I’m sure GLK and Sufi aren’t the only masterminds at play here. However, who could deny The Gas Lamp Killer his deserved credit for the luminous, 60′s turk rhythm he brings. In combination with Gonjasufi’s eerie and absorbing voice, it’s an amazing collaboration that defines what a good, well planed aural divide should sound like. Brought to light by 2007′s Kobwebs, this is album is absolutely hypnotic and driven. You can take pleasure in knowing you can listen to the entire album, from start to finish on Clash Music.
Most original release of 2010 for sure.
Digital Release Date: March 8th, 2010
CD/Vinyl Release Date: March 8th, 2010
Label: Warp Records
What’s up peoples! It’s already been a good week and projects seem to be popping off.
I just received a phone call about potentially working with a man I highly respect, which is kinda flattering. I may need to ditch my vans for our meeting however.
I also uploaded 2 new tracks to the music section of this site. A really sick radio show The Gaslamp Killer did when he was in Amsterdam for the Five Days Off festival. Also put up another radio show EPROM did at his local KUSF radio. Both are cut to their respective sets and contain little interview segments which is dope. Give them a listen.
Lastly I want to tune you guys into a great series of blog posts Nemo did on the creative process. The assignment was designing a magazine cover for a Kid Cudi feature in Complex Magazine. Augor is an acquaintance, I wouldn’t go so far as to call him a friend. He’s adapted and developed amazingly as a a graff artist and has garnered some notable nods from the likes of Murakami and the infamous Seventh Letter Crew. Regardless of how you perceive graffiti, Augors raw talent translates too well from the wall to the page. His study is becoming more recognizable as a style everyday. Anytime you can recognize the pulsing, tattered flesh characters, pussing with infected open wounds, you know you’re in for a treat. Amazing work my friend.
It’s amazing how many languages you can get out of a qwerty keyboard when interpreted by a human. That’s if you take the time to learn the language. The way music communicates on the other hand, it’s altogether misunderstood if you ask me.
I don’t pretend that what I find current and interesting should matter to you much. Admittedly some of the music I’ve been tuning into has been downright noncommercial for the sake of pointing it out. In all seriousness, there’s allot of good music being produced if you bend your ear enough. But there in lies the difficulty, finding the gems among tons of potential.
I suppose it started with Aquarium, that for me was the song that made me a fan before I knew who the artist was. Back then I was on a steady ripping diet courtesy of somafm.com. How often does that happen? Too often, I would argue. It’s all about composition and this kids got it. Putting hands together for more than a decade and still managing to be rife. My words just can’t do his music justice, so the following should make it pretty clear.
Nosaj has a posse. They’ve got handles like the Gaslamp Killer, Free the Robots, Samiyam and Ras G, and ties to the Plug Research label, Flying Lotus’ Brainfeeder imprint, and Alpha Pup, founded by longtime L.A. producer Daddy Kev. But within this well-pedigreed crew, Nosaj Thing stands out.
Some of those name’s you may recognize. And I truly would hope you start googling those that you don’t. This is some music, altogether different and put together by an amazingly humble architect. Buy his album, because I assure you, the gems last a lifetime.
NOSAJ THING DRIFT
Digital Release Date: May 26, 2009
CD/Vinyl Release Date: June 9, 2009
Catalog: APR-025
Label: Alpha Pup Records
* The DEBUT full length album from Nosaj Thing
* Featured this week on iTunes, Bleep and Addictech
* Record release party at Low End Theory on June 10th
I just realized I can’t listen to music and write, which I find unfortunate. As you can see (unless you’re getting the rss copy) I’ve been spending the better part of today updating my website to the latest version of wordpress. While I was at it, I thought it would look into changing the layout as well. I never last very long with a theme, I’m constantly on the lookout for a fresh new minimalist look.
I’ve also fixed a few nagging items that were bothering me here and there. Specifically the Music page. I’d really like a way to tie together my web related projects, so you’ll most likely be seeing a “Projects” section soon. As much as this is my personal site, I still need a few tools that I hope you’ll find use-of as well. I’ll be fixing the aggregate news portion of the site that keeps me up to date of skating related news. All good stuff. All about me.
I just sent this to a journalist who’s doing a story on recently laid off IT workers.
I’m surprisingly upbeat about the whole thing really. However, that could also be a circumstance of my employment conditions. First I feel it’s important to designate what area of expertise I focus my efforts on. I’m primarily a Systems Administrator for Windows, Mac and Unix derived systems. I deal with preliminary networking, approximating it to a CCNA, would be good policy. I also deal with end user desktop support, however, am not central to that role. I do know a fair amount of varied languages for web development and when it comes to databases, MySQL is my favor. All of these things are important because IT workers always want to know where they stand. The industry I was currently involved with was non-profit education. A music school specifically. I live in a major city (Los Angeles) which provides thousands of jobs for IT workers every year.
