Short answer, no. Long answer, read below.
I know those of you that are frequent readers (yes, all 3 of you!) are probably curious as to what exactly is going on in my world, musically. We all know that I moved down to Texas to pursue my dream of being a singer, and we also know that I’ve had issues that have been keeping me away from going to Septien and doing my vocal lessons.
As some of you may know, I recently moved away from DFW (where Septien is), and up to Amarillo. This was done for job reasons (Josh’s job was no longer using the office in DFW), but I assure you that this has done nothing to hinder my progress towards my goals. We have already discussed it, and once I’m ready to take the lessons, I can go stay with my father in DFW and take the lessons. It’s only about a 4-5 hour drive from where I live, and my car will most certainly make it.
The issue, of course, is the same as it’s always been. Going to karaoke clubs was fun, but I never really felt like I was ever really getting much better in terms of my vocal abilities. I suppose that maybe, since I had an audience, I wasn’t trying any new or challenging things. Interestingly enough, Amarillo has pulled me out of this rut!
Rock Band 2 is my new best friend. I got a Playstation 3 for my birthday (LOVE YOU JOSH!!), and the very first title I picked up for it was Rock Band 2. With this game, I can play the songs on expert, and practice singing songs I normally would never touch in public — and learn trophies and such, thus increasing the fun factor so it doesn’t feel like I’m just practicing. The best part, of course, is that if I’m singing them on expert, I have to be pretty damn close to the correct notes in order to not fail out on the songs hardcore. Freaking.. awesome.
I’ve recently determined that my heartburn issues have also been contributing to my sore throat issues. Now I’m taking Prilosec (for the heartburn/GERD/ulcer/whatever on earth it is), and Zyrtec for the allergies. I still have breathing issues though, so I’m also using the Neti pot. Sure, these are health issues that I have to deal with regardless of my goals for the future, but they certainly impact my ability to sing well.
In fact, just yesterday Josh and I were playing Rock Band 2 and I did horribly on a song I normally do well. I just couldn’t hit the note, and my throat was sore, and I could feel something blocking airflow somewhere in my sinus cavities. Sadly, this just reinforced that I am not ready to attempt professional vocal lessons — I need to keep at taking care of my body and getting myself ready.
When the time comes, I will be ready for the 4-Session Evaluation Period, I will pass the evaluation, and I will go on to record a CD of myself doing all original music. It will be awesome! =^_^=
In the meantime, if you’re a fan of nerdcore, feel free to check out funky49’s most recent album, The Rapbassador EP.
For those of you that didn’t follow my European twitters and/or wanted more information about how my first trip off of the North American continent went, I’ve chosen to write a long and detailed play-by-play of the whole thing. If you want the short version, the twitters are still there.
Friday, November 21
Snazz and I flew out of DFW Airport in the evening, heading up to Chicago. Everything went rather smooth @ DFW, even though I was a bit agitated at no longer being able to bring a drink through the security checkpoint. After we landed in Chicago, we had a two-hour layover. This might not have been so bad because it was two hours of hanging out in the international terminal with a bunch of people speaking tons of different languages. I counted at least 8 different European and Asian languages while waiting for the plane. The bad part was that apparently at Chicago O’Hare, there’s no food places past security in the international terminal. Of course, this would be less of a big deal if we were allowed to bring drinks through the security checkpoint, but no.
After 2 hours of trying not to die of dehydration, we boarded the plane from Chicago O’Hare to København (CPH, also known as Copenhagen to the English-speaking world). I honestly don’t remember how long the flight was, as I thought that constantly checking the time would make it seem longer. As such, I watched a couple movies, drank water every single time a flight attendant walked by, and learned my very first lesson about Europe: Ice is available for your drinks only upon request, and water comes carbonated by default. Luckily for me, it only took me about an hour to realize that the Scandinavian flight attendants were in fact speaking British English, not the Americanized stepchild version. I’m glad I didn’t ask for a napkin before figuring this little tidbit out. Thanks Dr. Who!
