In the spirit of my letter writing campaign, here’s a VERY interesting article for you all.
Click here.
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Month: September 2006
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My Letter to Black’s Photography
You know me…if I’m disastified with a service, I write a letter! Here’s my letter to Black’s Photography.
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To whom it may concern,
Thanks for wasting my time! (alright, I just added this for the fun of the blog)
—–
What’s everyone’s take on this? Maren was talking about how everything has an expiry date clearly listed (gift cards, etc.) but she did agree that in principle, this is a lame business practice. But, I’m sure we all know WHY they do it this way. They hope that they have people like me who forget about it over time, let the thing expire, and then they essentially got a profit for no work done.
OR, they have an expiry date so that they generate more sales during the 2-year period that it’s good for, rather than sales generated until the END OF TIME. Mwahahaha.
So here’s my take and feel free to comment. Good business policy internally – gets the money in and potentially nabs some cash from the stupid customer who forgets to use it. Bad customer mojo to those like me who forget to use it in time.
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Urban Croquet
Take a look at my cousin’s blog entry on our adventures with Urban Croquet! It was my first time playing croquet and it was a sweet, sweet game.
Here.
Random Note: It was strange to hang out in the midst of another Palmer who goes by the name of Palmer. Everytime someone would say “Palmer” we would both look their way. 😉
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Review: iTunes 7
The best thing about Apple updating their product line is the fact that they usually update iTunes which is free and makes me feel better at handling the fact that I can’t purchase their new products. 🙁
Anyhow, there are two new features on iTunes that I thought are intriguing.
The first is the Cover Flow option for viewing your songs. As seen in the picture above, it will show you what song is playing along with displaying the album cover. On its sides are the album before and after in your list of songs. When you switch to another song, it flips to the album cover which is a pretty neat effect.
The other feature which has been sought out by many live music afficiandos is the GAPLESS MUSIC PLAYBACK which essentially eliminates the annoying gap between MP3 files. This isn’t inherent in the actual MP3 file itself, so they must have just created a workaround to eliminate the gap it causes.
This is great for the live concerts I listen to as it was always annoying to have a little gap when the track changes. You want the thing to flow!
I noticed that the software was processing all my songs for gapless playback when I installed it so I thought it would be complete, but nothing changed. After reading about the feature more this morning, I found out that you need to select the tracks and click the YES button for Gapless playback.
Kind of silly when you think of it. Wouldn’t you want all your songs to be gapless?
iplaying: Happiness is A Warm Gun – The Beatles (White Album)
Swimming: Swimming is going swimmingly well. Ha ha ha.I keep upping the number of laps I do each day. I’m a week into it, and have not got bored from it yet. It may be the fact that it’s conveniently down the street from me, and the pool is usually empty which lets my mind wander instead of always being on high alert watching out for lane changers.
The Who: The Who kicked off their North American tour last night in Philadelphia. Check out the setlist here. When we bought tickets for the Who show (in town this coming Friday), I had not known much about The Who so I sought out some albums in the mall and they had crap. In fact, I didn’t much about them and ended up buying some soundtrack to Quadropenia. BOOO. Tha isn’t a freakin’ album! Anyhow, after downloading their discography (hey, give me a break here…I tried to pick up their albums!) I was introduced to a few albums and am now listening to a mock setlist on my iPod.
iTunes: The new iTunes version 7 is freakin’ amazing. So slick. I love this software. I am also impressed with the annoucement of an 80GB iPod. Just in time considering mine has hit it’s 60GB limit. Let’s be honest…other than a glitch that I may have to send it back for repair, I am fine with mine and won’t bothering upgrading until it bites the big one. I was hoping Apple would have announed a new chipset for their MacBook line so I could think of buying one. But I’ll hold off.
Recording Tip: When you’re bouncing all your tracks to the stereo tracks, don’t have a conversation with Mike and noodle on the guitar while it’s bouncing, or at the very least, unplugh your mic and guitar from the soundboard or else your recording is ruined.
Medical Miracles: I found this amazing, amazing, AMAZING article on the Wolfshack about how common sleeping pills have brought people out of vegetative states. No joke. This is insane to think about. I was running around telling everyone about this. This is something that I can tell my kids that I witnessed. Click here for the article. Thanks to Pete for digging this one up.
iplaying: Who Are You – The Who (Who Are You)
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Review: Stock Ticker
I almost forgot about my Saturday night! I spent the first part of the night going through some old recordings with Vero, but later on we hit up Sarah’s pad (just down the hall, boy do I love residence!) to play some Stock Ticker.
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/2680
From the onset, the game looked pretty lame, but then I got into it and it turned out to be cool that I will be keeping my eye open at garage sales for this gem.
Stock Ticker basically involves stocks. You all start out with $5K and are able to buy stocks. The players determine a time when the game will end (let’s say 2 hours from now) and then the dice start rolling. There are three dice – the name of the stock, the action of the stock (it can go up, down, or pay out dividends), and the number associated with the action (for example if you roll a 20 and it’s dividends, then you get 20% of whatever stock you own).
