A couple of music recommendations
Pete, my college roommate, is the most gifted musician I have ever met. He helped shape many aspects of my life, not the least of which was helping develop and refine my taste and appreciation of music. Having previously turned me on to such gems as Supertramp, Brahms, Galactic, Rush, Peter Gabriel, and Spock’s Beard – when he talks, I listen, and am generally very glad I did. However, when he recently told me that his favorite musician for a while now has been Sarah Groves, I was stunned.
You see, Sarah Groves is the kind of music that is played on contemporary Christian radio. As someone who LOVES rock music (far more than I could ever hope to) I thought Pete shared my distain for anything that has the label “contemporary Christian” on it. Thankfully, Pete doesn’t let labels get in the way of his appreciation of music, and helped me open my eyes. Sarah Groves’ music is remarkable. She has an angelic voice, honest and vulnerable lyrics, and chord progressions and grooves uncharacteristic in the world of contemporary Christian “music”. Check out her new album Add to the Beauty.
The other band I have very recently fallen in love with is Future of Forestry. A relatively new rock band whose sound is more melodic than grunge, many of their songs have an the epic emotionally building sound - similar to Explosions in the Sky or Sigor Ros. Check out Twilight.
For the adrenaline junkie
You heliskiied. You bungee jumped. You ran with the bulls and swam with sharks. When skydiving lost its thrill, you picked up basejumping … but it still wasn’t enough. For you my friend, you need to check out “Speed Gliding” (combining heliskiing with basejumping and kitesurfing).
(Keep watching for the part where the “slope” just drops off into an enourmous cliff - insane!)
silverstripe?
A friend and I have been toying around with the idea of customizing wordpress (which powers chriswho) to turn it into a custom CMS that we could then turn around and use for freelance purposes. This weekend I came across Silverstripe though, and I’m wondering if we really need to do all that work - this could be what we are looking for. Has anyone ever heard of this (or anything like it) and have any recommendations or words of warning? I think I may try silverstripe out pretty soon. And being open source, we could still customize it as we want … If anyone has thoughts on this, I’d love to hear them.
Oh, and on the freelance side of things, sidejobtrack could be pretty cool.
Speaking of “NAPP”y
I would like to thank Don Imus for his idiotic comments and the mainstream media for their enthusiastic dead-horse beating … if it weren’t for them, I may have forgotten to let you all know that I have just recently joined my first “professional association” - the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (or NAPP).
That’s right ladies and gents, I’m unionized, so watch out! Well it isn’t a union, it is an organization dedicated to training its community about the my favorite program, Adobe Photoshop. Now that I am finally in a job where design work is a primary responsibility of mine (and not a little side project), I figured it was time to get serious about staying up to date on the latest with the program, as well as the thousands of tips and tricks from other users (and magazine subscriptions, etc).
I attended a training seminar put on by NAPP this week and it was EXCELLENT (and only $99!!!). I am very excited about taking my understanding of this tool to the next level.
The Machine is Us/ing us
This is an interesting video commentary on my professional field - a great overview, as well as an intriguing commentary on what this means for our culture/future.
Maybe I’m just too private or old fashioned, but things like this make me think about topics like microformats… I’m a firm believer in seperating content from presentation, however I (right now) have no interest in making it easier for machines to index any sort of personal info about me or anyone else … if the machines are going to take over, I’m not going to make it any easier for them.
(I honestly have no fear of SkyNet happening …)
Athlete of the month
My cousin just received the honor of being the athlete of the month for his college. He is a great tennis player, and it is cool to see him grab some honors like this. Congrats Robbie!