[music | Velvetina Underground - Rusty The Black Skatemaker's Death Song]

Rasputina is always a good show, though I'm still waiting for one of their shows to match my first show with Zoe Keating and Jonathan TeBeest at Pearl St. There were some surprises tonight too, and I make some demands.

pics, videos

Late late update.

Natalie and I were very happy to see these guys touring this year. Squirrel Nut Zippers is fun, the Dise is a fun place to see bands (as long as I can stake out my pole early), so it was a no brainer. We got lucky, for this show was greatness.

Pictures, sure

[music | The Breeders - Sinister Foxx]

Fun fun fun. This show was apparently the first ever at LeLacheur Park in Lowell, I hope they do more after this, it was great. The floor they put down was way easier on an old man's knees than concrete or even wood. After jumping around for 3 hours I can still pretty much walk, which is a bonus.

Pics and rambling

[music | Consolidated – Infomodities]

We went to Beth Orton's 7pm show at the MFA, and I can say, finally, a relaxing show :-)

Unqualified Review, couple of pics

Peter Murphy @ The Roxy

[music | Leonard Cohen - Jazz Police]

Ali Eskandarian opened. I have no pictures of him, because I didn't want to get bounced since the place was still pretty empty, but he was a spaz. I especially liked his cohort, whose name I can't find. He looked just like Early Grayce (Brad Pitt) from Kalifornia, and did a good job of engineering the bleeps and bloops.

More and Pics

[music | The Bruisers - Greed]

DEVO came to Boston for the first time in 20 years and rocked the Pavilion. They brought with them Tom Tom Club. The Dork was strong with this show.

Pics!

[music | New York Dollls - Vietnamese Baby]

Videos are up from the Boston Pops show we went to on the 19th. These look fantastic if you append &fmt=6 to the end of each video URL to get a decent res version.

Today I listened to the MP3s (THANK YOU table-mate!) of the set, and they came out great, even though I can be heard laughing at certain points. I swear though, the person coughing isn't me, I promise, really. As much as I generally cough, I held it, it was hard. Sounds like me though. Isn't.

[music | Chicane - Andromeda]

Saturday we did some strawberry picking, 9lbs for like $18 at Lull Farm's field in Milford.

Sunday, I headed up to Dunbarton to help out with this monster Sun e450. It was trapped in my friend's car because he didn't have anyone to help him move it into his house, haha. At my suggestion we pulled out everything that was modular before trying to get the stupid thing out of the car and up a flight of stairs to his room. From there it was a simple matter of giving it a serial console, with the null modem adaptor I didn't bring, so we had to drop the $9 at the Shack.

Then just feed it CD after CD. He only let me get 3/5 of the way through before giving up. I think it's going to be for sale, any takers? Sucker. My only comment was that it would probably cost him a fortune to make the Boy Scouts take it away from him next spring. In our town they only charged $20 "per computer", but I'm pretty sure they'd make an exception in his case and charge by the pound like with all other electronics.

[music | Mediæval Bæbes - Summerisle]

***Here be spoilers.*** If you didn't go to the Thursday night show, and are planning to go to the Friday show, I would urge you to read things only before the cut here.

Generic highlights and things I know:
-For this show, it's Screw You Ray, I'm going to hang out with Heinrich Steinweg for a while, it was a good plan.
-There will be video
-There will be audio
-I almost broke Sxip Shirey's arm as he got up from his table and spun right into me.
-Smarter people than me took lots of pictures, which I'll link to eventually. This is also the last straw for my "paying attention to the venue's camera policy" policy.
-I forgot that Zoe Keating is on New Record until I saw 50 string instruments backing this music and now I can't wait to hear New Record.

I have some form of concert Alzheimers disease, since I tend to say this a lot, but: This is, almost without question, our Favorite Show Evar. I think this one might hold onto that title for a while too, at least until DEVO.

Fanboy Aweigh

Someday, we'll live in The Future, I swear it.

Last year I bought OmniGraffle 4 Pro, I really, really like that app, and it makes using Visio seem like self torture. Now only if the formats were open all the way around...

The thing that has held me back with OmniGraffle is the lack of stencils. Graffletopia does a great job, but I find myself using the Apple or Dell (mixed with the Sun, Netapp, etc) stencils that aren't really representative of my hardware, and I feel that it just doesn't seem that professional when I hand my boss a network or rack diagram that has all this disparate hardware that doesn't match anything we actually own. I have a lot of Visio stencils, some of which DO work in Omnigraffle using their preferred import method: Make a new drawing in Visio, drop your objects on there, save it as an xml drawing, and import that into OmniGraffle. The problem is that for a huge percentage of stencil sets, you get an error that you can't load the EMF data and get a grey rectangle or munged object.

Many people have been recommending blowing the objects way up in Visio and using a screenshot, or exporting the document from Visio as a PNG or some such. This will get you your objects, but they'll be raster images and you will lose both detail and the ability to scale them. What makes Visio and Omnigraffle (and PDFs, and Illustrator) work so well is that your objects are vector images and are scalable in all directions while maintaining quality.

To import those objects which don't convert properly, I've started using the following method, which isn't perfect, but the objects do come across, and you don't have to rasterize them.

I am using:
Visio 2002 in a Windows XP VM
Illustrator CS3
Omnigraffle 5 Pro

Go into Visio, create a document and populate it with some of the objects you want to convert. I've found that if I really load this up, it doesn't work so well. Save this document as .emf or .wmf (enhanced metafile or windows metafile). Oddly I've found that CS3 doesn't like the .ai files saved out from Visio 2002. YMMV. This would obviously be the preferred way to move files around, assuming it works.

Open the saved file in Illustrator on the Mac. You may have to ungroup/regroup your object and sub-objects. When you're ready, cut and paste your object from Illustrator into Omnigraffle using CMD-C and CMD-V. Dragging them from one app to the other didn't seem to work exactly as I would have expected.

Now, in Omnigraffle, click the gear icon in the Stencils panel and select "new stencil". This will open up a canvas that you can copy your new object into after whatever tweaking you want to do. In Omnigraffle 4, this is done with the Stencils menu instead.

There should be simpler ways to do this, but I haven't found any that produce results of the same quality with as few steps. I've found that you can use OpenOffice or NeoOffice to open the emf/wmf files, and then follow the same steps to import the objects, but it seems the NeoOffice rasterizes the files, so while it does work, you lose some detail. I'm also looking for other methods. Inkscape does a great job of opening and editing PDF documents, but doesn't seem to save in any vector format that can be loaded by Omnigraffle (mainly saves in SVG variants). Omnigraffle claims to be able to open PDFs, but I haven't had good luck with that in the Real World.

If I find an easier way to get quality stencils from Visio into Omni, I will update the page. In either case, I'll add screenshots soon enough.

I also wouldn't blindly upload any stencils you create to Graffletopia without running by them or the original stencil distributor, as that would almost certainly put you and Graffletopia both in hot legal water.