Circadian Shift

Grid.

Non-grid.

The same 12 images, arranged differently. Being unable to pick one board, I figured I'd put up both.

Saw the movie Munich (official site is an annoyingly sluggish Flash thingy -- here's the IMDb info). I thought the film, while not perfect, was a worthwhile film to watch. (FYI, here is Wikipedia backgrounder info on the Munich Massacre and some of the controversy about the film.)

Otherwise, not much to report. The temperature has been really freakish this week -- either very cold, or very warm. Stupid weather.

Incidentally, all the images on the board(s) are avatars, except for the profile shot of Eric Bana that I took from the movie poster for Munich.

Addendum: These are mood boards number 49 and 50, since I started doing/posting these things last year. I also went and deleted and re-uploaded the boards over at Flickr so that they'd appear in the correct chronological order if you browse through my "Mood Board" Flickr set. (And after having done that the hard way, I discovered a tiny set of Flickr controls that might've enabled me to do all that re-arranging the easy way. Arg.)

Some moody retro tunage:

• bumrocks has the extended version of "Driver's Seat" by Sniff 'n' The Tears
• silence is a rhythm too reposts the magnificent "Primitive Painters" by Felt

Addendum: Realized afterward that I got the title quote for this post from a site that misheard the lyrics to "Driver's Seat"; I'll leave the title as is, because it seems to work that way.

Despite the whimsical tagline "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards", the scribblings done by Hugh Macleod over at gapingvoid often capture a truth that is both pithy and precise.

Twenty years ago, this cartoon would have had people scratching their heads.

Today, it is a way of life.

• Free Stock Photos for Graphic Designers & Web Designers
  big list of links
  (tags: visuals)
• Business 2.0: 101 Dumbest Moments in Business
  (tags: biz)
• Playing the digeridoo helps alleviate snoring and sleep apnea
  (tags: meta squishy)
• Making Music: A big list of FREE music making software!
  (tags: music audio)
• 23 Things to Do With a Thumb Drive
  "Put your USB drive to work as a portable desktop, PC recovery kit, entertainment platform, and more."
  (tags: tech)

Same old, same old...

Finally breaking free of the grid for the first time in a few months, I chose to populate this week's board mostly with avatars and buddy icons (little images that users of Instant Messaging applications and bulletin boards or forums use to represent themselves online).

Besides being a convenient source of visual micro-content that I can plunder (no cropping or resizing needed to fit them on the board), I also happen to like avatars because they can say so much in so little space. OK, so there are a lot of avatars out there that are crap -- and why do so many of them have spelling mistakes -- but in theory these little 100x100 pixel (or smaller) squares are personas writ small.

Think about it -- how would you capture yourself in 10,000 pixels? Could you?

(And of course, what does my choice of these images say about me?)

Incidentally, the mood board from two weeks ago and Friday's post also use avatars.

One musical acquisition of note: The album OK Cowboy by Vitalic was added to eMusic's catalog this week, and I snapped it up as soon as I saw it there (I've teetered on the brink of purchasing it from Bleep.com several times over the last six months or so). You can view the video for "My Friend Dario" (Flash, 14.7 MB), a song that's a fantastically catchy slice of electro dance-punk. The video's lots of fun too.

I am, how shall we say, in a mood.

I've been listening to dirtyradio, and this song grabbed my ear:

• Longwave - "The River (Depot Song)" (MP3, 6.53 MB)

A mood, indeed.

Here is the band Longwave's website. You can sample more of their wares in the "Jukebox" section.

• The Great British Venn Diagram
  explains "what the difference is between England, Great Britain, the British Isles and the United Kingdom"; heck, I just like Venn diagrams
  (tags: visuals meta)
• Bored meetings
  "a general relationship between meeting load and the employee's level of fatigue and subjective workload was found"
  (tags: squishy biz)

Just because I can, I set up a flickr account and uploaded my weekly mood board images to it (sans commentary). I should probably dig up my old keychain-cam pix and do the same.

I couldn't help but be amused at the resulting view of my 'Mood Boards' set -- namely a grid of grids...

The word "setup" is not a verb, it is a noun.

The correct phrase, if you want to indicate an action, is "set up". That is the verb "set", plus the adverb "up". Two words, goddamit. Two.

Set up.

Set up.

Set
.
.
.
up.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Addendum, 18 January 2006: The same goes for "check-in" -- grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

• Tips for getting to sleep faster & sleeping better
  "1. Don'€™t watch TV or even so much as look at a computer screen at least 30 minutes before you lie down."
  (tags: meta squishy)
• A list of workplace buzzwords
  Eeeeeeek!
  (tags: biz)

Blah.

Not much to report.

Of the few highlights of the week, I went out on Friday night to meet up with Eva and some of the other local bloggers and say hello to visiting blogger Shelley, who managed to survive a 29 hour flight from New Zealand relatively unscathed. Much fun, geekery, and the usual blogger hijinks ensued (Eva's pics of the evening are here). (BTW, there were two Jens at the event; as I was the second to arrive, I became "Other Jen" for the rest of the evening.)

In other news, triggered by a conversation with Junkman, I wound up dipping into my eMusic booster pack to download the compilation album A Passage In Time by Dead Can Dance. The work is at times gloomy and other times contemplative, which makes it good to listen to on cold winter nights.

