Dec
31
Best of ’08

I’m not usually one to give into making an obligatory end-of-year “best of” list, but I thought I’d give it a go for once.

Best Album: MGMT Oracular Spectacular

The New York duo MGMT exploded in 2008 with their debut on Columbia/Sony Records. They have a great vibe and can smoothly swing between indie rock and synth pop. I gotta admit that “Time to Pretend” has been played out after appearing in heavy rotation lists and so many TV shows and movies. But ya know what, I still love that track. “Kids” is also a manic bomb that hasn’t lost a bit of luster for me. Between the ambiguous yet catchy lyrics, pulsing synth bass, and thumping beat, this track has continually been in my playlists. “Electric Feel” is down right chillin, funky goodness. Other tracks like “The Youth”, “The Handshake”, and “Weekend Wars” recall a retro psychedelic feel without sounding recycled. Whether MGMT can follow Oracular with a second quality record remains to be seen, but they have certainly left their mark.

Best Concert (that I saw): The Faint @ Southgate House

For me this was a really weak year for attending shows. So many acts just don’t make it here, and for a change I didn’t chase any down. I missed Lolla (again) and all the reunion dinosaurs on tour this year. Jonathan Coulton was certainly a blast earlier in the year, but the recent show The Faint put on was just crazy.

Best Movie: The Dark Knight

I neither intend to be on the fan wagon nor pick the most obvious choice, but quite simply I paid to see this twice within a couple weeks of its release, and that NEVER happens. It’s not a perfect flick, but it was a great, gritty turning point for comic-based movies. As everyone knows Heath Ledger put in a heck of a performance that was both funny and fearful, but there were other quality moments. Hearing Michael Caine say how “some men just want to watch the world burn” was classic. And let’s not forget the visual effect masterpiece in the tumbler turned bat-pod sequence.

Best Video Game: Rock Band 1&2

A real tough call here, but I gotta give the nod to a game I don’t even own. No other game quite redefined Friday and Saturday nights throughout the year like this one. Rock Band forever changed the face of rhythm games as it brought more people into the jam session. It also reminded me that playing drums (even silly plastic ones) is a hullava good time. From fearing “Run to the Hills” and closing with “Still Alive” to rocking the endless setlist – 1 3/4 times – the Dubya Oh had a blast in 08.

Posted Wednesday, December 31st, 2008 2:54 AMNo Comments

Filed under Movies, Music

Dec
24
Twas the night before Christmas…

Happy Holidays! Hope you have loads of fun with friends and family.

Posted Wednesday, December 24th, 2008 5:39 PM1 Comment

Filed under General News

Dec
19
The Geeks Were Rocked

D and I took a trip down to the Southgate House to catch The Faint Wednesday night. I find it’s getting harder and harder to pull me out of my comfy suburb to see a show in a smokey club – especially in the middle of the week – but every now and then one comes along that can’t be missed. This was one of those nights.

My friend’s band Eat Sugar opened and put on a solid set. People were still filtering in when they went on, so it wasn’t as packed for them as they might’ve hoped, but everyone seemed to be having a good time. Their music was a great fit with The Faint, so hopefully they picked up a few new fans and sold some discs.

The next act, The Show is the Rainbow, was a hot mess and doesn’t merit any space here. Let me just say Rainbow is a single dude onstage flailing away to prerecorded laptop tracks in some terrible, unmusical, unfunny version of Jack Black. I was cringing with his first song and cowering by the sweaty, shirtless finale.

The Faint came on about 11 and played for an hour (with a three song encore) and they completed shook the joint. For the unfamiliar, they are an electro-punk-pop band from Omaha who really started taking off around 2000. As expected they played a lot of tracks from their latest album, Fasciination, but also threw in their older, harder rocking favs as well. They brought all the AV equipment they might normally use in a much larger venue – so much that they actually had their own generator running in the ally to help power it all. On stage there was barely enough room to move. In addition to the drums, four keyboards, and lots of monitors I counted at least 6 LED light panels, 4 flood strobes, 2 spot strobes, 6 programmed scanner spots, and 2 huge video projectors. The lighting and video (mostly black and white processed collages) was intense and meshed with their sound perfectly. The audio was very good and balanced considering it can be a hard room to mix for. The bass was heavy and throbbing and the synths growled and screamed nicely. And to top it off, singer, Todd Fink, performed in a very Dr. Horrible-esque outfit. Mad scientists or not, they were legen…dary.

Posted Friday, December 19th, 2008 5:29 PMNo Comments

Filed under Music

Dec
12
Bball Double Header

D and I shot over to Indy last Saturday to watch a doubleheader of Men’s Basketball – the first basketball games to ever be played in Lucas Oil Stadium. Lucas Oil will be the site of the Midwest Regional NCAA finals later this season and the site of the Final Four in 2010, so it was kind of cool to get a sneak peak at what they may be like.

