duteVino played in Suburbia

Update: the band released their first album in December 2009

Last month I blogged about the Romanian band called duteVino. On the 8Th of March they had a concert in Suburbia and I decided I should go.

The bar is nice. It is slightly smaller than Fire, but a little classier, with small tables and taburets on one side and with a more open space (less colonnades). I got there with my wife and a friend and hunted the chairs until we had some table space.

The band started singing soon enough and they sounded really nice. The girl vocal has it all: the looks, the voice, the nicety. The band itself is made of four people and, since I am not a musician, I can't comment on the quality of their instrumentation. They sounded OK to me. duteVino played (I think) all the songs from their upcoming album, ten in total, and Gruv they left for the encore piece.



Unfortunately, the sound engineer was a moron. It's not like you can find good sound engineers anywhere on the street, but at least find one with guts! You see, the "chicken" way is to maximize the sound of instruments and minimize the sound of the vocal. In this way, even if there is faltering in the voice, most people won't realize it. Or at least I think that's the explanation why most concerts leave you almost deaf from the sound of the instruments while you struggle to understand (or even hear, as was the case here) what the vocal says.

The result here was that the voice of the singer was almost inaudible and I wonder if I would have enjoyed the concert if I didn't know some of the songs beforehand.
All in all, I like the band. I won't call myself a fan, but I will try to buy their album, nonetheless.

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Inner Universe - Ghost in the Shell, Stand Alone Complex soundtrack

Ok, let me feed my weird side. This is the soundtrack of a very nice anime series, itself spun from an anime movie called Ghost in the Shell. The series was called GITS - Stand Alone Complex and this was the opening song. This is not the official video for this song, especially since it depicts images from the movie, not the series, but I liked it better. Enjoy!

The original video was removed from YouTube, this is another, same song.


Inner Universe - GITS SAC OST
Composed by Yoko Kanno
Performed by Origa
Click here for lyrics and details.
You can also download the manga for Ghost in the Shell and its sequel (GITS 2 :) ) at narutocommunity.net, after a very annoying registration and a lot of popups (or javascript errors).
Try these direct download links, although they might not work:
Ghost in the Shell
Ghost in the Shell 2
Warning: don't use multiple connections or download accelerators. This site only allows one connection from one IP, apparently.

And here is Making of a Cyborg, by Kenji Kawai, the original soundtrack for the movie.

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Real Time Blogging

You might think you are so cool when you blog about whatever goes through your head, but people have done it before you since times immemorial. Bucharest, for example, is filled with Real Time Bloggers (or RTB) and you may find them really easy by going on any public transportation vehicle (or RATB).

The RTB is easy to recognize. He or she (let's call them it) has old and discolored clothes, smells really bad and, most importantly of all, can't shut up. It will tell you its entire life story and any (if any) thoughts that it has had in the last 15 to 20 years. It will tell it whether you want it or not, usually hitting end tape and repeating itself in about 30 minutes which is, by the way, the average time someone spends in public transportation to get to one place to the other in the city.

Now, you might think that this has nothing to do with any network (aka web) or logging (since it is all verbal), but if you spend some time researching this you will notice that they are everywhere and they pretty much say the same things, so they have their own network and they are saying the same thing from their own unique perspective. So it's exactly like blogging.

Also, don't confuse them with beggars. Beggars smell worse, they ask for money and they usually make sense. They are the real life equivalent of spam or commercials. And everyone would like to click them really hard, but they are afraid they will catch some virus or some other malware.

The interesting thing is that they don't really talk to each other and in the winter, when their publicistic careers peek, there is one on each single bus, trolley, tramway or subway. If one leaves the vehicle, another one comes. So they have a very efficient way of disseminating information, unlike web bloggers who, being relatively new to this business, still wait for others to come read what they had to say and sometimes flock on the same information highway.

I also tried to add an image to this entry, however, no doubt due to their experience in blogging, couldn't find one. They probably don't have any contact with our own, new and untrusted network, and prefer the more advanced technology of 3-D smellovision.

So, quit being so full of yourself. Blogging may be the oldest profession in the world, for all you know. You're not special!

