Outspark’s Neighborhood

I hate waste. Wasted food, wasted resources, wasted time; all these things lead to a very annoyed Rammi.

Even if I'm full up, and feel as if I can't eat any more, whenever someone is about to throw perfectly good food away, I am always tempted to take it from them. And sometimes I do. I'm not greedy, but I just hate seeing something that could easily be salvaged go into the bin.
People in third world countries are starving, and yet some people still think it's OK to throw away half their lunch because they "just didn't feel like it after all". I'm the type who is very particular about the stuff I leave behind. I squeeze and squeeze a ketchup packet until there's nothing left, and when tipping a soft drink can into a cup, will tap and tap until I'm satisfied that all the last drops have come out.

I'm the same with everything else too. It's not just food that annoys me. If there's a tiny bit of paint left in the tube, you can bet anything that I will be the one to spend 20 minutes trying to get it out. I will cut open a toothpaste tube when most of it is gone to try and get the last bits in the tube, and will attempt to use every single inch of paper that I get. Aerosol cans? I press and press until nothing - and I mean nothing - but air comes out. None of this throwing away when it begins to splutter nonsense for me.

People who throw away money also deserve a slap, in my opinion. I've walked alongside people who, after coming out of a 99p shop, will casually throw away their pennies. Statistics have shown that every year, people throw away millions on the streets. Why would anyone waste their money like this?
In the scheme of things, a penny isn't a lot. But when people who frequently throw loose change away how much money they've thrown away, it can add up to quite a lot of money.

Wasted time also irks me. I hate being late (although I sometimes often am), and will often get quite angry at friends who leave me hanging. I know some people don't mind lateness at all, but if a friend I'm meeting up with is an hour late, that's an hour I could have spent at home in bed, or doing something equally as worthwhile. >.>

I don't know where my obsession with saving comes from (besides from not really having enough money to buy all the things I want to buy). It certainly doesn't come from my mother or grandmother. My family are the type to leave everything where it is if they don't like it, and will frequently throw good food away when they feel that they don't want it any more - my grandma is a prime example of this. This makes for awkward mealtimes, when I insist that they at least finish some of their food (one mouthful of a meal they just made isn't good enough), then get tired of arguing and eat it myself, whereupon I am rebuked for being greedy. It's a no-win situation.

Frugalness isn't an admirable trait to have when you live in a developed country, where practically everyone wastes what they have without even thinking about it. I know I can get quite obsessive over this, but it's difficult not to be. I would be able to understand throwing things away if people at least made an attempt to use them, but when they don't even make an effort, why should I bother trying to understand?

If I ever get the chance to be a parent, I wonder what I will be like. I hope I'm not one of those parents who forces their kids to eat all their greens and clear their plates even if they don't want to, but I can see myself heading that way already. ^_^

Originally published at rammi.glomp.me. You can comment here or there.

Nine hundred dollars, (I know, only?) gets you the worlds cleanest keyboard.  Great for popular coffee shops I guess, or ultra clean electronic rooms (chip makers).  But $900?  I'd be okay with just running it through the dishwasher at the end of the day.  Yes you can do that, no soap though.

Har Mar Superstar - Game Night Har Mar Superstar Tour Dates 11/08/09 Aquarium* Fargo, ND 11/09/09 Waiting Room* Omaha, NE 11/11/09 Brick Kansas City, MO 11/29/09 Oxford O2 Academy 3, UK 11/30/09 Relentless Garage London 12/01/09 Thekla Bristol, UK 12/02/09 Wedgewood Portsmouth, UK 12/03/09 Cabaret Voltaire Edinburgh 12/04/09 Bodega Nottingham, UK 12/05/09 Brickyard Carlisle, UK 12/06/09 King Tut’s Wah Wah Glasgow 12/07/09 Ruby Lounge Manchester, UK 12/08/09 Plug Sheffield, UK 12/09/09 Academy 2 Dublin, Ireland 12/10/09 Stiff Kitten Belfast, Ireland 12/12/09 Concorde 2 Brighton, UK 12/13/09 Barfly Cardiff, UK * with Bang Bang Eche Read More Har Mar Superstar http://weheartmus... Har Mar Mall - I mean Superstar - is back, after five years of absent since 2004's The Handler......

Parking in the college area known as "Dinkytown" in Minneapolis can be kind of hard, especially when the meters on 4^th Street runs until 10pm. I didn't mind walking a few blocks to the beautiful Varsity Theater as the weather was nothing less than perfect that Friday evening.

Opening up for Har Mar Superstar are three very different genre and acts. Starting with Koo Koo Kangeroo (official / myspace), whose music styling is that of hip hop - for toddlers. Their songs are dead simple, like "AOA" (sample lyrics: "aye oh aye oh aye") and "Cheh Cheh Chi" and "LMNOP", but they're catchy and easy to sing along. The highlight of their set was when they threw down a white tarp-like covering and the audience was dancing under it like a party fort.

