Music – My alternative preferences

Recently I have been listening to a lot of new bands that I had never heard of before, some that have been recommended to me by my friends and people I work with.

My music interest varies a lot, I could like one song by an artist and completely dislike all of their other songs, for example, I like the song Nothing else matters by Metallica, however I do not like any of their other songs!

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Recently I was shown a new artist that I had never heard of, the group are called Florence + the machine, and they are just incredible! My favourite song is “Swimming” and since hearing them I went and bought the album, titled “Lungs”, from iTunes. It is rare to find an album where you like every song and this Lungs album is one of those! Out of my entire library of music in iTunes almost the full ‘Lungs’ album is in my top 25!

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The amount of music that I have in my iTunes to actually ridiculas, I currently have a little under 7000 songs! Now most people seeing that many songs would instantly say, there is no way that I would ever listen to all the songs let alone half of them, I would have to completely agree with you, the reason that there is so many songs in my library is not because I personally added them, most of the time my friends come down to my house and would just throw in a cd and rip it into iTunes.

I have tried to go through all my music and remove everything I don’t like however I just get sidetracked as it takes so long to do it. I always say that one day I will just sit down and get rid of everything and then just copy back on what I want, I don’t see that happening anytime soon!

Having so many songs can be very beneficial in one way I suppose, when people come down they can just pop on a song that they like Smile . With one of the last few big releases of iTunes they added one of their best features in my opinion which is called Genius, and they definitely picked the right word for it as it is the best feature ever, in a nutshell Genius basically recommends great songs that go well with the song you are currently listening too when you click the Genius button, it creates a playlist of songs which you can save and refresh as many times as you want!

Why I like it so much is that since I don’t know half of the music that I have it helps me to find new music that I like! , and I get bored of songs after listening to them for so long, so having random playlists of new songs generated for me is just great, the only downside to genius is that you have to have an apple account to use it, that’s fine for me since I buy music from the iTunes store but many of my friends don’t have an apple account so can’t use this feature and making a apple account requires a credit card which many of my friends don’t have.

A few more of my favourite bands would include Belle and Sebastian, Regina Spektor, Ian Brown, The Afghan Whigs, The Smiths,  The National,  Arcade Fire, The Temper Trap and The Stone Roses. I will add some of my favourite songs by these artists below, the videos will be small but you can just double click the video for full screen if you like!

Belle & Sebastian – The Blues Are Still Blue
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Regina Spektor – On The Radio

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Ian Brown – F.E.A.R

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The Afghan Whigs – My Enemy

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The Smiths – This Charming Man

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The National – Lit Up

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Arcade Fire – (Antichrist Television Blues)

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The Temper Trap – Down River

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The Stone Roses – Waterfall

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Google Me

Google Inc.
Image via Wikipedia

Something that I am sure most people have done, Google themselves! I know I have Grin Everyone always wants to know who has the same name as them or even if someone actually has your name.

For me when I Google my name there is a lot of other people with my name, it’s strange to think there is so many people with the same name as yourself, and yet you have never met any of them! In the results for my name, there is a Canadian footballer.

I have recently come across a film/documentary about a man named Jim Killeen who went one step further with the Google yourself idea, he found loads of other Jim Killeen’s and decided that it would be great to go and meet them and get to know them a bit!

The idea of meeting other people just because they have the same name as you is interesting. Some people were hesitant about whether they should go and meet this other man with the same name as them because they didn’t fully understand his intentions!

The film/documentary is titled “Google Me” , and is definitely worth seeing. The only site I have seen where you can get it is from Amazon. However it is available on YouTube! I watched it on YouTube and definitely enjoyed it.

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Happy new year…

New Year's Eve 2007 firework
Image by Kol Tregaskes via Flickr

I know it is well into the new year, however this is my first blog post of the year. Last year was a great year for this blog. I really only started to put effort into my blog around March 2009 and from sticking at blogging on a fairly regular basis I have started to gain a fairly good visitor count.

