An Apple a day keeps Microsoft away…

Hey hey hey! Just doing a mini-post from work, a habit which I could possibly develop if workload is low, but anyways, here was me saying I would blog more, and oh crap! we’re already a month down of 2008. My friend Adam has decided to go on a solo
holiday to Amsterdam, and he’s documenting his travel adventures here, so go check that out, it’s got lots of lovely pictures (which can be enlargened oh yes!) and it’s well written, but I’ve got a slight bias there.

Anyways, Adam was going through selling a lot of his stuff, and naturally being one of his good friends, I got first dibs on some of the stuff. I got a few games, Halo 3 legendary edition (yes, the one with the helmet! :D) and the ultimate amongst the list is the Mac Mini. Slightly embarassingly I have not properly set it up, but what began with mere curiousity to the Apple approach, is slowing becoming fanboy status of the sliding scale. I’m not there yet, but I would only keep Windows for games and really the only games I stick on my PC have been WoW and the football manager series, and it is possible to get Mac versions for those, and if that’s not enough, thanks to the Macs being Intel-based, it’s much much easier to get Windows apps or indeed Windows to run natively without any hacky emulators and the like.

I am slowly going to make the transistion. Although not really an Apple product as such, but around the same time, I’ve been checking out some podcasts. It kinda started out with ExtraLife Radio (please check out this guy he is super talented, so much so a part of me resents him) and having that play whilst I’ve been working through the tiresome later stages of the career in Forza 2. Oh yes, please check out the rest of the site, the web comic he makes is absolutely pr0, I stumbled on it thanks to the heavy WoW content much earlier on, but basically it’s a geeky comic, so win!
This led me to check out iTunes, again with the Mac influence (I’ve tried it before and found it rather clunky compared to Winamp). Anyways, I will eventually get an iPod classic (I know, too many Apple products), so it’s good for me to get familiar, make sure all my music is added etc. Anyways, I have to say that using the iTunes store to find podcasts is awesome, so I’ve added all my old subscriptions and a couple new ones, like the Jonathan Ross one which I still need to check out.

I also took this opportunity to check out the diggnation podcast which is really really good. I’ve got the HD one so I can enjoy it in all it’s lovelyness through the 360. Anyways, it’s basically two guys (which actually work for digg I later discovered) that have a chat on a couch over some popualr digg stories drinking beer. It doesn’t sound much as a concept, but it’s pretty godamn entertaining, and the two boucne off each other really well. It’s so good in fact, I’ve downloaded some of the back catalogue as I really don’t mind the chat about old stories such as the Halo 3 4 player online coop announcement etc etc. Yeah so check it out, I did it and think it’s awesome.

All this podcasting stuff got me thinking that maybe I could knock one together, just have it be a light-hearted topical chat/rant show. From my limited past experience it is best to have 2 contributors, just 1 and it’s just a monologue, not that great, any more, and there’s just words everywhere. So, I’m appealing to the intermawebs to see if someone would like to be a co-presenter of some kind. Scott Johnson of Extralife seems to simply record his skype conversations, so it wouldn’t be too hard to get up and running, and plus it would mean that I would be posting to here more often, so it’s all good. Comment me up and that would be cool.

Anyways, posting in my lunch hour when I really should be lunching.
Take it easy

Smooth with a capital Smoo…

Two posts in one day, I truly am on a roll. Again, I have been on a search to spruce up my blog. I found this little method to largen and indent the first letter here. It’s a shame that you have to physically force the style settings. Perhaps with a bit more research, I could get a little script to do the hard work for me when I hit “submit” in Windows Live Writer or an alternative offline blog writing tool thingy.

I’m also looking into lobbing on a chat widget into the already crowded sidebar, which makes me think it may be time to adopt the 3-column layout hack – again there
’s no simple high level way to do that, you have to physically go in and play about with the CSS styles, and in my experience it gets a little awkward getting a layout that renders well in all (majority of) browsers. I would just develop in wonderful Firefox but the n00bs that buy their computers from PC World enforce Internet Explorer development on us and that’s always fun, although not seen how vers 7 renders – if you ask me it is so much closer to FF now, I’m of the opinion that as FF is open source, the lazy Microsoft boys went in and reverse engineered 7 from it, mmm…

Here’s wasting time looking for Blogger hacks…

Gym Impressions #1

This is going to be the first of what hopes to be a lengthy series of opinions and reviews towards some music that I have listened to, whilst gymming, to use a bastardisation.  As I have mentioned earlier (I hope), I got myself a little mp3 player which I would then load new albums onto, and then go enjoy them at the gym, and thus avoid having to experience any other noises that may be happening.  I also hope to start adding a few pics to the blog, brighten it up a bit with a few album covers by using Windows Live Writer, so here goes.  If it fucks up then I’ll take the post down pretty sharpish and try again :s

EDIT: laptop was being incredibly unresponsive when adding the pix so apologies it looks a little crappy and in need of better presentation, but I ran out of hair to pull out arg!

 

 Mike Park – For The Love of Music

Ah, Mike Park, first experienced this guy when he supported Alkaline Trio when a group of us went to see them in wonderful Brum.  For those not in the know, Mike Park is the founder of Asian Man Records, a record label that Alkaline Trio released some of their first material, hence the connection.  Armed with a stool, guitar and a small projector, he put on one of the greatest, and without doubt most enjoyable support sets I have witnessed.

The standout track from the live performance was of course “From Korea” which he is probably the most well known for.  I acquired two albums through Soulseek – a great little App, a peer-to-peer program which I’ve found to be the best source for the more obscure and/or less known music.  Anyways, back to the review, and I opted to put on “For the Love of Music” onto the mp3 player because of the familiarity of the “From Korea” track.

