Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Weekly-Song #1 - "Daisy"


HAPPY NEW YEAR!

I don't know how long I'll be able to keep this up, but I do know that I have tons and tons of basically completed songs that I've pointlessly never released. As an incentive to finish/release my mounds of songs that are going unheard, I am going to release a song each week for... awhile. My goal would be a year, but that really depends on how busy my upcoming semester is going to be. My guess would be: really really epically busy. This test of self-whatever is inspired by Jonathan Coulton's Thing-a-Week which was pretty much the exact same thing I am doing here!

I also haven't chosen a day of the week to release these. I feel like Wednesday nights (Thursday mornings) are always terribly busy, so these will probably be moved to a Thursday, Friday or Saturday night release.

My first weekly-song samples a 1963 computer speech demo done by the Bell Laboratories (hear the original audio). The computer says a few historically significant things and then proceeds to sing "Daisy Bell." The robotic singing gives me goosebumps so I took it and used it!

Funtastic Power! - Daisy.mp3

DOWNLOAD, LISTEN, ENJOY!

Sunday, December 28, 2008

YAY or NAY: 2008 year in review


Reviewing everything for 2008.

(YAY) last.fm: It never ceases to amaze me how many amazing artists last.fm is able to recommend to me. They have done an amazing job of keeping the site in a constant state of upgrade. This year it has become much prettier and as useful as ever. KEEP IT UP! And also thank you for finding me more top-notch free mp3s than I even have time to listen to.

(YAY) RSS:
I never used any sort of RSS things before this year. I'm very glad I looked into it. I love being able to subscribe to website updates, and have things that people can subscribe to. Making posts through RSS makes it so easy to make each post show up in multiple places (blogger, last.fm, website...) all at once. LOVE IT

(YAY) Google / Chrome / Reader / Gmail:
I didn't really start using Gmail until this year because my school took it over as the default email client. I like it a lot. Chrome, I'm not absolutely decided on. It doesn't really seem any better than Firefox, except that it opens quicker. Reader is great as well, I'm glad I started using it.

(NAY) LG:
the first edition Verizon LG Chocolate Phone was a rather terrible phone. I had to get it replaced like 3 times. This month it stopped functioning completely. Nice job failing.

(YAY) LG: the new Verizon LG enV2 phone is a rather great phone. I'm very happy with it. [edit: this phone seems to delete all my "Notes" for no apparently reason every few days. It's very annoying. So the phones NOT SO PERFECT]

(NAY) Verizon: thanks for boosting all of the cell phone prices up 50 dollars for Christmas right when I went to buy my new phone after your other one broke on me for no reason.

(YAY) Feedburner:
another side-project of Google. Go google!

(YAY) Blogger

(NAY) YTMND.com:
I liked it a lot for the past 2 years up until about 2 months ago. The featured users section being gone isn't the problem, it's just the fact that I was removed as a featured user even though my site scores clearly showed that I deserved to be. That made me a bit bitter. I don't want to make content for a site where the owner doesn't like what I'm doing.

(NAY) Windows Vista:
It seems for the most part that Vista hasn't given me much too many problems, but it seems like more recently it has been bugging me.

(YAY) Wii / Nintendo / Super Smash Bros. Brawl: I don't tend to like games too much anymore. Most of them are just unable to interest me. But Brawl is endlessly entertaining, and Super Mario Galaxy is much better than I thought it would be.

(YAY) Guitar Hero: Didn't really play it until this year, I LOVE IT.

(YAY) Valve: Great company. I hope they never stop churning out great games. Portal, Team Fortress 2, and Half Life 2 are still great! I'd like to Left 4 Dead not only for how great I hear it is, but just based on the company's reputation.

(MEH) Dell: I'm very happy with my Dell laptop I've had for about a year and a half. But I have had some huge issues with a few things. It took Dell an entire year to come out with a proper device driver for my video card (it's Dell's responsibility to come out with drivers for mobile cards, not nVidia's). The card kept failing up until this update. Also, the Dell website is very frustrating to navigate.

(NAY) Myspace: I'm surprised how many people ask me for my myspace address. I feel like it has really fallen out of fashion. I know that I haven't updated anything on mine for years.

(YAY) Facebook: Good.

(NAY) Reading: I hate reading

(MEH) Macintosh / Apple: My iPod still functions as it should. A plus for Apple! I've had to deal with Macs a lot more this year than any other time in my life, and I still have to say I don't like them. They are getting a little more useable with how they are starting to accept that a RIGHT-CLICK is totally necessary and other stuff like that. Another thing that has brought them a little closer to competing with Windows is that Vista is pretty bad. But, they still crash way more than Mac users let on. And all there software that everyone raves about is terrible. Final Cut is TERRIBLE! Final Cut is terrible terrible terrible. It's not completely unusable, but there is no way it should be some sort of industry standard like it is. And Garageband is not only terrible, but it actually is unusable.

(MEH) Twitter: I can't decide if I like it or hate it.

(MEH) Firefox: Seems like it has been crashing A LOT lately. This might be Vista's fault, but it never used to happen. Other than that Firefox is very good, a lot better than IE.

(YAY) Youtube: Just good. I love the new HD quality. But also it seems like uploading has become harder. The new "beta uploader" never completes, even if the video has been put into your video list. I just keep on canceling after the video seems like it has been uploaded and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Your Next Favourite Band


This web-app seems useful if you're a last.fm user (which, really, everyone should be). You put in your username and it looks at your neighbors' top artists and finds an artist that all of them are listening to a lot and you are missing out on. I'm surprised last.fm doesn't do this already.

http://yournextfavband.com/

It recommended 2 artists to me that don't seem completely terrible!

Saturday, December 13, 2008

HOLIDAY TUNES


1) Karol of the Bells
2) God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen - one of my personal favorite songs I've ever done. I feel like the vocoding turned out really well on it. (vocal-only version)

Also, I changed the index2 page of my website to show a few of my most recent blog posts. Although, I'm having trouble getting the padding and font sizes and stuff correct, so all of the post titles show up as normal sized links with no space between it and the previous post. I should learn more about CSS. Never mind, I fixed all of this.

MERRY X-MAS!

Sunday, December 7, 2008

Epic Beatz (fun times mix) part 12

New YTMND: Epic Beatz feat. feat. user (part 12)

Features part 12 of the epic, never ending, Keaton vs. Kassius remix battle. Image by Ochobobo.