The photos are a few weeks old, but I really wanted to build a fire tonight. This will have to do.

This deserves a longer post than this, because ultimately I’m going to have some hands on experience comparing Ableton Live Intro vs. Propellerhead Record+Reason, but I actually like how this came out enough that I want to share it.

The short version of the background here is that I’ve been a long time Reason owner, and I have Record as well. I’m pretty poor with both, and I’ve finally set aside a little bit of time to figure out how to use everything. I’ve decided to start by just figuring out mashups and remixes (creating original songs seems way too hard right now) while trying to learn the guitar. For Christmas, I got a copy of the book Audio Mashup Construction Kit by DJ Earworm. It’s a good book, and I’m really learning quite a bit just from the music theory chapter. The only issue is that the book uses Sony ACID as the tool it describes in detail. ACID is a Windows-only product, so I’m SOL. So, that’s how I ended up messing with Live & Record this weekend.

Here’s a clip (about 30 seconds or so) of the mashup tutorial from the first chapter, built by me using Record.

Nothing complicated, obviously. Just a beatmatched, slightly sliced mix of Dizzee Rascal’s Stand Up Tall (Instrumental) with the a cappella track of Tag Team’s Whoomp There It Is. This probably took about 2-3 hours or so to learn what to do, how to do it, and then tweak until the beats lined up.

Like I said, this deserves a longer post, because I’ve learned a few things worth sharing for novices like me. For example, mixing/matching tempos is very different in the two products. So far, Live seems a bit more natural to me, but I was able to get better results out of Record (probably because I’m more familiar with Propellerhead’s products. More eventually, once I’ve done something a bit more original.

Synesthesia came up in sort of a wacky conversation on Twitter. I linked to a clip from Heroes showing their take on Synesthesia. This clip, however, is a neat little 8 minute doc on Synesthesia.

While watching the Orbitz commercial above, I noticed the little HRC logo on the shirt of one of the golfers. I was watching on my SlingPlayer in a small window, so I wasn’t sure if I just imagined it. A little bit of Googling later and we find out that Orbitz reached out to HRC to feature the logo in the ad. From the press release:

Orbitz contacted HRC asking to license a piece of merchandise with an HRC logo for this national commercial which began airing on June 15 and will be seen nationally on 20 cable stations.

Orbitz has a strong history of reaching out to the LGBT community and in fact, scores a perfect 100% on our Corporate Equality Index. The ad fits into HRC’s strategy to try and broaden our reach to a larger segment of the population, both LGBT and straight, and continues to help disseminate our organization’s brand.

Though, I have to say, the rainbow towel on the golf bag… a bit much.

This ad will make me consider Orbitz the next time I have to travel, and I’m a Travelocity VIP member, so that’s saying something.

Want to expand on two recent Facebook interactions that have gotten some criticism from my more conservative friends.

First one was about a tweet, my comment on a recent Krugman article:

Krugman’s column about California sounds about right to me. Our perception of taxes is warped by Republican spin: http://is.gd/DOOE

140 characters is a tough limit, and I think some things get misunderstood. Couple of clarifications are necessary. First, I’m not claiming there that Republicans are to blame alone for all of California’s problems. My point is that the Republicans have convinced a great many people that our taxes are high. They’re simply not, especially for the wealthy. They’re low by international standards, and they’re low by historical standards. That was the point of the second sentence.

The rest of my responses in that comment thread were to the idea that California’s budget is unsustainable due to a welfare state and regulations. Nothing I’ve read suggests that the budget is completely unsustainable. What I see, instead, is a property tax policy that has crippled that source of income (we can debate whether this is a good policy or not, but the revenue effect is pretty clear). This is combined with a income tax policy that makes it impossible to raise taxes as long as one party refuses to even consider that possibility.

I remain unconvinced that taxes are too high in CA, or that a $30-40 billion deficit is the fault of out of control spending. For example, here’s one of the editorial I’ve read that lay out some of the issues. There are better articles, but this is the only one I found that I read before.

Ok, that’s item one.

