Author: josh

Puffy AmiYumi

Well since there’s so much going on these days with extolling the virtues of iTunes I figured I had to jump in with my own story.

Two days ago while I was using iTunes, I decided to once again take advantage of the shared music feature (half way down the page) built into iTunes. iTunes lets users turn this sharing on in preferences, and when they do that, everyone else who is running iTunes on their local network can see and play the music in their music library (with one notable exception). So I picked one of the (currently) nineteen available music libraries on the network, and started rooting around. It was there that I stumbled upon a band called Puffy AmiYumi.

Guess what country they’re from. Yes, that’s right.

Anyhow, these gals (the band consists of two women) are totally awesome. They’ve got a website of course. I also understand that they hosted their own TV show in Japan for awhile called Pa-Pa-Pa-Pa-Puffy. Honestly, I don’t know what those people have with hyphenated names, but it’s catchy.

I would highly recommend checking out the samples of their album “Nice.” on there. Yes, the album title includes the period. “Red Swing” and “Thank You” are two of my favorites right now, but I would have to say that “Tokyo Nights” is #1 for me. Something about the super-super-happy-fun bass line (see?). I don’t know what it is. The modem-friendly encoding on the online clip doesn’t do it justice. It’s not even the best part of the song, but whatever.

So if you’ve got a chance to snag some Puffy AmiYumi, go ahead and do it. I swear, it’s totally rockin’.

Spy

I saw an iSight software update pop up in the Software Update control panel tonight, and it got me to thinking. When this little gadget was introduced, I had one within a week or two. It was a semi-impulsive buy and I’ve really enjoyed playing with it and chatting with friends from around the country, as you can see.

But the realization that I almost never use it hit me when I saw that update. I actually thought “Well, I could update, but I’d never reap the benefits of the update since I almost never use the thing.” That’s very unlike me when it comes to technology. The only thing I usually ask when someone offers me software is, “Why couldn’t I have had this yesterday?” So then I started thinking about how I could get more use out of my iSight.

I don’t know why I decided to do it this way. I just had to. Maybe I’ll keep it up a week. Or a day. Or a month. Or a year. I have no way of knowing. All I know is that I’ve found some pretty cool software that can actually detect motion, and then when it detects motion it uploads a photo, waits X minutes (X == 5 in my case) and then checks and does it again if there’s more motion. Pretty sweet!

Come enjoy odd, blurry pictures of me in horrible lighting, frowning down at my screen while you still can.

Ha… ha?

It’s a little bittersweet, since I’m not the kind of person who really likes to revel in the destruction of competition unless it’s Microsoft. But this article backs up what I’ve been saying all along. Other music stores are gonna have a horribly difficult time keeping up with iTunes.

Art without Explanation

I’m curious to know how people feel about this, so I want to take an informal poll. Here are my questions. Answer some or all of them:

  • How do you feel when an artist writes a song and you don’t understand what the lyrics mean?
  • How would you feel if you heard the creator of a song you like claim that the song’s lyrics didn’t really have any meaning at all?
  • How would you feel if someone you knew wrote a song, but refused to explain the lyrics to you, or tell you for certain what the song meant?

Just curious to get your answers on those questions.

John Mayer’s Invasion

My apologies for my recent absence. I’m working on a pretty serious entry, actually. It’s the most serious thing I’ve ever posted on this blog, but it’s not done yet, so you’ll just have to wait.

You know, I’ll probably chicken out at the last minute and “fun it up” anyhow. I always do that.

Anyhow, I was looking over my Top 50 most played songs in iTunes today, and I suddenly realized that John Mayer has totally invaded my top 50. Fully twelve of the fifteen songs of his that I own are in my top 50 most-played songs. Not even Beck has percentages like that (who is 17 out of 56 for my top 50). So I guess John Mayer is pretty amazing (in my opinion that I didn’t know I had until I looked at the stats in iTunes).

My least-loved Mayer songs? I just added one recently that can’t compete because it hasn’t had the time to stew. But the ones that have naturally fallen to the bottom are “Split Screen Sadness” and “Only Heart.” The tops? Well, the top two have been in my playlists for almost four months longer than the others, so it’s the two radio-friendly ones, “Your Body is a Wonderland” and “No Such Thing.” Still, I’ll stand by the quality of those songs. They’re really excellent. The acoustic version of “Quiet” from “Inside Wants Out” is my third favorite. “Daughters” is climbing the charts quickly.

So I encourage you to go check out John Mayer on the iTunes Music Store. He’s got a very rich sound, very mature lyrics for a guy his age, and his style is a lot of fun. Spend a few Pepsi caps on him.