If you are a fan of the Flight of the Conchords TV show then you will no doubt love this CD. The album contains songs from the second series of the cult musical comedy, and these songs definatly top those form the first series, and the first series had some very funny songs.
For those of you who are not familiar with the TV series you may find this CD a little odd but still enjoyable. There are many different varieties of musical genres throughout this album from the bands attempted rapping in the opening track Hurt Feelings to a dark 80’s sound in Fashion is Danger, with vocals that sound slightly like Marilyn Manson and a cheesey reference to Thatcher and Reagan. You are also treated to an odd Russian styled track called Petrov, Yelyena And Me which in the TV show has an odd video to match.
The lyrics in all of the songs are not just amusing but also on the verge of genius. Rambling Through The Avenues of Time and Carol Brown are prime examples of the skillful and clever song writing the band frequently produce, although that could easily be said about the other tracks too.
Verdict: These guys may not be to everyone’s liking but they are certainly to mine. You have to get the humour to really appreciate them and I highly recommend watching the TV show first. If you enjoy the second series of the show you will find it hard not to buy this.
On Saturday my home town of Great Yarmouth attempted to break the world record of the number of people dressed up as wally in the same place at the same time. The current record was set earlier in the year by residents in New York with 1052 Wallys. I was quite confident that we could break this record, especially as it was confirmed that over 1200 people had bought the costume, however with only 901 showing up on the day it was disappointing not to have broken the record.
However it is not about breaking a world record that this event excited me about. In recent years the town has started to have more and more events but these usually take place over the summer, due to us being a coastal holiday town, so it was nice to see that on a rainy October afternoon people got together to do something different. Despite not breaking the record I think the turnout was very good and to see that many people dressed up in the red and white of wally is quite amusing (or really cute if you count people who dressed up their toddlers and babies!). The main importance of this event though is that it was all for a good cause. £1 for every person who entered was donated to breast cancer care, so despite not breaking a world record at least it was a fun afternoon that raised a lot of money for charity.
You may have seen the new Monopoly City board game advertised on tv or in the shops, well there is also an online version of this called Monopoly City Streets. This online version combines google earth with Monopoly City. That’s right, the whole planet is now a giant monopoly board. Although every single street in the world is there, they are not all available to buy however the majority of them are. You start off with $3m to spend and each day (aslong as you log on) you get extra income from the streets you have bought.
You can gain more income from streets by buying buildings for them. There are quite a few buildings available ranging from small houses for $50,000 to Monopoly Towers which costs a hefty $100m to buy. There are also bonus buildings and hazards that you can only build if you get a chance card. Chance cards are recieved randomlly after buying buildings. There are 5 types of chance cards from what I can see. They are: Fines, Cash increases, bonus building, hazard building and demolish a building. Hazards and buildings such as power plants and prisons that can be placed on other peoples roads. By placing one of these down you stop that road from recieving any income until the other player demolishes your building or place a bonus building down. If a road already has a bonus building on it you cannot place a hazard on it. You can also demolish buildings, such as hazards on your roads or other peoples bonus buildings.
There are local and world wide leaderboards. Overall I don’t see a great deal of point to the game. It’s wise not to purchase many roads as you get taxed on every street you own after the first 5 so it’s far better to buy 5 long roads and place lots of buildings on them. I have just found myself gradually adding buildings to my few roads each day. What I do after this I don’t know. There will never be one ultimate winner to this, nor is there any prizes or gains if there were. It’s a little bit of fun to kill a few minutes each day but nothing more.
Today sees the general release of Microsoft’s new operating system, Windows 7. I have been using the beta for sometime now and i’ve been very impressed from the start. Now you may have already heard a lot about the new features of Windows 7, especially the touch screen technology, but most of us do not have touch screen monitors. What about the features that will help us every day users the most? Well this post is about all the little features that make just every day computing much easier.
The New Taskbar
The first thing you will notice about Windows 7 is the brand new taskbar layout. If you are like me then you may have been a bit wary at first over this. We are all so used to the taskbar from old versions that we might find it hard to adapt to the new one but this is not the case. I found myself gettting used to the taskbar very quickly and it is certainly an improvement over the old one. I like my computer looking tidy but I also like having lots of things open and quickly at hand. The new taskbar makes all of these possible. Programs can be pinned to the start menu so they can be easily accessed. A little box appears around the pinned programs when they are open so you can easily tell which is being used or not.
