Last.fm: Why Everyone Should Use It

I know there are a load of services that are kind of similar, but i just thought i'd stick a few words out about this one and why i like it a lot!

What is it?:

Last.fm is a music based social media site which basically logs the tracks you play from your devices like PC's and Phones etc... known as 'scrobbling'. The 'scrobbler' attaches as a plug in to all the mainstream media players and uploads the track information on what you play.

Why I love it:

Mainly cause it's a great way of charting my music interest over time and mapping exactly what kind of music i really do listen to compared to what i think i listen to most (if that makes any sense!). I have always been fascinated by stats and so that is why this appeals to me, i like to understand trends in people and with music being able to convey so much emotion i think it can sometimes say a lot when you look at what you listen to. I love the fact it keeps overall records of how many times you listen to an artist or a song in a kind of 'top of the pops' kind of way and looking at the list its interesting to see unexpected artists high up that you didn't realise you spent so much time listening to.

For example, i have listened to 'Senses Fail' 146 times in the last 12 months, the third amount over the whole year but they sit only 35th on 221 plays in my overall chart. This means that you could maybe say my interest in them has increased dramatically over the last year, whereas Ill Nino for example sit 3rd with 745 plays overall but sit joint 51st with Devildriver on just 25 plays over the last 12 months.......from that very quick, limited and basic snapshot look at 2 random bands, you could say my music tasted has possibly become less heavy and more punky over the last year?...........well i find it interesting anyway!

It also has other great features like suggestions on music you might like (a great way to find new music based on fans 'tagging' artists with genres). Another cool feature is the 'radio stations' basically you can pick a band and click their radio station and it will play a track from them and then a load of tracks by similar sounding bands. You can also log gigs you are going to and tag yourself as 'going' which is cool for finding out if other friends of yours are going too. Theres plenty of other features including free track downloads amongst others so there is loads on offer!

I also like the 'Paint it Black' button too (just restyles the site to black rather than red!), the reverse being 'Simply Red', the small things, especially as i design websites too.

Check my profile out and then sign up yourself!
http://www.last.fm/user/Lawrenciumbc

Muse - Madness Track Review and a Change in Opinion?

I might do a few of these, i listen to a lot of music and always have a view on it so why not blog more about something someone might actually care to read about! (or as a businessman might say 'add value to the customer').

Ok so here's the first one....

Track:

Madness

Artist:

Muse

Album:

The 2nd Law
Track Released: 20/08/12

I first heard this track on the way to work one day on XFM and i have to say, i immediately thought 'not another modern day Muse track!', i thought it was slow boring and i let my preconception of how Muse have evolved over time get the better of me.

I used to be quite a big Muse fan 'in the day' and i really appreciated what  Matt Bellamy did with the bands' music, however it all went wrong (in my opinion) when they released Black Holes and Revelations in 2006 i thought it was 'un-muse-ish' and a step away from what i liked about them. I'm sure the album was great, i just didn't like it and so from then on i've always not been too bothered with whats been released since.

As it was a band i always used to like, i knew what they were capable of and i knew how much more popular they had become since they became less popular with me so i felt compelled to give this a chance (the old cliche; 'for good times sake' springs to mind haha!), plus i didn't have much choice with such a poor choice of radio stations available on my car radio, XFM seemed to play the occasional track that i didn't mind, so maybe this could be one.

Eventually they played it over and over again and the more i heard it, the more i liked it. It has this epic ominous build up for the majority of the song and i thought it was very 'Queen-like' in style, reminiscent of 'We Will Rock You'/'Under Pressure'/'Bohemian Rhapsody' esq i thought. Not in tune but in structure. Another section which i really liked is the eventual emotion release by Matt, excuted perfectly with a great melody behind as he sings 'I need to love' practically at the top of his singing voice.

