OK, so I was really frustrated with the Sparkle "cat video" that I found on YouTube, so I decided to create my own video from the pictures from my long road trip.
Hey, maybe I’ll graduate from making music videos to making movies like Len Wiseman, and end up nailing a hot chick like Kate Beckinsale! I also wouldn’t mind Milla Jovovich, who seems to end up marrying every director she’s worked with.
Or maybe not. Still, here’s my first shot of making a video from a slide show set to music. Not to worry, I’m not quitting the day job.
Well, I finally gave in. iPods are such life-enhancers that I succumbed and bought a black iPod video to replace the black iPod video that I found on an airplane, and then lost in a rental car. Why life-enhancing? Well, with the proper equipment, you can copy the stuff on your TiVo to the iPod video and watch all your TV shows on the go, which is very important time saver if you dont want to spend that much time at home watching TV. And that’s what I’ve been doing until I lost my iPod.
Well, what about the $100 off? Thats what got you to read this post right? Right. It turns out that Audible.com, you know, the audiobook website? They’re offering $100 off any compatible MP3 player in exchange for a year’s subscription. So with the discount already on Amazon, my 30GB black iPod video rang up to $124, what a steal! I occasionally buy audio books from audible when there is a promotion, and this was a really good promotion. If you can’t wait for the library to get the audiobooks that you want, audible is the way to go.
$124 still to steep? How about $35 for a 2GB iPod Nano on the same promotion? If you don’t need video, or dont have the facilities to take advantage of it, a Nano is the way to go.
It had started as a simple jaunt over to the mall to go see the latest "Die Hard" movie, little did I know it would end up as multiple trips down memory lane.
First, the drive. As I was walking out to my car, the clouds that had been hanging menacingly for the last couple of hours decided to start sending a few droplets down my way. No worries, I thought. Little did I know that as soon as I drove out into the highway that it would turn torrential. It was so bad that it stopped traffic on I-95. Motorcylces and even cars were stopping underneath overpasses to shelter themselves from it. The rain was so bad that it cut visibility to almost nothing in the early afternoon. There was a splattering sound way too loud to be rain, then something bounced off the hood. Hail? Yes it was! Traffic was diverted by the cops to avoid stretches of road that had flooded in mere minutes. Yes, minutes! Monsoon-like rains, floods and resultant traffic jams, it reminded me a lot of ‘Pinas 1998+ when I first started driving.
I of course was half-an-hour late for the movie, so I decided to try out the asian fusion restaurant that had newly opened and wait for the next showing. Asian fusion always makes me suspicious, as the "fusion" part of the equation inevitably means that the food is prepared in a thai or korean manner - which isn’t fusion at all! It’s just Japanese or Chinese by way of Thailand or Korea, which is never good. This one was actually done pretty well. The clincher was the Singapore-style noodles, which again harkened me back a couple years earlier to around 1997-1998 when I spent more than I year living and working in the island city. After the first couple of months I had acclimatized myself and ate at the foodcourts, usually singapore noodles or fried rice. It is basically chinese food applied with lots of hot stuff.
Finally, of course was the movie. It was totally early 90’s. The sensibilities, the action, the humor. There was none of the overproduced sheen. No Shayamalanic plot twists. No mind benders, green hued film stock, or mysticism. No existential anguish or overbearing feeling of nihilism or any other artifact of movies of the new century. It was a slam-bang, smart-talking, buddy-bonding, rescue-the-daughter bloody action movie. And tha sent me wayyy back into 1989.
Fun stuff! I can’t wait for the Transformers movie next week. That will send me even further back - to 1985! I’ll bring my camera along just in case I meet people on the line as interesting as these:
There was something terribly familiar about the last couple of months. If I took work out of the equation, I was going out watching the movies I liked on my own, started to listen to music again, and generally focusing time and energy on my hobbies for the first time in 8 years. Basically, I was doing the things I liked doing before I ever came to the US. On top of that, I have this little shiny silver thing that lets me fly through the empty evening roadways with the wind in my hair, and seemingly not a care in the grown-up world. Being in NY for 4 weeks also helps. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?
Its been almost 20 years since the first Die Hard movie was shown back in 1989. I remember that it was in theaters in Manila for over 2 months. Or was it 4 months? Regardless, the movie was on the screens for a significant part of that year. It was such a landmark movie that it gave the world the whole action sub-genre called the "Die Hard movie". Movie studios described their sometimes less-than-inspired movies as "Die Hard on a Train" (Under Siege 2), "Die Hard on a Bus" (Speed), "Die Hard on a Boat" (Speed 2), "Die Hard on a Plane" (Air Force One) - the only thing similar to the original movie being the bigger and bigger explosions at the end of the movie that more and more seemed to have no bearing on the plot.
Eventually after a decade or so of Die Hard clones, including 2 less-than-inspired sequels, the "Die Hard movie" died out and was replaced by the "Matrix with a twist" movie. Seems like that is the way with Hollywood movies, keep on copying a success until the next successful original movie arrives - then copy that.
