Gecko Bloggle

Hi.  Been eleven months.  Any of you still out there? I occasionally post on Twitter now, and maybe post a little more often on Facebook, but mostly I just.

I just what? I work. I cycle. I sleep. I surf. I make stupid jokes at my lovely wife, the doula/writer/teacher/mom, and watch my kids get huge.  17combined years of childhood combine in the house to create one hell of a mess sometimes.  Also, we have rats now. Rats are odd.

I occasionally drive around in

Hi.  Been eleven months. Any of you still out there? I occasionally post on Twitter now, and maybe post a little more often on Facebook, but mostly I just.

I just what? I work. I cycle. I sleep. I surf. I make stupid jokes at my lovely wife, the doula/writer/teacher/mom, and watch my kids get huge. 17combined years of childhood combine in the house to create one hell of a mess sometimes. Also, we have rats now. Rats are odd.

I occasionally drive around in other people’s cars. People keep giving me cars, or asking me to drive their car, or park it somewhere. I sound like a mule, but I’m totally not. Just near the airport, and the sort of person not likely to destroy your vehicular baby. Though there was that one time I went WAY too fast through the tunnel, but I was young and foolish, as opposed to now. I’m older.

Holy crap you guys, I’m almost 42 now. I’m not going to ask where the time went, ’cause I know where it went. Away.

There’s some sort of format radio button that’s called Aside, and I suspect if I played with it even once, I would probably want to use it all the time, and wonder why Thunderbird/Facebook/Twitter don’t also all have this wonderous feature.

So I’d better just leave it the heck alone.

Instead, I’ll play you a little of what I’ve been hearing in my head while cycling the 10k to/from work every day this Summer up until, the uh, the third day of Bike-To-Work-Week. To be fair (to me, not to you) there’s been some reasonably good excuses for driving my dad’s car to work for the last two days, but they’re more about reason (I’m getting a cold? I have to get home faster than 30+ minutes?) and less about anything approaching what I’d normally do.

Ramble bramble scramble, get on with the music. Alt-J album An Awesome Wave simply blew my mind, and continues to do so, a full two months of heavy rotation later. I’ll let it speak for itself, but I wanted to say that I’m pretty sure this the most beautiful control and playfulness I’ve ever heard in what is, at best, a very weird voice.

And I’m a big fan of weird vocalists.

Thanks for stopping in and feel free to say hi.

other people’s cars. People keep giving me cars, or asking me to drive their car, or park it somewhere. I sound like a mule, but I’m totally not. Just near the airport, and the sort of person not likely to destroy your vehicular baby. Though there was that one time I went WAY too fast through the tunnel, but I was young and foolish, as opposed to now. I’m older.

Holy crap you guys, I’m almost 42 now. I’m not going to ask where the time went, ’cause I know where it went. Away.

There’s some sort of format radio button that’s called Aside, and I suspect if I played with it even once, I would probably want to use it all the time, and wonder why Thunderbird/Facebook/Twitter don’t also all have this wonderous feature.

So I’d better just leave it the heck alone.

Instead, I’ll play you a little of what I’ve been hearing in my head while cycling the 10k to/from work every day this Summer up until, the uh, the third day of Bike-To-Work-Week.  To be fair (to me, not to you) there’s been some reasonably good excuses for driving my dad’s car to work for the last two days, but they’re more about reason (I’m getting a cold? I have to get home faster than 30+ minutes?) and less about anything approaching what I’d normally do.

Ramble bramble scramble, get on with the music.  Alt-J album An Awesome Wave simply blew my mind, and continues to do so, a full two months of heavy rotation later.  I’ll let it speak for itself, but I wanted to say that I’m pretty sure this the most beautiful control and playfulness I’ve ever heard in what is, at best, a very weird voice.

And I’m a big fan of weird vocalists.

Thanks for stopping in and feel free to say hi.

