17 October 2008 @ 01:30 am
The Minister of Silly Walks has spoken.  
John Cleese has demoted Michael Palin to #2 on his list of funniest Palins. No prizes for guessing who's now #1.

I just found out this guy from A Clockwork Orange is Darth Vader. The guy inside the voice, not the voice, of course.

Maybe it's my dad genes kicking in, but this is pretty funny. 

And now that I've just spent an hour and a half or so translating what I think of the new Oasis and Keane albums into 240 words or so for a review, I have to say almost the whole time, I've been listening to fucking Be Here Now, and I'm still not even half way through it; and it rocks. Yes, I've fully ingested Perfect Symmetry and Dig Out Your Soul, but Be Here Now is a part of my adolescent musical education I can't deny. Yeah, it's loud as hell, which in some ways places it 10 years ahead of its time, but there's so much random shit going on, and the 'modern' loudness is being applied to a '90s cocaine-fuelled mix, and yeah.

I should re-do my 128k mp4s into 192 though. When I got my first iPod,  it was hard to imagine that within four years my monthly data allowance would be as large as my hard drive ( at the time).

My landlord was supposed to be doing a flat inspection today, but never showed. And I'd totally taken down all the posters and removed the Star Wars displays and vacuumed. And shit.
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09 October 2007 @ 09:27 pm
Oasis and Jamiroquai following Radiohead?  
Oasis and Jamiroquai are considering following in Radiohead's footsteps, and offering their new material for whatever you wish to pay. And so it begins... the traditional music industry just might be screwed for real this time. Hehe.

We're hard at work putting together the last issue of Te Waha Nui for the year. So glad I don't have to go to shorthand class in the mornings... though I wish the bus drivers would decide once and for all how much it costs to bus from here to town and back. I seem to get charged a different amount every time.

And when I say I wish they'd decide, I wish they'd decide to stop charging altogether, of course.

Today I tried out the video function on my new iPod, and watched Alan Partridge's Knowing Me Knowing You while on the bus. Awesome. It really is the future, except the bus was on the ground, running on fossil fuels, and it still costs a fortune.

I've composed a massive rant against ticket scalpers for the Te Waha Nui blog Citybeat, but it hasn't been posted yet. I'll keep you, er, posted.

EDIT: PS. I'm not sure why, but our dead 40gb iPod on Trademe is going for nearly ten times our still kinda working 30gb one, at least at the moment. Weird.
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Current Music: Pink Floyd - The Wall
 
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05 October 2007 @ 09:06 am
It's gone to meet its maker... Steve Jobs  
I'm such a nerd. But hey, it could have been worse. I originally adapted the entire sketch, only to be told to remove 2200 characters. Luckily I have my sub-editing hat on for the next week or so.

My new iPod is the shizzle. And my new Koss headphones fit snug when they're hanging around my neck. Which is totally the best way to listen to music...
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05 October 2007 @ 12:45 am
Passed!  
I passed shorthand. Crazy. Shorthand is the paper still freaking out 80% of the journalism majors and grad dips. I don't know how I passed. Based on the two days (the requirement is to pass twice) I turned up and made the grade, the secret to passing is not studying at all, eating toast (and only toast) for breakfast, turning up ten minutes late and finding out what the subject is when you've finally snuck into class and opened your booklet, drinking a Coke Zero during the rehearsal session, cracking lame jokes in between practises, and expecting the worst.

The universe rewarded me by making my new iPod arrive instore (it's been loading songs on from iTunes all night, I'm yet to have a proper play with it) and Chris Knox responding to my requests for a brief interview about the new way the music industry might work. He was cool.

Apple haven't had it all good in my view today though. Their media relations rep in Australia gave me the runaround in relation to parallel importing, answering every single question I had for her with words effective to "take a look at our website" which is not only the complete opposite of what we've been taught to do, but a really fucking lame thing to quote in a news story. And to think the rest of the staff on the way up the call centre ladder to her were so helpful and friendly...

[info]tariqa got an iPod Touch. Oooerr.
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Current Music: NiN - With Teeth
 
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07 September 2007 @ 07:22 pm
'Cause we all love to scrab  
Now that I've got a moment to make a proper entry and the desire to do so, I'm not sure I've got anything to say.

I suppose I'll just do one of them random updates that do a disservice to the term 'blog' then! Not keeping a diary anymore, this is the only way I'm going to know what I was upto when I was this age, when I'm 64 or so.

Okay... We got Muse tickets this morning through the ultra-mega-covert-secret presale thingee. Well, it's not really that secret, and I sent texts to five or six people telling them how to get theirs, so even if it was at 9am, it certainly wasn't by 10. 

