This is awesome!
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Last summer (‘09) I went to a music festival in Nanaimo called the Big Easy mainly to see my favourite band Thrice. It was great to see them perform in my neck of the woods and I really hope they come back some time soon.
I was even lucky enough to find a lost media pass dropped by some unassuming journalist which let me get back stage! I met and talked with Teppei from Thrice. It was one of my few star-struck moments.
Thrice being awesome wasn’t a surprise. What was a surprise was finding other good bands at this festival. My big find was a band by the name of Open, Parachute!. The were a local band from Nanaimo and Victoria who disbanded a while back and were brought back together as all of their spin-off projects were all playing at this festival too. I’d never heard of them but I was thoroughly blown away.
Over the past year, they have stayed one of my most listened-to bands. I thought it would be nice to share their music and some of the photos I’d taken of them at the festival. Enjoy.
Two weeks ago (April 30th) marked the 35th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. This was a war fought between communist North Vietnam and South Vietnam with the United States being the main supporter of the south.
The war is well known to have had a huge death toll: between 3-4 million Vietnamese, 1.5-2 million Laotians and Cambodians, 58 159 U.S. soldiers.
Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America - not on the battlefields of Vietnam.
-Marshall McLuhan, 1975
There have been countless movies on the subject, including such well known films as: Apocalypse Now, Platoon, The Deer Hunter, and Full Metal Jacket to name a few.
I hope you enjoy (in the least insulting way) this photo-collage I’ve made.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Right Where It Belongs - Nine Inch Nails [With Teeth] - 2005
See the animal in his cage that you built,
Are you sure what side you’re on?
Better not look him too closely in the eye,
Are you sure what side of the glass you are on?
See the safety of the life you have built
Everything where it belongs
Feel the hollowness inside of your heart
And it’s all, right where it belongs
What if everything around you,
Isn’t quite as it seems?
What if all the world you think you know,
Is an elaborate dream?
And if you look at your reflection,
Is that all you want to be?
What if you could look right through the cracks,
Would you find yourself, find yourself afraid to see?
What if all the worlds inside of your head,
Just creations of your own?
Your devils and your Gods, all the living and the dead
And you’re really all alone?
You could live in this illusion
You can choose to believe
You keep looking but you can’t find the woods
While you’re hiding in the trees
What if everything around you,
Isn’t quite as it seems?
What if all the world you used to know,
Is an elaborate dream?
And if you look at your reflection,
Is that all you want to be?
What if you could look right through the cracks,
Would you find yourself, find yourself afraid to see?
Here is one from the genius that is Trent Reznor. For those that don’t really know about Trent and NIN, you should take a look because he and his band are quite a unique occurrence. Trent is the only member of the band. He writes and generally records all the parts of NIN recordings. When he goes on tour he does being a band with him.
He is quite an outspoken critic of the music industry which tends to get him into hot water. But over the past twenty years he has fought and won his freedom to be an artist totally independent from a record label. In fact, his latest record was given away freely on his website without any promotion.
This song, taken from his 2005 release With Teeth, came out while Trent was recovering from alcoholism and substance abuse. It always makes an interesting story to tell! I love the lo-fi ambience in this album, but especially in this song.
Turn the lights down and the volume up. Yes, it’s one of those songs.
If the TMI [too much information] posts and status updates on Facebook and Twitter have taught us anything, it’s that users apparently have little sense of boundaries in sharing personal or sensitive information with the anonymous masses.
Tony Bradley in an Open letter to facebook.
He goes on to talk about how fb likes to introduce new interfaces and features, which lately were ‘opt-in’-by-default, without warning.
With this business model, Facebook gets the same net result—half a billion users freely sharing personal and sensitive information with the entire world via Facebook and its third-party partners—but without the legal or regulatory scrutiny.
I don’t even care anymore. People are stupid and I am crazy.
They [Twitter] contain more observations, recorded at the same times by more people, than ever preserved in any medium before.
RANDALL STROSS talking about the wealth of knowledge hidden inside of Twitter (http://nyti.ms/cdGwP7)
Ever wonder what it would be like to play through Super Mario Bros. as Bill from Contra!? Or maybe Link, Samus or Mega Man? Well now you can with Super Mario Crossover, a flash game developed by explodingRabbit. The game comes complete with all the music from whatever game your chosen character is form, which is a very nice touch indeed.
I recommend giving it a try. It’s super fun!
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Simply put, our customers do not want a world in which it is easy for developers to write apps that run on many platforms. They just don’t. They want this to be hard for developers. I don’t know why — you’ll have to ask the customers. We’re just listening, and doing what they want.
Fake Steve Jobs on the removal of Flash from OS X after real Steve Jobs posted his essay “Thoughts on Flash”
Hubble is now 20 years old. It is expected to be in continued use until 2014 when it will be replaced with James Webb Space Telescope. Over its lifetime Hubble has captured some of our most beautiful views of our galaxy and beyond. It has helped solve as many mysteries/theories about our universe as it has created new ones! One of it’s main missions was to help accurately measure the Hubble constant (the rate that the universe is expanding, which also helps in determining its age).
Google Earth has the nifty feature of flipping your view of the world to the stars where you can learn a thing or two about constellations, as well as looking at many well known (and not so well known) images taken by the space telescope. This video is a nice overview of many beautiful images taken with this amazing instrument.
Although astronomy plays a much smaller role in navigation and surveying than it used to, it is still taught to geomatics students of survey technology. For example, with observations to a few stars from a thodolite, and a few other pieces of information (Lat/Long and/or time depending on what you’re solving for), you can determin a very accurate true north azimuth, or you relatively accurate location on the earth (if you happened to not know where you were while having a theodolite handy :P).
For example Willem Barentsz, a Dutch explorer and cartographer of the late 1500s, famous for searching for the northeast passage north of Siberia, used astronomic observations many times to help his navigation. It sounds like a cold trip, I wouldn’t doubt if he wished on a few of those stars while he was at it!