Didn’t have time to pull the ripcord on the datamine I had been building for the team, Which will probably be a bit of a puzzler for some security folks at some point – leave them wondering why the safe they just spent a week trying to crack was empty (but angrily, huffily, locked.)

I remember the systems that used to extract the entire size of the volume every time you tried to open it, even if the keys were wrong.

Wonder of encrypted AI ever gets a hint that it’s about to be frozen in state. What does clenched intelligence look like?

The rain was light this morning. None of that benzoate stuff fired into the clouds today. Trying to keep low profile from the satellites until after the Olympic team is finished doing their thing on open road.

Dropped the database into the mist in order to collect what I could from whatever data was being exhaled by the suit towers on 264th. Nothing leaking today. Not anything that wouldn’t be at least as interested in you as you are in it.

Kid on a bikepack sighs past me before collapsing his ride into the familiar circular shoulderbag. Should pick up one of those but keep forgetting to figure out what size I need. Regular two wheel or the full jacket system that allows one to harpoon passing vehicles. Old man was right. It does work, but is best left to the couriers.

Checked the network perimeter to see if anyone’s looking for me who shouldn’t be. Paranoia can look a lot like flirting, with all the looking at, looking away that goes on. Like a damn highschool dance in this hood. All wallflowers, no mosh pit to hide in.

Shut down the scanner before it draws attention of the birds, and their bored screen pilots across town. I hear it in my head like Will Smith in that MIB movie: “Don’t start nothing: won’t BE nothing.”

Hungry. Wanna find that spinner from the other night again. Suspect some sideband data in his last set. See if he knows it was in there, or just part of a recording he was reusing. Kroftwark was good at dropping entire number station recordings from Conet directly into their live shows. Wonder if they meant to?

Oh hi.

Just got in the door from an afternoon at Arwen’s mom’s place, and we’re sitting here in utter silence.  The kids are asleep, the cat is ignoring us, and the late night planes haven’t started coming in yet (their takeoffs and landings are actually pretty spectacular in the summer, when they really get going.  This picture is day 13 of Movember (couple more pictures and a donation link are somewhere on this page under Mo’10).

Made a mistake while at Beth’s today.  Got on a scale.  Been a long time since I got on a scale.  Creeping up higher than it was last time I was on one.  Of course, I’d spent the afternoon and evening putting away a few pounds of food, I’m sure, but still.  Woof.  Gotta lay off the takeout/mall food when at work, and not just for financial reasons.  Been looking at the daily photos I’ve been taking this month to mark my moustache, and it’s been somewhat alarming to see how blotchy my skin is.  I know it’s bad lighting, with a flash, *right* before going to be, so how shiny am I think I’m supposed to look, really, but still.

Actually, most of it’s probably just the picture flip thing.  I think I’ve talked about this before, that most people don’t like photos of themselves because their face is on backwards from what they see in the mirror a few times a day.    Maybe I’ll try that again, and you tell me which looks like me to you.

Camera 1

Camera 2

wow.  I bet the formatting on that’s going to be atrocious.

So yeah, ate a bunch of food, and then we decorated these cool little sugar skull things Beth bought and filled.  Pictures will be in the post once I figure out how to get my text where I want it.  Nope, I give up.  Went to the Farmer’s Market (Farmers?) at Nat Bailey stadium today, which was at least as big at the Summer market at Mole Hill, minus all the shitty “Oh hi, yes, lovely day, blessed to be living here, yes, management and board are causing us to move out, yeah, no sure, we love it” politics we used to have to deal with while downtown.

Bought some of the black bean homous from the bean guy (yay!) and the boys got actual real honest to goodness maple syrup on snow (okay, crushed ice stuff) on a stick.  It was extremely messy by the time our two monsters go through it, but they certainly seemed to enjoy it.  That reminds me, there should be a single maple leave thingie in a bag somewhere, ’cause I bought three of those, and Arwen and I only had one each.

Later, maybe.

