Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1445
Ice Maker update, Digg, Mogwai, live sound engineer documentaries, dreams of roadside tourist museums, Unifi support, bathroom permits. The building code kind not the creepy pervy republican kind.
Good morning, hello, boy am I tired. I wonder if GMHHAY would be better or worse if I wrote it when I wasn’t tired, if I wrote it on the few days I get to sleep past 6:30. Oh. Well. There is the summer. Maybe GMHHAY is better or worse in the summer, based on whether or not I’ve slept enough. Be cool if there was a way to quantify that.
Big response from yesterday’s Ice Maker news, lotta people wrote in to ask about it. This is the model. It was a wirecutter pick. Not the main one, not the budget one, maybe the runner-up? I dunno. It is good. My research tells me they’re all mostly the same except a) the GE one makes better ice, and b) some of them make clear ice, this is not one of those. It is decent. My one gripe is that the on/off button is a digital button, so I cannot put the thing on a timer, that would be nice.
Join the GMHHAY slack! Reply to this email and ask for an invite if you’re a human who likes chatting with other humans about topics such as these within!
(There are now 115 members in the Slack, which is crazy. About a quarter are dormant-ish but I have faith they’ll come back one day.)
This morning for the entirety of the drive to school, I played Mogwai Fear Satan for Jane and explained to her the concept of post rock and talked about all the times Mommy and Daddy have seen this particular Scottish band live. She liked the flute part. I started thinking of all the places I’ve had the joy of seeing Mogwai: at the old Limelight, at Stubb’s, in vacation parks on two continents for All Tomorrow's Parties, San Francisco, LA, and, of course, Boston. Thought about that first Mogwai show that got moved from the Middle East to Jacques (!) because of a fire, I did not go but Y Mike did the sound for it. Thought about the Middle East downstairs show that Emily and I saw from the front side. Thought of Y Mike doing sound for that band, taking them around the country when they weren’t all even 21 yet.
Then it occurred to me that live sound engineers, working club engineers, are probably a very fertile ground for the making of documentaries. Sound engineers have seen some shit, I bet every one of them has some amazing stories. So I am pleased to announce that I’m gonna quit my whole life and become a traveling live sound engineer documentarian and make video interviews of them and then present them in a roadside museum on little holographic video players like they did in Interstellar.
I cannot convey to you how badly I want to start a roadside tourist attraction museum. Maybe for my longbox collection. Maybe for hotel keys. I think I have wanted this my whole life. I remember when I read Gaiman’s American GodsI was like “man the dude is copping my roadside museum fetish this is not on.”
My friend Nick and I were talking just yesterday about how we should start a museum of “Rare Items that Rick and Nick both own, primarily related to rock music.” This would include:
A Pailhead T-Shirt
First Editions (only edition?) of Wesley Willis’ seminal book of illustrations, North Lake Shore Drive.
There are probably a few rare records we both own too. Maybe the first Helium 7”. Nick did you sell yours?
Real banger of a museum. Bringing it back to Mogwai, Nick owns the Mogwai Big Muff distortion pedal and whenever one goes on sale, he strongly encourages me to purchase it, but the thing has gotten to be over $1k (Nick was on it early) and I never have the cojones to pull the trigger. My commitment to Rick and Nick’s Roadside Museum (still working the name) is dubious. I need to recommit.
We are listening to the two advance tracks to the new Bob Mould album that comes out tomorrow. They are rock. They are energetic. Sugary, mayhaps even a smidge Husker Du ish. I am optimistic for this record.
There is also a new Doves record, it arrived yesterday in the mail (ordered in 2024, still (mostly) keeping my resolution to not buy vinyl in 2025). It is called Constellations for the Lonely and it is very good. It has.. mm.. gonna say four pure Doves songs on it that will give you your Doves fix, which is an amazing thing in 2025. This is two-to-three more Doves songs giving your Doves fix than appeared on 2020’s Universal Want, which was a decent album but just not very Dovesy.
Doves, man. Saw em at the Filmore with Ali. I miss Ali. She is great. We got the posters for them. Wonder where my Doves poster is. I know I got it framed at some point.
I really need to get back to California.
And I am so sad I didn’t go to Tom and Jerry’s last night it looked like a good time.
But I am going to Boston in three weeks, that is exciting.
And supposedly New York in April but we will see.
