The Journal Of E. A. Kolb

Last week, Kristen (galactose), Nate (statichd3), and I went to see Nine Inch Nails at the Knoxville Auditorium and Coliseum. We had bought floor tickets through nin.com the minute they became available several months ago. This was my second time seeing them in concert; the first being in Buffalo, NY during the Fragility tour in 2000 (tour shirt: "Where the fuck were you?").

I first started listening to NIN back in 1997. That was the summer I was working as a councilor at Camp Sabattis in the Adirondacks. That year the staff suffered through the regime of a particularly inept program manager, so there was much angst to be had by all. Between Zay (linzzay) and a couple of other staffers' music collections, I got hooked and the band has remained one of my favorites to this day.

The tickets we were general admission floor tickets. Eight years ago, the ticket I had was not a floor ticket and I recall trying to spend a fair amount of time at the concert trying to weasel my way down to the floor. (No dice, by the way.) When tickets for this show went on sale, floor admission was a necessity.

We got in there pretty early on and got a good position -- about 15 feet from the stage. Of course, with so many people packing into a place on a summer evening, body odor became a bit of an epidemic, but what can you do?

Reznor picked four different bands to open for Nine Inch Nails: Crystal Castles, Does It Offend You Yeah?, A Place To Bury Strangers, and Deer Hunter. Sadly, it was Deer Hunter - my least favorite from the sampler that Reznor distributed earlier in the season - who opened for us. Apparently the front man is a native of Sevierville, not far from here. I don't think his memories of this place are that fond; their performance could be summarized as irritating the crowd for 45 minutes. All of their music sounds like a rambling Tom Yorke solo track, only completely lacking any soul. It seems like they were deliberately lengthening their songs with the same narrow sequence, just to fill their time on stage. By the time they left, most folks around us had reactions ranging from "good riddance," to mild rationalizations that they didn't feel totally gypped.

We had miscalculated a bit on our positioning strategy when we came in. Once Nine Inch Nails came out, the crowd surged forward, utterly ignoring the notion of "personal space". I feel like I should have anticipated this, but nobody's perfect. Predictably, our position (now slightly less than 15 feet) turned into the writing masses once the music began. If you were by yourself, this was probably a lot of fun. However, I spent most of the first five songs doing whatever I could to keep Kristen from getting crushed and/or smotherered. I wasn't exactly comfortable myself either. Things got just way too hectic and, by the middle of "March of the Pigs", we started pushing our way towards the back.

This turned out to be a Very Smart Move^TM. Not only could we see better, we weren't distracted by personal safety issues and pressing concerns of getting knocked over or trampled to death. Plus with my height I was still able to get a fair amount of photos and videos. You can see them here: http://flickr.com/photos/eakolb/sets/72157606858403079/.

The show was amazing. They touched on music from every major release (including Ghosts I - IV). The theme of the concert was Lights In The Sky Over North America and was hallmarked by the dual screens they had going for the light show. The screen in back was backlit while the one in front was a mostly transparent grid that seemed to be projected on. The grid was wired up with various sensors that played with the show. For instance during "Only" -- the highlight of the lights show, in my opinion -- the projected screen of white noise bubbled around Trent. At one point, they had the screen obfuscating the stage while the crew cleared the Ghosts kit (they were performing "The Greater Good"). When that was complete, one of the crew guys came out and used his flashlight beam to wipe away the front projection layer. Finally, at the beginning of "Echoplex" during the encore, one of the band members came out and touched the squares on the projection layer to program the drum machine.

All in all, it was an incredible show. My left leg locked up on my way out and my calves were sore for like four days afterwards, but it was worth it. Also, the only time I would willingly drop $70 on t-shirts and not bitch about it.

If you've been ignoring the music scene for a while, you might have missed the waves Trent Reznor's been making -- that's easy to do when you're out to sea, after all. Those waves have become a tsunami now as we've reached the shore.

