Hal Stern's thoughts on sports, work, technology, food, and life in New Jersey
From the category archives:
One of the joys of having a bit of time off is that you can follow an interesting idea or thread to its illogical conclusion. There’s no concern about deadlines, work products, or meetings to snap you back to reality, pulling your head out of whatever cloud (private, public or hybrid) it was in [...]
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8 track tapes make me laugh. Anything involving 8 track tape references makes me laugh.
Whoever invented the format thought it would be OK to fade songs in and out so they fit the impossibly short lengths of the tape loop.
The player moves the heads between track pairs, ensuring that you’ll never approach any kind [...]
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Proper subtitle for this post: How to tune a Schecter guitar with a Floyd-Rose tremolo bridge.
Sometimes the simplest tasks, performed hundreds of times, become herculean when the parameters change. And sometimes your good intentions cause those changes and leave you sitting with a half-assembled Schecter guitar and a somewhat confused teenage son.
Backstory: Bubba needs [...]
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What do deception, love, redemption, mutation and perhaps a bit of science fiction have in common?
It’s either Coheed and Cambria’s Year of the Black Rainbow or Greg Bear’s Darwin’s Children, or both. What if evolution breeds xenophobia, and subsequently fear and hate? What if evolution is forced, and therefore somewhat dangerous, grounding [...]
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That was the view from the general admission, standing-room astroturf field at Central Park’s Rumsey Playfield, where Coheed and Cambria took the stage for what they claimed was their largest audience as a headliner. These guys put on an incredible show, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to be listening to copious amounts [...]
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Just got back from seeing American Idiot on Broadway. It’s complex, it’s loud, it’s raucous, it’s insanely well produced, and it’s a must-see. My first thought was that it was a Green Day version of Movin’ Out, but it’s really a Millenial generation version of Rent. If Rent took La Boheme [...]
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New CD by wonderful singer, songwriter and guitarist Raul Midon is out today. “Synthesis” contains much of the material he played on last year’s tour with Stanley Jordan, nearly a year after he started putting tracks onto disk. I was sold when he opened the solo performance with Don’t Take It That [...]
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There are a few groups that I grew up listening to but never had the chance to see live; with reunion tours and better medicine, I’ve been able to catch Yes, Genesis, Rush, and others live. But I have always longed to hear Renaissance, with Annie Haslam, in a small venue, with high-end sound.
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Every summer, I try to make a pilgrammage to the Princeton Record Exchange. My affiliation with Barry and his floor-to-ceiling crates of vinyl goes back to the spring of 1980, when I was a wide-eyed high school senior who happened into this used record store that just opened on Nassau Street. [...]
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Back from a true week of vacation: thanks to the hotel’s internet service provider’s inability to maintain IP addresses consistently during a 24-hour period, I had almost no IMAP service and therefore no email. A week of bakery-fueled breakfasts, days of reading by the pool, and some random boogie boarding were a huge [...]
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