Because I’ve been diligent, I’ve had an opportunity to directly influence decisions related to IT in my organization. I’ve grown professionally since the dot com days. Which should be evident, if any of you study trends in enterprise technology. With the rise in Apple related hardware and software, alongside virtualization, I’ve adapted my existing foundation of knowledge, and applied it to two new kinds of system/services.
Needless to say, things have changed dramatically since 1999 and 2000. The IT industry as a whole may be getting smaller, but the reasons this time around are all too different. I definitely didn’t lose my job from a lack of projects! Technology is pervasive and an essential tool for today’s work and play. Everyone needs a publishing scheme to give information, or a data gathering plan to take information. I won’t bore you with the pyramid economics that got companies into and surprised by this mess. But what I can tell you is to never stop learning. It’s almost like beating a dead horse, but if you’re not adapting, your not in the right line of work. That also may be what attracted me to IT in the first place. It reinvents itself more than any other industry I know. When was the last time you used a ZIP disk?
My advice to anyone recently laid off is to first update your resume. Make sure whatever proprietary hardware/software is listed by name in your resume alongside your achievements. I treat them as a keywords for searches. Next, find educational materials and study. This can be anything from books on the subject to something like lynda.com. For many of you, this should also include refreshers on subjects you think you already know. Then use simplyhired.com and dice to search the boards for keywords that can be found in your resume. Also, don’t be afraid to doctor your resume for a specific job. NEVER lie, but support your strengths in whatever areas they desire. Whatever you do, if you value your talent, don’t spam your resume everywhere. An example of this would be sending out more than 5 resumes a day. You’ll end up with tons of recruiters for staffing agency’s and unless your hard up for work you shouldn’t give precedence to. It’s better to take your time and find a great fit, if you can afford to do so. Last but not least, experiment. Now is the perfect time to find solutions for problems that suffer from a lack of innovation. Empower people to help them selfs and you’ll end up helping yourself much more.
It’s funny when I stop to think about our collective circumstance. If you’ve yet to feel the pinch of the economic contraction happening on a global scale, all I can offer is “be prepared”. My old scout motto finds me well worn. I lost my job today.
I’ve written before about the economy and it’s over reaching contraction. Some of my friends commented about my negative stance and I can’t help but feel a bit vindicated today. Even if it is inherently wrong of me. This is an eerie feeling I dare not wish upon you. It will subside eventually, the uncertainly and surprise of it all.
I just returned from my vacation and prepared breakfast in an attempt to get back into the swing of things. I can’t say the writing wasn’t on the wall, as our morning chatter invoked a “what if” mentality. Across the country, the upper crust has utterly mis-managed the last 30 years. My employer of just over two years unfortunately cant be excluded. The race for growth during my tenure there has left a bad taste in my mouth. As the phone calls keep pouring in offering solace and support, I find that I cannot be counted as a victim in this mess. I foreshadowed the first and second round of layoffs months before senior management could possibly come to grips with what was happening. I even went so far as to send an article to the CFO on how to minimize the damage to the stability of the workforce once the realization hits, that not only are their friends no longer around, they have to work even harder to keep up. This would suggest I was in fact prepared for the failures of grey-haired nitwits in charge.
I’m comforted by the knowledge that I can pick myself up off the ground, as I have many times past. For those of you that know my background, I’ve always come from unsuspecting places to race past the commonly held mentality that what go’s up must come down. There is no up or down! There is out, in and around.
I found myself up and wide awake at 7AM today. Assuredly well rested, but still reeling from an 11 hour flight and subsequent time change. We landed at Heathrow yesterday with Tim picking us up in his “me” car. Had I known just how far Tim had to drive to pick us up, I probably would have taken the tube from the airport to Kings Cross. Poor Tim, he always seems to stay up past 6AM, and on a Tuesday of all days, has to wake up early and drive 2.5 hours round trip to pick up his lame Cali friends from the airport.
Just outside of the terminal, I was reminded why I came to the U.K. The weather is fantastic! Just bitter cold! The drive from Heathrow to Cambridge was nice enough. When we arrived the first order of business was finding a nice establishment for a proper sit down meal. I was looking and feeling haggard from the flight. I only managed to get an hours rest. Tim being a local to Cambridge, managed to find us a quaint little cafe that served the best food. Following this, Tim took Desi and I on a brief walking tour of his posh university town. I immediately fell in love with the grand architecture of Kings and Christs colleges. I was exceedingly glad to have come to Cambridge and catch a glimpse of where many scholars have attended. After the brief tour Tim led us back to his home to rest up before work. This 2 hour period was the worst part of the day by far. I had to fight the urge to sleep, because we’d be heading back into the city center later. I spent the time reading up on Cambridge in my touristy guide book. Learning facts about the oldest buildings (from 1442 AD).
