ricardocabellov5.5

The 1st of January of this new year xplsv.com had a gig at goldance'06 (cerdanyola, barcelona). It was suposed to be a pro club with professional people and all that. But since I arrived there I knew they weren't really professional and It was clear that I was not going to do anything on there as I knew they didn't have a projector. In fact, they were asking if WE had a projector. That scene is always going to be the same.. I think I'll start looking around London to offer my visuals ;)

Well, I'm don't regret anything. It was a chance to catch up with Alex Martin and also meet Tony Rox. And also to do some extra visuals with neon2 and give some more ideas to shine for the tool.

So, click here to check out the visuals I produced for that party. A shame that wasn't used, I think they were looking quite nice. Maybe for the next one

As looks like ox86 was not really moving enough to have something usable in a near future I decided this weekend to give a try to Windows Vista as my friend Emulin just gave me a copy of the build 5231.

So, the installation was really loong, the progress bar was not working properly but somehow I had the patience and after 45min or so, the new OS was installed. It looked quite nice and a lot of things were designed UI with another concept. Browsing my computer was really different. Some modules crashed some times and restarted again, atleast now says "I crashed and I'll restart". There were some very cool bits like the list mode for the windows (you know.. Thumbnail, Details..), were you can mix styles using a bar, I mean is not any more one option or another, you can drag the bar to select a mix between two styles, it looked quite nice. And also they have now super big icons as osx does.

Internet Explorer 7 had all the TAB system totally ripped from Firefox and Opera, same mouse buttons to do everything. But hey! better than IE6!

Unfortunatelly, there were no working drivers (atleast for that build) for my ATI x300, so I wasn't able to see the glass transparency effect and some other things (I guess mainly Avalon). My friend Emulin told me he is going to give me a copy of the build 5270 which says is much better.

I'll keep  you up to date ;)

Google just released at CES an installer of a selection of good programs which they called Google Pack. The selection is cool, it's basicly all the programs I usually use but inj the other hand I don't understand the fact of having Google Talk! and Trillian separated, it just looks messy, and also instead of Norton Antivirus I would better put AVG. The screensaver looks cool (quite similar to my phodoob thing), but I hate to have the logo on the top right-corner.

I'll like to see if Google adds more software to the pack tho.

Some weeks after my kind of complain about the unsincronized evolution between video compression and datadisk capabilities looks like everything is starting to move (at least I didn't read anything about it before).

Like this new there are a lot more talking (mainly about CES) about HD-DVD as well. I'm really looking forward to see those 50GB disks! :') But that means, I will have to change my laptop soon again as it doesn't have a HD-DVD/Blu-Ray reader :'(

Once again last.fm is discovering me a great one. This time his name is Ochre and you can download quite a lot of MP3 for free!

http://www.ochremusic.com/
(to start listening his music right now click this link :D)

Hope you like it as much as I do.

Ok, probably some of you have seen some spam comments around these days. It was just a matter of time until I add to this hand-made blog an antiSPAM system.

It just flags the comment as SPAM if it comes from specific IPs. A message on the top will appear if it was flagged as SPAM, but I'll check all the comments in case there is a comment that isn't.

I'm doing the list of IPs in "realtime" so maybe you will see some shit some days.

Sorry about it :P

Wishing the best for everyone!! Have a very productive and creative 2006!! *\o/*

... let the money work for you.

Meanwhile I was looking for a chistmas gift for my father I was on amazon checking some books and I found this book called "papa rico papa pobre". From amazon you can read some pages of each book, in this case the introduction, and after reading it I understood myself a little bit.

I grow up under one of those educations like "save, save, save, don't spend too much, look for the cheaper one". But maybe because I'm lazy (doing things like that) I just tried to find a reason for not doing this. And somehow I had one but I never thought that was in fact a much better way to think. For example:

Issue 1 - mp3 player
You have to buy a mp3 player. Everybody always told you that you have to compare different shops before buy it. You got one shop just in the same street where you live but it's more expensive that buying it in a shop where is cheaper. Don't worry about it. You need it and you don't want to waste time getting the tube/bus and then going back. You need it, you go to the closest shop and you buy it. End of the story. Probably going to that shop that was cheaper you will have to pay the bus or tube to go there, this fact makes the product more expensive, but perhaps including the tube/bus ticket is still cheaper. Doesn't matter, it's 1hour of time your time that you saved.

