7/31/07

Cover Song: Foo Fighters - Virginia Moon (Acoustic Cover)

As promised a while back. I want to post some of my original music creations on this blog as well as some cover songs of songs that I like and am learning to play. Here is the first one. This is a song by the Foo Fighters, it's called Virginia Moon and is from their last studio album In You Honor, which is very good if you haven't heard it yet. It was a 2CD set with side one classic Foo rock and side 2 a softer mellower more acoustic Foo. This is from disc 2 and features Nora Jones adding her beautiful, dreamy, raspy voice to Dave Grohl's soft, subtle singing. She has a great voice. Oh lawd please don't laugh.

Foo Fighters - Virginia Moon



7/26/07

LOLCAT Of The Week: THX 4 DA TIRDZ

LOLCATS are awesome and I can't get enough of them. Here is a totally brand new LOLCAT that I made, hopefully makes the rounds and spreads all over the internet. You can easily make your own by visiting the Cheezeburger Factory section of ICanHasCheezeburger.



Da Winner

When someone dicks you over or brings more work your way you can say hey buddy, thanks for the turds, or just send this pic to them. Thats how we do it. You'll be surprised how much you need to say it. No rly!



1st Runner Up

This is funny, but I can't take credit for this one. I think we all can relate to this on some level. I'm seriously considering getting cats just to take good pictures of them to make lolcats of them. I wonder how cooperative they would be. Nothing a little maryjane couldn't fix.

7/16/07

New Jersey Guitar Show

I love music, and I'm into guitars so I certainly did not pass up a chance to help out my old boss at the guitar show in Somerset NJ this past weekend, firstly because I don't have to spend a dime and secondly I contribute to the chillin fund. Now even though this was in Jersey, and I do hate NJ, I went anyway. To start off the directions to the place where awful. We got lost on the way there. I was the navigator so I guess I'm at fault and not the bad directions. I'm retarded for not MapQuesting that shit.

Guitar Show attendees are interesting creatures indeed. They are often of mature age, I would say 40's and up. Have long hair in a pony tail, unsuccessfully hidden under a baseball cap. The place was totally a sausage fest with only the occasional girlfriend, daughter, or wife. There were hardly any females that weren't there because of a male. What I'm saying is there are very few female guitar players out there.

The guys that come to these shows are pretty experienced players, many of them with young kids 8-12 that can easily play 5 times better than I can. Truly demoralizing. I take comfort in the fact that I could easily kick their ass. The place was loud with sounds of blues solos that all sound the same going on at the same time. Then of course there are the Jazz guys playing their endless runs that seem to go nowhere. I could hardly hear my self play. I had plenty of time to get good practice in though. I tried to remember how to play some songs that I like. I am notorious for forgeting how to play stuff.

I did see plenty of guitars I would like to get including a Sea Foam Green early 60s Fender Jaguar in good condition. The scene stealer of the show however was an actual 1958 Gibson Les Paul "Burst" in near mint condition. There are few of these left and even fewer available for sale. They were asking $550,000 for this one. It went unsold at this show. There was easily several million dollars in vintage instruments at the show not to mention all the cash that was circulating around. Security was basically a joke. I kept thinking about how I could pull a heist in one of these places, how seemingly easy it would be.

7/11/07

Apple iPhone A Mini Review: Typing Is Hard

So the other day I was on 5th avenue on my way to Tiffany's to return something. It was excruciatingly hot out so I took shelter at the Mac Store of course! This was my first time there and it was definitely pretty cool. The place is designed nicely and they have plenty of gadgets out for you to play with. I was drooling over the big Apple Mac Pro towers with their huge LCD monitors. They are so cool, but pricey as hell. I'm good with my iMac for now. They had plenty of iPhones out to play with so I grabbed one and started messing with it.

First thing I noticed is that it is thinner than I had thought and that the screen resolution looked really good considering the screen was touched by who knows how many sweaty, sticky, and dirty hands. The user interface was nice and similar to Mac OS X so it was very familiar. Next I tried watching some videos on YouTube. This was very easy to do and fast. The resolution of the videos was also very good. You see the videos in wide screen mode. However typing is a mess. You can't get the virtual keyboard to appear while in wide screen mode. That really pissed me off. Typing on the iPhone took a long ass time. Next I tried to connect to the internet and read my blog. Its wi-fi worked great but loading a page was slow. Typing into the search box was a pain in the ass. Eventually I was able to do it but honestly I don't think I would want to spend so much time to get to one site. Over time you can bookmark frequently visited pages. It would be good to import your bookmarks or integrate a social bookmarking tool like delicious.

Overall though I would say its pretty cool gadget and they were selling like hotcakes the whole time I was there. Its just too much for this blogger to justify. If they get better apps for it I would definitely consider it. In the meantime I'll wait for the next gen iPhone.

Buying A New MP3 Player When An iPod Just Won't Do

I'm in the market for a new MP3 player. Its been a while since I shopped around for one. I recently lost my beloved iRiver 320 after 3 years of being together. Now I know everyone has an iPod but this just won't do for my purposes. I need something easy to carry, big enough hard drive or flash memory, and it must have a built in mic for recording voice or anything else. This is critical and this is where the iPod fails. Sure I can get the mic attachment but this makes for a big fumbly device that is just too expensive to justify. I'm willing to spend $300 tops, maybe a bit more if I can get more use out of it. Here is what I'm looking for:

Plays MP3s
Plays Ogg Vorbis files
Plays MP4 video
Records to MP3 from built in mic
Not fragile
Good Battery Life
Plug and Play

Finally after much research I decided to get the Creative Zen 30 Gb MP3 Player. It beat out the rest because it has a bigger color screen than the iPod. In fact it is strictly widescreen similar to the Apple iPhone. It also was availeble on eBay fro less than $150 . I forgot to keep track of the bid but ended up buying a similar one for $175, $25 more than I was about to spend, but still its a worthy investment if it turns out to work OK.

Lately I've been having too many emotions bottled up that it was leading to increased creativitly that I have to get down on some kind of medium. I will attempt to share these moments with all of you to usher in a new era of recording ideas, now on a new medium.