It’s that time of year again. Time for me pretend like I’ve got my finger on the pulse of the sinking ship that is the global recording industry and list the albums that made my toe tap the most all year long, from tap-tap to tippety-tappety-tip-tap-tap.

This is the eighth year I’ve compiled such a list. Here are the previous ones:

2012  |  2011  |  2010  |  2009  |  2008  |  2007  |  2006

It’s neat to go back and see how many of my previous “favorite” albums are still in my listening rotation. Quite a few, actually. So here’s 2013!

Warning: You won’t find any Robin Thicke, Rihanna, or Miley on this list. If that’s your idea of the best that 2013 had to offer, this list is not for you. How the heck did you find this page anyway? What, do you watch MTV or something??? OK, enough stalling. Here we go. No excuses. No explanations. Just my favorite albums from the past 12 months:

10. Disclosure – Settle

Slinky enough for the club, down-tempo enough for a rooftop soiree, Settle traverses boundaries and expectations. [Delusions of Adequacy]

9. The National – Trouble Will Find Me

The National are such a powerfully gifted band, they need no theatrics to deliver an absolutely stone-cold beast of an album. With the music that is on here there is yet another thirteen songs to savor and salivate over until the next batch of songs comes about. [Entertainment Weekly]

8. Haim – Days Are Gone

With the triumvirate of googly-eyed rhythms, sinfully catchy melodies and a breeziness that seems only fitting, they’ve served up one of the most auspicious debuts of the year. [Beats Per Minute]

7. M.I.A. – Matangi

Her child-like rhymes may seem like she’s only toying with playground politics but she knows exactly where her strengths are; Matangi is a tribute to those talents and it’s an unmitigated thrill. Dissident, deviant, “mili-tent”; Cookie cutter pop star she is not, but a true great she absolutely is. [The Line of Best Fit]

6. Guster – Live Acoustic

Great vocal harmonies and unusual percussion are just a couple of things that set this band apart; for you drum and backbeat enthusiasts out there, percussion is lively and interesting on all of the sixteen tracks found on “Live Acoustic.” [musicalnewsandviews]

5. Atoms for Peace – Amok

Awash with beats, rhythms, electronics, the occasional guitar and Yorke’s soaring if still mostly unintelligible tenor, Amok is a record to get sonically lost within, a work whose every measure teems with a quality and a precision that only musicians at the top of their game can touch. [Los Angeles Times]

4. Daft Punk – Random Access Memories

By assembling a cast of their favourite musicians and delving into their adolescent memories, Daft Punk have created something as emotionally honest as any singer-songwriter confessional–and a lot more fun to dance to. [New Musical Express]

3. Arctic Monkeys – AM

In the end AM not only signifies a career-defining moment that neatly places the band on a proper pedestal for all to admire–this is where not only Arctic Monkeys have come but in many ways, how they’ve masterfully conquered and continue to simply win. [Delusions of Adequacy]

2. Vampire Weekend – Modern Vampires of the City

Each verse/chorus/bridge/​intro melody, each lyric straight or knotty, each sound effect playful or perverse (or both)‑-each is pleasurable in itself and aptly situated in the sturdy songs and tracks, so that the whole signifies without a hint of concept. [Expert Witness]

1. Arcade Fire – Reflektor

There is so, so much content, so beautifully and flawlessly presented that it can be baffling at times. The Suburbs, to many, was decade-defining music. Reflektor, I feel, through both content and design, will be artist-defining. [Prefix Magazine]

Honorable mention:
Original Soundtrack – Frozen
Laura Marling – Once I Was an Eagle
Youth Lagoon – Wondrous Bughouse
2013 Broadway Cast Recording – Pippin
Queens of the Stone Age – …Like Clockwork
David Bowie – The Next Day
Bill Callahan – Dream River
Phosphorescent – Muchacho

Do you have any favorites from this year that I may have missed? Leave me a comment and let me know!

As they successfully did this past summer, Giulia and Matt organized another iteration of Play In A Day this past month. And it was great. Thank you, guys!

What is Play In A Day? In a nutshell, a group of people collaborate to create a play, from inception to production, in just 24 hours. Insane! One may sign up as either a writer, director, or actor. Plays should be about 10 minutes in length. Multiple plays are created in parallel and they are all performed together the following day in front of a paying audience. Whew.

