Modern Musicianship

Let me introduce you to Ronald Jenkee, an amazing, fun, talented musician.
When I first heard Jenkee, one of his tunes was playing in the background of a LikeTotallyAwesome vid I was perusing. Of course, the song stuck to the point where I had to go back on to youtube and see if I could figure out where the track came from. Thankfully Mr. Defranco cites his background jamz.
If you haven't gone to Jenkee's Chanel yet, please do! He has two CDs out, but is yet to be signed, but using youtube and social networking sites in this case has turned out to be a great thing for this guy. He is kind of odd, but totally endearing, just the type of personality people on teh internetz jump on board for. Also, throw in the fact that he donates proceeds from certain songs to charity, and you have quite the winning combination. (oh yeah and i suppose being talented doesn't hurt, whatev)
He is a self-taught keyboardist and is very personal, reading and replying to EVERY message he receives. So if you have any questions for the man, hit him up.
Well, here are two of his songs:





So yes, I like him.
And I think he is a really great example not only of how musicians today can pull themselves up by their bootstraps, but how almost anyone can. It makes me think of the pilot episode of Glee where Rachel, the unpopular talented girl, says she posts a a video on myspace every day, because if you aren't relevant, you might as well be dead. So yes, irony for all us self-indulgent twitter using-facebook status updating-blogging youth. But obviously Ronald is not one of these types. If we wanted to characterize his cuteness in a sentence, every word would be abbreviated.

Add-Art Love

So being a lover of most things technological and geeky, as well as being a student in the modern world, I spend a lot of time online. Now there are certainly drawbacks to the internet, some which are obvious and direct and some subtle and indirect like let's say, having no social life in the real world (or the rw as they say). Since internet has existed the need to make money off of it has also existed. Today as the idea of free information takes over, the use of advertisements has become a primary method of sites with heavy traffic to create profit. Ads on the internet have honestly become less invasive over the years, with sites using subtler integration (such as inlaid background images) and less annoying popup windows with seisure inducing graphics and peircing noises.
However this doesn't mean everyone is still all hunkydory with seeing ugly blocky graphics and text- we want something aesthetically pleasing! Well now thanks to American artist Steve Lambert, us Firefox users can experience less ads and more art with a free ad-on called Add-Art (http://add-art.org/). This thing is neat-o. You just install it, and it will automatically replace ads with artwork, AND I think about every two weeks new art is cycled in. Some of the art is cute animation, some is warped still life, odd photography, classic images... I really haven't had it longer than two months, so that is the extent of how many genres I can honestly claim it has.




Here is my Yahoo home before with a big Progressive ad, staring at me.









And here is a screenshot of my Yahoo home after addart, with some crazy Ganesha in neon.








Right now they have been using modified religious imagery and old timey looking book drawings. It always changes.
BUT some people mights find the app alightly annoying if only because it doesn't automatically block everything. Here is the demo from the website:

Some items it will replace, no problem, but sometimes the ads are still there and you have to click a little button on it's corner that saus block. Although that might just be me not bothering to mess around with the settings! But it doesn't bother me to have to do that.
The app also doesn't block pop-ups, but most people have something which already does that.
Lambert also makes another clever addon called Self-Control (http://visitsteve.com/work/selfcontrol/) which can bar you from checking your e-mail or other addictive techno innovation for a set time. This is of course something I could never have enough self-control to do, but I think many probably need :)

So anyway props to Steve, he has cauhgt my attention by playing in to my obsessive techno-joy. Maybe I'll spend an unhealthy amount of time browsing his site!