Minimally Exceptional

I recently switched hosting services. Previously, I was using Hasweb, which when I signed up with them four or so years ago, they were a great deal. If I pay for a year in advance, I get 5GB of storage and 100GB of transfer for about eight bucks a month.

I wanted to be able to upload and make available for download the concert recordings and DVDs that Laura and I have put together – I want to distribute them, but my upload is capped at a low enough speed that seeding through bittorrent isn’t feasable. Obviously, HTTP access isn’t happening on 5gb of space.

I started looking for a new host a few weeks ago, and found HostMonster. Their plan looked great, had lots of storage, and tons a bandwidth all for a reasonable price. Sounded great, until I read the terms of service. No profanity, not offensive content.

Fuck, I guess that’s out.

Eventually my search lead me to Hostgator. Hostgator also had a great plan. I’m paying $15 a month for 200GB of storage and 2TB of bandwidth – more than enough for what I want to do. I signed up, changed name servers on my domain, and was up and running within a few days. Overall, the process was much less painless than I expected it to be. I was expecting flurries of emails to and from support desks and techies trying to move all of my stuff from host A to host B. This was much easier than the other web change I made, which was registering Laura’s domain at somethingferretrelated.com and changing the main domain associated with my hasweb account. That was a little more painful.

Anyway, after a few days of uploading, downloading, md5 checking, et cetera – the first set is available online. Info files aren’t there yet but they will be after this weekend.

In the downloads section there is now the Greg Howard 2005-07-15 DVD, the Tim Reynolds 2005-07-15 Early DVD, and the Tim Reynolds 2005-07-15 Late DVD. The Matt Nathanson / Graham Colton / Kyle Riabko show at the Gargoyle in 2004 will be going up next, as soon as the graham and kyle discs are ready. Yes, this is the ripped pants show.

So anyway, I’d like to think that’s a pretty significant improvement/addition to the site. There’s finally content available here other than my petty bitching and geeking out. Go nuts and download them if you want them – I’ll password lock the directories if/when I run out of bandwidth.

I don’t think that I’ve ever adequately professed the awesomeness of Matt Nathanson in the history of this website. So, without any further ado:

Matt Nathanson is fantastic. Sure, he’s not for everyone, and I know that there’s lots of people who are turned off on him for a handful of reasons (he’s too vulgar on stage, he covers 80′s hair band songs, whatever,) but he’s been writing some great songs the past few years and he has absolutely one of the best live shows that I’ve ever seen. He’s fun, energetic, he always interacts with the crowd, and he works his ass off to make sure that crowd leaves talking about how great the show was.

So in April of 05 he did a short little record store tour promoting the live album he just released. One of the stops on the tour was Streetside Records (at the Loop.) The recording and setlist can be found at the archive, here: http://www.archive.org/details/mn2006-04-29.instore.

Pluses and minuses to this, obviously. The plus here is that it’s free, and it would be a relatively intimate setting compared to the normal stage-concert.

The cons: A very much abridged setlist, likely not to clock in at over half an hour, the possibility of having way too many people crammed into a record store, and (as we would find out later) Matt’s manager/crew/whoever being a total pain in the ass about taping the show.

Laura, Christine, and myself all went to this. It was at about 10:30 in the morning (and Christine’s first live matt experience) and he stars absolutely came into alignment for this. The weather was bad – it was the coldest day we’d had in a few weeks, and it was raining and gloomy all day. So needless to say, everyone who was there wanted to be there.

Not only was it a very small crowd, but everyone was perfectly behaved. They laughed when he was funny, they were quiet when he sang, and they didn’t talk on cell phones during songs. Matt was funnier than usual, played some stuff that was neat to hear in that setting, and the recording sounds fantastic – really worth checking out if you’re even just a little bit of a fan. The whole show is worth having, but Car Crash, Detroit Waves, and Suspended are especially fantastic if you only want to check out a few.

The Matt Nathanson trifecta is now complete – I’ve professed the greatness of Matt, reviewed the Matt show that we went to, and made a shameless plug for one of my own Matt recordings.