UPDATE: So I’ve since returned from England. I had so much trouble finding Internet Access in London that I haven’t updated since my return. I do, however want to recount my days and evenings spent there mainly because there we so moving.
The evening in Cambridge was spent mainly in Pubs. Defintly the best night life of our trip was spent in Caimbridge of all places.
It was an intriguing day on the street today as Lehman Bros. filled for bankruptcy and Merrill Lynch struck a deal with Bank of America. These actions remain a continuation of the turmoil surrounding credit, investment banks and the economy as a whole. What’s left after a 500 point index decline is Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley as the last investment banks on Wall St. The U.S. dollar is entering yet another phase of consolidation as dire predictions foreshadow even more collapses from smaller regional banks.
Lehman’s inability to strike a deal with Bank of America or Barclay’s or to receive some form of government assistance was a deliberate tact. Let the invisible hand take care of Lehman and the market is supposedly better for it. So who decides, exactly, what companies get bailed out, and which are left out to dry? The Fed itself has said “Given the exceptional pressures on the global economy and financial system, the damage caused by a default by Bear Sterns could have been severe and extremely difficult to contain.” So how is Lehman’s bankruptcy any different? The general consensus is the Bear Sterns collapse and Fed mandated bail out bought everyone enough time to attempt a rescue of the inevitable. Although the Fed was unwilling to assist in saving Lehman they were willing to lower their credit standards for the last remaining investment banks.
So what does this mean for you and I you might ask? The answer is you should probably get used to living on a budget. You most likely won’t be able to renew that lease on your BMW. You should probably start making your own coffee at home. You should definitely be thankful for what you have, because America is officially for sale! I won’t even begin to speak of the overwhelming number of job cuts in the banking industry alone. Some predict upwards of 200,000 people out of work by this time next year. Just don’t go out on any monetary limbs anytime soon.
I didn’t really blog about Muxtape, but I intended to. Many of you discovered it all on your own, without my help. For those lucky few, it came and went so fast, we were left a bit perturbed without cool user generated mix tapes to listen to. Admittedly, I found a way to download mp3′s from other Muxtapes via a highly contended greasemonkey script. Naturally, when the RIAA came knocking on Muxtapes door, I was a bit more disappointed than most. Muxtape was my escapists return to Napster 1.0, with thousands of individually created libraries to listen to and download from. Many savvy audiophiles took care in selecting the kind of music they would add, and of course in what order.
Muxtape may be down but Justin’s concept lives on through OpenTape. A new kind of mix tape software, it may just be the promiscuous cousin of the former service. It’ll run on just about any PHP5 web server. For those with the means, OpenTape essentially allows us to host our own special version of Muxtape. I missed my library enough to install it and get it playing with even more great music.
What a great kitschy title. It’s about as dry as I am on drugs. Please, keep in mind, that while I provide the following information to gather your thoughts. I am no investment professional and can hardly consider myself a blogger, let alone decent investor.
However, that said, I choose to recently manage my own 401k and in the pursuit of knowledge and learning, I’m posting my experiences here you for you to examine.
Much of the investment advice/learning material I’ve been able to find on the internet is focused on the ever evaluation of practically living stocks. The market breathes, if not by some imaginary force, also by an invisible pulse. I follow day traders, penny stockers, investment and portfolio managers, angel investors and hybrid media/investment types. Hardly ever can I find the static long investor, eager to share his wisdom. The breed of my fathers age, who in a time of deep perspective decided it would be a good idea to develop money, just doesn’t care about the little investor. Obvious reasons for this could be lazy investors don’t bother with the internet. They are after-all, baby-boomers, utterly inept when it comes to blending technology. And yet another reason could be disclosure. If your not trading your not shouting.
The first trade I ever performed was a buy of NVDA at 18.29 and a sell at 24.52. I had nailed a 52 week low and sold at near it’s peak. I held my investment for 2 months and made a 34% return. Beginners luck? I’m willing to think so.
As so eloquently detailed in my first post, I bought into BCS thinking it would be immune to the U.S. Economic slowdown and my naiveté got the best of me. I had been watching BCS since the March decline and decided, because it was a European bank, and it was minimally invested in the sub prime mortgage debacle, it should remain a sound investment. I bought in at 28.30 and after watching my pick loose envious amounts of steam, I decided it was time to cut my losses. I sold @ 25.80 for a loss of 8.6%.
I’m under the impression that because I have a smaller amount of capital to invest, I should invest more often. However, that too may eventually lead to false logic. Not to discount my own analysis, but I feel as though larger portfolio’s have more to loose. I for one would be cautious, so would you. As I look to tomorrow morning with the knowledge that there WILL be a rally, I’m attempting to decide which of my P/E winners that are at or near their 52 week lows AND have decent analysis, will be my monetary development. Round 2 anyone?
