I want to be a clone

In truth I would have gotten Julieta Venegas’s MTV Unplugged DVD from NetFlix just because it was her. I love her music and her voice. But adding Marisa Monte to the mix? Bumped it straight to the top. I’ve been a fan of Marisa Monte since my days at Ball State, when I found a copy of her second album Mais, used at a tiny record store in Anderson, Indiana. politzania may not remember it, but she was there along with my good friend eraserhead667, who I think drove us. I also got a copy of the Indigo Girls second album and as I recall I might also have gotten an album by Duncan Dhu, though I might be confused about that. Why do I remember my purchases? Probably because they all became important to me.

I hope you enjoy this duet even half as much as I do. It’s a real treat for me, I can tell you.

I first heard this song when it was newly released, in 2000. It’s hard to believe it’s been so long. The song sounds as fresh and potent today as it did back then. Lead singer Amaia Montero has since split from the band to pursue a solo career, which is a pity as they are really, really good together. I got their video clips collection from Netflix in the mail today, and I’ve been enjoying watching it.

If you’ve got the ear for it, you may notice these folks don’t sound the same as Julieta Venegas, whose video I posted a few days ago. Julieta is from the US, and speaks Mexican Spanish. LOVG are from Spain, so they’ve got a Castellano accent. Ll gets a “je” sound and “z” get softened - Vez, por ejemplo, se cambia a “veth”. Corazón becomes corathón. Hard “c” sounds remain the same, but the soft c gets a similar treatment - A veces becomes a vethes. This accent is primarily found in Spain and Argentina. I love the sound of this accent. It feels cultured and refined but still relaxed and easygoing.

Grace did this, and it seems somewhat interesting.

( meme! )

I adore her voice. I just got this DVD from NetFlix and I’m loving it. Highly recommended if you like Spanish pop.

( In which Bruce whinges about having to wait for his new glasses. )If you need glasses and don’t have prescription sunglasses, you really should look into getting a pair. They’re so nice. But if you need your glasses quickly, avoid Sears. We only go there because we’ve got a Sears card, but that’s not much incentive these days. I think given the bumblefuckery that’s transpired this time it’ll be the last time we go to them for glasses.

Well, thanks to the daring and intrepid travspence and destroyah_des I now know whose pigeon it was. My guess is AU 2008 AA 21213 managed to get lost during the storms and nasty weather of the last couple weeks and made its way west. Exhausted after its long trek it was probably easy prey for one of our neighborhood cats. Poor thing! I’ve emailed its owner and hope to hear back from him sometime soon.

Last week one of the neighborhood cats killed a pigeon in our back yard. Today, while out in the backyard I found a small, neon-green leg band which I had previously seen on the bird. I brought it in and cleaned it up. Thing is, I have no idea what to make of it. The number is: AU 2008 AA 21213. So if anyone out there has any idea what this all means, please let me know.

For a LONG time I’ve been wondering how to make iTunes manage multi-artist compilations. ( Warning: This is material of interest only to Bruce. You'll probably be bored if you read it, so you probably shouldn't. )

Me: The sun isn’t made of monkeys. Thousands of burning monkeys.
Grace: How do you know? Have you BEEN to the sun?

I’ve ripped all of Uchida Yuki’s albums for the Jpop comm Grace joined recently. I thought I’d post it here, just in case anyone’s interested in hearing some mid-to-late 90s Japanese pop from one of my favourite idols. I’ve left the file names in Japanese because...well, it’d be a lot of work to romanise everything and I’m sure most of you don’t care. :) If you’re only going to download one CD I’d recommend either Present or Ai no Baka. Present contains the first song of hers I ever heard, Ashita wa Ashita ga Kaze ga Fuku (明日は明日の風が吹く), which means tomorrow’s wind will blow tomorrow. It’s also got Hirose Kohmi’s song Shiawase ni Naritai(幸せになりたい).Ai no Baka has some of her best songs, such as Be My Boy and Baby’s Universe, plus the Chara-penned Mou Iya (もぉ いや).

