Track of the Week: We Swarm by The Glitch Mob
This week's track is We Swarm by The Glitch Mob, off of Drink The Sea. Over the last few years I've heard a lot of Glitch Mob tracks in passing and in friends cars, or at Burning Man, but it wasn't until I went and saw them at a show about a month ago that I took a serious listen to their music. This track, We Swarm, is a killer glitch/electronica song. Opening with strained synths and breaking in to a bounce after that, the real hook for me comes in at about 2:15 where a syncopated back beat comes that's joined with an explosive percussive sound at 3:05. Listen to it in your car with the volume up and the windows down and you won't regret it.
Track of the Week: Freak You Out by Blip Blip Bleep
This week's track is Freak You Out, by Blip Blip Beep off of Like Track Stars. I saw BBB perform at Mercury Lounge in NYC a few weeks back with a friend as the second band in a three act lineup. Super energetic and straight up electropop their sound is super fun and poppy, with a dash of rock. This song was (I think) their closer in their set which included an amazing electrodub cover of Michael Jackson's Beat It. Like Track Stars is definitely worth checking out, it's better than their prior EPs, and this track is the most fun out of all of them.
Seven Days with Windows Phone 7
Last Friday I decided to put the Blackberry down for a week and use a new phone for seven days. If you know me, you'll know I'm an avid Blackberry user. I pretty much don't need a laptop, on my Blackberry I'm nearly as efficient as I am when I'm sitting at my desk at my computer. For this test, I chose a Samsung Focus, a Windows Phone 7 device with the stock operating system (no Mango) and used it for a week. Here are some of my observations:
Pros:
- The screen is beautiful. Inky blacks, vibrant colors, everything looks beautiful on the device.
- The UI. For the iOS diehards out there, you might find Windows Phone's animations a bit over the top but I'm absolutely in love with them. I found myself often swiping the UIs to just play with the animations.
- The phone feels alive with data. It does a fantastic job integrating my Facebook, Google and Windows Live accounts and giving me a holistic view of my friends and contacts.
- Live tiles. I wish there was more of this, but the live tiles as the app icons is sexy. They pulse with information that's hiding under them. Some of them aren't really that useful or interesting like the Zune app or the Photos app (I don't need to see Lady Gaga's for two straight days -- show me my album art).
- The browser. Before you jump down my throat, remember I'm coming from a Blackberry. Even though it's IE7, the browser to me is a huge step forward from what I'm used to.
- The camera. Beautiful photos and great videos. Love taking photos with this phone.
- Windows 7 Phone Connector for Mac. I was surprised to see how much care and attention went in to making the phone work on the Mac. Music syncs seamlessly over from iTunes (altho there's no audiobook suport and the Zune app keeps forgetting my location within a podcast).
Cons
- The keyboard. Oy, I miss a real keyboard. Of course compared to a Blackberry keyboard, the on-screen keyboard holds no salt. On the other hand, I also own an iPad and I have an iPhone, and I feel that I'm 10x more accurate typing on iOS devices and it's 100x better at making suggestions than Windows Phone. This, more than anything, holds me back from making it a full time phone. I constantly found myself having to backspace because I accidentally started a new line, pushed space by accident, or something else equally obnoxious. I never had these issues typing on an iOS device.
- Windows Live, Twitter, Linkedin. You can't turn off the Windows Live contacts. Once you hook your device up to your Windows Live account, you can only turn off email sync from Hotmail but you can't disable Contacts sync. Come on guys. My Hotmail address book is so dated and unused so showing me all those contacts is silly. Let me turn it off. No Linkedin app, which is a minor annoyance, but the Twitter app is a trainwreck. It's slow, buggy and doesn't integrate at all with the phone well.
- Apps. The Marketplace has a dearth of content, and half of it seems like it's made by Microsoft. In addition, navigating the Marketplace is impossible and it seems totally chaotic and disorganized.
There were other minor annoyances, such as there being no unified Inbox (e.g. my Sencha email and my personal Gmail have their own icons), but that's more on the minor side. My understanding is a lot of this is fixed up and better in Mango, so I'm looking forward to that.
Overall, I think if I were to buy a phone, it'd be a two horse game between Windows Phone (assuming Mango is all that) and iOS. I haven't spent a ton of time with Android, but based on what I've seen and having now used Windows Phone, I think the experience of Windows Phone is far better than Android's.
Track of the Week: Escape 700 by The Chemical Brothers
This week's track is Escape 700 by The Chemical Brothers, off of the Hanna soundtrack. I haven't heard much from The Chemical Brothers in a while and haven't seen this movie, but the album randomly crossed the desks of Track of the Week. Escape 700 is a pulsing, yet brooding electronica track, perhaps best described as electronica/house meets Middle Eastern beats. There's probably a whole label out there that specializes in this genre of music. Of all the tracks on the Hanna soundtrack, this is maybe the one that's most "song"-like, as many of the others are ambient mood setting types of sound. It's a great track in an otherwise good album.
Track of the Week: I Want the World to Stop by Belle and Sebastian
This week's track is I Want the World to Stop by Belle and Sebastian off of Belle and Sebastian Write About Love. I've had this song in my library for a while and have kept putting off sending it out, mostly because it feel out of my Recently Added list. I've never been a huge Belle and Sebastian fan and Write About Love their first album I own. When I first heard of them in the early 2000s, folks might have described them as folk music but as I listen to them now after the indie revolution (is that a thing?) I would probably call them indie pop. The sound of this specific track harks back to The 5th Dimension's Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In but at a slower BPM with a somewhat mid-late-60s sound.
