Erik Novales

Last night I saw Matthew Sweet play at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano. He’s on a mini-tour to promote his new album (out since a few days ago), which I picked up but haven’t listened to yet. The show was OK — heavily weighted towards the new album, which I am cautiously optimistic [...]

[Read more →]

Recently, I went to the DMV in order to renew my car registration, as well as renew my driver’s license. Now, if this were a very tired comedy shtick, I would proceed to complain about how this experience wasted an entire day of mine and destroyed my soul. Instead, because I try to give things [...]

[Read more →]

After finishing my CD ripping project, one of the first things I considered was, "How should I back this stuff up?" The last thing I want to have happen is for my hard drive to fail, necessitating a repeat of this epic project. My brother had suggested just using another hard drive or some sort [...]

[Read more →]

Braid is a very good game that overcomes some ham-fisted writing and overly ambitious themes. I won’t really dwell on talking about the game in this post other than to say that I recommend it, and that there are some mild spoilers in the remainder of this post. I saw a post by the author [...]

[Read more →]

I’m pretty much done with ripping my audio CD collection to my computer — I just have a couple of stragglers (lost, then later found in long-disused CD carrying cases) left to deal with. The final count wound up being approximately 900 CDs, with 16 cases where I couldn’t get a clean read of an [...]

[Read more →]

I mentioned earlier that I was ripping my entire audio CD collection to my computer for ease of use. Initially, I was getting the back covers out by sticking my fingertips underneath the edge of the “tray area” (the part with the eponymous jewel), and then wiggling the tray to the side to dislodge one [...]

[Read more →]