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Rogue Amoeba has software out now called AirFoil (http://rogueamoeba.com/airfoil/ ) which lets you stream ANY audio content (from Real, iTunes, Windows Media, RadioShark, your XM web player, any line-in device) through multiple AirPort Expresses…. in sync! That is insanely hard as Airport Express’ have a weird delay on connection.

This is a good alternative for a Sonos device for getting audio simultaneously to multiple rooms in a house. Here’s a good setup (borrowed from my home one).

Living Room – Airport Express with optical out to your stereo
Bedroom, dining room, office, etc. – Airport Express with a set of desktop speakers (pretty looking of course)

For use as a remote control, I have an old iBook I got on ebay that just has iTunes connecting to my G5′s library, and streaming out to our Airport Express in the living room. Have it send through AirFoil and you have a multi-room home entertainment system for pretty cheap (much cheaper than the 3000 dollar startup cost for Sonus, plus it supports FairPlay).

Given adequate airport coverage, you could have four airport express’ with speakers around your home. With USB powered speakers, you won’t even have to have a power-brick.

Bonus: Airport Expresses also passively relay your Airport signal, so you get more coverage of your home Internet connection.

I’m available for installs on weekends

I’m at [tag]MacWorld[/tag] Expo tomorrow for the day. If there are people who have cool shit that want me to see it (and I love seeing cool shit), please drop me a comment. Warners Bros. Records is a record company, but we love the technology

[tag]CES[/tag], oh how I love thee. A conference filled to the brim with hall after hall of people competing to be “it” amongst the gadgets, to be the de facto, to be the coolest thing the world has or ever will see. Its basically hall after hall of people trying to become Apple, which I found quite funny.

I took a late-afternoon flight out of Burbank, right after [tag]Paris Hilton[/tag] was photographed getting to our building, so the steps outside were covered in papparazi. A suitable beginning. Upon arriving, I boarded our limo bus that we rented for the ocassion and we proceeded to our hotel.

Queue hotel drama. End with a nice VIP room at the Hard Rock.

It is little secret that CES is not so much for the technology as it is for the parties around it. First party on the list was the Motorola party featuring the Foo Fighters, at the House of Blues at Mandalay Bay. We went and got in using our Moto contracts, but the place was packed with people and we couldn’t find anyone we knew, so we left. After that, I was bailing to go to what was supposed to be the be all, end all party of all time.

My friend Maria was friends with the promoter who had told her that Perry Ferrel was going, the party cost a lot and it was only 300 people. I get there early and Maria shows, only for us to have to wait for Perry and her friend to arrive. In the end, we get there and it turns out that the party is for a porn company out of Boulder, CO. What the hell? Entering, the party consisted of two types of people: software engineers and porn-stars. Both had seemingly low self-esteem. There were things going on on the bandstand that I didn’t even want to look at, but the drinks were free.

[tag]Perry Ferrel[/tag] though…. I have been a fan for a long, long time. I lost so much respect for the man though after he started “DJing” (if you can call it that) by mixing Nirvanna’s “Come as You Are” with “Revolution No. 9.” Not cool. And then he brought it one step further by playing a sped up version of Jane’s Addiction’s “Been Caught Stealing” and singing along to it through a microphone.

We left, and went back to Hard Rock and met up with some friends. We ended up being out until four AM.

I still had not seen one piece of technology.

The next day, we headed to the Sands to check out the auxillary show-floor. That floor is reserved for smaller companies to get bigger booths, and mostly all we did was chat with people that did things to decorate other things. Basically manufactuerers of CD cases, iPod skins, etc. We print logos on them and sell them. It works well.

Deciding it was time to bite the bullet, we headed over to the convention center. I was excited because I had just read Microserfs last week. I told Maria to call me Bug BBQ and I’d call her Karla, but she didn’t get the reference. Anyhow, one cab ride later and we arrived into the land of Microsoft (out front) and Microsoft (inside). Holy christ did it hurt. So here’s the report from the floor:

House of the Future outside – it had a 30 minute line, and no air conditioning. Considering how bad people were smelling, we skipped it.

[tag]Microsoft[/tag] booth – Holy shit that’s a lot of blue! Microsoft needs to fire all their graphic designers and just start over. This Luna design scheme doesn’t do anything but give me a headache. They were demoing Vista at every turn, as well as their home entertainment systems. The problem I have with both is they look so clumsy, like a first-year graphic design students attempt at interface design. Horrible. We tried watching a Vista demo and got bored. The game demos were hot though, I’ll give them that.

