Last week I came home from work and Kristy asks me if we have anything planned for Saturday night. I reply with “I don’t think so… why?”. She then proceeds to ask “In that case, do you want to go and see Mum’s Tennis Friends play?”.

Coincidentally, Kristy’s Mum does happen to play tennis and I had no idea a band called “Mum’s Tennis Friends” even existed, so I looked a little puzzled as to why we would want to go and watch Kristy’s Mum play tennis with a bunch of her friends on Saturday night… but I figured there must be a reason for the invite, so I respond “Um… ok… sure…. where are they playing?”

Kristy replies “At the Coronation Hotel”. Now I’m baffled. Not only am I confused as to why we’d want to spend our Saturday evening watching a bunch of old ladies play tennis, but now I have to process the fact that this whole crazy event would be taking place in a rough Ipswich pub that’s a few doors down from a gun shop and an adult store (which both scarily occupy adjoining premises… but hey, that’s Ipswich for you).

Then if my brain wasn’t broken enough by this stage, Kristy then throws in the comment “Madonna’s husband plays with them, so a few of my old school friends are going along and thought it might be fun to rock-out with them”.

This must have been the point that my head exploded and I was left dumbfounded with a permanent ‘brain freeze’ expression stuck on my face.

Kristy, noticing my mental agony, says “what’s wrong – don’t you want to go?”

So I try and explain that I have no idea of what’s going on – why on earth does the husband of one of Kristy’s old school friends play tennis in pubs with Kristy’s Mum and a bunch of her friends on Saturday nights and how has this mixed group of amateur athletes managed to gain a cult following of 30-year-old women who all went to school together?!?

The next 10 minutes was filled with Kristy explaining that they’re a band and after a couple of pain-killers and a lie-down, I’m back on track and finally understand what just transpired.

So, Saturday afternoon rolls around and we figure that since the band doesn’t start until 7pm and it’s local, we’d have a few drinks before the gig starts… rock-up fashionably late and party-on. So I have a couple of beers… play some PS3 while Kristy gets ready… have a shower… a few more beers… I get ready… another couple of beers and we leave. I’m feeling a bit pissy already and the night technically hasn’t begun.

We arrive thinking everyone would be there already – but no – it was just us and a dishevelled looking crowd. More beer is required.

Now, I should also probably point-out that, as a wimpy, weak, slightly pudgy geek who was picked-on a little through-out school and over the years has been mistaken for a homosexual on more than one occasion… I’ve developed this fairly unfounded and quite unnatural paranoia that whenever I’m in a large group of blokey blokes and I don’t have suitable “backup”, I fear that I’ll get into a fight… or more accurately, get bashed-up.

So given the surroundings, I was feeling a bit nervous. Fortunately, Kristy’s friends turn-up, we start chatting and all is good… Until one of the girls’ husbands starts spear tackling guys randomly. I’m nervous again… but then we start doing shots of tequila and the nerves disappear… as does the feeling in my legs. The pub is also too tough to stock salt or lemons, so we’re doing straight shots of tequila with nothing but the bitter flavour of beer to wash down the sharp after-taste.

By this stage, I’ve forgotten that I’m scared of anything – probably because even if someone did punch me, I probably wouldn’t feel it. But I’m also so drunk that remaining upright is a challenge and end-up deciding it’s probably best if I go home and leave the girls to finish the night without me. And after all that, I don’t even think I saw Mum’s Tennis Friends play.

On Sunday I woke-up and felt worse than I have done in ages. Kristy took Caleb to SeaWorld whereas I just slept, ate (when I could finally stomach food again at some point that afternoon) and then spent the rest of the day randomly watching the lights on the tv flicker at me and played some more PS3.

Despite the pain felt throughout Sunday (and even a little bit on Monday) and the fact that my Saturday night was a little anti-climatic since I didn’t even get to see the band play – it was actually quite a good weekend.

