Music

Our society relies on technology. Look at this blog – hah.

But are we so obsessed with technology that we have to make our singers sound like computers?
Listen at the newest songs of popular artists like Kanye West and Britney Spears.
They take voice fixing a step too far. They don’t even sound human anymore.
Every song in the top 10 or even top 40 pop/hip-hop has some sort of voice overly-changed.

C’mon America!

Goodbye HP

Today I had to send in my HP laptop for the THIRD time!
The first two times, the hard drive failed completely. Had to get them replaced.
In fact there were many issues. One issue was the speakers.

They did NOT fix them in the first repair. The second repair was supposed to be just for the speakers.
By the time I got the box and was ready to package the laptop, the hard drive failed again.

So what do they do? Fix the hard drive and don’t fix the speakers. In fact, they made them worse.
Instead of being just low quality, now the left speaker did not work at all and the right sucked.

Sent it in today just for the speakers. Thankfully the hard drive still works this time.

Pandora!

Alright… Who uses Pandora?

Recently I was away from my laptop and iPod and I needed to listen to music.
I always knew about Pandora and used it a few times but never really needed it as my music collection is pretty big.
Well, let me tell you. With customizing and tweaking, Pandora will find songs you know and love (if you know and love lots of songs) and find songs you instantly enjoy that you didn’t even know existed.

It does have flaws though. If you’re really not liking many of it’s recommendations, you’re SOL because you have a limited number of skips per hour. Also, thumbs-upping songs will sometimes cause that song to repeat many, many times.

A workaround is banning that song for a month. Unfortunately, there’s no middle-ground like a “play less frequently” button.

Ubuntu

Ubuntu is by far my most favorite linux distro.

It is developed with the user in mind. With that said, they gear themselves toward a wide range of users, not just the advanced tech geeks like with other distros.

Info courtesy of Ubuntu:

Ubuntu is a community developed, Linux-based operating system that is perfect for laptops, desktops and servers. It contains all the applications you need – a web browser, presentation, document and spreadsheet software, instant messaging and much more.