[conspire] No CABAL meetings in August, changed date for September

[Rick Moen]

This coming Saturday would ordinarily be a CABAL day, but most of the
household will be up at a big Sons of Norway social event & picnic at
Henrik Ibsen Park[1] off Skyline Blvd.  And at the end of the picnic, 
I'm taking a trip to Santa Cruz and back (Wine Club quarterly release
at Santa Cruz Mountain Vineyard) - so there's not a lot of time for a
CABAL meeting.

After that - poor us - Deirdre and I are flying to London and then
Dublin next week.

In September, I'll be on a cruice from Lisbon to Rome, and so unable to 
host people for the regular meeting date, but the 4th Saturday, Sept.
27, is feasible, so I've set that as the September meeting date.



I win.  For years, we've lamented having only a somewhat lackluster MP3
of Orbital's The Box (Full Version) 28:26, from the album In Sides.
It's electronica of more-or-less symphonic complexity.  1996, UK

You might think:  Just get a CD set of In Side, then.  Problem:  Almost
all CD sets furnish only the 4:13 Radio Edit of The Box, not the
glorious four-movement 28:26 Full Version.  The long version was
included on a Bonus Disc bundled only with the first 30,000 US album
copies of the 1996 release - while a different Bonus Disc was bundled
with the 1997 re-release.  Buy a set online, and most often you get the
wrong Bonus Disc.  

I managed to find the unobtainium at Discogs.
http://www.discogs.com/Orbital-In-Sides/release/13099
And the first thing we did was rip a good AAC release of it.  Which
brings me to my point:  a good open source audio player app for Linux
that includes AAC support.

In the way of graphical players, you could use Rhythmbox (GNOME thing),
Amarok (KDE thing), or Banshee (Mono).  Those are the most common
bloatware suggestions.  I would like to mention something I like a lot
better:  DeaDBeeF, http://deadbeef.sourceforge.net/ .   It's a fast,
light, gtk app with almost no dependencies, and Just Works[tm].

If curious, you can stream the Full Version of The Box from YouTube in
relatively decent quality, here.  (You can clearly hear some digital
artifacts if you know the piece well.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cONv26K0vL8




[1] Please, not another performance of Hedda Gabler.  But seriously, 
it's pretty up there.  http://www.henrikibsenlodge.org/
https://www.google.com/maps/uv?hl=en&pb=!1s0x808fa0db85d090f9:0x39f28751f6d46d8c!2m5!2m2!1i80!2i80!3m1!2i100!3m1!7e1!4shttps://plus.google.com/107978418906856051850/photos?hl%3Den%26socfid%3Dweb:lu:kp:placepageimage%26socpid%3D1!5sHenrik+Ibsen+Park+-+Google+Search&sa=X&ei=6TDkU-bcHI6hogSJ_oD4Bg&ved=0CHsQoiowCw