Welcome to tastypopsicle.com

I've decided to open up the weblog archive. At one point is was closed off except to registered members due to an incident, However, that company has since closed its doors so they can just eat it. Use the search to find something that youmight be looking for. Maybe you'll find it.

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On Monday I turned 28 (yea for me!) which as it turned out happened to be the 28th of February. Ergo, it was my Golden Birthday. I had a FABULOUS birthday weekend. It started Saturday night at Vision with Kristen, Cooper, Jin and Jen (and of course Amy). Together with Jen getting us all in for free and Jin feeding me cheap drinks all night I can say without a doubt that I had a great time and I was inebriated. Thanks to Amy for getting us home. :) Monday was my big birthday surprise. Amy had me believe that she and I were going out to dinner just the two of us. However, when we got to P.F. Chang's I quickly realized that a lot of my friends and family were there for a big surprise dinner. I had no clue that Amy had planned this. I was soooo excited and happy. Thank you, Amy for such a great weekend. But as promised, the presents are for you. If you like music, and who doesn't, then there's nothing better than getting music on the cheap (read: free). I don't care what you think about "Illegally Downloading Music" and how it is "Hurting the Music Industry" - cry about it some place else. My body flows with pirate blood. Arrrrgggghhhh!! Through my traversing along the internets I came across this gem of an article - "How To Find MP3's with Google" Yes, people, it's VERY easy to find pages and pages of mp3s all for the plundering if you use the secret password. I'll explain: Lets say you want to see if there is some music by an artist that you like. For example - DJ Tiesto. If you go to Google and type in "mp3 DJ Tiesto" you will be sadly disappointed. You're not going to find the booty that way. But you can tell google to look for file types and by using limitors you can tell google to not return web pages - just files. Don't worry, it's not that confusing. If you wanted to find some music by Tiesto all you have to do is type this in: intitle:index.of + mp3 + "tiesto" -html -htm -php -asp -txt -pls Yea, pretty sick isn't it? Just replace the word "tiesto" with your artist and pilfer til your heart's content. Maybe you want to find a certain song. Just replace "tiesto" with the song name. Yea, you know you like it :P Some notes: some of the links you get from Google won't work. Deal with it - move to the next. When you find a good link go the page and hold down your mouse on a link and choose "Save link as..." (might be something different if you use a PC/IE - I use Firefox because it's a damn better browser). If you just want to listen to the song just click on the name it should play right in your browser. The Piece de Resistance: Lets say you click on a link from the Google results and you quickly realise you've hit a jackpot. Lots of files - lots of stuff that you like. Clicking and saving each file would take forever - so what can you do? On my Mac I use SiteSucker because it's free and it works. If you're on a PC there are plenty of similar programs (try HTTRack) SiteSucker is a website copier - meaning that you type in an address and it will pull all of the pages and files that finds linked from that page. So, while you aren't copying a website you can use the program to download the files for you. Yea, it's THAT easy. But seriously: this is hardcore. You might not find everything but you can find a lot of good, new music as well. The beauty is that there is no spyware/malware. You don't share the files that you get so you've got that going for you. And hey, I'm not responsible for you or your actions. So be cool, stay in school and don't smoke crack. Oh, and if you feel guilty for not getting me anything for my birthday (and you should you cheap bastard) I TOTALLY want this flask - shaped like a frickin' cell phone. Think of all the places you could sneak that thing into. Baseball games, a club, work, church...

This past weekend Amy was up in Michigan visiting Grandma while I stayed home. To amuse myself I decided to play around with Garage Band. Interestingly enough, time just flies by when you're making "music". Anyway, by the end of the weekend (this morning at 8:30am) I had a four and a half minute song put together. So without further adiou I'd like to introduce to you - "Jigga Man"

Some more info while you listen: I used the Apple loops in Garage Band to compose the song. There's about 9 tracks total that you hear in some parts. After I got the music sounding the way I wanted it to I exported it to iTunes as an uncompressed audio file (.aif) From there I opened it up in the open source audio editor, Audacity. I popped in my Jay-Z Construction Set and dropped in the acapella version of "Encore". This let me grab the vocal sections that you hear in the beginning and middle. After that I exported the whole thing as compressed audio (.mp3) and imported this new version into iTunes so that I could modify the ID3 tags. It was fun to make - just something new to learn. I'd like to know what you think about it, though. Drop a comment if you've got some time.

Happy 49th Birthday, Mom!

Please note: this image has been digitally altered to protect the innocent. Viewer discretion is advised. Oh, and this picture is like 2 years old - what can you do?

I really can't wait to try out this technique. Kristy (aka girlx512) posted a t-shirt screen printing on the LiveJournal community group, craftgrrl. girlx512 has posted step-by-step instructions that should you follow what she's written, you should end up with a 100% unique, hand made t-shirt. Now, I just need to learn what tulle is and I'll be all set. Hobby Lobby - here I come!