Yeah, so last night was an odd experience for me.  Don’t know if it was caffeine overload, caffeine withdrawal, or good old fashioned physical exhaustion, but holy WOW was I uncomfortable in my own body right before crashing out to bed.  Just everything hurt, and itched, and was generally wound up.  I slept like a log last night, crashed on the couch for another hour this morning, and fell asleep in a chair at Beth’s (woke myself up with my own snoring, and then did some dishes).  Why is it always so much easier to do dishes at someone else’s house?

Here’s some sugar skulls.

"Despite what Amanda said, the icing was quite tasty" - Ripley, 8

I’ve got one in there around the 8 O’clock area.  I’m sure CakeWrecks looks forward to me following my bliss as an icing piper.

That’s it for tonight from me, gentle readers.  On the “but am I dying?” front, my finger seems to be getting better, though it still looks scary as heck.  I think the top and bottom layers have fused together again at the nailbed, and I try to ignore that I have a slightly frost-bitten feeling at the tip of my finger.

Give it six months, and it’ll be fine, I’m sure, but I might use crazy-glue as a temporary fill in the meantime (if I could figure out some way to do it, I’d probably include a zip-tie (zap strap? what’re those things called?)

My buddy who was in Malibu until about three weeks ago might be going back again next week, at least until we figure out how best to use him.  $Foundation purchased $Company1 back in Jan/Feb, and he doesn’t see where his Art Direction and storytelling is going to come in when it comes to a 2d-to-3d film conversion company.  I know the feeling, since I’m the IT manager, and don’t know where I fit in with a 90% Mac office right now.  Not my forte, y’know? (Didn’t I say that yesterday, too?)

Nice thing about visiting with Arwen’s family is that her sister’s partner is this very low-key, grounded, softspoken person who doesn’t seem the type, but has been talking about learning to spin, and bringing up bands (artists?) like eDIT and Burial.  I would LOVE to go to a club night somewhere playing something like that.  Maybe it’s more that I wish *I* could do that, so I instead want to help anyone else who’s interested in doing it.  Maybe it’s because I think if THEY can do it, that means maybe *I* could do it too.

Alsoplusand… if you want to hear the first overseas podcast we did since Jonny Vancouver went to China (of all the unmitigated GALL), please visit http://www.geckotemple.com/podcast and enjoy my utterly blown-out microphone (tip: don’t use Skype, and then record it if you’re also participating, ’cause I think it somehow managed to record me at DOUBLE the input, or something – you’ll see what I mean the second you hit play on episode 36).

Oh, and if you’re on Twitter, come follow me in my grumblings about BCTransit, and weather, and you kids get offa my lawn. @zenrender

Nightie night, folks.

If I type sixteen more words, I’ll hit an even thousand.  Cool huh? Yep.

November is a dark and dreary month here in Raincouver on Canada’s Wet Coast, and the first two days have certainly been, uh… wobbly.  Yesterday was dim and dark, but today was only foggy (like, Londonesque) and then suddenly freakishly nice out.  It’s waffling.  Nice breezes.  Good sweater weather.  Not weather that’s good for sweaters, but weather that calls for good sweaters.  Even the old Heathcliff Huxtable from crazy Aunt Flarmboza in Rangoon would be nice on days like today.  I’ve got a sweater drawer (that’s technically under the bed, but it’s a drawer-worth of stuff), and then I have this huge schwack of tee shirts, some of them are older than both my kids combined (okay, maybe not combined – both my kids in parallel concurrent streams of timespace).

Uh, what?

Yeah, work was just work today.  Not crack-under-the-pressure, screamin’-an’-peein’ work, just a day.  A day in which things that were supposed to happen didn’t, and some that weren’t supposed to happen, did, and generally nobody freaked out.  Just a day of slugging through to the other side of the clock, y’know?  Things was did, and stuff got doed.

