New CD's and Technical Update

Author: Ben <benk@tilde.team>

Mon 25 Apr 2022 10:15:40 AM PDT

CD's

Since I'm visiting the US I took the opportunity to order a couple music CD's online. I still like buying discs in spite of the fact that it's easy to use music that's distributed digitally. One reason is I want to keep the discs forever, and the other is that my parents' cars have CD players in them, so might as well make use of it while I'm driving around Southern California.

I'm not really a big music afficionado, especially not anymore. So my taste is kind of stupidly limited to a few go-to artists I've been listening to for decades. I guess I forget to explore new things that I might like better now.

When I was a teenager my (now deceased) uncle took me to a concert featuring both Joe Satriani and Dream Theater. Both artists are exceptionally prolific, so they've released several albums since I went to live abroad.

Since Satriani just released an album this year, I had to get that, and Dream Theater's last album from 2021 has earned them a Grammy award, which is their first if I'm not mistaken. By now I've listened to the latter more than once, and my ultimate conclusion is that it is probably the best album Dream Theater has released in a long time. I haven't listened to all of them, though. (My opinion is they lost their inspiration a long time ago, but if you want to get one album of theirs from the last 15 years it might as well be this one.)

If you are totally unfamiliar with Dream Theater, then you should probably start by only listening to their albums from the 90's, as Images and Words, Awake, and Scenes From a Memory are regarded as masterpieces in the genre. I didn't discover them until the early 2000's and their first three albums from that decade are fine. It just feels like they followed a long, slow downhill trajectory, which made this last album a pleasant surprise. Some people say it's too similar to their other (recent) work, so maybe this album is like a stylistic summary of what they've been attempting.

Now, regarding the latest Satriani album, I need to give it a few more listens before coming upon a final judgement, but at first it doesn't really seem like anything special. Some reviewers feel it's more of the same, and maybe they are right. I also listened to his latest album the last time I visited my parents in California, so by way of comparison I think his best recent album is Shockwave Supernova, which pleasantly surprised me by being better than his other recent albums. Nothing of his really drew me in since maybe his 2004 album "Is There Love in Space?", and even that was not as good as his earlier work.

If I had to pick one best album by him I am sure I would go with Crystal Planet every time. I also listened a lot to Strange Beautiful Music and regard it highly.

I also picked up Steve Vai's latest album even though I don't normally listen to him. It just happened to be released this month, so I thought oh hell why not. What he does is very similar to Satriani, but I've never owned or listened to one of his albums. This last one has a pretty smooth texture that I can appreciate. It might make good background music, and compared to Satriani's work it feels more jazzy and less melody-driven, which is a welcome distinction. With Satriani you can expect the fundamentals of rock music, namely melody and rhythm.

Vai's album seems to be partly based on a gimmick whereby he plays this bizarre triple-necked guitar called the Hydra. It looks as ridiculous as it sounds. So maybe the entire album is a gimmick? Hard to say, but Steve Vai has been an established musician for a long time, so he's earned the right to have some fun. Even so, I'm not going to trade in Satriani for him any time soon.

Technical Update

In my last post I mentioned how something was going wrong with my gemlog bash script. I seem to have resolved it by changing the hashbang to /usr/bin/bash rather than the standard /bin/sh, so it must have been just some compatibility thing. Glad that's fixed.

Another interesting piece of news is that I technically have e-mail working on my domain now since we've switched service providers. AT&T, our previous provider, blocked port 25 and so getting e-mail working on my server was just a pain in the ass and I never did it. It was also not a great loss because hosting your own e-mail inevitably means battling with spam, so it's just a project I have been reluctant to start.

Now that I have a better ISP and FreeBSD has e-mail ready out of the box, I just had to open the port on my router. You can (for now) write to ben@kwiecien.us and I will get it, but I have nothing set up beyond remotely logging in and running Unix mail commands (and neomutt). I would like to set up IMAP, but that again seems like too much trouble for something I'll barely use. I already tried changing my MTA to that end and it failed, so I'm back on sendmail with no idea how to configure it. I'm still using tilde.team for now, but I may switch over some time in the coming year.