HOLY COWZEZ!

Ok this is, like what.. the third time I've done this? Meaning not post in almost a month.. oh dear.

So, major updates: I'm no longer in Canada. Came home on christmas eve and almost immediately went to france to ski for a week before finally getting home to merry old England.
I'm heading back to uni (Keele) on saturday to bum around with friends until I can move into my room on campus, which is gonna be sweee-eet. Re-integration has so far led to too much Fallout3 and Icewind Dale 2 and not enough revision.. not much change there then.
Grades from last semester look good so far but I'm still waiting on two more before I jump for joy.


Ok so, that's the boring stuff out of the way... This month I'm feeling... music and games I reckons.. Check my next post for more interesting things. I leave you with.... YATTA! If you haven't seen it already, and if you don't completely love it, then I don't know what society can do for you to be honest..



(p.s. I'm back this time... promise.)

Snow, Harry Potter and about 3 weeks..

SORRY FOR NOT POSTING IN LIKE A MONTH!!! Seriously guys, I'm uber sorry I disappeared for so long. I got lumped with all of my final projects and severe financial oblivion so my excuse is that I've been super busy.. I SHOULD be all finished by the end of next week though. So I'll hopefully get things up and running again pretty soon.

But now that I get here it's suddenly difficult to think of anything to write...

Anyways I'll try to make this post readable.. After the break:

First of all, hit play:



Well done, now read on.

Concerning my life: I saw Harry Potter a while ago. I guess most of you have seen it by now so a detailed review would just be pointless. In short, I'm glad I saw it, it was a fun movie. It finished a bit too soon and I think they rushed the story along EVEN MORE than previously. Also, the bit with the dancing... seriously? Oh dear.

Don't worry though, the new TRON is on the horizon..


+ It FINALLY snowed properly here in Montreal. After being teased by everybody back in England at how they have tons of snow and we had nothing, the gods decided to dump almost two feet on us over the course of Monday. Which is cool. Because I like snow.

It's weird to think that in two weeks from today I'll be going home.. This term has gone super fast. The main concern now is finding somewhere to live when I get back to Keele... Which isn't looking promising I must say.

Finally, I'll be taking suggestions on how to survive until January on £72... (w00t)

An age old rivalry..

The other week we found this place in china town that claims to offer "all you can eat and drink" including draft beer... So, in true student form, we decided it must be done. And it just so happened that in the same evening a French guy challenged me to a drinking contest..

So we're goin to this place tomorrow with a bunch of international students from England, France, Australia and Germany to test out this "all you can drink" claim... I'm pretty skeptical to be honest. If they live up to it then I'll be pretty impressed.

Peanut butter

Can somebody in Canada please tell my why I can't find any good Peanut Butter?

And don't give me that Kraft nonsense..

If you haven't tried this you haven't lived:

Headphones

So during my 6 cups of coffee, musical marathon last night my headphones finally gave out. Which meant that I had an excuse to sleep, but also that I needed new headphones...

In light of this I picked up a pair of these badboys today:

I was torn between these and a pair of Aerial7 Chopper2's which had a better frequency response but a slightly lower sensitivity. I'm also not familiar with Aerial7 so I decided on the old faithful Sennheiser, having had good experiences with them in the past.

They boast "high attenuation passive noise canceling", which isn't all that effective but I'm still fairly impressed with it, although it's nothing compared to a good set of high-end AudioTechnica or Bose cans, (who both had the noise canceling thing pretty well nailed) I couldn't really expect much more while still paying under $200.

Good points:

• Nice, level frequency response with a good range of 18 - 22,000 Hz. (we can hear between 20 - 20,000) Level frequency response is good for critical listening, composition and studio work.
• Decent passive noise canceling, but nothing to write home about. This is helped by the full ear coverage though, as opposed to smalled headphones that just kinda float on your ear and allow a lot of sound to leak in.
• Very comfortable fit covering the whole ear with a good range of extension.
• 3m lead which is a pretty perfect length for my room.
• Sennheiser headphones have notoriously good engineering and will last a good few years if treated nicely.
• Lead only hangs on one side which is handy. 
• They don't make me look like a Skull Candy faggot.