Saturday, November 22
We landed in København sometime Saturday afternoon, met up with my mother and her Viking husband, then headed out into the world! Our first stop was the grocery store to stock up on some snacks and such for our downtime. Simply being surrounded by signs in a language I had no prior knowledge of (aside from translating Basshunter lyrics) was absolutely amazing! I had fun trying to read signs, and ultimately found that my knowledge of German really helped a lot in trying to figure out what various words in Swedish meant.
Sunday, November 23
We headed out to the mall in the early morning to pick up some clothes to survive the trip to Germany, as I “accidentally” didn’t pack enough clothes to survive the whole week. We got back in time for my mother to cook an amazing turkey dinner for all of us, and we just sat around drinking Glög and enjoying each others’ company.
Monday, November 24
We headed out to Ales Stenar, making a quick stop near the coastline to take tons of pictures. Ales Stennar was absolutely stunning, although I think I might have enjoyed it a bit more had I been able to feel any part of my anatomy in the murderous sea-wind.
After freezing at Ales Stenar and taking lots of pictures, we headed down to a little fish place at the base of the hill. I had some freakishly amazing Salmon, and we all headed back to their place in Tågarp. On the drive back, we stopped in a cute little Swedish town to check out amazing architecture, get rained on, walk the dog, and do a little bit of Christmas shopping on the side!
Tuesday, November 25
MY FIRST DAY IN GERMANY! Anybody who knows me, will know that I will probably always remember this day. We got up really early and headed out to the ferry, which was pretty neat in and of itself. Our first stop once we got to Germany was this quaint little town called Fehmarn, where I probably stood staring at all the cool buildings with my jaw open for at least 10-15 minutes. We took pictures of all the neat buildings, stretched our legs, then got back into the car and headed onward to Hamburg!
We made it to Hamburg in the late evening and checked into the Crown Plaza hotel. We thought it was going to be right on the water, but no worries, it was only a few bus stops down from the town center and train station and everything! Thus began my quest to find “authentic” German food. After a few hours of roaming around and finding everything from a Burger King (and “Hamburger” jokes) to Italian food, we finally ate at some mall-quality place where I ended up eating some Wienerschnitzel with pomme frites (french fries). After dinner, I was tired and it was icky and rainy, so we all headed back to our hotel rooms for some much-needed rest.
One thing I found interesting about Germany was the fact that absolutely everything on TV was in German. I know, this shouldn’t have been a shock, but after most channels in Sweden being in English (but subtitled in Swedish), I found it surprising. South Park in German was rather amusing, and I found that most of Family Guy was still at least entertaining even in German. I ended up leaving the tv on MTV Germany, because I was kind of interested to see what was considered the “popular” music over there as opposed to here. I was interested to see some Marilyn Manson song from a decade ago on the top 10, not far from the current single by German native Jennifer Rostock. That reminds me.. I picked up the Jennifer Rostock CD, but I haven’t given it a listen yet. I should probably go do that. =^_^=
Wednesday, November 26
also known as THE BEST DAY EVAR.
My mother and Lars were more interested in the Christmas market (which we were at the previous day), whereas Josh and I wanted to do some sightseeing. The obvious solution became to split up for the day. Kind of odd, I know, fly to Europe to visit my mother and then spend time away from her, but it seemed to work out for everybody.
Josh and I started with a bus tour of Hamburg, taking note of places we wanted to investigate further after the bus tour was over. After finishing the bus tour of Hamburg, we went off in search of Starbucks, and found some! The coffee was just the fuel we needed to walk from the town center down past the Rathaus and on to the church of St. Michael. By the way, if you go to Hamburg, YOU WANT PICTURES OF ST. MICHAEL’S! The building was beautiful, and we got the tour of the entire church - including the crypt. IMHO, the crypt was the coolest part, although the tower might have been a lot more interesting had we not been pelted with wind and rain the second we stepped off of the elevator.