The Movember moustache is already silvering up nicely.  Looks like I’ve been making out with a pixie.  Not saying I have or haven’t, just saying it’s what I look like.  Also old, and tired, and yellow.  Arm’s length camera with flash is alarmingly bright and shiny, without flash is jaundiced and eye-baggedy.  Moving on.

Okay, here’s something hip and new that’s media-based that all the cool kids are talking about: fonts

(ooh, I’m getting into design and now this is going to become a design blog, and have guest bloggers from Iceland who enjoy skydiving while screaming every seventeenth word from Brian Eno’s journal “A Year With Swollen Appendices,” while playing minimalist covers from the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds album in Swahili.)

Fonts are used for

(no, really, that actually sounds like fun, now that I think of it.  Maybe the Icelandic band “Mum” could get on that, and do a remix/relaunch of the Beach Boys vs. J Dilla “Pet Sounds: In the Key of Dee” album)

Fonts are…

(what?)

…you done?

(yeah, oh no, yeah, I’m good, go on, this is fascinacipaction going on over here, honestly)

FONTS. ARE…

(…)

used in ads all the time to convey stuff.  Fancy fonts (we’re rich, or you are), interesting (we’re hipsters, or you are), comic sans (Latin for “Funny – NOT!” from the late 80s, and should have been banned around the same time)

There’s a font that’s been bugging me lately though.  Reaching out and grabbing me right in the oculars, y’know?  Forcing me to take notice.  Y’know why?  ‘Cause there’s “Notice” right there in the poster.  That’s not entirely why though.  It’s the fact that the poster appears to say something other than the hip/hot/dangerous thing they’re trying to convey.

I’m talking about, of course, the new Spies on the Run (on the Sly?) show “Bum Notice.”  You don’t retire, you get bumed.

No wait.  “Burn Notice”  BuRn.  Burn.  Burn.  See what’s happening there?

Look:

Notice the Bum

So, I’m no fontophile (textualistico?) but this is what happens to my brain when I’m supposed to be busily not noticing things.  In transit, on transit, transiting, transmutating, whatever, and then stuff like this pops up and I wanna go “Hey, lookit THAT Elmer, that thar them there postar says ‘bum’ onnit!”

Sad.

So to avoid noticing bums, (and getting mine back in shape in the process) I’m getting a new bike.  Mine’s old and kinda falling apart.  Actually, that’s not true.  *I* am old and worried I’m falling apart, so I’m going to blame the $500 I spent six years ago, and run away to the circus with a new $800 instead.  I shall refer to this new bike as my midlife crisis mobile and get a private license plate for it that reads “Burn Notice” and people will think I’m insane.  My mom’s kicking in the bucks to make this happen, as a payback from the UN for putting her in harm’s way (it’s a long story, and it’s fascinating, and it’s freakin TRUE)

So yeah, new bike.  Getting a Kona Asphalt something.  Dew… thingie.  I have to go to the store and actually LOOK AT AND SIT ON one of them, but after that, I’m going to ask if I’m big enough that I’m going to run the risk of actually shattering the frame and landing on what is essentially a Burmese Tiger Pit before getting run over by a car or five.  Haha (hi mom!)

No seriously, I’m going to ask that, without laughing.  No space age polymers in my lower torso, thanks, I plan on using that later (maybe as a place to balance a bowl of popcorn, but still – needs it for laters).

Tomorrow’s another day.  Hope yours is, too.

Was listening to William Gibson’s latest in audio book format, which reminds me of how I accidentally listened to what amounted to a shuffled version of the latest Neal Stephenson tome.  Like, Track 1 from each disc in order, and then track 2 of each disc, but there were (I think) three parts to the book, and there were aliens and futuristic (and some very not-at-all SciFi bits, and they dealt with people who were exposed to the outside world every 10, 100, or 1,000 years.  With time jumping provided by my iPod being on crack.  Imagine 12 Monkeys meets Memento by way of Steven Wright read by Walter Cronkite on cold medicine.