Iffy things:

•  Noise canceling is only passive, I can still hear the vietnamese lady next door when she gets particularly riled up.
• The lead, while long, seems a bit flimsy. I don't really trust it being handled roughly.
• Instead of increasing my productivity by allowing me to listen to my work they have so far lowered my work-rate by prompting me to write this post...

Now that that's out of the way, time for more coffee.

Peace.
X

Entering work mode.

Apologies for not posting in like 2 days. You can blame Concordia University... and Time Crisis...

Basically I have 3 compositions to get done this weekend and they're um.. not going well.
Anyways, I have coffee, soup + bagels and 750g of trail mix... So get ready for a night of procrastination-by-blogging! I'll probably upload the results when I'm finally finished so you can all tell me "dude.. that's just weird. You actually study this shit?"

See you on the other side.

(meanwhile, have some sonic gold. make sure you listen all the way through.. If you don't know Venetian Snares, you won't see it coming)

RRAAAAGEEEE!!

Ok, so the BBC posted THIS ARTICLE today. Which made me rage SO HARD.

In short, the British twat convention government has, on recommendation from a recent review by 'Lord Browne', has given A huge middle finger to everybody involved in education by abolishing the current cap on tuition fee's. Which means, starting 2010, we'll have to pay 'up to' (which means DEFINITELY) £9,000 per year to study.


£9,000! Are you fucking serious? that's almost THREE TIMES what we're paying already. That means families who have been saving for the last 18 years and can just about afford to get their kids to university, can now afford to go for ONE YEAR! ONE! That's a third of a degree.

This breaks Nick Clegg's so-called "promises" made before the election. As well as proving to us all what we already knew when Dave Cameron said THIS. Which was basically "Fuck the middle class."
Basically, the government decided that they'd rather continue their campaign for the pay rise they've been gagging for over the last few years than worry about the future of the country.

more>>

SNOOWWW!

So today was a pretty chilled day. I went up to Mont Royal with Mark and we found this sweet poutine restaurant. Seriously, they had like 30 different poutines.. And I'm not generally a fan of poutine but even I was impressed. Also I picked up some gloves and a hat in preparation for winter.

(pic related, apparently this is what Elvis would have ordered...)

Tonight was also pretty fun. It involved us Brits and Mark (the Australian) going to a Mexican restaurant with a few Frenchies, then getting some beers at one of said French people's apartment.

ALSO! We got the first snow of the season in Montreal. Just before we went to the Mexican place it started to snow lightly but it picked up a bit as the night went on. It's started to get cooold too. Which means soon i'm gonna have to be wearing ski socks and pj's under my trousers... (which I'm actually looking forward to because it's soooo comfy.) See the picture to see what snow looks like.

(snow.. this is what it looks like)

Tomorrow is looking like boot-purchasing day. I could do with a good pair of moon boots. Although it will mainly be Post Modern String Quartet writing day since I need to get one written before tuesday and I've had so many issues with Sibelius and Ubuntu that I haven't started yet.. But I downloaded musescore which is free (i think open source) notation software which should be fine for now..

I might upload the quartet once it's done. What are you guys' stances on post modern 'classical' music? Anybody a fan?

Gooood Morning

Morning everybody! :)

In keeping with my recent musical theme, have some wisp to start your day:






Related listening:



Enjoy :) and have a nice day.

I've gotta go and save somebody from a hornet now apparently.. No seriously.. I do.

My daily happiness

 Does anybody else watch the Shaytards? (http://www.youtube.com/user/SHAYTARDS)
It's pretty much what I look forward to every day... (is that sad?) This guy basically has the perfect life. He makes videos, posts them on youtube, and supports his wife and four kids off ad and merchandise revenue.. He's also a radio dj but I think he does less of that now since he moved house.
But seriously. I want Shaycarl's life.

This kinda sums it up quite well:




Anyways, that's just because I'm bored this morning.

Breakfast time followed by class time I thinks.

Large things...

So this is my first post from inside Concordia... I don't have a lecture for another 1h5m so I thought I'd do some catching up.

Mainly: fun weekend was fun.

