Awake, thanks to a 1:30am “wake up call,” at 4:25am, finding some rest from a fairly debilitating bout of depression, tackling some small tasks while listening to some awesome internet radio I will clue you into later in this post, I’m feeling rather sheepish for not yet posting any of the cool stuff I promised at the end of November. But those things getting pushed back in the name of quality, and I keep finding cool stuff elsewhere on the world wide interwebbie.
Just by way of a small update, SWIM is getting pushed back yet again, as we make some radical but important, and hopefully awesome, changes to the user-end portion of the software. It’s a long story I won’t go into here, but suffice it to say that while most blogging system’s template systems suck, they are very hard to improve upon. Hopefully SWIM’s template system will suck less.
At some point yesterday, I stumbled upon Acts of Volition (via airbag), via his Acts of Volition Radio Christmas: Session 17: Christmas music that doesn’t suck. Turns out that AoV is one of those “perfect” (imagine those being air-quotes, meaning “relatively,” meaning I like it, meaning it has an ethos I connect with and possibly like this site’s own) blogs: clean design, geek but in plain English, very smart taglines indeed, good posting frequency (not too much not too little), and the AoV Radio Thing. Of course after checking out the Christmas show, I went back and scanned the other shows…and started downloading…like crazy.
Here are the names that make me freak out (like, some guy in Canada knows about these bands?): Michael Knott, Adam Again, Poor Old Lu, Aunt Bettys, Chagall Guevara, Cush, Dennison Witmer, Daniel Lanois. For those who don’t recognize some or any of those names, those are bands from The Days When All “Christian” Music Didn’t Suck, as well as Indie Music For Those Of Us Who Are Over Indie Music. He also packs his shows with great indie-indie music and Canadian bands. He makes short, insightful commentary inbetween tracks and each show is downloadable as one mp3, most coming in at around 40 mins/40-50M. Plus you can hear him apologize profusely for including (a good) Newsboys song (I think he actually describes their name as “unfortunate”) and say “aboot” and “baas.”
Listening to his story about going to see Michael Knott in Ontario right now (Session 3)…very cool (later: another story about an email exchange with Gene Eugene before gushing as much as I would about the song “Worldwide”). So check out Acts of Volition, load up your iPod, or if you’re me, your 3.5-year-old 10lb Dell laptop, and enjoy.
Some cool stuff on danielsjourney tomorrow. Only half a month late.
Thanks Steven; your show, and finally “Worldwide,” which I listen to frequently but somehow meant more this morning, finally put the axe to my bad mood.