FIVE IRON FRENZY RULE!

If you don’t know anything about Five Iron Frenzy, please educate yourself here and here… or below.

Go Munk Yourself here and share in the comments below the link. I’d love to see and hear your Chipmunked self.

Also, enrollment is not immediate. It can take a few days but it to go through so be patient.

Alrighty, good luck and enjoy.

With this new Spring season upon us, as I tend to do from time to time, I’ve created a new ‘mix-tape’ that feels appropriate for the new Spring season of Life I’m entering. I’ve called it my Breathe iMix
.

Well, I’ve actually called it Breathe, but I made an iMix out of it and would love to share this lovely mix with you, oh faithful reader. I titled it Breathe after the song on U2′s album No Line on the Horizon. I really love that song. I built the rest of the list and track from there. I usually try to theme the songs in one way or another when I create these mix tapes. I feel they flow better when listening to them.

itunes left out a few tracks from the original mix that I created since they don’t sell them. Those songs are

My Dear Machine, Amazing Grace (Give it Back), Sooner than Later, and Around by Sixpence None the Richer

Hologram by Katie Herzig

and Lost Part I and II from the Viva La Hova project.

How to Create an iMix in itunes

How about you? Would love for folks to share what you’re listening to in this new Spring season. Feel free to share.

For those not technologically inclined, watch the video below to learn how to create an iMix in itunes, and then share the link.

On the bottom right hand corner, click on the computer screen icon to make the video full screen. It will help make things easier to see.

How to Create an iMix in itunes

Check out my new shirt. Made it up myself. I wonder how many people will get this while I’m walking around town.

Many thanks to to the folks over at custonink.com. This shirt feels good and looks good.

So, what are your thoughts?

(If you don’t get this shirt, you might want to check out this post for more information, then check out twitter.com.)

Here are some highlights from my list:

Line 6 POD Studio UX2
: Would be great for recording vocals and bass, in addition to guitars because of the software plugin that it includes called POD Farm. That and it’s USB based, so no worries regarding Firewire with the new laptop.

Some of my favorite features about it:

• 18 guitar amps, 24 guitar cabs, 5 bass amps and 5 bass cabs, 29 essential stompbox and studio effects and 6 mic preamps in Mac® AU/RTAS®/VST® and Windows® RTAS® /VST® formats
• Free FX Junkie model pack adds 35 more effect models, including synths, filters, delays and more, to POD Farm. Ableton® Live Lite Studio Edition 16-track recording software and award-winning Reason Adapted production software
• Two 1/4-inch guitar inputs,two balanced XLR inputs with mic preamps,phantom power and trim knobs, 1/4-inch stereo monitor input, two 1/4-inch line inputs, two balanced 1/4-inch line out, S/PDIF digital out, 1/4-inch stereo headphone, assignable VU meters
• 44.1/48 kHz 16-/24-bit recording (88.2/96 kHz with sample rate conversion) Compatible with USB 1.1 and 2.0

MarsEdit 2 – Powerful Blog Publishing For Your Mac: MarsEdit is a desktop blog editor, so you can write a blog without giving up the comforts of your Mac.

Some of my favorite features:

• Powerful Markup Macros:
  Tired of typing the same things again and again? Set up macros with MarsEdit to easily insert commonly used snippets.
• Offline Freedom:
  Write when you want to, without an internet connection. Fine-tune your masterpiece on the plane, and publish when you get home.

Line 6 M13 Stompbox Modeler

This thing is freakin’ amazing! I’m a Line 6 effect fan/jumkie. This pedal is the pedal to solve all pedals. Essentially it’s a combination of the 4 major line 6 effect modelers (the distortion, delay, modulation, and synth/filters) in one plus a tuner and their Verbzilla pedal, with a bonus loop. It gives you the ability to save ‘scenes’ or difference sound set ups that you can recall with the push of a button. This pedal is a must have for me, and if I got it, I would probably sell my MM4, DL4, and tuner.

Some of my favorite features:

• Over 75 stompbox effects, 4 simultaneous in any order and any combination
• Dedicated knobs to control each of the parameters of each effect
• Create up to 12 pedal board scenes for instant recall. (It’s like having 12 fully tricked-out pedal boards available at any time)
• Universal tap tempo to sync all your time-based effects
• 28-second looper with dedicated footswitch controls for Undo, Record/Overdub, Play/Stop, Half Speed and more

Apple Logic Express 8

For recording, this is what I’m feeling. I know Pro-Tools is the de-facto recording standard in the industry, but I’m not leaning that way. I’m leaning towards Logic Express for the time being looking to upgrade to the full version of express at some future day.