[tag]Panasonic[/tag] I have a Panasonic plasma, so I was interested in this one. They had an amazing grid of Plasma’s, but my god, why did they have tap dancing people? On the other hand, their 103″ plasma rocked my world. I must digress a bit and remember Siggraph’s of year’s past when a plasma display was reserved only for Sony, Apple and SGI.

HD-DVD vs. BluRay BlueRay is the winner in my estimation, as their masters and demos looked much, much better than the HD-DVD ones. The HDDVD reminded me of how the first DVD masters of Twister looked when they did the DVD demos. Washed out, a bit noisy, aliased, etc. I vote for Blu-Ray. However, HD-DVD is getting better titles, so fuck it, I’ll have to get both and an HDMI splitter.

[tag]Sony[/tag] A mighty cool booth. The PS3 was the most popular thing there, but their large format plasmas were marred by bad color correction and tuning. Spiderman 3 looked awful on it. I did rather like their new high definition video cameras and some of their new digital cameras.

[tag]Motorola[/tag] My have they jumped the shark. The Motorola Q (the RazrBerry as we call it in the office) is awful. The user interface (MS Smartphone 2005) is slow as hell, the keyboard is very awkward and hard to type on and the form factor just doesn’t feel very good. The PEBL is stupid and overrated, the new RAZR still retains Moto’s slow UI performance. The only good thing that Motorola has is their new quarter-sized (the coin) Bluetooth headset that fits into your ear canal.

Otherwise, we looked at some of the Intel stuff, and some of the other consumer electronics goods, but nothing really jumped out at me and said “wow, I want that” (except for the 103 in plasma). It seemed everyone was neglecting some fundemental concepts and then not mention the dreaded three letters (DRM). It also seemed like a lot of nervous laughter regarding MacWorld.

Maria and I, for shits and giggles, went to the car audio floor. It was the most ridiculously stupid thing I’ve ever seen, especially the demo cars. However, we at WBR do have a promo partnership with DUB, so we went over there to make sure we were representin’. We weren’t, only some Lil’ Jon footage on a screen. However, who should walk in but Benji and Joel Madden, to sign autographs. No one showed to get them and it was kind of sad. I know from Trent that they are nice guys (and I don’t doubt that), but they try way too hard to look like thugs. It’s kind of sad.

That being said, we did accept invites to a party at Beach for DUB, which the Madden’s would be DJ’ing and Coolio would be hosting. Yes, Coolio.

It was as lame as it sounds, but saved by Grover, who is head of radio promotions at work. We had fun shouting “Mike Jones!” at the Madden’s periodically while reminding everyone that WBR is the number one record label of 2005.

Queue 2 hours sleep, plane flight, naps and sleeping and I’m back where I started.

So in summary: CES is fun, not so much for the event but for everything around it. CES is also where deals are made, things are demoed and meetings for later are arranged. I had fun, but I don’t think its necessary all the time. This week: MacWorld on Tuesday. I’m not going to the Keynote, but we’re going up for the exhibit. Anyone else who is going, hit me up and we’ll meet up.

To all my ten readers or so, I will be heading to [tag]CES[/tag] Thursday through Saturday, and then to [tag]MacWorld[/tag] next week. I’m not going to the keynote, just the show floor. As there is no music related announcements going on, us poor record company people didn’t get keynote invites. So sad.

If anyone reads this and has cool as shit products on the floor of either show, drop me a line so I can come check it out, meet you and chat. I’m charged at WBR with finding cool shit (its nearly my official job duty), so I want to see what people have got. Even if its a Web 2.0 application. With chrome.

Drop me an email at ethan at warnerbrosrecords dot com or AIM me at EthanKap

In practice, I hate year end lists. It seems slightly silly to even think of compiling one for anything to do with the technology industry, as the industry operates on such tiny increments that things like my running blog (see right) seem more appropriate. In the past two days, I’ve been doing software development, something that I have neglected for a long time as I switched to being a (cue music of doom) manager.

I’ve also been spending my time configuring my PPC-6700 to fully operate as a mobiel communication device. I’d do a howto on that, but it might be a narrow market segment. On the other hand, maybe not. So I think I will this week.