This made me want to discover more and interpret the lyrical theme of the song. My own initial interpretation was that it was about drug addiction (yeah cliche'd I know) where the character was singing about his love for the drug thats pushing him to emotional extremes before realising that its not the drug he needs to fill the gap in his life, he needs to love (or 'loooooooooooove' as Matt puts it). Then i thought maybe it was about two friends, but after reading about it, i t is actually (apparently) about Matt's relationship with Kate Hudson.

Either way, a roll-reversal in opinion on this one but now it's a track i like a lot and am currently regularly listening to. Good video too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ek0SgwWmF9w

Strange dream!

Randomly the other night, I had a wierd dream; I was out walking in the woods when I met victoria beckham and former arsenal player marc overmars.victoria was pushing a pram with a small child in and marc had put on some weight, grown dreadlocks and had become a builder. As I stopped to talk, get autographs and photos (this is when i found out about marc's employment), jls (boyband) and acted as if they had been with me the whole time.

The dream pretty much ended there, but what what stood out for me was the variation of the subject matters, my mind digging up a football player of whom I have barely thought about (though occasionally) for at least several years since his retirement and putting him in this completely unrelated situation both visually and the fact that he was a builder?! Then bringing in jls who I can only assume were there cause I heard a song of theirs not long before I went to sleep. I thought this mix of old and recent matters indicated an interaction of different brain sections or something mad like that! Victoria beckham, I have no idea why though!

Halloween 2012!

Almost Christmas......man my blog entries are relevant!

For my pumpkin for this year, I went for something slightly less cliche'd, i went for a stormtrooper from Star Wars which I think looks pretty cool and still scary to fit with the Halloween tradition.

This year was different again as we used the inner part of the pumpkin to make things. Cat did the cooking and came up with this pumpkin bread which tasted amazing and also these roasted sugared and cinnamon pumpkin seeds. The seeds had an interesting after taste but I couldn't really eat a lot of them haha! Either way, did i mention, the pumpkin bread tasted ace!

FIFA 13 gameface!

Yep I got FIFA 13 a few months ago for my Xbox 360 and its a great addition to the series (especially the seasons online mode!).

As I have done before on FIFA 11, I wanted to give The gameface feature a bash. Gameface basically allows you to download a head model created on the ea games website that you create based off a profile and a portrait photo you upload. The result being, your created 'pro' looks just like you.

I gave this 2 attempts. The first (right photo) looks great and very accurate......apart from the blue 'avatar like' neck colour. This is due to my beard and therefore the colour tone its picked for my neck is from my bears, not my actual neck.

Obviously I wanted to do better and after a bit of trial and error with the colour correction sliders when I input my photos, I came up with this (2nd right photo). Not perfect, slightly orange and I have the scariest eyes ever (clearly they did not render accurately!). After downloading this to FIFA however, the result is pretty decent and despite the fact I am slightly more tanned in it than real life, I have used that one. I will just put the skin colour down to if I was a real professional footballer, I'd be outside more anyway!


Overall, a good feature which makes a change from all the other character generators in games which although are very in-depth and incredible use of technology to get them into cut scenes etc..., you never actually get them anywhere near to yourself. Basically from my point of view, I only ever use the character builders to build me and gameface gets it 10x closer and 10x quicker than manually selecting nose heights and eyebrow widths. Gameface is only going to get better so thumbs up for ea gameface!

And just so you can see the images I uploaded, here they are:

A rush of blog to the head!

This is just a quick-fire, 'things i was going to blog about but never did'. So here it goes, in no particular order:

1)

-41 views, well that sucks! (haha!)






2)

 Stu exclusively wearing 'the manchester menace' Manchester Phoenix mascott head. NOTE: he is not the menace, though he should be, not great with kids though.

 Here is the same guy after several hours and several beers after realising he was sat on a chair with only 3 legs in Indigo, Withington










3)

A green Gnome i found in B+M for a quid so i bought it and it sits on my desk at work. It gets multiple threats a day from work colleagues of imminent smashing  but he's still going strong.








4)

Me working in London for the Olympics (at China House) standing next to 'Wenlock' a statue of one of the mascotts. A month long job full of all sorts of random stuff during the 'UK's rendition of the Olympics', it was hard but great at the same time, glad i got to go and be involved!