I was out of the country when they did they did the first one this past summer so I wasn’t able to participate or even see the finished product, which I heard was excellent. But I sure as hell was here this time and was eager to take part. I made sure to not schedule any 39 Steps rehearsals that day and got my entire cast involved, as well. Jan was also eager to participate but we had to synchronize our efforts to ensure the kids weren’t neglected any more than usual, so that meant that one of us had to write and the other could either direct or act. We both wanted to act, but Jan was more against the idea of writing than I was so I signed up as a writer.

Now, I hate writing. Not writing plays specifically. I had never written a play in my life! Just writing anything. Like what I’m writing right now, for example. I usually love the finished product but I find the process to be very stressful. That’s the main reason why this blog has been so woefully ignored as of late. But I decided that a jaunt out of my comfort zone would be enriching so I took the plunge.

And did I stress.

I remember about two weeks before the event, I decided that I would just start writing (cheating) well in advance to avoid as much stress as possible. If not a complete play, at least a rough storyline or a few quality character outlines. I remember watching a few episodes of It’s Always Sunny… and thinking how I would love to be able to write such funny and chaotic stories and characters. They were an early inspiration for the eventual anarchy that would inevitably result. But I didn’t write anything. More out of laziness than anything else. I think I was hoping that last-minute inspiration would see me through. I was stressed.

But not really. I was kind of excited, to tell you the truth. I had accepted the fact that I wouldn’t be writing a magnum opus in just 10 hours, and was sure that anything I wrote would be good enough for a director to play with and for a group of actors to make their own. But the night before the event I did sit down with Jan for about 15 minutes and brainstorm a few different approaches I could take. And I credit her 100% with the inspiration for what was to follow.

It may have ended up a little longer than intended. With more sound cues and costume/character changes than I’m sure were appreciated by the director and actors. But I’m happy with the final result. I think it’s funny. So here it is, my first play. If you’d like, you may read it here:
The School Nativity Play [PDF, 21 KB]
(and yes, I did stay up most of the next day creating the 15 needed sound cues, including four original song snippets)

I just found this entry from six months ago. I have no idea why it was never published.

Today is Father’s Day (in many countries, just not where I live).

Take your mouse right now and hover over the image below. That’s 30 years of parenting.

Seeing these pictures next to each other makes me happier than I can possibly put into words.

It’s so easy not to blog.

Emily is big into Muppets this month. I introduced her to The Muppet Show a couple of years ago, but I guess she was too young. I tried again last month and she’s hooked! She’s watching the Muppet Show, Fraggle Rock, drawing all of the characters, singing the songs, and is absolutely fascinated with puppeteering. I even managed to find some copies of the records I used to listen to when I was her age and put the MP3s on her player. Pretty awesome.

In putting her to bed last night, we had this conversation:

Emily: Who invented The Muppets?

Me: A man named Jim Henson.

Emily: Is he still alive?

Me: No, he’s not.

Emily: Did he die because he had a bad cough?

Me: (amazed) Yes! How did you know that??

Emily: Mummy told me.

Me: Oh.

Emily: A cough isn’t that bad. How did he really die?

Me: Well, you see, he got very sick and didn’t go to the doctor. So he didn’t get better and his cough turned into a bad sickness and he died.

Emily: Why didn’t he go to the doctor?

Me: I don’t know.

Emily: (thinks for a while) Jim Henson may have been a great actor but he wasn’t very clever.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Mr. Pillowcase:

For those of you not feeling the whole tech story thing, here’s a video of Sebastian sledding down a hill:

Don’t you just hate it when you buy a new motherboard and the onboard Ethernet controller isn’t natively supported by your Linux distribution? Tell me about it!

I recently scored myself a shiny new Gigabyte H77M-D3H motherboard for my new rig (photos to come!) and, as you probably know, it sports the very new AR8161 Gigabit Ethernet controller. Schwing! How do I know that’s what I’ve got?

$ lspci | grep Ethernet
03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR8161 Gigabit Ethernet (rev 10)

And I’m currently running Linux Mint 14 Nadia on a Linux 3.5.0-17-generic (x86_64) kernel. As far as I know, this distro doesn’t come with native drivers for this controller. What does that mean? No Internet. Quick, to the Googles!

