How was your day?

There are days when you woke up on the wrong side of the bed. You leave your bed with little motivation and enthusiasm to go about your day that although nothing bad happens, (your day) just lacks that umph.

Other days, you wake up the moment that alarm clock rings and you immediately hop off the bed, sing or dance in the shower and proceed to have a mini-adventure of your own later that day.

I think I just had one of those days where I felt alive and chatty.

I had all reasons to be grouchy because I had to wake up at 5am just to make sure that I finish my work before 7am and have it ready for the boss to go over at 10am.

Plus, I had to rush all the way to Bandar Baru Sg Buloh to meet a class or Fifth formers who published a book, which is now in its second print. I’ll blog more about that some other day.

And then, I had to take the komuter to go back to the office and finish another piece of writing to be submitted before my sub leaves the office and takes the day off tomorrow.

But today, I also have a lot to be thankful for.

I work up at 5am and managed to finish my work within two hours  –  just like how I had planned. Normally, I would set the alarm at 5am and would hit the alarm and go back to sleep.

Then, my husband was free to send me to Bdr Baru Sg Buloh, so I didn’t have to take the train because I was running late anyway. We got to the school without any problems because I could find the school in the GPS and it took us right to it, right on time.

I had a blast talking to the students and some of the teachers who treated me to lunch. And then, one teacher — who was on the way home — was very kind to give me a lift to the komuter station.

I had to wait for only 15 minutes for the train to arrive and had a good chat with a Sixth former who was going back to her boarding school in Seremban. Before I alighted the train at KL Sentral, she actually salam-cium my hand as a sign of respect because earlier I had told her I was older than she thought. She thought I was a college student. Haha! That made my day

I got back to the office just in time to write the piece and still managed to leave the office at 6pm.

And when I got home, my mom-in-law had cooked yummilicious nasi ayam and I had that for dinner.

My day couldn’t be any better, really!

So I wonder what kind of day is in store for me tomorrow? Whatever tomorrow lies for me, I’ll start the day with a prayer and a rock-out session with my Disney princesses Miley Cyrus, Demi Lovato and Selena Gomez.

I love my manufactured pop and rock songs

Sergeant Pepper is bad for Rock Band.

My iPod served up She’s Leaving Home, a song from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. This song has no drums, bass, or guitar. We’re going to get this song soon as DLC for Rock Band when they offer the whole album.

From a certain point of view, Sgt. Pepper was a reaction against exactly the kind of band your Rock Band band is. Two guitars, bass and drums were boring to The Boys and they went into the studio to do something different. There are going to be a lot of songs from that album that are fun to sing, but boring and/or impossible to play.

I don’t think there are many rock albums of any kind that are good for DLC. There are almost always dud songs involved that shouldn’t even be offered. But I guess the allure of “get the whole album” is working, and I’m sure the sales support the concept. Sigh.

 

RITA MITSOUKO

„La Petit Train” music video was my first glimpse of Bollywood. I adored it – loved the colours and the dance moves – but as it was Eastern Europe in 1989, I had no idea what Bollywood was and thought that the song was… Georgian.

I rediscovered it around 1997 when I watched all of my dad’s music videos recorded on video tapes looking for something interesting and unusual to copy onto audio tape. Those video tapes of his were my Last FM in that pre-Internet era. Now I was big enough to know that the lyrics were in French. The memory of the video must have faded quickly though, as I can’t recollect being surprised by this multi-culti combination.

In 2004 or so I recognised the female voice from “La Petit Train” in an equally energetic song called “Cool frenesie”. That’s how I learned about Rita Mitsouko.

And today I finally watched the “Georgian” video on Youtube and (surprised by the barbed wire fence I completely forgotten about) looked for the lyrics to have them automatically translated into English. And it turned out it’s no Dan TV but a song about concentration camps!

I wonder what Kishore Kumar is singing about…

my dear diary... (some not-so-old memories)

Portland, OR

I was so proud for the forth time be part of the X crew, this time in Portland. Really amazing the city. I had the opportunity to play tourist and visit some nice places.

