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Watch this music video from Jurrasic Five and DJ Format!
http://www.vimeo.com/361491

My Dumb Car:
I had to get all of this work done on my car. It was totally expensive and predictable since I had basically been doing no regular maintenance on my car. Lame. I got new break pads in the front and back and I had to get at least one new rotor. I also got a new belt and a PCV valve. That was like the emergency stuff. But they also said I needed a new sway bar, a tune-up and something else I wrote down but can't remember. I am starting to get a little bit worried about the price of all these things, and was thinking about getting a second estimate. Does anyone have a mechanic that is not Pep Boys that they go to and would recommend?

7/4:
The other night Tom and I worked on a new song which just happens to mostly be in 7/4. Writing lyrics is largely my responsibility. The funny thing about writing lyrics for a song in 7/4 is that it's difficult; you're not use to doing it so it takes some work. However, the great thing is that you're constantly amazed by how many more syllables you can fit in each line. It's like the measures never end!

Today the Comcast man came and turned on the cable TV and Internet at my new place. Nice! Those first few days in a new apartment without the Internet are always hard.

The only annoying thing was that I had to string the cable myself, from the side of the room where it came in to the other side of the room where my TV is. I actually did a pretty good job of this. It looks pretty good, thanks to my friends at the Home Depot.

I also have a few neat toys that I am playing with: An M-Audio recording box and Microphone to go with it, and a Korg USB keyboard (the musical kind) that Rand gave me for Christmas. I'll play around and try to post something cool in the next few days.

Woot! 

Why, oh why does the 'backspace' key go 'back' to the previous page in all browsers? This is a bug, not something helpful. I just lost the entire entry that I was composing. This is worse than the 'insert' key.

Last night we finally submitted the paper that I have been spending all my time on for the past 3 weeks. We submitted to TRANSACT 2009, a workshop on transactional memory. Our paper was on an optimization of STM using the static aliasing annotations that we have been working on in our group.

Honestly, the process was pretty painful. We had to do benchmarks, which is not something I am used to, and we had a couple fall through at the very last moment, because we could not explain why we were seeing the results we were seeing. I now have a lot more repsect for people who work in systems.

Anyway, tonight I am rewarding myself by going to the Girl Talk concert. I've never seen him live, but his last two albums are in super heavy rotation at home and at work. (Seriously, check the stats.) Also, Grand Buffet is opening, and they are sweet.

Tom is out of town. So, acting in a completely unauthorized manner, I posted some songs that we recently recorded, for free, on last.fm. You can hear "Custom Party Music," which is what I'm calling the collection of all the songs that we wrote for a specific occasion, and you can download all of the songs.

Highlights include, "Birthday Control," and "Unfairbanks," which is about the sad economic state in which we find our country and my friend George Fairbanks leaving Pittsburgh. "Sick Day," isn't really custom party music, and in fact is just a demo.

 Last night at a Steeler's Game Watching Party/Free Concert/Free Hot Dog Festival, I saw two bands.

Nik and the Central Plains: I know Nik from the open mic nights. His music is great. It's like super weird folk music, but is very catchy.

Aloud: Aloud was your more straightforwad modern rock band, but they were pretty good. The were from Boston, MA, and had a good "wall of sound" thing going.

Last night Pittsburgh's own, Sick Ridiculous and the Sick Ridiculous played at Brianne's birthday party. We had a great time, and debuted a few (3?) new songs. We ended up playing three separate times during the night, including as late as 2am. This happened because people kept showing up, and getting upset that they had missed the music. Thank-you guys for feeding our large egos! Also, the first set was a little sub-par, due to some string-related issues. 

With any luck, we'll record a few of the new ones tomorrow, so you can hear that.

The party itself was pretty rad too!

Tonight Sick Ridiculous and the Sick Ridiculous will be playing at George's graduation party. I won't give out the information here, but email/text/message me for the infos. 9pm start, 10pm rock.

Well I know I'm like 5 years behind the times here, but the Kings of Leon album, Youth and Young Manhood is really good. You should give it a listen.

On Friday night, I saw John Vanderslice at the Andy Warhol museum, an incredible experience. I heard about him through Tom, basically the only person I know who listens to him, and therefore Tom gets bonus points for introducing me. The concert was great. The band was incredibly tight. The sound was great, and John had plenty of neat old analog equipment, for which he is pretty well know. (This is partially the reason for my renewed interest in the electric guitar.) He was really funny, and seemed to be genuinely enjoying himself. The selection of songs was good too, mostly songs I knew from Emerald City and The Life & Death of an American Four-Tracker, the only two albums I have, but also some ones I had never heard.

The highlight was the end, when he and his band-members went out into the gallery area for some acoustic songs. It sounded even cooler with the natural reverb of the room.

Go to his web site. You can listen to his entire new album, and I'd be surprised if you were disappointed.