Apparently, the AR8161 is a very new combined Ethernet/Bluetooth controller and its driver – alx – is still in the testing/QA process, so it’s not in the kernel yet. Great. So what’s a guy to do? Download it, install build dependencies, select the AR8161 module alx, build and install it!

First things first. Go to the official Linux Wireless wiki and download the latest linux-stable compat-drivers release (formerly “compat-wireless”).

“Wait a minute. I just told you I can’t connect to the Internet! How the heck am I supposed to download a driver?” Use a different computer and a USB stick. Or do like I did and use your phone to give your lame computer Internet access via USB tethering. Now stop whining and keep reading.

The compat-drivers release provides kernel backport support for all supported Linux kernel releases and includes the alx driver we’re looking for. At the moment, the most recent version available is v3.9-rc4. But when I navigated to this folder on the Linux Wireless site, I found three different versions: the vanilla version, the -s version (get and apply pending-stable/ from linux-next.git), and the -su version (apply the patches on the unified-drivers/ directory). I tried them all but only the -su version actually had the /drivers/net/ethernet/atheros/alx subdirectory that I was looking for. The others had folders like atlx, atl1e, or atl1c. What the heck are those? I have no idea. So I downloaded the “compat-drivers-3.9-rc4-2-su.tar.bz2” (yes, you want the tar.bz2 tarball).

Next, open a Terminal window (Alt+Ctrl+T) and navigate to the folder where you downloaded the compat-drivers tarball and enter the following lines one-by-one (without the $, Einstein):
$ sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-generic linux-headers-`uname -r`
$ tar -xvfj compat-drivers-3.9-rc4-2-su.tar.bz2
$ cd compat-drivers-3.9-rc4-2-su
$ ./scripts/driver-select alx
$ make
$ sudo make install

You can then reboot, or manually load the driver with:
$ sudo modprobe alx

Et voilà!

Easter holidays are upon us, so we packed up the kids and flew to England for a few days to see grandma and granddad. Barcelona before we left was a wonderfully spring-like 17C (63F). England when we arrived was an inappropriately winter-like 2C (36F). In fact, just as the plane touched down at Stansted Airport, a very light dusting of snow began to fall. Jan and I were in shock. The kids were ecstatic.

It continued to snow gently throughout the night. When we awoke the next morning it was still snowing but none had stuck to the ground. So it continued to snow. Sometime around lunch we noticed the ground outside getting whiter. And it continued to snow. Just before dinner, about 24 hours after we had landed in England, there was about an inch of delicate snow covering the Fens. The kids were in heaven.

We rushed out into the back yard and the kids and I inaugurated spring with an all-out snowball fight. It was their first snowball fight ever. They were mad with delight. Then I nailed them in the head with a snowball. They were still happy.

It wasn’t the first time they had seen snow. Both Emily and Sebastian have been skiing in the Pyrenees, but the snow was never right for packing. So this was monumental. A trip they will not forget for a long time.

And speaking of skiing, here’s a video from our last ski trip where Emily explains how Sebastian didn’t really enjoy his first ski lesson, demonstrates her understanding of ironic timing, and then skis off without a second thought.

Tucking Emily into bed, her little eyes starting to roll back in her head:

Emily: Who is the oldest Zamrycki?

Me: That would be Grandpapa. And Sebastian is the youngest.

Emily: Was there anyone before Grandpapa?

Me: Oh yes. Lots. But that was a long time ago.

Emily: Who were they?

Me: I don’t really know. But I know they lived in Poland and their name was a little different. It was Zambrzycki back then.

Emily: Oh. Who was the first person ever? And where did they live? And where did they come from?

Me: Oh boy. That’s a tough one.

Emily: OK, what was the first animal ever?

Me: I don’t know. But I’m going to guess it was the amoeba.

Emily: What’s that?

Me: Uh… it’s very small.

Emily: And then what?

Me: Maybe fish. Or turtles. Or crocodiles? I don’t know.

Emily: But then the dinosaurs came.

Me: That’s right.

Emily: And then monkeys. And then people. No! Then came scientists. And then real people.