490 + Davids

Yesterday I did the second Part of my exam for the third time. It's something to do with work so that I can demand a raise. I need 500 points to pass. The first time I did 460. The second time I did 480. So using the trend I should have gotten a 500. I did study a bit (albeit with Prison Break in the background - or perhaps it was the other way around?), I prepared as well as I am able to (a couple of minutes here and there), and I got a 490.

I calculated it and I was just missing 3 correct answers. Three out of 140! That's only 2%! I should have answered B instead of C for question 79 and C instead of A on question 123 and maybe I would have passed the damn thing by now. It's just fucking gutting!

Anyway, on another note, welcome back Edje! Great to have you back again!

First Snow of the Season

It finally arrived! Winter is finally here! It's been snowing since 1pm (it's now 5 pm). It's almost white outside. Now it feels like a proper winter. Yippee...

It's going to be freezing in the next couple of days.

So Come On Baby Cover Me

I've been listening to Coverville's podcast quite a lot lately. It's a nice podcast, made as a hobby by a guy called Brian Ibbot somewhere in Colorado, the U.S.ofA. The podcast is about 40 minutes long and plays songs that are covers of other songs. Sometimes you get to listen to an amazing cover and sometimes you get to hear the awful ones as well. I like it and I get to hear (some) new cover songs as well in the process.

At the end of 2006, Coverville did a Coverville countdown where people go on the website and choose their favourite cover songs. The most favourite cover song is, unsurprisingly, Johnny Cash doing Nine Inch Nails' Hurt. But one song, listed in the Top 10, caught my attention.

It started all folky, with guitar picking not unlike Jack Johnson, and then he started singing the first line "I like big butts and I cannot lie". I started giggling as the original song brings back lots of memories.

Anyway, you can buy that song from iTunes, if not go to the artist's website. His name is Jonathan Coulton. It's done very well and definitely worth at least a listen.

"24"

Didn't do much this weekend. We jumped into the lake and realised after 10 minutes that it's freezing cold (around 6 degrees) so we went up again. Still a nice dive though.

In the afternoon I watched seven (yes, 7!) episodes of 24 season 4, ending the whole season. Big fans of 24 will know what happens in the end and I found the end to be a bit tacky, seeing a "newborn" Jack Bauer walking off into the sunset alongside traintracks with his leather jacket and his Raybans on.

As for 24 season 4, some stuff don't make sense. But then again, it is television and it is Jack Bauer. He's like the superhero, the can-do-it-all. When his highly tactical team goes into the field, they all wear heavy armor and helmets. Jack just goes in with his jacket and he just dodges bullets like Neo. He never drinks, eats, or sleeps, he never even seems tired at all. He cut himself at night but then never suffered from that wound in the early hours.

Oh, well, finished 24, now on to either Prison Break or episodes of CSI: Miami to make us fall asleep.

Poor Mother Earth

I'm looking out of my window office today. It's bright, sunny, blue skies. I came in this morning on my vespa and only wore my thin windbreaker instead of my big duvet coat. Yesterday I played football at lunch time and I was hot in my shorts and t-shirt. The thermometer in my car showed 13.5 degrees Celsius this morning at 08.30 am. Tuesday night I ran in shorts and wasn't cold at all.

And this is on the 11th of January??!!??

The world is going mental. We can now feel the effect of global warming. I cannot go snowboarding yet, there is no snow.

Even though the weather is very nice, I just want it to be cold and snowing like a normal January. This weather is just freaking me out! (Although it's not freaking GWB I'm sure).

Al Gore must be right.

Movie of the year 2006

After listing the 10 albums I like the most from 2006, it's now time to turn to another media: movies.

In 2006 there is one movie that stand out head and shoulders above all other movies. Borat's Cultural Learning of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan is the movie to watch in 2006. For me, it's up there with This is Spinal Tap and Office Space.

If you haven't seen it, go out and watch it!

Top 10 Albums of 2006

It's early 2007, so it's time for me to list the best albums of 2006 and a bit of comment on each of them.

Here's the list in alphabetical order (it's almost impossible for me to quantify my liking of an album hence no 1-10 list):

Alright, Still - Lily Allen
She's the chav princess, the female equivalent of Mike Skinner. When she sings/raps, she just takes daily happenings. Her sound is fresh and very poppy but if you listen careful you can hear that she actually knows what she is singing about. LDN is by far one of the best songs about London.
Listen to: Smile, LDN

Black Holes and Revelations - Muse
It's the Matt Bellamy circus show again. He sings about love and spaceships (in the same song), while showing off his amazing piano and guitar skills. Even though the album starts out a bit Radiohead, by the end of it it's more Rush. Long live ProgRock!
Listen to: Starlight, Supermassive Black Hole, Knights of Cydonia

Inside In/Inside Out - The Kooks
A couple of art school boys, an ex-boyfriend of Katie Melua, a bit of swagger and you have The Kooks. Their songs are happy happy go-along and it makes your head bop to the tune. It really sounds like spring / summer and their live performance isn't bad either.
Listen to: Naive, She Moves In Her Own Way, Ooh La

Razorlight - Razorlight
When I first heard their first album, I though Razorlight was just an overrated band with Johnny Borrell an attention seeking front man. My thought of Borrell remains the same but the band showed class with their second album. They dug deep and found what they are good at and used it. But with Borrell around, we can only guess how long this band is going to be around.
Listen to: America, In The Morning, Kirby's House

