.. but thrice:

From an e-mail: This last Wednesday, we had the great opportunity to spend a beautiful, sunny afternoon at A Place Called Home youth center in South Central Los Angeles with our buddies Thrice.

For those of you that didn’t know, Thrice and Sub City donate a portion of every sale of ‘the illusion of safety’ to A Place Called Home youth center. To date, the band has sold over 100,000 copies of the record which means $57,000 has been raised for the center. With this donation, A Place Called Home has established the Sub City / Thrice Scholarship for six students to get a year of professional music theory and performance lessons.

It was full afternoon of activities. During the program the six students were announced; A Place Called Home gave us and Thrice a plaque to thank us for our partnership with them; we gave Thrice and A Place Called home ‘Fool’s Gold’ plated plaques to commemorate the 100,000 ‘illusion of safety’ records sold and then The City of Los Angeles honored us and Thrice with a Certificate of Appreciation for community involvement. The fun didn’t stop there. After all the presentations, we got the chance check out one of the bands in the music program at the center. They were called No Act and they ruled! After No Act’s set we were all treated to a very special acoustic performance from Thrice that included a kick-butt cover of Elvis Costello’s song “Radio, Radio”. To top it all off, after Thrice’s performance we all got to hang out on the playground with the kids from the youth center and talk while eating cake and drinking fruit punch… It truly was a fantastic afternoon!

Pretty cool, if you ask me. It’s been a pretty uneventful last few days. I bought an iPod, and am loving it. Hooray for 5000 songs at my fingertips. I also bought a really good, really cool CD: The Rocket Summer - Calendar Days. There are a couple songs up in the mp3 player thing up top. There is one guy in this band; he played all the instruments and sang all the songs. I stumbled upon his band when I bought a compilation from The Militia Group. I had originally bought it for an alternate version of a song by Copeland. Bottom line: it’s good, check it out.

Earlier this week, I decided to turn off Listen-To. It’s been something I’ve been kicking around for the past few weeks, and decided it has run its course. I don’t have the time (or motivation) to dedicate to make the site worth running. It has been on ‘life support’ for a few months, and was getting close to its death. Rather than clear the stats, and tell myself (and the thousands of users) that ‘version 2′ would be done soon, I figured I would just give up and focus on other things. It sucks that it had to end, but now I don’t have to worry about providing a service that people pay for, and it not being a good/reliable one. I’ve started using AudioScrobbler and it seems like an equivalent replacement.

That is all. No more ramblings.