Pop music isn’t bad, it is just ruled by a bunch of twats. Throw a little electricity in there and all will be fine. Came across this video on Motionographer saw that Miho Hatori was involved, and I was sold. I really liked the video so I did a little research of my own and was incredibly pleased with what I found.

Goes to show what is possible with a fairly basic and really crazy idea, some fine tuned editing skills, and some nice looking animation. Something about this I just really like, I have been a big fan of Miho Hatori for a long time, something about this type of music combined with her voice is just magical.

He has been responsible for many great things in my lifetime, and I am just now learning about it, what a chump I am. If you have the internet chops, make sure to check out the Last Century Modern album. And let me know if you discover anything else. Not a lot out there from the normal music vendors, so I may try to do a little digging for more.

Enjoy! Looks like there may be a new album in Feb. according to my research.

You may have to do a little searching to listen to more.
[WIKIPEDIA]
[MOTIONOGRAPHER]

I saw a blip of this many many years ago on TV, still not complete, but still the best MC out there:

ダウンロード

You already know who The Roots are, if you don’t, you might want to start listening to some better music. Luckily they have made it very easy for you with Home Grown!

I highly recommend checking out any of their albums in full. Do You Want More?!!!??!, Things Fall Apart, Phrenology, and The Tipping Point are my favorites, but The Roots are kind of special in that they have an endless list of incredible tracks.

[The Roots - WIKIpedia]
[iTunes]

I can’t believe I missed this:

This is one of the most useful things I have found when it comes to quickly learning the meaning of characters and words.

Moji is a Firefox Add-On that gives you a sidebar that allows you to easily highlight an individual character or word, then look it up right in your browser. It gives you all the information you should need including index pages to any other book or flashcards you may already be using.

Highly recommended. I will try to post some other things I have come across in the future, I have a pretty extensive list of bookmarks and apps that are very useful.

[MOJI]

Google makes many cool things, some of the best are all of there different web applications. The coolest thing about them now is that they are nearly all very accessible offline as well. Meaning you can still read your email without an internet connection, check your RSS feeds, as well as create documents and many other things. This is possible because of Gears, and its implementation is excellent, if you are on the go without a conneciton and create an email, it will be sent as soon as you have a connection again, just like an email App like Mail, or Outlook, or whatever, but with the nice features that Gmail offers. And the same goes for all of their other web apps as well.

So the main problem here is that having all of these apps just opened up in different tabs in Safari or Firefox is pretty annoying and a little difficult to manage, as well as really eating up your computers resources. A great solution to this is to make Stand-Alone WebApps, or SiteSpecificBrowsers (SSB’s) to manage each specific App. That way everything is more logical, to look at your email you open the email app, RSS feeds open up Google Reader, Docs, etc.

So how do you make these SSB’s? The best method I have found is by using an App called Fluid. You basically just type in the url you would like to create an App for and let it work its magic. It is very easy to do and customize on your own, so you can definitely do this on your own. But if you like you are more than welcome to just use the Apps I have already created for Gmail, Google Reader, and Google Docs, all with nice looking icons:

Google Stand-Alone Apps

You will have to adjust your own preferences and things, just the same way you would with an other Application. Also, I would make sure to just use the App for what it is intended for, and let it open up other links in your default web browser, it just makes a lot more sense and is much less confusing that way.

Also something cool to mention, when you are reading things in Google Reader, make sure to Star and Share items (S & Shift+S Respectively) and then you can use your Shared Feed to let others see what you are finding interesting. You can check out my Shared Items on the right column of this site. This is great because you can easily find great new sites this way and discover content you may have never come across. It is basically each persons filter of the web.

Definitely let me know if any of you setup a Shared Feed, as I know there are a few that are already using Google Reader. Feel free to post your feed link in the comments.

I am absolutely terrible at keeping track of my spending, I really didn’t have a simple and quick method.

Now, however, I have discovered an incredibly user friendly and efficient way of doing just that, all using Google Docs, so it will always be available from anywhere with Internet access. Google makes it EVEN cooler with access to all these things Offline as well meaning as long as the info has been recently synced up, you can check your balance spreadsheet, email, etc. without an internet connection, using Google Gears.

Here is my new gameplan:

I followed a Doc written up by Nick Espinosa, that allows be to access the Form to Add a Transaction or Deposit in many different ways, the main one being right from my email Account, other include a simple bookmark, etc. You could even do this with an Internet capable phone (iPhone, I wouldn’t recommend the others). So basically whenever you spend some $, you simply open up the form, fill out the info, press Add and the data will be sent to your Google Docs Spending Report spreadsheet, which you can also access easily from Gmail, or just a simple Bookmark, to checkout your total Balance, or really do what ever you want with it.

You could even make Pie charts of the different categories of your spending, or a line graph to watch how the amount of money you have is falling drastically. . .

Anyway, it is fantastic, I highly recommend trying it out. And for those not using Gmail already, come on already, it is not that tough to switch your email address, and it is definitely worth it.

Also I can email anyone the link the the Google Docs template from my own account so they can use it as reference as well. The part that will take the longest is creating your own custom form that you will use to add data to your spreadsheet. So worth the 10 minutes it took.

[LIFEHACKER)