I recently picked up a new notebook. I’ve only ever had work notebooks, so they weren’t really personalized much. Just didn’t feel like “mine” with all work crap on there. Futureshop had a great deal going on an HP TX2524CA tablet PC. I wanted a tablet for those few occasions when one might prove useful. I also wanted to see how one would work with Corel Painter. It doesn’t have the same pressure levels as a normal Wacom tablet nor does it have the angle sensitivities, but it’s still pretty good. Nothing to show for it yet though.

I’m not impressed with the battery life of it though. 2 hours seems pretty generous. Hoping I can pick up an 8 cell or higher sometime.

Finally, Canada gets a Do Not Call list for stop those annoying telephone spammers from calling. Head over to the National Do Not Call website to sign up today. On the first day, the site was basically unusable due to demand, which should tell spammers something. We don’t want you calling us! Go Away!

It remains to be seen if this will actually do anything for us. According to the commercials I’ve heard, some companies don’t have to honour the DNC list, but rather they can keep their own. I’m sure they’re trustworthy…

Ran right out and upgraded iTunes recently, getting the new version 8. Usually this is a mistake, as things often go terribly wrong for me in this regard, but it wasn’t eventful this time. Guess I was lucky I had XP instead of Vista. I setup Genius first thing. Well, almost first thing cause it took over an hour. At first I wasn’t impressed. Giving me links to the store with similar music. Big deal, easily done once you gather everyones listening habits. But then I found the Genius button at the bottom that creates a playlist of your music that will go nicely together with the currently selected song. It’s pretty good stuff, and fast! Here’s the first playlist it put together for me.

We all know the oil companies makes billions off us. But it’s not their fault right? They just charge what they’re required to because of the cost of crude. Bullshit. Exxon posts the record quarterly earnings in the history of the US. $11.7 Billion dollars in a single quarter. Fuck you, is what I have to say about that.

However. There is a deeper story here that really bothers me. They actually failed to meet expectations! As a result, stock value dropped 5%! What kind of ass-backwards thought process is this? Post the biggest profits in history and get penalized for it?! I’ve never liked the stock market, and this only goes to fuel that hatred. Maybe I’m just simple, but this doesn’t make any logical sense to me.

Advertisers don’t even try to be realistic anymore. Look at this stuff. It’s not wrinkle cream, it’s a bloody youth formula! It could only be magic in a bottle. Oh wait, there is it, simulated imagery. Might as well say “Warning, the image above has nothing to do with the product we are selling. It’s only there to distract you from the cost of this garbage we put in a bottle.”

Something that flickr should have had ages ago is finally here. Statistics! Now we can all obsess over individual photo views, weekly views and graphs. The most welcome in my opinion is the referrer list. You can actually see who is stealing legally using your images within the license you’ve assigned. (I kid because I use a CC license). You also get a nice breakdown of your photos, showing counts of photos tagged, commented, favourited etc. Some really nice stuff to see. If only I had more photos to upload…

I discovered TheSixtyOne just yesterday. It’s a music discovery site, much like last.fm, but with a few twists. There’s a game involved, where you can spend points on a song to “bump” it up the list of popularity. Once popular enough, a song becomes hot. The catch is you get more points when people bump the same song *after* you’ve bumped it. So basically, if you get there first, you have a better chance at scoring points.

Now, I’m in love with this site. It’s so well done and put together that I can’t stop using it just for those reasons. Nevermind that it’s full of great music. The little pop-ups, auto-refreshing pages, automatically skip to the next track on the page you were on, even if you’ve navigated away from that page. Just so many little pieces done so right.

However, I can’t help but feel the system can be easily “gamed”. I’ve started scoring decent points already and I’ve only gotten a few songs bumped. I’m now level two and can start to earn double points. It stands to reason that the more songs you bump, the more points you get. So the more points you get, the more songs you can bump. If you’re lucky, you can get in early on some greats like Radiohead and Spoon, both of which are sure fire point scorers if you can get in early. I’m not really sure what the point of it all is though. What happens to the “Hot” list after a while? Do songs fall off of it? Is it only there for the top songs, only to be replaced by other top songs? Guess we’ll see.

For now, I’m listening to some great music.

I’ve signed up with the folks over at ImageKind.com in the hopes of making a few sales from my photography. I got a media sample in the mail, and I have to say, there is some excellent quality showing. Just hope my images are worth the paper they’re printed on. I recommend the Epson UltraSmooth Fine Art paper. Zero glare and perfect resolution and saturation. It’s a bit pricey, so if you want a less expensive print, try the Epson Enhanced Matte. It’s about the same, just not as heavy.

