adrian is rad

I’ve arrived. The two days on planes wasn’t all that horrible, actually.

I’m pretty sure I’m going to rock this jetlag thing. I am multitalented, after all.

Incidentally, The Queen is good. The Guardian is not.

Alright, I’m heading off to the airport in a few hours here.

Have a good few weeks and remember: life is not about fear; life is about love.

I’m a pack rat. I keep everything, though at time (when I’m moving, particularly) I get ruthless and throw everything out.

I am also disorganized. Most people looking at my desk or closet would wonder how I could find anything.

I also have good spatial skills and spatial memory.

Somehow these all work well together. My last trip to South Africa was a bit over two years ago. This morning I reached onto my desk and found 2 R20 notes and one R10 note without searching around at all. They were just in a middle of a pile. I also found about R10 in coins in my everyday shoulder bag which I was repacking it as my carry on.

I’m totally going to be able to buy myself a coke at the airport.

Somehow I missed this: Pitchfork publishes a weekly list of bands and artists on TV that week.

For example, this week’s:

Monday, January 22:

ABC: “Jimmy Kimmel Live”: Nas (rerun)
CBS: “Late Show With David Letterman”: Nellie McKay with the Brooklyn Philharmonic
CBS: “Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson”: Lady Sovereign (rerun)

Tuesday, January 23:

CBS: “Late Show With David Letterman”: the Shins [1]
NBC: “Late Night With Conan O’Brien”: Cheap Trick (rerun)

Thursday, January 25:

CBS: “Late Show With David Letterman”: Gwen Stefani (rerun)
NBC: “Late Night With Conan O’Brien”: New York Dolls (rerun)

Friday, January 26:

NBC: “Last Call With Carson Daly”: Young Jeezy (rerun)

Saturday, January 27:

NBC: “Saturday Night Live”: Ludacris (rerun)

Monday, January 29:

MTV2: “Subterranean”: the Shins

Now you can totally be up on that stuff. Set your Tivos!

[Update:] [1] Did anyone else catch this? Did you see Gibbard playing with them? That man’s everywhere!

Grab the January mix tape while you can; I’ll be moving it to a password protected folder tomorrow (or Wednesday).

Apparently the Steelers will name Mike Tomlin their new head coach. Who’s this Tomlin guy?

Is this a good or bad choice over Grimm? (The Whiz is going to Arizona).

Also, go Bears?

I’m leaving for South Africa (and possibly Swaziland) on Wednesday for a few weeks. I then get back and go to Mexico for five days. I’ll be back in the States ‘full time’ the third week in February. I won’t be blogging much during that period, though I’ll try to write some periodic updates (and also update my lifestats).

It’s a duel-activity trip. Road trip with friends (Jon, Helene and Dug) and family stuff in Cape Town. I’m flying into Jo’burg and spending a couple days there before the rest arrive. From there we go to Blyde River Canyon (including God’s Window). We may stop in the Kruger Park before driving through Swaziland to Ingwavuma. From there we drive to Durban for a couple days before flying to Cape Town. I’ll be in Cape town a little bit less than a week this time. (I was in Cape Town two weeks last time.)

After being home for less than a day, I’ll be heading to Playa del Carmen for a long weekend.

If you need to contact me, email will probably be best, just the same email address as always. If it’s urgent, my parents will have my full itinerary.

Notice anything new about the page?

Look to the right over there…

After Randy’s comment on my post about being inspired to keep track of some life stats for 2007, I was further inspired to put up some of the stats in more or less real time. So there they are. Are there any other stats you want to see? The full list of stats that I’m tracking:

• emails sent (home/ work)
• miles travelled
• wikipedia pages read
• beers consumed
• work days
• photos taken (digital/ film)
• albums purchased
• concerts attended
• books read
• movies seen (theater/ netflix)
• hours of TV
• haircuts
• shaves
• miles biked
• miles ran
• miles swam

Originally I was going to do this literally updating every time you loaded the page, but that made the page really slowly (even slower than it loads already), so I decided to write up a caching system where it only loads the new data every six hours. I might adjust this if it makes sense to.

The script checks to see if the cache is older than 6 hours old and if so pulls some data from a google spreadsheet. Otherwise, it writes the old data into the html that you see on the right. I’ll probably write up a full post or a instructable of how I did all this sometime when I have more time.

I’m going Web2.0 all over this place!@

Here’s the playlist for tonight’s show.

NEWSPECIALFUN:
I Once was Canadian 1 -18-07 (mp3)

I am genius at coming up with band names. I don’t usually tell people because I may some day need 1,027 band names for my various bands, but tonight I’m feeling generous.

You want to know it?

Alright, here it is: Frick! Paper Cut!

No, no need to thank me.

I’m almost hitting mid-month on this one. It’s a bit hard to believe that this is the seventh online mixtape already. I hope you’re enjoying them. In a way, they’re a lot of work, but a lot of it (finding the music, making the playlist) has become part of my routine.

You can download the zip file with the following:
1. mp3s of the songs
2. liner notes
3. playlist files (iTunes txt file and an m3u file)

(for the iTunes file, simply import all the songs to your library and then go to file->import and then select the song list. you should now have the 2007january playlist in your iTunes with all the songs in the correct order).

If you want to read the liner notes before downloading the whole thing, they’re here. It’s mostly smaller indie bands this month, with a couple bigger names thrown in and one Motown song.

Adrian’s January 2007 mix tape [zip file]

This’ll be up for a limited time (~1 week) before being moved to a password protected folder.

If you like the artists or songs, I suggest supporting them by buying their music, going to a show, buying merchandise from them or at least telling other people about them.

I like all the mixtapes I make. I like the songs on this one.

February’s mix tape (to be released valentines day-ish) is going to be mostly love songs of various sorts. Let me know if you have any suggestions.

[Update:] I once again messed up the m3u file. Jesse fixed it (m3u file).

There are a few links I’ve been meaning to put up. Things I find interesting but I don’t want to add to the sidebar on the right.

Random links:

• designverb: a blog about design related topics, largely product design and the like. fairly interesting stuff.
• rbally has a nice Cat Power show from Berlin for download [update: rbally seems to have taken this down/ broken]
• youtube has a great chemistry lab safety video explosion. (dylan, are you seeing this?)
• bitsandpieces silly college humor, but sometimes entertaining
• wikipedia has a list of African countries by GDP (adjusted for purchasing power parity) per capita. South Africa’s on top, but barely. For reference, the US is 3rd in the world for GDP (PPP) per capita at about $42,000.
• oregon trail is it possible you haven’t played this game? there are even shirts about it. And you can download an emulated version
• Tom Wilson I feel like I should add him to my list of best producers. He did Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, Velvet Underground and more