July 2009
Monthly Archive
2009-07-11 (Sat) 19:36 by mrdeus
It’s been a while since we heard anything from HIGH and MIGHTY COLOR. They’ve now released their first single featuring their new vocalist HALCA. I suppose it’s a digital single, since I haven’t seen it in any stores.
Credit: song from KannaSesshou@jpopsuki
So what do you think about HALCA? She sounds somewhat similar to Maki. I don’t feel the same “presence” that Maki had, but perhaps it’s just this song. I would love to see a (video recording of a) live performance.
Their next album Swamp Man will be out in September.
2009-07-11 (Sat) 18:57 by mrdeus
As you probably can guess from my previous post, I like to watch MMA fights. Mostly I’ve watched the UFC and the Ultimate Fighter series. I used to watch Pride FC before the owners of the UFC bought them out.
They show quite a lot of MMA on Swedish TV. I was quite impressed when I saw that TV4 Sport aired UFC 99 only one week after it was aired in the U.S. And I just saw that they are airing UFC 100 live (!). […] there’s more! »
2009-07-11 (Sat) 18:56 by mrdeus
The one picture of Arianny in the gallery was feeling lonely, so I added some more 
Arianny Celeste is a UFC octagon girl. I think she’s pretty (despite the fake boobs), but it’s hard to find photo shoots of her where she doesn’t pout her lips (which I think looks cheap, she’s much prettier when she smiles). […] there’s more! »
2009-07-10 (Fri) 22:44 by mrdeus
I need to be in a certain mood to be able to watch concert DVDs. Since this mood hadn’t appeared for quite some time, I had two unwatched and unopened Ai Otsuka DVDs in my shelf. Luckily the mood was right one night and I put LOVE IS BORN 4th Anniversary 2007 into my DVD player and enjoyed it with some wine in the midsummer night.
Since it had been so long since I had last watched one of her concerts, I had almost forgotten how awesome and beautiful she is.
Here’s Strawberry Jam from that concert:
2009-07-07 (Tue) 09:28 by mrdeus
Here’s a performance of Honey. Unfortunately Yu-ri messes up and forgets the lyrics, but I think she handles it well.
I first watched a fansub of this performance where they’d dubbed over her voice, but that only made things worse, because it made it look like she (and by association, all the other girls too) was lip-synching. I remember cringing when I first watched that video. Forgetting the lyrics live is not as bad, in my opinion.
Credit: source video from Yoobin.skyrock.com
2009-07-06 (Mon) 22:05 by mrdeus
I have been resisting the iPod for a long time. Mainly because of how “locked in” it is with its iTunes requirement (I know there are alternative programs).
One morning I was on my way to work and was listening to music on my cellphone… or at least I was trying to. The headphone adapter came off one time and the phone thought I had pressed the hands-free button three times. I had had enough.
I went looking for a new MP3-player on my lunch break and, as it turns out, the selection is horrifyingly small where I live, so I decided to go against my principles and get an iPod.
I got the latest Nano. I was going to get a 16 GB version, but they didn’t have the colour I wanted at the Apple store, so I got an 8 GB version instead. I also went back later to buy a pack of “iPod socks” 
(the sock in the picture is supposed to be green - the lighting conditions weren’t exactly ideal when I took the photo)
So far, I can say that iTunes works great with podcasts, and sub-par at basically everything else. I activated the “sound check” feature which caused iTunes to raise the volume of a few random songs by 100% for no apparent reason. […] there’s more! »
2009-07-05 (Sun) 15:45 by mrdeus
I was going to post only a selection of these photos, or possibly split them into several posts, but what the heck, here are all of them at once
[…] there’s more! »
2009-07-04 (Sat) 11:48 by mrdeus
During my time off from the blog YUI released a music video for the song Sea, which is a B-side track on her latest single again.
This time I’m testing a web seeded torrent. It basically means that if there are no seeders, the parts of the file that you need will be downloaded from my website by your bittorrent client (uTorrent or Azureus, not BitTornado).
Update 2009-09-20: I fixed the video and re-uploaded it.
2009-07-03 (Fri) 00:09 by mrdeus
The PV for Ai Otsuka’s song “360°” is so weird and yet so visually appealing
Happy Fr-Ai-day!
2009-07-01 (Wed) 00:22 by mrdeus
I’ve been wanting to take a Korean course for a while, but there are no classes where I live any more. I’ve previously checked out Pimsleur’s Korean and Rosetta Stone. Both are OK, I guess, but I wanted to go to a class. Mostly because I want to practice speaking with other people, but also because the previously mentioned courses felt incomplete.
A few weeks ago I, as I do some times, searched for a Korean course and I bumped into a set of audio files from KoreanClass101. I listened to a couple of lessons and was pleasantly surprised. I found the lessons to be very good. The teachers are very nice to listen to. They speak a lot about the dialogue in the lesson and you get good information about what’s being said and why.
After listening to a couple of lessons I went to KoreanClass101.com to see what the site was like, and to my surprise I found that all audio lessons are free for as long as you want! You can download them to your MP3-player if you want. On top of this you can pay for a subscription of the extra features that exist in the Premium Learning Center. There are many nice features. The one I like the most is the quiz for each lesson. The PDFs are also very useful. They are making new lessons all the time, so it’s good to know that you can listen to them even if you’re not subscribing any more.
You can check out the lessons for free and also get a 7-day trial of the premium features if you head over to KoreanClass101.
One funny thing is that Seol looks almost exactly like how I imagined from hearing her voice in the lessons
PS. Right now (until the 7th of July) they have 25% off on new subscriptions. Look for the “summer gift” after you’ve signed in.
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