Somebody used one of my songs in a video they produced. It’s a pretty neat photography video, check it out!

So I’ve been listening to lots of music, and I figure it’s time that I post some more cool music here.

First, there’s CONTACT EP by Moskra. I’ve keep listening to Donau, it is pretty great. The whole album is dark, deep, eerie, and groove-able. Plus, it’s free!

Next, there’s Philip Grass, a (mostly) instrumental rap group from Massachusetts. I found this album a few months ago, and I still find myself going back and listening to the whole thing once in a while.

This one is more than just a single artist. The folks over at Origami Sound have put together some pretty great stuff, and I recommend you check out their website. Here is one of their mixes, and I think it’s delightful, very high quality material.

Last, I’d like to include a sweet music video from ParallaxScroll, a super cool glitchy, video-game-inspired music artist that I recently found.

Well, that’s all for now. Let your ears be happy!

Source

    So my school installed these “Water-Saving” dual function toilet flush handles. I think that’s fine and all, but I have a few problems with this. First of all, there are urinals in these men’s rooms that already use less water than the sit-toilets. Maybe in the women’s rooms these would be used more often, but here in the men’s room the only people who piss in the sit-toilets are the same guys who leave a mess all over the seat and don’t wash their hands. Somehow I don’t think these people are going to be utilizing the “water saving” flusher on their way out the door.

    My first reaction is to think, “Oh well, it’s not like the handles are hurting anything, right?”

    Wrong. These dual function flush valves just by themselves cost at least twice as much as the standard ones. This doesn’t even consider the cost of the labor to rip out the old valves and put in new ones (and on a side note, this isn’t very ‘green’ once you consider the energy cost of recycling the metal pipe, or the waste if it isn’t recycled. Even if it’s reused, it’s still only a ‘regular’ flush valve). If the valve breaks, or needs to be replaced it will cost more than fixing a regular valve, considering you have to buy proprietary hardware. As a student, this cost shows its dirty face in the form of higher tuition for me and the other students.

    Maybe I could look past all this and see the good in the situation, but if you read the text on the sign near the handle you’ll find that Sloan is actually kind of a dick.

    Under whose authority, Sloan, did you become the judge, the sole agent to decide what constitutes a ‘commitment to protect and preserve the environment’? So just because an institution installs a few potentially water saving handles that you made, they are suddenly, without-a-doubt, committed to saving the earth? Maybe so, but maybe you should drop the better-than-thou attitude and let me decide that for myself. Your handles are cool, but they aren’t so cool that the only qualifier for being ‘green’ is having installed a few of them around campus.

    So with that, the next time I look to purchase institutional restroom utilities, I will look in a direction other than Sloan products. I hope you’re proud of yourselves, because you have lost a valuable customer.

It appears that I lack the commitment to frequently update a blog-style page.

That doesn’t mean that I am done submitting stuff to my website, but I am going to try to make my site less blog-like. It should really act more like a static site with new additions now and then.

To let you guys know what’s going on, I haven’t really done anything with Candyland, and I am considering the project to be in stasis. It’s not going anywhere quickly, so I want to focus my efforts elsewhere. I still want to write the story, so I may do something else with the idea (Skyrim mod? who knows).

Currently I am looking into developing for the OpenMW team, so I think that will be my focus for a while.

Here’s one that I happened upon about a year ago. I don’t know much about the artists, but I think their names are Oleg Kharkov and Igor Zakharov. There’s not a lot of info floating around, and most of it is written in Russian, but his music is very good. Really good industrial sound. Check out his free album, Liquid Time Zero. I was very impressed.

Very cool IDM album over here, which is a free download. Give it a listen! It’s ambient, unique, and at times sort of jazzy. My favorite track is ‘The Glass Full of Lead”

The download comes with the album art and stuff.

Lately I have noticed that video ads on the web are becoming more obtrusive. A 30 second ad every two minutes is just unacceptable, and often makes me leave the website in frustration. Instead, I propose more interactive web ads. Before or after watching a video, why not show a picture of your product and allow the user to prompt for more information? The most effective ads that I have found required me to prompt for more info, and the ads that are crammed down my throat just get largely ignored. I turn down my computer volume and do something else for 30 seconds.

Take, for example, the ‘wasting water is weird’ campaign. While it still employed the 30 second video method, it still sticks out in my mind as being a little less intrusive (if I recall correctly, this was one out of three total advertisements in a half-hour episode on Hulu). A video prompted me to learn more about this weird person and why he is weird; and you know what? When I go looking for plumbing products, I’ll probably look for the WaterSense logo.

What I am really talking about would be a little different though. Instead of showing us a video, why not just a picture, some text, and some sliders to view more information? Sort of like an interactive billboard on your monitor, one that you can skip if you don’t like.

The most effective part of the advertisement, in my opinion, is the ability for the potential customer to feel he/she is in control. Nobody likes to be told what to buy, but being provided with the information and requiring the user to want to know more will make the advertisements themselves improve in quality, creativeness, and likeability. The end result would ideally be a harmony of company pushed ads and user prompted media, allowing the user to skip over anything they aren’t interested in. If the user isn’t interested in a product, it’s the advertiser’s job to give them a quick reason to be interested, and if they still aren’t then to get out of the way.

At least, that’s my take on it.

First of all, I would like to apologize for the lack of posts. I have been very busy with college, as I am trying to earn myself a computer science degree. I don’t think I’ll have a lot more free time this summer, but I promise to try and be more attentive to the site. So without further ado, another featured artist!

This week’s featured artist is Aebeloe! Recently having released a track on the danish mix album Rekompileret No. 4 is Danish producer Natal Zaks pumping out some of the chillest grooves and beats I’ve ever come across. Check out his latest album!

Aebeloe – Agnes EP by Aebeloe

Pretty good stuff, huh? Best of all, you can download it for free (and follow a delicious paper trail to more neat-o albums) at the Farver bandcamp page! Also consider leaving a donation on his page, I’m sure he’d appreciate it

More of his music can be found here, on his soundcloud page.

This is a great dance album by Dusty Gorilla, he’s releasing it for free. It contains many cool tracks, including a neat remix of Ke$ha’s ‘Like a G6′.