Saturday saw us (Me, Ollie, Joe, Maaak and Benoit) go to Tremblant. Which was both odd and cool. And responsible for my earliest morning since I got to Canada. (up before 10am). For people who are unaware, Tremblant is where I first learned to ski when I was 5 and I haven't been back since I was 7 (I think, possibly 6?) It was sweet to see how stuff had changed.

Omnom pumpkin nomnomnom

So we found this SWEET bar called Foufounnes which has metal nights on saturdays with $1 beers :) woopah.

Also, it was thanksgiving today and apparently some people over here actually care about that so we got a day off lectures which was nice. Another food making evening with everybody was also cool and Joe made a s-weeet pumpkin pie and much Robot Unicorn Attack and Canabalt was enjoyed by all... well, by me Ollie and Joe at least...

Also, who invented the .xps file extention? And why were they allowed to live? This is something that baffles me.

Watch Ken Robinson: here

Hugo should be coming to see me this week :) no idea where he's gonna sleep though... i might have to  give him my bed and brave the couch myself :/

Oh wow

So that's been more than a whole month has it? unexpected.

I've started and stopped this post about five times now so I'll try to keep it brief so I actually post it and then fill in with a couple more over the next few days..

Shall we find out what's been happening?

In brief:

I managed to finally sort out my courses, so now I'm taking a recording module, two computer audio courses and music composition. Winner.

It turns out Kung Fu Hustle lady is actually Vietnamese. And maybe moving out at the end of the month... Which would be very desirable... And hopefully less pungent. I've decided that she makes a particularly foul smelling meal every 3 or 4 days which I am countering with much burning of incense and making of nice foods.

waaaaaay back in september, we saw the following:

Some far out chairs,

This I didn't go see... much to my eternal regret,

Many dead people,

This lake, it was most tranquil,

Some savory buildings with wacked out lights...

And slightly more recently:

Many a bicycle,

FOOTBALL!

This is what I look like when I watch FOOTBALL!

But seriously though, FOOTBALL... Not all that exciting.. The atmosphere was cool, we're expecting a better representation from the Concordia crowd as the season continues.. well we're hoping for one.

I still have yet to observe the Concordia Rugby team as I don't think they've had any games as yet.

Sooooo what's left? uuurm, oh yeah student loan came through the other day and almost brought me out of my overdraft before being immediately set upon the that most insatiable of financial assailants: The Rent. Also, Concordia made us pay for some health insurance deal which is apparently ESSENTIAL if you want to study in Quebec, but is also STUPID to make international students pay it because we inevitably all have health/travel insurance before we even get here don't we?
Silly Canadians, that's a student's bank account, money doesn't come from there, leave it alone.


The weather has started getting colder ever so slowly. We're at the English phase now. This week it rained for three or four days SOLIDLY. And I managed to leave my towel and gym stuff outside after washing it... like a genius.

I'm sure I'll think of some more stuff to ramble on about soon enough. Thanksgiving is coming up next week so the uni is having some sort of do for us foreigners which should be interesting.. well there's gonna be free food at least.

Right now, however, it is 12:37am and I need my internet chess + youtube fix for the night.

Peace.
xxx

(Joe's bum.)

4

hoookay, so a fair bit to update with today.

I found a place to live finally, which is good. my room is nice and big and the rent is super cheap ($280 per month).
The landlady is old and Chinese and really nice. The flat is pretty standard, three people living here: me, a Japanese guy who is apparently never around and some old Chinese lady (ever seen Kung Fu Hustle?) who enjoys mothballs and smoking.

^Her^

So yeah the place kinda smelled a bit funky at first. Not sure if it's because I got used to it already or because I'm chain-smoking incense sticks but it seems to be pretty much fine now.

Also, for some reason my bed was propped up on top of a bunch of boxes containing fricken bricks and stone tiles... odd. So I dealt with those and now have an actually pretty comfortable mattress which still leaves a good amount of room to live in. I also sorted out some internet with a chinese guy upstairs after a rather hilarious yet disconcerting episode yesterday when I was confronted by a(nother) half naked chinese guy with a kitchen knife.. But Kung Fu Hustle lady came to the rescue and shouted at him then told me not to worry about him because he's crazy... hmmm..

