TimsBlog

I’ve been reading Fred Wilson’s blog for a few months. Hes a venture capitalist living in New York city. Talks about a lot of things. Does a podcast with his wife and 3 kids where they pick a song from their ipod playlist to play and they ramble a bit to. This is what a popular blog should be. Or at least from my computer tech news searching point of view it works good.

He was spending Christmas in Thailand when I was there last month. It was interesting to see how someone with his income does when they travel. Mostly the way I would it was modest. For on his flight he was watching the BBC version of the office and using the internet. I got stranded for 3 days and stuck on a plane for 10 hours.

Just added about 60 photos from my trip home from Bangkok. You can Check them out at Flickr

I got snowed in at Japan. I have lots to post. Give me a day or two to settle in and write it all up.

I ran across a digital flyer for this event online. I’m up for any “bring you own booze” and chair film gathering. Sounds like i might have something to do in St Louis for a change when I get back. Its in my old hood South Tower Grove.

Webpage for Tortured Films

“Get on your dancing shoes..you little swine”

Arctic Monkeys is a great way to start off the 2006 music releases. It rocks, its raw, and people are going apeshit for them. Their album is releasing on Jan 26rd in Europe and Febuary 26th in the USA. After listening to an advanced copy and reading that they were selling out US and British shows I now will be bold and say you will be hearing more things about his band very soon. Tickets for a 7 British Pound ($12.30) sold out show were going on ebay for over a hundred a piece.

Rocking rifs and unique melody messed up with youth driven lyrics. I hate to even compare them to another band, but they are like what the White Stripe’s might have been if they were British and a four piece band. That might be a bad example as far as comparing them to another band but they have the same raw and new feel that the White Stripes had. These boys are tight, loud and soothing my fever with the only cure……..more cowbell.

Watch their two videos here I prefer “I bet you look good on the dance floor”

This continued flux of new music releases has fueled me to start a new hobby. When I get settled in St Louis I’m going to start work on a music review site. I find that I’ve been getting my hands on advanced copies of music for a few years now. Only the last few months I’ve been excited by the new music. I want to create a site that reviews new music releases. (alternative/college ones at least) Throwing my hand in the pot and giving mainstream affiliate marketing a go. Between itunes and Amazon I should be able to link to album purchase and make a commission. You’d be amazed at the numbers of people finding my album review on this blog alone. I might throw a little Google ad sense in the sidebar and see how that goes. Pitchforkmedia.com is a well oiled model of what I want to build. I would like the site to have the feel of someone that knows someone that receives press kits for bands. Like a site where you can feel like your getting a slight head start or “real time” view of the pulse of new music. If the site doesn’t generate enough money to self sustain itself then it will just be a cool place to get caught up on cool music.

Pandora is a site that been around a bit. I think I checked them out about a year ago but didn’t pay it much attention since I was on dial up at the time.

Pandora is a great way to find new bands similar to bands you already like. It asks you to enter a band or song name then it will play that song or band. Then the second song is a band that you may or may not know. It continues to play songs with similar style.

The people behind this site offer it for free. They also have a no add version thats really cheap. I forget how cheap but like $3 a month. They hire about 40 people to analyze each song taking up to 40 minutes a song. Then it is filed to the data for future cross referring.

I check it out with different types of bands. To my suprise they all came back with bands that were in the same style asthe bands I started with. This is basically not only a way to find new music, but a way to have your own personal internet radio station accessible from anywhere. Would be great for partys.

Streams at an amazing 128 bit rate

Check out Pandora

I was expecting a prank of some sort. Of course it was just good marketing instead. Way to go again Target.

I’m leaving Bangkok on Saturday Morning at 6am. I’m working on getting a Airport Hotel room for Friday. Its peak season and I’m have a little trouble finding one. I need to get to the airport at 3am to check in and all that. My office closes at 7pm so I really need a place to stay for about 9 hours.

I’ve also got a bit of an infection that started about Friday last week. I’m nursing that as best I can since I’d like to fly healthy. Its just making my last minute stuff I have to do in Bangkok a bit harder.

