Music/Movies
Holidays go by too fast
Dec 29th
I really should be working. But since I’m not, my holidays have been going by far too quickly.
Still, its been a good holidays – lots of time with the family, and a couple friends are coming over tomorrow afternoon. Then there’s new years and the two year anniversary for Diane and I coming up in short order! Amazingness!
Last night I watched Memoirs of a Geisha … I don’t know what rotten tomatoes has against it – I thought it really was a pretty good movie. Oh well. Maybe I’m just ignorant – I haven’t read the book nor do I know anything about Japanese culture. *shrug* – from an ignorant standpoint, I thought it was good 
Hope everyone is having a good holidays!
Heraldk
Narnia
Dec 17th
Last night Diane and I joined several of my friends to go see the first of the Narnia films. It was amazing … at least I thought it was really well done. I didn’t really like the discovery of the wardrobe sequence – but other than that, I felt that the movie was really quite well done.
I really quite enjoyed the Narnia books – and so I was quite excited to hear that they were making movies out of the books. My understanding is they are going to do them all … which should be pretty cool.
So indeed … a very good movie in my eyes and a movie to go see if you can!
Heraldk
CS Department Christmas Party and the Singing Christmas Tree
Dec 12th
Ahh Christmas … so much to do, so little time!
Saturday was the department Christmas party – and it was a blast as I kind of expected. The food was not spectacular, but the dancing was fun. Diane and I showed off our dancing skillz – though I felt really rusty at most of the dances other than the waltz. Our waltz is our best dance for sure The DJ at the party was a little too involved in the dance. At first it was pretty cool – with him playing several instruments along with the music. But after he switched costumes a few times and tried getting people to dance all night, I started to feel a little awkward. Oh wells. I also won the limbo contest, which was kinda fun. I dunno what I do right there – I just seem to know how to do it. Kinda weird For a prize, I got a cool see-through digital clock. It sits on my desk now
Last night I joined Diane and her mother to go see the singing Christmas tree. For those who haven’t gone, its a big tree with tiers for a choir to get setup in it. Its usually pretty good – and while I didn’t think it was too bad this year, there was a couple of things that I kind of didn’t like. Mostly, I didn’t like how the sound was setup. Usually, the capability of a largish choir to sing doesn’t need a lot of amplification through the sound system. But using a little is okay too. However, some sort of effect was being applied I think, and the result didn’t sound very good to me. The concert also seemed a lot shorter than past years too. *shrug*.
The other thing that I’ve started thinking over the past few years that I’ve gone there is that I’m feeling increasingly uncomfortable in a church like the one the tree is in. Its too … over the top for me. I consider myself to be a Christian – at least in a lot of the ways I think about life and its opportunities. But I just can’t feel comfortable in an environment where there’s this big speaker setup, with tv monitors lining the aisles and corporate sponsers for the program and the refreshments. I’m fond of the little church my family goes to – its nice, its not near as flashy, and it just feels more comfortable. *shrug* This will probably come up later in another post. For now, I’ll leave it at that.
It certainly doesn’t look or feel like Christmas outside. All the snow is gone again – and its less that two weeks to Christmas. Weird weird weather. But no matter – I’m starting to look forward to a chance to take a holiday here … I need some time off I think
Heraldk
iTunes and non standard pricing
Nov 18th
This is a really interesting article: This guy is claiming that the real reason the record companies want to change pricing at the iTunes music store is because they want to establish ‘image’ that a higher priced song is ‘better’.
It makes a lot of sense.
The iTunes music store currently sells all tracks at $0.99 a song. If the record companies get their way, then they would sell more popular tracks for more money. But now what happens? If popular, ‘good’ tracks sell for $3.00 a song, then what kind of song is a $0.89 song? You or I might might be able to say that it doesn’t matter, but the majority of people will automatically go for the higher priced songs because they are what are ‘cool’, ‘popular’ and … ‘good’. Now the record companies have another barganing chip in their deals with artists. Don’t want to agree with what we want? We’ll price your songs lower.
You know, I like music, but at times I wish I didn’t like it so much. I really like to support artists I listen to, but when most of the money I pay for their music goes to these damn record companies, it makes me feel kinda … unclean. Maybe I don’t know how everything is from their side of the issue, but really … when every move they seem to make is an attempt at keeping their wallets padded, I can hardly show feel like they have the best interests of the music artists at heart can I?
Heraldk
Super Mario Bros
Oct 16th
Seemed to be a theme this month. First, someone plays a level’s worth of super mario brother’s theme music plus the sound appropriate sound affects entirely on guitar. Craziness.
Then, someone comes up with a super mario brothers opera. Yes, really.
Some people, I tell ya. Crazy!
Still, I can’t help but be intrigued. Somehow, mario still holds my interest.
Heraldk
Edmonton Stratovarius Show Review
Oct 3rd
Boy was I excited. And nervous.
Since I found out that Stratovarius was coming to town, I was really wondering what sort of crowd would turn up to a band that is, as far as I know, virtually unknown in town. I was also nervous that the people I had dragged to come see the show (like Diane) wouldn’t like it and be forced to endure a few hours of misery.
Thankfully, I really had no reason to worry. Metal fans came out of the woodwork and we had a decent sized crowd – more people than I expected for sure!
Now for my show review.
I arrived at the door around 8:00. The starlite room is a members only club – so some of the people in my group needed memberships. We hung around there and got memberships for them and then entered the place. This was the first time I’d been at the starlite room – it was a pretty neat venue. Pretty small, but my first thoughts were that it was an awesome little venue to see a top notch band like Stratovarius.