One word of warning: these albums were uploaded to Megaupload, so watch out for popunders.

( Technical Details )

( Junjou Karen Otome Moyou )

( MI-CHEMIN )

( Merry Christmas for You )

( Ai no Baka )

( Nakitakunaru )

( Present )

I wasn’t sure what to expect from this album. It’s about eighteen years old and I’ve never heard it before tonight. It’s supposed to be a “classic” rap album. I wouldn’t know much about that, but it definitely has that late 80s/early 90s rap sound. I doubt I’d have enjoyed it much at 23, but at 41 I like it. Why is it that I’m only coming to this stuff late in life? I recently discovered how much I like Echo and the Bunnymen. A couple years back I found A Flock of Seagulls first album, and found that I Ran was just the tip of the iceberg. And don’t get me started on Adam Ant and Chet Baker.

I’m actually kinda pissed off that I’ve been missing out on all this great music for half my life. And yes, it does make me wonder what else I’ve missed. Ah well. Life is too short to hear ALL the music. Enjoy what you’ve got, try new stuff, embrace what you like, and don’t waste time on the stuff that bores you. And hope they find a way to prevent telomere degradation.

So I was perusing a new J-pop download site the other day when I came across something which blew my tiny mind. Someone had uploaded (in mp3 format, damn their eyes) the twenty-CD Candies Time Capsule box. It’s literally twenty CDs containing everything they released while they were active as a band. Anything post-breakup is left out, but what’s included is more than enough. And naturally enough, as if specifically to annoy me, the files are barely tagged. The band name, the album title...useful stuff, is missing. The only tags the poster bothered to fill in were the track name and the track number. The numbers are right, but the track names are “GC0x” (where “x” is the track number). Well, I’m used to having to fix the tags on stuff I download, but...twenty CDs worth? Daunting. Is it worth it? Hoh boy yoobetcha. Here’s one of my favourite Candies songs, Yasashii Akuma (Sweet Devil).



And then, as if that wasn’t enough, someone else uploaded a bunch of Polysics albums. Oh, yes!

OK. I just got off the phone with my mother. We spoke at length about her father’s side of the family. Let me see if I can sum it up cleanly. Not that you care, but I want to get this down.

( Warning: You are about to read potentially confusing genealogical information about families with no connection to your own. Proceed at your own risk. )

And now you know WAAAAAY more than you ever wanted to know about my family. And just think, you had me here making it “clear”! It took me nearly an hour to get all that mess untangled from my mother. It’ll be more clear to me one I’ve got it entered in VoodooPad, but I really can’t help feeling like a wiki would be the better way to go. Oh well. I’m still in the early stages of this project. I’ll work it out somehow.

And if you happen to be involved in genealogy (politzania, I’m lookin’ at YOU) feel free to advise me on how to find these hard-to-find folks with common names. I tell you, this would all have been a lot easier if I’d been interested in this thirty years ago when a lot of these people were still alive or only recently dead. But how many 11-year-olds are really interested in genealogy?

Anyone got a time machine I can borrow?

ETA: Mom tells me there's a family plot in Chicago, which is (probably) where Irvin is buried, where his other family should be as well, including his half-sister, Dorothy and their mother, Doad. This I have to see.

Is anyone out there using a wiki for genealogy? If so, which wiki are you using and how are you hosting it?

ETA: For the moment I’m using the (Mac-only) VoodooPad Lite, which is a kind of notepad/wiki hybrid. It’s not as good as a proper wiki might be simply because I can’t give access to other family members, but overall it’s a lot easier than trying to teach other people how to do wiki markup (especially since *I* don’t really know that much about wikis!). I guess it’ll do for now. :) There’s no Windows version of VoodooPad, but I believe there are similar products for Windows and Linux.

Click the picture for the story behind the picture.

