So, I left the Sofaris last friday. I’m gonna work for a new company now.
As a departure gift, my colleagues offered me an Aiwa MM-VX100 portable MP3 Player. This is a truly wonderful gift, which fulfills the geek in me. This very small and light box works with only one battery and contains up to 64 MB of mp3 files. Speaking of that, I’m looking for a software that can reliably and quickly convert an mp3 file to a lower bitrate. All my files are at least at the regular 128 Kbps rate, and I need to decrease their size to upload an interesting number of them on the player. From the hundred MP3 encoders I’ve downloaded so far, only MusicMatch can do that, but it’s dreadfully slow… If anyone of you know a reliable and powerful tool, your help will be highly appreciated.
The role-playing game was a real success (the entire set of picture, at a larger size, is coming later). It was a murder-party, actually. Everybody has done the best for the game to be entertaining, and I have to thank them all for being such great friends. Special hugs to Ninie for the chocolate cake (miam!), Franck for having played the most difficult character (the murderer !), Pierre for the numeric camera (way cool !) and Nita for the food and the preparation. And to all the players for having spread so much false rumors, and then having came and asked me about the « Beast » or the « Two Stairs, one up, one down » stuff that never existed in the first place. That’s the great part of being the organizator.
Amplified to Rock: Nanette’s weblog, which I’ve being reading for the last couple of months, is in its heyday. I hope it will last. I have a hard time trying to write her an e-mail to express my admiration (those things are always difficult to me, especially with people I don’t even know), so the least I can do is to encourage you to make a visit there, and read this post that I consider like one of the best pieces I’ve read lately. In my own way, I deeply connect with what she says.
Like a lot of people, I’ve bought and loved Radiohead’s Kid A. This is an exquisitely delicate work, from a band now in adulthood (the bends was harsh like teen-age, ok computer sophisticate and varying like you are in college years). Every site even remotely interested in music has pages and pages of words about it, so I won’t add my stone to this burden of information.
What I want to talk about is those people that almost made me have doubts about this album. First and obviously, Tanya shoot brillianty the LP down in flames (go and read the whole of her blog I hate Music *now*. I completely disagree with 85% of the posts, but it is so well-written, accurate and FUNNY that I just love it). But that was really foreseeable. Other disappointed folks include Jerwin, Catherine, and much more disturbingly the good-tasted Adam Kempa who all despise Kid A. I had to think a bit about that. Am I just blinded by hype and EMI marketing strategy ? Then Jerwin asked the definitive question : would Radiohead have never existed and this be the new Madonna, or even Britney Spears, album, would everybody still like it so much ?? My own personnal answer is yes. I would deeply love tracks like Everything in its right place or The national anthem, and lyrics like « the best you can is never enough » (Optimistic) anyway. I’m pretty sure about that. So my three days period of uncertainty is over now (24 is an age where you can start having your own opinions quietly and to know why you keep them).
PS: To the credit of Adam, he said he didn’t like the new album because of his personal tastes, and not that it’s bad.