Recommended Canadian Content of the Week: Blue Rodeo

Several weeks ago I took Gabe to San Francisco to participate with his t-ball team in a "Little League Day" at AT&T Park. Claire had the great idea of Gabe and I driving up Saturday and staying at a hotel so we could get to AT&T Park early Sunday morning for the Q&A with Giants coaches and players. (And then return in the early afternoon to sit in the bleachers with his team for the game.) It was a weekend of firsts for Gabe: riding in a "subway" (the Muni Metro), riding on a cable car, going to the top of a skyscaper, walking through Chinatown, going across the Golden Gate Bridge. Hopefully some of it made some lasting memories.

Driving home after the game Sunday, Gabe fell asleep (and slept all the way home—he was exhausted after a couple long, busy days). I didn't want to listen to my usual podcasts and risk waking him up (as I did on the way up Saturday), so I set my 5-star music playlist to shuffle. I enjoyed listening to a subset of my favorite music, something I don't make time to do very often.

I was struck by how much of it is Canadian. So I came up with an idea for a series of blog posts, each describing a favorite Canadian band or artist. My idea was to do this weekly, but since it has taken me weeks to finish writing up this first post, don't expect them that often. I'll do what I can.

Several of the tracks that played during my drive were by Blue Rodeo, and I've since noticed that there are more songs by them in my 5-star music playlist (13) than any other group or artist. (Runners-up are The Beatles and Louis Armstrong with 9, and R.E.M. with 8.)

I remember first noticing Blue Rodeo when Much Music took a liking to them after they released their first album Outskirts over 20 years ago. Their album with the most songs I've rated 5-stars (5) is Five Days in July, but I've over-listened to that album and need to leave it alone for a few years before I can enjoy it again.

If you buy only one song of theirs, I (currently) recommend Bulletproof from Palace of Gold. But I also recommend...

From Tremolo:

• Falling Down Blue
  
• Dragging On

From The Days In Between:

• Cinema Song
• Sad Nights

(I'm a sucker for ballads.)

Ah! Room to stretch

For some time now I've been just about completely out of space on my 17" PowerBook G4's 100 GB (93.04 GB capacity) hard disk. (My PowerBook has become my primary machine both at home and at work.)

Most days after I open iTunes and it downloads new podcasts and episodes of TheA Daily Show, I'm down to less than 2 or even 1 GB of available storage. The largest fraction of my hard drive is taken up my my Music folder (over 42 GB) and almost all of that is from iTunes, so I've been focusing on that. More often than I'd rather, I've been sorting the folders in my iTunes Music folder by size and copying the contents of the largest ones (the largest is usually almost always the Podcasts folder) to an external backup drive and then deleting stuff in iTunes. I can usually free up a gig or two, but that gets eaten up again in a couple days.

It occurred to me recently that my Pictures folder is also quite large, and most of that is taken up by my iPhoto Library. This morning I finally made time to backup the library (which is probably unnecessary since I'm already using Time Machine--but one can never have too many backups) and then create smart albums for all my unrated photos from 2005 and 2006. (Photos from 2004 and previous were kept in separate iPhoto libraries which I keep on several different external drives.) I then exported them to my external drive (for yet one more backup) and deleted them. (The trick to deleting photos from an album in iPhoto is to use Command-Option-Delete, which I learned from a "Mac 911" article I found using Google. And I had to remember that "Delete" means "Backspace" on non-Macintosh keyboards.)

I deleted 1533 photos from 2005, which freed over 4 GB, and 2021 photos from 2006, which freed over 7 GB. I now have over 12 GB available. I can't remember how long it has been since I've had that much free space. I'm going to enjoy not having to worry about almost being out of space. I wonder how long that will last.

Baseball is back

Two of the little pleasures of my life have returned: the major league baseball season, and the ESPN Baseball Today podcast.

The A's have lost their first two games of the season to the Mariners, who have now won has many games against the A's as they did all last season! (Oakland won 17 of 19 against Seattle last year.) Hopefully Rich Harden can prevent a sweep tomorrow. (And tomorrow's game is on KICU, so I'll be able to watch it on TiVo after the kids are asleep.)

I subscribed to the ESPN Baseball Today podcast all last year, and I don't think I missed an episode. It's just the right length: 15-20 minutes (every weekday); long enough to cover all the previous games and point out the interesting match-ups of the next day. The host Alan Schwarz and his rotation of co-hosts don't waste much time focusing on payrolls or the politics of the league--instead they focus on the games themselves--which I like. I wish I could point you to an easy way to subscribe, but for some reason there's no iTunes link on the only web page I could find: http://espnradio.espn.go.com/espnradio/podcast/index. But you should find it if you search for "ESPN Baseball" in the iTunes Store.

I only wish I could download podcasts and videos of games. Last year I subscribed to mlb.com's Gameday Audio, but I could rarely get it to work on Mac OS X and it was even flaky on Windows. I got excited when I read "MLB highlights coming to iTunes Store", so I've been watching for the "MLB.com Daily Rewind" and "Games of the Week". (I downloaded the 2007 Season Preview from iTunes, and it was worth watching.) "MLB.com Network Just Added" is prominently featured in the iTunes Store today, but when I click on it they only show the preview and "Baseball's Best". I'll keep watching.

Update 2007-04-05 09:30 PDT: I just checked http://espnradio.espn.go.com/espnradio/podcast/index and Baseball Today is right at the top of the page (describing yesterday's episode), with an iTunes link. But I'm getting an error (8006--whatever that means) when trying to update the podcast in iTunes. Perhaps that means that their podcast feed is down right now while today's podcast is being posted. (I saw the same error yesterday, and it went away later and then I could download yesterday's episode.)

MLB.com "Daily Rewind" is available on iTunes. I bought a 30-day "multipass" for $8, and downloaded the latest (April 3rd) episode. I'll let you know what I think.