Matt Van Stone

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Whenever Zakk Wylde does an interview with anybody they always get him to do a mini lesson for them. Here is one he did, I’m not sure who for, but it is freakin funny.

“You practice it enough, you can get it as clean as that. Trust me on this, I’ve done it for several years now, actually several decades. That is pure clarity.” I laughed my ass off.

Then some guy says “Zakk has been watching too much YouTube.” Classic.

I have been riding the train a lot lately and I am really growing sick of sitting there in silence. Since I had to give up the iPod that was never really mine when I left my last job I have been MP3 playerless. I purchased a RAZR V3i for it’s music capability, but the DAP on the phone really sucks. It is very picky about bitrates of MP3s and it has failed reading most of the songs I have put on it. Plus the sound quality really blows.

I have recently become addicted to reading Engadget and Gizmodo. These sites fuel some kind of sick addiction that people have with you guessed it, gadgets. The sites give the world up to the minute news on all sorts of fresh gadgets as well as specs, rumors, and reviews.

The Sansa Connect player has been on the headlines a lot over the past few weeks. It is a new wifi player that allows you to stream internet radio from Yahoo Launch right to the player from wherever there is an open wifi signal. Although I wasn’t interested in paying the premium for wifi, the regular Sansa e280 (8GB) looked pretty good to me. It’s the same price roughly as a 4GB Nano (if you find the Sansa on sale) and it supports FM Radio, voice and FM recording, and even does video playback. Plus the screen is bigger. This player looks nice, but then I found the iRiver Clix2.

Here’s a video of the Clix2 functioning.

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Ubuntu 7.07 has been released today. I was looking forward to upgrading from 6.10, but since I installed openSUSE the other day I don’t think I want to go back to Gnome. I love KDE. Gnome is great for people who dont want options. If you want it simple, stick with Ubuntu and Gnome.

I may break down and try Kubuntu which was also released today, but I don’t know. It is usually a few hours work getting Linux running on my GeForce 7800/Dell 2405 video card/monitor combination. Plus, I have read that previous versions of Kubuntu were not as quick as openSUSE. This release claims to be quicker than past ones, but will it really be worth it?

In the end I will probably end up trying it out. I’ll post back in the future with a comparison if I do.

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Last Sunday I had a few files on my system go corrupt. If I had a recent backup of my system I probably could have just restored it, but I didn’t. Some Linux fanboy I am. I tried to reinstall the components that went corrupt but I still couldn’t get X to start. If I took the time to troubleshoot it more I probably could have fixed it, but I really didn’t have the patience. I had read about people upgrading to Feisty beta to fix some of their problems in the past so I decided to give it a shot.

The upgrade was over 400MB and took over an hour to install. After all was said and done I was able to get back into Ubuntu. Everything looked ok, but I was having some (beta related) crashes. I have been wanting to try a distro that used KDE for a while so I decided to download openSUSE 10.2. Last night I burned the ISO, backed up my configuration, and started the install.

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If you don’t know the basic rules of soldering, don’t try to mod your Wii. It’s not easy. Follow the link below for more pics and how this botched mod job was actually salvaged.

How not to mod your Wii

Yesterday was a crazy day. First I got to meet Zakk Wylde, in the flesh, then his show at MacEwan Ballroom kicked ass.

We went to the show late. It opened at 7pm, but we showed up at about 8:30. The opening band sucked so we looked at the merch and the people for a while.

Once it seemed like the opening band was done and the setup for BLS was done we moved back into the hall. However, it was still about a half hour wait after some guy came on the mic and said “BLS Will be taking the stage in a few moments!”. They kept playing music that made you think they were coming out, but they weren’t. When the siren started going, we knew what was up.

They had a huge BLS flag covering the whole stage and when the siren and red light started going we could see flashes of Zakk’s shadow against the flag. It was pretty dramatic. Finally the song starts and the flag drops to the stage. It was wicked. I cant remember the exact songs that he played in the set. The highlight for me was probably The Beginning at Last since his first album Sonic Brew is my favorite. The sound setup was awesome at this show. When I saw him in Vancouver the sound really stunk. You could basically just hear bass and drums and every once and a while you could hear his singing or some guitar. This time was totally different though, all of the instruments were really clear and you could hear singing and solos and everything.

