This weekend there is a 50/50 chance that it will be raining here in the Bay Area. With this Sunday being Easter, having the rain is bitter sweet. We, the people that live in the Bay Area, need the rain if we don’t want to worry about having a drought this year. But we don’t want the rain because many of us will be on an Easter Egg hunt or watching an Easter Parade.
For you baseball fans, the regular season starts this Monday. But if you are either an Oakland Athletics fan or San Francisco Giants fan, you may want to catch them play a friendly exhibition game against each other this weekend. Friday the Giants will be hosting the A’s and on Saturday the A’s will be hosting the Giants in Oakland. Last night the A’s spanked the Giants 7-3 at At&t Park.
What ever you plan to do, just don’t forget to pack an umbrella.
With today being the last Wednesday of the month, this Wednesday can only one thing. Winter is Coming!
Not sure how many of you folks are Game of Thrones fans, and if you’re not you need to get with the program! Watch the series on HBO, so far there has been 2 season that has been produced and published. With only 2 season to catch up, one can get brought to speed by Sunday, when the Third season comes out. Currently each season of GOT covers about 1 book from the GOT book series that was written by George R.R. Martin. There are currently 5 books out with George R.R. Martin planning to write a total of 7 books for the A Song of Ice and Fire series). Book 3 is one of my favorite book of the series. BAD ASS is the best way that I can describe it.
HBO’s The Game of Thrones returns this Sunday March 31st.
For those of you that does follow the GOT, check out this short webisode series that I stumbled upon on YouTube. It’s called the School of Thrones, an adaption of GOT set in high school. Who ever wrote the show understood the main characters and the plot of the series. The acting is YouTube standard, a tiny bit cheesy, but the intro animation is pretty damn good, and these webisodes are a nice quick fix to those still going through GOT withdraws.
I’m going to try posting something up every Friday which will be called Friday Escape. Fridays are when most people are ending their weekly grind and starting their weekend. If you’re like me, by noon you’re ready to bolt out the door and get your weekend started. Hence, Friday Escape.
The idea behind Friday Escape is to post something that is relevant to the weekend quickly. Whether it is telling you about my plan for the weekend or an event that’s happening in the San Francisco Bay Area, since there is almost something going on every weekend here.
This week March Madness started and we have San Jose hosting several games that started Thursday at the HP Pavilion. Saturday you can catch a game our local team Cal take on Syracuse or Oregon against St. Louise, that is if tickets aren’t sold out.
The weather is going to be great all over the Bay so you can play tourist in the City, play at the many beautiful parks throughout the Bay Area, or locked in your room playing God of War: Ascension. What ever you chose to do, try not to miss out on the great weather this weekend. Crack the blinds open if you’ll be cooped up indoors. Keep in mind that we have spring showers coming in next week.
2013 is here! Yes, we are 2 weeks well into the New Year and I am a bit disappointed that the Mayan’s got it wrong. Oh well, all it means that I still have to give money to my estrange stalker Sallie Mae.
What I do look forward to for 2013 are some exciting movies from the second installment of the Hunger Games trilogy: Catching Fire to yet another Die Hard movie. Below are several movies of 2013 that I look forward to watching.
Catching Fire is the second part to Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Game trilogy. The only thing that I don’t like about this movie is that it doesn’t come out till the last quarter of the year, eta November.
Marvel has butchered the X-Men and Spider Man series in the past but they have redeemed itself of late with The Avengers, the Iron Man series, and X-Men first class. The Wolverine follows Logan through his journey in Japan and is based off the Chris Claremont storyline.
Tony Stark is up against the Mandarin, played by Sir Ben Kingsley. The movie is supposed to have the War Machine in it but from the trailer, it appears to be the Patriot. Oh Marvel, how you like to twist things up.
Just like that high school buddy that left town to attend college and now is back with a degree. That person is still the same guy from high school but more refined but still ever a good friend.
Well, Myspace is back along with a new look. Forget the look, Myspace is be back with a whole new experience.
Last week I requested for an invite to the New Myspace and last night I got invited to join the New Myspace!
You’re invited to Join the New Myspace
I’ve set up my profile, https://new.myspace.com/johnydecali, uploaded a couple pics, connected to some music, and added a couple folks to my Top 8.
Wow! I haven’t messed with Top 8 in a minute lol. Facebook has something like Top 8 called Close Friends but it ain’t like Top 8 where you can display who is in your Top 8 to your friends and trolls that cruise your page.