Here are some of the my favorite features:

• Makes it easier than ever to translate musical inspiration into professional productions
• Includes all the functionality of Logic Pro 8 except for four high-end professional features–surround, TDM/DAE support, distributed audio processing (DAP), and support for high-end control surfaces
• 36 instruments from Logic Studio, including Ultrabeat drum machine, EXS24 Sampler, and ES2 synth
• 70 effects from Logic Studio, including Guitar Amp Pro, Ringshifter, and full-featured Pitch Correction
• Hundreds of channel strip settings and thousands of royalty-free Apple Loops so you can make incredible-sounding music right out of the box
• Ultimate Writing Studio
  A professional collection of music creation and writing tools makes it easy to capture and develop your musical inspirations. Record multiple takes, quickly assemble the perfect comp, establish a groove with a selection of Apple Loops, and fill out the remaining parts in your composition with Studio Instruments.
• Precision Editing
  Audio editing features in Logic Express 8 let you work with power and precision, using sample-accurate tools in the Sample Editor or directly in the Arrange window.
• Professional Mixing
  Complete your project with powerful mixing and automation tools that meet the demands of any size production.
• Broad Compatibility
  The open architecture of Logic Express 8 offers enormous creative freedom to musicians by supporting a wide range of professional hardware and software options.

Flip Video MinoHD Camcorder
Since I heard about these things, I’ve been interested in them. It’s a simple to use video recorder, that records in HD and has a nice little flip out USB plug to import your video into the computer. Simple and easy enough, and to top it off, it fits in your pocket.

Here are some of my favorite features:

• Holds 60 minutes of HD-quality video (1280 x 720 resolution at 30 frames per second; 16:9 widescreen) on 4 GB of built-in memory
• Weighs only 3.3 ounces; Super-slim, super-sleek design, fits into your pocket or purse
• Features one-touch recording and digital zoom

Apple iPod touch 32 GB (2nd Generation)
I have the original ipod photo from when it came out back in 2004. It’s been through a lot and is definitely on it’s last leg. I have a rubber band on the inside holding the hard drive in place. Need I say more?

So, what’s that one thing you’d like to have, but probably won’t be getting any time soon?

So far, I’ve had it one week, and it has been a world of difference. For a little perspective I was running an iMac that I got in January of 2002. It’s a 700 Mhz G4 with 768 MB of RAM. I spent so much time waiting…. ugh. Anyway, that problem is gone now.

This thing is amazing. Stats below.

Anyway, with a new computer comes transferring and installing new software.
I plan on sharing a list of software I have installed on the new computer and recommend you check out. I hope you enjoy it, and If you haven’t checked out the software, click the links and let me know what you think. We’ll start with web browsers.

Safari

Safari is my weapon of choice, and on OS X, it’s the default browser.

What makes Safari special?
Well, it’s fast! It looks great as well. It doesn’t take up a whole lot of real estate on your screen and isn’t a distracting eye sore and lets you surf the web without getting in the way. The way Safari handles bookmarks and the bookmarks bar is very elegant. Let’s say you have a group of websites you like to visit pretty consistently. With Safari, you can create a folder on your Bookmarks Bar, and add all those site there to make a quick drop down of your favorite sites to visit. You can also open all the sites in that one folder in their own individual tab if you’d like. Safari includes an embedded RSS reader, which would be a great way for a beginner to start learning and using RSS feeds.

Some other great features of Safari is that it renders photos the way they are supposed to look natively, allows you to resize text boxes if you need a little more space to type or see, has a web first ‘snap-back’ feature and Safari’s Find Features is the best of any browser out there. Check out http://www.apple.com/safari/ for more information.

Camino

Camino is an open source web browser developed with a focus on providing the best possible experience for Mac OS X users.

The Camino Project has worked to create a browser that is as functional and elegant as the computers it runs on (Macs, of course). The Camino web browser is powerful, secure, and ready to meet the needs of all users while remaining simple and elegant in its design.

Camino combines the awesome visual and behavioral experience that has been central to the Macintosh philosophy with the powerful web-browsing capabilities of the Gecko rendering engine.

