http://www.flickr.com/gp/55592659@N00/13FS66 (i have some viewing restrictions on my pictures, so if you aren't a Flickr member, which is free, and aren't tagged by me as a "friend" or "family" you won't be able to see them, so enjoy the samples below)
We'd all be fourth graders playing Guitar Hero to score 1,000,000 points, only to realise that the "Super Star" levels do not actually exist. The good thing is we'd look like this:
Powered with what sounds like a midi sound engine from Windows 95, this $600 SharperImage product, clearly on the cutting edge of technology, will make you the creative performer of music you've always wanted to be (but couldn't because you have no actual creative, musical talent and won't have gained any more by purchasing this joke of a system)
yes it's real, no it's not a SNL digital short (although, if I told you it was, it'd surely be one of the funniest yet)
here's the product description from the YouTube page:
The beamz™ unleashes the musical creativity that's harbored in every soul.
* Extraordinary invention fuses the interaction of your hands with laserbeams to create the sounds of hundreds of different instruments.
* Breaking the laser beams with your hands automatically generatespre-authored pulses, streams, riffs or loops of musical notes or sounds from avariety of instruments — all kinds of strings, keyboards, winds, percussion.Sophisticated high-fidelity sounds seem to pour off your fingertips like magic!
* Choose a complementary rhythm track from 30 original songs in 19 musicgenres, including jazz, bluegrass, classical, hip-hop, reggae, heavy metal andmore.
* The beamz system has a "W" shape, with six laser beams spanning the twosections; connect via USB to your PC or laptop, then hook up some speakers andyou're ready to perform great-sounding music.
* Includes software CDs and USB cable for connecting directly to USB portof your PC or laptop.
Gizmodo says to watch the video "and marvel at the bozonic 'one man rock band,' the loungetard 'quiet reverie,' or the male-bonding 'jam session.'" There's certainly nothing better than bro-ing it up with your favorite dude and finishing it off with a rad high five, all to the soundtrack of a wonderful tropical calypso track!
Here's my opinions on this monster. There is no musical creativity involved with this. If you've got good rhythm, then you'll probably make this karaoke music maker have some sort of structure, but all your doing is triggering tracks that are already recorded. I'll have more fun with my Yamaha PSR-520 all in one keyboard where all you do is press the key you want and KABLAMO you've got a song. I guess that makes anyone using the keyboard a piano player and creative composer as well.
Anyone that's a big enough douche to actually spend money on this certainly deserves to part with the cash it takes to get this joke in your house.
seriously though, go by a PS3 and Guitar Hero..much more fun than this waste of space.
I mosey’d on over to mystarbucksidea.com this morning to see what the blabber was all about and to see just what everyones favorite/most despised coffee chains current conversations are.
It became apparent that most of the people with ideas were ignorant of their options (decaf, non fat, get it how you want it etc) and desired extraordinarypersonalization ("I don’t live near a Starbucks, you should deliver it to me so I don’t have to drive to you").
Instead of going with the Internet Troll inside me that wanted to post a comment on every single idea to say how stupid they were, I went in another route.
It appeared that most of the official Starbucks people that worked for Starbucks had similar nicknames when they posted something on the site like sbx_holly, or sbx_cafe, or sbx_jdoe.
In a similar fashion, my name is drnk_sbx.
I have taken in upon myself to be the silly sounding PR guy that wants to sound like I agree with you and then give you some sort of a solution...it may be actually boring sounding, but I like giving cheesy answers to sbux related questions.
I was at work yesterday and got off early, about 12:30pm. I parked a good walk away from work and since it was a nice enough day, decided to walk to my car (parked in a neighborhood) instead of parking in the employee garage. When I got to my car, there was a Jeep inside of it and a metro police car just pulling up to the scene. A jeep had slid on the slippery road, through the stop sign and into my parked car.
Long story short: he’s at fault, he has insurance, I have insurance, we have a police report, the front-drivers side of my car has an impact in it that looks terrifying and I’m worried about damage possibly to my axle and anything else that may have been shaken up.
This is annoying because I like the simple life. Just, y’know, working, enjoying my family, eating good food, drinking yummy drink. Calling insurance companies and getting my car fixed just doesn’t sound like that much fun.
I’m responsible for the best of times at Starbucks
Category: Food and Restaurants
This is a screen capture of the stock price for Starbucks during (almost to the day) my time working for them. As you can clearly see, between 2002 and 2007, the price of SBUX stock went from a modest $10 to a price split in 2005, and then to the highest close to $40.
After I left Starbucks in 2007 everything changed. Starbucks has been in the news for their CEO leaving and founder/former CEO Howard Shultz taking over once again. Dropping the breakfast sandwich, retraining baristas about espresso (I guess they’re figuring out how to bring flair back with a push-button machine), and trying to simplify.
I’m mostly excited to hear about the changes because those were all things that I wished for during my time there (less like a mall trinket store that sells coffee and back into a coffee shop).
Still, it can’t help but be noticed: when Michael Walker worked for Starbucks, his excellent customer service, commitment to quality, and love for all things caffeinated single-handedly made the company a lot of money.
What did I get for my labor? When I left Starbucks I cashed out all of my stock that I owned and bought a bunch of fun gadgets. Yes, I spent my stock money on iPods and stuff. This was free cash too! All I did was work there, and Starbucks continually gave me stock in the company.
I am selling CD’s & DVD’s that are gathering up dust and not being played. Several of them are even some Indie fav’s...yes, that’s what I said.
Having adopted into the digital music scene, I really only find that I treasure the physical copies of albums from only a select few artists and the rest are just sitting there when they could be making me money. Hey, I’ve already got a copy of the music on the ole computer but I don’t really care about the physical copy of them.
So please support the economic recession and help feed my baby(I’m only getting 36 hrs of work a week! Lame) and spend your tax rebate at http://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&me=AYTC9G5OTBBYT that is all
srlsly though, Vampire Weekend...are you kidding? Great, some rich white children from New England had enough money to record themselves and buy their way onto SNL.
from NPR:
Their lyrics provide a virtual tour of the life and education of the young and privileged, gleefully bounding from Cape Cod to campus, from sophistic grammatical references to the finer points of Beaux Arts architecture.[...]They make sense of how the thrill you get from seeing your crush walk to class is just about the same as discovering an obscure band that changes everything you thought about music.
The answer to what I've been looking for. I didn't know where to find a band that talked about the thrill of a crush (Jimmy Eat World circa 1999) or music that changed everything (The Beatles "The Beatles" aka "white album").
VeeDubbs (as I like to call them) aren't bad..just pretty boring
The wife and the boy went to Texas a couple weeks ago to have some time off along with Annie. Since we haven't been there since last September, it was a good time for them to show how big lil J is and catch up with others. here's some choice pictures from their fun time that weekend:
which one is which? that's our boy with his cousin (born two weeks apart) about to make a mess..but how could you stop them? they're so cute!
my lady love with my little man and the beautiful hill country behind them.
breezy