The main thing though is that hopefully Joe and Ollie will be getting a flat just a few blocks away. Which would be super cool and lead to much chilling.

Other things that have happened: We went for a walk the other night over to the Latin Quater and Jade decided to take a dip in a fountain (hah).

Swimming pool

Yesterday we went up to the Plateau which is a super nice area and we decided that after we all finish uni we'll buy a house up there and become one with the squirrels... There were lots of squirrels.

Still not registered for my courses as the helpful guy seems to have dropped out of existence.

Oooh also, I need to get a duvet. Currently mine sucks.

x

Birthday Bloooog :)

So yesterday was my birthday and I turned twenteen.
After another fruitless attempt at finding somebody to sort out my courses and a few wasted hours sat in the hostel being confused we decided to go see some park and the weird shaped tower thing that's on all of the Montreal tourism paperwork. We took along our new French friend called Fanny.. She's lovely.

The whole funky building thing was kinda cool but ultimately we became hungry and there was very little around to eat... Also we were keen to see the Botanical Gardens and Insectarium but it was all a little bit closed so that plan failed too.
Oh also there was a weird guy on the metro platform on the way up who gave me a lot of evils and smiled at Joe and took a picture of me on his phone as the train moved off... he was also rather fat.

So we caught the metro back home and me and Joe bought a sub from some hilarious dude who sold subs and felt the need to tell us about his monthly rent for the building and why he needs to charge $9 for a large sub when he would really like to only charge $5.

Funky building

FANNY... (and Jade)

Last NIGHT however, was far more interesting :)
As it was my birthday and I was king for the day, I found us a jazz club just down the road to go to. Jade had made EVEN MORE friends by this time so we took along 'Hiroko', a Japanese girl who is also going to Concordia for a semester.

The club was pretty much everything I'd want from a jazz bar. We didn't have any food but the drinks weren't over priced and the whole atmosphere of the place was really chilled. There was a piano trio playing (keys, bass, kit) and they were fricken awesome!
I decided to follow Ron Burgundy and go for a Glenlivet (without the pepper and cheese) which me and Ollie had a couple of followed by some Guinness.. which was also not an unreasonable price.

Joe ran off and came back with some birthday cigars, thereby completing the cigar+whiskey+jazz triforce of cool. Jade got some wine giggles. Possibly the coolest part of the night was the bill... which listed five times: "1 Jazz   -   $5" and totalled $155 which, when you think about it, comes to about £20 each... which isn't so bad at all for jazz, drinks and a birthday. Well, I don't think it is...

(it was super dark so pictures are a bit blurry due to long exposure)

Can't see the piano guy but he was old... and ponytailed..

Anyways. That's that. Today I think we're gonna look around some places to live Joe found us.. And I'll probably make some more useless phone calls about my courses..

Laters
xx

More walking around and stuff

Dear Blog,

Today and yesterday we did walking. Yesterday we went to look at a house near Loyola (the not-down-town campus that most of my lectures will be at). The house was ok but it wasn't as they'd advertised it which we didn't really like. The position etc. was perfect for me, about a 5 minute walk to campus and on a nice little suburban street but it turned out that they only had 2 rooms available (advertised 4) and one of them was 400$ (advertised 350£) so that was a bit sketchy... Also the landlord was away on holiday somewhere so we spoke to his daughter who didn't really know what was goin on.
However, we then went for a look at the campus which is SUPER nice. It's right in the burbs so there are lots of pretty houses and streets around and most of the sporting stuff takes place there. In fact when we were there the Concordia Stingers (football team) were training just across the road.

Pretty campus main building.

Some other building that we couldn't figure out the purpose for.

We didn't go inside anywhere but found a little park-style area between the campus buildings and chilled there for a while before catching the bus (with a driver who said "Thank you") back to the metro and into town.

Also, we discovered that Jade keeps a diary but DOESN'T start her entries with "Dear Diary"! We soon remedied that and made her promise to begin her next entry properly...

We also got a bit of bureaucracy out of the way by going to see some international help person at the uni. Joe and Jade were already registered for their courses so they got all their student ID cards and stuff. I reckon I won't get mine until next week sometime due to Concordia's staff being 80% USELESS.