The second one isn’t actually from my tweets, but from a comment I received from a friend and my high school debate partner (yes, really!) about a religious freedom case out in San Diego.

Perhaps this is showing that I should use the blog more, where I certainly have more room to be more nuanced and clear. To that end, addressing the issue raised on Facebook, I really do want to mention this one thing:

While the ACLU isn’t perfect, I find them to be more consistent and more true to their mission than many other organizations. Their mission is to defend the Bill of Rights. They do this far more consistently than conservatives would like to admit. If there is some systemic bias you want to accuse them of, I’ll need to be convinced with more evidence than just an accusation.

And, on the note of bias, one other general point. I’m opinionated, and I’ve thought about a lot of issues I write about quite a bit. So, to the extent I have any ‘biases,’ I’m up front about them and generally quite conscious of them. I don’t need to be reminded of them, or that they exist. The thing is, I’m much more interested in getting policy right than in being right or being ideologically pure. So, while I’m certainly on the liberal side of the American political spectrum, I’m willing to consider ideas that challenge my starting positions on issues. Give me a chance.

Update: Some more information on the CA budget situation makes it seem like I may not have captured the full picture of CA’s spending situation. Kevin Drum addresses the editorial I linked to above and points out spending is up 23% since 1997. The editorial looked at the budget from 1999 on, but a couple of big spending increase years were 1997 and 1998. As Drum says, spending went up during the dot com boom and never cycled back down. There’s more to this, so it’s worth reading his post. It’s short, anyway.

Sometimes a simple whim can become art. Kudos to the young woman who did this. It’s a neat little video.

(via Commanda.net)

The video above is the “making of” video, but I really recommend you watch the actual video BEFORE you watch the video above. I don’t want to embed that clip because you really need to see the full ad execution to appreciate the cleverness of the whole ad campaign.

Here’s the actual ad, with the unique execution they did on vimeo.com: http://vimeo.com/4281939.

The video shows a bunch of people apparently randomly starting to dance as Do Re Mi from the Sound of Music starts playing over the loudspeaker. It was apparently a publicity stunt for a Belgian reality show. It’s a brilliantly executed video, funny, and amazing to watch.

It’s not the first commercial done like this. There was a T-Mobile ad in London, also done live at the station.

There’s also clearly some shared inspiration from the stunts done by Improv Everywhere. Looks like this stunt at Grand Central was their most famous one:

It’s been fun checking these out. Does anyone know which reality show the Belgian one was promoting? Can’t find it online so far.

(Found via los anjalis)

Update: Ah, found it. It’s called Op zoek naar Maria (looking for Maria) and was in the title of the YouTube page. I just didn’t know what that meant, it being in Dutch and all.

This video shows an automated bicycle parking system in Japan. You can read more about this phenomenal idea at the blog that created the video, including seeing higher res versions of the stills at the end of the video. You can also check out another blog that has video of the inside of the storage facility (though, it’s in Japanese).

Very cool idea, though.

(via Boing Boing)

I’ve been playing the futures market game at HubDub.com. It’s basically like InTrade where you can buy futures contracts on various predictions. It’s all play money, so there’s no risk, and there are a wide (almost chaotic) variety of futures to bet on. Lots of political predictions, DJIA predictions, sports, entertainment (e.g. box office totals, Oscar wins, etc.).

Join up and let’s play. My username is codesujal. Add me as a friend if you do join up.

I really like this movie:

Yes, I’m trying to figure something out, but need some test data.

Enjoy!

That’s the title of a post over at O’Reilly Radar talking about this video. This is an Ignite speech (explained in the vid) at the Gnomedex conference given by Matt of “Where The Hell is Matt?” fame. Some neat details if you liked his little film.

So, I just noticed it is possible that Arizona (or the Dodgers) could make the playoffs, but have the 8th best record in the National League (behind the Mets, Philly, Florida, Cubs, Milwaukee, St. Louis, and Houston). Right now, Arizona has a “one-game” lead over Houston and is tied with Florida, but it seems possible that by the end of the season Arizona could end up ranked 8 out of 16 out of all National League teams and win the West!!