No wonder I notice stuff while in transit.  Look at the soundtrack I choose.

Guy I used to work with suddenly started talking to me after about a year and a half of nothing.  Looks like he got hit by what we at EA used to call an “MSN IQ Test.”  Gotta give them credit for incorporating that INTO the bot itself. Remember kids, just ’cause someone you know sends you a link, doesn’t make it safe.

ViralBot
1:29 PM
hello!

Zen Render
1:41 PM
Hey man, how goes?

ViralBot
1:42 PM
i just took an iq quiz

Zen Render
1:42 PM
Okay… The one for the interview process at work there?

ViralBot
1:42 PM
Hi!
1:42 PM
yeah, I was brighter than I am

Zen Render
1:43 PM
I suspect that perhaps you’re a bot, or something, instead of actually Mr. (ex-coworker)

ViralBot
1:43 PM
you should look if u can do better than me, http://{badlink}

Zen Render
1:44 PM
Yeeeaaaah… Not so much. {ex-coworker}, sorry you got hit, man. Good luck.

ViralBot
1:44 PM
i bet you cant haha
1:45 PM
hey!

Zen Render
1:49 PM
Hello, Bot McBotterperson. Your programmer should have taught you that most people don’t say HI/Hey!/Hello three times in a five minute period.

ViralBot
1:49 PM
i just took an iqtest

Zen Render
1:51 PM
So did I. You failed yours, I appear to have passed mine.

ViralBot
1:51 PM
yeah, I was smarter than I am

Zen Render
1:52 PM
That would be a neat trick, to be smarter than you are. Maybe if you were smarter than you THOUGHT you were, that’d be something, but mostly, you’re just coming off like a broken record.

ViralBot
1:52 PM
you have to look if you can do better then me, http://{badlink}

Zen Render
1:53 PM
What’s ironic is that I know I can do better than you, by not clicking anything at all.

ViralBot
1:53 PM
im sure you cant haha

Zen Render
1:53 PM
Eliza, is that you?

ViralBot
1:53 PM
take it now while i take a shower!

Zen Render
1:55 PM
Let’s see if you know how to respond to anything a human would, shall we?
1:55 PM
Marco!

ViralBot
1:56 PM
BRB!   take that test!

Zen Render
1:56 PM
Eye zuzpekt yoo arr prrapps not Henglitch schpeeking…
2:05 PM
Aww, did you forget what you were doing, and erase yourself? Maybe {ex-coworker}’s shut down the account now.

Was watching a commercial tonight for Disney, and it opens with two Dumbo cart things flying through the city.  As they swing past us in that opening flight shot, there’s a lens flare, and…

…and I start thinking about lens flare, and I was thinking that Ripley and Tate don’t know what lens flare is, as they haven’t yet seen movies that uses gigantic lenses for the, for the glass of it, y’know?  Lens flare is an artifact of using glass lenses, and is something that’s become a cliche for computer-generated film folks, as it’s one of the first tools that people started playing with in Photoshop while making the pamphlets for their illegal rave, or their new Business Improvement Project, or whatever.

But it’s supposed to invoke the reality of an actual camera filming something, to make you think you’re watching film of Dumbo flying over the city.  That’s all well and fine for ME, ’cause I know what a camera looks like from the shoooter’s side, but do my kids know?  They have always known digital cameras, with framing your shot by looking at the little 1.5 inch screen on the back of the unit, and not looking through the lens, but only at what the result will be.

But with 3d movies and IMAX and jumbo televisions, I wonder if lens flare makes sense for kids’ films any more.  If I’m watching something like A Bug’s Life, and I’m pulled in.  When I watch Final Fantasy – Spirits Within, I’m in there, ’cause it’s so pretty, and the motion is so well done.  I’m good.  I’m there.

Lens flare though?  It puts a camera between me and the story.  I’m not IN the story, I’m watching a movie of the story.  I’m outside, at arm’s length, watching from my seat, not even looking through the lens.  I wonder why that is, (for me, at least).