I love tutorials. They are the poor mans college. A must for anyone under the college age that loves to learn. I ran across Pixel2life.com on Digg. Wow what a site. They cover more programs than I’ve ever seen on one site. They even cover Java, Perl, PHP, HTML, CSS and C++. I do photoshop tutorials on a regular basis. They not only turn you on to new ways to get that desired effect, but also help in showing you around a program that can be overwhelming with features and functions. Practice Practice Practice. I choose a tutorial tonight that showed you how to make a pen in photoshop. Now I didn’t use one new feature in photoshop that I had not used 1000 times before. It did give me a bit of practice on working faster thats for sure. I’d say it took me about an hour to do. It could have taken maybe 45 minutes if I had two monitors or that 30” LCD since there was a lot of flipping back and for ther between the web browser (the tutorial page) and photoshop. I would have loved to just looked left to the tutorial and right to photoshop to follow the steps hehe. I need to settle done. Soon I’ll have more workspace. Check out Pixel2life.com

The Pen I made with tonight

List of the programs Pixel2life.com has tutorials for:

3D Studio Max
Adobe After Effects
Adobe Audition
Adobe Photoshop
ASP Coding
AutoCAD
Blender 3D
BodyPaint 3D
Bryce
C++ General
CGI Coding
Cinema 4D
ColdFusion
Corel Painter
CorelDraw and Corel PhotoPaint
CSS Stylesheets
Delphi
DreamWeaver
Fireworks
FreeHand
FruityLoops
General Website Development
Gimp
GoLive
HTML Tips and Tricks
Illustrator
Image Ready
InDesign
Java Development
JavaScript
Lightwave 3D
Macromedia Director
Macromedia Flash
Maya 3D
Microsoft Access
Microsoft Excel
Microsoft FrontPage
Microsoft Outlook
Microsoft PowerPoint
Microsoft Publisher
Microsoft Word
PageMaker
Paint Shop Pro
Perl
PHP Coding
Poser
Premiere and Premiere Pro
Rhino 3D
Sound Forge
Swift 3D
SWiSH
Terragen
Visual Basic
Visual C++

I saved the shoping cart at zipzoomfly.com. Heres what I’m buying.

CPU - AMD Athlon 64 bit 3700 (San Diego)

Total 2GB RAM - Patriot PC3200 two 1GB sticks

Motherboard – Epox EP-9NPA

Video Card - eVGA GeForce 7800 GT PCI express 256MB DDR3 dual DVI-D out/HDTV out

Power Supply - Logisys 550W

Cooler/Heatsink – Thermaltake Blue Orb II

Total came to $860. Thats a bit more than I wanted to spend. I was up to $550 before I found out more news today. I found out today the video card I planed on buying wouldn’t work. The 30″ Dell needs dual DVI-D connections coming from the video card. Leaving me with no other option but to buy a top of the line graphics card. Gaming should be fast and smooth, but I’ve never and would never spend $300 on a video card just for games.

The price increased again when I found out that the video card consumes more power. So I had to get a new power supply. As long as I’m getting hit with $100 here and $50 there I might as well get some new Ram right?.

So the only thing I’m salvaging off the old PC is the two hard drives, the DVD burner, and the case. Everything said and done I guess I’m due. I have not had a new PC in about 2 years. The one I’m running now is about shot. I had to turn down my CPU to half speed due to age and this Tropical heat here in Thailand. So I will be noticing a huge increase in performance for sure.

—————————–UPDATE:————————————

zipzoomfly seemed to have a problem with me ording it online from Bangkok. They “do not accept trasactions outside the US and Canada” Even with a US credit card and shipping to a US address. I guess they logged my Bangkok IP address when I was online making the order. I had to get it all from Newegg.com. Should make it to My house in STL a few days before me. I’m happy

“Nikon Corporation has made the decision to focus management resources on digital cameras in place of film cameras “ said in a press release from Nikon UK today. Not just focus on the digital, but they are not making anymore body’s or lenses for film cameras and when stock runs out thats it. So after market company’s have a chance to step up to fill the gap. Is this going to be the trend for all major camera company’s? I bet it is. I’m not shocked at all. Its just a bit of reality for me that I wasn’t properly prepared for.

When I worked for a newspaper in St Louis I noticed the photographers were using crude digital cameras even back in 96′. Mind you you don’t need to take a great picture to print it in the newspaper. Its only 300 DPI printing anyways and the dots bleed something awful. Digital just makes sense even back in 96′ its cheaper and quicker. In todays age its totally great to point shoot, post edit on a laptop, and then send over the internet to your boss. Not to mention you can instantly know if you got the shot. No taking photos and waiting in a dark room to see if you got what you wanted.

There will always be an artistic side to film photograph. There are many darkroom tricks that can be done on a computer, but will not have the warm feeling that it would have if done by “hand”

Welcome to the 21 century. Now if they will only stop making CD’s. Whens that press release coming out.

the Nikon Press Release

I always like a good Celeb Sex tape. This one i have not seen yet. Call me a pervor mean, but i love finding out that someone in the public eye is stupid enough to make a sex tape. I mean if you do destroy right afterwards. Unless you think you migh need it to pay bills in the near future. I still needto find the Tom Sizemore one. I listened to audio of it on the howard Stern show and he must have been high. he was talking al sorts of crazy shit.

