Auto-Tune

Okay, so now just about any singer, or want-to-be, can now sing whatever way they have always wanted, without the nagging worry of being off key or out of pitch, and at "perfect" intonation. Correcting the pitch, perhaps at the small cost of sounding similar to everyone else?

Yeah, I know the company claims it doesn't change the voice. Sure, whatever. I am not an expert, so I will not argue the point.

Here is another thought, *and a great test for it to show off just how wonderful it is at correcting a singers pitch*. Use it on a George Jones song... I assume it would work, but...

In all fairness electric guitars are often ran through numerous "magic" boxes, so if another box can improve a less than "perfect" voice of a less than talented singer, then I suppose it's all good.

I just think it's annoying then for "everyone" to kiss that singer's a** about how dang good they can sing. Especially when they are supposedly getting paid millions of dollars (which I don't believe, but that's yet another opinion).

Just a final point, I often like the "less than perfect" voices of some singers.

The Pretty Reckless...

What we have heard of their music sounds pretty good. Taylor Momsen has an interestingly refreshing voice, which is well suited for the genre she has picked to sing and has chosen some apparently capable musicians to back her up.

Here is a young woman who decided not to play the bubblegum Pop game, and appears to be churning out some honest to goodness, kick ass rock music. So, why does so many of the web authors/gossip columnist, or what ever they call themselves these days, seem so fixated on the way she dresses? Have they never seen legs or breast before?

Check out the videos on their official web site at: The Pretty Reckless

[ Not to sound too overly biased, We should point out, We think there are many excellent bands and singers that are often times taken for granted, or noticed for reasons other than their musical abilities. ]

Kay E-100 electric guitar, "humbucker" conversion

Converted our old Kay E-100 electric guitar from the original single-coil pickup to a new "humbucker". Visit our web site for more pictures and project details.

"I Am Omega"

We got this movie on a DVD with two other movies (cough, cough): “Monster” and “AVH Alien vs. Hunter”. Well I actually wouldn’t even call the other two, movies. IAO could have been a decent movie with a plot change. Or any number of plot changes…

Of course, if you haven’t seen the movie "I Am Omega", which I really can’t recommend, you won’t understand my alternate plot.

The movie was okay up to the point when Renchard answered the incoming video message, the second time. And the entire story line of Vincent and Mike was, in my opinion, just wrong. The actors weren’t bad; it’s unfortunate that the movie wasn’t better, as The Asylum might have achieved a slightly more legitimate reputation.

Anyway, here goes my basic idea of one possible alternate version.
==
Renchard would have set out to rescue Brianna, after answering her second video message.

Along the way Renchard would have came across Vincent and Mike engaged in a heated battle with zombies. Where Renchard would have saved Vincent from certain death, by killing an attacking zombie.

Mike gets killed in a subsequent zombie battle. Then later Vincent gets killed heroically during the battle in the parking deck scene.

Then the movie would have ended the same as it did, with the trick ending (which didn’t hurt at all).
==

And a final criticism; they shouldn’t have shaken the camera during some of the zombie scenes. That would have only been necessary to hide some deficiency in the makeup, which didn’t seem to be the case. In fact, for a low budget movie, the zombie’s makeup looked fine.


Note to the folks at The Asylum: put a bit more effort in your movies and you might get taken seriously, at least perhaps by those of us who enjoy fairly decent “B” movies. And Please Don’t ever make another movie like “Monster”. You hired two reasonably attractive actresses, and then really blew it. (IMHO)


(I wish I had the resources to make a movie, but alas that’s not the way the world goes round.)

"Corpse Bride"

Earlier this morning I watched (for the first time) the 2005 Tim Burton movie "Corpse Bride" on DVD.

As much as I enjoyed the movie I must say I was absolutely amazed watching the special features portion to see what wonderful mechanical marvels the puppets, especially for the main characters, actually were.

Watching the movie I would have never guessed such workmanship went into the creations, but after seeing how it did I can see how they managed to pull off such a feat, all while using the oft considered obsolete form of stop-motion animation.

This movie could certainly have been produced (a whole lot easier and cheaper) using CGI, but I'm certainly glad they didn't. My hats off to Mr. Burton and the entire crew who made such a masterpiece come to life.

As an afterthought; I'm guessing the puppets used in the movie would bring a small fortune on e-bay.

Gothic dreadlocks

Goth women and their fashion sense have fascinated me for several years. Lately I’ve been looking at pictures of the 'dreadlocks' worn by some Goth women, which if I understand correctly are often made of standard knitting yarn or similar fibers. Personally I think this looks rather cool, albeit a bit strange, in a uniquely different way.

Now at the risk of sounding like a smart ass, which I’m really not trying to be (at least not this time), I’ll just throw this out. Probably others have already expanded on the basic design, but my thought is why stop with yarn. Why not add some other things into the braids such as beads, wire, feathers, bells, charms, etc.

I'm also a bit curious as to the correlation of this styles direction and the development of headdresses in various earlier tribal cultures. If you have any ideas or observations feel free to post your viewpoint.

