Sloan

The new Sloan EP Hit & Run has dropped (as they say) and it's pretty good.

If you're unfamiliar with Sloan I'll make the assumption that you don't live in Canada but if you do... shame on you. And if you don't live here you should move, I'll wait.

Do yourself a favor and click play below and listen to the album as you read the rest of my review.

Sloan - Hit & Run

The title of the EP is most probably in reference to band member Chris Murphy being injured in a hit & run accident this past summer. That caused the group to cancel shows while he recouped.

As a long time fan it hits all the Sloan standards with tracks like Take It Upon Yourself, hand claps and all. It would have fit in nicely on their 1999 album Between the Bridges. It Is Never is pure Sloan awesomeness, but I'm a sucker for layered songs that build up to distortion endings that reprise the main theme. Plus I've always had a man crush on Patrick Pentland and his songs. 

One of Sloan's strengths can also be a weakness on a five song EP like Hit & Run. With four distinctive song writers the variation can be jarring switching between them. Jay Ferguson's Midnight Mass is a perfect example of this problem. It's a good song but sandwiched between two up tempo ones brings down the energy. Which is a shame since Jay Ferguson has done some really great songs with excellent lyrics and melodies over the years.

That said it's a good addition to the Sloan catalog of memorable songs.

Sloan is offering the EP in MP3 320kbs, Apple Lossless and Flac formats directly from their site in addition to other music stores.

This is unreladed to the Hit & Run EP, but Witch's Wand was one of my favorite songs off their last album Parallel Play but the video that I just got around to watching is so weird I have no idea what's going on.

Sloan - Witch's Wand

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This is why I love going to Wal-Mart without the kids so I can stop and window shop and enjoy awesome toys. It's a rare occurrence and I totally have to thank my parents for looking after the boys for a few hours on the weekend.

TRANSFORMERS UNIVERSE G1 SERIES MASTERPIECE SKYWARP

Star Wars AT-AS

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I don't know how many of my fellow VOXer's read Team Vox's latest post but there is now a free version of Typepad called Typepad Micro.

I'm guessing with the prevalence of Twitter (@grantalias), Six Apart wanted to get into the micro blog / status site. We all knew this was eventual since their acquisition of Pownce's earlier this year.

I've done a test post on my Typepad Micro so you can see what it looks like.

You can have links to all your online sites like flickr, Vox, Facebook & Twitter. Those of us from Vox will find it very familiar. I wish it could automatically pull data from those services. It would certainly save some time for the user.

Unfortunately (like Vox) you can't pull Facebook photos but unlike Vox you can't pull photos from any service or video sites for that matter (which you can do on Vox), unless you use embed code. Unlike Twitter there isn't an ecosystem of third parties developing sites like Twitpic to close the short comings.

Typepad iPhone App

The only real saving grace is that you can use the Typepad iPhone app to post while on the go (which is how I composed my first post).You can link it to both Twitter and Facebook with manual or automatic posting to each service as you wish is nice. To bad it won't cross post to my Vox account. Too bad there is not a Vox app like this. And no Blog It does not count. Don't even get me started there.

Compose

Since it's Typepad you can import and export your blog to or from it. With Vox there is no such ability and I'm pretty much screwed if I ever want to move anywhere else.

UPDATE 11/24/2009

I've discovered that you can seemingly cross post from VOX to Typepad Micro (along with other LiveJournal) . I have not posted enough to actually see it work but some of you might find it interesting. My main goal was to see if I could then export my posts, but it doesn't seem possible. Maybe it's only for the paid version.

Setup cross posting

Here are the directions

1. Click Account
2. Click Outside services
3. Add Blog
4. Enter login information & save settings.

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In what's turning into a yearly event, the local mall had Dora & Diego for a two hour meet and greet.

Carts enjoyed it much more than last year. When we talked about going ET said it was for babies... that's a five year old for you. He did say he had papillons in his stomach when we were waiting in line (that's butterflys for the non french speaking). AR didn't go since she was with Donna in Zellers, maybe next year? 

The boys, Dora & Diego

Dora & Diego

UPDATE 11/24/20009

The photo made the [Life is Good] explore page.

Life is good explore

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Wii Says Me Too

In the three years I've had my Wii I've probably played my Xbox 360 more (and I've only had that for the last year). All be it fun and the source of all my plastic guitar collection, the Wii has always had glaring short comings in the features department.

One such example is the lack of demos. Now this might seem a trivial point but I've lost hundreds of hours over the years to demos and in hindsight I wish I could have banked them for later use of sleepless nights with children, but I digress.

