| so much for tired |
[25 Sep 2007|11:05pm] |
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So This Is It // Slow Reader by Slowreader
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Brian and Zack came over shortly after i wrote my last post and we played music for a few hours. Brian and i had played before, it was the first time zack had come. it was awesome. I'm so psyched to be playing with other people finally, after so long of not.
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| Time For Rest |
[25 Sep 2007|07:09pm] |
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Lion's Mane // The Creek Drank The Cradle by Iron & Wine
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My life has been so good lately, and i've had a lot of fun, but i think i need to slow down for a while. Between parties and concerts and jewish holidays and just staying up late sometimes i am really tired. I've seen someone or had guests done something social basically every weeknight for a few weeks straight now. I think i'm going to try and plan for a few days straight of reading books and watching movies... as soon as my calendar clears ;-)
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| I got a Taylor! |
[20 Aug 2007|04:59pm] |
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As a windfall present to myself, i just bought myself a really nice acoustic-electric guitar. I'm pretty excited to play and record with it. I'm kinda scared to touch it too :-)
I got a Taylor 312ce, which i decided upon after spending about 3-4 hours in Dusty Strings. Dusty strings is a really nice acoustic only music shop, and i've picked up my last two guitars there. I've been wanting a 'nice' acoustic for a long time now, never owned one worth more than about $300 before, and so i splurged. I spent the last two hours going back and forth between the 312ce and the 412ce, which was about $200 more, due to it being made of a more expensive wood. I like the tone better of the 412ce- it was much warmer, but there was something that i couldn't put my finger on that made me enjoy playing the 312ce more. If pushed, i think i would have to say it was that the harder wood made the fretboard more brittle feeling against the string. It sounds dumb, but I just liked the feel of the 312 more. In the end, i decided that my enjoyment playing was the most important thing- more important even than tone..
Anyway, i'm hope to record at least one song before i start work again. I'm going to set up my gear tonight :-).
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| Who's Seen Superbad? |
[19 Aug 2007|03:58pm] |
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Me and my friend brian thought it was hilarious. Very very funny. My friend Jenn thought it was funny, but didn't love it as much. Theory is that this might just be because it's really a movie about teenage boys, and Jenn was never one of these. I'm looking for more data. Boys, Girls, did you love it?
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| wow |
[12 Aug 2007|09:38pm] |
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 mela |
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none |
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demi sent this to me... holy cow.
update soon about my brother's wedding this weekend etc...
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| Today's FBI. It's For You. |
[03 Aug 2007|10:13am] |
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something that demi is playing |
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Today on the bus i was sitting near enough to this couple of capitol hill hipsters that i was able to hear the large majority of their conversation. They were not at all bothered by this, they were talking loudly and i was not at all hiding that i was listening to them.
I think these people should have their own radio show. They were hilarious. The guy sitting next to me told me that they regularly ride this bus and are regularly enjoyable to listen to (it wasn't my normal bus). They spent the entire bus ride ripping on the advertisements plastered around the bus- most of it talking about the FBI Jobs ad on the ceiling . They are advertising pretty hard. Their (new?) slogan is "Today's FBI. It's For You.", which is a good thing to know. I guess i've always had the "Don't mess with the FBI, or they'll totally fuck you up" perspective. I'm glad that today's FBI is for me. That makes me feel safe.
The conversation on the bus touched over many important issues from "This ad is a canon of contradictions!" to "I don't think that man is wearing any pants..." to "Wow they are clearly advertising at minorities" to "wow that is dangerous, bears driving cars. that should be illegal." ok. that last quote was about a brown bear ad. Not the FBI ad. The FBI ad had nothing to do with bears driving cars. Or bears wearing bifocals (which was on a credit union ad) and whether or not you should trust them to lend you money ("Oh sure bears are trustworthy, until there's a fish in the room.").
I have to come clean here. I do not have a photographic memory. I have what i like to call an 'approximate' memory. Most of these quotes are actually paraphrased. Although all of them are paraphrased to the best of my recollection from real quotes. This makes me think of something important. Don't you think the english language should have a written symbol to represent a paraphrase? Kinda like a quote, but by defenition a little less accurate? Poll #1032902 The English Language: Does it need a 'paraphrase' symbol?
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 2 Should the written english language contain a new symbol to represent a paraphase? This would be used similarly to quotation marks, except that it would be used when you are uncertain of the exact words spoken. What should this symbol be? (even if you woldn't choose to answer it, what would you have it be, if it did exist?) Ok, this post is now over.
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| Boycot the recording industry |
[01 Aug 2007|04:36pm] |
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fuck it. |
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Over the past few years, we've seen the recording industry take a hard stance against copyright theft. They sued students, and they brought down a lot of 'normal' people to prove a point. I'm sure we were all very proud of the recording industry and their lawyers for these very public successes. Great musicians like Metallica and Sir Elton John will now be able to continue to scrape by and everyone wins. Yay.
But today the I read an article that really made me feel as though the music industry had taken it a little (err.. a lot) too far. It seems that The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) is no longer content to stop internet downloading of music. No they are not focusing on DRM, and CD copying (which if you haven't heard we have a right to do with our own purchases as long as we don't give them away). No, they are now suing restaurants who play songs without paying explicit rights to play those songs in public. The sickening part of all this, is that restaurants who pay for CDs to play in their venue, and pay for subscribed music services, are still apparantly (in the eyes of ASCAP) committing a federal offense, and they are suing for big money. Buying the CD does not give you the right to play it for people who are not friends or family, and the industry is sending spies into clubs and restaurants to figure out who is 'cheating'.