Anyhow, my year end list of things:
Epiphanal Moment of the Year

March 9, 2005 @ 4:27PM. It was on this day that I sat down, took stock of where my life was headed and decided that I did not like it. I didn’t like school, I didn’t like teachin gas much as I had, I didn’t feel that I had a future in the course that I was on. Now, anyone that has been at that 0 hour place knows how difficult it is to face. You move in life toward a goal you think you have, visualizing yourself in 10, 20 years along this course in every ideal situation you can think of. Success. Power. Wealth. Influence. It was there at one point, along an academic track. I was a tenure track professor, writing books, teaching 300 kids at once. It was there, it was fun, it was a future.

Then it left me, and I was left wondering what the fuck I was supposed to do. And it wasn’t just my life either. I was married, with pseudo-kids (less expensive, and harrier, but still like kids) to take care of. If I was 22 and facing this crisis, I would have moved to San Francisco to start over. I couldn’t do that now, so the decision I made had to be good for both of us, and a defined future that I wanted.

So on this date, at this time, I made a decision to do something about a future I wanted. About two months later, that future started writing itself once again.

Best Day of the Year

May 19, 2005 – I was going to be giving a lecture in Art 7A about fanaticism and the music industry when I got a call from Robin Becthel telling me that I was hired at Warner Bros Records. I went inside, kind of on cloud ten and gave a lecture, where I also kind of announced that I was starting to withdraw my involvement from Murmurs. That night I went to a nice dinner with Amy. Like I said, the future started writing itself again at that moment.

Most stressful day of the year

June 13, 2005 – my entire family came up for graduation, and the moving van was arriving the next day. My family is difficult in the best of circumstances. I ended up storming off from everyone, saying “fuck this shit” twice in a 48 hour period. Joy.

Most interesting and deja vu development

This whole Web 2.0 thing. I didn’t quite get rich in Web 1.0. I don’t think I will in Web 2.0, because well, its a stupid concept that needs to die rather quickly. I’m glad that there is a new era of openness and optimism in web development. I’m sad that its getting usurped by buzzwords though. I like where I work, but I do have things on my back burner that might happen, or might not. Point is: its the Web people. A newfound optimism brought by a resurgence of intelligence is nothing to label with iterative concepts. Instead, lets keep our heads, keep doing smart things and then maybe we’ll have something special in the end, rather than sock puppets.

New favorite websites

• Andy’s links at Waxy are good, and he’s a pretty nice individual
• digg is good, but not great, and getting worse by the day unfortunetly
• BuzzMachine/Jeff Jarvis gets me upset and angry in a good way, frequently and causes me to enter into post-newspaper brat rants with great frequency. In a good way.
• TechCrunch makes me mad sometimes, but I like getting an overview of what’s happening.
• 9rules.com is a great concept, and fulfills my geeky desire to belong to a group of other geeks

People I’m Glad I Met in 2005

• Merlin Mann – of 43folders fame. Merlin is a cool person, with awesome taste in music, who I am somehow 2 degrees from with about 30 different individuals ranging from the lead singer of the Posies to an on-air personality on VH-1.
• Trent Vanegas – my pal from Pink Is the New Blog. I am not ashamed to be on team pink, whatsoever.
• Jeff Watson Work associate, and somewhat of a “me clone.” Kind of scary.
• Robert Greenhood – the only person who can match me in talkativeness. I work with him, but we literally talk on the phone for about two hours a day. Scary.

Best Concerts of 2005

Gang of Four – the Avalon, Los Angeles
If any band is to be regarded as the progenitors of the current crop of staccato-with-attitude bands (Killers, Franz Ferdinand, Bloc Party, et al) it is Gang of Four. Entertainment!, which was released in 1978 is as fresh and resonant as ever. I finally got to see the newly reuninited band and they were as ferocious and amazing as I would have expected.

The Decemberists – Henry Fonda Theater, LA
Probably the most fun show of the year in how theatrical everything was. Their new record is amazing and the show was doubly so. It erased the misery that was the New Pornographers at the same venue two weeks prior.

Green Day – AOL Network Live performance, The Wiltern, LA
What can be said? It was a 3000 person venue, with low ceilings and they did the full pyro. Plus it was free. Plus it was a hell of a lot of fun with everyone at Warners who worked on the American Idiot record (which I didn’t work on, as I started in June).

