Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Archives for October 2007

Fast Asleep or Rocking Out With The Band?

by

The first rock concert Gina and I ever attended was The Presidents of the United States of America.

Over the summer the reformed band visited the studio @ Daytrotter, and amidst a trio of newer tunes they also turned in an acoustic version of “Lump.”

Also @ Daytrotter: Catfish Haven returns for an encore session and turns in one of my favorite Bowie songs, which is actually a Rolling Stones cover – “Let’s Spend The Night Together“.

Gina and I are so going to play at Daytrotter within the next two years. Mark my words.

And, on that note, we’re off to play at a bar.

Sorry, no Trio; have some Kelly instead. (SOTD #7)

by

I spent the last four hours setting up for and recording a Trio, but the more I listen to it the more it sounds like a full dress rehearsal rather than an actual show.

Positives:
– Good setup; very clean sound
– Great performance of my new song
– Articulate between-song talks
– Bonus: Made it through a really hard cover for the first time, ever

Negatives:
– Brief audio skips from my FirePod (as many as three per song?)
– Blew my voice attempting a different (easier) cover; lead to lack of dynamics on (harder) cover
– Questionable rhythms on my old song; bad final note
– Bonus: Audio sync on my camera didn’t work

I’m trying to get away from being a crazy perfection freak, because that doesn’t lead to a high quantity of Trios. However, given the clarity of the audio the skipping is driving me crazy, and that’s enough of a reason to compound the other negatives into a redo. Freak or not, I want to be able to listen to Trio months from now without wincing (which was generally the bar I set for myself in Season 5, and it worked out nicely).

Also, I really wanted to do a video podcast of some portion of Trio in video, but my camera doesn’t seem to be up to the job. I can use Elise’s video camera, but that means waiting until she returns to the country, plus a few days (at least) to learn what to do.

So, sadly, I bring you no Trio. We’ll see how long it takes me to trouble-shoot the audio skips and work from there.

In the meantime, have a random recording from over the summer – “Chivas” (aka “Shivers”), by Kelly Clarkson, on baritone guitar. At the moment I have no idea what key I’ve transposed it to, but the chords in standard are A, F#m, C#m, E.

Your Next Link Post

by

Trent Reznor now free of record label. Given how white-hot-awesome the marketing for NIN’s last record was I can’t wait to see what he does in the absence of a label.

1-800-GOOG-411 is Google’s new, free, voice-recognition driven information service. Put it on speed dial, now.

What Should I Read Next suggests a next book based on your last.

Jason Lewis traveled around the world on his own muscle power. It took him 13 years.

Turn any regularly updated page you read into an RSS feed.

Predictify allows you to predict upcoming world events, and pays you for being correct.

A Montage! I’m All Sewn Up.

by

Okay, before I can blog about anything else I need to address the pressing issue of a several-day backlog of interesting links.

Have at them.

I’m sure all of you savvy people have seen these already, but just in case you haven’t, via Debbie Millman: Dove has released two videos that play on the image of female beauty in media – first one that follows a supermodel from first call to final poster, and a second that’s a montage of images of feminine beauty. You could argue (as Kottke did) that Dove’s parent company Unilever is a major offender in the image war, but, regardless of whose on which side of the line, both shorts are fantastic.

Layer Tennis is a volley of increasing oneupmanship conducted in consecutive layers of a design file. Coincidental to my prior topic Debbie Millman explains in more detail. Ages ago Jett was the narrator of a round, but I’m not sure that old-skool layer tennis was organized by the same people as this newfangled one that’s drawing links from everyone and their mommyblogger – partially due to killer narrators like the above mentioned pair of Dovebloggers.


You know all those annoying distorted words you have to transcribe for highly discerning websites to prove you’re not a robot? They’re called captchas. However, you could also use the word “captcha” to describe a word or passage in a scanned book that is not definable by OCR software. Are you sensing some synergy? Well, a team at Carnegie Mellon University did – they’re farming out book captchas for websites to use as entrance captchas, logging all of the user generated solutions. The result? Recaptchas, which crowdsources its way to about 3,000 hours of captcha deciphering per day.


Everyday Goddess wants to break into episodic television directing, but she’s having trouble finding a foothold. The means of production for specific industries like this are all sewn up by the major players, and the entrance requirements are often paradoxical – she’s been told that she should direct an independent feature so that she gets noticed. But she doesn’t want to direct features, she wants to direct TELEVISION. So, if you know someone who knows someone, drop her a line.


DIY internet musician BradSucks is seeking volunteers to record themselves singing along with his new tune, “Out of It.” I’m going to try to find a moment to record myself this weekend.


Quicker hits:

The Rum Bar was nominated by several independent auditors as a location for our next upscale bar crawl.

Which of two famous Roger Fenton photos came first – one of a road without cannonballs, and one with? Errol Morris writes two fantastic NYT articles on the topic – one of journalistic inquiry via research and interviews, and a second featuring more direct investigative journalism. A final part pends. Via K.

I’m not a great fan of crying at work, but this article about a Pittsburgh professor with a limited time to live did the trick.

Three links from the unstoppable juggernaut of posts that is Mashable: WikiInvest is a wiki community for stock junkies. TIOTI is short for “Tape It Off the Internet.” YouTube + Bittorent = Virtual Tivo. Great for non-teevee owners who still enjoy a show or two (i.e. me) . For those trying to kickstart their blogging, 10 Free eBooks for Bloggers.

FriendFeed aids you in stalking your friends across multiple websites with social networking components, including FaceBook, Flickr, Amazon, Netflix, and more. Via Make You Go Hmm.

OCDblog: Meetimer tracks how long you surf each website, helping you manage your time (and decrease your procrastination).

How fantasy football is like business. A lot of people are probably going to use the former to inform the latter, but it’s the other way around for me.

Go behind the scenes building the Great River of China. From the same source: Animal Logic is a unique series of photos documenting the installation of animals into museum exhibits.

No more taking calls behind the wheel for PA drivers.

We know I love all things colorful and retro, so I love this set of color photos from World War II.

The Starburst Cluster in NGC 3603 is my favorite Astronomy photo of the day in weeks.

(fin)