This is one of my favorite songs from one of my favorite movies from when I was a kid. This song is from the movie Sholay, arguably the biggest Bollywood hit in history. My parents had the song on tapes and I think maybe even an LP. It’s one of those songs that just is permanently part of my life’s soundtrack. And, it’s such a good song too. Some more background about the movie from Wikipedia:

Sholay is the highest grossing film of all time in India. It has earned Rs. 2,36,45,00,000, equivalent to US$ 60 million, after adjusting for inflation. When first released, the film was declared a commercial disaster. Word of mouth convinced movie-goers to give the film a chance and soon it became a box-office phenomenon. It ran for 286 weeks straight (more than five years) in one Mumbai theatre, the Minerva. Sholay racked up a still record 60 golden jubilees across India and doubled its original gross over reruns during the late 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s. Sholay was the first film in the history of Indian cinema to celebrate silver jubilee (25 weeks) at over a hundred theatres across India.

In 1999, BBC India declared it the “Film of the Millennium”; Indiatimes movies ranks the movie amongst the Top 25 Must See Bollywood Films. In that same year, the judges of the 50th annual Filmfare awards awarded it with a special award called Filmfare Best Film of 50 Years.

Bollywood films, especially from that era, always feel campy to me, but I think I might have to give this another viewing soon.

Bonus video from the 1965 film Gumnaam. This song, Jaan Pehechan Ho, also appeared in the movie Ghost World (which, if I’m remembering correctly, is the first movie my wife and I watched together):

We always wonder if her neck hurt after shooting finished…

(PS. I’m actually reasonably impressed that I can translate much of both songs without looking up words… considering my parents don’t speak Hindi in the house (we’re Gujarati), I think that’s an accomplishment)

Very, very tempting. And, since Heidi claims she no longer reads my blog regularly, I can probably buy it, blog about it, and she doesn’t even need to know!

(Expecting a call from Heidi in 10… 9… 8… )

Here’s the link to the $100 off Kindle Offer. Maybe someone else wants one.

There is a catch, which is that you’ll need to get an Amazon credit card. I really don’t want another credit card, so I guess no Kindle for me.

Couple of random notes for everyone. First, today was the NERFL Fantasy Football Draft. We all got together at the Uno’s in Newton, MA for about 5 hours to draft our teams. A good time was had by all, and it was by far the fastest and most fun draft I had attended in a long time. Our draft spreadsheet is online at Google Docs, as usual. If you’re looking at it for research, just keep in mind we have a 150 point salary cap and 1 optional keeper per team (players with a K for the round selected are keepers). The keepers have a cap value based on their cap value the previous year (ask if you want more details).

Our league is running at ESPN.com this year, still the best fantasy football game on the web.

Also, I’m spending much more time Twitter these days than I ever have. First, finding interesting local folks twittering about stuff I care about helped, but I also just like it.

I’m working on a new design for FM that incorporates these external feeds, but it’ll probably be another month or two before any of that sees the light of day… I’m basically sneaking in an hour or so a week to work on it as a break from working on Coolspotters, and as you guys know, new designs for FM take me a while.

Sign up at Twitter and hook it up to your phone if you have a decent SMS plan, or use something like Twitterific.

Just a random software post: One of my goals post-vacation ( I was on vacation last week ) is to get back on a more human schedule. I’m failing miserably so far, but I think I’ll get better soon. One of my problems was that I would get wrapped up trying to solve a particular problem and completely lose track of time.

My solution for this used to be to have a little hourly clock chime so I would know that I notice the hours go by. I used to use the clock widget from Yahoo Widgets, but it died when I moved to Leopard and was otherwise a bit of a pig. So, I looked again last week and found Cuckoo for OS X, which basically lets you set up custom chimes on the hour or for any 5-60 minute interval you choose. It’s free for the basic hourly chime, but only $6 if you want to use the advanced functionality.

I have it set to chime every 30 minutes with the beep-beep made ubiquitous with late-80s/90s digital watches. Retro, or something.