Kevin Rose and Alexis Ohanian are doing a tech equivalent of the Traveling Wilburies (Sean doesn’t read GMHHAY but when we saw ELO a decade or so ago they played “Handle With Care” and it was awesome I love the Traveling Wilburies) and bringing back Digg which is just kind of bonkers. Digg, for those that don’t remember, was Reddit before Reddit was Reddit. When Reddit launched, it was derided as a straight Digg ripoff. A friend of mine, Reily, astutely noted yesterday that Reddit ultimately won because of subreddits, and I think that’s true? I think? I don’t remember any equivalent on Digg.
But also I think Reddit won because it got bought by Conde, and placed in a publishing empire that lets things sit for long periods of time and did not have Silicon-Valley-level expectations for growth and (someday) revenue, whereas Digg had to keep going to the VC markets and justifying higher valuations for essentially the same thing? Man, my memory is murky.
Anyway it would be super awesome and hilarious if Kevin and Digg brought back the whole gang: Aubrey and Mike and Joe and Danny and Matt and yeah I would enjoy that very much. I could start going to SF again and we could all hang out at the Kilowatt or the Page or whatever is left of those years. Aubrey could start doing parties at Stubb’s again. We could all re-live our youth.
I am absolutely, 100% a firm believer in starting up old companies again, even if they ultimately go nowhere. Did the second version of Upcoming go anywhere? No, but worthy effort and I am thankful for the shirt. I did try and buy Barbarian back at one point, but, alas, the Koreans rebuffed me for better or worse.
Oh shit I could get a new Digg shirt to replace that one I got twenty years ago.
I am pumped.
Here lemme find a screenshot from my extensive archives of some of our work for Digg:
I am pleased to announce that yesterday something went well and the county of Chatham has told me that I can have an additional bathroom in my studio, so long as there are no additional bedrooms. And even better I can do this without a bunch of additional inspections by simply filing a notarized affidavit. This is great news. I think I’ll get a urinal. I will now recommence watching innumerable Youtube tutorials about the proper use of Schluderboard.
I have undertaken a support ticket with Unifi for my problem with Time Machine and my beloved NAS for backups, BackDatNASUp. Unifi insists on starting your support tickets in Chat which I do not love because then I gotta sit here and wait for them. I prefer the asymmetrical, my-time-is-mine format of email. But whatever, I do it. The first thing the dude said was “well your Mac is connected via SMB right?” And I’m like I think so? Unifi NAS only support SMB and NFS and I have NFS turned off, so it has to be, right? Is there a way to tell the protocol of the connection of a mounted server on a Mac? And its not like Unifi supports AFP. So I tell the dude all this, and he’s like “this is too hard for me we need to switch to email.” Okay dude.
He also weirdly kept insisting I use command-K to connect to the server and I’m like “look I just browsed to it in the file browser with the network browser isn’t that the same thing?” And he had no idea. But since he gave up anyway, I figured hey you never know. So I deleted everything, used Command-K and restarted the Time Machine backup.
I can now report that no, that was not the solution.
Also I have another Unas Pro with two macs connected, doing Time Machine backups in the exact same way with no problems, so, as they say in the biz, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
So we will await the email. Which has not arrived.
Rewatched 12 Monkeys last night and it is just stunningly good, still. Timely. Solid. Two new layers to it: one, Terry Gillian’s surreal and apocalyptic direction takes on very different connotations in this day and age and it works. And two, same with just the absolute shittiness of American cities in the 80’s and early 90’s, you really do forget. I mean, Gilliam turned up the volume on that but yeah, remember when there were cheap buildings in urban areas that leftists and homeless people and artists could take over? Not a thing anymore!
Also, potholes never seem to steam anymore what is up with that.
Justa mix for you today and I just put some work into it, it was about 20 minutes short, added a bunch of older songs. And actually arranged it too. This is a good mix I am excited. Has a new Doves tune for you. And an old (well, late period but that was still a while ago) REM tune and the Hold Steady because I also saw them in SF at the same venue I saw Mogwai and I really wanted them to play this song but they didn’t but then they played it a decade later in Williamsburg so thank you. And Mountain Goats cuz that guy is putting in the activist work on Twitter, thank you. And Luke Van Acker because he has a new song this week after twenty years (thank you Nick for alerting me to this) although this is not that song this one is old.
One more early morning and then I can sleep. I can do it, I can do it, I can d—-
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Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.