Yesterday the buzz started hitting the Seattle blogs about the possibility that the Croc was shutting down shop for good. It seems that completely out of nowhere, in the midst of a rush to book their spring lineup, the owners simply decided to call it quits. Even the employees were shocked, finding out just over a week before Christmas that they were out of a job.

I stopped by on my walk home just to see if the rumors were true. As far as I can tell, they are. The lights are out, the stools neatly stacked, and there’s no sign of life other than the familiar green sign out front. I thought the small candlelight vigil out front was a nice touch. I chatted with a few other sad Croc fans who happened to walk by, and everybody seems pretty pissed.

A friend of mine who works in the real estate industry says that the money for new condo developments is pretty much dried up because of the mortgage crisis, and that there’s nothing on record about any development going in on that block, so maybe we’re lucky and they really did just run out of money. Maybe we can cook up some sort of “Save the Croc” fund or another local venue owner will step up and take over the reigns.

The block between the Croc and Mama’s Mexican Cafe is the last holdout of the “Old Belltown”, before it became all $700,000 condos and trendy sushi bars. I’ve always imagined that when they came for the Croc that the hipsters would all ride their track bikes down to 2nd & Blanchard and lie down in front of the bulldozers. Hopefully it won’t come to that, but it would be quite the sight.

Well, here’s to progress! Sushi bars and f*cking condos!

Update: Well, its real. Here’s an article in the P-I detailing the chain of events that foretold its eventual downfall…

The Shins need almost no introduction.

Click through the image for more pictures from the show.

Awesome show. I’ve seen The Shins before, at a free concert at Carnegie Mellon a couple of years ago, but this show may actually have been better.

About a year ago I picked up a pair of Shure E2C headphones. Well worth their somewhat expensive price, I use them all the time. They provide a ton of isolation, so they’re great on the bus and when flying.

But, in my experience, the actual headphone plug leaves a lot to be desired. Within about 8 months of regular use, I started getting the traditional crappy connection problems you get with cheaper headphones. After a few months of constantly trying to tweak the connector in order to get a good connection, I finally decided to replace the connector myself.

The final product was quite impressive. For more details, read on.

Step 1: Acquire supplies

Obviously you’ll need a pair of faulty headphones. And a new connector. I picked up a gold-plated 1/8″ connector from Radio Shack for about $3.99. I could have bought the standard chrome one for a buck or two cheaper, but in this situation, “bling” is worth a few extra bucks.

Step 2: Strip off old connector

First step is to remove the old crappy connector and strip it down to it’s bare wires.

Strip off the main cover for an inch or so, and then strip the individual wires. They will be incredibly tiny. This is where it pays to be really good at soldering. I won’t elaborate, but I’m not that good at soldering.

Step 3: Solder on the new connector

Now solder on the new connector. This is where reading becomes important.

According to Wikipedia, the three connections on a headphone jack are as follows:

1. The “Tip” (the end of the connector), which handles the left stereo channel. For me this was the blue wire, which I connected to the shortest terminal.
2. The “Ring” (the first segment of the connector), which handles the right stereo channel. This was the red wire, which I connected to the middle terminal.
3. The “Sleeve” (the second segment of the connector), which is the common ground. For my headphones, this was the conductor with no insulation on it. This was the wire with no insulation, and it connected to the ground terminal.

It may or may not take you some experimentation to figure out what wire is which channel in your headphones. Once you figure it out, solder or screw the connections down to each channel.

Step 4: Reinforce the connection

This step actually came later for me. At first I just soldered up the connections and used the plastic sleeve that came with the connector, but after a week or two my connection was flakier than the original. The tiny wires were moving around too much within the connector. So I re-soldered my connections and then encased the whole deal within a protective layer of cheap two-part epoxy.

Afterwards I waited for the epoxy to dry, and then shaved it down small enough to fit into the screw-on connector.

I’m very happy with the final results. After the epoxy modification, I’ve got a connector that is rock-solid and as good if not better sounding than the original jack. And I get tons of great compliments on how cool the “bling” connector is.

There you go. About $5 and less than an hour’s work to save a $100 pair of headphones. I hope you find this as helpful as me.

So a week or so ago I discovered lala. It may just be the simplest and best dotcom idea I’ve seen in a long time.

I have CDs. You have CDs. In all honesty, I’m sick of most of my CDs. And you probably are too. I might not have listened to my Nirvana “In Utero” CD in 8 years, but maybe you’ve recently suffered a bit of nostalgia and you want to listen to them again. So why don’t we trade?

Within a half hour or so of me having my beta account I loaded a bunch of the CD’s that I knew I had into my “I Have” section and I’d added a bunch of CD’s I wanted to my “I Want” section. About an hour or two later I discovered that I’d had my first match and that somebody wanted my copy of The Clash’s “London Calling” (an excellent CD by the way). And simultaneously somebody was shipping me Jurassic 5’s “Quality Control”. And I was only out $1.

Too cool.

Update: If anybody wants lala invites, add a comment below and leave the email address you want it sent to. I have a bunch.

A great album for a great price. We really should encourage this method of distribution, so I encourage you to go check it out.

It also includes “This Year,” which is a freaking awesome song. Go get it. Now.

But nobody ever bothered to write a command line remote control for it. So I wrote my own in a few lines of Python. Hopefully somebody else will find it useful.

Be warned. Its my first ever Python app, has no error checking whatsoever, and will probably replace all your MP3’s with Prince albums. It also only recognzies three commands - “next”, “back” and “playPause”, mostly since those are the only three buttons Rhythmbox has in the first place.

Download: remote.py

And that dog is so freaking cool.

Update: John Vanderslice has a song titled Bill Gates Must Die. He kicks ass too.

Awesome show. Very much worth the $10 cover, plus the $3 service charge, and the $4 ordering charge. I ended up buying both their albums right there, so that says a lot.

I very much suggest you catch them before they get big, because these guys are good. They’ll be back through town later this year.

And their website is valid XHTML. Ain’t that cute?