• The Goat Rodeo Sessions (click the “Preorder now” link to see more about the album itself, while mentally cursing a musician’s idea of web design). I don’t have this yet, but it promises to be excellent: a Yo-Yo Ma project featuring Chris Thile on mandolin. YouTube has plenty of teaser material and one entire track to whet your appetite. The album lands October 24th.
• Floex / Zorya by Tomáš Dvořák is a really neat combination of electronic and acoustic elements. Dvořák (aka Floex) is the musician behind the soundtracks to Machinarium and the Samarost games, and the studio he works with (Amanita Design) has a new game coming soon which I’m excited for.
• My third discovery is more of a rediscovery. I have the (excellent) Tim O’Brien and Darrell Scott album Real Time, and last month on eMusic I picked up Darrell Scott’s 2008 solo album Modern Hymns. I’ve just had to delete a paragraph here extolling his virtues as a wordsmith: the songs on that album aren’t his. (I only recognised “American Tune”, shame on me.) Anyway the songs are excellent, and kept me thoroughly distracted for about an hour when I was supposed to be proofreading.

I’ve been a member since 2005, and prices have risen several times in the interim. The nice thing is, those price hikes only affected new accounts: old accounts like mine are kept on the old pricing, even across changes like this. (In this case, they’re awarding “bonus credit” to puff my plan up to the same number of 49c downloads as I get now.)² Which leads to the following:

More bonus than payment? Cool!

Far as I can see, that means I’ll be getting my tracks for just over 20c each, instead of 50. There’s not many times being an early adopter really pays off, but this seems to be one of them!

Notes:

1. Why, eMusic, why 49? Why not 53? Or 47? Or (gulp) 50?
2. Variable pricing is going to mess with this, of course. I presume they’ll stick with “a track is 49c” for plan pricing, but of course variable pricing is only going to introduce tracks above, not below, that line.

Still, it couldn’t hurt to pop in to Waterstones and make sure, right?¹ And, score one for British punctuality, there it was.

Now I need to cancel all engagements for 72 hours or so (it’s quite chunky, 481 pages) so I can read it.

Notes:

1. Amsterdam is fantastic: the same square, Spui, houses both the ABC and Waterstones, as well as the Athenaeum, and just around the corner is a Scheltema, plus on Fridays Spui hosts an open-air second-hand book market.

Ευχαριστώ αγάπη μου!

The evolution shirt is (coincidentally?) pretty nearly the same colour-scheme as my Questionable Content Evolution Kills shirt.

And since I’m not sure if I’ve pointed at these before: Last Exit to Nowhere have some fantastic shirts. Like, Ray’s Music Exchange. Or Tyrell Corp. Man, I could spend a month’s salary there.

• Not one but two James Tiptree, Jr collections, both from before Alice B. Sheldon was revealed as the woman behind the pseudonym. One has the famous Robert Silverberg introduction: “It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree’s writing.” (He later wrote that she had given his head “a great needed wrenching”.) The other has two pages by Harry Harrison: “There is a temptation in an introduction of this kind to be very biographical and spend a good deal of time on the author’s lovely dark hair or firm waistline despite his advancing years.” A bit thick for 1973 (she was outed in late 1976), but he uses the word “obviosity” so I’m prepared to forgive him much. (Update: even better than I thought, it seems these are the first two Tiptree anthologies ever published, although not in their first printings. Joy!)
• A couple of M. John Harrisons; this is a dark addiction, I finish each of his books tasting ash and bone and immediately start reading the next.
• An early Samuel R. Delany. I have an almost-complete run of his sf novels (missing two, according to wikipedia), but still none of his short stories.
• A mathematics education book for Olga, Out of the Labyrinth, which looks interesting enough that I might have to steal it from her before she’s finished reading it.

That last one came from Het Martyrium, which seems to be criminally underappreciated in Amsterdam (possibly because it isn’t on or around Spui, and therefore cannot be a “real” bookstore). Their only drawback, as far as I’m concerned (apart from the lack of sf section) is that they have a nasty habit of stocking remaindered copies of titles I want at extremely low prices… in Dutch.¹ Which probably is actually good for me, in the long run. But occasionally leads to double-ups, if the English edition also turns up second-hand at some later date.

Notes:

1. That said, this is where I found The Naming of Names, in softcover and in English. So I shouldn’t complain I suppose.

Curious about the instruments?

But this weekend I’m off to Berlin for a week, where I will give three talks (two of them more working-session-ish, but still a pretty serious workload). Two of the three aren’t really written yet: I planned to do some work on the train and some work there. So I needed a machine, and fast.

Which is by way of semi-justification of the fact that this post is written on my brand new eee pc. It’s a teeny-tiny laptop and so far I’m very happy.¹ I’ve got it running an eee-friendly ubuntu flavour (easy peasy), and while I write this post Amarok is playing my music for me. Most importantly, I’ve installed latex and emacs and all the bits and pieces I need to work on my talks for next week. Success!

So: the laptop is dead, long live the laptop.

Notes:

1. The only major snag I’ve run into is the half-size right shift key, which means I keep hitting ‘up’ or ‘enter’ when I want uppercase. But I’ll get used to that, I’m sure.

I expect we’ll end up either set on fire or fed until we burst, depending on whether we get caught first by the Greek rioters or the Greek mothers.

If we survive these many and varied perils, there might be a few photos and stories in the offing. Check back mid-January (yes, we’re taking a long break).

The last two were marked down to €8 and €20, respectively, from €45 and €74. That makes savings of €91 euro, if I’m reckoning aright — which of course means I can go spend €91 in a bookshop, right? Right.

Oh, and they’ve got Finn Family Moomintroll for €5 — I bought two copies and have already given one away.