LCD Sound System - Sound of Silver

I discovered this record after surfing myspace profiles for a couple hours. I began to hear some of these tracks at the local clubs. It wasn't "the jam," people weren't spinning on the floor. I bet no one had even rendered a first drop drop of sweat while this was playing. Thats funny. Who the hell says your time at a club can be measured by how long it takes you to sweat. I just think thats bizarre.

Anyhow, I really like two songs on this record: Someone Great and All My Friends. To my luck the tracks are sequential ones. All My Friends was the first track that stuck to me because it reminded me of The Who's Baba O'Riley(you can listen to it here). LCDS's Wiki classifies them as "dance punk," I don't entirely agree with that but they are definitely something you can consider dancing to and I wouldn't be surprised if these tracks appeared on the next coming of age film or some hip new TV show. I can see how some can see that as degrading - not intentional. All My Friends has depth in some ways, at least a personal one to me.

It's not entirely clear to me what is on the cover art. If anyone knows, please share below.

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LCD Sound System - Sound of Silver

The Pope has a pretty badass background.

Forwarded from reddit.com

16 weeks of not smoking.

Check out this Tobacco Free Florida site. It's helping spread awareness. There's a YouTube video in there with some scary facts, check it out.

For shits and giggles I decided to count one more time and today marks 16 weeks. Thats 112 days. Imagine I would have smoked on average 5 cigarettes a day. That would add up to 560 cigarettes since I've quit. I would have needed to buy 28 packs to fulfill this quantity. At an average of $4 a pack, I have thus far saved $112.

More importantly, they say that each cigarette that you smoke is an hour of your life that you have removed. I'm not sure how truthful that is, but if its correct that means I have saved 560 hours. Thats 23 days of my life.

No matter how much money I make or save, I can never make up time. If the correlation is each cigarette is one minute, then thats 560 minutes which is almost 9.5 hours. Thats still a good chunk of time.

This is extremely encouraging. My weight has not suffered either. They say you eat more. I still weigh the same. Maybe the working out ha to do with it. Anyhow, this is just a journal entry for myself. A reminder.

The Viagra from Nicaragua

My best friend is Nicaraguan and he decided to visit his dad whom he hadn't seen in many many years. Now that he's a grown man I guess his dad wanted to show him what being a man was all about. I leave this to you the viewer... :D

Albero

I kinda just crashed into this name this morning (over a Google Talk status from an undisclosed buddy). I Google'd the name and found a bunch of cool stuff. Check these out.

• Persia
• Nice snow capped tree
• Interesting award-winning Italian movie
• Albero sounds like arbol -- I guess it's a tree thing. ;-)

Who likes trees? Raise your hand!

Earth Hour

On March 29th at 8PM turn your lights off for one whole hour. Millions of people around the world will do the same to make a statement about climate change and the environment.

www.earthhour.org

Saturday's Top 10

Behold, Saturday and the first weekend of Spring. Have an umbrella. Although when May comes around make sure to be outside for the first shower. My mom always said this brings good luck!

The list, and btw readers, this is the order that I find them, not a personal ranking system. This time I got carried away past 10 -- consider it making up for lack of attention to the blog and loss of frequency in posting.

1. Mike Giant "Kundalini" (Boobs, Serpents, the Written Word all in Sharpie)
2. Their's still hope for you old schoolers. Save Polaroid.
3. I would like a new phone.
4. I would like a point and click new camera or a medium format DSLR.
5. Am I the only person who thinks its weird to take your laptop to a bar?
6. Eating before and after excercise.
   
7. Cool site with Hubble space photos and here's a large cat's eye nebula photo.
   
8. Custom Moleskins!
9. First person to buy me this belt gets upgraded to thoughtful friend status.
10. Pretty girls.
11. A collection of last suppers.
12. What's amazing is that every comment on this page is that of priase. I found it to be rather gross. I can however see how it's interesting to behave this way and have the ability to do so at this age without your family getting in the way I mean WTF!
13. First shots of Snake Eyes on the upcoming GI Joe flick.

Crystal Castles

For some this is the new cutting-edge "thrash" dance piece. I call it the next background music applicable for several scenarios, film, or something to bob your head and relax - maybe with some lunch - maybe while you balance your checkbook or drive early in the morning with no desire to put your brain past first gear. Oh yeah, they're Toronto based for those of you who think thats important.

I have to mention their execution in 8-bit Atari/Nintendo sounds. Yeah they're in here. Run away if this brings you to regurgitation. Some people have hate and some people have a great fondness for the classic sound that once upon a time made days go faster and more enjoyable. The former however feel it bastardizes the 8-bit days or just dont' care. I can dig it. The only other performer that has implemented this where I enjoyed it I think was Beck in some bootleg album he has which maybe I'll post about later on (especially if anyone asks for it).