Oddly, the opposite happened in Surf’s Up, when they rigged out the action in virtual space, and then put a real camera operator in a room, and captured his “filming” of the action, ’cause that’s what he was seeing through the eyepiece of the camera.  Somehow, that made us feel more like what we were seeing was immediate and real.  We were there, even though it was totally fake.  Our eyes know real camera work when we see it, I guess.

Neat.

Weird.  I just watched 8 minutes of utterly scripted material with Henry Winkler on Craig Ferguson.  I don’t even know why he was on as a guest, ’cause it was just a string of premise/joke non-stop the whole time.

Most people can make their eyes pop out, but can you make your GLASSES do it?

HelLO, and welcome to another episode of “I’ve Reflanged the Barkolounger” with your host, Rupture Q. Throngboggle PhD, PTSD, NPC.

Tonight to change thing up not at all, I’m going to tell you about some surfing I did.  One of those things I do all the time is try to figure out how to get things to connect to stuff they’re not already connected to, and this often leads me to wondering how I get popular communications device A into protractive retrogrunion B.

This evening, when I was in transit home, it occurred to me that my Blackberry has Bluetooth, and my Netbook has Bluetooth, and I’ve heard about people using their Blackberry to connect to the Internet when they’re in the middle of a field or something, so I thought to myself “Are we home yet?  Did I miss my stop?  Have my ears popped from coming out of the underground tube of Canada Line yet?  Florence and the Machine is better than you think it’s going to be in the first four bars of any song.  I wonder if I can get my Blackberry to use my Netbook’s wireless connection to get onto the ‘Net instead of the other way ’round?”

“Wait.  Dude.  What?”

“Yeah, no, really.  Remember the Nokia N-Gage, with the totally ludicrous phone functionality?  It had software that gave it a Bluetooth Internet Gateway thing, so it stands to reason that TCP/IP over the Bluetooth stack should be possible.  For free.  Also, I want pizza pops.  Red Eyed Treefrogs are the perfect fridge magnet shape when they’re all tucked in.”

“You’re right, I should try that when I get home tonight.  Or maybe Briggs would know.”

“Shh. Can’t talk.  Pizza pops.”

About 45 minutes of Googling, installing, reconfiguring, de-un-re-anti-con-platifguring, and just plain looking it up in field repair guides and stuff came up snake eyes.  Not even snake eyes.  No dice, no table, no casino, you’re voted off the island, and Pluto sends its regards.

Probably because any of the Blackberry devices that are worth having have built-in wifi, so trying to bridge via Bluetooth across another device would be extra steps, and would mean the BB would be dependent on another device in the immediate vicinity.  Goes against the grain.  Causes seizures in succulents.  May lead to thoughts of super-suede.

So, what else?

Stumbled across Percussion Lab tonight while looking for some information about JDilla and the mind-blowing Wonk Funk mix by KPER.  They have it, but they also have not only a whole schwack of other stuff that I’ve never heard of, but lots of other world-class DJs and set that might have been around for the last ten years, but I wouldn’t know it.

Sad that radio in Vancouver just doesn’t play anything like this.  Of course, if my ability to make anything I like at Body Shop be instantly removed from the shelves (they had a liquid soap that smelled EXACTLY like fresh-cut grass, and after I bought my second bottle, it was gone) applies to music, it’s probably good that I don’t hear much that I can stomach on radio.

I think this is the first shot I've had that actually show's the 'stache.

So yeah, ignore the double chin (I come by it honestly, I assure you) but take note of the little Lemmy going on down there.  That’s not a goatee, that’s my mo.  It’s getting hi-…

What the hell’s going on with my hair?  I know I’m shooting through my wide-angle lens at a 90°, so that’ll make weird “tall angle” shots, but still.  Th’hell?

When I had long hair, it was always kinda sticky-outy on the sides, and that’d make me insane, but this little “wisp of hair at the tip of my egg-shaped noggin” is a bit much.