Wow, Bang Bang Eche (myspace) are young. Someone told me that they're about 18 years old, but they certainly look much younger. Their music is very punk high-energy and reminds me a bit of Arctic Monkeys influenced. My easily favorite song from their set is "Fist Full of Dollars", perhaps a reference to Sergio Leone classic film? They ended their setlist with "Die Hippy Scum". Oh, also, it's worth noting that bassist T'Nealle sported a three keyboard cat moon t-shirt. Adorable.

The odd group on the bill was two-person group, Lookbook (myspace). The band is basically guitarist Grant Cutler, who plays guitars and handles the pre-recordings, with vocalist Maggie Morrison. Their music sounds like 80s pop, not exactly the "body-moving" type of music that you'd think Har Mar's audience would demand. Not really much to say, except I think Maggie looks really cute and I will be talking about them in further detail on my "book"-theme news on Sunday.

Har Mar Superstar ♥ Varsity Theater, Minneapolis (11/06/09)

Compared to the last time I saw Har Mar Superstar, which was basically a man and his undies and boombox - he now has a full band, all dressed in white with a red cross on the back. Also, the last time I saw him, he basically stripped down after the first few songs - this time, he started off very heavily dressed with an African cover, hat, etc.

After the first song, he took off his hat. After "DUI", he took off the overall to reveal a Prince "Purple Rain" shirt. He kept taking off articles of clothing as the night went on. From "EZ Pass", to "Girls Only", to "Creative Juices"... the audience was loving it all.

Har Mar and Melinda Park singing "Powerline"

By the time "Brothers & Sisters" was played, he inevitably took off his shirt. The pants disappeared with "Apple Sauce", followed by "Turn it Around". The finale song was "Tall Boy", which Zach, from Bang Bang, and some woman called Melinda Park (or was it Mindy Park?) joined on stage to help sing the song. Park would later turn up again to help sing one of the encore, "Powerline".

The very last song, Har Mar sang an a cappella version of Boyz II Men's "It's So Hard To Say Goodbye To Yesterday". He would pretend the song ended and everyone would clap... only he would continue to sing the refrain. After the third false ending and after he said "goodnight", he came back and sang some more.

Har Mar's latest album is Dark Touches, available from Dilettante Recordings. Read Andrew's review of the album, pick up a copy at amazon

 11/07/2009 04:22:06 ♥ vu () ♥ harmarsuperstar.com ♥ myspace.com/harmarsuperstar ♥ twitter.com 

I don't see the point of categories and tags. How am I supposed to define a post?

In all the posts I've done on the Wordpress platform, I've never ever used a single tag. On Vox, my tags are just set to "mobile" and "post", because of the way I crosspost things. I've never really sorted them out, but I know I should someday, as Vox doesn't really allow me to organise my posts in any other way. But when Wordpress already has categories, what is the point of having tags as well?

Sadly, I never know what category anything I blog fits into, nor do I know what to name these categories. What I do know is that I hate "Uncategorized" with a passion. At the moment, I'm sticking everything in my "NaBloPoMo" category to save myself from this horror. But how do I categorise what I write? Does a certain paragraph make it fit into my "Nostalgia" category, or does a word make it fit into "Random"?

What I do know is that I need to get better category names.

I think categories and tags are great for some blogs that write about certain themes (technology, for example), but when I just write whatever comes into my head at the time, it's difficult to organise my blog posts into topics.

Originally published at rammi.glomp.me. You can comment here or there.

Possibly one of the best movie series of all time.  It still is great today as it keeps the attention of my kids, ages 13 and 7.  They both love the series and I don't blame them, the movies are awesome.

I have so many ideas in my head. Grand pictures with beautiful scenery, website layouts that are perfect in every way, songs with lyrics that are actually relevant to my life, and perhaps even videos that people favourite thousands of times because they're just that awesome. Oh yeah.
The problem with this is:

• Art: I can't even hold a pencil properly, let alone draw a masterpiece. I wasn't blessed with the ability to see shadows and light, and could never shade appropriately in art lessons, making my art teachers bang their heads against the wall in frustration.


• Websites: I could probably make the website layout of my dreams if I was prodded really hard, but there's that laziness thing. It creeps up on me on the rare occasions I'm actually feeling quite motivated, and makes me give up before I can get into that "OMG! I NEED TO FINISH!" mode, which usually only happens around an hour before I have a project deadline. Things I do for fun don't have deadlines, therefore making me drop them like they're hot whenever I start to get a little bit tired.
  I know I have major issues when it comes to completing things - most of my posts on this website seem to be rants about how I'm not getting anything done. Meh.


