A few days ago, I picked up this app: Animoog, which is made by the venerable Moog music (worth the 99c and is worth the 29.99 which it will go up to at the end of the month – it is currently sitting at #1 in sales in the app store). I spent a few hours playing with it.

Last night I made this in Garageband:

It is only 8 seconds long because I didn’t want to work with larger set until I figure out how everything works. It’s has five layers here: two of me playing the tabla (duet bwahaha), the ‘smart guitar’ (acoustic) playing the A minor chord, ‘smart bass’ Cello in A minor, and the drum machine doing a high hat and shaker (quiet, complex).

As I was working with this, I went downstairs to change the diapers around, noted the humidifier was full and fixed that. After that, I stood up and looked at the guitar, turned around and looked at all the instructional stuff relating to the guitar and wondered ‘why can’t I play the guitar?’

And then it made me wonder why I haven’t done a lot of things. Why haven’t I lost all the weight I want to lose? Why don’t I know more languages or read more books?

Going back to school made me realize I’m capable enough to do a lot of things and simply haven’t put the time in for anything else. I don’t want to roll into my forties being in the same situation… obviously, I’ll likely be an RT by then, but should that be my end goal forever and ever? No.

I’m not saying I’m going to succeed in doing anything above, but at least I’m mindful of what I’m capable of doing and the resources I have at my disposal.

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An update to the previous post about teaching Nora to read – she can read. No, not every single word or sentences but last night I gave her blocks with animal names on it that she’s never worked with before and I asked her to sound out the letters and figure out what the words are.

She did it. And she begged to keep going, but it was too close to bed time and she was getting a little feisty.

And that’s it: she was ready, but she needed to get over her mental block of relying solely on memorization. She can do it, and it’s clear she’s very proud of it, too.

Now the ‘problem’ is that this was she started all this by wanting learn her numbers, but now she has zero interest in that.

Next step is to bring up the chalkboard. When she gets on a roll, it’s like a torrent and the chalkboard is the fastest way to keep up with her.

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iOS 5.0 is very nice. I installed it on both my ipod and ipad. On the ipod, the feature set doesn’t bring the same sort of across the board improvement than what was brought to the ipad.

In sum, iOS5 has made me love my iPad even more (if that were possible) and convinced me to stick with android phones.

Steve Jobs said that the iPad was conceived before the iPhone, and I believe that the trickle down of ideas still continues. The iPad and the interface works so perfectly but on such a small device, android shines.

The Galaxy Nexus S is coming to Verizon, and it’ll likely be discounted by the time we’re able to upgrade, so that’s where I’m headed.

Every night when I start my workout, I start with this one. Somehow I missed this song on my first playthrough of the album (or I just wasn’t paying that much attention).

The one thing I appreciate of Rohff is his willingness to think outside of the box: he doesn’t seem to much care about appearances as his peers. He’s not a ‘baller’, he’s not ‘hard’, he just raps to have fun. See TDSI, which is probably the goofiest (but catchiest) song I’ve ever heard. The music video is even goofier.

Asked if the song was about drugs (since “Mary Jane” is a common nickname for marijuana, and marijuana is said to kill pain), Heartbreaker guitarist Mike Campbell said, “My take on it is it can be whatever you want it to be. A lot of people think it’s a drug reference, and if that’s what you want to think, it very well could be, but it could also just be a goodbye love song.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Jane’s_Last_Dance

Yep, weed.

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Usually in the morning I listen to some sort of hip-hop / rap / pop thing or listen to ESPN. Today I happened to listen to hard rock / alternative / metal and now I feel like I can run through a brick wall. Playlist included RatM’s “Sleep Now in the Fire”, Pearl Jam’s “Whipping”, and this:

Megadeth’s cover of Black Sabbath’s Paranoid. This was recorded once, in studio, with no practice or rehearsals. Nick, the drummer, wasn’t aware that the song was over and kept on drumming. Dave was yelling at him to stop and once he did (if you listen very carefully) you can hear him say “fuck. me. running.” It’s off of the “Hidden Treasures” record.

This one is my favorite thus far: R.E.C. Room, a mashup of R.E.C. Room (Inspectah Deck) and Girl (Beatles).