What makes Camino special?

Camino includes native Ad Blocking that is ridiculously good as well as session saving. If a page has a search feature, such as youtube or Facebook, you have the option of adding that search to Camino’s search bar secion, re-ordering the search engines added or you can delete them. Camino also natively supports Mac OS X keychain, and maintains compatibility with Safari keychain entries so that it’s easy to switch back and forth and like Safari, Camino has a simple elegant look that let’s you browse the internet without getting in your way. Another favorite feature I love is that Camino supports has the ability to block Flash animation from sites. It’s a beautiful thing.

For more information on Camino, visit http://caminobrowser.org/

Opera

Opera started out as a research project in Norway’s largest telecom company, Telenor, in 1994, and branched out into an independent development company named Opera Software ASA in 1995. Opera Software develops the Opera Web browser, a high-quality, multi-platform product for a wide range of platforms, operating systems and embedded Internet products.

What makes Opera special?

Opera has a feature called Speed Dial that allows you to save up to 9 websites that you visit on a regular basis to individual square whenever you open up a new window or tab. You can then quickly click and the select the tab you’re interested in to visit that site quickly without having to type in the address. Opera also includes access to different search engines such as amazon.com, google, and others, and you can perform searches quickly by typing shortcuts in the address bar. Opera has great tab management as well, and if you hover over any tab you have open, you can get a quick preview of the content on that site.

Some other features that Opera provides are customizable skins, widget support, a quick and light mail client, mouse gestures, plug-in blocking and a feed preview (as well as a reader). To get more information on the Opera browser, visit http://www.opera.com/

Opera is fast and actually has a lot of innovative features that were stolen borrowed by Google for their Chrome browser. Google it.

Firefox

Firefox is an open source browser like Camino that is based on the Gecko rendering engine. Most folks have already heard of Firefox in some way shape or form.

What makes Firefox special?

Because of Firefox’s history it is a very customizable browser by having Add-on/plugin support. If there’s a particular feature or item you would like for Firefox to do, you can probably find it by searching their Add-Ons site. Some other features of Firefox include it’s own password manager (as opposed to using Mac OS X’s keychain), a smart location bar that quickly searches through your history of sites for what you are looking for, and 1-click bookmarking of sites. Firefox also allows you to add Searches from sites around the web, and includes a Session Restore feature should Firefox unexepectedly close.

Check out http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/ for more information.

These are some of the browsers I downloaded for use on my new computer. There are plenty other browsers out there. What’s your favorite?

The free music is listed below.

I left my review leaning towards bandsintown. The layout and interface was nice, plus they offered RSS feeds for band calendars. It was quick easy and simple to use, without needing to sign up for the site as well.

One thing that was up in the air was a particular feature that songkick offered called songkicker. Here’s how it works:

The Songkicker is a plug-in that works with your music player. After installation, open your music player so the Songkicker can scan your library.

We compare all your artists with our database of thousands of events.

After a few minutes, your user homepage will get a personalized concert calendar, updated whenever your bands go on tour. We list all ticket vendors, so you can buy the cheapest ticket.

Every time you play a track, it’s songkicked to us. Immediately, you can see whether the bands you’re listening to are on tour.

A great idea, but at the time, it was only Windows only, and I currently run the Mac OS. Well, songkick has since added a Mac version of their plug-in, and I’ve been using it for the last few weeks.

Well, they finally got it working on the Mac OS (actually, they did a while back, it’s just taken me a bit to actually finish and post this), and it’s very neat. The nice thing about the plug in is that you basically set it and forget it. Once you’ve installed it, it’s there working in the background and you don’t have to do anything to get it to work other than install it.

Once installed, when you visit the Songkick site, you will see a list of bands that it finds in your itunes library that are on tour, and coming to your area. With Songkick, you also have the ability to add a band or artist that you may not have in your itunes library (or if you don’t want to install the plug-in) or remove artists that you have no interest in their touring schedule (you know, like that You Want a Piece of Me by Britney Spears. What? Am I the only one who likes that song?)

I’m currently tracking 476 artists, of which 149 are on tour. Pretty neat to know. If you’re a concert goer, or hate that you always find out about shows after it happens, this site is definitely worth getting into.

