Wish you had more holiday time away from work? Check out this chart which details holiday time around the world. (Warning to North Americans... What you see may depress you.)
Have you ever checked out Just Concerts? It's run by the CBC along with it's sister sites, New Music Canada and 120 Seconds.
Some concerts of note:
Bunny Cam is now operational. It will be online from 8ish to 23ish (CST). Most of the time it will display our bunnies... This Saturday it will display our xmas party.
Check out the images section. I've started to add the stickers my friends and I drew during the past year.
Today I'm going to talk about pride and confidence. Actually I'm just going to talk...
Last night Bruce, Jake and I saw the documentary Scratch. It was an amazing look at the evolution of hip-hop culture and the art of turntablism. The movie showcased some really amazing DJs. The first thing that hit me while watching these DJs perform was that these DJs were the best DJs in the world. From the looks of it, Qbert may be the best DJ to have ever touched the wheels of steel. That's huge. The respect and admiration I had for these guys.... I've never felt that way before. I've never really been a big sports fan so I've never really idolized someone who is "the best" at what they do.
So I started to think about what it would take to become "the best". Sure, you probably have to be born with a certain propensity for your craft, but to say that the talent is purely innate is to show a total lack of respect for the true artist. It takes the kind of hard work and dedications that one rarely gets to witness in our present day of apathy. I'm talking total devotion to the point of near insanity.
There is something else though. In order to be "the best" there is a hurdle you must jump. You can't be "the best" without outdoing those who came before. You have to push the limits... create... take things to a whole new level.
But the world has never been fond of the new.
Think of the courage and confidence it takes to show the world something it hasn't seen before. There will be resistance. There may even be pointing and laughing. We seek acceptance. That's what we do as humans. That's what most people are looking for in life. The true artist has to get past this by realizing that he is creating for himself and no one else. He's not seeking acceptance anymore, nor is he trying to force others to accept his new ideas. He's just displaying them for all to see. A pure expression of self.
Ok. So I was caught in a ramble there. Pride and Confidence.... That's where this started...
I want you all to forget about pride. It does more harm than good.
Self-Confidence. Not necessary. Well, not at least in the sense of self-confidence when dealing with other people. It's our constant quest for universal acceptance that is holding back the human race. It causes tension... anger... sadness... And why? Just because we think that we are able to read the minds of others... and from what we are able to tell from our magically mind reading abilities: The others don't like us!?! Our culture idolizes what we consider to be perfection. The cult of the celebrity. Our reason? It's not respect for what they do! It's jealously for what we think they have. They have the acceptance... and the confidence that we think we lack. But in reality our celebrity icons are one of two things... 1) Scared hollow individuals with less confidence than an pimply faced teenager hiding behind a false ego... 2) Someone who has figured out that they no longer have to seek the acceptance of the rest of the world in order to be happy.
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I went to my girlfriend's work xmas party tonight. I had a really great time. It was wonderful to see all the amazing people she works with and to see them all together and having a great time. I started the night as a stranger... but left with a big smile and some new friends.
We bought our NYE tickets for A One Night Stand this past weekend and they came with 2 free CDs. The first CD being the new Paul Oakenfold disc Bunkka. I wasn't expecting much from this disc so after I enjoyed the first track I was hoping I would like the rest. Not a chance. Paul's production style is all gloss and little substance. The hip-hopish track featuring Ice Cube is laughable and the track with the lead singer of Crazy Town is just plain bad. Both vocalist move their mouths a lot... but neither actually say anything. (What's with the lack of meaniful lyrics in pop music?)
I was much happier with the second disc, Warner Canada's introduction to Buck 65. If y'all have been living under a rock for the past while, Warner Canada signed Buck 65 to their label and re-leased most of his back catelog... (If you don't know who Buck is check this.) The disc is a sampling of Buck's back catalog along with a track from his new release, Square. Having seen Buck live so many times I find that I always enjoy his music in person so much more. His shows are always very intimate and moving. That being said, the disc is a great intro package for 65 newbies and a nice mini 'best of' for long time fans.
Ok. I think I've finally gotten this site sorted out. I've been wrestling with making the CSS skins multi-browser compatible with a fairly high degree of success. To begin with, the layout looked best under IE and quite a bit was missing or poorly formatted with Opera and Mozilla. After some tweaking, Opera and Mozilla seem to format the layout the best and IE does a reasonable job. You win some, you lose some.
I've mod'ed this main blog page so that it will no longer be cached by web browsers. Some browsers were displaying old cached versions of the page instead of the latest blog entries. I've also forced the images on the cams page to not be cached since IE was stubbornly holding on to week old cam images.
Tonight is my xmas party for work. Last night was Andrews birthday party. Oh the joys of multiball foosball. MULTIBALLLLLLLLL!!!
The lovely people over at New Winnipeg have added me to their links page. I have also been recently added to the google and altavista databases. I guess I'd better get working on keeping this site up to date and adding some more original content. (I wonder how many times I will write about adding content before I actually get around to doing it???)
For those of you in Winnipeg looking for information on our local electronic music scene... check out Prarie Groove.
I made a couple small changes around here. This blog page is now the root page on this site, (this was done so that I could gather more accurate stats). The second change should be entirely transparent since I just fixed up some of the javascript that controls the skins. Other than that, I added some more links.
Groove Salad and the rest of the SomaFM stations are back on the air!
This week's song of the week (No Longer Online) is Johnny Cash doing a Nine Inch Nails cover.
The day would be quite complete without a collection of strange flash movies.
I finally got around to scanning the Uptown interview with Professor Groove from Halloween. Check it out on the events page.
The song of the week (No Longer Online) is Flunk's cover of Blue Monday. (Check the video here.)
Serialtext: 5 novels, 5 days a week. Serialtext brings you a new chapter of a new novel every day of the week, featuring some of the best authors found online and offline.
Spontaneous Prose.
A list of webpages with interesting/novel design concepts.
The car is in the shop and it supposedly needs $500 dollars worth of repairs, (plus labour!). Being able to brake is fairly important to me... so I think we will go ahead with "da fix'n". I just wish I knew a bit more about the inner works of cars. I hate feeling so clueless when talking to the mechanic.
Scratch is playing at the Cinematheque from Decemeber 7th until the 12th. I should really keep up with the Cinematheque scheduel. I missed Secretary and Thirteen Conversations About One Thing this month.
I love the fact that the Hayden album Moving Carful devotes twice as much time to the sound of rain falling/water dripping than it does to music.
Think the 80s were lacking in quality music? Think Again.
My memory is weak.
Ode to a robot.
Feel like killing art?
fuck.