So it’s been a week of surprises – my weekend in the mountains (without mobile phone or internet coverage) was really good. My sister, Karen introduced us to a game where you take a random object and pretend it’s something else. For instance, you take a shoe, hold it up to your ear and everyone has to guess that you’re pretending it’s a phone. Although simple, the game actually gets rather interesting once all the obvious scenarios are done.

Karen explained to us that the game was introduced as a study to identify how lateral a child’s mind is and to some extent, gain an indication of their overall quick-wittedness and intelligence. Sort-of like a word association game, but instead with objects. All I can say is that my family (and myself included) are rather inventive, quite funny but I’m not so sure about intellectual

Then on Monday night I did my first-ever public speaking gig which also, surprisingly, went really really well. I’d go as far as to say that it went so well that I’d happily do it again. If you’re interested in reading some of the geeky SEO things discussed, you can check it out at my work blog.

Then in other news this-morning I hear that Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett are both dead… not related and their deaths don’t really have any impact at all on me personally – sure I liked some of Jacko’s music and think his title of ‘King of Pop’ is justified considering his career… although he also is the King of Crazy amongst other things, but I won’t go into that and I’ll avoid making any jokes [for now] as I think that anyone who passes deserves at least a little respect for them and their loved ones (yes, even the crazy ones).

So in honour of his death, here’s a homage to MJ via Darth Vader:

While we’re on the topic of music (how was that for a segway?) PlayStation have just launched a new, free, music video service VidZone which looks pretty cool. Now if you’re as geeky as I am, you’re probably thinking that since PS3 has a web browser and supports media servers, why would you need a dedicated music service when there’s YouTube and other streaming options via your PC? Well, I agree, it isn’t necessary, but from a quick play lastnight the quality seems good and it’s easy to use, so it ticks all the right boxes… and I imagine that it’s targeted to people who probably don’t use their PS3s to stream YouTube so with that in mind, it looks like a good little service.

Last thing related to music… the following clip was sent to me via a Twitter buddy and I have to say I really like the song and the filmclip is awesome:

Moving away from music and onto photos… This is photo bomb – a website devoted to the delicate art of inserting ones self (or finding someone or something distracting) into other’s seemingly legitimate photos. Or if you’ve got family snaps like those found on this next site, you don’t even need photobombing: Awkward Family Photos.

And finally, last photo-related thing, I stumbled across a project started by Ze Frank called Youngme / Nowme. The site is dedicated to replicating old photos, so you get a photo of you riding your first bike, or sitting on the potty or something typical of kids, and then you try and replicate that photo by wearing a similar outfit and get a snap of you trying to ride a kids bike… it sounds a bit silly, but I love the concept and some of the photos are pretty funny.

Do you like coffee and robots? I certainly do, so if you’re like me, then check-out this super terrific Japanese coffee making robot thing (I think that’s the correct term for it if my translation skills are accurate):

And last, but certainly not least – I like obscure comics / cartoons and years and years ago I was a big fan of the short-lived series The Maxx. Much to my delight, I just found you can watch full episodes of the show at MTV’s Maxx website.

That’s it from me peoples – have a good weekend if I don’t post anything beforehand!

To give you some examples, here are a few of my favorites I read today:

Today, I received an email from my boss telling me how appreciated I was and how valuable I am to the company. I wish I hadn’t scrolled down to read the included conversation where he asked his boss whether to lie to me about how good I was or not. FML

Today, I tried buying a video game that was rated “M – for mature”. The Cashier told me “you have to be 17 to buy this game”. I didn’t have any ID on me. I’m 25. FML

Today, I was looking at this site when my wife called to ask what I was doing, I told her I was looking at a website called F*** My Life and she hung up. I called her back and got yelled at because she thought I was using a website called F*** My Wife. FML

There were a lot of other funny ones and as I was reading through the list (and remembering how I arrived there in the first place), I came-up with a FML of my own:

“My friend forwarded me a link to fmylife.com… Is this her polite way of trying to tell me my life is f*cked? Then I started reading through some of the entries and found 2 on the FIRST page that applied directly to me. Perhaps she’s right. FML”

She’s been making music (and movies) for the last few years and the song I heard (called “I’ll Kill Her”) has been around for a year or more, but it’s still new to me and I like it.  I downloaded her EP – ‘Not Sokute’ and the thing I love about it is that all her songs have an interesting honesty to them.