My X conferences

BTW, I just collect the photos of all four X conferences that I’ve attended. It’s not much photos but there’s some funny things

X on embedded

The cool thing of the work that I’m doing at Nokia is that I can publish and discuss mostly all X fun with the open source communities. “Mostly” because, for the last device – the N-shiny-and-awesome-900 – for instance, the video driver is closed (provided by Imagination), so we cannot comment much regarding such driver stack C’est la vie.

So we’ve been using Xorg for our small devices (FWIW the development of kdrive based servers is dead! Period). Therefore, myself and Oliver brought to XDC some discussions that we had about X server for tiny systems. Xorg DDX is still too fat. There’s a lot of code that we can cut off and that was the whole idea of our talk, more concerned about Xorg’s memory footprint.

Life is beautiful

6 months living in Helsinki: hosted 4 visits of friends, 5 new European countries visited and an average of 2 pints per day Lot of fun and no time at all for opensource pet projects. Even so, I’m enjoying! Besides, I bought an skate board and I’m speaking the first Finnish words already. I’m happy also that I’m (finally) finding time again to appreciate a good music (but didn’t get a guitar yet for me here). Let’s see what will be my next musical project… Nähdään!

"I don't think you're ready for this...

…

’cause my body’s too bootylicious for ya babe”

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So I had the privilege to go see the brand new JKB Showcase, a brilliant idea thought of by two young men who study music together at the Pop & Jazz Konservatorio in Helsinki. I didn’t catch their names, mainly because I never asked. I know, some reporter I would be! Oh well, what I can tell you about, is one of my best friends Linda Ilves who played a big part of this JKB Showcase.

So what is the JKB Showcase, you ask? Well it is a brilliant show with drums, bass, guitars, trumpets, keyboards, cowbells and amazing singers, everything one could ask for. Glittery and sexy…yeah…those two words best describe it. Glamorous, glittery and sexy. The students have been working together for some time now to create this show, and all their hard work has certainly paid off. The participants are all very skilled at what they do, we (the audience) got to witness some aweinspiring solos on the drums, the keyboards, the bass, and not to forget, the singers. It is easy for me to say that as a participant of the audience I most surely felt amazed.

But to tell you more about the girl I know, Miss Ilves; she sang beautifully and had acted coreografer for the Showcase. Some of the participants weren’t as fluent in the dance moves as the others, but they made up for it with other areas of expertize. Among all the powerful and enticing songs were Destiny’s Child’s “Bootylicious”, which Miss Ilves performed with great power and convincing bootyshaking, together with the three other girls.

I was most certainly blown away by this performance, and very entertained. I wish the JKB Showcase the best of luck regarding the future and I am sure we will hear, and see, more of these talented students many times to come. Now please enjoy some images.

All rights of the images reserved to the photographer

Song of the Day (11/05/09)

If you’ve never seen or heard Explosions in the Sky – or even if you have – you owe it to yourself to watch this video.  The band dispenses with vocals in favor of sprawling, intricate – and, at times, earth-shakingly heavy – arrangements that manage to sound like nothing else out there.  Can I get away with the phrase “sonic cathedrals”?  Well, there it is.  Sonic cathedrals.  Nothing else quite fits.  This is “Memorial,” the centerpiece of their 2003 album, The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place. Stick with it; the reward will come.  Holy cow, I love this band.

We're All Connected - Symphony of Science.

With English Subs.

MP3 available at http://www.symphonyofscience.com.

“We Are All Connected” was made from sampling Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, The History Channel’s Universe series, Richard Feynman’s 1983 interviews, Neil deGrasse Tyson’s cosmic sermon, and Bill Nye’s Eyes of Nye Series, plus added visuals from The Elegant Universe (NOVA), Stephen Hawking’s Universe, Cosmos, the Powers of 10, and more. It is a tribute to great minds of science, intended to spread scientific knowledge and philosophy through the medium of music.

Check out “A Glorious Dawn” by Carl Sagan, another Symphony of Science project!