The first game was 5th ranked Gonzaga versus Indiana. IU, working with a new coach and nearly entirely new roster, kept it close in the first half. IU stayed within 10 most of the second half, but as soon as they’d crack into the single digit deficit, Gonzaga pulled out a three point play. IU sealed their fate with 24 turnovers and the Zags went on to win by 16 in front of the large Hoosier crowd.

The second game was 7th ranked Notre Dame taking on Ohio State. The Irish have a powerhouse on the team in the 6-8 freshman Luke Harangody. As expected, Luke had a strong game, but he also made their team fairly one dimensional. On the other side on the court, the Buckeyes’ Evan Turner surpassed Harangody’s 25 points with 28 of his own (a career high). Turner’s double-double made up for OSU’s horrible three point shooting (3-16) and the Bucks upset ND by five points.

After the game we headed over to Dave and Christian’s for a tree trimming party in which every guest brings the hosts a Christmas ornament, and in return, the hosts give the guests many drinks. In typical, inappropriate fashion, D and I gave them a full size zombie head (from Halloween a couple years ago) with a metal hook attached on top. It’s definitely an attention grabber on the tree and actually not the most inappropriate ornament they’ve gotten.

Posted Friday, December 12th, 2008 1:44 AM1 Comment

Filed under Sports

Dec
04
Fruits of Our Labor

I’m pleased to announce that the Powerloader has won the Instructables.com DIY Halloween Contest! We were awarded the Craft Grand Prize and the Core77 Editors’ Choice Award (Core77 is a design website/zine). There were a bunch of prizes and different categories, and I’m sure the Instructables editors wanted to spread the wealth a bit, so we’re not mentioned under the costume category which is sort of humorous.

In all there were 328 contest entries including some projects that were really ingenious and complicated. After entering and losing three other online contests it’s sweet to have nabbed some of the top honors in this one (this site, after all, is near and dear to the DIY geek community and was the one I was really gunning for). The swag we should be receiving is quite generous – over $900 worth if you can believe that! While the hourly rate spent on the costume doesn’t even match up to minimum wage, the prizes easily pay for the materials of the costume several times over.

I really encourage those of you who routinely blow us away with your Halloween creativity to document your efforts next year…it very well may pay off!

Posted Thursday, December 4th, 2008 4:22 PM1 Comment

Filed under Halloween

Dec
03
Youtube: now serving a little less suck

Like any other monkey with a digital camera, I’m a fan of occasionally dumping videos online. Youtube has always been the de facto place to put your vids online quickly and for the widest distribution. But being popular was also the cause of their biggest shortcoming: crappy quality. With millions of videos and viewers they simply don’t have the capacity to stream top quality vids to everyone. So, they take your nice, shiny, possibly even hi-def, videos and squash them down to blocky, tin can sounding shadows of themselves. Even when they added a “watch in high quality” option I was “highly” underwhelmed.

Early this year I evaluated a dozen other user submitted video sites looking for a higher quality option. I even considered just hosting my own videos. I settled on Vimeo whose default high quality bitrate and 16:9 player were much better than what Youtube could offer. I still used Youtube for most uploads, but if there was a video that I really didn’t want to compromise too far, I’d stick it on Vimeo.

Well, it’s time for another review because Youtube is trying to right themselves with a new, larger 16:9 player and new, higher quality encoding. As a test I took a hi-def (720p) video I recently put together. The original vid is an H.264 encoded MPEG4 and is about 69MB and 2 minutes and 17 seconds long, which puts the original bitrate at 4110 Kbps.

This video looks dramatically different with the options available on Youtube. It’s as noticeable as anywhere looking at samples of text in the video. Unfortunately the default that Youtube viewers will see is the worst. The “normal quality” view in Youtube is highly compressed (over 10:1), down to a 326 Kbps bitrate (making the resulting file only 5.3MB). As part of the compression, the original 1280×720 size has been reduced down to 320×180. Furthermore, the audio has been smashed into mono at 22kHz. Clicking on the “high quality” improves things dramatically. Now the bitrate is 1034 Kbps (total file is 16.8MB) and although the audio is still mono it’s held at a respectable 44KHz.

Then there’s a little known way to force Youtube to reluctantly hand over a truly decent HD file. Add the special parameter “&fmt;=22” to the end of the URL and now we finally have something that can compete with Vimeo. In this case, Youtube streams back a very similar video as I gave it. The video is a H.264 encoded MPEG4 with the original HD dimensions, but compressed down to 2229 Kbps (total file = 36.3MB). The audio is respected too, encoded as stereo AAC at 44kHz. The only caveat is that the file may not stream as smoothly to all viewers.

For comparison the Vimeo video is the same physical size, but encoded with the On2 VP6 codec down to a 1748 Kbps stream. The audio is a stereo mp3 track at 44kHz. One interesting difference is in the frame rate. The hidden-HD option on Youtube kept my video at the original TV standard 29.7 fps, while Vimeo automatically renders videos at the film standard 24 fps.

Posted Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008 11:27 AMNo Comments

Filed under General News