Shawn Mariani

I’ve listened to Crystal Castles,  a Toronto electronic duo, for about a year now and thought I would write a quick post explaining how great they are.  They’re pretty glitchy, but if you like Nintendo breaks fused with distorted female vocals or “pitch-shifted vocal snippets [that] ricochet like pinballs around Crystal Castles’ patented 8-bit synths“, then check them out.  They need to tour around here (missed the show in Bowling Green, Ohio).  If they do come, I hope I don’t experience the snafu that happened in Dallas.

Took some video on my Cannon of the St. Marys Cement II as it made it’s way down the Cuyahoga.  Kind of cool I can see this stuff by walking a few steps outside my apt.

Full Gallery: http://picasaweb.google.com/shawnmariani/StMarysCementIIBargeCuyahoga#

To each their own, and all that jazz, but I really wonder what MJK would have said 15 years ago when told, “Hey, in fifteen years you’ll market a wine via e-mail and use your face to sell it. Oh, and it costs $100 a bottle.”

This is a guy who was known for performing in the shadows, and spreading the idea to enjoy music for the music, not who the front man is or what he looks like.  Yeah, he slowly moved out of that in the latter days of Tool and early days of APC.  During the few interviews he has done, he would often wear wigs and odd glasses to throw fans off while delivering quirky responses.   Yes, this is wine, so why would his thoughts on music matter?  I guess they don’t – and I need to realize that Tool is actually a huge band and not this dark small band I listened to when I was 13 and the Internet sucked so I didn’t know who they were or what they looked like.

Now, to his credit – it seems that he puts a lot of effort and work and soul and time into his wine at his own winery, Caduceus, in Arizona (grape vineyards in Arizona?).  The website is beautiful, too.  Maybe I’ll pick up a bottle.  MJK is the man.  Just get back in the studio with Tool and stop the 1-album-every-10-years model.  But then again, every album they’ve delivered takes 10 years to fully grasp how great they are – so maybe he’s on to something.

Caduceus Maynard:

Maynard of yesterday:

Pirates attacked 66 ships this year, 1 of which was American; yet watch how the bulk of America’s conservative media attempts to agitate the assault against Obama and pull the oh-so-familiar military card.

This is a brilliant collaboration of about 12 clips from one prominent network being 100% denounced and corrected by MSNBC’s accurate delivery.  When will they learn?

“…keeps trying to find some magical solution that doesn’t involve effort or risk…”

“Nobody would dare think about sending in the Marines…”

“..the Navy doesn’t know how to fix this one…”

“We’re screwed!”

“What do you make of Obama’s reaction, or lack thereof to the pirate situation?”

By far the best: “I’m afraid this administration is going to try to string this out and just not hurt anybody…”

MSNBC - ” Captain safe and unhurt tonight…3 pirates shot dead by Navy SEAL Snipers from the deck of a warship…SEALs made move after Obama authorized the killing of the pirates…”

Link: http://www.dailykostv.com/w/001151/

Recently I installed Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR) as the main OS on my HP Mini 1000.  With no optical drive, I was forced to boot from a flash drive, something I hadn’t done before.  The .IMG file was too large for my old 2GB SanDisk Cruzer Titanium, so I picked up a new 8 GB SanDisk Micro for $14.99.

Using Windows XP, the following procedure outlines how to extract an .img file and create a bootable USB drive with a few simple commands:

1. Download the latest daily release of UNR 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope:  http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-netbook-remix/daily-live/current/
2. To prep the drive, perform a Quick Format on the flash drive, use FAT32 as the file system.
3. Download flashnul: http://shounen.ru/soft/flashnul/
4. Run flashnul with a -p flag (take note of the number of the recently formatted flash drive):
5. In this case, my 8GB flash drive was number 2.
6. Next, run flashnul with the -L flag followed by the path to the downloaded UNR .img file:
7. Enter the word ‘yes’ to begin the process:
8. The extract and transfer should complete in under 5 minutes.  Press Enter to exit:
9. Note – the extracted files won’t display in a Windows environment.  In fact, it won’t even display the proper drive capacity:
10. This drive is now ready to go!  Remove it from your windows machine, connect to your netbook and select it from the boot menu while starting up.  Most modern machines will display the USB drive if bootable.  Enjoy UNR!