There’s so much that I want to write about and yet I feel that I still have so much to experience w/ the New Myspace that I don’t want to be to judgmental from my initial test drive of the site. So I’ll just mention a few quick things that are both good and bad.
Let’s first talk about lagging. One would be able to pan horizontally through their stream and what ever they were looking at should populate. Below is how my stream should appear.
My stream feed on the New Myspace.
However with either my connection lagging or the New Myspace server having issues, I was receiving content that was not fully uploaded. Below you can see the same exact screen from above but rather with the upload issue, which was intermittent. If any of you are having the same issues, please let me know because it would be great to know that I’m not alone with this problem. Thanks.
Content not fully uploaded from the server.
Besides the uploading issue, everything is great!
It took me a few seconds to familiarize myself with the UI and get into the habbit of simply hitting escape to close out the pop up windows. Panning horizontally versus the usual vertical style web page seems intuitive, especially since the wheel on the mouse already knows to go from left to right on horizontal websites.
The music features are pretty nice. I like how one can have the music play and have the control bar anchored to the bottom of the web page. You have the options of having a queue of songs play, music video play, or connected to a “radio station” where one would get a feed of the selected artist. If you have a music video playing, by default, it appears full screen but you can quickly minimize the video and that video plants itself to the bottom left of the screen.
Fullscreen: Linkin Park – Burn it DownMinimized: Mike Shinoda going off at the bottom right of the screen.
With the ability of playing both songs, videos, and being a social website the New Myspace may kill sites like Pandora or Last.fm as a source of streaming music.
Unlike Facebook, where you go on a liking spree and Like a ton of stuff from your feed, the New Myspace does not have a like button. Neither did the original Myspace. But there is a connect button that appears in the form of 2 circles that intersect. When you connect to a person or subject, a portion of the circle gets shaded in. When the other person connects back to you, the 2 circles combine into a single circle to represent how each of you fully connect.
Is connecting the equivalent as a “Like” button? For now I am going to have to say yes.
Below is Scholar Apparel’s New Myspace stream that shows that they have been listening to music and connecting with people.
School Apparel’s stream.
The New Myspace is somewhat similar to Twitter, in the same sense that you only have a limited amount of characters to enter a post or leave a comment. But the New Myspace took it up a notch above twitter by adding an additional of ten characters. To some folks that is a lot, to me it does. But whatever.
Are we going to see the end of Facebook? Google+? Twitter? Who knows but my money is no. People will adapt and so shall Facebook. And in truth, there are so many social media sites that it is a challenge to keep them all up to date. But I do like how the New Myspace appears to be more polished that Facebook.
Let me know what you think of the whole New Myspace and if you’d like to connect to me, just click here.
Sorry for the AFK folks… I’ve been busy all this month and looks like that this will be my one and only post for November. Sad… I just got a Deviant Art account, igloojohn. So far I only placed up a few photos. I plan on putting up some illustrations in the near future… Also I just wanted to wish everyone a Happy Friday! It’s storming out here in the SF Bay Area. So if you’re near or around the Bay, stay safe and dry!
In 1989 I was ten years old and growing up in the hard streets of Oakland, a city that is approximately 12 miles east of San Francisco. To better defend myself form the punks in the neighborhood, my mom signed both my brother and I up for taekwondo classes.
On October 17th, 1989 I was at my taekwondo class which started at 5. We were done with our warm ups and were beginning our stretches with everyone sitting on the floor in a circle. As we sat there facing each other, I felt the need to fart. I slowly turned my body to one side to help the gas escape out slowly and quietly. While farting all my concentration was on myself trying to be a ninja and not make any noise. Next thing I knew the everyone got up screaming and running towards me to get to the door behind me. The room was rocking left and right but I just thought that someone had bumped into me. This whole time my thoughts were that everyone heard me fart and the room smelled hella bad, which is why everyone bolted for the door to get outside. As I sat there alone in the circle, I noticed that the rocking hasn’t stopped. That is when I knew that there was something wrong. I don’t remember getting up, all I remember was running for the door.
As I look back to the event, I’m just glad that I didn’t shit myself. As selfish as it sounds, I’m grateful that I did not lose anyone close to me that day.