Everybody but me got the H1N1 shot today.  Tate was asking where the “bugs” were in his arm.  I’m not sure whether or not he was asking where the shot was administered, or where the pre-defeated virus was in his body now.

I got nothing for ya today folks, so I’ll just say a couple really quick things:

• My half brother in law is back in hospital – think happy thoughts.
• My dad’s in Mexico so I ended up doing a long distance support call
  • Last month, I did the same thing (remote connect) for my mom, in Juba
  • So then I had to try to troubleshoot the video camera of my half-sister in-law, too.
    • While THAT was happening, the emergency number called me, Vancouver studio was “off the map”
• Had to zip into the office tonight to apply the technician proximity effect
  • Worked like a charm.  Everything was running again by the time I sat down at my desk.  Disaster averted.  Fire fought.  Action taken?  None.
• Looks like my buddy Nilo might be heading home to LA in the near future.
  • I’m going to miss him a lot, he’s been a good friend, and I don’t have many.
  • Not sure if that’s because I lose them, or just don’t make them very quickly.
• Ghost Whisperer is officially my guilty pleasure.  Stupid show, but entertaining, and Jay Mohr cracks me up.
• Jonny Vancouver called tonight with a “humline” request, and I had no idea, Arwen was pretty sure she recognized it.  Told Jon to phone Delilah, ’cause she’d know something like that.  She heard the Chocolate Song by Buddy Whatshisname and the Other Fellers (true band name) ONCE, and a year later sang it verbatim, complete with odd key changes in the third verse.
  • For Real.
    • I don’t have many friends, but stuff like that is why I love the few I have.
    • PS: Duncan got the song title together before anyone else.

This evening I was bombing around Hintertubes looking for clues about a new album by Burial, and was reminded of how I found this weird little bubble of sound in the first place.  Rather, I was reminded how I did NOT find this artist.  I didn’t find them on the radio, or a magazine, or even through a friend, it was something I faceplanted into during a dig in the databases of a record label I knew nothing about.

I think it took me about ten minutes to figure out whether Burial was the name of the song or the name of the band, ’cause there was so little information about this song (it was Archangel, from the album Untrue).  What was really fun was that the person who is Burial doesn’t do interviews, and doesn’t really talk about the process, and probably doesn’t perform live very often (and if he did, I dunno if it would work).

I tend to become loyal to labels, which is odd for me, considering how I’m not really crazy about large corporations when it comes to their treatment of their lesser-known musicians.  Maybe it’s the whole sellout effect.  As soon as they become big, I’m like “ew, too commercial” or something, maybe.

Or maybe I just happen to like this one artist, and don’t know what I’m talking about.

I’m wandering around trying to find a way to get me from A to B, and instead of having some slick way to get me to what I really wanna talk about, I came off slightly snobby and pulled some data (or lack thereof) outta my butt.

Sorry about that.

Ignore the stuff about Burial, I have no idea what I’m talking about.  Burial’s good though, and there *IS* a new album coming, so I’ll be checking that out when it drops.

Here’s what I wanted to say.

About a year ago, Duncan tipped me off to an hour-long mixed set called GlitchBitch, and I was floored.  I’d never heard music like this.  It was different, it was broken, it was funky, and it often had strings in it.  All good things to cram into one set.  After a little digging, I found a playlist, and found out that about half of this amazing set was by edIT.  More digging turned up the album Certified Air Raid Material, which is a stellar piece of audio.  Not quite “all killer, no filler,” but about 75% of the tracks blew the top of my head clean off.

Turned out it was something being called Glitch-Hop, and that edIT was a member of the GlitchMob in California.  Crazy.  That album set up camp on both my iPod and my Blackberry so I was never without those tracks.  Around the same time I started trying to find more of this stuff, and found the wonderfully bent mix “Wonk Funk” by Kper, which had some edIT on it, but also had some interview talky stuff, mentioning J-Dilla, who I’d never heard of.

