…it’s pretty clever, isn’t it?

Kind of reminds me a little bit of Broken Bells, which is not a bad thing at all. This is a good song. The video’s also pretty neat. Good job, RP. Keep up the good work.

Seas and Centuries is a Reno band that specializes in the kind of music that could best be described as pretentious philosophical space rock. Those seem to be the kinds of bands I am most attracted to, so it’s not really a surprise that I continue to be impressed with this band’s work. Their latest EP, Macros, finds them playing their signature sound, with their already excellent production techniques leveling up with a lot of little sonic tricks that add a hard to describe addictive quality to the music.

So, what is Seas and Centuries’ sound? The best way to describe it is that it is spacey and philosophical. It calls to mind a feeling that you get listening to prog rock. Synth pads will fill in the background during vocal parts, with rhythm guitar layered over the top while the rhythm section solidly keeps the beat. Effect-laden guitars will break in and come to the front during instrumental bridges. There tend to be layers of sound, with excellent separation of the instruments from each other and from the vocals. These musicians should be proud of their craft.

It is clear that love of the craft keeps this band going because they play a fair number of shows, so it won’t be hard to find them playing out. Like them on Facebook and you’ll certainly hear about their live performances well in advance.

I’ve been living under a rock trapped in the new SimCity for the past 3,00 years, so I had no idea that the new Bioshock game is almost here.

The original Bioshock was an extraordinary video game that set a very high bar for what a first-person game is supposed to be, to me at least. The formula seems to be to mix social commentary, your character’s ability to choose between right and wrong, incredible powers and weapons that are incredibly fun to use in game, and magnificent setting to create an experience that the player will hold onto for a very long time. If Adam Sessler is to be believed, this latest installment takes that formula, and manifests it in a game that dials it up to 11.

Bioshock 2 was a disappointment, it failed to be groundbreaking on just about any level. This new installment looks very promising. Can’t wait to spend some time playing it. If I can drag myself out of the game, I’ll post a follow-up.

REreno reports that there is a Planning Commission meeting this Wednesday, March 6 at 6pm where one of the subjects to be discussed will be changes to the Midtown neighborhood plan.  This will be an important one in terms of what happens in the more residential area between Virginia and Plumas/Forest north of Mt Rose St. Virginia Street should focus on trying to get bigger developments that make the area look and feel and function more like an urban main street and less a collection of car dealers, motels, and strip malls. It’s a bit worrying how much the residents want to pull back from the TOD corridor plan. The area in question is a mixture of all kinds of different uses, has had apartments and multitenant houses for quite some time.  A drive down Plumas Street is a drive down a street littered with terribly quaint apartment buildings.

The very same Planning Commission meeting will also feature a presentation of the 2035 Regional Transportation Plan draft which is being shopped through the public input process. This presentation was given in the 2-27 City Council Meeting.

I’m always looking at the transit component of the Regional Transportation Plan. The transit agency is looking at a “Financially Constrained Plan” where they are trying to focus on things the public has prioritized. A demonstration project will be implemented in 2013 with RTC RAPID service to UNR. The financial constraints are based on the revenue source for transit operations, which is purely sales tax based. The community wants RAPID service between Reno and Sparks and from UNR all the way down Virginia Street to the Mt Rose Highway, but that’s not something the RTC can afford given the funding constraints it faces for transit service. The extension of the RAPID line up to UNR makes a lot of sense due to the short distance and the thousands of additional riders that would be able to take advantage of the service.

One other transit-related demo project happening this year that’s worth a mention: Summer weekend service to Tahoe. Caught this one last month on the public open house agenda. It’s an interesting idea. You shouldn’t have to have a car to get to Tahoe, or drive a  car to Tahoe, especially knowing you’ll have to park. For those able to put aside paranoia of being stranded at Lake Tahoe carless, the bus makes perfect sense as a way to get up there, and it’s potentially good for Tahoe’s environment as well.

Peruse the draft 2035 RTP here.

There, I’ve spoken.

From the RTC’s website:

RTC RIDE Proposed Summer 2013 Service Change and Fare Concepts Open House

Thursday, February 21, 2013
RTC 4TH STREET STATION
7:00 am – 10:00am
3:00pm – 5:30pm

Proposed Service Change Concepts:
• Southern Route Realignment (Route 6, 9, 12, 56 & 57)
• Possible Extensions to Route 5 & 15
• Route 2 and New Pyramid Service
• North Valley Service Modification
• Lake Tahoe Weekend Summer Service

Proposed Fare Concepts:
• Overall Pricing
• RTC INTERCITY
• RTC SIERRA SPIRIT
• RTC RAPID

It has been reported here before that there is a crazy Romanian living in Reno making astoundingly good funky, jazzy, R&B. His name is Saoul. And he has a new EP out called Side Effects, which is worth a listen, or several.  So here, for your Valentine’s Day enjoyment, I present to you Saoul’s Side Effects.

