lockbox

pattern #4

pandora, last.fm, blip.fm

a while ago my friend sent me an email to check out pandora. later that day i checked his moblog, and there was a post that looked just like the email i received "check out pandora". later on i logged into facebook and my buddy had posted "check out pandora".

and that's around the time i realized that some automated pandora promotion tricked him into spamming every single contact in his address book.

his official twitter comment: "wow, pandora, really? you are the worst..."

now i've never really jumped on the pandora bandwagon, in fact i somewhat dislike pandora. up until recently i've been a last.fm diehard. okay, not so much a diehard. but i've been scrobbling with last.fm for quite a while.

you can check out my recently played tracks, as well as artists, albums, and songs categorized by playcount. tracking that information is pretty interesting and effortless with last.fm [my stats]. as you can tell i'm pretty into tegan and sara.

there's a pretty good comparison of the two music discovery services previously mentioned located in this post. it seems that there's always a pro and a con, nothing completely does the job 100% perfect each time in each area. welcome to the real world mr.

honorable mention goes out to blip.fm:

think twitter, but every tweet requires a song attached to it. you wanna say "i had a crappy monday" you better attach a song to it. the songs are pulled from all over the net, not uploaded by you (or other users). it's an interesting perspective, i've started my own page, for those who can't get enough of my inactive twittering or want to hear what i deem worthy to 'blip'.

the 61 is also a different new music discovery site. the think i like most about this site is that no matter where you click (with the exception of the pause button) the song you are listening to continues to play. most other sites don't support this.

there's so much music, and now there's so many ways to consume it. i'm currently in process of performing an analysis of how i consume music. document the flow, assess, and then streamline for maximum efficiency. that's another post.

pattern #3

kneeling tree

gourmet sabzi

today is attempt one at a staple persian dish. granted they didn't use a slow cooker to make this dish back in the day, i'm trying to be as efficient as possible.

the above picture is taken at the point where i let everything cook together for hours and hours. ~10mins before i'm ready to feast, add the kidney beans and i'm done.

well kids, you guessed it - touchdown, homerun, he-could-go-all-the-way!

the dish came out great, i don't think i'll ever pay for this dish again. come to think of it, i've paid for this dish 4-5 times in my life, so it's not really as life changing as i am trying to make it appear.

pattern #2

pattern #1

my first attempt at drawing a pattern. a 2" by 2" square that i filled in, then photocopied 4 times and put it together to see how it looked.

pi

inspired by the number pi and the song 'deserter' by matthew dear.

bring a friend to work day

i feel like i know my friends fairly well. i know their likes, dislikes, dating history, fears, hopes, shoe sizes, top three most embarrassing moments and more. but my friends lead a double life. matter of fact i lead a double life as well. i've touched upon this topic before, the 'work' personality and the 'life' personality.

thing is, i only see the 'life' personalities of my friends. technically i've worked with a few friends, but a misguided startup company environment doesn't necessarily bring out the professionals in all of us i'm going to discount that experience. things would have been very different if that same group of friends worked at a company of 2,000 people or more that's established (and actually generates revenue).

granted the white collar environment isn't too exciting. a cube is a cube, an office is an office, if you've eaten at one cafeteria you've eaten at them all. but i find it fascinating to see what my friends do when they are out of my presence and at in the real world earning cold hard cash.

i'd be thoroughly entertained to see what my friend's workspaces look like, where they spend time heating up their lunches, what meetings do they participate in, who are their allied or enemy coworkers and how they deal with them.

i'd love to have a 'bring your friend to work' day, and be able to shadow my friends to experience this other life that they lead 5 days a week. though, lately i have many friends who only lead the life i know. i blame the current economic climate, there's no way my childhood friends have grown up to be slackers.

i also have nurse friends, i do not have the stomach to see everything that they do. conditional bring your friend to work day it is!

Coffee Shop with Tegan and Sara

my adidas

july 24th 2004 in santa monica, ca is where it all started.

a close friend of mine was born on july 24th, and in 2004 he threw a birthday party. his parties normally have themes. this theme was 80's rockstar party.

apparently i waited till the day of the party to find an outfit. with no clue of what to wear i stumbled into aardvarks thrift store in santa monica and found a black leather hat, just like run dmc used to wear! that $9.99 hat was the first piece of my outfit. i cruised around a few other stores and bought a cheap plastic gold chain and then a pair of white adidas superstars (which i plan to wear with no laces). the rest of my outfit was black pants and a black long sleeve shirt.

the party was fun and my costume was far from the coolest one there, everyone participated. we jammed to madonna, black michael jackson, george michael and more.

after the party i ditched the hat and the plastic necklace, but those $60.00 adidas shell toes were far from expired. i wasn't initially in love with the shelltoes, however they slowly grew on me. more and more i'd wear them on weekends and casual fridays at work. before i knew it, my white with black stripes superstars were my favorite sneaker.

flash forward a few years, and i find myself making the new year's resolution: buy 1 pair of shoes each month minimum. i wasn't sure what to buy at first, but i knew that i wanted adidas. ever since childhood i've always like adidas shoes, probably because as a soccer player adidas was king.

well i ended up expanding my adidas collection as well as my shelltoe collection. if you know me, or ever see me, chances are that i'll be wearing some adidas superstars. and this pair right here, this is the pair that started it all.

i keep all my sneakers in the box for storeability (and for stackability), but i've also picked up the habit of tossing the receipt in the box as well... which is how i know that these were bought on 7/24/04.

5th of july panos

Meats

smoked pork butts, smoked brisket... (cold beer)
and then the surprise guest, fresh tuna.

Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds

dj hit the remix

i've liked everything remixed by supermayer (a duo out of germany) that i've heard so far. so it was only normal that i surfed their myspace page in hopes of usa tour dates and undiscovered tracks. no usa tours unfortunately. there was an undiscovered track titled tiergarten.

along comes twelve and a half minutes (though the one i downloaded is 13:32) of holy mack my moly!!

supermayer's signature is heavy bass, delicate melodies, and catchy vocal hooks. 2:30 mins in i'm thinking i must have the wrong song. something is not right here. where are the signature sounds? i hear rufus's voice, a beautiful harp over some xylophone, and a small kick drum...

-that's when 2:53 hits. and oh does it hit! here comes the bass and synth sounds. the bass is so upfront and heavy that i literally melted the fuse protecting my 760 watt amplifier jamming this tune at 80% volume. the song doesn't build up and drop down like one would expect. in fact i don't think many people will appreciate this wonderful track, but i sure do.

i'm fascinated by remixes. most people hear a skipping cd and say "oh, remix! haha", it almost offends me. especially in the voyeuristic state our entertainment industry is in, where behind the scenes gets just as much attention as the scenes. we love the creation process, the start to finish. a remixed song is a perfect start to finish, especially if you are intimately familiar with the starting point (original song)?

take a listen to the original track, and then listen to the remix. why did the remixing artist use this as the original, what did they use or leave out? what did the remixer add in, has the song become something completely different, or is it a slightly mutated form of what the original artist created? these questions ponder in my mind, and i wonder what i would have done differently if i were to remix the original myself.

remixes do get a bad name however, and i'll be the first to attest why. tracks (originals) that shouldn't have been produced in the first place are remixed by someone who shouldn't be mixing anything more than a rum and coke get together and produce complete crap.

another remix i've been obsessing over is sally shapiro's jackie jackie remix. junior boys remixed the song and renamed it to jackie junior. listen to the original first, then visit the remix and connect the dots. i could do this all day!