After leaving the church, my feet started to decide they hated me, so we hopped a bus on to the mall to pick up my Jennifer Rostock CD, then we hopped another bus back to the Christmas market and grab some awesome Bratwurst from some random street vendor.
Of course, no trip to Germany would be complete without, you guessed it, MORE CLOTHES SHOPPING! I picked up a few more pairs of pants (I freaking LOVE European clothing designers, seriously, I never imagined I’d run into so many cute pairs of pants in my size!), then we headed to a little Nautical-themed restaraunt to have dinner, where I finally managed to get some German potatoes, at least.
Thursday, November 27
We checked out of the hotel in Hamburg, then headed on to Lübeck. Lübeck was freaking beautiful, as I’m starting to believe all of Europe might possibly be. We ran through some Christmas markets, I had my picture taken with the devil, we all drank some hot chocolate, then ultimately our bodies started screaming “LET ME REST OR I SHALL KEEEEEL YOU!”, so we finally decided it was probably time to head back to Sweden — and rest. Friday, we did just that, sat around drinking Glühwein, watching Swedish television, and just chilling out.
Saturday, November 29
We went to Malmö to stalk Basshunter do some more sight-seeing, and it was pretty awesome. Lars didn’t come with us because apparently he’d already seen Malmö before, so it was just Snazz, my mother, and I. The rain was absolutely ugly and wet, but we noticed that a lot of the shops were interconnected, so we managed to stay indoors for the most part, shopping and taking in all the sights around us. For lunch we had some pretty decent Chinese food, solidifying my belief that mall food in Europe is a much higher quality than mall food in the United States. In the center of town was a giant Christmas tree, and it looked like they were just setting up to build a temporary ice-skating thing around the tree, NYC Times Square style. Too bad we can’t go back when it’s done, that would’ve made some awesome pictures.
Sunday, November 30
We headed back home. First an uneventful flight from København to Chicago O’Hare, where I watched way too many dumb movies, then we had to spend almost an hour trying to figure out why only one of our suitcases made it to Chicago. Since it was late, and we were about to miss our connection back to DFW, we dropped the issue and headed to our plane. Once we finally got back to DFW, the valet had our car ready, and we drove back home to get some much-needed rest.
Now it’s Tuesday and my feet are still screaming in Agony. My stomach really misses the non-Americanized versions of, well, pretty much everything I ate in Europe. I’m quite fond of having air conditioning that’ll cool a room below 80 degrees Fahrenheit, and finding bottled water in every convenience store I go near is a welcome comfort as well.
All in all, I absolutely loved Europe. A++++, will travel again. I specifically loved Germany more, but then again I think I’ve been in love with Germany since before I’ve been there.. except now I have reasons to back up that love. If you’re a facebook friend, my mother posted about a million pictures of the whole trip, and Snazz should be uploading some to his site once we get some free time, too.
If you go to the Pure Pwnage Download Page, you’ll notice that some of the season 1 episodes are available in torrents, while others have to be downloaded directly. Since I figured people other than me would prefer to get all of their downloads as torrents, I’ve created a torrent for all of season 1. It has no tracker, so it’ll only work with torrent clients that use DHT. I’m not using a public tracker because I don’t know of any public trackers that aren’t already infamous for pirating illegal content, and I kind of like my current relationship with my ISP, thanks. If you choose to post it to public trackers you happen to be on, feel free. After all, I don’t own the content, I’m just distributing it as a mirror source. Rock on Pure Pwnage fans!
If you don’t want to download the whole season at once, your client should have an option to select only specific files within the torrent. If it doesn’t, you could always consider installing utorrent. Yes, it even works under linux with wine, that’s what I’m running on my seedbox.
That being said, here’s the torrent:
pure-pwnage-season-1-purepwnagecom
If you’re looking for torrents of season 2, they’re all already available directly at the Pure Pwnage episode download page. I’m personally seeding every episode from my dedicated seedbox as well, so they should never die. If the tracker goes down, you’ll still be able to find them through the beauty that is DHT.