5)

 Cat stood next to a life size Lionel Messi. If he wasn't wearing boots they'd be the same size haha!










5)

Paid £17 for this piece. By far and wide the coolest thing i own ever (the lego head not the amazon box!). Always wanted one and eventually dug deep for it!




6)

Steve during dinner in the maddest Brazilian restaurant ever. They just kept serving us random meats from various animals. I swear i ate a farm that night and so long as your card was turned up to 'yes'/'green' then they kept coming! I think Steve had enjoyed a few beers by that point too.








7)

Saturday saw the purchase of this beast! A gammon joint which was labeled half price so we went for it. Little did we know, £10.21 was the discounted price! It lasted for 4 days of 2 of us eating it for lunch and tea everyday at generous portions so it had longevity and a great taste! Though i think i'll lay off the gammon for a while!


8)


Yep! i finished 24 last weekend :(. I've been watching it for over 6 months, catching up from episode 1 all the way through to the film and the end of season 8. Awesome series, just want more, long live Jack Baur, don't do what the book says, just do what's right! oh and patch me through to the President!




9)

 Upgraded to a new Macbook Pro. So far so good, sweet piece of kit, though i didn't go for the new Retina Display versions. Mainly due to money constrains but also their lack of connectivity and no Firewire 800 port (i don't think) really put me off too so got the top-end-non-retina-display-version out there! Done!





10)

Finally, (lets make it 10!) last weekend me and Cat ended up going to the Wales comic con. Cat really wanted to go and i thought it was worth a look so we went to Wrexham for it. Met Warwick Davis and saw Boba Fett amongst others but most importantly, the voice of Johnny Bravo! (pictured). I didn't pay £10 for his autograph but i did get a picture with him but couldn't be bothered to find it. go to Facebook for more pictures on this:
http://www.facebook.com/lawrence.card

mistaken identity!?

A bit of a random one and probably the first ever post that doesn't start with:

'I haven't blogged in a while so i thought i'd.........'

but I was just searching for my blog (cause i use it that often i forget where it is.......plus i access it on my phone normally) and links such as these came up:

http://www.bulletformyvalentine.com/us/users/lawrenciumbc
http://www.1st-movers.com/my-profile/userprofile/lawrenciumbc

...amongst others, these aren't my profiles, just someone that seems to have used the same username that i tend to do.

This isn't really that mental and doesn't bother me that much, i just thought it was an interesting experiment to see how many accounts that aren't me that share this username there are, mainly because i would hardly have thought it is a name which would come to many peoples minds when choosing account names; 'lawrenciumbc' (or 'lawrence crumble' as lazy work colleagues like to call it haha!)

To be fair, as of today, the first page of user accounts from various places apart from the 2 listed above are all mine.......which is good news i suppose.

The 2nd page seems to be all me too but predominantly forum accounts when i have been stuck with something. Then this one popped up:

http://www.totalmortalkombat.com/board/profile.php?mode=viewprofile&u=39333&sid=224bd416c1546a57df5e8e73ff030f7a

TOTALMORTALKOMBAT?! i don't ever remember making that! but i could see it happening, im a casual mortal kombat player but don't know why i'd ever go on a website for it, well apparently i did in 2008. What alarms me most about this is under 'interests', all that is listed is 'finishing him', which, if your not into mortal kombat sounds pretty strange to say the least...... .


There you go, on the other hand maybe it was the same person who loved bullet for my valentine.

Come to think of it, maybe i did sign up on the bfmv site for some merchandise or tickets, i did used to be more of a fan than i currently am so its not out of the question and when i delve deeper on the '1st-movers' site, i realise that they created a joomla extension to auto post to facebook and twitter, so that was me.

the 3rd page is much the same as the 2nd so i stopped there and so in conclusion i don't think there is actually anyone using 'my' username, just me in the forgotten past.

........well that killed 20 minutes. Lawrenciumbc, that's me.