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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

  • Happiness Is Canned Food

    Second breakfast, this morning, consisted of a can of Chef Boyardee ravioli. I had to give serious thought to actually buying the stuff, considering past experience, but I’m glad I did. It hit the spot rather nicely.

    I’ve got the place to myself, today, at least for a while. Not that this is much of a boon considering that I’m generally glued to my desk for the next twenty hours, but hey, I won’t turn down peace and quiet either. (Not, mind you, that my roomie or his progeny are horrible to have around!)

    Now that I’ve cranked out a music review, I’m going to take a stab at some creative writing for the next posting. Wish me luck, kids.

  • Puzzle

    In 1992, KGON still played new music by newer bands, and I was a board-op on the weekends. In among the Nirvana and Pearl Jam tracks was a snarky, upbeat little piece by a band you probably haven’t heard of. The band is Dada, and the song “Dizz Knee Land” is from their debut album, “Puzzle.” When KGON went all-classic-rock, the other board-op and I (whatever happened to Loren, anyway, I wonder?) raided the music library (with permission, mind you) for stuff they weren’t going to play anymore, and I picked up one of the copies of the album.

    I can’t really explain why I like this one so much. It’s not really my normal style, being a sort of laid back California sound, mostly low-key, and not exactly the cheeriest record ever made. There’s a haunting beauty to tracks like “Surround,” “Dorina” and “Here Today Gone Tomorrow,” as well as a quirky sense of humor that shows up in the lyrics of the aforementioned single as well as the sexy romp “Posters” and odd fare like “Dog” and “Timothy,” one of my favorite tracks.

    I’ve uploaded and linked the promo I made, so you can hear bits of four tracks: “Dizz Knee Land,” “Mary Sunshine Rain,” “Surround,” and “Who You Are.” And if you decide to pick up “Puzzle” and wonder what other albums to buy, I heartily recommend their self-titled 1998 album. The only other one of their I own is “American Highway Flower,” which I’m not completely sold on. Don’t let that stop you from trying it out yourself, mind you.

    (Say, what do you know? I got the entire review done in time for the 9:30 posting. Go, me!)

    Dada – Puzzle promo

  • First promo almost complete…

    Hey, did you know that you can still sign up to be a sponsor? See this post for the how-to. I’m at just under $100 total (official) sponsorships, so maybe you can be the one who pushes it over into triple-digit territory. C’mon, you know you wanna.

    In other news, the promo is 3/4 complete. If all goes well, I should have it uploaded by the next posting.

    In other other news, there’s enough light outside that I was able to turn off my indoor lights and thus give the webcam slightly better lighting to work with. Yay, and stuff.

  • Ogg in Cool Edit & Audition!

    Continuing on from my previous entry, I have another useful link for you: The Ogg Vorbis filter for Cool Edit Pro/2000 and their successor, Adobe’s Audition.

    I’m learning how to do multitrack editing in Cool Edit 2000. It’s not wholly intuitive, but then again I haven’t played with very many other multitrack audio editing systems either. I imagine I’ll get the hang of it soon enough. I’ve already placed my synthesized voice bits and the first music segment. Now I just need to drop in a few more snippets, get the crossfades right, mix it down to an MP3, upload the file, and… oh yeah, write up a review.

    Have I gotten myself in over my head? Maybe, but I look at it this way: I shouldn’t run out of Blogathon entries any time soon!

  • Talk To Me

    Part of my geeky little plan to do “album promos” involves installing some text-to-speech software. (What? You didn’t think I was going to use my own voice for this, did you?) I selected Sayz Me for my first trial. (If you want to try this at home, you’ll want to use this page for the “download text-to-speech components” part, ‘cause Sayz Me’s copy of the speech API and of the synthetic voices are hosted on the slowest server I’ve ever had the displeasure of trying to download from.)

    So far so good, though I’m experiencing major flashbacks to good old SAM back in the Apple II & Commodore 64 days…

  • One part of the day’s plan…

    One of the “grand overall theme” ideas I came up with for this year’s ‘thon was something along the lines of a rundown of my favorite albums. Of course, I couldn’t just write about them. No, if I was going to “do it right,” I’d also include promo clips.

    You know those ads on the radio promoting an upcoming concert, and they play bits of a few of that artist’s most recognizable songs? Yeah. That’s what I have in mind, pretty much.

    I’m going to do a few of them today. I don’t know how many, largely because I don’t know how much of a giant pain in the neck this is going to become. But… hey, who else in Blogathonland is going to give you this kind of experience, eh? (Answer: Nobody else is crazy enough to, and/or nobody else works in radio. Heh.)

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