Track of the Week: I Put a Spell on You
This week's track is I Put a Spell on You by Nina Simone, mixed by MiM0SA. There's so much to say, yet so little. I think the best way to approach this song is historically. Originally recording by Screamin' Jay Hawkin in 1956, then covered by various people over the years in various styles. From Nina Simone in 1965, to CCR in 1968, to the first dance versions by Sonique in 2000. This week's track is a 2010 remix of Nina Simone's take, mixing Simone's classic vocals and haunting intro with banging dubstep breaks. It's worth taking a run through all the covers of the song, they're all so different and specific.
Track of the Week: The Bay by Metronomy
This week's track is The Bay by Metronomy off of English Rivera. Surprisingly, this is Metronomy's first appearance on TOTW. I'd originally come across them with a free iTunes download of Heartbreak from their Nights Out EP. Half lo-fi, half electronica, they have a very unique and original sound that is hugely different from album to album. The Bay may not where you want to be right now as it's the middle of May and it's raining, but hopefully this little track will help get you through the day. As seems to be the tradition on track of the week, The Bay is the most upbeat and high tempo track from the album. I'm not entirely sure what the song is about, but it's totally possible it's about the San Francisco Bay Area since the lyrics are quite clear what it's not.
Presentation from Source Dev Con
I've uploaded my presentation from Sourc{ Dev Con last week, where I previewed Sencha.io, our new set of cloud services. They're also available on SlideShare if you want to browse them directly online.
Last Day in Berlin
I had my ICE train to make at 330pm from Berlin to Frankfurt so yesterday was an abbreviated day in Berlin. I started the morning by heading to Museumsinsel (Museum Island) in the middle of Berlin and went through the Pergamon Museum. The entire Museumsinsel complex seemed to be under a bit of renovation and once I got in to the Pergamon there were a few hundred school children jostling to get tickets and general madness all around.
Once I managed to get my tickets and walk through the entrance, what an incredible museum the Pergamon is. Outside the Met, the British Museum and the Istanbul Archaeology Museum, it's probably the most impressive collection of antiquities and the ancient world I've ever seen. It's breathtaking. What's most unique about it is the huge restored excavations, such as the Ishtar Gate from Babylon (you know, from the Bible), the Pergamon Alter, the Market Gate of Miletus, the Aleppo room and the Mshatta Facade. Fully reconstructed out of excavations from the late 1800s and early 1900s, it's awe inspring to stand around and walk through all of these major parts of the ancient world. To make it even better, the audio guide (which is surprisingly included with the admission cost) is fantastic. The guided audio tour takes you through all of the most important areas of the museum and is very well done.
After the Pergamon I walked around the Museumsinsel are some more and then ended up on Unter den Linden and made my way by foot and the 100 bus down to Gendarmenmarkt, which is a very pretty square. The day had gotten warm so I had lunch there in an outside cafe before heading out to the hotel and back to Berlin's main train station.
Overall impressions of Berlin: super modern, super clean, amazing public transportation (who said you can't do major infrastructure works in big cities -- take that San Francisco), and amazingly well spoken English. I really enjoyed the city and it turned out to be quite different than I had originally had mentally envisioned Berlin to me.
I'm now in Frankfurt and my flight for split in is a few hours. I'm going to take a quick stroll and breakfast in Romer square before I head over to the airport.
Around Berlin: Checkpoint Charlie, Berlin Wall, Topography of Terror, and more
Today was my first and only full day in Berlin. I leave tomorrow afternoon back to Frankfurt. My dad had sent a great list of the must see items from when he was here with the fam, so I took to getting as much done as possible on the list. I started the morning walking Friedrichstraße towards Checkpoint Charlie, taking a few photos of the site as well as spending a lot of time reading all the signs along the way. I spoke to the 'guard' who was taking photos with tourists there and asked him if he was American. He said yes, and for a moment I thought he was but actually I think he's just a really well accented German. Strange encounter.
I went from Checkpoint Charlie to the Berlin Wall Museum and read through all the escapes, deaths and other sad stories that the Wall become a symbol of. The museum is a bit dated, but the amount of material they present is staggering. I walked down from there to Wilhelmstrasse / Niederkirchnerstraße to see additional remains of the Berlin Wall, plus to see the museum at the Topography of Terror. While walking there I stumbed in to the Stasi museum along one of the side streets. More modern in its history that much of the rest of the day it was very well presented and depicted the haunting the Stasi performed on the GDRs own citizens.
I made my way to the Topography of Terror. The museum is stunning and riveting, walking you through 50 years of the Nazi's and then of the separation of Germany. The museum is just incredible. It takes a long time to get through but it's well worth the time. Right next to the exhibit is the last (?) remaining Nazi building, the old Luftwaffe headquarters that is now occupied by the German finance ministry. It's an imposing old building.
Looking for a change of pace, I went over to Kurfürstendamm and walked around for a while until I landed in KaDeWe and parked myself in the foodhalls for a while. From there I went across town to Alexanderplatz (which I think is in the Jason Borne movies) and took a tram to Hackescher Markt. Very cool part of town with little shops, squares, cafes and bars. The area right next to the train station is very well developed with people milling about.
Tomorrow I head back to Frankfurt via ICE at about 330, so I think I'm going to see the Museuminsel and hopefully Gendarmenmarkt time permitting. If the weather is good, I may even attempt to rent a bicycle (it rained on and off most of today). Impressions of Berlin thus far: incredibly clean city, amazingly well spoken English, but it all feels very new and very modern. Not terribly 'quaint' but I guess that's what's to be expected post-war. Also very bicycle friendly and the S-U Bahn system is unbelievably good.