Issue 2 - Getting a charge of 1 month for just half.
This month Foxtons did charge us for 1month when we only been on the flat for 15 days. Well, I don't care. I will probably lose a lot of time, finding the correct number to call, speaking with the correct person, making my english pronunciation as clear as possible, and probably I will have to lose time of my work because they only answer the phone in working hours. Solution, don't worry about, keep working and you will probably get the money back just doing what you like to do: your work.

Some people did ask me at some points of my life, "Where the fuck you get the time to be able to do all what you do?! Don't you sleep?!" they said.. Well, I certainly sleep much less than other people but the next time I will probably know what to answer. Just without caring about those small things that happens in your life that If you care about It will make you not concentrate in your ideas. I have to chose, or concentrating about having a very fair life where all what I have to pay is what I should, or just continue doing what I like, and probably will get back that money I lost and twice of it probably. The time I would lose doing things like that is time that I will lose of my relax time, If I lose my relax time the relax time will supply the work time.

This way of thinking just apply to the people that does have too many ideas and a lot of things to do. If you have time to watch tv or you got nothing to do. Don't worry, you can plan your day just traveling to get your life as fair as possible

Once again, Apple is kicking the ass of Microsoft in their own Platform. I'm talking about Video Players.

For years Mac (David Notario) was always complaining about Quicktime because wasn't really an open format that you could play with another player and he was always defending .wm9. In fact, when we (he) did all the videos of all the threepixels demos, he didn't want to save them as .mov mainly because that.

But, as you can see, .mov is now a very used video format in for anything. In xplsv.tv for example 90% of all the content is in Quicktime, looks like everyone using mac or After Effects (win or mac) always export as quicktime. And I say "thanks god!". Whenever you try to see a video streamed in a website using the shitty Windows Media Player I get quite angry, my conection sometimes isn't fast enough and the video stops.. and says streaming... 20% 45% 76%... that sucks. I can understand that they do that with a TV stream, but not with a video! Quicktime instead saves all the video information, and you can play it without any stops whenever you want. Somehow, the quicktime player that is used for online files looks more profesional than the shitty windows media player.

Some months ago they released Quicktime 7 with the new HD technology (H.264). This simply rocks! As we have finally internet at home and one of the firsts things I did was to try the speed of it watching a lot of Movie Trailers in HD. And where else to check trailers at this resolution better than Apple Trailers? Again, a very clever move by Apple. So, what I was actually doing was watching all the trailers at 1080p definition. This means 1920x1080 pixels. So I was watching almost in realtime Trailers from internet at 1920x1080 (filling for first time totally my screen (1920x1200)) without resizing anything. Isn't that impressive?! I was even able to see a lot of bad texture mapping in Ice Age 2.

Something I really hated is that I'm not able to download Quicktime alone now, I have to download it with iTunes which I really hate (tho I'm starting to find usefull (the shop for CD previews and because we have some airtports at Spring which can connect directly to some speakers and with iTunes in your computer send the music to play in the speakers).

Talking about the technology, definitelly this has been a very big step that will really change a lot of things from now on. The PAL resolution is just starting the final days now. And again, thanks god! as I went the other day to a Dixons shop, where they had all those super screens and they were just doing a very crap interpolation of the PAL signal. The texture was so disgusting.

Btw, meanwhile writing this post I realized that Microsoft is working in this technology as well but they have the links to an EXE that you have to download and it's actually a zip, unzip and play.. Very useful, isn't it? :D MICROSOFT! LOSERS!!!

Here is a screenshot of my desktop so you can understand easier what I'm talking about.

r08028 - Cath the TechGoblin.mp3
HardTechno
I had that one started from long time ago, I had the idea of playing with random cartoon sounds on it, as there are not too many clown/funny hardtechno tunes out there. The final tune reminded me to Skaven's old track 'Cath the goblin'.

r08028 - Team3670.mp3
Bigbeat/Joke
This week the two design teams at Spring Digital just merged in only one and the mix inspired me that tune. It does kind of show the new sounds I hear now ;)

Enjoy!