I'm guessing you probably heard about Radiohead's experiment with releasing In Rainbows as a pay-as-you-like digital download. It was a huge publicity stunt that supposedly netted the band more cash than they've ever made off an album (though the band isn't interested in telling us just how much money that is). The problem with Radiohead's radical tactic is that is was entirely ingenuine. The stunt worked well, but a month and a half later, they signed the work to a label and pulled the pay-what-you-want downloads in favor of plastic distribution. On top of that audiophiles weren't entirely pleased because the only option for download was 160kbps MP3s. These provide respectable sound, but it's hardly high-quality.

Look back even further, when Reznor was pimping his Year Zero saga and alternate reality game. Things seemed to be going smoothly until Reznor's label Interscope took the wind out of his sales. It was a rocky road for them both. Part of Reznor's game included leaving new tracks on thumbdrives to be found at his concert venues. These songs would inevitably get back to the Internet for viral distribution. This was Trent's explicit plan, but the label owns the music and worked to protect its interests. The real barb in the standoff between label and artist came in Australia, where Interscope was intentionally pricing Year Zero several dollars higher than the latest pop flavor of the week. When Reznor pressed the label for why, they slapped him in the face by telling him his fans were willing to pay more for his music, and therefore they should.

From here forward, Reznor's been more than a little fed up with record labels. His early career was hallmarked by him getting the short end of the stick (like most artists), and now that he'd made it the treatment was that his fans got the privilege of paying more for his music. Trent had been working on ways to buck the system right about the time when Radiohead pulled their stunt. He had been working with Saul Williams to produce The Inevitible Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust, which was released with higher quality under the same pay-what-you-want system on the heels of In Rainbows (the free option limited to the first 10,000 customers).

The real test was Ghosts I-IV, an instrumental/ambient album recorded by Nine Inch Nails. Reznor decided rather than try a half-solution, harnessing the power of the internet like a jump-start, he would embrace the Internet and its power completely. Ghosts was released sans label. It was put online with several payment options: free (9 tracks of 36), $5 (full album, digital only), $10 (full album, digital immediately and physical in early April), and $70 and $300 limited editions. The digital downloads were of very high quality, offering 320kbps MP3s, lossless M4A, or FLAC files.

The album was an incredible success. The $300 limited editions were sold out within the first day and the record as a whole made $1 million in its first week, with 0% going to a record label. (Bear in mind, this is an instrumental/ambient album.) In early April the CD came out proper and is now in retail outlets, with absolutely none of what you pay for going into the pockets of record label execs.

Once that was said and done, the question for many of us was, "What's next?" Was that a single, big fuck-you to the labels, or will this be the new world order for Nine Inch Nails?

The last week in April, Reznor suddenly released a new track "Discipline" to radio and the internet. The MP3 carried a comment that said "Go to nin.com on 5 May." This was followed by the release of a second track -- "Echoplex" -- with the same comment through Facebook last week. The signs pointed to a new album on the imminent horizon.

I don't think this is what anyone expected. Yesterday, 5 May 2008, Nine Inch Nails released The Slip. For free. Let me reiterate that:

Nine Inch Nails is literally giving The Slip away to fans.

Even if you're not a fan of the band, I'd highly encourage you to download the album. Reznor's stood out from the crowd as the one artist who is willing to completely buck the artist-label system that is dragging the music industry as a whole down.

In other Nine Inch Nails news, there's an upcoming tour. The band has itself bought the best seats at the venues, and those tickets will be pre-sold through tour.nin.com before tickets through the conventional outlets go on sale. These tickets will carry the name of the purchaser on them and will require ID to be shown at the door to use them. Why? They can't be scalped that way. That way the band makes money on the tickets and not some shadow company of people prowling the lines outside.

 

1.) Microsoft Internet Explorer 7
One of the components I've written for eGov's clerk suite is a miscellaneous receipt processor. Receipts in general consist of the subtotal from the items found thereupon plus the taxes and fees and assorted whatnot heaped on top of that. In this instance, receipt items are based on service codes. For a clerk's office, these codes are tied to how the money collected for an item should break down into their general ledger distributions. In other words, when you pay $X to your county clerk for Some License, $W is kept by the clerk's office, $Y goes to the state, and $Z goes back to the county in general (where $W + $Y + $Z = $X).

