Sorry about the buzzwords in the title. I swear it’ll never happen again, but I had to throw a few of those out there when I saw this article over at Wired. Interesting stuff.

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’.

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.

OK, broadband or not, you’ve gotta check out this movie (12.5 MB, spotted on U2Star.com). They’re performing “Life On a Distant Planet,” which I’ve never heard. Is this a well-known U2 oldie? I have no idea.

The video is in Windows Media Player format, and it seems you’ll need the latest version to watch it (Mac, Windows), but man it’s worth it.

It’s of a U2 performance from 1979. Hey U2 fans, remember those pictures where Bono is wearing strange checkered pants and trying to be punk? Yeah, it’s from that stage.

I’ve gotta say that although most of the performance looks extremely forced, the little blue-screen effect with the gloves is interesting.

Oh, and Larry hasn’t changed even a smidge, except that now he has a more-dangly earring.

I’ll be doing web dev and chilling out all day long (I took the day off work), but I just had to point out that I totally love this commercial. It’s awesome. Really fun to watch.

Update (1.22.04) : The song they play in the iPod commercial above is now available on the iTunes Music Store right here. So enjoy!

If you’ve never played, seen, or heard of the Mario Kart series of video games, this might not make much sense. It might be a good idea to go read up.

I’ve done a great thing today, people. For awhile now I’ve been playing Mario Kart: Double Dash!!, and honing my time trials on the Baby Park course. Originally, I was proud of the 1:18 I had earned for all seven laps. Then my friend Jeff came over, and I saw that he had some mad skillz on the game, so I asked him to give me a record, and he cut mine down by about two seconds. I observed his game closely, and attempted to mimic his every move. I was only about two tenths of a second above his record for awhile, and then finally broke it last week. I’ve been down in the 1:15.x for awhile now (using the Green Fire with Mario and Luigi, if you’re curious).

Tonight, another exciting thing happened. Steph saw that I was having trouble winning a Grand Prix and suggested that we play two-player to see if that would help, and we earned a 3rd place on the 150cc Star Cup, which was pretty challenging for us. Then we went and took 1st in the 50cc Special Cup, which was a walk in the park. She can really bring the blue sparks. That win unlocked the Bullet Blaster, which is a little black, bullet-shaped cart with decent acceleration and very nice speed. So I took that cart back to the Baby Park track for a time trial, and even though it wasn’t a really perfect race (I made some big mistakes) I beat my previous record. I’m now finishing Baby Park in 1:14.779, which is a very tight race.

I would love to hear if any of you guys have records on that course, and what they are. Oh, and what you’re driving of course. If you’d like to see some records for Baby Park online, there are some very impressive ones right here.

Bring it!