For instance, in “I’ll Kill Her” she’s basically going on about being stood-up on a date and how she’d like to kill the guy because he’s now dating someone else.  It sounds a bit morbid, but her cute little voice and laid-back acoustic guitar, plus the blatant honesty in the lyrics makes something that sounds terrible seem innocent and genuinely honest as I’m sure that was how she was feeling when writing the song.

Generally speaking, a typical love-song or break-up song is usually quite politically correct and while they display emotion, the lyrics aren’t really constructed in the same way that you would vocalise your emotions when speaking with your best friend.  SoKo’s music is refreshing in the fact that it comes across as being completely honest and it’s written in such a way that it seems she isn’t doing it to make money, it’s simply an emotional release.

Perhaps I’m reading into things too much and perhaps she’s marketed herself in such a way that seems honest but it’s all a ploy… who knows, but hey, her music is cute and interesting.

Here’s her song “I’ll Kill Her” and you can find her other stuff on her site or just do a YouTube search for SoKo.

Kristy’s work usually organises an event for the staff and their families which includes a couple of drinks, a BBQ meal and a good vantage point to see the fireworks display.  We went a few years ago, but as Caleb was a bit younger, the noise and commotion that comes with a fireworks display was a bit too much for him and he spent most of the show hiding under a blanket (a fatherly trait that I’m sure he could only have picked-up from me).

But this year Caleb seemed a lot more interested in going along and Kristy’s friends Trish and Dave were also planning on going, so we made a group booking and it was a great night.

On the train coming home, there were a lot of kids (and I’m not a huge fan of kids) so to amuse myself (and hopefully mentally block-out some of their noise) I started playing a few of my favorite tunes in my head.  This lead me to thinking… wouldn’t it be even better if instead of just playing these tunes in my head – I could mix them together and create my own little mental DJ mix.  So I did.  And the mix was awesome.

So when we got home, I jumped on the interweb and downloaded a trail version of some mixing software and since then I’ve been dabbling with various tunes and creating my own mixes.  Throughout this process I’ve learnt a few things:

• It’s much harder to create a good mix than I originally anticipated
• Mixing is more about choosing the right songs rather than the technique involved with blending two tracks
• Finding the perfect tracks to use is tricky because the most common versions of popular music is the ‘radio edit’ which is short (only goes for a little over 3 minutes… so there’s no long intro/outro to use to blend songs either side of it).  Finding longer remixes of songs can be a bit trickier, but the process has been great because I’ve ended-up finding a lot of great stuff… and in some cases I actually like the remix more than the original
• Mixing software can be fairly resource hungry, so if I’m going to mix anything longer than 3 tracks, I’m going to need a more powerful computer

The final thing that I’ve learnt is that I need a whole lot more practice because I’ve spent most nights for the last week playing and so far all I’ve got to show for it is the joining of two songs (and even that is pretty crap)… or perhaps I just need to change my target market to the hearing impaired.

This weekend it was Father’s Day and I didn’t do anything much at all.  On Friday night we enjoyed a few quiet drinks and some DVDs followed by a brief network outage on Saturday morning causing me to wake far earlier than I anticipated to the joyous sounds of clients wanting to know why their sites and emails weren’t working.  Thankfully the issue was resolved fairly quickly (within a few hours) and I was able to have an afternoon snooze before heading-out to see my niece Anna perform in a musical/dance concert that evening.

Sunday was fairly cruisy… just did some stuff around the house and watched a couple more movies.  My Father’s Day pressie (which is on its way) is a couple of cool Threadless T-shirts which Kristy ordered last week.

