Month: September 2006

I am not overly fond of the City of San Jose

and I grow less fond every moment I spend there.
If you work in the tech industry, you will spend at least some time in your life in San Jose. If you are lucky, it will just be for a meal or a sharks game, or visiting friends, or visiting a corporation for the day. If you are like me, however, your company will be headquartered there and you will need to spend a significant amount of time in the area. This is especially painful if you live in a nice city, (ie: Seattle) and you grew up in a nicer city (ie: Chicago), because San Jose is not very much fun. The people there are lovely, but it is a bedroom community. For a sizable city, there really is very little of interest going on. Perhaps there are pockets of cool or fun, but for those of us who spend our time downtown, it is a wasteland. Over the last couple of years, I have found a couple good restaurants, and a nice bar or two, but that is about it. If you want music, art, theater, or cool stores; you gotta hop a caltrain north to San Francisco (1.5 hours non-express) and hope that you don’t miss the return train. For those in the area, what am I missing? I am especially talking about night life there. Oh, and I’ve walked all over the downtown areas so I know about the streets of sad bars and yuppie-geek pick up joints. I’m looking for culture, not alcohol.

Project Runway: you cheap bastards! Stop ripping off music!

So in the Paris episode of Season 3, there is a lot of lovely French-sounding background music. Sound familiar? Well it should if you’ve seen the movie Amelie or know the work of Yann Tiersen (one of my favorite artists). The Project Runway people took his tracks, changed the melody in only the slightest way and then did a new recording of his music. I mean, it is 90% note-for-note. Either, the production company tried to license the music and failed, or they didn’t even bother. Either way, I hope YT and his labels sue their asses. That kind of crap is low: for a well-funded TV production company to rip off an independent artist in such a blatant way.

Posted: Thu – September 7, 2006 at 01:15 AM