“I don’t need new friends, I keep the ones I know.”

I Know - Evidence - The Weatherman LP

The fact is this is not the case for me, perhaps I wish it were.  I don’t really move around that much, but in recent years be it for school or work I tend to uproot my life leaving behind most of what I know.

A couple weeks a go my cousin was talking to me about concerts, and was telling me about a band that was coming to play a concert here in Cuenca.  After a couple tries (she wasn’t sure how to pronounce the English word) I figured out that she was saying the band’s name was “the Doors”.  I balked at the idea pretty much immediately, and told her the Doors couldn’t be coming to Cuenca (because why would they come here, not Quito or Guayquil, much larger cities) and because their lead singer was dead.  I figured it just had to be some Ecuadorian (or other) band that for some reason had decided to use the same name, or maybe a tribute band.

Well yesterday I came across this promotional poster for the concert.  Turns out it actually is the Doors, or at least two original members and “3 other guys” filling out the band.  The lead singer for this tour is actually Brett Scallions, who you may know as the lead singer of the band Fuel.

My brother showed me this video we both found hilarious. It’s a video of Gregg Gillis trying to scalp tickets to one of his own sold out shows. Good to see he doesn’t take himself too seriously (not that I would have expected that) and can still have fun messin’ with people.

I was playing around, changing the music to this iPod commercial and I came up with this.  Feel free to share your thoughts.  I think it kind of channels “iPod nanos of doom”

Nanochromatic [Justice Remix] from Joshua J. Campoverde on Vimeo.

This may seem sappy to anybody else who reads this, but I will actually miss LeRoi Moore, a man I never met.  I will miss him because for so long I have appreciated his music, and from the six times I saw him perform he was an amazing musician.  Dave Matthews Band will never again be the same, and I will miss it.

I’ve been really excited since Harmonix released the Rock Band 2 song list.  I was looking through the list tonight getting even more excited to play some of the songs once the game is released so I thought I’d embed some of the songs for your listening pleasure.  Some of these sound insanely difficult and will probably be damn near impossible to beat on expert, but honestly that will make them more fun to play and I’d complain a lot more if the whole game were too easy.

Panic Attack by Dream Theater

Let There Be Rock by AC/DC

Painkiller by Judas Priest

Hungry Like the Wolf by Duran Duran

I’ve been an avid user of Pandora and Last.fm for over two years now.  Both are great online music services that have gotten increasingly popular over time, but I’d always used them for slightly different purposes.  Pandora I’ve always used as an alternative music source when I’m separated from my music collection.  Picture sitting at your desk at work with your headphones on, that’s me on Pandora pretty much every day at work.  When I get home from the office and back to my Powerbook I open iTunes and launch Last.fm, tracking my listening habits on my personal music collection.

Recently I’d been craving a solution that would link these two great products and increase the utility of my Last.fm account by including in its tracking all the hours of great music I’d found and been listening to on Pandora.  Last week I found it, the Last.fm Firefox extension at Yerblog.com.  With a quick install this extension allows you to send all the songs you listen to on your Pandora account to be scrobbled (tracked) on Last.fm.  Now the awesome discovery power of Pandora is combined with the statistical analysis and recommendations of Last.fm.  Combined with the recent release of both the Pandora and Last.fm iPhone applications, which make both of these services completely mobile, hardly ever again will a song you listen to go untracked.  Maybe you really can have your cake and eat it too.

Here’s an excerpt from a recent preview of Rock Band 2 over at avclub.com

First off, the career mode. Rock Band 2 cuts the solo world tour, and it makes the concept of a “band” more flexible. Any number of people, online or off, can join a band: you can play by yourself with three steady non-player characters of your own design, you can start a band with remote players, and you can invite people just to sit in with you. Your characters don’t have to stick to one instrument, giving you the flexibility to jump from guitar to drums.

The (p)review is quite long, but I wanted to focus on this small part because it’s something I’m actually really excited about.  My issue with Rock Band since I bought it has been that Harmonix made what is, on all accounts, a really awesome game, but screwed up the little “gimme” things that should have been really easy decisions.

The most glaring example of this flaw is that is nearly impossible to figure out how to manage multiple save files in the game, meaning if you and your roommate both want to rock out, it can get pretty confusing.  I’ve spent months playing this game and can hardly ever get this right.
The other element of user experience that was flawed in the the first Rock Band was that your character was restrained to a single instrument, meaning if I want to play drums and later switch to guitar I have to make a character named Campo1 for drums and one named Campo2 to for guitar and the two characters share no traits.  A lot of people think it’s really fun to manage the look of their characters in Rock Band but having to do it for three difference characters just gets cumbersome.

Fortunately from this review, it sounds like Harmonix has repaired these issues and are focusing the release of Rock Band 2 on increasing the quality of the overall user experience of the game.  I expected Harmonix to have solved these issues before releasing the original game, but it’s “better late than never” and I credit them for acknowledging the issues and making a commitment to fix them for the upcoming release of Rock Band 2.

Also GameTrailers.com has just put out a video trailer of Rock Band 2 game play. This Foo Fighters track looks absolutely insane and I cannot wait to get behind the drums for this song. Enjoy!

flow.tv and dodge promoted the 2007 hip hop live tour, of which brother ali was a part of. Here’s an embedded clip from flow.tv introducing you to the Minneapolis, MN MC.

i think a couple of the things he says in this video speak pretty highly of his character as a performer, and I can vouch for his performance from experience, he puts his all into his show. If you’re around Boston at the end of March you should check out his show at the Middle East in Cambridge.