Hey guys,

It seems like clockwork, but Sick Ridiculous and The Sick Ridiculous (that's now the official capitalization) has a new song. It's called, The Giving 43 Billion Dollars to Charity "Blues," and as always it can be downloaded from our MySpace page. Hope you enjoys.

My best friend from high school, Rand, is now in a band out in LA. They used to have a somewhat ludacris name, but now that they've gotten some interest from actual music people, they are known as "Pizza!"

Anyway, they just released an album and it's available for free on their web site. Their music is somewhat avant-garde, but they are extremely tight musically, and have some clever songs. My favorite so far is bird-dreams.

By now you've probably already heard, either from Wired or Rolling Stone magazine. But just to be safe, Sick Ridiculous and the Sick Ridiculous have a new song. It's the Theme from SIGBOVIK, and you can listen and download from our myspace page.

A couple people said they couldn't download the songs because they weren't on myspace. We understand. We plan to upload our songs somewhere else real soon.

There is a definite possibility that Sick Ridiculous and the Sick Ridiculous will be playing at the SIGBOVIK party tonight, FYI.    

This weekend there were some fun music developments:

Friday Night Cappy-oke:
Friday night I joined Marcus et al. at Cappy's for their weekly karaoke extravaganza. I sang two songs. Neither of them actually went all that well:

Graceland, Paul Simon. I had been looking for this song at Karaoke for a while now. Finally found it. Sang it. Great song, but doesn't work too well for me for karaoke. First off, it's a little too low. Second, it's a little too long, and there are too many parts where I don't sing.

California, Phantom Planet. I sang this song with Marcus, and we were both convinced it was going to kill. It did not. Again, this song was too low, but this time way too low. Considering how slow the song was playing, I suspect we had some version of the song that was actually lowered in key. I remember singing this song in my car, and it went a lot better than this attempt. Oh well...

Monday Night Sick Ridiculous and the Sick Ridiculous:
Tonight, my band Sick Ridiculous and the Sick Ridiculous went to open mic night at the Rex Theater on the south side. It was fun. We played two songs, 737 and Two Mellow Bros. (or whatever we call it). For our first time ever playing live, we both thought it went pretty well, and we even had a few people tell us that they enjoyed it. If you're pissed because we didn't tell you, don't worry. We're just trying to get a little bit more comfortable with ourselves and our live persona.

Yesterday on the radio I heard, for the first time, Stronger, by Kanye West. It was notable because I immediately recognized the sample as being from Daft Punk's Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger, an all-around great song. I was a little bummed by the fact that it was slowed down so much, since a lot of the awesome of the original song came from the fact that it was uptempo. BUT, nonetheless, I think it's a pretty good sample to rap over, and the end product is pretty good. The only bad part? The weirdo robot harmonies when Kanye says, "That's how long I been on ya." Best part? The line, "Since O.J. had Isotoners."


That being said, I guess it's weird to talk about Kanye without mentioning the recent death of his mother. Therefore I must say that I do feel sorry for him and hope he is holding up. Bottom line, Kanye makes great music, and I hope he continues to do so.

I just finished stringing up my acoustic guitar, something I haven't done in about a year.

I've been picking around a little bit too, trying to get my callouses back into shape.

Just in case you haven't heard, Pittsburgh is about to get Sick Ridiculous.

Hey I just got a Last.fm account! Check me out and add me as a friend if you're already on.

Are there any livejournal gurus out there? I'd like to add my last.fm playlist image to a fixed spot on the top of my blog, but I can't really figure it out. Is this even possible? It's just an image... It looks like this:



As of post time, this hasn't synched up with the tracks I have played.

Don't you ever wonder? Why do they call the wheel on the side of the paper towl despenser the "emergency feed?" Is it ever really an emergency, just because you don't have access to paper towels? I propose they call it, the wheel you use on a regular basis because a lot of people don't pull down with two hands.

In other news, today is Mardi Gras. It doesn't really mean a whole lot when you're outside of New Orleans, and I don't feel like I have to go out and party tonight or anything, but it is nice to know that all of my friends are having a ridiculous amount of fun right now (or at least did up until today, since Mardi Gras day is never actually that fun).

Finally, this Friday (like every Friday) is Formal Friday here at CMU. Formal Friday is a creation of simrob. This Friday, I will be suiting up, so won't you do the same?

Finally Finally, listen to Tom7's new Album-a-day, Exile on Atari St. It's pretty good. Highlights include, the first two songs and the one about sugar pills.

I just won tickets to a concert off the radio!

WRCT has a show on Tuesdays called the "Brass Band Power-Hour," which plays, of all things, Brass Band music.

This Saturday night, Rebirth Brass Band (New Orleans' finest dance brass music) Ellis Marsellis and some blues singer whose name I forget are playing at the Manchester Craftmen's Guild in a celebration of New Orleans music. This rules, because the tickets are like $40 normally, and I got two. If you want to go see some booty-shakin' New Orleans music, just let me know...