Below is a California Highway Patrol recount and investigation from that day:
What I’ve learned from watching shows such as the West Wing, The Wire, Boss, along with reading books like Boardwalk Empire, Game of Thrones, Animal Farm, Leviathan to name a few, and from life experience. Is that even though we are living in a democratic country, no longer a republic country, lands and titles are still worth as much as they were when the British Monarchy controlled the colonies. The only difference is that instead of Sirs, Lords, and Barons we are using the terms CEO, CTO, VP, Council Member, and so forth. With these titles come a larger paycheck and a better view of the city. One must ask the same question that our fore fathers asked during the British rule over the colonies, what are these modern day lords doing for us?
This past Saturday in Oakland there were almost 400 noise complaints for a rave that was happening at the O.co Coliseum. This rave that lasted till 2 in the morning had headliners that consisted of Avicii, Alesso, Sander van Doorn, Chuckie, and much more. This rave that caused so much noise that can be felt and heard for miles was called Beyond Wonderland. And what a wonderful experience it was!
Beyond Wonderland has been around for sometime however this was the first time that Insomniac has decided to bring it north to the San Francisco Bay Area. The line to enter the venue moved fast, the weather wasn’t to cold, the Dj’s were killing it, and my ears were ringing till this afternoon 🙂
Going crazy in the Madhatter’s Castle!
I have included a map (courtesy of Insomniac) of the venue below so you can get an idea of the venue. For those of you unfamiliar with O.co Coliseum and the Oracle Arena, the O.co is the home of both the Oakland Athletics and the Oakland Raiders while the Oracle Arena is the home of the Golden State Warriors. The O.co is set to the East of the Oracle Arena where they are both flanked by parking to the north and south. The venue was set in the south parking lot. There were 3 stages; the Caterpillar Garden which was to the north east of the venue, the Madhatter’s Castle set in the middle, and the Queens’s Domain to the south. There was a ferries wheel, drinks, and other “attractions” that were set between the Madhatter’s Castle and the Queen’s Domain.
Map of Beyond Wonderland
With the name Beyond Wonderland I was coming to the venue expecting to go down the rabbit hole and find myself in a whole new world. Instead I ended up at the Madhatter’s table sober. Beyond Wonderland was like a bad regurgitation of the Electronic Daisy Carnival. I didn’t feel energy in the air, the ferries wheel and the picnic area seemed like an afterthought, and there wasn’t enough lights… What I mean by not enough lights is that the physical experience wasn’t all there. This is my opinion and I know that it aint fair to compare Beyond Wonderland with EDC. With that said, the sets were amazing! Which is the very reason why people come to these events/raves/festivals. To hear and see their favorite DJ’s perform and fuck them sideways.
Sander van Doorn.
Oh man, where do I start? I saw Avicii for the first time and his set was crazy! Craziest part of it was that in the middle of his set, someone ignited a tear gas or let lose a fire extinguisher. I was to the right side of the tent when what ever it was went off and as soon as it did, many of us cleared the tent fast! People were running while covering their face, some were chocking and coughing, and there were still people enjoying the music. So I’m sure that what ever it was, was not tear gas. If it were, I’d be dying and more people would had been affected. The music kept on going and once the ominous cloud cleared, everyone went back in the tent to enjoy the night.
Avicii throwing it down!
I can’t stop saying how wonderful the DJ’s were. Cazzette, Thomas Gold, and all the other DJ’s that I saw that night. I wished that there was better timing with the different set times and less overlapping. Since there were overlapping set times I caught the tail end of some sets. For example, after Aviccii I went from the Queen’s Domain to the Madhatter’s Castle to catch the end of Chuckie‘s set. I wished that I saw all of Chuckie’s set since he was killing it.
Chuckie getting down in the Madhatter’s Castle!
The best DJ of the night would be Sander van Doorn. This. Guy. Killed. It. WOW! Sander’s set at EDC was one of my favorite form that weekend. But the set that Sander played for Beyond was a godly amount better! Holy shit! Can you say wow! Damn, damn, damn. Here’s a tease of Sander’s set from my girlfriend.
I’m thankful that Insomniac brought Beyond Wonderland and these wonderful DJ’s to the Bay Area. Over all the night was bad ass! I know that I’m being ignorant for writing that my ears were ringing the next day but I earned those damage ear drums. Next time I’ll bring ear buds. Which means that next time Beyond Wonderland is up here in the Bay Area, I’m going.
johnydecali 