For my original impression visit here:

Are You Kidding? Did I Miss Another Show? Solutions to Concert Tracking in Your Area

Songkick also provides widgets that you can post on your blog, and to the right in my sidebar, in purple you can see what they widgets look like.

Bands in Town has them as well, and I might use those for bands specifically coming to Tallahassee at a later date.

Check out songkick and let me know what you think about it.

I’ve recently got an email from songkick letting me know about a few shows that I am definitely interested in checking out in the coming months; Phantom Planet and the Trans-Siberian Orchestra might get a few of my dollars.

I love experimenting with things, so I may end up hating it and switching back or I may love it and keep it on forever, we’ll see.

The idea behind disqus(pronounced discuss) is to keep the conversation going, or as written on their site, webwide discussion.

The idea seems great. If all your comments are located in one place, then it makes it easier to keep up and track what’s going on in a site after you have left a comment. This actually happens to be one of the features I like best about blogs that are hosted on the wordpress.com. If you have a wordpress.com account, whenever you log into your account, you can click on My Comments from the dashboard and see what new comments have been posted since the last time you left yours.

The idea behind disqus to me seems to be to be able to do this with all sites across the web. It’s dirt simple to sign up/into disqus. If you’ve posted a comment before, more than likely a profile has already been created for you, all you have to do is claim it (I went ahead and imported all my previous comments into disqus btw) by clicking on your name. You can then add your website/blog if you have one (disqus works across multiple platforms such as wordpress, blogger, tumblr, MovableType and more).

According to their website, disqus will help accomplish the following:

• Provide Easy Connected Comments: Disqus is a powerful comment system that easily enhances the discussion on websites. In minutes, connect your community with those of over 25,000 other websites. Track conversations across the web, plus bridge discussions with your favorite services such as FriendFeed and Plaxo.
• Provide More Interactive Discussions: Threaded replies reveal the conversations in your comments: And now it’s easier to keep the discussion alive with email and mobile replying. Features such as ratings and video comments make comments interactive and expressive.
• Better Tools for Admins: An intuitive admin section makes it easy to moderate the discussions from one or multiple websites. Disqus is easy to customize, with widgets that lets your audience become your community. With search engine-friendlydata sync, Disqus is as safe to use as it is easy.

Also, Disqus incorporates gravatars, so if you have one, it will continue to show. In addition to that, you can leave video comments through seesmic‘s video comments (I had a plugin that allowed that previously, although nobody ever left one).

Having disqus means that a few of my plugins will no longer work. Subscribe to Comments (you won’t really need it if you do the disqus thing). Neither will UserAgent Spy, which was more for fun. This is the one that showed what browser and OS you were using when you left a comment.

So let the testing and experience begin. Check out disqus and leave a comment below telling me what you think about it.

Do you like it, hate it, don’t really care?

I’ll see how I like using it. It might stay, or it might go, but I’d love to know what you think.

disqus, blogging, commenting,

That’s Engrish Funny, from the the folks that brought you the fail blog, I can haz cheeseburger, Pundit Kitchen and others.

For all you twitter users out there that were dealing with Fail Whales and other issues a while back… this is for you.

My Comic I Created on Strip Generator - Click to Enlarge

I hope you enjoyed that.

Also, if you don’t know what twitter is, just visit this post or this post here to get a little acquainted (fixed, thanks Nat), and then head on over to twitter.com to sign up.

A gravatar is nothing more than a Globally Recognized Avatar. Avatars are small photo boxes that you see when people leave a comment on a blog. What a Gravatar does is allow you to have the same ‘buddy icon’ wherever you leave a comment on someone’s blog. Gravatars support is included in new versions of self-hosted WordPress blog, and for all (or almost all) wordpress.com blogs and can also be used by other platforms. As wordpress blogging becomes more popular, you might want to take a few minutes and give your comments a ‘face’ when responding to what someone has written on their blog, and a Gravatar is the easiest way to do this.

So, how do you get a Gravatar? Glad you asked, it’s really easy.

Signing up for a gravatar.com account is FREE, and all that’s required is your email address. Once you’ve signed up you can upload your avatar image and soon after you’ll start seeing it on gravatar enabled weblogs!

Make sure that you enroll with the email address that you use to leave comments on blogs so that it works. Also, you are free to register more than one email address and store more than one gravatar, so if you’d like, you can have one gravatar for one email address, and another gravatar for another email address.