This post is a test of the Blog It! application for Facebook.
Hello world. Just in case you’ve forgotten, I’m a geek. I know I haven’t posted about anything except for music and/or video games in quite a while, so I figured it’s about time to get back to my roots.
Since we last spoke on the topic, my only gadget of note was my Treo 600. Since then, I have scrapped it for a Treo 650. I enjoy the 650 much more, although admittedly it’s pretty much just the 600 with a removable battery and a better camera. It’s still my primary phone, I can still ssh into my webserver with it, and overall it’s pretty awesome.
The second addition to my gadget collection is my Stiletto 100. I originally obtained a Stiletto 2, but after much research, I realized that the functionality difference between the 2 and the 100 didn’t really match the price difference; therefore, I decided upon the Stiletto 100. Basically, it’s a portable satellite radio that can also store up to 2GB of recorded content (1GB of which can be MP3 files, the rest need to be recorded SIRIUS content). Since my #1 reason for purchasing the Stiletto was to listen to recorded content, I needed a way to reliably record the content I want. I purchased the Soloist Sound System. This idea worked in theory. I have the antenna outside, I can get signal any time of day or night, but the thing doesn’t seem to like coming out of sleep mode to do the scheduled recordings. Still though, it’s handy because I use it in my car with the Stiletto 10/100 Car Dock. This means that anytime I listen to SIRIUS in my car, I can press the “love” button to save songs and/or programs to listen to later. Eventually I’ll RTFM and figure out why it’s not doing the scheduled recordings, but in the meantime, I think it’s a nifty little device that’s well worth owning.
My most recent acquisition is an iPod Touch. I had no intentions of ever buying anything with an Apple logo on it, as I’ve been pretty much a PC purist since birth. Since I recently interviewed for a job doing technical support for the iPhone, I figured it’d be smart to pick up the iPod Touch for research purposes. 24 hours later, I was hooked. I have 8GB of storage space for MP3s, which is way more than I’d listen to in a single day anyway. I even adore iTunes. Yes, I still hate DRM, and will likely never buy any music from the iTunes store, but I actually like it for organizing my music library, creating dynamic playlists, and playing MP3s (I haven’t checked to see if it can play FLAC or not). I’ve been using MusicMatch 8.20.0107 for almost a decade now, and I love it. The only reason I left MusicMatch was because it won’t scrobble to LastFM. I tried the lasted Winamp, but I didn’t really like the UI there, so I’ve actually been using the default Windows Media Player for the better part of the last two years (except when I needed to tag files, then I still opened my MusicMatch). Now I do all of it within iTunes!
Before I wall-of-text ramble much further, I’ll give you a breakdown of why I am in love with my iPod Touch, despite not particularly liking Apple as a whole.
- It has wifi and seems to get along with my router, as well as any wifi hotspot I’ve attempted to connect to in my area
- It can play videos. The screen is too small for me to consider watching a full movie, but it’s neat for music and instructional videos
- I can rate music on the iPod itself, syncing it back to iTunes so that data can be used in dynamic playlists
- The web browser is a million times better than the one on my Treo, and it can even do flash! (homestarrunner.com didn’t work, but every other flash site I tried has worked flawlessly)
- My main requirements for a hand-held internet-capable devices are met — I can install an SSH program to do emergency work on my webserver, and I can read/write email with ease
- Album-art scroll view just FEELS like something that every MP3 player in the world should do. It’s almost like having that stack of CDs actually in your hand while looking through them.