I have a sneaky suspicion that the next couple of weeks are going to be fairly busy as I’m compiling data for a new little work-related project plus a few other things that are ‘on the go’.  If anyone wants to help with the data I’m compiling, just add a comment below with a few brief words about what you think ‘web hosting’ is.  If you don’t know, that’s cool (perhaps even better) as I’d love to hear what different people think about the topic.

Yes, some people have been waiting for such a day to happen again since July last year (and after tomorrow they’ll have to wait even longer until September next year).

When I heard someone refer to the day as 80808 (eight-o-eight-o-eight), it reminded me of some rap lyrics that I’ve heard dropped into more than a few popular rap songs.

As it turns-out, the term 808 could possibly refer to the Roland TR-808 which happened to be the first-ever electronic, programmable drum machine. I believe the bass drum effect from this machine was programmed as 808. Even though this machine first came-out in the 80′s, the sounds of the TR-808 are still commonly used in drum and bass, hip-hop, R&B, house, electro and many forms of electronic dance music today. Just add some some synthesised sounds and a repetitive catchy lyric and you’ve just described some of my favourite songs.

It also coincidentally refers to the American penal code for disturbing the peace (most commonly through the use of loud music).

The other reference to 808 that I could find is that it’s also the telephone area code for Hawaii, however I doubt a phone number would have inspired any rap lyrics… unless you count this De La Soul classic.

So there you have it… they might only be three small numbers, but they are responsible for a rather large sound.

Last weekend we went to watch the Lions (AFL) at the Gabba.  I like mentioning sport on the blog because in reality, I don’t follow any sport, but simply by mentioning that I went to the football gives the impression that I’m a die-hard fan.  To be completely honest with you, I struggle to understand what’s going on half the time, but always ensure that I “woo”, “ahh”, “ooh” and “boo” when everyone else in the crowd does, so as to get the most out of the live sporting experience.

Something that I am a lot more interested in (and I like to think I understand some of the rules of… or at least more rules than I know about any sport) is music.  As a child I learnt how to play the keyboard / organ and in my teenage years learnt the basics of the guitar… but I haven’t played either in years and to be honest I didn’t really learn how to read music properly as I’d often cheat by playing by ear and memorising the keystrokes that my teachers would do.

Ok… so my music abilities are fairly crap, but that has never dampened my interest.  While on holidays Kristy saw a book called “This is your brain on music” by Daniel Levitin and suggested I have a look at it.  Now I don’t read books very often.  I read a lot of blogs and other online articles, but I very very very rarely read books.  When I do read a book, it usually is a reference book of some description and of late, most of the books I’ve read have either been about business development or marketing.

The thing that attracted me to this particular book was that 1. it was about music and the brain… (two things I find fascinating) and 2. it was written like a reference book as Daniel Levitin has worked as a recording engineer and producer turned neuroscientist.  So he’s got the hands-on experience but also an incredibly comprehensive understanding of the brain.

So I bought the book and it was fantastic.

I’ve learnt a lot about how the brain stores and interprets information in general and a lot of specific examples pertaining to how it handles music… what makes us like the songs we like, what makes us dislike other types of music and many other things far too detailed (and most likely boring to anyone who isn’t me) about the brain and music.

To demonstrate various types of music and the cognitive impact they have, Levitin referred back to a broad cross-section of music (ranging from classical, rock, jazz, pop and the list goes on) along with specific tracks by certain artists which make fine examples of these.

This made me realise that although I love music, my listening has been fairly limited and there are a lot of ‘great’ musicians and groups that I’ve never really listened to (other than what I’ve heard on the radio etc.)

So I’ve just started downloading a lot of new (to me) music and I’m going to be working my way through it… so far I’ve recently been listening to The Carpenters, The Stranglers, Phil Collins, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Elton John, Pink Floyd, Lead Zeppelin etc. etc.

Some of these probably seem like a strange selection… but then again, I’m a little strange, so it’s a good fit for me – plus the broader you cast your net, the more likely you’ll catch something you like.

I’d encourage comments on other artists you think I should expose my eager ears to.