Fast forward to today, and to my surprise the 4th Die Hard movie is premiering tonight - at midnight! I had known that the movie was being made, but it being released today just creeped up on me. There really was very little on the TV to make the public aware of this movie. However, the advanced reviews are really, really good. Good like Spider-Man 2 good - which must mean something, and has gotten me really excited. Directed by Len Wiseman, who helmed my small budget favorite "Underworld" and it’s sequel, it was getting curiouser and curiouser. Not sure if I’ll catch the premiere tonight or an early showing tomorrow, but here’s a trailer for you folks.
A month or so back I found myself with a PT Cruiser as a rental car. Now I’m not the kind of guy who likes cute cars, but as soon as my behind hit the driver’s seat, I was sold.
The interesting thing about the PT Cruiser was how it integrated the retro-future concept not only in the exterior, but also in the interior. There was faux painted metal, classic-looking gauges as well as a long shifter with a nice ball grip that reminded me of my childhood in a VW Beetle. I was smiling even before I turned the engine. I’ve seen this done badly, like in the new Ford Thunderbird. It had gorgeous lines outside, but the V8 was a gas guzzler, and the interior was borrowed from a Lincoln - not the way you should do your retro cars.
The interior was very airy, SUV-airy in fact. Lots of practical interior space for the driver as well as cargo, as the PT Cruiser comes with a rear hatch. Although it was a compact car, it felt a lot roomier than many midsize cars I’ve been in.
But what about performance? Surely something this cute could not perform? Well, I was a bit surprised. I knew there was only a four-cylinder under the hood, but pep was good, and I could actually pass other cars if I wanted to. In reality, I’m not so sure that this is because of the innate nature of the engine itself, or I had learned to flog cars ever since I got the MR2. Heaven knows the Accord gets less mileage now than it used to.
The PT Cruiser convertible must give even more smiles per mile than the hardtop. The lines on it with the top down is beautiful, and would suit a lady looking for an attractive car (no, you will not catch a red-blooded male like myself in a PT Cruiser convertible as much as I like it).
You may not like it personally, but you should try it at least once if you have the opportunity.
Its 2am, and I just finished up on the arduous task of compiling an MP3 CD. In my previous post, I mentioned the stereo upgrade on the car, well the CD player now also plays MP3s, and since I don’t want to shuffle regular audio CDs around, and since I still do not want to buy another iPod after the last one I lost, MP3 CDs were the only way to go.
I still remember the time when people still put music on cassettes. That was an art unto itself. Aside from finding contiguous songs that sound good together, you had to choose the songs that played exactly 30 or 45 minutes depending on the length of the cassette so that when the last song finished, the tape would be at the end of the roll, and would auto-reverse to the next side. I remember I would spend hours and hours selecting songs and taping them, sometimes over and over, just to get to the timing right. The satisfaction of the last song finishing on a side, then hearing the click of the auto-reverse was priceless.
Then recordable audio CDs came. This made life much easier from the timing-it-exactly perspective as there were no sides, but made it a lot harder from the song selection perspective because it was really hard to have a 65-minute stretch where a single progression of songs made artistic sense.
After a while, I discovered that for CDs it made sense to create "vignettes", or a series of song "movements", so you could have a 35-minute "song vignette", followed by a 45-minute song vignette or other combinations to get to the 65 minutes or maybe even less. Filling up the CD was still important but no longer paramount as there was no longer any Side B to worry about. The most important thing for audio CDs was the composition and order of the song vignettes.
For the uninitiated, heres "Mix CD 101". Song vignettes are a method to arrange songs in such a way that they complement each other for maximum effect. Usually the basis for selecting songs for a vignette are tempo and genre, and sometimes how songs start and end. I’m not making this up! You think bands play songs randomly in concerts? Of course not! They’re always done in a particular order, and the same thing applies with a well-made mix tape or CD (at least thats what I used to insist for my band and my CDs) Lets take the band example. You would usually start with an upbeat song to get the crowd’s attention, then follow up with a slow song, then a slightly faster song, until you get to the fastest song at the end of your set. If the slow songs become monotonous in your set, you sprinkle it with a faster song for some variation, then back to slow. The technique is to either reinforce the mood of the previous song, or change it to another mood depending on your method. The last song is always the fastest, except if you have a denouement, in which case after the fastest last song, you end with a slow quiet song.
One of these arrangements becomes a "vignette". A CD usually gets 1 or 2 vignettes, a throwback from the old Side A and Side B cassettes which have a vignette each.
The problem is with MP3 CDs. As you have more than 7 hours and more than 300 songs to arrange, the problem is how do you keep the listener interested? Movies are around 2 hours. Concerts are around 2 hours. Lots of things go for 2 hours because that’s how long people will have time for something. People will not commit to a 7 hour listening experience. And that’s my dilemma. Yes, I’m not one who will slap all the MP3s in my computer and burn it to disc if you have to ask!