So, today:
Decided to go see "Old Montreal". We walked a loooong way through town and had a little look at China Town before getting to retro town.
Old Montreal is basically a few cobbled streets with some nice looking cafés and such. There was a wicked cool looking Jazz Bar with a red piano in the window, which I decided against playing, although when we walked back up the street there was some pro old dude playing some wicked jazz. Oooh another thing about this town, all of the restaurants/cafés/bars have massive window/walls which are always open so you can literally walk through the windows rather than the door. Which is pretty cool and friendly feeling.

cool piano

dude

Old Montreal also had a few street performers and buskers around which was nice. Even including the token Peruvian guys playing panpipes...
It's also right next to the harbour which we also checked out. We took a walk along the front and climbed some clock tower to get a reasonable view of what was going on:

thing

place

more place

On the way back we succumbed to having our first "poutine" (which, by the way, is nothing to write home about) and are currently watching replays of Canada owning Germany at hockey in the Winter Olympics..

Plans for tomorrow: Tim Hortons; maybe Jazz Club but they're waaayyy expensive; finish registering for everything and find an apartment.

Ooooh! Also:

"Fuck you Mister Bitey!"

Peace

xxx

Day 1 (2)

Ok, so. First (full) day.

We got here yesterday around 8 and taxi'd to our hostel (on Rue Mackay) which is run by "agent 007" and "The Cowboy" (who are awesome). First night consisted of a first Canadian beer at some bar called Thursdays which we found out today from a tour book "gets more people laid than craigslist".... hmmmm....

The hostel is cool, beds are nice, me Ollie and Joe are in a mixed dorm with handy lockers and a tree in a bath and Jade got dumped in a girls' dorm downstairs. Some aussie dude just moved into our room today and, in true long-haired dreadlocked australian style, he is awesome.

(Obligatory photo of room)

(our hella pimped out bathtub)

Had a decent look around town today and Montreal is awesome. We started in some mall that NEVER ENDS (seriously, we walked for like half an hour and didn't find the end.) and somehow after aiming for the Latin Quarter ended up in Montreal's gay town... unless that's just what the Latin Quarter is like? Either way, it was pretty gay.
For the "this city in nice" perspective: Montreal is awesome. We decided it's basically as if somebody took about 4 different cities and shuffled them all together. You can walk two blocks and see old school stone churches next to 50 story modern office buildings next to some tiny little gothic style house. It all goes from feeling really huge and overwhelming one minute, to being quaint and welcoming just around the corner. I definitely feel more like a stranger here than in BC, maybe due to the french, but as it turns out Ollie is fluent which is super useful. We also found our first food court, something I've missed in England.
I also found a couple Jazz clubs which WILL be hit up at some point, one has awesome stuff going on from september until April, with stuff like the Gotan Project and Pat Metheny.

Also! Mountain Dew, 10 different flavours of Rockstar, 20 different energy drinks, Pizza Pockets, HUGE cans of EVERYTHING, Fruit Loops, Lucky Charms, Kraft, Milk in bags, silly plug sockets, Pedestrians have right of way and DRIVERS REALIZE THIS, TIM HORTONS, eh!

+ Rather a lack of pictures today as the other ones I took are rather useless but I'll get them up either on here or facebook at some stage.

Kinda lame post but it's only one day right?

Peace.
x

Pre-going stuff.

Righty-ho then. Just a brief starter to get things rolling and start to fill out the page before anything actually interesting happens.

So I leave tomorrow with the other Keele people (Jade, Joe, Ollie and no Alex because he got ROYALLY screwed over by Concordia.. the bastards.) after staying with my wonderful Lawrence tonight in LANDAN.

Packing began at 5:00pm yesterday and ended at midnight, sometime in between there I found some travel insurance too (last minute etc.). Money is still a rather huge issue, in that I HAVE NONE!
Also it seems that my idea of 4 months worth of stuff equates to slightly less than Lawrence's (or in fact my) 1 festival worth of stuff... Ooh I also got a nice shiny new camera today to take lots of pretty pictures :)

That's about enough to make my page look tended to.... for now. Time for pizza and playstation.

Oh yeah, I also am only registered for 1 of 4 courses and still have nowhere to live. Winner.

Peace.
x