November 2007 Archives

Indiearchivist has compiled a set of equipment that frequently used by Joy Division on stages or in their recording sessions. Along with it we can see that Joy Division performed a very unique act in a show.

The classic Joy Division line-up has always been Ian Curtis on vocals, Peter Hook on bass, Steve Morris on drums and Bernard Sumner on guitar. What a lot of people do not know is that JD used to experiment with swapping of instruments and sometimes different line-ups.

Sometimes this experimentation and instrument swapping was more or less forced upon them. For example, when somebody hurt their hand during a "joke" fight with empty bottles just as the band were to go onstage. Or, with Curtis deteriorating health and more and more frequent epileptic seizures, he would sometimes not be well enough to perform, and somebody else would have to take care of his guitar duties (and sometimes even singing! read on...)

The instrument sets are rather odd and rare (a melodica, for instance), probably it's their style to make a bizzare sounds that were a trademark to their genius songs.

Though it seems to be outdated, but in the euphoriastic-nostalgic spirit of Back To The Future shoes, here's a project that I volunteered enthusiastically:

What's the McFLY 2015 project? It's a grassroots movement to get Nike to make available to consumers the futuristic-looking sneakers seen in the 1989 movie Back to the Future Part 2. Do these shoes even exist? Yes, Marty McFly (played by Michael J. Fox) wears them during the year-2015 scene that takes place at the beginning of Back to the Future 2. I want those sneakers too, what do I have to do? Just sign up on the official website of the McFly 2015 project. It's on the Interweb at www.mcfly2015.com

This is the second props shoes that I must have from BTTF, it's kind a dorky, yet back in the days, every kids want to have this kicks, including me. So sign the petition right now and help us BTTF fanatics fulfilling our dreams in becoming Marty McFly to restore the space-time continuum. :)


(via McFly 2015 project's MySpace)

Fast Food or Junk Food I might say, is not necessarily good foods. Though, I admit I occasionally enjoy eating fast food :). Now, a Calorie Counter has compiled comparison tables of nutrition that resides in fast food items.

To show this, I've compared the nutrition facts of the most popular foods from over 20 popular fast food restaurants to see how each restaurant's version of the same food stacks up against the others. If this isn't enough to convince you to eat less (or none) of this stuff, it will at least give you the information you need to make the better choice and avoid making the worst one. Enjoy...

"Still eager to massively consume those delicious Whopper again, Pat?" Hmmm, I think I'll have a second thought on that one. :)

(via Kottke)

Mozilla is giving more eye candy features on it's  upcoming Firefox 3 browser. Everybody love tabs in Firefox, right? So they enhanced it more for a better browsing experience.

Among Firefox 3 pending improvements it a cool tab preview feature that shows actual thumbnails of the currently opened tabs.

First, the List all tabs button in the tab bar is replaced with a button that opens a black window with thumbnails and the active tab highlighted in a slightly bigger size. Tabs can be located by inspection or you can enter a few letters from the tab title you want and thumbnails are quickly filtered out.

You can see the preview on Mozilla Links blog, nice feature by the way. But performance wise? Firefox is getting bulkier I suppose.

(via Mozilla Links)

Let me say this first, I love music very much. If I love an artist and their CD’s is available here in Indonesia, then I would definitely bought it. However, things are a bit more complicated when Internet arrives. We all know these days, you can download practically any songs from artist you like, all it takes is your bandwidth capability and your for searching the songs you want.

Now I don’t want to join the political sides of this issue, I love music and that’s it. I don’t want to involve to this pros and cons of the-so-called illegal music download. But I can’t resist to show you a piece by Rob Sheridan a while ago. FYI, he's a cover album artist who works for the "Big Man" (a.k.a major labels). He talks about Oink, a file-sharing website which recently been put down and and how it related to the whole MP3 sharing problems. Here’s a highlight:

For quite a while - long after most tech-savvy music lovers - I resisted the idea of stealing music. Of course I would download MP3s - I downloaded a lot of stuff - but I would always make sure to buy the physical CD if it was something I liked. I knew a lot of musicians, a lot of them bewildered at what was happening to the industry they used to understand. People were downloading their music en masse, gorging on this new frontier like pigs at a troff - and worst of all, they felt entitled to do so. It was like it was okay simply because the technology existed that made it possible. But it wasn't okay - I mean, let's face it, no matter how you rationalized it, it was stealing, and because the technology existed to hotwire a car didn't make that okay, either. The artists lost control of distribution: They couldn't present albums the way they wanted to, in a package with nice artwork. They couldn't reveal it the way they wanted to, because music pirates got the albums online well before the actual release date.

"...file-sharing is the greatest marketing tool ever to come along for the music industry. One of Oink's best features was how it allowed users to connect similar artists, and to see what people who liked a certain band also liked. Similar to Amazon's recommendation system, it was possible to spend hours discovering new bands on Oink, and that's what many of its users did. Through sites like Oink, the amount and variety of music I listen to has skyrocketed, opening me up to hundreds of artists I never would have experienced otherwise. I'm now fans of their music, and I may not have bought their CDs, but I would have never bought their CD anyway, because I would have never heard of them!

You can see this whole massive long article here, ‘cause after I read it, my views to this issues are shifting. But aside of this, just enjoy your music, support your artist, live a good life.

link
(via Listening Post)

I've missed the whole In-Rainbows-can-be-downloaded-free fiasco. I just finished downloading the latest from Radiohead last night. The album? well anything from Radiohead is destined to be great, and so is this album.
But now here's an interesting piece by Ryan from Deathrockstar about In Rainbows true meaning:

In Rainbows dimaksudkan untuk menjadi sebuah album komplementer untuk OK Computer, secara musikal, struktural dan lirikal.
Cobain sendiri dengan membuat playlist ini (tentunya sangat mudah dengan lagu-lagu yang didownload). Mulai dengan lagu pertama dari OK Computer, Airbag, sebagai track 1 dan dilanjutkan dengan lagu pertama dari In Rainbows, 15 Step, sebagai track 2. Terus sambung playlistnya seperti diatas sampai ke Karma Police (OK Computer) di track 11, dan sambung dengan Fitter Happier (OK Computer) sebagai track 12. Dua lagu ini adalah bridge dari 10 lagu pertama dengan 10 lagu terakhir. Lanjutkan dengan Faust Arp (In Rainbows) di track 13 dan Electioneering (OK Computer) di track 14, lanjutkan sampe kelar.
Transisi antar lagu-lagu ini sangat luar biasa dan memang sepertinya disengaja.

Well after I try it, I truly agree that it was a new hearing experience of both albums.

It seems that Google has confirmed their framework for the their upcoming Google Phone:

The company is expected to hold a press conference on Monday to unveil the project, which is expected to incorporate software from the Linux world into a mobile platform code-named Android that's designed to run on phones, according to sources familiar with Google's plans. A software development kit for what's being called "a complete mobile-phone software stack" is believed to be in the works and will be released relatively soon thereafter, the sources said. It's not exactly clear what kind of software will come as part of that stack, but it's said to include everything you need to run a phone.

Link
(via Techmeme)