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I am a guy who likes my music fairly loud. In college, this meant that for days after a show I would spend a lot of time asking people to repeat themselves. In recent years, I have just worn earplugs to concerts. This makes the crescendo of ‘Karen Revisited’ and ‘My Father, My King’ much more enjoyable. However, the ear plugs I usually use come from the drugstore, and are designed to make it easier to sleep. As a result, they cut out a lot of the sound, particularly the detail in the high-end. I usually respond by pulling them partway out of the ear when I need to hear more. Only now am I discovering the existence of places like The Earplug Superstore, which sells products specifically designed to make concerts more enjoyable (according to this earplug attenuation graph).

This makes the only outstanding question whether I want to find an audiologist who can make molds of my ear so I can get custom-fitted earplugs. And I am guessing the answer to that is no.

In case anyone was concerned, I made it through my first hurricane with minimal difficulty. In fact, I have never experienced a natural disaster about which there was so much advance warning (unless you count crackpots predicting earthquakes). So I was able to spend much of Wednesday buying things I already should have had around (bottled water, fire extinguishers, duct tape, extra batteries, a battery-operated radio), go to class Thursday morning, and hunker-down Thursday afternoon. Said hunkering involved going to a friend’s apartment, watching the trees getting blowing back and forth and small bits of the roof flying through the air, reading the new Sandman, and watching the same TV coverage everyone else was seeing. Once it was over there was debris sprinkled all around the apartment complex, but nothing that looked too damaged. We had occasional power interruptions, but none lasting for more than a minute. Eventually the cable modem stopped working, but it is hard to separate that from everyday life with Time Warner. It seemed that the storm had not hit us as hard as we thought.

As we gathered more information, it seems that the area was hit harder than we were. Most of the rest of the town had no power, and a number of roads were blocked off by fallen trees and power lines. I haven’t ventured out on the town to see if things have gotten better there, but it looks like a beautiful day here. The only real repercussion of all this is that I had to cancel a brief vacation. Disappointing, but all things considered that is not too bad.

Just finished reading the Scott McNealy interview that was linked to from Slashdot. It is a somewhat informative look at his thinking. But he makes a the following suspect financial assertion:

Q: What about the people who bought (Sun stock) in 2000?

A: At 10 times revenues? Do the math. Do the math at 10 times revenues. There is no way to justify anything. Two times revenues implies 15 percent compound annual growth rate forever. Jack Welch did that for 20 years and went down in the hall of fame as the greatest CEO ever. So what does 10 times require? Do the math.

We can compare to where stocks were at the peak of the bubble but we have generated cash. I think we’ve got a really solid business.

Ignore the fact that ‘generating cash’ is enough to make a business ’solid’, regardless of how much capital it takes. And I am sure he is right that Sun was overvalued. I am interested in the assertion that the relationship between a company’s market value and their revenues implies something about its expected growth rate. Yes, a company’s stock price reflects a market consensus about the growth and riskiness of its profits, but which are the difference between its revenues and costs. So presumably McNealy’s analysis involved a fixing the costs relative to revenues. (A quick bit of Excel shows that he assumes margins of around 30%.) But why would investors believe that a company’s cost structure would remain unchanged as its market matures? This example seems to indict McNealy’s financial analysis more than his shareholders’.

I saw the great and fearsome Mogwai on Wednesday. They were awesome as always. (I contend that they are in that category of bands whose shows outshine all their albums, like the Jesus Lizard and …Trail of Dead) The band was not too animated; perhaps relentless touring is wearing them down. But that didn’t keep them from playing an amazing set. In addition to several great new songs, they performed the best tunes from all their older albums, including ‘Mogwai Fear Satan’, ‘Chirstmas Steps’, ‘Helicon 1′, ‘2 Rights Make 1 Wrong’, and ‘My Father My King’. The only change I would have made would be to replace ‘Stop Coming To My House’ with ‘Stanley Kubrick’ (preferrably the cello-accompnied one I saw in Chicago a few years ago). But that is minor. It was a great and deafening set, and showed that Mogwai are still in their prime.

Speaking of long-lived indie bands, I got ‘Earthquake Glue’, the new Guided by Voices album. After one or two listens, I did what it sounds like a lot of people did. I have been listening to ‘The Best of Jill Hives’ on repeat for half an hour. It is both awesome and classic GBV. Plus repeat keeps you away from that bad song that follows it. Although I was quite fond of their last album, I am not sure that I could imagine any of its songs on a classic GBV release. Whereas this would fit perfect on the seminal ‘Under the Bushes, Under the Stars’. It sounds like a sequel to that albums single ‘The Official Ironman Rally Song’. (I wonder if one could compose a piece of prose consisting of nothing but Bob Pollard song titles.) Now that I think about it, the last album has a stylistic similarity to the power-pop of ‘Mag Earwhig’, much like this one does to ‘Under the Bushes’. I wonder if GBV is recreating their own catalog backward? If so, it is just going to get better.