Twitter: Social Networking?

Although it is called social networking, I somehow seem to be missing the true social aspect (this post refers to Twitter, but may also apply to other online services).

I’ve only been a Twitter member for a few weeks, but I already have formed a few preliminary opinions. Which admittedly may change over time?

Strangely there’s no ability for individuals to contact someone they are not being followed by, even though there is the easy ability to “block” any unwanted people. Yes, there is the @username feature, but get serious while there are many of us that do, there would also be many people who never bother checking that.

"Protected" postings; Okay, I don’t get it, these people might be better off using email (or perhaps the telephone)?

Many who don't follow anyone, even though they themselves post plenty of "Tweets", apparently expecting others to be interested enough to read what they have to say. Even though they appear obviously uninterested in what anybody else may be posting.

As opposed to the individuals appearing to, or at least wanting to give the impression that they follow tens or even hundreds of thousands of other people (Have you ever tried following a handful of fairly regular posters? Perhaps they are speed readers?)

The auto-follow-back function of some third party software, although seeming courteous, simply gives many spammers (using the term in a broad sense), also using automation the appearance of legitimacy (or popularity) by giving them an artificially inflated number of followers.

#hashtags, okay enough with the hashtags, there are so many it doesn’t even make any sense anymore.

Although there are many post which are interesting, amusing or even relevant (at least to some), many others are filled with seemingly endless inane babble. Which makes one wonder why the individual even takes the time to post it? (Okay, maybe many of us are a bit guilty of that, but you probably get my point.)

In fact in many ways it seems rather cliquish and anti-social, seeming to be more of a narcissistic broadcast medium than a social network (thus the possible proliferation of hoards of posers, spammers and celebrities (real and wannabe)).

Don't get me wrong, there are obviously many fine and sociable people using Twitter in a variety of useful ways; it's simply that the core functionality could be modified a bit to be a bit more social.

Agree or disagree?

"Hoarders"

(Okay, it's probably like most of the "reality" shows, but...)

It's not that they have too much stuff, maybe they just need a bigger house.

I thought having stuff was part of the idea.

"Stop buying": What? I thought the whole idea was make money, buy stuff...the one with all the marbles...blah, blah, blah.

Or maybe, it's just a bunch of strangers want too come in and loot peoples houses, with their permission?

Are they not going to buy more stuff after the first batch got hauled away?


...but in my defense; I am a Virgo. I think we often like clutter.

Following thousands on Twitter...

Okay, call me skeptical, but do the math:

If each person posts only one 70 character Tweet per day

70 characters / 3,000 character page* = 0.02 page
(approx. 50 Tweets per page*)

Now multiply that by the number of thousands of people followed...

10,000 x 0.02 page = 200 pages
100,000 x 0.02 page = 2,000 pages

(Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace" is approx. 1,350 pages)


I don't know about anybody else, but I sure couldn't keep up with that amount of volume.

*refering to a typical 8.5 x 11" word processor page with 1" margins

Set up my mail2blog, and other things.

Now I don't have to actually go to the site, log in and navigate through the dashboard, just to add another entry.

 

Still a few things to hammer out about my Twitter account. Am now playing with Friendbar (for Firefox browser) and MadTwitter third-party apps to see how they work.

 

My Twitter list: girls-wearing-glasses has 100 listed, think that's quite enough for now. More accurate name would have been "Twitter-girls-wearing-glasses", but anyway.

 

Snow is melting here, so I think I'll venture out shortly to look around.

Organizing with Tweeter Lists

I’m currently trying to come up with a system to organize the various people I want to Follow on Twitter without everybody’s Tweets being jumbled together; because for me, since there will often be gaps between when I check in to my account, that could create a dilemma.

I think using multiple Twitter Lists may be the solution, once I come up with an organization scheme.

“Wind Chill Factor” and “Heat Index”

Okay, the meteorologists often say, “…making it feel like xx degrees.” Who exactly does it feel that temperature to? I thought applied science, which meteorology claims to be, was usually based on standards.

So, does The National Bureau of Standards (USA) have a guy, let’s call him Joe, locked in a room in Boulder, Colorado, and the wind or heated temperature feels like xx degrees to Joe? If so, shouldn’t it be called the Joe Wind Chill Factor and the Joe Heat Index? … Otherwise…

Well, this is just another of my many pet peeves.

“Snow eater”

*Is this a new meteorology term?* One of the local weather men used this phrase last night, apparently as an excuse for why we didn’t get the eight to ten inches of snow predicted by some earlier (which we seem to be getting a bit more of now). Something to do with dry air, blah, blah, blah…

This brings a couple other weather related things to mind…

Okay, this is better...

Moved over on to my Windows XP box. Am now able to type in the posting text box, rather than just in the "Title:" box. As was the case on my other box, which is still running Windows ME, and does run into a few snags on some of the sites with newer JAVA content.

I have no idea what I'm going to be putting here; I'm barely adding anything to the other official blog, but for some silly reason I decided to set this one up here.

Hello World...