm pacific time so I have it on as I type this and apparently they had a ton of technical issues to start the show – basically the first fifteen minutes has been background noise, concurrent playback of multiple audio streams and multiple news casts. I’m not even sure if what I’m listening to now is previously recorded or live – I just heard someone tell someone else to “have a good night”. Hopefully, they’ll get these issues worked out shortly.

Good pal Tony Goodhew just started blogging this past Sunday. He’s already posted 15 times. Even though he’s a Product Manager in the developer division and has been involved in J#, he hasn’t posted much on technology yet but he sure has several opinions on the NFL.

We’ve added a session to the Architecture Strategy Series. The Technology Roadmap has proven to be a popular session at our architecture forums. I delivered it twice two weeks ago and I’m delivering it for a customer later today. The version of the presentation up on Architecture Center was delivered by Norman Judah, VP of Business Development for the Platforms, Technology and Strategy Group.

What’s nice about the Technology Roadmap is that it isn’t a product roadmap (mostly). We talk about the value of technologies themselves, rather than a list of features each product will have. It also talks about the market forces at work that are leading us to build the technologies in the first place. Well worth the watch.