For the next two week's I'm going to be interning at Yahoo!Xtra, apparently in their marketing department. I'm not sure how I ended up there and not in news, but with their latest disaster probably not entirely sorted it should at least be interesting.

I'm also working all this weekend, so no break for me till... shit, I don't want to think about it.

Need the money though, as we're moving house in two weeks. I'm not sure I've mentioned that yet, but yeah. Off to Mt Albert to save money, and hopefully bike into town each day and lose some belly. At least that's how I'm justifying continuing to eat crap at the moment.

If you feel like buying me a new iPod, cause mine is dead, I wouldn't mind a 160GB iPod "Classic" as they've been re-labelled. I still prefer to call them Man's iPod, as opposed to the Nano, or Woman's iPod. Tariqa wanting a 16GB Nano or Touch and me wanting the Classic proves my point, and if we're an exception, we're proving the rule that I'm right. Or something.

My Ryan Adams review is now online (opens PDF of Te Waha Nui Issue #19 page 21). My original was over 900 words, believe it or not. Graham Reid (our tutor this semester) helped me hack it down to a manageable 400 or so - "no one cares about this... that's not important... I have no idea what you're talking about here, so it can go.." 

I also did an opinion piece on religion that appears here (once again a PDF) that has apparently caused a bit of a stir amongst the more faithful on the course. They've banded together to write a rebuttal I hear, which should be amusing. Some of them are cool people who enjoy a good debate, but one or two really are so brainwashed, any questioning of their beliefs, or even the very mention of agnosticism sends them into a tailspin of cognitive dissonance.

Alright, I'm off to do a Facebook purity test and continue to lose at Scrabulous.
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Current Music: Elton John
 
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21 August 2007 @ 08:28 pm
Sad iPods for Sad Pandas  
It's almost been too long since the fact to talk about the Ryan Adams concert hasn't it? Ah well. I've written a massive long review which I'll link to once I know what I'm doing with it (probably using Graham Reid's advice and cutting it in half somehow).

Uni is still hella busy. Hence the lack of posts...

My iPod died on the weekend. It's had a good two-and-a-half-year run, but now whenever I turn it on, it has a sad face. I can't make it happy again. Went to buy an 80gb video iPod cause I can't live without one anymore... but even offering to pay a deposit, the finance company declined me! Grrrr. I've never missed payments on an HP or anything ever. Sucks. Now I have to wait a few weeks and save up. But then we're considering moving, so if we do I'll have to wait a bit longer...

But moving if it happens will be to a cheaper place, which is good. With a lawn too, so the cats won't have to journey across the roof of the building to get into the great outdoors, as they currently do.

If you haven't watched the video I linked to the other day (previous entry), I highly recommend you do.

Got another story in the Waikato Times - this one about a high school surfing championship. Mmhmm. This Thursday they're publishing my Brunettes review, and also a review of Scud Of Freedom, my latest recording... which is appearing next to Chuganaut again, as it did in Nexus (a few posts back).

I've got another metric assload of CDs and magazines for sale - loads of guitar/music mags, some computer ones, Top Gear, Listener/Time/New Statesmans, etc etc.

More on the way later in the week. The ones that say "buyer must pick up" I'll make an exception for friends if there aren't too many (postage costs will be included then of course).

Sweet.
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Current Music: Flavor Flav & His Ho-Party Show
 
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02 February 2007 @ 05:10 pm
two days to go  

TOP 5 ALBUMS FOR JANUARY!

1. The Good, The Bad and The Queen - The Good, The Bad and The Queen
2. The Decemberists - The Crane Wife
3. Muse - Black Holes and Revelations
4. Kasabian - Empire
5. The Decemberists - Picaresque

Two and a half days here to go. Mandeep reckons on my last day I could get away with not taking any calls at all, being Waitangi Day and none of the managers being here and all that. Would be pretty awesome. And only a marginally more lazy level than what the two of us are already at.

Does anyone know if using the restore function through iTunes makes you iPod run smoother again? Mine's been playing up a bit recently.

Oooh, Amplifier will be licensing all independently submitted content to iTunes. This is awesome, cause it will now be a lot easier and cheaper to get my new albums on there. Was previously going to go the CD Baby route, but that's a little convoluted a method for a NZer. Amplifier's announcement makes things heaps easier.

Fuck this, I'm leaving here a couple minutes early. Cause I'm a rebel.