The Eels, the Labero Theater, Santa Barbara
A weird show, where we all sat in a small theater while the Eels played various strange instruments with hauntingly beautiful effects. Their new double record is devastating in its sadness, and with their prior records alternating between sad and funny, it made for a special evening. Plus a meet and greet afterwards.

Best Records of 2005

In non order:

Architecture in Helsinki – In Case We Die Sublime in its silliness, and beautiful in its earnest urgency. It sounds like koalas on crack.

British Sea Power, Open Season Not as strong as The Decline Of… but, equally as tragic and theatrical.

The Decemberists, Picaresque Although awesome, I don’t think that it matches the sublimity of the first two, especially Castaways and Cutouts. However, the songwriting is maturing to such an extent that it makes me wonder exactly how far this band of merry men and women can go. Where can you go after the Mariners Revenge Song? 8 minutes about people in the belly of a whale? Honestly now.

The Eels, Blinking Lights and Other Revelations So far the only Eels record to come close to the sadness and beauty of Electroshock Blues. The record leaves you breathless at the end with sadness and hope that your life could be as fulfilling as a fictional life on a record.

Kaiser Chiefs, Employment Na na na na naa is my favorite “to run to” song of the year. I think this record slaughters Franz Ferdinands new one, sadly. I love the Franz record, but there’s only a few ways you can redo Gang of Four guys.

Of Montreal, The Sunlandic Twins So twee and happy, and yet so twinged with this acid trip type pathos that I wonder what exactly is in the water down in Athens, GA. To think I might have run into these guys on my many visits that fair city. The mind wonders what could have happened?

Rogue Wave, Descended Like Vultures Yes, it is slightly like the Shins, but with less pretentious wordplay I think, and a bit more of an ear to subtleties of pop music rather than intentional similarity between song structures, instrumentation and mix. Sure, it might be more obvious, but 10:1 is such great power-pop, and such an obvious nod to REM’s 9-9 that I can’t help but smile.

Sigur Ros, Takk Almost equal to their second record. It is stunningly beautiful. I still think that Saeglopur could have substituted for the Sia song at the end of Six Feet Under’s finale.

Sufjan Stevens, Illinois Can’t leave this off or Pitchfork Media would kill my puppy.

Supergrass, Road to Rouen Likewise.

Moments that made me cry

• My great-grandpa Jim dying
• The finale to Six Feet Under
• Finishing the Dark Tower

Favorite movies of 05

• 40 year old virgin
• War of the Worlds
• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
• Wallace and Gromit and the Curse of Were-Rabbit

Moments of ERK Zen

• Hal Sparks hitting on my wife
• Amy pissing off Omarosa minutes earlier
• Natasha’s appearance on Pink Is the New Blog
• High school friends at launch parties in SF
• Making the confess line happen

More coming….

The time was 1995. I was 15 years old, nearly 16.

Around three years prior, I befriended Greg Hurst, who worked at my mom’s company (The Orange County Register). Greg, who was ten years older than I, became sort of an older brother to me. Plus he was a huge geek, and helped me bring my geekiness out. I went from wanting to be a doctor (like a good Jewish boy) to wanting to be a computer nerd, whatever that was and whatever that entailed.

Greg fed my newfound addiction through a steady supply of floppy disks and CD’s that came from the bowels of companies in Redmond, Vienna, San Jose and Cupertino. They had codenames, they were colored (sometimes) and they crashed all the time. I loved them dearly. My dear 486 DX50 (with 8 megs of RAM and a 120 meg hard drive) was reformatted and redone more in the two years that followed meeting Greg than I care to think about. I actually had to have my mom buy me a Colorado tape back up drive so I could continually have a fresh backup.

From 13 to 15, I beta tested various applications including Windows for Workgroups 3.11 (enter 32 bit addressing of the disk!), Delphi (early Internet), America Online (right after they went public and changed names, pre the Dec 1993 500,000 user milestone), Photoshop and others.

And then I got Chicago.

I first got Chicago (which became Windows 95) at the alpha stage, right after John Ruley published his article in Windows Magazine. I was on the Microsoft boards on AOL at the time, which he was on. Greg hooked me up with the same alpha (which didn’t work btw).