The acoustic set was good, but I like the old Zakk “machine gun man” Wylde. When he started playing MGM I was pretty excited, but he didn’t end up playing anything but the rhythm and he only played it for a bit. I would have loved to hear that song live. Zakk’s piano set was pretty cool. He didn’t do anything like that in Vancouver when I saw him in ’05. In fact, he seemed really happy to be there and seemed to he having a great time on stage. In Vancouver he just played and that was it. At this show he was joking around and dancing around the stage making fun of Dancing with the Stars. It was awesome. I really hope that he enjoyed playing here enough that he will come back next time he is on tour. BLS is still somewhat unknown as a band. They have a pretty big cult following though and pretty much anyone who has seriously played guitar knows that he is one of the greatest players to ever live.

There was no encore, but he did play a 2+ hour set and I was really happy with it. I got a bunch of good pictures that I have uploaded to my flickr account and I got a few videos too. The one video is awesome, but since I was so close to the stage the sound is messed. I’m gonna see if I can clean it up a bit and then upload it to YouTube if it is acceptable.

Again, it was a really wicked show, I probably would have paid five times as much to see him and it has renewed my obsession with him and his music. SDMF Bleed Black Label.

Here is a link to the flickr set of photos from the concert.

I want to do this while it is still fresh in my mind…

I arrived at Guitar Works at 11:30. I was a bit early but I was about the 20th person there. They started handing out entry wrist straps at 12pm. If you brought your Shot to Hell CD with you they gave you a wrist strap. Then they started another line for people who did not bring a CD. I did not bring a CD because I assumed they would be readily available. So I waited with a group of about 25 people who needed to buy a CD. 1pm rolled around and still no Zakk, 2pm – no Zakk and still no CDs. At about 2:30 we see Zakk walk by the window. A guy comes out and starts handing out small posters for Zakk’s new deal with Dunlop for guitar strings. Apparently the CDs got lost somewhere or weren’t brought to the store or something. No big deal, I didn’t really care that much about the signature.

The shitty thing was I was maybe 5th in line to buy a CD, but when they started giving out the posters they just sort of started from the middle. By the time it was all done I ended up near the very end of the line. I was probably the 10th last person. I was a little choked. I had been standing there for 3 hours already and now I’m behind people who showed up an hour after I did.

By 3:30 I was 3rd or 4th and Zakk just gets up and walks out. I started to sweat a little bit… Where is he going? Then I overhear someone say he had to take a leak – ok, thats fine. Finally I get up to the front, he’s standing in the corner behind a round table. I walk over, put my poster down and he shook my hand and gave me a one armed hug. He asked me what my name was and I told him. He said right on brother or something like that. He asked me if I was coming out to the show tonight and I said yes. I told him it was my second BLS show and that I saw him in Vancouver two years before. He smiled and said right on again. He took a swig of what looked like his 4th Becks and signed and dated my poster. He gave me another huge one-armed hug and said thanks for coming and I’ll see you at the show tonight. For some reason the only thing I could think of to say was “you’re fuckin’ awesome man”, and that was it. The whole thing lasted maybe just over a minute. It was pretty much the single greatest moment ever.

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Ok, so I was just doing a quick Google to find The Sopranos creator’s name (David Chase) and I came across this short bit of an article from New York magazine.

The Young Tony Soprano Chronicles? Janice Loves Bobby? Sopranos creator David Chase says he’s thought about a spinoff of his soon-to-depart hit—but don’t hold your breath for one. “HBO has those moments. I have those moments. But it’s doubtful that there would be a spinoff. Actually, one time we talked about it—and I didn’t know if it was serious—I thought there could be a good sitcom of Janice and Bobby Bacala. What’s also occurred to me is a prequel with Tony. But the problem is that Jim Gandolfini is such a genius, frankly, that it would be a real challenge to find someone who would be believable as a young Tony.” So how about a movie? “A movie still exists as a possibility, I suppose. But it becomes less and less of a possibility because of technical challenges. I mean, where would you come in on the story? Let’s suppose, at the end of this, there are characters who don’t make it. How would you do the movie without them?” The Sopranos returns to HBO on April 8.
Source

The thing that intrigues me is that it is from the March 2007 issue of the magazine. I know that there were talks of a Sopranos movie a while ago, but I thought that David Chase basically was making this final season his “movie”.

I am really excited to hear that a movie is still a possibility and that even a spinoff is possible. I would definitely tune into The Young Tony Soprano Chronicles. I have to agree though, it would take a special actor to be able to do what James Gandolfini has done with Tony. When you watch the first season compared to the last season it’s amazing how he grew into that character. Whoever picked up that [young Tony] role would be constantly compared to Gandolfini.