An excellent fall for concerts

Tickets acquired for the following shows:

• The Jayhawks - October 22nd @ the Keswick Theatre in Glenside
• Lucinda Williams - October 29th @ the Keswick
• Ryan Adams - December 2nd @ the Academy of Music in Philadelphia

I passed on (a) Richard Thompson (Oct. 15 @ the Keswick) since we'll be up there already the following two Saturdays and (b) Gillian Welch & David Rawlings (Oct. 20 @ Union Transfer). I really would have liked to go the the GW/DR show, but it's on a Thursday night and Jen has class then. I've never been to Union Transfer but from what I can tell it's general admission and I'm too old to stand to watch shows :-)

Looking forward to the Jayhawks' "Mockingbird Time"

Paste magazine recently posted a nice video about the upcoming album from one of my favorite bands, the Jayhawks. For some reason I can't figure out how to embed it, but here's the link. I can't wait for Mockingbird Time to drop this fall...

We've also got tickets to see them at the Keswick Theatre in October. We saw the Jayhawks the last time they were at the Keswick in 2004 and also when they opened for Lucinda Williams at the Tower Theatre in 2003. In addition, we caught the Gary Louris and Mark Olson reunion tour(s) at the Ram's Head in Annapolis in 2005 and at the Sellersville Theater in 2008. I should check my stack of old ticket stubs...It could be that we've seen Gary Louris and company more than Lucinda or Richard Thompson (our other frequent shows).

In the meantime, here's a short clip about the album:

Back!

In my last post I apologized for not being around much, so I won't go into that again. I will say that ScienceOfRelationships has been seeing some really good growth; it's fun to see a site take off. We've got some really interesting articles posted there, so check it out.

I haven't shot much since I got back from Vermont, but for those of you interested in cycling, yesterday was the Philadelphia International Championship, and Jen and I spend the day in Manayunk watching the race. I have some good pictures I'll be posting soon, with the hopes of reviving the Photo of the Week. If you want a sneak peak, see the album here.

Nikon D90 + 70-300mm VR lensI took two telephoto lenses to the race along with my beloved Tokina 11-16mm, a 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6 VR and a 135mm f/2 DC (both Nikon), not knowing which would work the best. Last year I used the 85mm f/1.4, which didn't give quite the reach I wanted. I started with the 70-300mm and found that I couldn't get my shutter speed fast enough to really freeze the action (i.e., too much blur), at least at a low ISO. So I switched over to 135mm, which is really more of a portrait lens. Although I got a few good shots with the 135mm, it doesn't focus fast enough for action sports, so I went back to the 70-300mm but kicked the ISO up. This worked pretty well, and I got some good images this way. But now I see why the 70-200mm f/2.8 is so valuable; it would have been perfect for yesterday. I've got a year to save up for one before the 2012 race!

In addition to going to the bike race in Philadelphia yesterday, we also spent some time in the city looking at condos. Living in the city would be an interesting change of pace, but I don't know whether there's enough to do in Philadelphia to make it worth it. Philly seems to have all of the hassles of a city (traffic, parking, noise, grime) without any of the charms or things to do compared to cities I've spent time in (Chicago, San Francisco, Portland, the Twin Cities). I'd still like to move to Madison, but of course I've only spent time there in the summer.

Other stuff going on: I'm looking forward to today's WWDC announcements to see what new tricks Apple as up it's sleeve. I'm especially interesting in hearing about iTunes/iCloud, but I'm not confident it will be a solution for someone like me with a massive music library (~60k songs) that were not purchased from iTunes. But I'm keeping my fingers crossed. I've been playing with the Google Music beta over the last few days, but it seems like it has limited utility for me because (a) it doesn't support lossless file formats, which make up 2/3rds of my library, and (b) there's no iOS playback; just Android.

I'm also very curious to see if rumors about a robust network file sharing/sync solution pan out. I love dropbox.com, and I'm interested to see if Apple could best this great service.

We just got tickets to see the Jayhawks at the Keswick Theatre in Glenside this fall. It's great that one of my favorite bands is back together and touring, and they are supposed to have a new studio album coming as well. That, in addition to a new album from Gillian Welch, will make for a good summer of music.