I was going to talk about music and started to write an intro on the topic and managed to get a little carried away (which I also tend to do if you’re talking to me in person)… anyway… now that you know that I like music (and the fact that it makes me remember) I’ll get on with the post I meant to write a few days ago.

Because I like listing to new music, every few months I’ll decide to find a bunch of stuff I haven’t heard before. A few months ago I found myself listening to a bunch of Global Underground albums which weren’t too bad and a few days ago I listened to:

Dizzee Rascal – Maths and English
Digitalism – Idealism
Justice – Cross
Laurent Garnier – Retrospective 1994 – 2006
LCD Soundsystem – Sound Of Silver
Plain White Ts – Every Second Counts
Gatecrasher – Immortal – 14 Years Of Gatecrasher

Was I familiar with any of the stuff above… not really… I had heard of two or three of the groups above. When listening to some of the albums I found there were a few more tracks that I recognised… and some were completely new.

How did I come across this selection? I looked-up a few album charts for styles of music I like… looked on a few other music sites, read some reviews and then randomly selected some stuff that sounded a bit different.

I probably won’t ever listen to Dizzee Rascal again… I quite enjoyed Digitalism, Laurent Garnier and Plain White Ts. Justice needed a second-listen, and it wasn’t too bad the second-time round… I’ll do the same with LCD Soundsystem too because I was doing a bunch of stuff whilst listening to it last time and wasn’t really paying attention and Gatecrasher was exactly as expected.. nothing amazing, but still good to have in the collection.

So that’s my write-up of some random music.

I also tend to associate songs/albums/artists with particular events. Here are some examples…

In highschool I was dating a girl and didn’t honour the relationship as I should have causing her to break-up with me (all my own fault and there was no excuse for my actions)… that night I was heading to a ‘Presidents of the United States of America’ concert with some friends and discovered that I had left my wallet (with the tickets) at my ex-girlfriends place. It was a very awkward situation retrieving the wallet and tickets and now if I ever hear any music by POTUSA it reminds me of that incident.

Anything by East 17 triggers Mel’s unhealthy fetish with that band and any time I hear ’2 Unlimited’ it takes me back to one of her other fetishes – Rock Eisteddfod.

Another example is when I used to work with Kristy on night shifts and weekends at an ISP. It was usually pretty quiet so when there were no calls we’d turn-up the music and sing loudly (and quite poorly) to songs like – Starlight by Superman Lovers, The Music Sounds Better With You by Stardust, Spillers Groovejet (if this ain’t love), Basement Jaxx’ Where’s Your Head At… etc. etc. Although none of these songs are particularly romantic, nor would I consider them to be ‘our songs’ but if any of them come on the radio, I always think of Kristy.

Last example – when Con and I travelled around Switzerland and Italy a few years ago, the soundtrack for the trip was Faithless’ Outrospective/Reperspective with a little bit of Groove Armada’s Goodbye Country (Hello Nightclub) on the side. Now whenever I listen to those albums it takes me back to things like – getting lost in Singapore or being taken for a dodgy ride by a bloody took-took driver… seeing snow for the first time (and snowboarding worse than a bunch of 5 year olds)… drinking grappa… missing the last bus back to Locarno and having to walk a frickin’ long way in the rain… climbing what could be best described as a mountain to check-out what we thought was an abandoned castle only to discover we were trespassing on what was probably a very wealthy estate.

ahh all good times.

Anyways, I didn’t start this post with the intention of reminiscing… but that’s what happened… so I’ll write another post later when I have some more time on the topic I was originally going to write about.

Feel free to share some of your musical memories in the comments below…

This year it featured Bob Sinclar, Mylo, Darren Emerson, Plump DJs, Hybrid, Judge Jules, Freestylers, Martin Solveig, Axwell, Mousse T, Tocadisco, Bodyrockers, Switch, BK, TV Rock, Kid Kenobi & Mc… and many more.

The only bad part is that we’ll have to wait another 12 months before it happens again.