By left clicking a program you will bring it to the front it as normal, unless you have multiple windows open. Thie picture picture on the left shows my web browser with two windows open that i’ve left clicked on once. It shows previews of both windows. I can hover over the preview to view it and I can click it to bring it to the front. You can also do this without left clicking. Just by hovering over a program’s icon on the taskbar you can get the small previews up, even if the program only has one window open.
Right clicking an open program on the taskbar also brings up a nice feature. With most programs you will be treated to a list of your most recently opened files from this program. In the picture you can see the last few tracks that I listened to in my music player. In web browsers it will bring up your last viewed web pages. Just like in the taskbar you can pin files or web pages here so you can easily access your most used or viewed files. By right clicking you can also choose to pin or unpin the program itself from the taskbar and you can also close it from here too.
Another nice little feature is that different program icons glow different colours when you hover over them. Thunderbird for example glows blue and firefox glows orange.
Start Menu
The start menu hasn’t changed too much from Vista. You may notice that recent files has gone which at first is a disappointment but thanks to pinning you wont need recent files no more. The start menu can be used in the same way as the taskbar and I use it for my less frequent programs and files. I have pinned microsoft excel for example and when I click the little arrow next to excel I am shown a menu with my most recently used excel files, to which I have pinned my business accounts file. This file is usually updated every day or two and not everytime I use my computer so I keep it here as it is easy to get to without being on the taskbar. Another nice feature is the much quicker search box at the bottom which can also be used to execute commands in the same way as the run command does.
Snipping Tool
If you are writing a blog on Windows 7 using screenshots then the snipping tool is just fantastic. In fact if you are someone who used the print screen button a lot you will find yourself using the snipping tool instead. What the snipping tool does is it allows you to drag a box over any part of your screen and when you’re done it will take what’s in the box and turn it into an image. You can save it or mail it in just a click. It’s a really handy tool.
Snap
Snap is a great tool if you need to look at two windows side by side. Instead of spending ages resizing two windows you can now just snap each on to the edge. One way of doing this is by dragging each one to the egde of the screen. You will see an outline of a box appear that’s half the size of the screen. By releasing your mouse the window will then fill this half of the screen where the box outline was. I’ve found a much easier way to to this is by pressing the windows button and the left or right arrow key when viewing a window. This tool is especially handy for when web designing as I can have the code or ftp program one side and the web browser the other.
Paint/Image Editing
Not really much of a new feature or improvement here but there are a couple of small changes that I like. The image editing has been kept seperate from the viewer unlike in Vista where they were together but there are now more things you can do when image editing. By right clicking and pressing edit, the image will be opened in paint. Paint has got slightly better over the last few editions of Windows. It is now possible to crop and resize images much easier, which were both key features that paint really lacked. I always used to find myself opening up Fireworks just to resize an image but I no longer need to. However that said there are not any other features to paint that are that useful to image editing but for me I am glad these two basic features are finally included and very easy to use. There is one draw back here though. When you could edit an image in the Vista picture viewer you could use auto levels to ajust the colour and contrast and you had red eye reduction. This are not available in paint which is a shame.
There are plenty more features in Windows 7, in fact there is a 140 page document that contains them all, but these are the main ones for me. Overall it is definatly the best operating system from Microsoft. It is faster than Vista as it uses much less resources which was the major downfall of Vista. I think that XP users will be swayed to use it and they will like it. With the touch and speech technology built into it we could see the way we use computers change over the next few years.
Absolute Radio have teamed up with Spotify and Shortlist magazine to find the song of the decade. The last 10 years has seen some fantastic bands/artists and songs come to light so choosing one song is very difficult indeed. Luckilly you can vote for more than one song if you wish but if I had to choose just one song then I would choose One Day Like This by Elbow. It’s a bit of a weird choice for me as I am not a massive Elbow fan and I don’t listen to this song that much (in fact as I write this it’s 98th on my last.fm page). However this is one of those songs that can brighten up a rainy day and i’ve even heard of couples playing it at their weddings. It really is just one of those songs that everyone has their own reason to enjoy, it has great lyrics and is the only song I know that has ‘Holy Cow’ in it. It was also the song that launched Elbow into the mainstream. So if you agree then please follow the banner below to vote for it.