I also bought a few tracks from Bleep.com:

• Helios - "Nine Black Alps" -- minimal beats over warm synths; a calming atmospheric tune
• TTC - "Meet the New Boss" -- French electro that's buzzy, blippy, and stark
• Cursor Miner - "The Sports of Kings" -- exuberant and propulsive; a great pick-me-up

All were finds via dirtyradio, which has introduced to so much cool music over the last year. It's a pity that I can't listen to it at work.

BTW, Bleep is currently giving away a free music sampler (as with all Bleep offerings, it's in MP3 format, with no DRM) titled Bleeps-oh-six; you do have to set up an account with them to download the sampler, but it's free to do so.

• Early-morning bleariness worse than sleep deprivation
  "A team has shown that people are as woozy when they wake as they are after drinking several beers."
  (tags: meta squishy)

...since I posted anything substantial. Sorry, I'm not feeling very inspired.

In the meantime, please enjoy little Tarepanda, as he tumbles over and over and over.

(Animation taken from this page. I have no idea who those other characters are, but the dancing bunnies are kind of cute.)

I figured I'd follow up on the mood board retrospective that I did back in October, and re-post my mood board highlights from the last three months of 2005.

30 October 2005

Not a particularly clever composition, but I sure like those colours. Plus the images that are third from the left in both the top and bottom rows summed things up pretty well.

20 November 2005

As far as depicting a mood was concerned, this was another one of those boards where I think I really nailed it. Cold, wet, and sleep deprived. Yep, got it.

04 December 2005

As I wrote at the time, I found it really difficult to put together something that I was happy with, but I look at this board now and I quite like how the composition turned out.

Which, I guess is partly the point with these mood boards of mine. Sure, I struggle with them sometimes, and I feel like I've just been phoning in the last few that I've done, but when they work out well it seems to make the whole exercise worthwhile (at least for me).

As always, you can view all my mood boards here.

An unremarkable week.

Went to work and did stuff. Listened to MP3s. Web-surfed. Read a little bit. Was lacking in sleep.

Now that the holidays are over, things are going to be rather routine for some time. Which isn't bad. It's just.... meh.

I forgot to go outside today, and now there is no daylight.

Oops.

Long time readers of this blog will recall its companion website, Circadian Shift: The Outpost, where I used to regularly post retro MP3s and some other stuff.

Then, back in July of last year, the free hosting service that the site is on decided to clamp down on the file types that it hosted, so that you could no longer upload MP3s or other multimedia filetypes, and also set bandwidth restrictions on how much could be downloaded from the site per day and per month.

At the time, any existing multimedia files were left alone, but a few weeks back the provider made good on their promise to lock down on the unauthorized file types, so that if you've clicked recently on one of the few remaining MP3 links to the site, you'd have seen a screen that looks like this. As mentioned before, I have the option to upgrade my account to one of the company's paid hosting packages to lift the restrictions, but I'm not going to bother.

I've left the site up for now, having cleaned out some dead links and changed a few widgets. At some point, I'll probably incorporate the remaining content into a page on this site, and then just kill it. And I still have to go back through the archives here and take out the remaining MP3 links, and also update the sidebar.

A belated Happy New Year to everyone.

I spent the last week of 2005 fighting off a headache, doing stuff at work, dealing with my course assignment, and halfheartedly glancing at a couple of Boxing Week sales.

I did buy one thing, namely the single CD version of The Prodigy - Their Law: The Singles 1990-2005. It's funny, because I really didn't listen to The Prodigy much when they were really popular, but I do get nostalgic once in a while for that old-school booming techno sound.

There were more musical acquisitions, thanks to my eMusic subscription:

• Bloc Party - Silent Alarm -- an album that was much beloved by the hipster kiddies this year, and I like it too; wears its retro/post-punk influences well, without being so bloody obvious about it (cf. The Bravery); you can download the lead single, "Banquet", for free from betterPropoganda
• The Clientele - Strange Geometry -- another 2005 release that's been getting lots of good reviews; features lots of jangly reverberating guitars, melancholy lyrics and vocals, and many riffs and harmonies that are positively Beatle-esque; you can download the tune "E.M.P.T.Y." for free, once again courtesy of betterPropoganda
• Richard Bartz - Midnight Man -- another dirtyradio discovery; Bartz is a veteran of the German techno scene, and if you like that sort of sound, you won't be disappointed
• Alva Noto + Ryuichi Sakamoto - Insen -- featuring Sakamoto's piano compositions all cut up and glitched out by Noto's electronic manipulations, this album really works best as background music; I noticed that bleep lists the album as "Not For Sale In Canada", so I figured I'd grab it from eMusic while I still could (which meant dipping into my "Booster Pack" to get it)
• John Adams - Shaker Loops / Wound Dresser / Short Ride in a Fast Machine -- some Minimalist Clasical music for a change of pace; I already have a different recording of "Shaker Loops", so I only picked up the other compositions on this release

New Year's Eve was pretty quiet. Went out for a nice dinner, then stayed in and watched Monty Python's And Now for Something Completely Different on DVD. CITY-TV then ran Fight Club after midnight, so I wound up going to bed fairly late.