Not all receipt codes are created equal. Fixed values are trivial, but some of these codes are percentages of a given amount. For instance, if they're charging you for 5% sales tax on your car then the amount you pay rather depends on the amount you paid for your car. So, to proceed with the calculations at that point, my code uses JS' prompt() function to obtain that foreign value immediately rather than muck about running absurd calculations.

Enter MSIE7. Some genius at MS decided that JS' prompt() is an untrusted function call. This means that prompt() does nothing unless one of two things happens:
    1.) The user right-clicks the pop-down sheet each time and chooses to temporarily allow the call to work.
    2.) The site is manually added to MSIE's list of trusted sites.

This came to my attention when I went to train the first end users with this particular component yesterday and it just wasn't working, despite a thorough double-check of functionality. Problem is, I've got MSIE6 on my work computer, which didn't present this asinine problem.

Regarding #1: no one sees those pop-down sheets to begin with ever, let alone the fact that it's a totally unacceptable non-solution to the problem. I cannot count to you the number of PEBKACs I've dealt with that would have been thirty second calls if anyone actually mentioned these sheets to me. Regarding #2: that's something that hasn't been part of our setup process and with counties on the other end of the state it's not a trivial matter to have that arranged.

Ultimately, I'm going to have to write an AJAX-y circumvention that does the same fucking thing as Javascript's prompt() because Microsoft had to go screw with their implementation of JS.

And before you fucking say it, we can't dump MSIE. It's not even an option at TNII counties (it will be uninstalled), let alone the fact that we're using a third-party ActiveX control for dialogless printing.

2.) Apple iPod

Prognosis on my older 20GB model comes and goes. Last night, the thing was a brick. Right now it's "fine". At least, for definitions of fine that are permissive of potential bad clusters on the disk, unexplained and only periodically reproducable startup failures, and so forth.

The way I figure, it's had a run of a few years and it's pretty much enjoying its last days. Time to start looking for a new one, right?

Guess not.

I haven't followed the market for these things avidly or anything. I'm not the kind of guy who gets a boner over the gadget market. Don't get me wrong, gadgets are great and all; I just don't pay much attention until I'm actually in the market.

Apparently, Apple's decided that they really just hate their customers these days. The least expensive iPod model is $250. Sure, the iPod Nanos are cheaper, but I don't want a fucking iPod Nano. Those things have something like 2-8GB of space. I'm using about 15G of my 20GB right now, so that's not even a viable option for me.

Thing is, I can't get an iPod that doesn't have all these new features that I don't want. The whole video kick is nice, but I fly maybe once a year and when I do I've got a book handy. Aside from that, when is a video screen on my iPod going to do me any good. Hell, I don't even need a color screen on mine.

I want what I've got - a 20ish GB MP3 player that integrates directly with iTunes. The product I describe no longer exists on the market. I would gladly give Apple money for the product I want. I will not give Apple money for features I don't want and will not use. This is an impasse, so they're losing me as a customer.

And you'd better believe that this fuck up makes me rethink ever putting money into their desktop or laptop computers, something I've been contemplating for a while.

Someone please explain to me why The Killers continue to be some big deal. It's mediocre music with rotten lyrics -- I've yet to hear a song by them that wasn't simply lame.

Also, please stop covering "Common People." William Shatner did it; if you do it, you're effectively covering a Shatner cover and that makes you dumb.

If you use iTunes, please heed this advice: DO NOT UPGRADE TO VERSION 7.0 OF iTUNES!

Version 7.0 has been changed in such a way that if it cannot monopolize your CPU, your music will sound like crap. For instance, while playing Warcraft, forget about listening to iTunes. Your music will be pain for your ears. It even started skipping when I opened semagic to make this post. Even folks who have machines much newer than mine (voodoo_prophet) are having problems with it. I strongly urge you to NOT upgrade until they fix this crap.

The iTunes installer is unable to upgrade Quicktime v7.0.2 to v7.0.3 for unknown reasons.
iTunes v6.0 cannot run without v.7.0.3. It instructs me to reinstall iTunes.
Rinse.
Repeat.

Edit: I've finally got it working. I had to dig around for a standalone Quicktime installer, which was a bit more informative with its error messages. Using that information, I was able to correct permissions on registry keys well enough so that the installer could do its job.