I have been interested in Nirvana bootlegs for years now. I have only recently became serious about collecting them and I have gathered a small number of them from various sources.
What is a bootleg? A bootleg is an unofficial cd release which usually contains a live performance from a band. Some bootlegs are compilations that contain TV appearances and radio recordings. Before the Internet made this kind of material easier to obtain, bootlegs were very popular with hardcore fans. Nirvana are one band that were around during the time when bootleg cds were at their peak and therefore have more bootleg albums in circulation than most bands in history.
I have recently aquired a very special Nirvana bootleg entitled: First Live Show which is exactly that, Nirvana’s first ever live show. The show itself was at a friend’s house party in 1987 and at the time the band were not even called Nirvana. The set list contains tracks from Bleach and Incesticide plus two Led Zeppelin covers: Heartbreaker and How Many More Times. The fact that a recording like this even exists is astonishing, especially as this was recorded long before current technology made recording and sharing easier. Considering the show was just recorded by someone at a house party in 1987, the sound quality is pretty good too. It is cds like this one that make’s collecting bootlegs worth while.
I have dedicated a page on this website to my Nirvana Bootleg Collection. This is mainly for me to keep track of them and to be able to share further details about them.
My Nirvana Bootleg page
If you have visted my website in the past you may remember it looking very different. In fact the entire format has changed a couple of times and it’s even had a name change.
The website started life back in September 2004 during my college days, when the website was originally called Beg To Differ. The website was then moved onto the domain craigrandall.co.uk in March 2005. The website was first used to display song lyrics that I wrote, album reviews and some basic pixel art. It also contained a flash logo mainly due to the fact that it was created around the same time I learnt basic flash. I changed the colour scheme of the website of to green and white after seeing the colour scheme used on a design on csszengarden.com. At one point the website even had a feature that could change the colour scheme of the website with a click of a button.
I changed the format of the website to a blog in August 2006. The original pages were kept on the site, as was the colour scheme and design. The only difference being was that the website was using word press software to power it. For 2 years and a half years I kept the blog going but then unfortunatly had to move hosts and I lost my previous posts. I then decided to redesign the website into it’s current design, but in a static format, but I quickly descovered the format doesn’t really suit the website at all so I went back to using word press and made a few improvements on the design.
Over the next few months I will be gradually adding the older posts back on to the site inbetween my usual blogging.
This must be the third time I have reposted them due to their popularity. So once again here are a couple of Cristina Scabbia wallpapers I pieced together.
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Muse are a band who have changed their style slightly over the last years. From being a riff heavy, effects driven, high tempo alternative band they have slowed down the overal pace and added to the generic bass, drums and guitar. Resistance is good example of the new direction Muse have taken. All the old elements are there and in Unnatural Selection especially you are still treated a fast paced guitar riff which shares a lot of similarities to Origin of Symmetry’s New Born. The album kicks off with the first single from the album, Uprising. The mix of guitar and voice shouting ‘come on’ during this track is definatly the highlight. The rest is what you would expect from Muse, as is the title track, Resistance. What stands out for me on this track is the backing vocals from Chris and Dom. Although at first they may sound a bit cheesy, I think they really work with Matt’s lead vocals and it also seems like the band are communicating with each other through song. You are treated to Matt Bellamy’s piano skills on United States of Urasia and I Belong to You, which the more and more I listen to is quickly becoming my favourite track from the album. Bellamy also showcases more of his musical skills in the beautiful Undesclosed Desires in which he composed the string section but he does not play neither guitar or piano on this track.
The album ends with the three part track, Exogenesis Symphony. I will admit I am not too fond of these three tracks. They certainly wont get much love if they came up on your ipod on shuffle. The three parts do work on their own but you can’t really get the full potential out of them unless they are all played in sync. The tracks themselves are just examples of the way Muse like to branch off from the traditional Guitar, Bass and Drums combo. Although this is nice in small doses throughout the album I think these tracks do let it down a bit.
Verdict: The first 7 tracks are all great Muse tracks in their own way but Exogenesis Symphony is just not for me. The band, Matt Bellamy in particular showcase their many musical talents and it wont disappoint any Muse fan. If you don’t like the album at first, give it a few more listens. It grew on me very quickly and now I find it hard to stop listening.