The opening band, Into Eternity, started up at 8:45pm sharp. I had not heard anything by them before, and I think its obvious that I would have benefited from doing a little research before hand. I wish people would realize that its not all about making music as loud as possible. Sure, more volume can make things sound really good. But the clarity and balance of all the instruments together that makes for a good listening experience. That is my biggest complaint for the opening band – they seemed extremely talented, but because of the balance issues, I could barely hear the middle range of the vocals. The only notes we heard were when they were growling into their mics or when the lead singer hit some super high notes. I may have to take a listen to some of their music to see if I like them. Unfortunately, the show was not enough to make me buy a cd right then and there.
Finally, Stratovarius made it on stage, and they started in with a great deal of energy. The volume/balance issue did affect them too, but to a lesser extent as more of the Strato songs included quieter ballad songs that took us away from the sheer volume for a few songs. Still, the balance was a major complaint of mine and if I hadn’t heard the songs before I think I would’ve enjoyed the show a little less than I did.
Don’t get me wrong – the show was amazing. I find myself wishing that I had more time to spend with my keyboard to try and learn how to play as well as Jens Johannson. For those who don’t know, he used to play backup keyboards for Yngwie Malmsteen – often heralded as one of the best speed guitar players. So Jens is a pretty amazing keyboardist since he was able to keep up with Yngwie, and is now playing with Timo Tolkki – who is pretty amazing as well.
They could’ve kept playing for another hour and half at least and not run out of songs. Stratovarius has a long list of cds they’ve put out over the years. I think the count is up at 12 cds or something, and almost all the songs on the discs are good enough to be played in a live show like this one. Unfortunately, they couldn’t play all night, since they needed to be in Calgary the next day … They gave us a good selection of music from their repertoire, including some old and some new.
They played two encores – the first ending with Hunting High and Low and the second ending with … of course … Black Diamond. There was a startling number of fans who knew the words to many of the songs and that was pretty sweet.
All in all, it was a pretty incredible evening. I’m very happy that they came to town, and at the end of their show they had a slide at the back that said they were coming back in 2007! Woohoo!
Maybe I can drag a few more people to the show this time 
Heraldk
Star Wars Episode III
May 24th
Last night I was able to go see the new star wars movie as part of Nolan’s birthday gathering. The critics generally agreed that this movie restored some of the former glory to the star wars franchise. Episode one was terrible, and episode two was better but still not as good as the classics. Now that I have seen the movie I’m not too sure how much I enjoyed it.
My overall impression though was that the movie very smoothly made the transition from the end of episode two to the start of episode four. My problem is that this transition was almost too smooth. The movie hits all the points along the way, but there are no surprises along the way. I got the feeling that many of the events in the movie happened “because they had to” rather than for the value of that particular scene.
So while the movie was a nice close to the series, I was overal kind of unimpressed with the movie. Perhaps the problem is that we all know what has to happen to get us to the proper place for episode four… but still, I felt that the movie was missing some excitement that could’ve been there.
Anyways, that’s what I thought.
Heraldk
Collective Soul
May 22nd
The night was Saturday, May 21st. The occasion? To see a band that I have grown to love – Collective Soul. They played at Red’s for their second concert in Edmonton in less than 6 months. I missed their first arrival here in December and was kind of annoyed because I had really wanted to see them, so I was really glad when they announced another date in May!
The group I went with included Mike, Nolan, and my girlfriend Diane. We had supper at the Old Spaghetti Factory beforehand and then wandered down to Red’s where we proceeded to wait for the show. The doors opened at 7:00, but oddly enough the show didn’t start until 9:30. So we wandered around for awhile. Mike got some game tokens to play in the arcade with. We played some air hockey, foosball, and table hockey. T’was good fun.
When it got closer to show time, we went to try and find a spot to stand an watch the show. We got lucky and found a spot that we got an excellent view of the band at. The house was packed – the concert had been sold out for a couple of weeks. As usual, the show started late, but finally the opening band The Waking Eyes took the stage and I was pleasantly surprised by how good they were. Aside from their known garage-rock style, they brought out a few surprises including a piece where they ditched their conventional guitars and the bassist picked up a stand up bass, the lead guitar sat down at a keyboard and the singer/rhythm guitar took up a trumpet! They proceeded to play a jazzy sounded track with a quite catchy bass-line. Very cool!
Finally though, Collective Soul took the stage. Its been awhile since I was last at a rock concert, but it was probably the most intimate rock show I’ve been at. All my other concert experiences were at the Shaw conference center or Rexall place – both of which are very large venues. Red’s is quite a bit smaller than either of those and as a result created a very nice atmosphere for being up close to the band.
The thing with Collective Soul is that they have a *huge* number of hit songs, and for them to just play all of these songs would take them quite a long time. They played all these songs plus a couple of songs off their new album. It was pretty incredible – hearing the hits like Precious Declaration, Why pt2, Gel, Where the river flows, Heavy, and Shine. The years in the business of touring has obviously made them very good at what they do. The show was very very well put together with a proper buildup to a rocking and loud conclusion to the concert. The encore was three songs long finishing with the song Shine – where everyone in the audience was singing “Oh oh oh oh – heaven let your light shine down”. I always like it when bands give the audience a chance to sing
All in all, it was an amazing evening. There are many unpleasant aspects to the concert experience … but the part that matters was amazing. For the others, here’s hoping that the no-smoking bylaw gets passed this year like planned!
Heraldk
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