Good News!

Another reason for me to avoid Facebook:
An Australian couple have been served with legal documents via the popular social networking site Facebook.

ready to Amarok

Amarok 2.0 was released earlier this week. I only found out late Wednesday night, after checking my email before bed I decided to quickly drop by the Kubuntu forums; must have had a feeling.
Of course I got very, very excited being the semi-geek that I am and wound up staying up until 5am playing with it.
It really is the nicest music player out there - kicks the shit out of iTunes, but then so does Songbird.
Here's a screenshot of the shiny new interface with built-in Wikipedia info:



Some instructions for downloading & installing on Ubuntu

"Sloppy Seconds"

Pretty ridiculous:

NHL suspends Avery indefinitely over personal remark

I mean, the guy is a dick, no doubt about it, but this just feels like a gross violation of freedom of speech. Doubly so when there's cameramen ready & willing to stick a mic in front of his mouth.

E.R.

Using some of my photography, I entered a few submissions into a contest from MTV & HP, designing skins for notebooks.
Only one of the three I entered is up so far ... they had to be accepted and thus far I've only heard back about this one, so I hope they go through.
Anyways the one that was accepted was my favorite:







If you like it head over there and give me a vote, and enter some yourself ... it's fun and free.

the Smell of Cologne..

Just back from a three day trip to Cologne/Koln. 'Twas a nice reunion of sorts, Mike&Tania from Germany hosted us and Brian from Ireland ... we all lived in Vancouver last year and it was nice to see a few familiar faces over here.
After a crazy barhopping night out the first night, we all went to see Gogol Bordello again. Made for an exhausting three nights in conjunction with the night before we left Berlin, when we had a Spanish language dinner and late-night jam session at Zach's.
Here, I'm still job hunting and getting discouraged, but generally that's when things pick up in my past so ... here's hoping.
I've started playing around the city a bit as a drummer for Katinka, which pays a bit, and gives me something to do for NY's.
In case you're wondering, there was nothing significant in the smell of Cologne...

The Dane

Puppy Pics of Harvey, who's arrival I just missed by a week when I left Ontario in October.
I'm told he eats asphalt, mistaking it for kibble. He's a-gonna be huge.

darkness

Dark Days is a documentary from about 8 years ago. I just got around to watching it late last night. Still fascinating and relevant. Marc Singer, the guy who made it, had never made a film before and was actually living in the tunnels with the other characters.
All the music is by DJ Shadow and Uncle. Apparently, they edited the film using his music, and then realised they would need permission. Shadow is notoriously against others using his material so the filmmakers came up with a scheme to have 'an attractive female friend who would go backstage after a show and personally hand-deliver' a letter. Still, after setting up a meeting, he was totally prepared to say no, until he saw some clips from the film.
Watch it, intense, difficult, beautiful, dark, watch it.

Earlier, we found a small jazz and crepe bar by the river with a film room in the back. We watched Mon Oncle and a very strange black-and-white puppet movie, I guess what passes for horror film in ye olde days. Film filled Sunday!

elexxions - continued

Well, my foresight is rarely so shrewd in these matters; however, almost two years to the day that I made this livejournal posting, I actually get to say ....


Told Ya So...

Well, actually I was wrong when I said Barack Obama might not have the experience to get elected.

But so it goes, good work foreign country!

Fibonacci & Hacking gReader

Just a quick couple of items of interest, both taken from lj-friends page:

The Use of Fibonacci Sequence in Tool's Lateralus:


What a great way of explaining this usage to the common reader (like humble ol'd me's). It is a great song too, has a couple of my favorite Maynard lyrics contained within:
"Push the envelope, watch it bend" -> I love lyrics that riff on tired old cliches and put them in a new perspective.
"Overthinking, overanalyzing" -> Even in a song so meticulously constructed, Maynard and Tool can't resist a tongue-in-cheek roast of themselves; their humour is one thing that keeps consistently above the rest of the prog/metal crowd.
I remember hearing an interview with Danny Carey a few years back where he talked about 46 & 2 using the sequence, but can't remember much about that. I'll have to look it up when I have more time.

Thanks to Veleda for that, and to Apollo ("FrozenTruth" on lj) for supplying me with a link to this 3rd party app that translates LiveJournal friends entries (including friends-only posts) into your Google Reader. I searched for something like this back when I set my Reader up and came up empty handed. So I can now save myself the trips to lj's site (they are, after all, slightly proprietary, though not quite as evil as, say, Microsoft) yet keep up with the few friends who still post reading-worthy entries there.

Ich Bin Ein Berliner

I'd forgotten the small things that make this city enjoyable, lovable, and oh-so-delicious:

-Chocolate-Banana-Yogurt cereal
-Drinking beer on the subway w/out looking over my shoulder
-Feeling desperate, homeless and broke

Oh, scratch that. I'll write more when settled and not on a wifi connexion that drops every few mintues.

It's on ..

I am now certified - but in a good way - to trade labour for cash, in a foreign country.

(no matter how I right labour/labor, it does not look write)

Of course, the incubation of Oakville has given me far too much time towards introspection, my neurotic nature shifts the burden of a visa straight over to jobs when I get there.

But I've been writing much more recently and am trying to build up some momentum to get freelancing going once there. Not sure how to go about setting this up though. And, severely looking forward to starting something up musically overseas. That might pay.

Piratic Karma

We hear a lot of fundamentalist, evangelical horror stories coming out of the U.S. and everytime I'm close to losing all hope for the people down there, news like this reaches my ears.

A group of baptists in Arkansas were doing their thing, which in this case means protesting against 'baby-killers and fags', when they were challenged by a group of angry pirates. These turned out to be members of the Central Arkansas Pastafarians who decided to make use of the coinciding talk like a pirate day.