After that, I got put on the beta under Greg’s ID. A part of the beta was MSN. The original MSN of course was built onto Windows Explorer, so it was more a bulletin board system than anything resembling an Internet service. Going on MSN at this point was pretty funny, as it was a ghost town in which things were getting built out for public launch. It was akin to going into a party before doors open, where the lights are up, the staff is out, things are getting put into place.

The best thing about MSN at this point was Frogpond. Frogpond was a chatroom created just for us beta testers. It was in fact, the only chat room available at the time I believe. On the chat screen, it was signified with a little frog, and at any hour of the day you could enter and find an assortment of beta testers and Microserfs engaged in collective nerd-dom.

I was 15 going on 16 and a complete geek at this point. I had yet to start driving, and was completely hooked on the notion of chat rooms, forums, etc. My first AOL bill was 300 dollars, mind you. I started getting free minutes from AOL because I was a “charter” member (pre 500,000 mark), but that didn’t help matters much.

Frogpond and I instantly clicked, because I could enter it and see 20 or so uber-geeks who not only were up at 2AM, but also up, on a beta operating system and talking about build numbers, thunking, 32bit memory addressing and other Microsoft betas. It was beautiful. I felt like I was home.

I made a lot of friends in Frogpond. And I loved every minute I spent in there. It might be sad, or maybe its funny to think that a chatroom on a beta online service from Microsoft played a large role in my adolescence, at least for 6 months, but that is the truth. In 1995 or so, the Internet was not necessarily understood. My friends and I, those of us who traded beta CD’s, were on the Internet using SLIP connections to our local college, traded Elite BBS numbers and the like were freaks, and at that age, the primary reason for us reaching out online was to find others that overcame the obstacles to get to a position where we could type “Hey, Ethan from CA here, who else is online?” without fear of reprisal or curious glances.

I know a large part of why I created Murmurs.com in 1996 was because I wanted other people to have that feeling, specifically those that were REM fans. Being an REM fan in 1996 wasn’t very hip either, hence I felt the need to find a place, or create one, where acceptance could be assumed. We’re almost ten years down that path. I think it succeeded.

It is almost 2006, and its over ten years since I was a Frogponder. Its four years since I gave up on Microsoft products and it’s a long time since I was an MSN member, but as I approach the ten year anniversary of Murmurs, and marking almost 15 years that I’ve been online, I have to give a large portion of credit to the geeks in Frogpond for convincing me that social connections through the textual ether can have ramifications long after ones logs off.

So for that, if nothing else, I give Microsoft and Chicago credit.

Oh jolly. The holidays are upon us again. It’s time for family, food, kugel and guilt. Gift giving, drinking and yelling.

I hate the holidays.

I don’t mean that facetiously. I really hate them. I hate them so much that this year it made me sick with a bad flu to the point where I’m not going to our first (yes, we have multiple) holiday parties. Don’t get me wrong though, I do love seeing the family, and to some extent I like gift giving. The problem with the holidays that I have is that it seems so forced and fake, like everything is done out of obligation and not because of any feeling.

We had a holiday party once that was all of my family and Amy’s family. All the gifts were piled in the living room at Amy’s parent’s house, and we all went to town grabbing our own. It wasn’t a gift giving type of thing, it was shopping. I didn’t like it. The holidays used to be surprises. It used to be cold weather and hot chocolate, with our Hannukah Bush in the living room, lighting candles every night. Now it has become this thing that is between end of year crunch and beginning of year crunch. It snuck up on me so rapidly this year that I haven’t even finished my shopping yet.

I wish for the holidays to return to what they used to be for me. Something to look forward to, and not something I have to suffer through year after year, and look forward to the end of. I don’t know exactly what that entails, but I need to find ut because I absolutely can not do another year like this one.

For next year I have some ideas for what I’m going to do:

1) Go on vacation. Amy and I really need one, and its the perfect time of year to do it. I was thinking Aruba for Christmas/New Years. Europe is too cold in most places.
2) Devote one day to family and that’s it. None of this two party business.
3) Find a more creative gift for everyone. Donations? Subscriptions? One year I asked for everyone to donate to the Murmurs hosting fund, which ended up raising money for about four months of hosting. That alleviated bills to where I could buy what I wanted for myeslf.
4) Boycott the whole fucking thing and stay home.