DubStep & Asian Fusion Techno

So I have been kind of playing around with music again... exploring a little bit deeper into different sections that I used to listen to. I am really interested in the way they have evolved since I was really into it back in high school. So I figured why not just use YouTube and post some of my findings here.

So first up is a type called DubStep. This is a slightly rougher sound then traditional dub music which tends to have a smooth mellow flow. DubStep tends to have the same reggae beat while put to almost a marching step sound that is almost chopy. Anyways check out the small clip below.

Benga & Coki - Night

Next up is a fusion of traditional asian inspired music with Techno (usaly trance due to the instraments used in ansian inspired music). I have always loved the way Traditional asian music has sounds because each note almost bleads into the next give a very solid yet airy sound. Throw a techno beat behind it (personaly I like some Drum and Base) and you have your self a song that flows like watter.

Caspa - Cockney Violin

Nerd Rage

So I've got fast internet... I mean pretty dang fast for internet these days in the US. These days everything I do runs off the net... my phone (Skype), my tv (Hulu, Netflix), all my shopping and of course all my news. If they could find some way to send me power over the internet I would probably have that too. All of this has made me spend tons of time maxamising the speed of my network. I've done tons of work starting with a new gigabit router and QoS. But after it leaves my network it is all up to comcast (my current ISP). Now on an average night both myself and my wife can be found playing WoW... this includes both of us hooked up to Ventrillo as well... and either streaming tv (Netflix) or music (Zune)... all of that and my connection almost never falters.

... The people I play games with on the other hand do not seem to be so lucky. It seams like almost every night people are having connection issues... small hiccups... or even straight up boots from networks. Most the time people just straight up blame their ISP... and in a time to where it seams that ISPs simply do not want to open the flood gates that is the internet I can understand why they would be the first to be blamed. I know that I get letters from comcast all the time complaining about my internet usage and they always seam to play the "irresponsible internet user" card but I mean really could my excessive use of the internet truly be causing the issue? I can't see how. Personally all this whine we have been getting from ISPs these days seem to stem from the fact that there primary line of work doesn't seem to be providing internet. I worked for AT&T for a while and in my opinion it is that they are trying to treat it too much like a phone service... lock it down and charge for usage... But in the days of freely sharing data and a plethora of services that can be provided on through the internet it seams to me that we should look at it less as a service and more of a community... why should your internet connection be something you own rather then something you share. I know that while my systems use alot of bandwidth there is alot that is leftover as well... why is it that I cant share that with someone else or that it could be something that the ISPs can buy back from us? It seems to me that the internet is one of those things better left to its own devices open up the flood gates and see where its balance point is.

... All and all we are seeing more and more connection issues with the internet these days and as we are starting to see more and more people using the internet in their everyday lives I wonder how those people are going to start reacting when all of these control issues come to a head and they start having issues with products they use in their every day life... all Im going to say is the Nerd Rage will be unparalleled.

Blizzcon and the curse of the jade failock

Ok... So Blizzcon... usually I wouldn't be writing about something like this before the event... however the purchasing of tix to the even has been such Epic Fail that it begs a little discussion...

Blizzcon tix were supposed to go up for sale yesterday at 8am PDT (start of biz for Blizz)... this happened followed by Blizzard's servers getting crited and then taken down... Now here was the plan... Blizzard launched a new store earlier this year... and instead of using something like ticket master like they had in the past they decided to cut out the middle man and use the store they built to directly distribute the tix... sounds like a great plan right?... Wrong! this must have been thought up by sales and marketing... notice how I said Blizzard's new store... ah didn't catch that did you?... So since the store has never seen this much traffic you would have thought someone on the stores design team would have said "Hey, you know we never ran any kind of simulation of 5000 users trying to sign up and buy an item before, we should probably do that"... Wrong again!... nope yesterday rolled out the tix to the blizzard store over 5000 users showed up to buy tix and the server just could not handle that... ok so lets give bliz a little brake... in the past blizzcon tix only had a small demand... but this year you don't just have the World of Warcraft players interested... there was the announcement of both Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3... you took that into consideration right marketing department... right?... Anyways... no bother the store couldn't handle that load and it's relatively new we will take this as a learning experience... good thing I set this all up at ticket master just in case this happened so we can just redirect the users over there.... what? we didn't set up a backup plan? what our coders are so arrogant that they said they didn't need a backup plan? OMG cue the Failoc (the opps murlock that bliz uses for an error page)...

Ok so at this point you have a ton of users unable to buy your product due to improper planing, lack of testing. and poor foresight... time to take this to the forums to calm down the masses... now at this point you have users who have taken a day off work to secure tix... users who have already booked flights and hotels... and users who have already been waiting for 2hrs to hear from you because they can not buy tix... so what is your next course of action... post to the forums and reschedule the launch of the tix so that your users can go off and enjoy their day without having to refresh you failock page making the problems worse while you take the time to fix the problem right?... Wrong! you go out there and give little acutal information that gives no time this will be fixed so that your users stay glued to their computers getting more and more angry all while intermittently putting the site up just to let it crash again... 11hrs latter the same story still no better information... 24hrs latter same story no better information... but now you are responding with hostility to an increasingly angering crowd... at this point you are getting reports of some tix being sold and some people who did not receive conformation have 500-10,000 dollars in holds being put against their bank accounts for your faulty store... some have the money to cover the holds other have lost all access to their bank account.... now what do you do? what do you do at this point?

Well I don't know what to tell you... best not let it get to this point... I guess better luck next time Blizz... you have pissed off your users while not giving them any kind of time line or comfort... you have become increasingly hostile in your post and you have charged massive amounts of money to some peoples accounts without any reprieve or apology... It seams to me if you would have just come out and said "Oh man guys we didn't expect such a big turn out, you guys are so excited that our system couldn't handle it... we are going to need some time to fix this so we are going to relaunch the site at 8am PDT on Friday so you all can get your tix then and our systems should be smooth as butter by then" and then delivered on the promise this whole thing could be avoided... but at this point it just looks bad on you.

Eh,
good luck to those who are still dealing with it.

OMG LOLCATS FTW

These are great