Now, “From Korea” itself is a very simple song, in which Mike Park explores the misuse of politically incorrect terms like “gay” and “nigger” to quote the song.  Just like at the live show, the song is very immediate, has a wonderful sing-along quality and serves as an obvious entry point into Mike Park’s material.

I admit, I was slightly skeptical at what just one guy with an acoustic guitar could do – could it be as good, if not better than From Korea?  The answer, is most definitely yes, and in fact as alluded to before, “From Korea” Is one of the simplest songs on the album, and that a high number of them contain other strings to add layers to help create a greater depth to the songs.  Park has a wonderful sense of melody and by the second chorus I was already armed with the skills to sing along to what are all at times throughout, simply charming lyrics - ”You’re grade today, an A for loving me”.

Other standout tracks are ”I’m Supposed to Be There Too” and the other protest (kinda) song “Hey You!”.  Overall, a great little album, I can almost guarantee it will not blow you away in terms of stature or content, but if you feel like kicking back and enjoying some charming, acoustic based, and honest music, then look it up.

 

 AFI – decemberunderground

Not so much a new album, it’s been knocking about for at least a year, but I felt it deserved at least a listen.  Now, my first exposure to AFI was the album “Sing the Sorrow” and because of this I’m not a fan of the much more raw and lesser produced material which predates that album (sorry).  Before experiencing decemberunderground, reviews I had read on Amazon had expressed generally negative thoughts due to the departure from the type of music which AFI started out with.  Not weighed down with this emotional baggage, I was ready to check it out.

The first song, or more of a short introduction, sets the scene for more to come, mainly the more orchestral-sounding element which first began on “Sing the Sorrow”. Also the first vocals are very much of a “Sing the Sorrow” mould and definitely not the more harsh, ragged, more harsh vocals on previous albums.  The first song “Prelude 12/21″ also features the lyric, “kiss my eyes and lay me to sleep”, which I almost immediately found myself changing to “Kiss my arse and lay me to sleep” – old habits die hard…

After the quiet opener, the album properly kicks off and as is as explosive as ever, and does not let up much at all.  Something that is quite immediate is the high quality of production that this album has been subjected to.  The entire album simply wreeks of slick production, which some purists and hardcore AFI fans may hate, but it’s something I am finding myself requiring as a prerequisite to a good album – solid production.

Moving onto the songs themselves, and I regret that there aren’t many standout tracks on the album, although saying that the quality of all tracks is high, and there is a good flow to the album.  A flow which is helped very much by the pace of the songs, it’s almost a barrage at times.  One reason perhaps why there aren’t more standout tracks is the difficulty (i have at least) of understanding and recognising the lyrics which is a continuing element of AFI’s music.

If you have never heard of AFI before, I would recommend “Sing the Sorrow” before this one.  The standard is very high on “decemberunderground” but it lacks the standout tracks, which luckily “Sing the Sorrow” posesses in high numbers.  Although that is my personal view, and perhaps a fairer assessment of this band would be to begin at the start of their discography, but again I have given it a try and not found anywhere near as many gyms as can be found on “Sing the Sorrow” and this, their latest albums.

More Gym Impressions later, I am still undecided whether to post the “mini-reviews” altogether or give them their own individual post listings, mmm..

Till then, here’s hoping you will listen to something new today.

The State of Blogs to come…

Hey all, again I have neglected this blog over the last few weeks despite a couple of noteworthy events happening etc. Anyways, I plan to hit the heavy stuff a little later in the evening, but first some lighter stuff.

First things first, I’ve made a few small cosmetic changes to the look of the blog. Probs the most noticable is the header image I’ve added to the, believe it or not, header.  Yeah, no particular reason for the water, I was just looking through this archive of random wallpapers I downloaded a while back, looking for something I could take a slither off to turn into some cool artsy background. Well I went for this ocean scene with dolphins jumping. I almost cropped a dolphin into the header image but thought that would be a little lame, so just kept to the waves.  The colour of the sea being pretty close to the standard background I had before has meant that I have kept the header text white.  I’ve also changed the blog title and added a subtitle, subtly withdrawing one of the many names under which I go.  Wow, who thought you could talk at length about some small changes to a blog header lol.

There is one small problem with the new header image, in the fact that it has a fixed size. I spent some time trying to find a solution to the problem as if the blog is viewed in resolutions of 800×600 or dare I say it, lower then the header image overhangs the header and doesn’t look very pretty indeed. Also due to the limitations of my available monitors, I have not seen it above 1024×768 and I don’t want to think about it – I was suprised it was not more of a common problem, but I gave it a good search but gave up after a few hours. My advice, only view this site in 1024×768 resolution, kthx :D

 

Other changes are to do with the Last.fm quilts sitting in the sidebar.  Thanks to the efforts of the last.fm development team, they’ve now developed multiple sizes for the quilts, so I’ve opted for the smaller ones. It’s ok folks, the pictures swap round so you can still watch in awe and see/read the artists/albums I hold dear.

Also new in this post is my use of Windows Live Writer in composing this blog entry.  I read that version 2 had entered beta phase on the blogger main page, so I’d thought I’d give it a go, hopefully it won’t fuck it up completely.  It has been found to work ok with Blogger so I don’t foresee any problems, so if it works out I will use it more in the future, and possibly make more exciting blog entries, with pictures and definite links, rather than me kinda rambling about something I read/watched but may in fact of dreamt up, mmm.

 

Take it easy…