Witness what happens when someone tries to challenge the lies told by an ex-gay speaker at a church in Sparks.

What incredibly Christ-like behavior, don’t you think?

Parents of gay kids, do yourselves (and your kids) a favor. Accept your children, be involved with their lives just as you would if they were straight, keep your family together, and for the love of all that is good in the world, don’t encourage this sort of menacing, un-Christian behavior by attending, and worse yet, tithing to, authoritarian outfits like this one. These pharisees are giving Christianity a bad name and causing more life-long mental and behavioral issues than they can ever hope to prevent.

Kudos to you, Kathy Baldock.

Check out what I just found.  It’s a pair of youngsters with some instruments, silly demeanor, fun attitude and what appears to be musical talent, cranking out some lo-fi surf rock.  They call themselves Surf Curse.

I was wondering when some more music like this would come along from the Biggest Little City.  Glad I didn’t have to wait for too long.

Techies who follow the news have no doubt heard that Michael Dell has partnered with Silver Lake to take the computer company bearing his name private.

Dell is in a tough spot right now, and it’s good that Mr. Dell is trying to salvage the company that he started in a college dorm room and turned into a powerhouse of PC manufacturing.

Nobody’s made a better desktop machine than this.

Dell’s initial claim to fame was build-to-order, high quality, competitively priced computers.  Things really heated up for Dell when Windows 95 and Windows NT 4 transformed the way PC’s were sold into enterprise.  Dell was on the spot with extremely high quality, very innovative corporate PC’s like the Optiplex line.  In 1997, I was working in IT and the only computers I wanted to use were the Optiplex machines.

They were solid as a rock and incredibly easy to service.  They had a hinged case that opened with no screwdriver required.  Processor and memory were tucked neatly under a hinged power supply.  All the expansion cards were in a detachable carriage that also took no screws to remove.  Nobody has made a computer so easy to work on since, not even Dell.  I had one of those Optiplex machines powered on for 6 years straight acting as a web server, and I still have it.  It still works.

Dell must have garnered a considerable amount of loyalty amongst IT people like me, who must have proceeded to recommend Dell products to less computer-savvy people.  Sadly, Dell would spend a whole decade squandering that loyalty, putting a lot of us recommenders in a tight spot.  Those of us who bought Dell machines for ourselves were also caught with egg on our faces.

When it came to building computers for business, Dell never really messed up too much.  But their failure to build anything of quality for the consumer market, especially in the laptop form factor, didn’t make them any friends in the ’00s.  Loading up the machines with tons of so-called “crapware” didn’t help, either.  Their OS images were in many cases not very well tested.  By 2010, under almost no circumstances would I have recommended Dell products to anyone.  All this, without mentioning Dell’s ill-advised forays into smart phones, media players, and the like.

Here’s where the unsolicited advice comes in.  It’s pretty straightforward:

1. Computers aren’t dead.  People still need them.  Lots of people still want them.
Build only solid, well-tested portable machines with rock solid no-BS OS installs, and take them on the road to show the people who are still buying computers.  What’s not accounted for in this talk of “post-PC” this and that and the other thing is that a considerable percentage of people still rely on computers for lots and lots of tasks.  Computers aren’t going away.  Macs attracted such a large share of the market of people still buying computers because they are innovative, high-quality, and no BS.  Don’t copy the Mac, but build an innovative, high-quality, no BS computer, and make sure everybody knows about it.  Now that consumer desires are driving corporate IT, make a computer that appeals to the former and is engineered to withstand the needs of the latter.

2. Build an awesome tablet
Take Microsoft at their word.  The Surface is a signal to the market of what is possible to build.  A considerable share of people’s “computer use” outside of getting things done will be on tablets.  So build a great one.  And make sure everyone knows it.

3. Don’t take on any new work until you’ve nailed those two things
Let’s assume you can do these two things I am suggesting and that you’re not having any trouble also doing servers, storage, consulting services, workstations and desktops for enterprise.  Take a step back and marvel at all the things you’re doing.  If you can recapture your formerly unparalleled reputation for mass-market quality, you’ll be in a strong position.  The people in the back of the house will like the same stuff that the people in the front of the house are demanding.

I’m probably not alone in wanting to see Dell make a comeback.  Whatever the company ends up doing, it will start with winning the hearts and minds of the right people, and not squandering that goodwill again.  Good luck.