They’ll frame and matte your print for you too, so it comes in the mail ready to hang on the wall. There’s a ton of selection too, so your sure to fine just what you want.

I’m a little concerned about getting my name viewed among the masses, but we’ll see how it works out. I guess I just have to push myself a little better, sell my own skills and such.

I’ve often heard that reading community reported news is the best way to get the real picture. No lefty/righty hidden messages and political spin involved. Recently, I got tired of just reading the headlines of one social site, and started browsing both digg and reddit. I came across a headline that looked like the same story, but wasn’t at all portrayed the same way:

Digg: “Digg Shout Out on The Colbert Report!” This linked to a YouTube video from The Colbert Report where the text “Can you digg it?” (or something, the video is gone).
Reddit: “Colbert slams Digg, says college students *in the same room* would rather blog a kid getting tasering than get off their asses and help”

Sadly, the reddit link wasn’t the same video, and the link has been replaced with different videos, but it’s obviously the same clip being referenced. Sure glad I didn’t get a biased opinion about that story!

Osheaga was a success all around. Two large stages for main attractions with two smaller stages for the lesser known groups. We saw the best bands of the weekend on the smaller stages. Jam packed with people at times, they provided the best entertainment value. I’ll run through the days separately and follow up with a rant I’ve been saving for a while now.

Saturday: We arrived near the beginning of the stage performances at 1pm. We caught a bit of Thunderheist on the small stage and quickly left the scene. We heard a good chunk of Jamie T, which was a great and welcomed surprise. Another UK group, so I was of course hooked. We followed this up with some Editors, which didn’t fail to entertain us. I cant’ seem to recall what we did for next hour or so, but I wish we had seen some more of Blonde Redhead. Patrick Watson, a home town hero (at least in Montreal), was a hit among everyone who knew him. A complete bewildering experience for the rest of us. Experimenting with throwing a balled up necklace at your guitar strings may be neat in the studio, but you just look like an idiot on stage. In the past, playing the guitar well has been described as having sex with it. The lead guitar in this show could only be said to have raped his guitar. Feist did a good job of relieving me of the previous annoyed attitude, only to have it replaced with CPC Gangbangs again. But then, despite sound check issues, Ohbijou once again entertained the hell out of me. What a wonderful band. Next up, best in show. During Ohbijou, we noticed a young lady in the back wearing deer antlers on her head. Not wanting to miss the chance to see Smashing Pumpkins, who should have gotten back together 7 years ago when they would have still been relevant, we opted to wonder away from the small stage. Hearing Billy slowly kill his own fame, we opted to see what the young lady in the antlers was up to. We were greated with the Hank and Lily Show stage scene. The description of the band suggested we would see more of stage/puppet show than a rock band, which intrigued us to no end. What an amazing show. I just can’t say enough about it. It was suggested in the preview that Lily played the drums like a sledge hammer. No other words could have described it better. She did hammer those drums, all while standing and singing. Just check them out, you won’t regret it.

Sunday: We didn’t see anyone in the lineup that interested us until later in the day, so we arrived around 4pm to catch a bit of Au Revoire Simone, which worked out nicely. We didn’t catch the whole show, as I wanted to see some Pony Up as well, so we headed over to the other small stage to see them. Good stuff. Next up was Sam Roberts over on the main stages. Though I’m not a fan of Sam Roberts, I can’t think of a single reason why. Great show and well played. We stuck around for a bit because the friend we were with knows everyone, and ran into the bass players mom in the crowd, so we had to wait for bass player himself to come out and say hi. Arctic Monkeys were next up, and although we didn’t see much of the show, we heard every beat and enjoyed each one. Macy Gray apparently doesn’t have any songs of her own, but managed to put on a pretty good show anyway, which surprised me, not expecting to care at all. Gotan Project could only be enjoyed live, with the massive screen playing stock videos and psychedelic patterns along with an orchestra style stage scene. Good stuff. We saw a bit of the terrible M.I.A. and then some Interpol, then left before Block Party came along.

Sound Guys. What the hell is your problem? Your standing out front of the stage. Can you not hear that the base is louder than anything else? Or that the drums are smashing all over the vocals? Does it amuse you to make as many high pitched squeals as you can before finally coming to rest with ridiculously high levels? See that line of LEDs where the top 4 red ones are all lit up all the time? Maybe that needs attention somehow. Honestly, I love loud music. But I love hearing ALL the music, not just whatever channel can be turned up the highest without causing feedback. Open your ears, if you can still hear, and fix it!