Wait I just found out Bam Margera’s got one too. What a Jackass. Jen is riding reverse cowgirl no less. Ride ‘em

I was one of those Pirate Windows Os users that never ran updates like a fool. I never ran into problems over the few years of unpatched useage. Anti Virus AVG fre version (not Norton since Norton is imposiable to remove) kept me safe enough
Now there is a new threat involing WMF (windows Meta File) Basicly (I’m no expert) it means that if an image loads on your browser it can load a backdoor virus without you even clicking a link. It affects every Windows OS. All you have to do is be on the wrong webpage at the wrong time and your in trouble.

If you run a legit copy of Windows then please update your patches. If you run a pirate copy of Windows I can suggest you goto this site WinDizUpdates. You fire up Firefox, then goto WinDizUpdates and it will guide to installing windows updates without the windows verification check that the MS site does.

A MUST FIX SITUATION!

I downloaded Becks new album Guerolito a few weeks ago. It was just released about a month ago. Its a remix of his Guero which I gave a listen to back in March of 2005. Beck hits me the same way every time. It takes me about 4 listens to get into. This album was no different. Nicely done and there is one song on the album that has such a modern and retro 80’s feel at the same time. With its slow synthesizer and slow rhythm of vocals.

I can not say I’m a big Beck fan. I can say I must have a soft spot in my heart for weird white boys like Beck and the Beastie Boys.

“Mising” by Beck

I prayed heaven today
Would bring its hammer down on me
And pound you out of my head
I can’t think with you in it

I had to bit torrent his first show since I can not buy and subscribe to sirius in this part of the world. (wink and poop eating grin) I got the show here Stern Torrents.

I just started listening to the show it got put up sometime around 6pm on the 9th. Thats about 5 hours later than normal but its ok as long as I can wake up and listen the next day its all fine.

Well i knew they were going on sale Jan 5^th. I waited a few days to check prices. So I head over to pricewatch.com today. One store listing it at $2500. Yeah so that sent my stomach acid stirring. I did froogle search and got same thing. One store around $2480 this time. Then I really got worried. I’m thinking to myself this better be price gouging. The prices were listed on Jan 6^th so they must be high listing prices to suck some extra cash? Right?. I checked bizrate.com and found one for $2120. so this is about $300 more than I expected. I still must have one. If the specs were the same as the apple one I’d just buy the apple since the dell is $2120 and the apples about $2500. Since the spec are not the same and the dell is better I have to stay with function over fashion. Yes the apple has firewire and the dell does not. The dell does have a 9 slot memory card reader which I’d use more than the firewire anyways.

You can see them at flickr

I’ll be spending a few days near Hau Hin at a friends. I’ll finally get to see the ocean. New Years was fun. I picked up a friend (the same friend I mentioned I’ll be visiting) at the Airport on New Year Eve. It was a busy night is Bangkok. Craziness all over. All the Taxis were charging double price. When you said “ah thats crazy, thats too much” they would say (more or less) “come on its New Years”

They flooded the floor of a go go bar we stooped at with these Styrofoam balls. It was crazy. After we found a seat and got drinks this Aussie guy comes up (with a look of anger) screaming about his fucking camera. He was sitting in our seats before us. We stood up to let him look in the seat. I garbed my beer for a crude weapon. Then he starts searching the floor under all that Styrofoam. I used my feet to feel for it and found it in one second. He cooled down ASAP. Then apologized and bought me a beer. Guy must have been new or a fool. I take nothing out with me when I hit the street. It all stays in my pocket and I keep my mind on it the whole time. I’m not losing a $400 camera or worse my wallet. I see people with backpacks and shit all the time and I think “target”. I’m not getting cut with a kitchen knife over a backpack full of shit. Now I’m not even trying to paint Bangkok as violent. Its not. You have a better chance at getting hit by a car than getting robbed. As long as you don’t get drunk and start a fight you’ll be fine. If you happen to start a fight with a Thai you will be in for a world of shit. Thai’s tend to not stop kicking the shit out of you till you are close to not breathing. Its so dangerous to be the “drink and fight” or “pint and a fight” type person. In fact if I was with a close friend and he got into a fight with a Thai, then hes on his own. Sounds fucked up but I’m not going to die defending a drunken fight here.

Oh well enough about craziness. I’m going to finish up my laundry and get packed for my Beach trip. I will have photos to post when I get back.