Well, to be fair, it’s not Kroger. It’s one guy. I just got back from Kroger, where this week they’re having a buy two, get three free sale on Coke and Pepsi. Mix and match? Well, I don’t see any signs which say the offer only applies if you buy only Coke or only Pepsi, so I get a couple bottles of the sublime Cranberry Splash Slice (it’s back in stores already? YAY!) and a few bottles of Coke. I’m walking out the door and I realise they haven’t given me my discount. Manager 1 passes me off to Manager 2, who tells me it’s not mix and match. We go look at the shelves. The same tag advertising the deal is affixed to every slot on the shelf, and the fine print says “One offer per household”. “Well, you still can’t mix and match,” she tells me. OK, I say, I’ll just return the soda, which is where M2 passes me back to M1. He proceeds to ring it all up, hand me my cash ($9.05 to be precise) and I walk away. I’m halfway home when it hits me: A two litre bottle of soda is $1.99, with .10 CRV (the bottle tax) and .17 sales tax (that’s 8.25%). I’m short $2.26. *sigh*

I wheel the car around at the next light and head back, upset but not really angry. The fifth bottle was off to the side, and I can see how he missed it. I assumed he got it, so it’s as much my fault for not asking as his for missing it. I park. I go in, and see M1 walking down an aisle. I call out to him but he doesn’t hear me. He stoops to pick up a piece of trash and for a moment turns and locks eyes with me, whereupon he all but runs for the back, knowing I won’t follow. NOW I’m angry. Sonuvabiscuit knows he shorted me and doesn’t want to deal with me. Either he doesn’t want to have to admit he did it, or he thinks I’m Joe Nuclear ready to shout my lungs out at him. I’m actually just interested in my $2.26. So I find M2, and tell her what’s wrong. Her response? Did she say, “Oh, I’m terribly sorry sir, let me get that for you, and here’s a $(token amount) gift card for your trouble!”? Or did she sigh heavily and walk to the register and then in a near-surly manner give me my money back and then hand me a $5 gift card while saying “Here’s $5 for your headache” in a tone which made me think it was coming out of her paycheck? Guess.

So I’ve got $5 to spend at Kroger. I’m not really sure I even want it, honestly, but $5 is $5. Maybe I’ll go back, buy some soda and then use the rest on a candy bar. Or maybe I’ll buy a steak. Whatever; I just know I’m not going back there for a while.

It turns you into Penn Jillette.

Anyone so inclined is welcome to visit my Flickr photostream and partake in some freshly snapped screencaps of iTunes 8’s more interesting new features. I’m trying out Genius, but it’s going to take a looooooong time to do so because first it has to analyse the music in my library, and there’s a lot of it in there. I’ll upload more screencaps when something interesting happens. :)

This one’s for the Mac users only, sorry: If you want to disable the arrows in iTunes (the ones which link your content to the iTunes Store) do this:

1. Quit iTunes
2. Open Terminal and copy & paste the following: defaults write com.apple.iTunes show-store-arrow-links -bool FALSE
3. Launch iTunes. Voilà, no arrows. Awesome.

Thanks to Rob Griffiths at MacOS X Hints for this very welcome respite from Apple’s incessant desire to sell me things.

ETA: And here’s a tip to turn off the Genre column in the browser, if you so desire. I don’t mind it, actually, but some folks are really getting bent out of shape over it. I understand their frustration.

ETA: There’s another big change, and this one applies to everyone: You can now do batch editing of Sorting tags in iTunes. This is something which should have been in there since the Sorting tags were added in 7.0 last year. This is (to me) one of the biggest improvements, and it makes lots of sense anyway, but in the context of the grid view it’s even MORE sensible, because it doesn’t show individual tracks. About. Freaking. TIME.

Apple seems to have upgraded their album recognition algorithm for finding the album artwork. Nice. I’ve managed to find artwork for a couple dozen albums iTunes 7 couldn’t manage. Of course, it seems to be hitting the same false positives as iTunes 7. Still, this makes me very happy. The grid view looks really stupid with spotty cover art. :)