For the Love of Ben G.

Share the Music

Music has always been an integral part of my life. Just like certain smells bring you back to your childhood, I can always remember exactly where I was when I first heard my favorite songs. Listening to these always brings me back—I can't believe some of these songs are 10 years old already!

To be properly thankful for the US Thanksgiving holiday, I'd like to share a few electronic music songs that really tell you a lot about the kind of person I am. (And, of course, I'm eternally grateful that YouTube keeps all these memories alive!)

First off, the classic "1999" by Cassius. The groovy 70s styling and dirtbikes just go way over the top. Only the French could pull this off.

Next up. My friend Colin turned me on to this video via MTV's sadly forgotten show, Amp. I found out years and years later who actually did this song: it was one of my favorite bands, Hexstatic. This is their breakthrough 1997 song, "Timber".

What's so impressive about Hexstatic, and their American cousins, Emergency Broadcast Network, is that they completely predate digital editing. All this stuff was done with tape and analog mixing. Today, it's not that impressive, but I know how hard it was to make these kinds of incredible effects with just a few tape decks.

Last but far from least, it's the song that really, really made me want to rock out whilst dialing a rotary phone. Mr. Oizo's "Flat Beat", starring the Jim Henson's Creature Shop-created Flat Eric:

Enjoy!

Ultra Cool Disc Treatment

Holy cow. I want one of these $199 babies so bad. Clearly, by using the QUADRI-BEAM ULTRA CLARIFIER on my DVDs, the compressed data on the disc will get.. less compressed!

It's just like the over-used movie trope where Will Smith narrows his eyes at the tiny, blurry, zoomed-in image on his computer screen, and says "Enhance the image!". Suddenly, the image magically gets more data and becomes crisp and clear.

It's sort of like Willy Wonka's Great Glass Elevator, which as everyone knows, used skyhooks, not those silly rockets in the Johnny Depp movie. (Johnny, we love you, but please, don't ever talk like Michael Jackson again.)

I Was Not Aware

Now, I'm as big a fan of Aphex Twin as the next guy. (Well, I can only listen to so much before my ears start to bleed, but I think that's kind of the point.)

Here's one of his kinder, gentler tunes. More with the soft and fluffy, less with the "brains leaking out my nostrils" feeling:

Aphex Twin – Flim (LP Version)

What blew my mind this morning was to find out that people actually do covers of Aphex Twin songs. Here's The Bad Plus doing a live cover of the song above (Flim):

Super Joe! Badds! Hitler!

Holy schnikes! Bionic Commando is making a comeback! It's one of my last childhood video game memories that hasn't yet been stripped of its innocence and forced to live on the streets as a 3D urchin.

Let's hope Capcom Japan has the sense to keep a hands-off approach, and that Capcom USA has enough sense to make it as funny as the original was.

I loved killing Hitler Master D at the end of the original 1980s NES game. What a classic!

... Geez. My last three blog posts have all been about video games. I just can't help myself: they're like sweet little nuggets of digital crack. Maybe I need to see a professional about this..

Aperture Science: We Do What We Must Because We Can

Run, do not walk, to your nearest PC or virtualization solution and grab Valve's Orange Box.  Even if you're not a first-person shooter fan, the collection comes with a terrific little first-person puzzle game called Portal, which I just finished at the behest of a friendly co-worker.

And it was the best three hours I've spent in a long time.  I couldn't stop laughing at the ending credits; I don't want to spoil anything, but they really put a lot of heart into the end of the game.  The way the computer mocks you in its sing-song synthetic voice, it's just wonderful.

Highly recommended.  Oh, and Orange Box comes with some other little game called Half-Life 2, with a bunch of expansion packs or something.  Never heard of the thing, I guess it was popular once. :)

Be sure to visit the secret Aperture Science web page!  I hear if you log in as 'portal' and try guessing a password, there's some goodies there.