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Current Location: work
Current Music: the cure
 
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21 May 2006 @ 10:24 am
YAY!  
My iPod came back to life!!!
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Current Mood: chipper
Current Music: cars on the motorway
 
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11 May 2006 @ 10:05 am
Pennsylvania?  
I'm currently on hold talking to a girl in Pennsylvania. Why? I don't exactly know. My iPod seems to have died, so I began by calling the only NZ phone number I could find on apple.co.nz. The girl there gave me an Australian number, said it was freephone. So I called that number, listened to some Andrew WK while on hold, and a guy answered. He ran through the obvious - try restarting it, try plugging it in, bla bla bla... then said he'd put me through to the iPod division (he wasn't the iPod division?). So about six different voices telling me to wait later, a girl answers, and the first thing she asks me for is my full name. I'm like, whaaa? Why? I just want to know how I can get my iPod working. She won't help me unless I give her my full name (which is irrelevant, really). Suspicious of all the American voices I heard while on hold, I ask her where she is, and she tells me... Pennsylvania. Hmmm. So she goes off to find the number I should call in NZ, I listen to some Good Charlotte, and she returns with the same number the first girl gave me. I tell her, well, she works in iPod support, couldn't she tell me what I could do? No, it turns out.

Fucking call centres. Now I'm off to find out why Thunderbird is downloading 1500 invisible emails every time I open it.
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Current Mood: pissed off
Current Music: Andrew WK
 
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20 January 2006 @ 09:44 am
list #1  
I made this playlist on my iPod, 'Never Been Played'. Basically, it does what it says - randomly plays songs that the iPod has never played before, rather than the same ol' Arcade Fire songs I've had on repeat for the past six months.

Anyone else tried this? I'm finding some of the most random shit I never quite realised I had, don't recognise, or not sure why I bothered to put on there in the first place. If having your iPod on random is like having your own radio station, then chucking it on the 'Never Been Played' list is like the night rotate, where all the odd stuff comes on.

TOP 5 ALBUMS FOR THE PAST FORTNIGHT
1. The Strokes - First Impressions Of Earth
2. Maximo Park - A Certain Trigger
3. Ryan Adams - 29
4. Tristan Prettyman - 23
5. Bic Runga - Birds


TOP 5 SONGS FOR THE PAST FORTNIGHT
1. The Strokes - Juicebox
2. Maximo Park - Apply Some Pressure
3. Ryan Adams - Strawberry Wine
4. Fat Freddy's Drop - Wandering Eye
5. The Strokes - Vision Division
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Current Mood: dorky
Current Music: The Cure
 
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29 December 2005 @ 05:12 am
Coffee King  

I was in line at BK today, and the middle aged man in front of me asked the staff for a coffee. The girl told him they didn't do coffee. He looked confused, and asked them what drinks they DID do. She told him, he began to get rather annoyed that he wasn't gonna get a coffee, and asked her what the closest thing to coffee they had was... now she was confused, and suggested perhaps an orange juice. The man stormed off, not happy they wouldn't serve him a coffee.

Now, if the general consensus amongst coffee drinkers is that Starbucks coffee sucks, then how bad would BK coffee be? And with the number of Starbucks along Queen Street, why would you go to a BK for a coffee in the first place? That'd be like going into the Warehouse and asking for a quality television.

Walking to work is turning out OK. I doubt I'll lose any weight, but I suppose I'll get my 'Never Played On iPod' playlist down a bit from 2337 songs. Does anyone else with an iPod feel nervous when they listen to a CD at home, knowing the plays aren't going to be added to the iPod playcount, and therefore making it look like you listen to that particular song/band less often than you actually do?

We are ridiculously over target today (but it's dead now), so should climb our way back into the top three stores in the chain. Bring on the bonus... Though the dire need for it is a little lessened now. Last night I came up with my latest plan to make brazilians of dollars; design a board game. Not like a really ccomplex one that's aimed at a small niche market, I mean something ubiquitous and universal like Checkers, or Ludo. Something that in 100 years will be so elementary and well known that people will forget it even needed to be invented in the first place, and won't be copyrighted, cause no one will know who made it, assuming it had been around for centuries, yet in reality was invented by me and made me a brazilian dollars.

Rob and I once had the idea to develop a board game based around terrorism, and I even went as far as designing a board, a set of rules, etc etc. Needless to say, I don't think that is the game I described above.

But instead of focusing my energies of conceptualising the next backgammon, tonight I think I'll continue my epic game of Age Of Empires II. I WILL establish a beachhead on the neighbouring continent, and I WILL win. Damn Turks, with their mobile flaming-rock catapults. I can build them too now, so lets see...

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Current Mood: determined
Current Music: Gorillaz - Demon Days
 
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