Dayman Fighter of the Nightman Champion of the sun You’re a master of karate and friendship for everyone! Dayman (Auhhhaahhh) Fighter of the Nightman (Auhhhaahhh) Champion of the sun (Auhhhaahhh) You’re a master of karate and friendship for everyone! Dayman, Dayman (Auhhhaahhh) Fighter of the Nightman Champion of the sun
(Lyrics to Dayman vs. Nightman by Charlie in Always Sunny in Philadelphia)
“I’m so blessed to have spent the time with my family and the friends I’ve loved in my short life I have met so many people I deeply care for”
I woke up with Yeasayer‘s Blogotheque session in my head this morning and I still can’t get enough of it.
#87.1 – YEASAYER – No need to worry / Redcave by lablogotheque
via http://www.blogotheque.net/2008/03/10/yeasayer/ (or http://en.blogotheque.net/2008/03/10/yeasayer-en/)
Enjoy – happy rainy Sunday!
PS. If you’re in Ljubljana, see you at PJ Bond and Mark McCabe at [A] Infoshop tonight!
Gramophone / Phonograph / Record Player - Engines in Enginuity, Coalbrookdale (Photo credit: ell brown)
Another year, another Record Store Day.
Some blogs I read are heralding it as the largest music event in the world. Pretty sweet sauce – you’d think that for something of that magnitude, a cultural European center the size of Ljubljana might have something going on. Unfortunately, no. Ljubljana has no proper record shops, just a couple of music stores that look like they transported here from the mid-90’s, and I have to read about events like Other Music’s in-store DJ lineup of Suckers, Four Tet, Ex Cops, The Men, and Wild Nothing, not to mention the fact that the releases I’m listening to online are actually available there on 7 inch vinyl…
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Last year I prepared myself better and made a day trip to Zagreb to see some in-store performances and buy some vinyl, and despite talk of making a road trip to Austria this year with some friends, this year finds me unprepared and sitting on my couch. Oh well. I guess I’ll have to settle for internet streams this year – at least this year finds me with a record player to listen to the few vinyls I’ve been able to collect over the past year.
Either way, here are my picks:
Long time.
We’re all anxiously awaiting Suckers‘ latest, Candy Salad, and My Old Kentucky Blog has got the goods!
Enjoy: http://www.myoldkentuckyblog.com/?p=28681
(more soon)
Android Robot. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Yeah, I know that I’ve been gone for a while, and no, this post won’t have anything to do with music, except to tell you that if you’re in Ljubljana tonight and missing Nils Frahm at Menza pri Koritu then I don’t know what to tell you.
No, today’s post is about finishing and what that means. I was going to start with a dictionary definition, but I think you all know what “finish” means. It means bringing a task or activity to an end; completing something that you started.
In truth, I don’t finish many of the things I start. When I was a kid I quit hockey. In middle school, The Boy Scouts. In high school I quit the swim team after one year. I started a company in college that we disbanded a few years later – in that time (Facebook‘s early days, when there was still space there) we built an entire social network that we never launched to more than a few hundred people. I remember when Facebook first opened their platform, and some of the proofs of concept Facebook apps that I came up with. I was also there with a handful of ideas and prototypes when Foursquare launched their API. Several years ago now, I wrote an entire autonomous Twitter bot platform that I’ve never officially done anything with. Before I moved to Slovenia I spent a few months screwing around with an Arduino, never to actually build anything long-standing or useful. In the last year and a half, I wrote the meat of a brilliant and complex social/gaming web application, working with an excellent UX person who is plugged into New York City’s thriving tech scene (she has friends at TechCrunch, in several influential tech startups, etc.), yet we still haven’t brought it across the finish line. When Android first came out I switched to TMobile and bought the G1. I was at all of the NYC Android meetups. In the last few years, I’ve written seven or eight interesting Android apps that are in a half-finished state sitting in my Eclipse workspace and/or on only my phone. I have all the excuses in the world (hockey got rough, boy scouts got boring, swimming wasn’t fun, no time, lost interest, etc.), but when all is said and done, what it boils down to is that I don’t finish things.
As a side note to any employers who think that they hired/are hiring/will hire a dud, I’m speaking strictly about things that I do/build in my free time; when it comes to a job and being professional, yes I do finish all of the tasks required of me. It is in my code of ethics to uphold my contractual obligations.
But why don’t I uphold that same code of ethics for things that I don’t get paid for? Why don’t I finish things?
I think that the answer lies in the fact that I love making a good proof of concept. I love mock ups. I love the kind of instant gratification that a prototype offers. I love spending enough time with a technology to learn about how it works, grasp it, and build something with it. Maybe my quest for knowledge is breadth-first? Back when I was a junior dev in my first startup, our chief architect (also a good friend) used to compare me and my colleague, saying that I’m like a sponge, soaking up all of the knowledge that I can about everything that I work on, while my colleague strived to finish each assignment as quickly as possible without needing to know why things worked, just that they did. I guess it’s good to have both types on your team. The yin and the yang.