Together at Last

Oh lordy. My childhood dreams have come to fruition:

Sonic can finally beat the hell out of Mario in the upcoming Smash Bros. Brawl for Nintendo Wii.

I don't know about you, but I've been waiting for this moment since I was a little kid. I'm giggling like a schoolgirl on the inside. Cheers to the folks at Sega who made this possible! I know how hard getting this kind of thing through the legal process can be.

Starbucks and The Electric Company

Everyone loves reminiscing about the retro 1970s shows they grew up with. We all make fun of the dorky hairstyles, the out-of-date cars, and the insanely wide collars.

But did you ever stop to think about the colors?

What really scared the crap out of me besides remembering the harvest gold cars, avocado green ovens, and burnt umber sofas of my childhood was realizing that it hasn't gone away. Oh no; the global shortages of earth tones reported in '77 were just a cover story—they've been slumbering these past three decades, growing bolder and tackier by the month.

I first noticed the trend at Starbucks: the trendy walls covered in caffeine-inspired scrawls seemed at first to have a sensible Mediterranean color palette, but when I looked closer, they've literally lifted the colors of the 1970s, Soul-Glo and all, and dumped it into suburban strip-malls across the world. In California at least, it seems to be state law that all newly constructed condos and row houses must be painted in green, gold, and brown. I'm not the only one to have noticed the hideous Starbucks color palette!

Worst of all, the scourge seems to be returning. Don't believe me? Check out this page from the 2004 Williams-Sonoma catalogue:

Yipes.

I Did Not Jump The Shark

Jumpin' the Bungy
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And that's a wrap, folks. Without exaggerating, I can safely say these past three weeks in New Zealand have changed my life for the better. I love this country, and I wonder if I don't have a little Kiwi blood in me—it just felt like home from Day One.

I'm heading back to California tonight, and so I wanted to share my crazy bungy jump photo (just incredible—two or three good arcs of pure weightlessness, with no jerk or yank at the bottom at all!) with you all. I cannot wait until I get to do another bungy jump! They're seriously addictive.

I'll leave you all with a few Very Important New Zealand Ratings:

Most Adorable Award:

New Zealand Lambs (they also receive the coveted Most Tasty Award).

Most Sweaty Place:

Franz Josef Glacier (no, really!)

Best Skiing:

Treble Cone, Wanaka

Best City:

Dunedin (love the architecture, the college town atmosphere, great music, and great cafés!)

Worst City:

Queenstown (total tourist trap; since they don't mine gold there any more, now they get their gold out of rich foreigners' pockets. Wanaka has pretty much everything Queenstown does, and does it better.)

Best Place to Stay:

Top Ten Holiday Parks. I stayed in these great, cheap little cabins all over the place.

Worst Place To Stay:

Amber Lodge in Queenstown. Ask me why sometime: I have photos. Ugh.

Most Scenic:

Bar none, driving the Haast Pass was the most stunning and emotional experience.

Best Seafood:

Kaikoura! I loved the roadside stand seafood barbecue where I had dinner. One of my favorite meals of the trip.

Best Day Trip:

I can't recommend strongly enough that everyone in Auckland take the day trip to Tiritiri Matangi Island, the endangered bird sanctuary.

Most Expensive Activity:

Internet access. Man, I can't believe how much they charge here to use your own laptop to get online! NZ$10/hour wasn't uncommon. Still, it was worth it to get all these photos to everyone.

Total Distance Driven:

4316 kilometers (2682 miles), an average of 216 km (134 miles) each day

Total Photos Taken:

2273 photos and 42 movies, a total of 6.1 gigabytes, or two DVDs

Well, it's about time for me to start getting ready for the 13 hour flight back to California. I'll be leaving Auckland at 7 pm Monday… and arriving in San Francisco seven hours earlier the same day. Isn't time travel fun?