Sam's Town - The Killers
I loved their first album, it really sounded like English 80s. With the second album, Brandon Flowers and his friends looked at their roots and realised it isn't Birmingham like Duran Duran, but it is Las Vegas, USA. So they looked at their own country and made an album that sounds very different than the first one. From Duran Duran to Springsteen in a couple of years, that's an achievement.
Listen to: When We Were Young, Bones, Read My Mind

Stadium Arcadium - Red Hot Chili Peppers
After 4 years gone, these veteran rockers knocked on Rick Rubin's door and recorded a double album with lots of great songs in it. Even though Flea is one of the best bass players in the world, this one isn't about him, it's about Frusciante. He came to RHCP very young and was basically just copying Hillel Slovak but now he has matured and is definitely on par with Flea and the rest of the Peppers. His guitar playing is just awesome, as are his songs.
Listen to: Dani California, Torture Me, Tell Me Baby, Animal Bar

St. Elsewhere - Gnarls Barkley
The album with the song of the year (Crazy). We all know the genius that DJ DangerMouse is (if you haven't listened to The Grey Album yet then you are waaay behind). This time he teams up with Cee-Lo and just pulls out amazing stuff. It's not rap, it's not hip-hop, it's not electronica. It's soul. Actually lots and lots of soul.
Listen to: Crazy, Smiley Faces, Gone Daddy Gone

Twelve Stops And Home - The Feeling
There was a time when listening to soft rock is a guilty pleasure. Actually it still is. Using that then The Feeling should be sentenced to life in prison as their album is nothing else but just soft rock with influences from the biggest of them (10cc, Foreigner, etc). But this guilty pleasure is just what it is, a pleasure.
Listen to: Sewn, Never Be Lonely, I Love It When You Call, Fill My Little World

Under The Iron Sea - Keane
The opening bars of Is It Any Wonder? is exactly what the Keane's second album is about. You're thinking "hey, they use guitars now" or "hey, is that The Edge from Achtung Baby?" before realising that Tim rice-Oxley plugged his piano to a bunch of sound effects and he made this album sounds like Achtung Baby. A little help from Brian Eno doesn't hurt either. The still don't use guitars but they rock!
Listen to: Is It Any Wonder?, Crystal Ball

Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not - Arctic Monkeys
Most critics will claim this album as the best of 2006. It broke records as the best-selling debut just by virtue of word-of-mouth (or is it word-of-emails or word-of-chatting?). After listening to this songs, not a lot of people would have guessed that this band consists mostly of teenagers. Yep, teenagers made one of the best albums in 2006. The line "dance like a robocop from 1984" inspired Peter Crouch to do his robo-dance even though these lads weren't even born yet in 1984! Since then the bass player has quit but if Alex Turner continues writing songs like these, he'll end up up there with the likes of Bono, the Gallaghers, and David Bowie.
Listen to: I Bet That You Look Good On The Dancefloor, View From The Afternoon, Fake Tales From San Fransisco, Mardy Bum

What are yours?

Deja Vu

I'm a bit bored at work now and am basically waiting for a phone call before I can leave. So I just browsed my own blog (as you do) and looked up the month of January 2004. Everytime I read an entry I can remember the exact day and what happened, but if I didn't have a blog I probably would have forgotten those days. It's nice to have a blog...

On New Year's day we went to see Deja Vu, the movie with Malcolm X, Jesus Christ and Jim Morrison. It dealt a bit with time travel. If you haven't seen the movie and want to see it, stop reading this entry right now because I will be handing out spoilers now. If you want to read more, then do so.

Anyway, the movie is about a bomb blowing up in New Orleans, killing 500+ people. Denzel the cop investigates it and finds another cop, Val Kilmer. Denzel joins Val and his team where they have hypermodern satellites that can stream live video from 4 days in the past. Turns out that these bunch of geeks found a way to travel back in time.

Movies about time travel have been done before. Back to the future, The Terminator, even in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. And in all those movies they have got it right, but Tony Scott and Jerry Bruckheimer obviously never saw those movies because the whole time travel thing in Deja Vu just sucked ass. It was bad.

How bad you ask?

First of all, when you go back in time and change the past, the events gets changed as well so whatever should have happened won't happen. This means that in Deja Vu, the bombing never happened. Then the issue of Denzel going back in time and dying. This means that the Denzel of the past is only going to live another 4 days. And how is the coroner going to explain having a dead Denzel and a live one at the same time? And also having a facility as such, how come they close it down so easily? I would have thought a project like this will be kept secret for all the world to know.

In short, this movie sucks.
Read the rest of this entry...

And a deja vu is a glitch in the system anyways...

Two-Thousand and Se7en

Happy New Year everybody! All the best for 2007!

So what did you do on New Year's eve?

I went up to the mountain with my girlfriend, to a chalet of a friend, where we joined 9 other people in celebrating new year's with a 3 liter bottle of Heineken in one hand, a bottle of bubbly in the other, some fireworks and my iPod in my pocket.

Played UNO, played a drinking game, ate pasta, set off some fireworks (without a lighter though), drank a bit, danced a bit and then back home.

What a pleasant way to start 2007!