Know what’s bad for business? When a customer comes to your Web site three days in a row, looking to buy something you sell, and all three days he sees the same page saying that the online store is closed.
I’m heading to Japan in six days, and I wanted to find out if I could get a map for my TomTom GPS unit – and TomTom is giving me the finger. Ironically, I found torrent listings for the map – is that what it’s going to come down to? If the store isn’t open for the customer, he has to get a “hot” version of the product? Idiotic. TomTom, get it together!
Eight days from now, Ashley and I get on a plane and go to Japan. First we fly into Vancouver, then from there it’s an 11 hour flight to Osaka, Japan. And guess what? The Air Canada plane we’re flying on doesn’t have any power in the seats. AUGH! That drives me nuts – in this era, almost everyone has some sort of electronic device with them, and most of them do not last 11 hours. I ordered one of these today, which hopefully will help. The real solution is for Air Canada to get out of the ’70s and retro-fit their planes with things that airline passengers want. I really hate flying Air Canada – they suck. When I flew back from New York to Calgary, they wanted to charge me $2 to use a pillow. And even on a four (or was it five?) hour flight, they served one drink and didn’t even offer the standard bag of pretzels/chips/whatever.
Nearly a decade ago, in January 1999, I went to visit a friend from my childhood (Brock Harris) in Los Angeles. Brock was teaching a group of high school students something called “A Capella”. I knew that A Capella meant voices only, but it never occurred to me that someone could take modern pop songs and perform them purely with vocals (at age 24 my musical horizons were more limited then they are now). What I saw blew me away – a bunch of young adults, not that much younger than me (most were 18 or so), blending their voices into amazing sounds. The group was called No Strings Attached, and I still listen to their album to this day. Sadly, that seemed to be the only CD the group put out.
Fast forward nine years later, and I enjoy A Capella more than ever. I think it’s partially because it’s nothing but the human voice – no technology beyond a microphone, no vocal auto-tuning (listen to the before and after) for sloppy vocalists, no layering of the same vocalist over and over so they sound fuller…it’s pure vocals, pure music. I tend to gravitate toward college and high school A Capella because they pick cool songs, and have great energy. I recently stumbled across A Capella videos on YouTube, and not surprisingly, there are a lot of them (especially from this guy). This video caught my eye today, and spurred me to finally post about this topic. Check it out:
I tend to prefer all-female, or mixed groups (great female vocals = heaven), but that all-male group video was just too good to ignore – when the rather short, and somewhat rotund fellow steps up to the microphone, you expect a certain type of voice – not the powerful bass-heavy vocals that comes out of his mouth. And it gets even better when he kicks it up to his higher range…simply awesome! If you want to check out more college A Capella, the BOCA albums are a good place to start.
I’m a comic book geek, and few things get my blood pumping faster than seeing characters bought to life that I’ve envisioned in my head for years. Iron Man, being released on May 2nd, looks amazing…I sure hope the movie lives up to the coolness factor that the trailer is generating!
The new trailer looks so cool! It’s under VIDEO > TRAILER. I dig the Chris Cornell tune they use in the trailer – hopefully it’s in the movie as well…
People who live in Calgary have a saying: if you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes, and it will change. Exaggerations aside, it is rather amusing (in a bi-polar kind of way) how quick the weather will change. On February 27th, the weather was clear, sunny, and quite warm (I think around 10 degrees Celsius). There was no snow on the ground in my back yard. The morning of February 28th, I woke up to this:
The above photo was taken at 10 AM. Eight hours later, at 6 PM, here’s what the same scene looked like:
The snow is nearly gone – the temperature was over 10 degrees Celsius and the day was beautiful. I love this city, but the weather is sure bizarre sometimes…
It seemed like I was never going to get my contest launching post done, but I did, and the list of $6500 USD in prizes is up at Digital Home Thoughts. Like prizes? Sure you do. Keep an eye on the site, and enter to win…
Well, I did it. After going to the gym for a month, three to four times a week, I decided I liked it enough (or, rather, could tolerate it enough) to make it a regular part of my life. I signed up for two years in order to get the more reasonable rate of $38/month – the gym charges $48/month for a one-year sign up. Paying month by month? $99/month, which is insane and what I paid for the first month because I didn’t want to lock in for a two year period unless I was 100% sure I could commit to it. They have a $149 sign-up fee, and thankfully they put the $99 I paid for the first month against that fee, so it worked out OK.
I’ve been slowly but surely improving my fitness level over the past month:
Treadmill: when I started I could last about five minutes at incline 2.0 and speed of 4.0. Now I can do incline 4.0, speed 4.0, and walk a full mile (15 minutes or so) without needing to stop.
Stairmaster: also known as the “machine from hell”, I started at difficulty 5 and could only last three minutes – and after three minutes, I thought my heart and lungs were going to explode. Now I can last five minutes and only feel like I’m having a mild heart attack. A ways to go on that machine, but it seems to kick everyone’s ass…and it’s just climbing stairs. Go figure.
Leg Press: I started out at 225 pounds (this is a two-leg press) and last Friday I was able to do two sets of 10 reps at 315 pounds. This isn’t so much from me building muscle in mylegs as it is me getting more confident about wanting to push myself.
Lat Pull-Downs: I started out able to do one set of 20 pull-downs at about 60 pounds, and last Friday I was able to do one set of 10 pull-downs at 120 pounds, and one set of 20 at 90 pounds.
None of that is particularly brag-worthy, but shared as an encouragement to other out-of-shape geeks like myself out there, that even in a month if you’re committed to working out regularly you’ll see positive changes. I haven’t lost any weight yet, but I have noticed a marked improvement in my energy level on the days I work out…except for today. What happened today you might ask? I had my initial consultation with my trainer, Kirk.
I had hoped that one month of basic prep would allow me to survive the assessment, but it was brutal – sometimes the simplest things can be the most difficult, like doing push-ups while using nearly every muscle in your body to stabilize yourself because you’re balancing on a Bosu ball (imagine a ball cut in half with a flat plastic top but round and bouncy on the bottom). It’s amazingly difficult for what seems like a simple motion. Or doing squats while standing on said Bosu ball, trying not to fall over. My arms were so exhausted when I got home this morning I could barely wash my hair in the shower – they felt like rubber and were hard to lift. Even now, six hours later, I’m wiped out. One day at a time…
