The Shins: Chutes Too Narrow

© The Shins: Chutes Too Narrow

Track List

1. Kissing The Lipless
2. Mine’s Not A High Horse
3. So Says I
4. Young Pilgrims
5. Saint Simon
6. Fighting In A Sack
7. Pink Bullets
8. Turn A Square
9. Gone For Good
10. Those To Come

Genre

Alternative/Punk

Description

This is the second album produced by The Shins. Every song on this album is amazing except “Gone For Good” which, for some reason, goes country.

“Pink Bullets” Music Video

The following is a music video of one of the slower songs on the album. I like the stop motion used in the video:

Tags: The Shins

The Shins: Oh, Inverted World

© The Shins: Oh, Inverted World

Track List

1. Caring Is Creepy
2. One By One All Day
3. Weird Divide
4. Know Your Onion!
5. Girl Inform Me
6. New Slang
7. The Celibate Life
8. Girl On The Wing
9. Your Algebra
10. Pressed In A Book
11. The Past And Pending

Genre

Alternative/Punk

Description

The Shins debut album. The song “New Slang” was featured in the Garden State movie where Sam says to Andrew: “You gotta hear this one song - it’ll change your life.” Well, I suppose she is right as it definitely got me hooked on a new band.

“New Slang” Music Video

As mentioned above, here is a music video to the song with clips from the Garden State movie:

Tags: The Shins

Fusion versus Parallels

I have been playing with Fusion and Parallels in order to run other operating systems on my Mac OS. In my case, I have been running Windows XP mostly due to the nature of the development work that I am doing at the moment. I will not claim to be an expert in knowing the differences of Fusion and Parallels but I can say that I like Fusion a lot more and ended up buying a copy. Here are a few reasons why I choose Fusion over Parallels:

1. One File - Fusion saves all VM data to one file that ends in a .vmwarevm extension. This makes management of my various VMs easy. I ended up creating what I call a “fresh” VM that is Windows XP SP2 with all the latest updates installed and configured the way I like it. This file is roughly 3GB in size. It is from this file that I make duplicates to use for home, work, etc. Easy to duplicate and destroy at will.
2. Dual Processor Support - I can configure Fusion to use both cores of my processor. Parallels doesn’t do this.
3. DirectX 9.0 - Supports the latest 3D graphics (well almost, as DirectX 10 is out now). Parallels uses a version older than 9.0.
4. Java Swing - Some aspects of Java Swing like the rendering of windows, panels, etc did not work properly when using Parallels but worked fine in Fusion.
5. Stability - While Fusion has some bugs I found it to be more stable than Parallels in terms of not crashing and locking up. In fact I had more problems with Parallels in this regard and have maybe only froze my Fusion image once (and I use Fusion almost every day).

While I do like Fusion, my only gripe is that Fusion does not release system memory once it has been shut down (or so I seems). Annoying but something I can deal with for the time being.

Tags: VMWare Fusion

Virtual Windows XP Power Settings

One of the first things I usually do when I install and setup Windows is to configure the power settings. This is important when running Windows XP Professional within VMWare Fusion on a Mac OS, for example. The reason is that I find it annoying to switch back to my virtual Windows environment after a period of time only to find it sound asleep. I want it to be always running just like any other application that I might have open. In order to prevent this I have adjusted my power settings as shown here:

(click to view)

One word of caution. Leaving a virtual operating system always running can eat up a lot of memory, CPU, and power. For a laptop user this can mean that your hardware might get really hot so keep your machine well ventilated.

Tags: VMWare Fusion, Windows

2007 Adventures DVD

(click to view)

Kate and I have put the finishing touches on a DVD that chronicles the adventures of the past year that we hope close friends and family will enjoy. Much of the content of the DVD can already be viewed within the Adventures category on this site but the DVD supports much higher resolution and comes complete with a stereo soundtrack.

We had a lot of fun putting together this DVD and hope you will enjoy watching it. If anyone has issues with the disk or we have forgotten someone, let us know. All disks should be arriving in the mail by end of week. Otherwise, feel free to comment below.

Crested Butte

This quaint but meticulously upkept storybook town is real treat. Not to mention having a Christmas-like feel to it after being covered in roughly 50 inches of new snow.

For lodging, we ended up staying at the Cristiana Guesthaus as mentioned earlier. It was a fun bed and breakfast that had free Wi-Fi service, an outdoor hot tub, and common space on both the lower and upper levels for people to eat, lounge, and enjoy each others company. As for our room, it was tiny but clean and nicely kept. For some reason I couldn’t help think of this as a radically scaled down version of Le Chateau Montebello. I suppose I was just reminiscing of an age now long past.

The following are a few pictures of the town after spending the morning on the slopes:

(click to view)

At around 3pm we left the city and began a four hour drive back home, which is quite beautiful if you have never experienced what Highway 50 has to offer.

For us, the exploration of Crested Butte has just begun. There still more to experience of the mountain resort as well as the town. I also hear that the Wildflower Festival is a sight to behold, not to mention how great I imagine some of the back roads would be while traveling on two wheels.

Tags: Crested Butte

Ginger Cafe

(click to view)

The Ginger Cafe is where we stopped for dinner yesterday evening based on recommendations from the staff at the Cristiana Guesthaus. Although we had other tasty choices, we seemed to be in the mood for pan-asian cuisine. The only problem is that it took almost three hours to get served. I don’t think we would have been as nearly troubled by the long wait if the waitresses had been a little bit more empathetic but they didn’t seem to care. Our pain was slighly eased by spending some time enjoying the The Wooden Nickel bar and then the Ginger Cafe bar before eating. By the way, if you have a sweet tooth, try the “Drunken Thai Tea” at the Ginger Cafe bar. It is a blend of Indian tea, milk, amaretto, and rum.

In the end, the food was outstanding and I definitely recommend checking out the five-table (roughly) establishment. That is, if you are not pressed for time and don’t mind the sub-par service.

Tags: Crested Butte

Crested Butte Mountain Resort

Taking advantage of the free skiing and the recent heavy snowfall, Kate and I took off for a short two-day vacation near the Crested Butte Mountain Restort. Opening up a ski map of the area you will see that many of the runs on the mountain are black diamonds or double black diamonds, which definitely put a smile on my face. However, many of the diamond/double diamond runs were not open yet. At least many of the high elevation runs that, at least for me, looked to be the most interesting. Despite this fact, we were still able to experience a good portion of the mountain and I really enjoyed the “International” black run. Being a bit of speed demon, I was able to race down the face of the mountain for what seemed like a couple of miles at high speed. As for tree runs, I had a difficult time finding them since the trees were so tightly packed. The following are pictures from an afternoon on the slopes (since we drove all morning to reach them):

(click to view)

Tags: Crested Butte