Friday, 30 April 2004

can't go wrong with Beethoven I did not know that the EU's official anthem is Beethoven's Ode to Joy. You can never go wrong with Ludwig Van! How did they get 15 members - now 25 member states as of today - to agree on LvB? 7:51:40 PM    comment []; Reality-TV human baby giveaway The ABC-TV program 20/20 will air a contest between five couples on the show this Friday -- the winners get to adopt a real-live, pooping, crying baby. Snip from SJ Merc story: "What's that? You say the program and host Barbara Walters have gone too far this time? What do you know about television? ABC knows a winner when it sees it and this is Nielsen gold, my friend. A reality show with a human life on the line -- all disguised as news programming. Let the other shows have half-naked people betraying each other on a deserted island. Give them the half-naked people eating buckets of bug eyes. And the half-naked people putting up with Donald Trump. And the half-naked people trying to get other half-naked people to marry them." Link to SJ Merc story, Link to NY Post story UPDATE: Stop press! The real scandal here? Celebrity spoon-bending psychic Uri Geller is outraged at news of the 20/20 baby giveaway episode. He's planning legal action, and claims he owns a worldwide patent on any reality TV show that involves winning a baby. "I will speak to my patent attorney," says Geller, "I own the idea." Whatever, dear BoingBoing readers, but let me set the record straight: I own the patent on any reality-TV show involving live mudwrestling smackdowns between Uri Geller and Barbara Walters, and I will personally bend the spoon of anyone who forgets it. Link to Reuters story. UPDATE 2: BoingBoing reader Kevin T. Keith says: "As a matter of fact, Uri Geller does hold a patent for a reality TV show that involves competing to adopt a baby. You can view the patent by going to the Patent and Trademark Office's Applications search page here and entering the phrase "in/geller-uri" (without quotation marks) in the large search window. The world gets weirder and weirder." [BoingBoing] This is one of those times where I feel like I was born in another century....wait, I was born in another century. 7:39:52 PM    comment []; Paco! I have noticed something curious in the Jaleo on some Flamenco records. Jaleo is the shouting and clapping that accompanies the guitar. It seems to me that on Vicente Amigo and on Tomatito's records somebody always shouts "Paco!" when either guitarist plays a great riff... Presumably that means "yeah, he's as good as Paco" or "check this out, Paco" or "watch your back, Paco!" or maybe it is just a touching tribute. On Paco's latest release "Cositas Buenas" they call out "Paco!" as well. They also yell "Mira!" a lot, which is a terrible tease, for how are you supposed to see what he is doing...... 7:33:51 PM    comment []; New lossless Apple Encoder The new lossless encoder came with the newest version 4.5 of iTunes. I will try to compare AIFF, Apple Lossless and AAC and the best way I have been able to figure out is albeit a little complicated: I will take a good sounding CD and import it to iTunes as AAC/160, as Apple Lossless and as AIFF file. Then I will burn an Audio CD using these three files, which will create new AIFF files of differing quality, depending on the source (AIFF, Lossless or AAC). Lastly I will import those resulting AIFF files into ProTools and listen. Why am I doing it this way? Well, first of all, our human audio memory is very bad and the best way to compare audio is by switching back and forth between different sources. By importing the files into ProTools I will be able to have each on a different fader. I can then adjust the volume of each type of file to be exactly the same, and using the solo buttons on the mixing console I'll be able to switch between the three choices very quickly.....I'll let you know what I'll find. 11:01:24 AM    comment []; Album gets ringtone only release A German band have released their new album as polyphonic ringtones, rather than as a traditional CD. [BBC | TECH] Talk about limiting your palette! 10:49:14 AM    comment [];

© Copyright 2004 Ottmar Liebert. Last update: 01.05.04; 21:16:06.