• Music: Song lyrics come to me easily (much like ironic poetry does), but my one attempt at a musical career was taking a Grade 1 violin exam many years ago (I passed, but never bothered to practice). I suck at theory; it takes me ages to read notes, and even then I'm not thinking in proper terms. For example:
  Me: "That's where I'd put 3 fingers on the A string! Oh yeah, it's D!"
  Other musicians: *facepalm*
  My singing voice is also of dubious quality, so I'm not even going to attempt that. I've watched the X Factor and American Idol. I've covered my ears and cringed for the contestants. What may sound good in my head doesn't neccessarily sound good in anyone else's.


• Videos: I have all the right equipment to make a kickass video, but I'm a n00b at editing, and too shy to rope other people into making them with me when I'm not sure how they're going to turn out in the end.

Originally published at rammi.glomp.me. You can comment here or there.

In the past few years, I've morphed from a Microsoft-lover to a fully-fledged iTard. How did this happen? Clever marketing? Good SEO? Growing annoyance with Microsoft?
This may seem a bit strange to you, but I actually blame Last.fm.

You see, back in April 2006, I joined Last.fm, mainly because my peers at the Rathergood forum were joining it, and I didn't want to feel left out... It's bad enough being a loner in real life, but being a loner on a social networking website? That's just sad.

I've never been a heavy listener of music, and I didn't listen to it on my computer at all, because it was just too slow. My computer was a crappy Windows XP desktop that I had bought in early 2004, but 256MB of RAM really isn't good enough when you have a hundred applications open at the same time. >.> But as time went by, I slowly began to love hearing music on my computer, despite its flaws.

Eventually, I thought, "Hey! If I don't want my music to stop because my computer keeps crashing, I should get an MP3 player!" *claps self* I have awesome logic.
When I was a little kid, I owned a portable cassette player, which soon got upgraded to a portable CD player when I broke the other one (I've broken a lot of gadgets; explained in more detail here). My younger self only listened to Madonna and Cliff Richard on repeat, and needed a portable CD player when they stopped releasing their songs on cassette.

And so, all was well in the Rammi world, until something dreadful happened. I dropped it. As I was changing Cliff Richard's Greatest Hits from 1994 to Madonna's Ray of Light, the CD player slipped out of my hand, and right into a puddle. Despite my best efforts - talking to it, hitting it, coaxing it to work - it was never the same again.
I remember crying for a week.

I got a replacement eventually, but that one soon stopped working. After that, I just gave up. In hindsight, this was probably a good thing, because it gave me a much needed break from Madge and Cliff.

When I joined Last.fm, my music taste was just as bad as it was when I was younger, but thankfully did not involve me vogueing down the road. I was just starting to get into this whole "scrobbling" business, and wanted every single song I listened to to show up on the website. Last.fm's website at the time told me that the only way you could scrobble was through your computer (duh) and an iPod!

I wasn't too impressed by iPods originally, because they didn't seem to be *that* special, when you compared them with other MP3 players... They didn't look like Hello Kitty or resemble something rude, they didn't come with pretty matching earphones, and they didn't have as much space as some of the other brands available.

Yes, I judge gadgets on appearance first, and then glance briefly at the specs. Shh.

But all my negative thoughts about the iPod disappeared when I saw that it could SCROBBLE. And so, I grabbed my money, ran off to the shop, and became the proud owner of a second generation silver iPod Nano. It went everywhere with me, and I dutifully plugged it into my computer every night just so it could scrobble what I had listened to earlier that day.

Soon, I realised I wanted more Apple items, and more Apple stickers to stick around my house. When the first generation iPod Touch was released the next year, it quickly became my next pet - to coddle, access websites with, dress up in pretty cases, and, most importantly,  jailbreak the hell out of the software. There's only so many times you can play Solitaire with the second generation Nano.

I sense that my beloved iPod was feeling jealous around the newer model surrounding it, because a few months after I had bought the iPod Touch, it kicked the bucket whilst I was listening to Wuthering Heights by Kate Bush... "Oh let me have it, let me grab your soul away..." With lyrics like that, no wonder it croaked.

However, I still wasn't satisfied. After my iPod Touch came the iPhone 3G, because I had gotten sick of carrying around several devices when one could easily do the same job as them all. I promptly jailbroke my iPhone, dressed it up, used it to phone people and accessed the internet on the bus. Oh, and of course, I used it to scrobble all my music every day.

Later that year, my Windows desktop computer finally died. And with it, so did my music collection. After many years of using Windows, I guess I wanted a change. Looking around at my collection of Apple items, there seemed to be only one choice for my next computer...

See? Without Last.fm, I would never have been sucked into that abyss of font smoothing, rounded corners and shiny shiny things without interchangeable batteries. While my music taste hasn't improved much, my collection of gadgets with the Apple logo emblazoned on them has grown and grown.

And I have lots of stickers!

Originally published at rammi.glomp.me. You can comment here or there.