Up to march 2009 my blog received Just 535 visits, in 2 months. Now that is not bad I suppose, especially since I hadn’t really attempted anything with my blog in those first two months. From march on though the numbers just kept on going up, couldn’t believe it! I decided that if I was to keep my blog I had to take an interest in it, and so for the whole month of March I set myself the task to blogging every day of the month, and it paid off!

For the whole of last year, January 2009 – December 2009, my blog received 43,638 visitors! That is incredible in my opinion Grin .

My aim for 2010 is to keep up with my blog posting. I now know that I will not be able to make a daily blog post anymore. It is just too time consuming. With me having work and college it is just too much, also with having 2 new websites coming out this year i will need time to dedicate to them!

I start back at college now for my final semester of my course on the 18th of January, and if all goes well with my exams, which the results come out on the 21st, I hope to really put effort into this final hurdle of the degree!

2010 is looking like a good year already! My wallet is feeling the pinch from going out over Christmas, and each day has been great so far! I have a website lined up to start at the end of this month so all is good at the moment!

Another one bites the dust

Christmas decoration at a shopping mall in Brazil
Image via Wikipedia

Today I had my second Christmas exam. Today’s exam was in Web Applications Development, and I have to say I found it really easy. Now I do not usually like to say that because I always think once I become too confident in an exam I will probably fail it. But that is just not the case here, since this exam is 50% CA ( Continuous Assessment) and 50% exam, I have already got 35% out of the 50% CA so I only really need 5% out of today’s exam to pass the subject since a 40% grade is a pass Grin .

So I have no doubt that I have sailed through this exam, and after leaving the 2 hour exam after just one hour, I had actually written a lot and couldn’t believe how much time I had left! I was not alone in leaving the exam after the hour was up, most of my classmates left too!

In our exams we have to stay for the first hour then we can leave, but I had just finished after the first hour. So that is two of my exams done so far, now there is only two left then I can enjoy my break from college Grin . Tomorrow I have organised that I am off work as I really need the full day to prepare for Fridays exam.

The exam on Friday is going to be the most difficult and I expect to be sitting there right up to the last second of the exam. The next exam is in Broadband Technologies.

The Christmas exams have begun!

Students taking a test at the University of Vi...
Image via Wikipedia

Today I sat my first Christmas Exam which was Database Management Systems. I feel that it went really good. I have almost already passed today’s exam as 50% of the marks can be achieved throughout the Semester. It feels great now knowing that I have one exam done and dusted and now I just have to focus on my remaining three.

My next exam is not until Wednesday, that exam is in Web Applications Development, that subject is all about websites, mainly Asp.net websites. That exam should be interesting, the lecturer I have for this subject is new to it! She has never taught it before so we have no previous exam papers to look over Frown .

Then my final exam of this week ,Broadband Technologies, will be on Friday, the exam on Friday is my most difficult one in my opinion. I need to work really hard at this subject in order to pass it and hopefully I can achieve this.

I remember when I had to repeat an exam before, it is not a nice thing, and the exam I had to repeat was one I failed on my summer exams so I only had to wait a few weeks before I got the opportunity to repeat it so at least it was fresh in my head!

However if a Christmas exam is failed you have to wait until the end of the next semester for the repeat exams during the summer! Since in the second semester I will be doing different subjects than in first semester,by the time the repeat exam from christmas comes it will be dificult to revise for a subject from such a long time ago, failing any Christmas exams will not be an option. It is just too stressful having to repeat an exam!

So that will be three of my four exams out of the way, for the fourth exam ,Training and Support Services, I have to wait until the following week Frown I would rather get them all out of the way in one week, but at least it gives me an opportunity to prepare for the exams.

I know a lot of other colleges here in Ireland give there exams out after Christmas, I feel that having the exams over before Christmas makes the Christmas period more enjoyable and relaxing Grin .

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