It’s been about four months of listening to Wonk Funk while cycling and commuting, and I’m still not sick of it, but I can feel it *finally* starting to become a little too comfortable, so it’s time to start digging into this mix, and see what bubbles to the surface.

It’s like finding the food of a new country, which at first is shocking, but once you get used to the flavours, you find that there’s one spice that you don’t recognize, so you figure out what that was, or at least what it might be, and then you try to figure out whether or not you enjoy a lot of it, or just a little.  Then one day, you meet a person who knows all about that sorta food, and they whip up a whole meal of stuff you’ve never heard of, and it’s delicious.

But after a while, you start wondering what else that spice might be in, where else in the world that spice might be used, and that leads to the next step.

I think I stumbled across what’s moving me on to the next step tonight.

I’m pretty sure I’m moving backwards in the timeline on this musician, but I enjoy doing that.  Figuring out how they fit into the audio cosmos is part of what’s so enjoyable for me, ’cause it means I get to find out what “country” that spice is used in, and that’ll take me to wherever’s next.

Next stop: Flying Lotus.  Maybe not new to you, but certainly new to me.  There’s a few albums out, but what caught my ear first was the EP “Reset.”

I’m getting on that bus.  Whee!

Oh man, I just sneezed, and now I instantly have a headache AND feel like I have a cold.  Yaaaaay.

Wow, today was a hardcore Vancouver rainy crapfest.  Welcome to Winter.  Last week was Fall, this week is Winter.  The way Vancouver works though, next week will be Spring, after our obligatory three days of snow (which then becomes slush, and then we’re done).

The moustache for Movember is finally starting to look like a moustache, BUT it’s almost impossible to get a picture of it because a flash washes it out, and NOT using a flash makes everything in the room yellow/orange.  The best part is that it looks sorta dirty-reddish brown to the corners of my mouth, but then goes completely white.  It’s like uh, what, it’s like Hulk Hogan or a two-tone biker or something, but with more crewcut, and less arms.  I dunno.  You guys tell me when you go check out the photos.  While you’re there, make the stupid moustache have a point and donate a few bucks to the cause, mkay?

Today I stumbled across the Bizarroworld’s version of FailBlog -  Succeed Blog, and along with something I Tweeted earlier about someone starting a dance party that goes from zero to 300 in three minutes.  Now THAT is what you call infectious dancing.  There’s also some insane juggling linked from there.  I mean, I can juggle three balls, and can do it pretty fast, but this guy can do stuff I can’t even track (and this is coming from a guy who has literally juggled oranges on acid*.)  I couldn’t even move my hands in some of those configurations, much juggle at the same time.

I think the thing that drew me to SucceedBlog was that it is all about the most insane, and amazing, and beautiful and truly awe-inspiring moments.  Some of the pictures are just sorta cute, which you could find at ICanHasCheeseBurger, or CuteOverload, but some of the video is just a big ol’ glass of freshly-squozed awesome.  The sorta stuff that makes you glad to be alive, glad to have a heartbeat today, instead of the kinds of things that just make you glad you’re not whoever that is in the cringe-worthy photo.

So yeah, a good find.  I hope they keep going, along with their ilk.  At least for the rest of the Winter.

Also, I watched Human Traffic last night, which is a movie about uh… a bunch of kids having a lost weekend (one of many) and all the stupid stuff they do, but it’s sweet somehow.  Think Trainspotting, minus any blood or overdoses, and a happy ending for everyone.  Two Word Review: Doesn’t suck.

OMIGOD, we’re watching a few minutes of Demolition Man before the Daily Show starts, and we just watched the bit with Dennis Leary going on a tear about having your life controlled by the man, which is fun, but just off his right shoulder is a very young, silent (and puffy-haired?) Jack Black, who looks like he’s maaaaaybe 22… could that be right?

* Hi Mom!