this is my current avatar at work. thanks to the oatmeal’s article about customer service.
today i am attempting to configure cross posting between wordpress and LJ! and now, it works! awesome awesome awesome.
next on the list:
automatic twitter updates for new posts
better flickr integration
make a logo
SOMEDAY i’ll get the stream working. oh wait i need a new laptop for that. QUIET TOPH, IM NOT BUYING A MAC.
mischievousthis past wee
kend i had the good fortune of being invited to bikes inside! a “bicycle themed dance party” put on by the nice people at thisisplanb.net and jimfamous. with the promise of bike porn visuals (bikesmut.com), gastown sprints (stationary bike races), bike art, and cheap beer set to dubstep, electro and disco, i was intrigued to say the least!
the event was held at the w2 culture and media house, which is a new venue in the heart of vancouver’s notorius downtown east side, across from the newly revamped woodwards building. the venue first caught my eye a few weeks ago when i was biking down hastings to work one night, and i noticed the entire building engulfed in flame. after doing a double take and almost being run over by a motorist who was as distracted as i was, i realized i was looking at a video loop of fire being projected onto three floors worth of full sized windows.
i arrived fashionably late to the party, after helping a disenchanted unicorn recover from an unexpected rendevous with gravity, her bike, and a parked car’s side view mirror, followed by an exciting two adventure through olympimania land. i attempted to convince the nice folks working the door that i should get bonus points for having my hands covered in chain grease. they wouldn’t give me a discount, but i did get a high five. good enough for me.
the crowd was…. weird. a mishmash of hipsters, artsy weirdos and bike nerds. perhaps a bit intimidating for those who haven’t spent significant portions of their adult lives in weird little lofty after hours spaces, but not me. i took one look around and said -if everyone has another drink and a half and the dj starts playing something really fun, this party is gonna go OFF. and it did!
i arrived upstairs to cat
ch the very tail end of the gastown sprints, which apparently is an ongoing experience featuring hipsters et al racing indoors on stationary bikes. pretty sure there’s beer involved. and lots of laughing. and dance music. i unfortunately didn’t get a chance to race due to my being distracted by bike porn, and more beer. soon i ended up wandering back down to the first floor to check out the rest of the bike art and ran into some guy wearing a full body disco ball.
at this point everyone drank that additional beer and a half, and the racetrack on the top floor errupted into super fun time dance party as autacoid took the stage - two dudes, a guitar, some mikes, a pedal and a roland 505! and then we danced the night away on the inside of the crazy flame projections. all in all a great success!
this arrived in my inbox yesterday, and for some reason i find it to be one of the most disturbing spams i’ve ever received. i’m not sure if i want to know what it says or not.
a quick meta post to commemorate version 3.0 of modemgirl.ca. looks like i’ve finally joined “web2.0″ and accepted that widgets are here and real and look way better than my old-school- geocities-style attempts. tonight’s goal was integration of all the other social media sites where i actually contribute regular content! except, of course, for good old livejournal, which will remain hidden away in it’s dark and dusty corners friends only corners. wouldn’t want the internet at large to find out how terrible my writing can get, particularly when infused by sleep deprivation, estrogen, my tendency to become excited over completely irrelevant things or my lack of interest in impressing everyone with proper grammar or sentence structure.
anyhoo, what do ya think? more content coming soon i promise!
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
psychedelic darkcore dub
february 2010
a collection of songs mixed with the intention of providing the soundtrack for battling psychic alien demons in space.
one! night! only! on december 19th a couple of crazies from the gorf beat soundsytem took over the airwaves at sleizure radio to explore their love/hate for 24 hour wal-mart by attempting to find peace between PC and MAC users. the result was a three hour onslaught of breakcore, freetekno, house, hiphop, gang signs, hat spins, baconators, OS debates, error messages, IRQ_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL and a complete lack of xmassive carols.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
i’m going to mutek this year! wow, i’m quite excited at this completely spontaneous decision! i noticed an old, dear friend of mine was going and the next thing i know, thanks to the lovely folks at westjet and their “hey we know you’re all broke so we’ll tantalize you with cheap flights so you’ll spend money you still don’t have” sale, i booked a flight to montreal in time for this year’s installation!