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Evanescence - a very beautiful performance

I don't usually enjoy live performances better than the studio sound. I am sorry, I know that there is a completely different atmosphere, that the true quality of the artist is revealed in live concerts and that the creativity and spontaneity of the band or singer can only be seen face to face, but the sound is usually worse and the way it comes out not usually exactly what the artist wanted or expected.
But this particular performance from American band Evanescence was very emotional and it moved me, even from a recording on YouTube. Enjoy!

Evanescence - Taking Over Me - live at Rock am Park

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RoBlogFest or Lonely People of the World, Unite!

My tastes in blogs are rather particular and the number of blogs I am visiting is not large. I write mostly about computing and personal taste and a lot of the things that really bug me! Well, I did use to be a debugger, after all.

Returning to Roblogfest. This was some sort of top blog thing + a party where bloggers got together and talked about ... wait a minute! What would bloggers talk about? And even more than this, would they repeat the most interesting stuff in the blogs the next day? I imagined blog entries like "Yesterday I talked to [some guy - with a link to the guy's blog] at Roblogfest and it was really interesting what he said about [this - a link to the entry of the guy's blog]". That's the Internet for you, hyperlinking to the extreme, I thought, feeling slightly smug and imaginative.

Returning to Roblogfest. I kept bumping into it, while reading some blog or the other, waiting for some smart thing to enlighten me. Instead: the RoBlogFest competition, with voting and everything. I imagined stuff like "The least interesting blog category: Xulescu's, winner with 5534 votes" or "Most read blog: Roblogfest". Well, it wasn't interesting enough to care, so I ignored it. I kept reading BBC news and Google news, looking for stuff. Who cares about who's blog is better or not? Isn't the blog a symbol of personal expression, uncorrupted by external demand?

Returning to Roblogfest. The competition is over, the party is over. The blogs are full of Roblogfest again. This time people either enjoy having won something (more people on their blogs?) or thinking the whole competition was stupid (they didn't get more people on their blogs). Also, a lot of pictures, little youtube videos and stories about how bloggers got together and talked and whatever. Lots of links, too. "I talked to [this guy] yesterday. The rest I didn't know. I wanted to know them, but some I didn't". Most of the bloggers were kids. Some cute, some not, mostly the kind of social pariah which would write their feelings in a blog rather than sharing them during a party. They enjoyed the party, though.

This reminds me of that joke, with two people meeting in a park and admitting to each other that they really enjoy walking alone in the park, then decide to take the walk together. Yeah, I am sure now I feel smug. I am definitely superior. I would have liked to be that young again... or to go to parties and meet cute blogger girls, but I am well beyond that. I am definitely superior. And my blog is better.

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theSTART, a very nice Rock with female vocal band

theSTART are a Rock / New Wave / Electronica band from Sudden Valley, California, as it writes on their mySpace web site. They also have an official website. I've discovered them quite a long while ago, but back then I didn't use to put images and video to the blog. Anyway, without further due here is the videoclip to the song Gorgeous, by theSTARt. I hope you enjoy it.


Yesterday, the video worked, today it's stuck on "Loading". Just in case you experience the same problem, here are the available videos with theStart.

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cannot open the file: mk:@MSITStore: ...

Update!!
Rick Strahl saves the day again in this post where he explains the "protection" mechanism for files downloaded off the internet in Windows and the "Unblock" option in the CHM file's Properties. If that doesn't solve it, read on.

Sometimes, while trying to read a Html Help chm file (STOP MAKING CHM FILES!), you get an error like "cannot open the file: mk:@MSITStore:idiot.chm". Googling it you quickly find out that the issue is the HHctrl.ocx file in Windows\System32 and that there are more than one version, the newer ones not always being better than the older ones.

There are a lot of suggested solutions on the web, from manually re-registering the OCX with regsvr32 to downloading the "right version". If you want to try those, you want to check the HTML Help - Diagnostics page, look for MJ's Diagnostics, a piece of software that tries to automatically find the Html Help problems and fix them. Well, that didn't work for me, though.

The solution I found: HTML Help Switcher 1.3, a utility that changes the Html Help OCX to any version you want with a click of a button.

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