Now, i know i took a jab up above at Sir John and Lars and company. I actually am not angry at the musicians most of whom are getting screwed by the record labels harder than we are but I'm really frustrated at the recording industry for this cheap jab of a lawsuit. I know very little about the internal workings of the industry, but i do know that some really famous and wealthy people are represented by ASCAP - the article i reference above mentions Coldplay, Dr. Dre, Avril Lavigne and Elvis Costello - and it would be nice to see them stand up and defend the people who listen to their work. The industry is going farther and farther in attacking even the people who support them, and if they don't start standing up for their customers, they should expect a backlash. This comes at a time when getting music for cheap or free (even legally) is very easy. Tons of bands have tracks available on myspace and other online venues, and the relative cheapness of recording equipment has opened up recording to a bunch of small time (read - not suing their customers) labels or bands directly. Choosing to not support major labels does not mean giving up on music.
I used to feel a certain sense of wanting to support artists (at least some of the time) with the music i listen to. But the system is breaking. Paying so much money ($10 for a digital album?) for music just doesn't make sense when the bulk of the money is going to guys who are suing restaurant owners for $30,000 a track (see the article) for playing CDs that have been payed for... I'm still happy- more than happy- to pay for concert tickets. Apparantly the concert tickets support the artist a lot more (even if much of it still is owed back to the label in the end, it covers artist debts to do so), but i think i'm donepaying so much for CDs from big labels.
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| Datasheets make me sleepy... |
[31 Jul 2007|01:04pm] |
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music |
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ulrich schnauss |
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I think reading datasheets is my least favorite part of being a hardware engineer. Right now i'm reading a 174 page document on one particular flash chip. OMG is it boring. More boring than... well almost anything. I need to learn this stuff, but i'm struggling to keep my eyes open (which is common for me when i need to read datasheets).
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| Links for this morning... |
[31 Jul 2007|10:00am] |
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Demi's Mix |
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Gcycle is a really cute page that helps you find ways to recycle electronics, batteries, printer cartridges, etc after you enter your zip code. Honestly one of the cutest websites i've ever seen. (demi recognized the artist as 'exploding dog', i recognized it as an artist i had seen before, i'm almost certain via ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) evan) [this link via greenissexy]
http://www.gcycle.org/
Coding Horror had a great post recently on the danger of software patents...
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000902.html
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| cool electric motocycle coming soon |
[30 Jul 2007|02:21pm] |
"Why design an electric motorcycle when gas motorcycles are already so efficient? Right?... Not quite! Compared to your run-of-the-mill car, a motorcycle is about double the efficiency, but compared to the Enertia, the average motorcycle loses by a huge margin. Modern motorcycles currently produce up to 15 times the emissions per mile as the average new car or light-duty truck! Even the California Air Resources Board has tightened emissions regulations for motorcylce manufacturers to bring them in line with emissions on other road vehicles. The Enertia solves both issues with a more efficient drivetrain versus a conventional motorcycle and far less "well to wheel" emissions. "
http://www.enertiabike.com/
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| cool, useful new link... |
[27 Jul 2007|01:26pm] |
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ulrich schnauss |
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online general file conversion tool - docs/pdfs/videos/audio/images
what a useful tool. I haven't used it yet, but the idea is great. God, i get so into distributed computing.
http://www.zamzar.com/
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| Faceball |
[26 Jul 2007|09:59am] |
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the blow |
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http://faceball.org/
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| I finished HP (don't worry, no spoiler) |
[26 Jul 2007|09:36am] |
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I've been reading the harry potter series now since 1999 or so when Prisoner of Azkaban (3) was on the shelves. It might even have been when the it was only chamber of secrets. Now about 8 years later i have finally finished the series.
As i've come to the end of the series, maybe for the last 2 - 3 books or so, i've been continually blown away at how much everything ties together. J.K. Rowling must have had the plot laid out for all seven books since at least the second book, but i'm guessing she had it from the start. As details from the early books that had slipped by almost unnoticed twist the plot in book seven (while my brain was straining to remember) i am so blown away with her genius. I doubt that future generations will fully understand this - i felt the 8 years between when i started and when i finished the series... each time waiting for a new book for ages and then devouring it in a few days. I know that she had to have this planned in detail for 10 years. But that will be much harder to understand when all the books appear in front of you at the same time (how many of you know how long it took Tolkein to write the entire LOTRing series, or C.S. Lewis to write the entire TLTWATWardrobe series...).
The other thing that really blows me away about Rowling's writing is that she really manages to capture the age of the narrator in the language and complexity of plot. Each book is succesifly more complicated than the last. This includes the plot, the descriptions, and the decisions that must be made by the characters (and how they view those decisions). Its something i've never seen before in any other book i've read. Its genius- especially because she is so successful with it.
Now that i'm done, i suppose i will reread all seven in a row at some point. As my books have become dispersed to different borrowers over the years, i'll probably wait until a christmas gift pack 'special edition' of the entire series comes out or something to do so. But i'm going to have to get used to life without the excitment of another Harry Potter on the horizon... an excitement i've been living with since 1999. I thought i was really going to miss the characters, who i can't help but think of as friends (i mean, i've been with them as they grew up, through the good times and the bad right?) but now that the series is done, i realize that rereading it a second time will be just as good as the first time.
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