We set up two rounds of rolling and then you get the chance to buy or sell stock. So in this time of two rounds, the stock market has fluctuated due to the rolling of the dice. Stocks have either gone up or down so you have to think about either keeping your stock or selling it.
That’s it! It’s a really simple game but there is definitely strategy involved which I failed at miserably as I came out with $2700 which was a definite loss whereas all others were in the positive.
Two thumbs up for this great game. As soon as I find it, I’m calling a games night.
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Palmer and Losier Recording
This weekend I did nothing much at all which was fine by me. Although when you get in those ruts, you don’t do things that NEED to be done, so tonight I’ll be giving the car a once over in terms of cleaning it.
I did end up spending a lot of time around the Fostex (aka the recording equipment I bought last year) and managed to figure out how to mix down tracks/master them, then port the tracks into a WAV file which I could upload to the computer.
What was the result? Enjoyment! I had a good time doing so, and I managed to find a bunch of riffs I had come up with awhile back, along with a few pseudo-concerts when friends were over. I also managed to find two songs that were complete, whereas a lot of them were just crap outtakes which I ponder why we even left them on there to begin with.
I will make a web page outlining a lot more information on the songs, but for now, I just threw them up into a directory for perusal.
http://palmer.grumpster.com/music
Some items of interest so far are:
Demos 2006 – He’s The Man – This is a song I wrote for Duncan a few years back because I was always singing the words Duncan Williams, he’s the maaaaaan whenever he would walk into the room. I thought it was catchy so decided to actually write a song. I think it still needs one more verse.
Landing in London – I like how this one turned out, although Mike pointed out that the vocals may have been mixed a little too high which I agree with. Perhaps when I’m ambitious I’ll remix it. I played around with having two vocal lines on this one which turned out alright. There are a few parts where they go wonky as I just wasn’t singing the same at all (or off time) but hey, we are not professionals here.
Live tracks – Fueled by playing songs with people who had never played the songs before led to funny tracks to listen to and are probably only amusing if you were actually there. Unfortunately, I don’t think we hit record when James and Ferda were singing one night as I can’t seem to find the tracks. I do recall in my memory banks that this night did happen.
Before I start off this next review of the other film we watched on Friday night, I have to send out a salute to our good friend James who came up with the title Fast and the Curious as to what this movie’s title would be if it were a pornography film.
Anyhow, if you’ve seen the previous Fast and the Furious movies, you know you’re in for a treat full of high paced race sequences.
I was not disappointed. It was cool to see this film introduce the term drifting into my vocabulary as I had been oblivious that vehicles could glide across the pavement so easily (at least in Tokyo they can. I have not seen evidence that you can do this sort of thing in North America).
I liked the characters and the classic story of the young one who knows nothing but then learns everything and kicks some ass at the end of the film. You can’t go wrong with an underdog story! Recommend this film if you want to zone out and think of nothing else but a car chase.
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Review: Nacho Libre
On Friday night, Mike and Mel had a slew of people over for Movie Night (which was excellent by the way).
The men retired to the basement to avoid any lame women films and poppped in Nacho Libre – the newest work to star our favourite Jack Black.
Unfortunately, this is the first Jack Black movie which didn’t live up to the hype. Both Mike and I have been waiting a LONG time to watch this film and were disappointed. I had only got through an hour of it a few months ago so was glad to catch the ending of it this time around.
Overall, it had some funny parts. The wrestling was pretty funny. But the rest of the cast is lackluster and if people were expecting a Napolean Dynamite all over again are in for a disappointment.
This also falls into the dreaded ‘best parts are in the trailer’ scenario. Perhaps we shouldn’t watch trailers over, and over, and over again as Mike and I did.
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New (Old) Star Wars Editions
Let’s talk a little about everyone’s favourite subject – Star Wars.
You may not know it, but tomorrow the original trilogy is being re-released on DVD in a LIMITED EDITION format with the 2004 edition (with all the new bells and whistles) along with (for the first time on DVD), the ORIGINAL untouched versions that you would have saw in the theatre back in the 70s.
Now, everyone and their grandmother (except for you Nanny!) have been asking for the original versions to be released on DVD at some point.
But you know what? They aren’t even touching them up to make them look decent. With the re-release of the movies back in 2004, they went through frame by frame and redid the sound, the picture, everything!
Personally, I dig the new versions. However, I know there are a few things missing from the new versions which I wish they would have kept. Oh Wolfman in the Cantian scene, where art thou?
Anyhow, back to my public service annoucement. Don’t bother getting this set unless you are so die-hard of a fan that you need everything that is Star Wars. Here’s a little gem of information that people may not know – 30th Anniversary of Star Wars next year. Can we say a NEW BOX SET of all the movies? Chances are, that’s what’s going to happen.
So why bother spending the $75 now for all three movies just to get the original craptacular versions as a bonus feature? Why not save that money and get the new editions that will most likely have the prequel trilogy redone?
Just wanted to put the thought in your head for those who are interested in getting these movies coming out tomorrow. Make sure you know what you’re purchasing.