My favorite song in here and that keeps me listening is called "Magic Spells." It reminds me of Boards of Canada for some reason. I'd love to hear about it if anyone agrees with this correlation.

Enjoy this.

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Crystal Castles

Boris - Smile

First of all, I really enjoy this band. Most of their work, maybe all of it. I'm sure of that actually.

Boris is a Japanese band that sings in Japanese and plays in badass. Their portfolio of work contains records that can happily put me to sleep or build up something more visceral...(see: Akuma No Uta, Dronevil, Mabuta No Ura). In the same light they can wake me up and make me with their encouraging methods in particular as from their stoner metal album Heavy Rocks.

Smile is a little different with more vocals and more non-traditional sounds. It almost pushes them towards something smelling like what a noobish alternative metal band would want to do. It's almost like they're on the edge. They almost lost me on a few tracks to be honest. Their's an element of rawness from some of those other records I mentioned that is missing. At the same time theirs a distinct degree of honesty in the music for this one and I give them credit for that. To me this means they have balls.

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Boris - Smile

The New Area-51 Brings More Than New Guts. It eats Blackbirds!

Yesterday, Alienware launched a new Area-51 desktop gaming rig with a whole new motherboard, graphics card, and DDR3 memory. Their homepage calls out "kicking the competition's teeth in since '98."

What I found particularly interesting for this launch was more than the usual. Their homepage banner shows their classic desktop being embraced by a creature from Crysis. If you look even c l o s e r, you can see the creature is holding what it appears to be a black bird.

This is obviously a jab at HP's Blackbird 002 gaming system. I wonder how many people have seen this thus far. I guess HP probably hasn't said a bleep or reacted to not give Alienware any more steam for this launch. HP has never really been a contender in the gaming market. Since their acquisition of VoodooPC they have made a good effort to compete in the gaming market but just how long will their investment continue to swim against the current? For such a large organism of a corporation it's funny to see how slow to market in keeping up with industry technology.

The heavier you machine is, the easier it sinks. It seems HP's acquisition of VoodooPC has made the symbiosis a 'heavier' competitor. I think HP should stick to competing with mainstream brands.

Kudos for Alienware for having some sort of creative competitiveness and keeping the industry interesting.

Alienware Introduces ATI CrossFireX Technology

Yesterday ATI released it's driver enabling CrossFireX technology. With CrossFireX enabled graphics your system can have more than 2 GPUs enabled to power the graphics on your screen for PC gaming or any graphics dependent software. Thats dual ati video cards with dual graphics processing units on each card. 2 + 2 = 4 !

Previously ATI had what was called CrossFire (without the X) where you could have up to two GPUs working in tandem. CrossFireX elevates that to three or even four GPUs which is exactly what Alienware is selling shown on the picture above. The technology is featured on their Area-51 ALX CFX gaming desktop which has all the attributes of any gamer's dream system like:

• liquid cooling
  
• overclocked Intel Core 2 Extreme CPU (to 4.0GHz!)
• 45nm Penryn class processor
  
• overclockable DDR3 memory - Patriot brand
  
• built-in wireless-N technology
• up to 4x GPUs and 2GB of GDDR3 graphics memory
• Solid State Drives in RAID0
• Dual eSata ports
• 1000 Watt power supply
  

It also carries a bunch of Alienware exclusive goodies like AlienFX system lighting technology, card keeper technology to protect the graphics cards, excellent internal wire management, their typical predator chassis (which needs a serious upgrade, sorry Alienware). It's also packaged very safely and nicely with extra stuff like a special black leather binder, the world's best mousepad, a mesh cap, key chain, and the usual new PC junk. This of course is for the fancy tuxedo gamer.

Priced at $5,149 you're really paying for the special brand, support, warranty, build quality and bragging rights. It's also really nice to see a bloatware free system which really sets Alienware apart from most PC manufacturers that just pack all the software they can from third parties. On the other hand, Alienware has some very unique software packages that don't consume performance-hurting resources like AlienGUIse which changes the skin of your desktop and overall theme of the OS with several options. There's also Alien Command center which can control your AlienFX and other power-related options. An equivalent performing PC can be self-built at around $3K (plus shipping) but of course it would be packaged in a regular clone case and you would be on your own when it comes to reliability, support, and some possible limitations on how far your knowledge of building and integrating a system goes. Good luck!

Regardless, I would love to get my hands on one of these, with that much processing and graphics power I bet you wouldn't need an upgrade for at least 3 years to play the latest games and possibly 8 years before you need to consider purchasing some upgrades. Thats a lot of deathmatches and raids! For now, considering it's configuration, it must indeed be the fastest gaming PC money can buy.