That's the 3rd tremor in as many days, all from the Hayward fault just north of the Caldecott tunnel, first one I was on Bart so the first I knew was when the train stopped at Lake Merrit for 10 minutes while they checked the tracks. No damage, but, last night a water main on our street was out so we had no water for the night, we had plenty of drinking water, I broke out some of our emergency supplies. Last night we had another one while I was playing video games, and this morning another one woke us out of bed (at 9:20 am - we really got a good sleep!).

So, lets hope these are all reducing the stress on the fault bit by bit and not precursors to something bigger.

I rarely spend time cracking sudoku puzzles, but while giving Skye breakfast ths morning I foud one in the paper in front of me. The hardest part of the solution was Skye sitting there saying 'no, no, no' whenever I wrote a number down, and her habit of trying to read out the numbers in the grid. I think she can recognise that a certain shape is a number but has no way to map the shape to the real number just yet, so she was just randomly saying numbers 'two, three, nine, one, five' which would derail my train of thought.

Jan seems to be a dedicated sudoku cracker, maybe I should send Skye along to help him.

She's also sick sadly, still running a little bit of a fever and hanging onto me right now, so the real celebration is going to be on Saturday today all she wants is her dad. She's also graduated to sleeping in a regular bed and surprised us all on Saturday morning when she woke up, got out of bed, opened the door to her room and played by herself for a while. The door opening skills are still spotty though and shes more likely to get bored and start crying rather than open the door.

Orion finally managed to figure out how to 'crawl' forwards, dragging himself towards an apple which had cuaght his eye, it's a big not-step.

After a lot of drooling and chewing on random things Orion has finally got his first tooth!

I guess that'll give the republican news and bloggers something to talk about tonight while they skirt around the inconvenient truth of the election results.
(Update @ 8:33 PST - ABC News has just called 218 House seats for the Democrats, giving them control)

I've been at a few internet media companies in my time in the US, and all of them at some point have had some Product Marketing wizard make a grand announcement to the company about how we're going to get tons of indie music content on the site. So, I wasn't hugely surprised when Steve made such an announcement and some work was done to import a ton of music content.

Now, I'm no huge lover of mainstream music, but the 'indie artists' from previous organizations challenged the converse of Sturgeons law (which says that 90% of everything is crap) and I found it hard to believe that even 10% of what we'd been given was worth listening to.... maybe it was just hard to find anything worthwhile in those previous organizations. It made digging for good tunes an unrewarding experience at best.

So I'm shocked at how much bona fide top notch tunes I've practically fallen over in the content we've added to imeem. The categorisation is great, you can just jump from meem to meem and find artists who I've not just heard of but I actually have tracks by on good old fashioned vinyl. There are even some chart toppers out there, well at least chart toppers from the UK, I've never followed the Billboard charts. And because of the way they're all linked together It's trivial to dig around and find new stuff.

So, congrats to everyone here that made this happen!

Now, the only problem I'm left with is getting some of these tunes on vinyl.

The Winstons were a soul band who had a single solitary hit record - 1969's 'Color Me Father', but I'm not here to talk about that I'm more interested in the B-Side. The B-Side is a fun enough soul groove which for a brief moment strips the track down to nithing but those drums, and in so doing provided one of the defining samples for the hip-hop and jungle music cultures. And it just so happens that someone has uploaded a great documentary on this little piece of the musical firmament....

http://systim.imeem.com/video/UBkIznnx/the_amen_break/

I kept playing this over the weekend, one of the legendary sitar players attempts to fuse jazz and traditional Indian music. The manic drumming is the real highlight - especially at parties where there are drums sitting around the room. This is not a humble record by any means, the musicians go for broke and the not so sobber people in the room had no chance of keeping up with their attempts at amateur percussion.

It's been around forever, one of those awesome electro house numbers with a synth hook that rises out of the breakdown and takes everyone up with it.