I partially solved the problem by looking at compilation DVDs. You’re not expected to watch the entire collection all at once, but at different sessions. So that’s the philosophy I’ve followed. Took me almost 12 hours to do, but I’ve collected and arranged the music in my collection into 3 different "sessions", each with 2 or 3 vignettes each. Just finished burning it on CD - why else would I be awake at this hour?
And no, it’s not for anyone but my personal consumption. Here’s a track from my CD, which I feel is pretty apt.
I had already designated today to be officially boring. I was going to have lunch at my nieces’, take a nap, and then burn some MP3s on CD (I had recently upgraded my car stereo - more on that in another post). But just as I was about to nod off in the "nap" portion of my itinerary, I remembered that this weekend was NERRF - The 2007 North East Regional Rocketry Festival. It was somewhere in upstate NY. Since I already was in upstate NY at the time, I jumped on the computer to get the address. 55 minutes away said Mapquest, so I took down the address and in 5 minutes was already off.
I had always been interested in amateur rocketry. As a child, Onjie, Homer, and myself would do our little rocketry experiments back in Fairview. More often than not our experiments exploded instead of flew, but it was still fun. Here in the US, you can buy the rocket engines and propellant - no need to build them yourself as we did. It was another perfect sunny day, so I drove out to the country roads top down and music blaring to the empty field in New Hampton, NY where they were holding this years festivities.
My thoughts were interrupted, still a couple of miles away when I saw the first pillars of smoke and fire rise from an empty field into the sky. I was there.
The first thing I thought when I arrived, well second thought actually. The first thought was my dang car was covered in dust from the mile of gravel road to the launch field - and I just washed it yesterday!
Back to the second thought. The second thought was that many of these folks must be loaded. Aside from their own portable gazebos and chairs, some of them had their own "rocket trailer", basically a towed sleeping trailer converted to storing rocket gear for "away trips". If they could spend tens of thousands of dollars for the accessories of their hobbies, how much did they spend on the hobby itself?
The third thing I noticed was that this was a real organized event. There was hot food being sold, porta-potties, and shops. I was tempted to buy a beginner’s rocket set for sale in one of the booths, but stopped myself at the very last minute. One expensive hobby at a time please, I thought.
Finally, there was a huge variety of rockets being launched. From foot-long rockets, to monsters more than 10 feet tall, to odd-shapped things like flying saucers and flying pyramids. What they were lining up for launch ran the gamut. I had pictures, but found a video of last year’s festivities. It will probably be more representative.
Today was a very good day - my first day out of the house. I was still feeling a bit weak but was invited by Eros to go wash our cars. I haven’t washed my own car in more than 4 years, ever since I moved out so I jumped at the opportunity. It may also be the thing that signals that I was back in good health.
As I drove out, the sun was up, the wind was cool, and being outside again felt good. It was the middle of summer, and the weather was as perfect as it could get in the Northeast.
There is something zen about washing your own car. You discover all the scratches, stains and dings that you would otherwise not have seen (the Spyder was lucky enough to have escaped the latter) and correct them using the resources at hand. There is also something to be said about the satisfaction of seeing the product of your own hard work.
Later that evening after we finished up we had grilled tuna belly, salmon, good conversation, and an episode of Discovery Channel’s "Planet Earth" on HD.
As I drove away afterwards, Rubyhorse’s song "Sparkle" came on the stereo (the version here is acoustic - you owe it to yourself to hear the fully instrumented version). How fitting, not only for the clean car, but for the beautiful day.
edit: OK, I found a fully instrumented version, but with a weird cat video!
I was finally well enough to take a walk outside the condo for some exercise. It was a warm sunny day out, and as I was stretching my legs I was amazed by how Main Street looked. for the past couple of years, the New Rochelle city government has partnered with building owners to help shoulder the cost of restoring old building facades. For those not in the know, New Rochelle was very much "in" during the ’20s and ’30s. It had the highest per-capita income in NY state, 7th highest in the entire USA. It had the first suburban department store - a Bloomingdales and a Macy’s located right in front of where I live now (although they have long been closed). There was a casino on one of the islands off the Long Island sound.
New Rochelle however fell on very hard times after that. Until very recently, it was a scary place to be. Almost half the families living under the poverty level, historic buildings falling to disrepair. Empty stores on Main Street itself. A population of "racially-profilable" people. But in the year I’ve been here, there’s obviously been a turnaround. Buildings are being restored on Main Street - they look so nice that they seem like the fake buildings on a Disney theme park. But from what I understand, they are historically accurate. A Trump Tower is rising a couple of blocks from me, and a 900-unit luxury apartment building even closer. The city actually has started a free wi-fi service. It’s amazing. All we need now is a Starbucks and a Target, and we’re all set.
