Deerhoof, Spinto Band

Listening to Deerhoof at certain times with certain people in certain places can be completely surreal. I felt like I was in a Dali painting.

The Art Brut/We Are Scientists show this saturday night is going to have the Spinto Band opening for them. Is it strange that I’m beginning to like the opener more than the headliners? Not that I don’t love Art Brut or We Are Scientists, but I just can’t get enough of the Spinto Band. Go out and listen to some of their CD, Nice and Nicely Done, they might just be your new favorite band.

I’ve also come up with a few designs for the LP Club. Check ‘em out.

LP Club, Moo, TVotR

I am now the founder and president of the LP Club at my school, Palisades Charter High School, a club which has the sole purpose of vinyl appreciation. Expect links in the near future.

Moo is awesome. 10 free business cards made out of your Flickr pictures if you’re a pro user (which I am). How can that possibly be beat? They’re still in the process of being printed at the time of this post.

TV on the Radio on Friday at Amoeba. TV on the Radio on Sunday at the Hollywood Bowl.

Style

I love how Tyrone Biggums‘ fashion has gone into style.

Case in point: Urban Outfitters on 3rd Street, downstairs.

Not that I have anything against UO, I just happen to be a bit biased towards the independent companies (American Apparel for shirts, Threadless and Oddica for designs).

Oink.me.uk

I am now part of the elite class of… oinkers? Oink.me.uk is a crazy exclusive bittorrent community. Luckily I found some very nice people to invite me in. Can you imagine downloading that new album you can’t find anywhere else on the net 2 weeks before it comes out? How about downloading it in less than 2 minutes? Now you may see the advantages of a community like this.

There has to be a catch though, right?

Of course there is, but it’s simply common courtesy as bittorrent goes, meaning you must have a fair share ratio (meaning you upload at least half as much as you download). But I haven’t found it to be an issue yet.

Damn. Life is sweet…

Update: Please don’t ask for invites, I only recieve them once I become a power user (upload 10 GB, be a member for 2 weeks, and keep a ratio of at least 1.05). I’ll announce when I become a power user on this blog, and I’ll be happy to invite people as long as they send me some kind of proof that they won’t cheat and that they’ll maintain a good ratio.

Movies, iTunes, iPod

Movies to see:
Science of Sleep
Idiocracy

The recent update to Apple’s iTunes is a huge improvement, despite the occasional bugs, especially on the iPod front. It not only is much more visually rich and attractive, but the syncing is significantly easier to use, not to mention intuitive.

I don’t know about the rest of the population, but a 60 GB iPod simply is not sufficient for an 86.68 GB song collection, and this has been very limiting. I use to manually manage my songs and videos, which was a huge pain if anyone’s ever tried it. Essentially, it entailed dragging every single file I wanted to be on the iPod from the Library to the iPod Library. It worked fine for a while, but then it started to become annoying when I wanted to change the tags for some of the songs or videos, and noticed that, since the computer and iPod don’t sync, I’d have to do the same change twice, once on the computer and once on the iPod. An incredible waste of time to say the least.

However, I recently had an epiphany. I realized that if I put all the music and video I wanted on my iPod into a playlist on my computer, I could have iTunes simply sync that playlist every time I connected. This meant that I could make sure everything was up to date (tags, play count syncing, etc.) on both my iPod and computer. Not only that but now if I want to add a new CD to my iPod all I have to do is drag it to the “Master” playlist, and the next time I hook up my iPod, it’ll be synced automatically.

Now I know this may seem like a very obvious solution, but if I can help just one more troubled soul out there, I could go to sleep proud that I made a difference in the world, albeit a very superficial one.

On games and movies for the iPod:

I’ve just bought Vortex on the iTunes Music Store (they finally dropped the ‘Music’ after about a year of offering TV shows in addition to songs) after adoring Zuma while bored on the bus. Both of these are games designed specifically for use on only the iPod 5th generation (i.e. video enabled), and they are gorgeous. The graphics are great, the gameplay is fantastic, and the fact that you can save your progress was a stroke of genius on the designer’s part. So if you have a video iPod, consider shelling out the $4.99 for Vortex or Zuma (the only ones I can vouch for as amazing).

I’ve also just bought my first movie from the iTunes Store, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. As mentioned in the Stevenote on Tuesday, all video on the iTunes Store will be 4 times the size of what was previously offered, and on my 17 inch monitor, it doesn’t look half bad, but on the iPod it looks fantastic. I’ve downloaded my share of movies and converted them to iPod format, but none ever looked as good as this did.

Sidenote: Saw The Black Keys at Amoeba (got a pin and a poster, which I ripped off the wall and had them sign), then Ima Robot at Safari Sam’s on Tuesday (another poster, no signage though). New club, pretty nice, but no air conditioning. What were these people thinking when they built this place? Pictures will be posted as soon as disposable camera film is developed.