"Whatca Readin?" This is how Tom and I would start most of our conversations. I was thinking about this today at his memorial. I was thinking about the first time we started chatting with each other, and it was about reading.  I was on his train heading towards downtown and I was reading  "Essential Chaucer", The Canterbury Tales, to be exact when he asked me what I was reading. So I told him, and share a line I had just read that I thought was brillant. It was easy to tell that Tom loved books. Tom always read great books. He would tell me about books he just got, or when the next book fair in glendale or pasadena was going to be.  Pretty soon we started lending each other books. It was really nice, because I would love what he recommended and loaned me and he would love what I gave him to read. It was so nice to just sit on the train and talk about how Kerouac described food so well that you could see it and taste it. Or how Orwell described being "down and out" so well that you could feel it.  Tom turned me on to so many great books, that I would always carry a note book with me to write down the titles of what he recommended. He loved the fact that he could read at his midday break for 2 to 4 hours. I remember him saying, "The only thing beter than reading is reading on company time".

At his memorial, there were at least 500 people. It was so packed that a couple hundred of us had to stand in the church courtyard for the service. It was nice to hear people tell stories about Tom, and how he had shown them kindness or generousity in his own special way. They told about how he loved to have water fights with his Grandkids, and how even the house was not a safe zone. It was obvious the people that truly knew him, because they couldn't get through their tale without having to pause and collect themselves. Every metrolink conductor I had ever met or seen as well as the Glendale, Fire Department and Police Department were there. It was nice to see such a large turn out for such a very ni, that I thought so highly of.

I remember how the train would pull into the station, and I would see Tom, hanging out of the car as i was pulling up, and I'd wave, and he would always waved back before the train had stopped just to let you know he was happy to see you. I'd get on the train, and after hearing him announce the that the train was departing he come over to his station to which I would sit next to and in is Olkahoma draw, ask "Whatca Readin?". I'm really going to miss hearing him ask that, and I am really going to miss him. Oh, by the way, I am starting to read James Joyce's Ulyesses, Tom recommended it.

I found out last night that a friend of mine Tom was one of the people that died in the train derailment that happened on Wednesday Morning. Tom was a conductor for metrolink and just an all around good guy. We had our own little Metrolink book club going. Tom would lend me some Orwell and I would let him some Kerouac. He loved books and loved to read. I never knew anyone that read as much as Tom. He is really nice person, and he is going to be missed.

 So I can count the days that I drive to work on one hand. Today was one of the days. Most of the time I take the metrolink in to work. Well if you've seen the news, you know that today was a much better day to drive than to take the train. If you haven't seen the news, there were two metrolink trains collided and derailed. If I had been on the train today, I would of been on the train after this incident, because I take the same line. One of my co-workers was on train after that one and has been trying to get to work for a couple hours now.

Anyhow here are some links to the info about it.
Article
Photos
Video
Metrolink Trains

This evening I was listening to KCRW and Elvis Costello was the in studio guest. He was talking about how his new album "The Delivery man" did have a concept behind it, but because of the way that people buy and listen to music now that it is kind of an open ended. So I was thinking about this and it is completely true. 10 years ago, how an album was put together meant something. Songs were components of the Album, but for the piece to be whole, you listened to the entire album to experience how the artist intended.

However now in the iPod generation, with just an internet connection, and a credit card, you can get just about any song you want within minutes. I remember when you would hear something on the radio, and there was an investment in time to go and get the album. You would listen to it for the first time all the way through. You understand the connections between each song, and you could get a sense of the concept behind the album. I think back to listen to Clebanoff "Strings Afire in Spain" in Grandpa K's livingroom. Of course we listened to the album in it's entirety. It was a vinyl album, there was no fast forward or next track on the remote, there was no remote. It was really fantastic. There is something about listening to the album in order, where, you know and expect the next song, so that even when you hear it on the song on the radio you expect to hear the next song on the album after the song is finished.

So fast forward to earlier this week. I had a song stuck in my head, from an album I use to listen to with my Dad, Pancho and Lefty, by Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson. Well within in 30 seconds I had the song found, paid for and downloaded. But I downloaded just the song, not the whole album. I thought at the time that I would go back and get the rest of the album later and I probably will, but the single song does prove the point. It is really easy to find the music you want and play it in the way and order you want to, not how the artist intended. Playlist make it so easy, to just throw a "mix" together. I have ones for all kinds of things. From relaxing to high energy for work. Infact the latest iPod is the "Shuffle". The slogan is "Life is Random". I have to admit, kind of want one of these.

So in this customer centric music purchasing and listening era, how can or will an album, or concept album survive? The kind of albums that you just had to listen to whole. What will keep albums from turning in to just a collection of songs? (Greatest Hits Albums, are of course excluded from this questions.) So I guess as a music fan it is up to us to make sure we put aside the time to listen to the entire album.

Yesterday I downloaded and started playing with Picasa 2. I had actually just started to get in to using the previous version I had installed, which was 1.68. Well I am happy to say that version 2 is a big improvement. It struck me that when I first started using Picasa that google had really put together (bought) a good product. Picasa, is the Windows version of iPhoto. Now that is a good thing. Apple makes great software and there is a huge gap between what Apple users have and Windows users have available. Yes, there are more "titles" for the PC, the got to have applications that just work on the Apple usually don't have an PC equivent. I mean, Apple ended up writing iTunes for PC. I brillant move if you ask me. Anyhow back to Picasa. What I really like about this program is that is will just go and auto-discover all of your digital images, group them in a album for you, and then let you do what you want from there. It does a lot of the heavy lifting if Digital Photo Managment. One of the new features is captions. This is really a nice feature, because ther are certian images that I refer to by a title or a caption. I don't know about you, but I usually never call an image by it's file name. The creators of the program know that, so not only do you have captions, you also have keywords. Now keywords were in the previous version of the program, and were seemingly easier to add, because there was a keyword button near the image you were working on. Well once you get use to control + k when you want to add a keyword, it is the same interface as the previous version and just as quick. I like the addition of a search field in the upper right hand corner of the screen. This search works just the way I like it do. It shows results as you type. X1 for windows, and the next version of Mac OS X  spotlight as well as iTunes use this same method and to me this is the ideal way of searching. Another big add to the applications is support for RAW file format. RAW is the file format used by some of the new higher end digital cameras. In short google has given us a really nice PCE version of iPhoto that is really usable, and in which you don't have to have a B.S. in computer science to use, oh, and the best part, it's free!

Now, I know it is Wednesday, but I'm going to talk about Sunday, mostly because I just got the pictures back. Sunday was another one of the rain hard all day and leave you feeling cooped up for days, days. For those of you that don't know, here in the Los Angeles area we have gotten more rain in the past two weeks then we did all of last year. Oh, and all those jokes you hear about Californians not being able to drive in the rain. They are all compeletely true. I will never understand how someone in a lowered SUV with 20 inch rims and 4 video screens can thing that if they just drive fast enough that they can out run the rain drops. But I digress.  So sunday night I get the camera out knowing  I want to take pictures of the rain but not sure how or what. My Beautiful Wife takes me over to the kitchen window and shows me the rain falling off the flood lights in the backyard. I thought that would me a great picture once out there, I looked at the backdoor and loved the reflection I saw in the window. Both shots were taken at f8 on asa 200 film. The timing was the only thing that was different. The reflection of backdoor, had a shutter speed of  1 minute 30 seconds, and out the back door had a shutter speed of  24.7 seconds.  I now carry a stopwatch in my camera bag, it saves me from counting out loud and waking up the neighbors.

Reflections of the back door on a cold rainy night