The Filibusters Use Summer to Break onto the Seattle Punk Scene, Bring Energy on Stage

The Filibusters are a local Seattle punk band that focuses its music on political and social themes. Formed in February 2009, Dan (guitar and vocals), James (bass and vocals), and Dustin (drums and vocals) have had a fairly busy summer, averaging about three shows a month for the past few months, in addition to jam and recording sessions.

Check out The Filibusters on their MySpace and Facebook pages. After their show at The Dubliner in Fremont on Friday, August 28, they’ll be taking a short break (about a month), doing some traveling, and spending time with their families. When they come back, they’ll be in the studio prepping from a full-length album and booking more shows.

I’ve been to a few of their shows and they’ve got some serious energy. They’re not some “organized chaos” band when they play; you can totally see the effort they put forth. It’s all just straight-up rhythmic, which is a nice break away from how some other bands just play to act wild or freestyle their instrumentals. When they play, all of their sounds are easy to tell apart from the music. When some bands play, sometimes you can’t hear the bass because the drums are too loud or sometimes you can’t hear the drums because the vocals are too loud. Not with this band.

If you’re free, join me at The Dubliner on Friday, August 28. Oh, and bring earplugs. Wuss. :P

Here’s a video from their first live show back in May 2009. Sorry for the low quality; I streamed it from my phone in a loud, crowded, dark room.

Recapping Three Months with the Windows 7 RC

I’ve been using the Windows 7 RC since Microsoft released it on May 5, but held off on blogging about it to make sure I had all of my facts and opinions straight. After three months, I might as well have written a review a week after installing it. The RC, which stands for release candidate, is Windows 7 Ultimate, the full-featured version of the operating system.

Setting up Windows 7 was a breeze. So much of a breeze that I installed it twice on my Compaq laptop within 12 hours. Well, there’s a disclaimer on that: The first time I installed it, it took four hours because I hadn’t realized that I selected the option to keep all files on my computer, meaning that my previously installed programs and saved music, pictures, and documents transferred over when I updated. This was not what I had planned, so I reinstalled it, wiping off all files and installed programs. This method of installing took roughly 30 minutes. Yes, 30 minutes, as in half an episode of Man vs. Food.

Note: When Installing Windows 7, remember to create installation disks for your current operating system, Windows Vista or Windows XP. I made the mistake of note creating the disks and cannot go back to Windows Vista unless I call Compaq/HP and pay for the disks. Oops. Guess that’s a good enough reason to buy Windows 7 Ultimate when it’s officially released on October 22. ;)

Setting up the new operating system was pain-free and straightforward. And, I didn’t have any problems with installing drivers that weren’t preinstalled on the computer, such as printers, mobile devices, and flash and external drives.

The only noticeable and annoying bug I experienced for the first two months was this: Occasionally when I moved files from a folder to the desktop, the desktop would not refresh unless I manually refreshed it by pressing the F5 key. The only way to fix this would be to restart the computer, which is hardly ever convenient. For the past month, though, I haven’t had this problem, so I wonder if it was fixed in a recent update. Other than that, I haven’t run into any major bugs, but keep in mind, I primarily use my computer for average tasks, like browsing the Internet and using applications in the Microsoft Office system, Macromedia Dreamweaver (yes, Macromedia) and TweetDeck.

My wife was even jealous to see my computer running Windows 7 that she wanted me to install it on her Sony Vaio laptop running a Japanese version of Windows XP. Not only did she set up the English version in 30 minutes, but she also can switch between English, Japanese, and Chinese anytime she wants to. Because of her higher-end, super-featured laptop, we did have a little trouble installing drivers that should’ve been on the laptop. I think this had more to do with the applications that are never included on U.S. PCs, such as FeliCA. Fortunately, Windows 7 provides thorough directions that help get the drivers onto the laptop.

Overall, I’m very pleased with the Windows 7 RC. From what I’ve seen, Microsoft is really listening to the public about how to make the operating system better, and I think social media is really playing a good part in pushing the Windows brand back to the ranks that it was before Windows Vista. People like Marcus Schmidt, Brandon LeBlanc, and Stephen Rose and online entities like MSWindows on Twitter are very active with promoting blogs and general Windows 7 information on Twitter.