First of all, I'm so glad to have had the chance finally to see The West End do their thing live. What a fun show! I still can't imagine what Brad Rourke has for breakfast but whatever it is we should all be eating a big bowl of it. And Mike Shawn is a joy to listen to on keyboards (and singing), Monique is probably the sexiest drummer in the universe, and new guy Matthew Taylor sounded great on bass. (Ok, I'm no music commentator -- I just know those guys put on a show that was really fun to listen to and be part of. And I enjoyed meeting Mike's mom and CindyCG and seeing familiar faces from all over Rockville.)

I took some video and was planning to put up a couple clips at YouTube as I did previously for The Digits and Nelly's Echo. After waiting for two hours for one of the files to upload though, I googled around to see if there was a way to upload a flv instead (since that's what youtube converts it to anyway and it's much smaller), and found a mention of Blip TV, which not only allows flv uploads, but shows them with the compression you set, and at a larger size than YouTube. As a test, I uploaded 24 compressed at 300kbps/128k at 320x240 (as I would do for YouTube) to Blip TV. What a difference! It uploaded in about 10 minutes and displays at a huge 624 x 470. Kind of a strange size, but I thought I'd go all out and try my favorite of the evening, Summertime, compressed at 400/128 and full size and it looks great! Here's one more for West End junkies: No Depression.

[Update, Apr 14: FLVs can be uploaded to YouTube as well. It's a speedy upload, but I think the file gets recompressed -- the quality at YouTube doesn't look as good as locally (testing in Flash, which I used to make the flv). Here is Summertime at YouTube.]

Next X on your calendar: May 25, when The West End performs at Hometown Holidays. I'm looking forward to it already.