Fast-forward to yesterday in the office: I was about to show off an Android app that I built this past weekend to a few coworkers, when my friend Drazen asked if it was the same app that I showed a few weeks before. I replied that it was something new that I cooked up from my bed this past Sunday morning. Drazen laughed and (rightfully) pointed out the fact that I don’t finish anything. At the time I was like “yeah, yeah” and shook it off, but his words stuck in my head for the remainder of the day. Last night at around midnight I fired up Eclipse, determined to finish what I started. At around 02:30 I had a fully working implementation of my gag app with basic functionality. I quickly read the release docs for the Android Market (now “Google Play”), registered for a developer account, paid the $25, signed my .apk file, posted a couple of shitty screen grabs and descriptions, and by 03:30 I officially had a finished product sitting on the Android Market, available to the masses!
I now present to you, Talking James! A proof of concept of finishing.
QR code for "Talking James" on the Android Market
Image via Wikipedia
Wow. We All Just Want Someone To Shout For said it proper – “2012 just got real.” Check out this new Beach House:
[new]: Beach House – Myth (via We All Want Someone To Shout For)
In other music news:
Andrew Bird – Break It Yourself The Magnetic Fields – Love at the Bottom of the Sea
Preview:
Krzysztof Penderecki And Jonny Greenwood (via NPR)
Bonus feature:
A buddy of mine named Zoran has been publishing an online zine called Addicted to Nothing, offering excellent new mixtapes every Sunday, which have been pretty popular in recent weeks in the Ljubljana blogger community. This week’s installment features a mixtape from another friend, Tadej Štrok, and comes highly recommended from this happy subscriber!
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Looking for something to do tomorrow night in Ljubljana?
Check out Tune-Yards at Menza pri Koritu (in Metelkova)
That’s all for now. Veseli sreda, y’all!
No new music news today. I’ve been real busy lately, but wanted to send out an update so that you know I still love y’all
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I went to see Lambchop in Vienna on Monday with the Look Back and Laugh crew – EXCELLENT performance! In particular, they closed the set with this song “Give It (Once In A Lifetime)” which blew the roof off of the place. Here’s a clip of a similar performance from 2009:
Here’s a link to the same version of the same song on Spotify. Kurt Wagner is a legend. Also check out their new record, Mr. M.
Other than that, here’s some other music love to hold you over until next time:
Memoryhouse – The Slideshow Effect Sleigh Bells – Reign of Terror
These cool Noisetrade samplers also came out for PS I Love You and Andrew Bird
Until next time
It’s a snowy wonderland outside my window in Ljubljana. It has been snowing basically pretty nonstop all weekend, and with all the things going on between work and shuffling around for this commitment or that commitment, it was a real pleasure to spend most of this weekend in the house just relaxing in PJs. While I did get a bit of sleep Friday night and make it to the market on Saturday, I spent most of the weekend actually developing a prototype for a secret side project – more details later – which leads me to my next thought – it’s kind of depressing being a backend developer because you don’t get to see any of the fruits of your labor until you have a frontend guy swoop in and spend two seconds coding up some pretty design and HTML/CSS to go with it. In my case, after about 36 hours of straight coding on a Django API and a functional Android app that calls that API, I’m still waiting for that frontend guy to show up (looking at you @pronebird and @SlovenianSteve!) – G-d bless frontend guys everywhere and the magic you do!
Image via Wikipedia
Anyway, enough of my nonsense – onto the music news!
Out tomorrow:
Punch Brothers – Who’s Feeling Young (Nonesuch) Tennis – Young and Old Shearwater – Animal Joy (Sup Pop)
See you next time…
Image via Wikipedia
Woke up early to a beautiful snowy morning in Ljubljana so I could get a shower and let some of this hair dry before having to face the cold. Getting a grasp of what these girls are complaining about all the time…
And now for some music news…
Dr. Dog – Be The Void The Kabeedies – Soap Sharon Van Etten – Tramp (Jagjaguar) Of Montreal – Paralytic Stalks (Polyvinyl Records) Die Antwoord – Ten$ion Air – Le Voyage Dans La Lune
Cover of Old World Underground
Now Playing: Metric – Old World Underground, Where Are You Now? and Cloud Nothings – Attack on Memory
Here I was complaining about there being no winter, and now it’s -11 degrees C outside and I don’t feel like braving the cold yet to go to work. I guess I’ll read some music blogs first… And now, onto the news!
Happy Tuesday, you guys – and now, off to face the cold!