Since the only hard drive support for the Wii has been a SD card which is a far from elegant solution I have never thought we would see them on the little white console. I comparison I have almost filled up my 60GB hard drive on my Xbox 360 with demos.

So you can imagine my suprise when my blinking Wii notified me that for a limited time they would have five downloadable Wiiware demos.

World of Goo is already a classic and works so well on the Wii you should certainly try it out. A super fun physics puzzle game. And great that you can play up to four players. 

Pokémon Rumble was a hit with the kids but I can see the repetitive game play getting old fast for adults.

Bit.Trip.Beat I thought was pretty innovative think Arkanoid meets Frequency. Of course the kids thought it was totally lame because dad was enjoying it.

The one negative is that the demo will launch the Wii store once completed in hopes of you purchasing it.

I really hope we see more of these demos from Nintendo it's a definite plus to try before you buy.

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If you're a regular or long time visitor here to grantalias, you're probably thinking with the regularity of posts I'm either dead or living in a cave. Neither of which is true but sure feels like it sometime. As you can see in the photo below we are kept very busy by our growing family.

the busy family

I am also desperately waiting for the release of Windows 7 so I can buy a Dell I have my eyes on and get back to editing the family videos (and subsequent posting of said video). As I do not have the time to take my production machine off-line and do a clean install to freshen it up; and after 3.5 years it needs it big time.

Here are the stats of the Dell I'm looking at.

• Intel® Core™ i7-920 Processor(8MB L3 Cache, 2.66GHz)
• 8GB Dual Channel DDR3 SDRAM at 1066MHz
• 1TB - 7200RPM, SATA 3.0Gb/s, 16MB Cach
• ATI Radeon HD 4350 512MB

The service I use (and many others around VOX) to post their tweets to their blog is back up. Loudtwitter is a great tool to automatically post my tweets here in a hidden post and then every couple of days I can go back and delete the junk and (hopefully) flesh out the gems with photos and video.

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I've been listing to the excellent tech gadget podcast gdgt for sometime now and they have just launched the corresponding site last week. Why don't you follow me on gdgt?

I'm running out of room!

N-e-who, you could sign up for a sticker and guess what came today in the mail, strait from New York city!
The downside to netbooks is that there isn't that much room for stickers.

I was greatly surprised that I could even get a sticker. When I got the GMail stickers I had to send a money order to cover the postage, which in retrospect seems weird since Google makes billions of dollars a year.

Thanks gdgt!

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Hail in June

cup full of hail

The Montreal region had a pretty big storm the 25th of June. Gusting winds and rain strong enough to knock out the satellite (it doesn't happen that often).

The real surprise was the marbles sized hail that came down near the end of the storm. It must have been pretty localized since not everyone I talked to the next day had seen it.

The boys were very excited (as was I) and wanted to go out during the storm and collect some hail. I got them to wait till after the storm died down. I still remember the huge hail we had in Quebec during the mid 1980's and didn't want them pummeled to death.

Donna collected some off the patio shelter for them as anything that had fallen on the ground had melted as it was like 30 degrees Celsius (or 86 degrees Fahrenheit)  that day.

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Bark Lake June

We visited with our friends Aaron & Cynthia and their kids at their cottage on Saturday (all be it a little later then we planned, first camping of the season is always rough and takes forever to pack for).

Let's just say it's never a good sign when your GPS shows you driving through trees. Thank goodness Aaron was waiting for us out on the road and led us the last little bit to their place. I was staring to get worried that we had taken a wrong turn somewhere.

That afternoon we drove over to my parents campsite (my sister and her family were also there) for an afternoon of swimming and later for dinner. It was a little crazy with seven kids under the age of five but it was still fun to see everyone.

Lake Daycare?

 

Baby's first camping

Early birds catch the fish?

I stayed up with my brother in law Phil by the fire (with a few beers) and whet to bed around midnight. Around 5am the kids woke up. Thankfully my sister Kim took them for a bit and let me sleep in.

Sailing with Daddy

It might look like I took the boys sailing the whole day, but it was really my dad who took them for two of the three races. My Lazer is a little small with an adult and two pre-schoolers.

Crewing with Papa

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Michael Jackson Dies Dead ist tot CNN Int 2009 06 26 00 46 19

A little help from my tweets.

• 18:31 Judging by tweets.. Michael Jackson just passed away. Still looking for links to confirm so don't quote me. (via @ijustine) #

• 18:37 CTV Montreal confirms Micheal Jackson died. RIP wacko jacko #

• 18:01 Michael Jackson 911 call released bit.ly/1HU3NX (via @montrealgazette) #

• 22:24 Jackson almost takes Internet with him bit.ly/Maami #

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