Milford Sound and Homeward Bound

Mitre Peak in Milford Sound
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Alas, all good things must come to an end. And so I'm nearing the time to say goodbye to New Zealand, which will always hold a big meaty chunk of my heart. Some of it I'm pretty sure I left in the water under the Kawarau Bridge on the 134 foot bungy jump leap I took this morning. (Yes, I will post photos of that as soon as I can!)

I'm in the beautiful Scottish-style city of Dunedin now, on the southeast edge of the south island of New Zealand. Dunedin is probably the nicest city I've been to in New Zealand, with a great friendly feel, a huge drum-n-bass music culture, and great museums. The stonework in the churches and the famous train station is just beautiful.

Yesterday, I toured the beautiful fjord of Milford Sound by boat. The experience was, as usual, beautiful and awe-inspiring. It's getting to sound like a broken record, but I love the huge variety of ways nature has crafted New Zealand into a hundred million shapes and sizes. Tremendously cool.

The clock's ticking, and I only have two days left here in New Zealand. Time to make the best of it! See you all back in California soon. Make sure to check out my Flickr page for lots more photos of Milford Sound!

Ski Treble Cone. No, Seriously. Do It.

Treble Cone
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I'm not kidding when I say that if you're at all into skiing, you absolutely must make the pilgrimage to Treble Cone on the south island of New Zealand. Skiing Treble Cone left me at a loss for words: it's situated thousands of feet above glacial valleys and lakes below, with views of the majestic Southern New Zealand Alps all around you.

Treble Cone a few hours' drive from the adventure capital of Queenstown, so most of the tourists down there stay where they belong; the real pros from all around the world come here to the ski town of Wanaka to make the trip up the mountain. Since it's winter down here when it's summer in the rest of the world, North American and European skiiers all come down to the Mecca of skiing here in New Zealand.

I actually came here on a lark: I was driving south from the beautiful Franz Josef Glacier, and after making my way through the "holy shit, it's so beautiful" Haast Pass, and I came to the tiny, adorable ski town of Wanaka, where I'm currently sipping a long black in an internet café. I saw all the ski bums and happy boarders hanging around town, and stayed in a little lodge with a bunch of backpackers, resolving to ski Treble Cone in the morning.

Choices, Choices…
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Bright and early, I woke up and drove my little orange Barina Holden up the zigzagging mountain road, with gasp-inducing views of Mount Aspiring and Lake Wanaka unfolding below me. I ran into a few fellow computer geeks on the ski lift who were way interested in VMware Fusion, and we rode together nearly to the peak mountain elevation of 1960m (6430 feet—yes, that's right). I'm no pro, so I took my time, enjoying my way down Upper High Street, a great blue square (intermediate) course down the mountain.

Treble Cone's claim to fame is that they have a huge variety of intermediate and advanced slopes, but even then, I didn't feel out of place at all among all the pros. Every slope was way steeper than anything I saw at Whakapapa or back home at Lake Tahoe, and every view of the lakes and glacial valleys below made my eyes pop out of my skull. I'm sore as hell now, but I'm still absolutely chuffed (to use a Kiwi expression) to have experienced the best in New Zealand skiing.

Cheeky Kea
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The most unique part of the Treble Cone experience is the Kea bird, which are one of the only alpine parrots in the world. The parrots literally hop around the slopes and nibble folks' food at the café when they're not looking; they're quite intelligent and very naughty! Kea are everywhere here, and their inquisitive, cheeky nature is most apparent when they jump up on your car and nibble at the rubber around your windshield. I have muddy parrot tracks all over the hood and roof of my car now!

As my New Zealand vacation draws to a close, I'm going to start the drive down to the beautiful Milford Sound in the Fiordland of the south island. I'm not sure how far I'll make it tonight, but that's the beauty of this trip: I've been playing it completely by ear, traveling as far as I like and staying wherever my fancy falls. And so far, it's worked terrifically. Oh, if only I could pull up my roots and stay in New Zealand forever. It's more than a little tempting!