for the past 10 years, mutek has taken place every summer in montreal (with parallel events in mexico, argentina, and chile). the primary focus is on exploration of innovative electronic music and expression / dissemination of new forms of digital art and media, not unlike vancouver’s own new forms festival. featured artists are a diverse representation of renowned international artists such as pheek, alex smoke, deadbeat, sutekh, stephen beaupre, thomas fehlmann, alva nota, apparat, modeselektor, adam marshall, the mole and of course one of my all time favorite producers AKUFEN, to name a few!
mmmmm….. minimal. so much minimal.
bonus: thanks to the rapidfire viral enthusiasm of the internet, mutek 2010 has quickly morphed into what i anticipate will be an awesome reunion as well as a complete and total shitshow. at least 10, but likely closer to 20, of my now grown up old school raver friends will be there! wonderful peeps all the way from vancouver, edmonton, winnipeg and ottawa will be making the journey from our respective lives to reunite for a weekend of dancing, techno, art, parties, exploring and adventures yet to be conceived!! i can’t wait.
and now for your enjoyment, akufen live from mutek 2001
apparently i’m not as professional as i’d like to think i am, as my attempts to keep this blog “professional” has equaled “free of regular updates” thus far, so i think i’ll make my posting policy a little less restrictive and allow at least SOME content to get through…
i found these on geekytattoos.com which is a mecca of win/fail by itself, but… wow. well played nerds, well played.
the second, for those of you who aren’t into networking, is a cisco logo which i think actually looks pretty cool inked. much more than say…. this one. i mean, i love my blackberry and windows office 2007 is pretty rad for what it is, but that’s a commitment i’m just not ready to make.
so…. anyone else out there (i’m lookin at you, russian spammers) have a badass (or lameass) geek tattoo they wanna share? post it!
october 2009
clubby peak hour flailtunes
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
this mix is essentially a 15 year dance anthem retrospective, from my POV. all my favorite TECHNO HOUSE DANCE RAVE MUSIC songs (i spared you from the eurodance this time though i promise) all squished together into an epic-ly cheesetastic hour of happy flail music.
some songs are new, some super old, some remixes of old songs, and others mashups. every song reminds me of someone…. either a friend, roomate, best friends from middle school, first favorite dj, cheerleading, ex boyfriend or my parents (yelling at me to turn it down).
also… just wanted to prove i CAN play music appropriate for consumption by the general population. if you ever ask me to play your wedding, this is pretty much the set you’ll get from me. so you probably should, cuz it would be awesome.
i seriously debated including ’satisfaction’ by benni benassi and then i remembered i still can’t stand that song. and i’m also sad i didn’t include spaceman by bif naked, anything by la bouche or love inc, or a better remix of ‘the music sounds better with you’. although i think the mashedup version i used worked pretty well in the mix.
modemgirl has a new toy! last week i had an incredibly synchronistic run-in with a couple of old friends from cities far away, that ended up with me being in possession of a roland MC-307.
i’ve played around with digital sound production a little bit, using software + midi (using things like reason) but…. ugh. i work at a computer professionally, so the appeal of sitting in front of one when i get home is… minimal. (but not the good kind, like you want. ) that, combined with all the midi mapping and sound card latency and the hey hey hey let’s spend all our time trying to make things play nice, i’ve never really gotten anywhere working on music digitally.
last spring i purchased a “new” set of tech 12s which have been keeping me occupied for the last few months (sold my old ones in 2005 to go to burningman :p) – but what i really want to do is to write my own music. so i decided once i paid off some debt i would make my first timid steps into the land of analog (or well, at least physically tactile, we’re not quite generating sine waves from scratch over here…) gear.
and now, here i am – will be completely debt free in a month (hurray!) and little roland pretty much falls into my lap. awesome!! and it even comes with a nice boy who wants friends to jam with – he’s a professional sound guy / producer / dj / old old old friend that has just recently moved super close to me and has a studio full of blinky shit!) so…. pretty much the best thing ever.
i think it’s time to make the floor burn!
the 307 is awesome… i mean, it’s by no means the fanciest or the best, but it’s hilarious. it is made to make RAVE MUSIC. so cheesy. which i love. some people say the interface is weird or hard to use, but i really have no basis for comparison so it seems manageable for me. i’m having a lot of fun learning to use it (BLINKY SHIT)!!