For those of you who get a buzz off consumable media, there's a couple hot items being released on 14 June that are worth mentioning.

You may have noticed that I haven't updated in a while. That has been intentional - I wanted my last posting to be on top for a while. As for not posting something Friends Only, I've simply been occupied since then.

For one, my job has been keeping me exceedingly busy. My department is kinda in the middle of everything - there's not a whole lot that goes on at deviantART that doesn't somehow involve the Department of Artist Relations. Consequently, that means that most crisises, big and small, end up crossing my desk at one point or another.

For instance, my boss was on TV again and I wasn't notified until about a half hour before when we were supposed to have the art we'd be featuring handed over to the producers that I needed to come up with two artists to feature. And I wasn't notified until about 60 seconds before the original deadline that the deadline was when it was. I had to pull some extra hours in that night, but with the help of object2bdestroyd, voodoo_prophet, moonbeam13, and damphyr we found a couple good guys, got through to them, and got their art on TV. The artists we got were Kevin Turner (turn2002) and Ross Campbell (mooncalfe).

Another example - the absurd Submission Agreement debacle of last week. So, after 4.5 years of having the same Submission Agreement in place, we needed to modify it slightly. The previous version granted deviantART, Inc. privileges sufficient to be a web publishing company. Recent business and technical developments have generalized the idea to a digital publishing company, and so the agreement needed some minor modifications to allow us to release technology that would send data to digital devices like cell phones, iPods, etc. Thing is, when we notified people of the changes, it blew up into a big thing because it was the first time so many people ever actually read the agreement! And, surprise! They discovered that they have to grant certain rights to DA for us to be able to do what we do.

A lot of it was inane crap, but I was one of the people on the front lines of that one. I wrote a big ass Submission Agreement FAQ on the subject and pounded my head into walls for most of last week. It was less than enjoyable.

And then moving on, there's plenty of stuff that's keeping me busy. Just today, I needed to write some copy for something that's barely been discussed internally and yet was needed to be done last week. There's no shortage of work for me.

Of course, all work and no play makes Jack a very dull boy, so I got myself into World of Warcraft. Don't worry - I'm not going to geek out excessively about it here. Suffice it to say that, if you play, start a character on Perenolde and send Derethas a little hello. I got Kristen interested too, so we have fun with it.

This past weekend, Kristen and I went to the-spifster's place in Wisconsin for a smallish meetup. It was a lot of fun. We watched Boondock Saints, Apollo 13, Anchorman, and Sin City (a second viewing for Kristen and I). We tried to play trivia in this massive trivia competition that was going on, but we gave up. Mostly because the radio station which you had to listen to for the questions was playing crappy music 90% of the time. We did go to BW3's and did substantially better on trivia there. Also, K and I bought the newest Lemon Jelly CD - '64-'95 - at an indy music shop that reeked too much of crappy incense. All in all, it was good times.

So that's the life and times. Now that this idiotic press debacle seems to have wound down again, I'll be looking to post more regularly again.

As I had anticipated, the decision to act on my interest in the Nine Inch Nails concert in Chicago this coming May was made simple. Tickets for both Chicago shows sold out in the first ten seconds they were available online. Of course this happened Friday while I was on a west-bound airplane.

Alas. I hope it'll be a hell of a show.

So, Nine Inch Nails has a new album - titled With Teeth - coming out on 3 May 2005. Exciting.

Moreover, they've announced their 2005 tour details. Of note, they'll be in Chicago, IL at the Congress Theatre on 6 May and 7 May. Fortunately, tickets for these shows don't go on sale until this coming Friday, so we have a little more than 24 hours to contemplate wanting to go before the gates are open.

Tickets would be $30, from what I'm reading on Ticketmaster. I'm interested. Who else is interested? Specifically, who else in the area is interested in sharing wheels?

I'm unofficially old now, so seats would be fine by me. I should have gotten floor tickets back in 2000 for the Fragility tour, when I was thinner and less likely to be accidentally killed in a industriogoth stampede. But the idea of seats a safe distance away from the pulsating, writing pit sounds just fine to me now...

_{Many thanks to phyrexia for keeping me informed on something I probably would have missed out on.}