A quick note regarding those who have wordpress.com blogs. You’re partially enrolled for a gravatar already. When you sign up for your gravatar, use the email address and password that you use for your wordpress.com blog to sign up/login. You’ll have the option to use the wordpress.com avatar or upload another. Enrolling in gravatar will now allow you to go to someone else’s (self-hosted) blog with gravatar support, and have your gravatar show when you leave a comment.

Head on over to gravatar.com and put a face to your words.

Hope you enjoyed that.

I, like many others bloggers check stats but not too obsessively. Mostly visitors and post popularity, but I don’t check it every day (although when I started I did cause it was kinda fun and cool).

I hope you find these interesting, and if not, my bad.

The Top 10 Browsers in Order

1. Firefox – 42.01%
2. Internet Explorer – 27.91%
3. Safari – 25.05%
4. Opera – 2.43%
5. Camino – 1.58%
6. Mozilla Compatible Agent – 0.50%
7. Mozilla – 0.38%
8. (not set) – 0.06%
9. Playstation Portable – 0.04%
10. Net Front and PS3 tied – 0.02%

The Top 10 Countries that have visited.

1. United States
2. United Kingdom
3. Canada
4. Australia
5. Germany
6. Netherlands
7. Philippines
8. South Korea
9. Norway
10. India

The Top 10 Most Popular Post determined by page views.

1. One of My Favorite Decapitator Pics
2. Leaving Town in Pink and Brown: Part I
3. You Too Can See U2 in 3D!
4. Bless the Lord (Son of Man)!!!
5. Shameless Self Promoting: Act III
6. Oh Man, it sucks to be this dude…
7. State of Music Now
8. There’s Just Something About This That Made Me Laugh…
9. Maroon 5 releases B-Sides Collection on itunes
10. What Show Would You Like to See?

The Top 9 Visiting Operating Systems.

1. Windows (Sadly, number 1. This group should upgrade their OS to a Mac sometime soon). 65.96%
2. Macintosh 32.42%
3. (not set)
4. Linux
5. iPhone
6. iPod
7. Playstation Portable
8. Nintendo Wii
9. Playstation 3

The Top 10 Screen Resolutions

1. 1024×768
2. 1280×800
3. 1280×1024
4. 1440×900
5. 1680×1050
6. 1152×864
7. 1920×1200
8. 800×600 (If this is you, it’s time to get a new resolution.)
9. 1280×768
10. 1280×768

Top 7 Connection Speeds

1. Cable
2. DSL
3. Unknown
4. T1
5. Dialup (Seriously? It’s time to upgrade… Really.)
6. OC3 (Lucky!)
7. ISDN

Top 10 Traffic Sources

1. Direct/None
2. Google/organic
3. stumbleupon.com/referral
4. google.com/referral
5. facebook.com/referral
6. blog.samuelfebres.com/referral
7. dashboard.wordpress.com/referral
8. theprodigaljon.blogspot.com/referral
9. twitter.com/referral
10. technorati.com/referral

Top 10 Keyword Searches

1. Samuel Febres
2. Vicki Paul Korea Blog
3. maroon 5 b-sides
4. bless the lord (son of man)
5. maroon 5
6. Sam Febres
7. maroon 5 b sides
8. kelly bell
9. shelby middleton
10. tye tribbett bless the lord (son of man)

Well, that’s it for my Top 10 lists for the first half of 2008. So, was that interesting for anyone else besides me, or did I bore the crap out of you?

The Improved:

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Come chat about Web 2.0, Social Media, or whatever else interests you. Be sure to bring your mobile gadgets.

RVSP at Upcoming.org

Many thanks to Clayton Bell for putting together the nicely designed advert above and letting me complain about what he should change on it. Follow him on twitter and Follow me on twitter.

If you don’t know what twitter is, check out these posts for more information.

UPDATE: Kidd Kraddick has provided a single that can be purchased online to help raise money for recording more songs for Freddy. They also announced this morning that Freddy would be opening for Maroon 5 at a concert event in San Antonio, Tx for their Mixfest concert with Maroon 5 headlining the event. He’s getting to play after Simple Plan, Colbie Caillet, and Ryan Cabrera. Nice break, huh?

They have a few invite available, but if they have run out, and you’re interested in signing up for the BrightKite beta, leave a comment and I have 5 invites available for you to use?

Check out Brightkite.com.