Come on kids

Last night, lying alone in bed, I did something I hadn't done since I was a teenager...I put on my headphones and listened to some music before falling asleep.

I listen to/hear a lot of music throughout the course of the day (19 tracks a day according to Last FM) - on my commute, in the office (I can't work without tunes in the background), having dinner with S. Thinking about it last night reminded me of the "No Music Day" article in last week's Ticket, how we all have music forced on us as we go about our normal activities, be it elevator music, ringtones, hold music. They advocate a complete ban on music, but that's a bit extreme for my liking. Last night I was able to give the music my full, undivided attention, and it was a revelation. 

I listened to the titular track from Radiohead's vastly underrated 2003 Kid A. When it was finished, I listened to it again, just for the sheer unadulterated hell of it. I heard every note, every twist and nuance: the brooding atmospherics of the xylophone, the distorted cajoling of Thom's vocal, the stacatto rhythm driving the whole piece forward. It was an amazing experience - everyone should try it tonight. Pick any song, I'm not going to pretend that Radiohead is eneryone's cup of tea, but give it a go.

Mix-um gather-um

I like mixtapes. The Expert of MJEX fame has a cracking one over at The Slate, and some others I'd recommend include Hot Chip's DJ Kicks (a seriously ecletic collection of party tunes), and Superpitcher's Today (Kompakt-flavoured minimalist-techno goodness). Thing is, I can't scrobble the individual tracks when the mixtape is stored as a single MP3 file - if you really want to create a record of each of the songs you're listening to, you need to slice up the master file using something like Audacity, save the individual files, and then craft the ID3 tags by hand. Yes, I actually have done this - now you know what I did with my time before I became a parent.

Anyway, it'd be great if it was possible to store the ID3 tags of n songs, (maybe their start/finish position?) within the file data. I remember reading somewhere about a French company who've released a new music file format that stores the individual "modules" of a song (drums, lead guitar, vocals, etc.) within the file, as well as the song entière itself. Something like that would be cool. I'll post the link to that article here if I can dig it up.

IIA Net Visionary Awards - RHK

Got to put on my glad rags and party 'til the wee hours last week (well, after midnight anyway) in the salubrious surrounds of the Royal Hospital in Kilmainham.

Some pics below, may be some more to follow...

From iia_netvis_301008

From iia_netvis_301008

From iia_netvis_301008

From iia_netvis_301008

That was the only drink I had all evening, I swear...

Cheers to the IIA for a great night out, and congrats to the winners.

Hiccoughs

Fionn chatting, being frightened, and getting over-excited at Brion & Roisin's, all the while wearing the world's deadliest t-shirt - nice one Steve!

It's oh so...

...tiresome. Picasa 3: it's uber-pants. Turns out it won't import video. Fair enough, I presume it's a beta release (tomorrow's news: Google in non-beta release shocker!!), and it's focussing on what it does extremely well, which is handle photos. Fine. But why the hell does it block access to the camera from any other device? Ubuntu has some automatic camera recognition, which I remember Picasa asking to annex when I installed it...but, guess what? Picasa doesn't provide an option to release that control back to Ubuntu...So I've uninstalled. Kerpow, Google!

And uninstalling it was hardly a breeze either, running dpkg from the terminal? Hardly user-friendly...

I'm still going to re-install it of course...

Can't touch this

Speaking of the young fella, here he is appearing in his latest presentation, "Tummy Time"...

Full album is here...

I've been busy...

what with college, work and baby, so haven't had much time to post. Right now however, I am waiting for the stinking piece of software that is Picasa 3 Beta (ffs) to transfer files from my camera to my Ubuntu desktop. Why does Picasa suck so badly at something that is part of its core functionality - and on an OS that generally out-performs the hell out of Windoze?

Speaking of - I love Ubuntu to bits. I especially love Amarok, the superb music player/organiser...it's actually worthy of a post of it's own, so I'll hold off.

Another amazingly fun feature of Ubuntu was the ease with which I could set up a file share between the desktop and Sinead's notebook (also running Hardy). In fact, I'll go a step further: I was able to attach an NTFS external drive to my desktop, and stream music to the notebook over the wireless network using Samba, and it took all of 3 minutes late on a Friday night to install and configure. Sweet, sweet, sweet...

Get it. There are no more excuses...