Andrew Underwood

Hoo boy! I haven’t visited the blogging tree house in months. Last time I was here I forgot to take out the garbage, and now it just reeks like a simile! It occured to me that I should get some blogging done after Dreamhost decided to bill me $213 for two accounts from the future. Yes they did this for every customer, depending on what your account was. I might not be paying that much, but I am paying for this.

What have I been up to? Hmm. Well I bought another 1981 Celica Supra, with the 5-me engine, except this car was turboed way back in the 80s. This would be a very unique characteristic as I have not heard of a turboed 5-me ever before. Once the mark 2 and 3 (mkII, mkIII) came out in the later 80s, people would just swap engines from those cars into the mkI (my model) to give it more power.

Jared gave me his snow blades to try out. I went to Fernie and used them for the first half of the day, and aside from looking ridiculous they are pretty fun. However I switched back to snowboarding at noon because there was lots of deep fresh snow that wasn’t being properly exploited with the snow blades.

I went to Calgary to play some guitar in a studio called The Slaugherhouse. I guess it use to be one, our studio room was called “The Killing Floor”. I made a recording using my mp3 player and it came out great! I’ll post some clips sometime. Meanwhile, see all the pictures here.

In case you are wondering, that thing on my head is a helmet cam.

I am also looking for somewhere to live, closer to the Alberta Research Council. If you have any ideas, let me know!

This steampunk styled guitar has me drooling. I’ve been planning on giving my guitar a custom paint job but this modification inspires me.

Via Gizmodo via BoingBoing

A few weeks ago Michael and I sat down and jammed on our guitars for about an hour. There wasn’t ever really any structure but there were a few interesting bits that came out of it. It’s all totally random and we were just making it up as we went along. I’ve selected some clips to put up and you can find them all here in mp3 format.

If you’re only going to listen to a couple, I can recommend a sampling:

• From the distortion section we have drunken sounding commercial music. Fit for something 15 seconds long.
• A slow clean bit, it gets unstructured around 20 seconds but it breaks down nicely.

City Hall is adjacent to the block where I live.  It sports a bell tower chock full of different sized bells capable of producing a wide range of audible tones.  Every hour during the day it plays some cutesy song, followed by a sequence of evenly spaced tones to indicate the hour.  It’s starting to annoy me, and the thing is it’s not repetition that’s the culprit.  It sure has a wide range of songs it can play, from themes from “The Sound of Music” to the usual Christmas melodies.  The annoying thing is that it tends to “oversing” everything.  It throws in lots of extra notes, sort of like those people who sing the national anthem at sporting events.  You know what I’m talking about.  Whoooaaaoooowhaaa oooohhhhhweeee hoooooowooowooo!  I especially hate this in regular music.

In the spirit of my hard drive dying today, here is a bunch of music made with the sounds of dying hard drives. Enjoy.
Odeo: Gizmodo Hard Drive Dying Dance Tracks

I’d just like to take a moment to point out this music video that is hauntingly good. In an acoustic, knife stabbing sort of way… Canadain band Wintersleep: Wintersleep – Sore