Warning: Language.

The mashup doesn’t use many proper Beatles tracks (other than Mighty Healthy with Ghostface Killah rapping right on top of Paul McCartney to great effect), instead relying on cover band renditions. Great care was taken not to do a mashup for the sake of doing a mashup – the combinations actually sound mostly natural. And the interview at the beginning and end of the track is from an out of print Beatles interview album.

Note: it might be somewhat hard to find this album now. Check your favorite torrent sites.

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Benthi by Melissa for the T4xi (Taxi 4) soundtrack. It’s French and Algerianin in the Rai style. The Algerian, Khaled, has an interesting background, which you can check out here.

Yes, there was a Taxi movie that had Jimmy Fallon and Queen Latifah – it was a remake of the 1998 Luc Besson film by the same name. The Hindi movie Dhoom was also a remake of this very same movie.

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Thanks to SXSW 2009, I found this song: T!Katz – 3AM (they have that Black Eyed Peas vibe, don’t they?).

Enjoy.

Most recently, as I was flipping through music in the car, she heard the first few notes of a song and requested to leave it on. The song was “Chinna Chinna Poove” by K.J. Yesudas, sung in Tamil. This song is older than I am.

K.J. Yesudas is probably the greatest singer ever. He’s sung something north of 40,000 songs in sixteen languages. He’s an admirer of Sree Narayana Guru; although he is a Christian, he’s followed Guru’s teachings and has sung religious devotional music for Christians, Hindus and Muslims. His voice has been failing him as of late, but one of his sons has promise.

His wikipedia article is here.

He was chased out of the Hindi movie singing business because it was feared he’d take over the industry. He did sing a few Hindi film songs here and there, and when he did they were generally a bigger deal than the movies themselves – I’m thinking specifically of ‘O Bhavre’ in the movie Daud. I have it on cassette, it’s an amazing song.

Her liking of my tastes pleases me to no end. She’s taken a shine to dancing to the Beatles, but like swing, isn’t too fond of listening while in the car. Oh, and as for this particular song, she said “No daddy, leave it on! Is pretty.”

Grim Fandango won several awards, but never achieved commercial success. This in turn signaled the death knell for the adventure gaming genre. Thanks to the Nintendo DS and the Wii, games like Professor Layton, Hotel Dusk, and StrongBad:CG4AP have achieved moderate success a decade later.

I won’t lie – I bought a Wii with the notion that maybe someday LucasArts will port their old library to the Wii; Telltale Games has already done the aforementioned StrongBad and also Sam and Max, Season 1 – though, the latter isn’t actually related to the original S&M. But that would require LucasArts to stop focusing on milking the Star Wars franchise, right?

Back to the track at hand, the whole soundtrack is beautifully orchestrated as is quite memorable, consisting of a mix of big band, swing, and mexican influenced genres. Enjoy.

I also think the Cardinals can roll over the Eagles if they look past this game. However, the Eagles snuck into the playoffs by the slimmest of margins, so I can’t imagine that they think they can look past anyone. Then again, they are the Eagles. And yet, these Eagles ran the ball 28 times even though it averaged only 2.1 yards. So, what the hell do I know?

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The best music, in my mind, is indian music remixed. Mind you, this is a personal preference. Bollywood music hasn’t really progressed past the 90s pop sound (the last time pop sounded really good); remixing in India is huge because remixed music has such a prominent place in big budget titles (Bollywood produces more movies than anyone in the world… on average, 2 releases a week).

Without further ado, Ek Baar Aaja remixed by Aksar, from the movie Jhalak.

You don’t need to understand hindi to like this song. They repeat the same lyrics over and over (“let me see you, come here for once”). The song takes place in a night club. India is a sexually repressed country (can a country of one billion people be sexually repressed?) so the lyrics are very sanitized.

The original song ensemble was fairly derivative tripe. Ever since Dil To Pagal Hai, all nightclub scenes seem to be required to have an industrial sound (think Nine Inch Nails set to pop). Someone took this remix and spliced it into the original video, and it improved the whole scene by leaps and bounds.