The Blog of G

Hindsight

If you are a fan of the loudness that is “System of a Down” you should be familiar with this song, but possibly not the musicians, a fantastic cover version and a lot *ahem* easier on the eye

Hands up if your surprised by how much Violins can rock, I was.

Getting married? Looking for idea’s for a wedding cake? take a look at this…

I’ve been getting myself back up to speed with wordpress a lot in the last few month’s and while I’m not using all these plugins, I’m definitely going to be testing them, thanks for the post Conor

And finally as the F1 testing season kicked off last week and the anticipation is building for the new season, I stumbled across this video of Bruno Senna training and being the king of all multi-taskers

Aerobic training, Core muscle & balance training, concentration, Focus, as as well as eye hand coordination training, inspired!

Wise words

We’re off to Jam in the Dam in march and as I mentioned before, I’m really excited to see Les Claypool play, but I have never heard of the rest of the bands so I decided to do a bit of research on them. Moments Later Youtube was fired up and being searched hard.

I made up a play-list of a random selection of video’s by the artists & bands (I could find) that are playing.

Finding Les’s work was easy thanks to youtube’s Vevo service so there are a few Primus Video’s and some of his own as well. The other artists (Umphrey’s McGee, Yonder mountain string band, The new Mastersounds & Josh Phillips Folk Festival) seem to only have live recording’s available (on youtube anyway) so I’m going to have to dig a bit further for more on them and the others listed for the show.

One thing I did notice looking through all the search results is that all the bands seem to have one thing in common, they seem to be fond of guest appearances and jamming live. I wonder will there be much of that? here’s hoping anyway

In the meantime here is the playlist I built…

If anyone reading this is planning on making the trip, or has been to a previous Jam in the Dam, leave a comment below.

I’m off on holiday, well more a weekend away in that it’s only four days. I’m really looking forward to getting away for a few days though, some relaxing, a change of scenery, some sight seeing and the first music festival that I’ve been interested in going to, in more than a decade.

“So where are myself and Elly off to?” I hear you ask. The city of Amsterdam, one of our favourite cities in the world and the place that we got engaged. We’ve been there a good few times over the years and we’ve seen a lot of the museums before. Thankfully there is a (kind of) new one for us to see this time, Hermitage Amsterdam.

I say kind of because The original Hermitage museum is in St. Petersburg. I have always thought that it was in the Kremlin as that’s what our tour guide told us when I was in Moscow in 1990, but maybe the 20 years have taken there toll on my memory more than I thought.

Either way that Museum tour was one of the most amazing of my life, our guide barely stopped the whole tour and I know there was a lot more to see. I could have stared at the Imperial Faberge eggs all day, such amazing pieces of craftsmanship and pure beauty, I cannot describe and no photo I have ever seen can do them justice. But I’m waffling now. In short, I’m giddy with anticipation

I mentioned we’re going to a music festival, Jam in the Dam to be precise. Two concert halls under one roof and a full set from all the bands each night, which is great because if you miss a band one night, you get to see them the next. I’d love to be able to go to all 3 nights but these days I’m grateful to even get 1 night.

There is only one act on the lineup that I’ve heard of before (I will be getting myself upto speed on the rest of the lineup before we head off so expect some post about them as well) but I’ve been a fan of Les Claypool since I first heard Primus play at the battle of the bands in San Dimas, California… oh wait a minute, that was in a movie… Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey.

Primus were barely even on screen but the music grabbed me and it’s never let go since, they still sound as fresh as the first time I heard them. Bands come and go and over the years Les has moved on to other projects and I have purchased almost all of his albums since.

If ever there was a band that I would travel through time to hear it would be Primus, even over the chance to be at Woodstock, so there was no way I was going to miss the chance to see Les play, especially since it’s his first European gig since I discovered you could use the internet to keep tabs on your favourite bands.

Unfortunately, I’m going to have to wait until March but in the meantime hears the track that grabbed my attention so fiercely 19 years ago…

It’s been a few weeks since Tim broke the news that Pandora would be blocking non US Ip addresses. I was so disapointed, I love Pandora’s service and I will miss it. I mean don’t get me wrong I understand the reason’s behind this decision but it’s still a hard one to get used to.

Good luck Pandora, I can only hope that you can resolve the issues soon. I would be happy to signup for a pay per play account if it meant I could use Pandora’s service again. I’ve blogged about Pandora before and it has helped me find some great music I would never have heard without your service.

OMG! Words cannot describe how impressed I am with an application I just downloaded and installed. :O

“Huh, this is Musical monday whatrye talking about an application for?”

Well if your reading this then you’re probably on a computer with reasonable internet connection and have some interest in music. Then this is every bit as vital an application for you as Pandora is a bookmark.

The application I am talking about is called Songbird and without getting into to much detail it’s a media player based on firefox. It’s opened my eyes to a part of the internet and the blogosphere that I barely new existed. Up hands who has heard of MP3 blogs? OK so maybe I’m late to the party but this is one superb app and I can’t begin to explain it properly so I’m simply gonna wait here while you head off to hear and watch the screencast. I’ll wait for you.

Now it is a very early release at this point but it’s a helluva place to start from, it already does what it set’s out to do, “play the web”

I have barely scratched the surface and I’m completely taken with this so thank you Wired and to you reading “why haven’t you downloaded it already?”

*edit* I just noticed that it is a tad on the resource hungry side, granted my Media centre isn’t the most current (Athlon XP 2000, 512mb ram) but it’s swallowing more than half the resources available still it’s worth it.