- Scrolling of webpages from anywhere with your finger is so addictive and feels so natural, I already catch myself trying to do it when I’m on my Treo
- Zooming in/out with simple finger movements in the web browser is BEAUTIFUL. It’s a lot more intuitive than you’d think, too
- The maps application is freaking insane. Yes, I know google made it, but it’s still on the iPod Touch — and not on the Treo 650. Google Map satellite views with your actual directions superimposed over it. Seriously, this is AMAZING. (and almost convinced me to buy an iPhone for the GPS option)
- IT WORKS WITH MY SOLOIST! That’s right, I don’t need a new home MP3 player/speakers — I can have it plugged in the same player I use for my Stiletto (AND they can even be plugged in at the same time, just choose which one you want to hear from)
… I’ve suddenly realized I could keep going for quite a while before exhausting the list of my favorite features, so I’ll just say I think the iPod Touch is amazing. The only reason I’m not running out and getting an iPhone is because I want to see what develops in the future with the phones running Android, as I’m a bit more fond of Google’s policy regarding third-party applications.
I’m in a bit of a writer’s funk for the Nerdcore song I’m doing with Snazz, so it may come out with only two verses and be really short. I’d rather release an imperfect song than just hold onto it until I “happen” to be inspired to add a verse. I can always write an extended version later. Now I just need to get ahold of a mic to work on the recording, as I left mine in New York when I moved. Oops.
I’m currently on a combination of increased water intake, Zyrtec, and regular Neti Pot usage. To test my vocal chords in a controlled setting, Snazz and I are heading out to City Streets on Wednesdays. Basically it’s pretty dead on Wednesdays, so we get the place to ourselves, and I get to practice being onstage with a mic in hand. More importantly though, I get practice singing in a “real” performance setting instead of just in my car with the radio. If the karaoke test goes well a few weeks in a row without any of the sinus issues I’ve previously been plagued with, I’ll be signing up for the 4-session trial at Septien Vocal Studios.
For those who might be wondering, yes, there’s a reason I’m doing all this prep before taking the trial package at Septien. You see, at the end of the 4 session trial, they determine if you’re good enough to even attempt to sign up for their professional vocal package. To make my odds as good as possible, I’m getting both my body and my vocal chords in shape beforehand. It’s a lot of work, but if it means I get my own CD by the end of it, then there’s one lifetime goal completed!
Firstly, yes, my webserver is now (finally) back online. I was without reliable internet for a while there and my DIY attitude wouldn’t let me put my blog on a colo box.. although I may setup a backup server for when such things happen in the future. I haven’t decided yet.
In other news, I’m living in Texas now! I said I’d do it, and it took longer than I planned, but I’m here! I’m working with the amazing Mr. Snazz on my first new nerdcore song. All I’ll tell you so far is that it’s leaning towards bit pop and it’s kinda sexy. 
I’m also going through doctors and a variety of sinus medications to fix the sinus infection I’ve had for the past year. Once the sinus infection is over, it’ll be to Septien with me!
As for work, I’m doing what I usually do. This means I sit on the telephone and tell people how to do (seemingly) simple tasks. On the bright side, I like helping people, and the lack of thought required for work helps me have brain left over for awesome side projects… like the Sirius On LastFM player/scrobbler that Snazz + I are working on. We’ve got some awesome features planned for it, so stay tuned!
So that’s the update for both the music and the geek side of me. I’ll have some more recent pics online soon, for those who care. The SpaziCam is also expected to make a return within the next month or so!
Why has it taken me until yesterday for me to know that Basshunter exists? I need people to IM me or comment me in order to find good stuff — I found this guy by accident on Wikipedia of all places! You people are slacking! Where are my recommendations? /cry
Here’s the problem, I won’t know somebody’s awesome and worth looking up unless I hear it through luck (like last night), or recommendations!
Come on guys, recommend me some awesome gamer music/nerdcore/europop and redeem yourselves.
I’m also looking for more music similar to Level Up and Spelar Dota to help keep me awake at work.
I went through over a year of unemployment, and it sucked. In the process I lost the motivation to try to push myself musically, got addicted to World of Warcraft, and put off getting this blog back online mostly because I didn’t think I really had a reason to have it up.
To make a long story short, I’ve noticed I’m starting to get into geekish projects again, and I always like to be able to share accomplishments, rants, and thoughts with the world. Here I am, world! Did anybody miss me?