As the (too) brief article says, they garnered all the media attention and the fundamental fuckwits packed up and went home; this means there must be footage out there, but so far I can't find it. Very hopeful though.

Judging A Book By Its Cover

Between the marathon still going on in the States and this little snappy sprint up here, seems the entire continent has a fever, to which the only prescription, is more voting. Bleh. It's a nasty, dreary, wrist-slitting topic - however, as I'm here just until early polls open and happen to be in my riding for the first time in three elections, I'mma give it a go. Get up in there.

So I had to review my knowledge of the national parties. The Undecided is a half (or maybe quarter) decent place to start but I found my mind wandering more towards a hatred of flash scripts than platform policies. So much for the Internet.

I've decided to take a step back and approach from a simpler perspective, and one I feel more comfortable with. Thinking about literary definitions.

Conservative Con*serv"a*tive, n.

1. One who, or that which, preserves from ruin, injury,
innovation, or radical change; a preserver; a conserver.

2. One who desires to maintain existing institutions and
customs; also, one who holds moderate opinions in
politics; -- opposed to revolutionary or radical.
[1913 Webster]

From my point of view this is a damn silly name for a major party. There's a lot wrong in society, the country and the world; the worst idea is that we should hold innovation and change back, or worse, roll it back to where it was in the past.

So, no Conservative.

Back to the Internet; I remembered reading an interesting piece about Danny Williams' ABC campaign in Newfoundland, which in turn led me to an article questioning the legality of online vote swapping.

So I still have a week and a half to decide, but I've been talking about swapping with a guy in Calgary, since he lives in Harper's Calgary riding. I'm looking at voting Liberal for him (it's a tight race here in Oakville but the Lib's usually beat the Con's) and he can put in a symbolic/funding vote for NDP or Green for me.

and PS - much as I like the concept, I effected this without the aid or use of Facebook .

Spawn of Bjork

In light of yesterday's sad news, something upbeat : the first inclination I've ever felt towards having kids -

An Instant and Nothing Less

"Both destiny's kisses and its dope-slaps illustrate an individual person's basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in his life: i.e. almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Psst that you usually can't even hear because you're in such a rush to or from something important you've tried to engineer."

Friday night David Foster Wallace hung himself in LA.
There's not much I care to say about it ... beyond how much he inspired and affected me, there's also the quality of his writing which tends to make anything I might write seem irrelevant.
I now would like to finally finish his biography on infinity, but it's in a box, in storage, across the continent. Perhaps I owe it to him to pick up A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again.

Big Big Bang Day

They Did It: A group of (not so) mad scientists in Switzerland switched on the Large Hadron Collider and "the first beam ... was successfully steered around the full 27 kilometres of the world’s most powerful particle accelerator at 10h28 this morning."

In my limited understanding, this means the cumulation of 15-20 yr.s of scientific preparation, the completion of Newton's original journey into the field of gravity, the equivalent in physics of man walking on the moon in astronomy, and, well, the possibility of a man-made and controlled black hole.

But don't take it from me, watch this highly informative dharma initiativerap video:

Zelva

My lovely turtle ('zelva') tattoo, I had imprinted a few days before my 26th birthday. This was in Praha, Czech Republic.

Earlier this week, cruising down Kerr with Erix, we ran into old man Jenkins at a stop light.

Yesterday, Jenkins met a girl at his climbing gym, and, being recently single, made plans to hangout with her.

Tonight, I went drinking with him and later we went out to chill with this girl, Kim, in Hamilton.

Over the course of the evening, we start talking tattoos. This one is hidden under my shirt, but I explain my wrist tattoo, and she explains hers (christian origins). But after explaining the meaning, she tells me that she travelled all the way to Prague just to get it, from the most respected female tattoo artist in the world.

"What tattoo parlour?" I ask. Of course, Tribo, from a girl with blond dreads ..... sounds familiar.

So now I have a great story to go with this one. Everything happens for a purpose?

nightwalk observation

Occurred to me late, late last night:
I think I'd rather be dead than live in an apartment without a balcony....something about canned sardines and the like.

BLATt

Saturday night on Craigslist.

O-ya.

Seriously though, I'm disappointed to come across a job-posting for an intern with Blatt Publishing in Berlin. After resigning myself to a job teaching English or working in a caffe - don't get me wrong, both have their perks, and hell any job will do - I now come across something I'd love to do.
I knew I recognized the name too, and it took a moment to realize why : Wolf At The Door, a fucking twisted novel Negin picked up in Prague.
It's not actually published by Blatt, rather by Twisted Spoon, but he writes for the magazine and they just published a collection of his poems in book form. This intern job would be sweet simply for the opportunity to meet him.

The problem? Starts in September, and I just bought an October 4th plane ticket.

reprise

It's been .... let's see, about 13 months since I last maintained and updated a blog online. Through the magic of the internet I'm sure I could hone that down to an exact date and time, but for now we'll leave it at that.

If you care to track it back, my livejournal account can be found here.

It's hard to say why I left my LJ to fester and rot back then, and even harder to say why I am interested in starting this new blog up now. Currently I'm going out of my skull with boredom (I took up running again today, if that says anything) in my hometown of Oakville, ON, near Toronto. I'm also waiting on a visa to visit and live in Berlin, Germany.

Essentially, my lack of other options for entertainment/communication led me to get this going but really does not give me any content of interest to write about. So hopefully I'll solve that in the near future, whether in Ottawa, Amsterdam or Berlin,

Or, who knows--> Something of interest might actually happen in Oaks!


(nah......)