So I’ve been meaning to post something about this for a while now, but just hadn’t gotten to it. I think Twitter is so impulsive by nature, that it may have made me more spontaneous in my blog posting. (Let’s hope.)

Expressive Connections is a fully web 2.0 compliant website that allows its users to create a profile page and upload “works”. Works are images like photos, drawings, etc, or writings like articles, poems, or other literary works. The site also allows you to share a list of links and even your resume. What you end up with is a simple portfolio site that can be easily updated. Here’s mine.

It’s been Julie’s pet project since her web design class last semester when she took a simple html/css design project and turned it into an opportunity to allow me to help her along with learning Ruby on Rails. This semester, though, she’s in a real Rails class at MSU and is taking advantage of the opportunity for furthering the website. Expect OpenID support, on-site messaging, groups, and a “favorites” feature which will allow you to have friends and keep track of them somehow. And other fancy features are on the horizon!

So it’s been a full week since I’ve moved into the new house here on Gunson Street. I’m already really enjoying living here with 3 other people: Erin, Matt, and Colleen. The house is very nice—4 (legal) bedrooms, a couple bathrooms, and a very cozy living room in which we now have 2 couches and 3 chairs. I think we’re all pretty excited about living here. Not only is the house so nice, but it’s a 2 minute walk from campus; there are lots of houses and apartments all around.

Anyway, here are a couple of pictures…

Scottfro is scheduled to appear on dnbradio.com tomorrow at or around 8pm EST. He’s got to hustle out from work at 7, grab his gear from the house, get out to my dorm room, set it up, and test it all before we can play. It will be tight, but we hope to come on at about 8. Of course if you miss it, that’s okay.. I’ll be recording.

Update: Scottfro finished his set on dnbradio a short while ago. I’m glad I ultimately got the chance to host him. It was something I had been talking about for a while, but only actually followed through on at the last minute as I’m moving out of the room the day after tomorrow. Scott has taken the set home with him for some tweaking, and will hand it back to me for posting tomorrow.

So it has been another wonderful night at the Temple Club tonight. Scottfro played with Silence tonight… that means two laptops, two minds, and generally twice as much sound. Hear it today at 192 kbps by visiting the torrents. Also, the Decompression Sessions happened again (also posted), although I’m only now listening to it. Man, I should go to bed.

Update: Kris’s name is actually Sci1ence. Whoopz! If you grabbed the torrent before 3pm today (Wednesday), you might want to try again. I’ve corrected the file.

So after about a year and a half, and after sitting on basically the final release for about an extra week, we’ve finally done the last part and actually posted the link to the new version. Of course, if you were following the kmp development in svn, you’d have had most these improvements for quite a while. Anyway, visit the KMP page and get your copy today!

Last night, when I arrived back at the dorm, my good friend Ben from down the hall stopped by to say hey how was your weekend and all that. He was telling me about his absolutely astonishing first-hand experience of the wrath of the cops right after the MSU men’s team lost to NC in the final four. I, of course, was out of state :) but the story goes like this: there was a gathering of people near the Cedar Village apartments and the cops believed that a riot was eminent, even though there was no sign of one. So, without warning, the cops unleashed a ruthless attack on the students, overusing by quite a large margin tear gas and mace. Cans of tear gas were thrown inside and around the gathering as well as outside local shops and even inside at least one car (as the State News reports). It was only after the cops insighted the riot that people got rowdy, throwing things back at the cops in retribution. Ben described one situation in which, after already being tear gassed several times, he was approached by an officer with full body gear (face mask made him unidentifiable) pointing his mace sprayer at him. When Ben raised his hands and told the cop he just wanted to go home, he was then sprayed in the face with mace with absolutely no warning or warrant, and for no reason at all. A handful of students were seriously injured, some from the chemicals, and still others from having cans of the tear gas striking them in the face.

It is absolutely amazing to me that the cops actually did all this. It sounds like a bad dream to me… The students simply didn’t know how to react. Ben plans to draft a letter explaining his experiences to send to anybody he can get an address for. I sincerely hope the aftermath of this event leads to some sort of remedy. This sort of thing just can not be permitted.

Talk about a good time! I’ve never been to Chicago before, so when my friend asked me if I wanted to hit up a drum and bass show and spend a weekend in the city, I just couldn’t refuse. The World of DNB II was Friday night. A bunch of different DJs spun mostly the hard & evil variety of drum ‘n bass, at least once the party really started kicking. They had a pretty serious sound system there, and it was fun to be rocked so hard when standing right near the speaker.

Saturday afternoon was spent wandering the streets of Chicago, eating at various places, and generally hanging out. We visited a handful of bars and restaurants until we finally ended up at our internet researched pick for the evening, a dance club/bar called Berlin. It was pretty hoppin from like 11 until probably 5 when they close (5pm-5am servicing bar!). The 4-to-the-floor house sound’s borningness was offset by how incredibly sloshed I got that night. =)

It was last Saturday night when Venetian Snares played at the Labyrinth in Detroit. His show came after an excellent line-up of live producers. Flybrains, 000, Kero, Derek Michael, God and his Bitches, and Shenanigans all played. Actually, I’m not 100% sure they all played since I don’t remember 6 different shows. But anyway, there was an abundance of weird ambient-industrial-idm noises and such for many more hours than a normal person could withstand… and it was awesome.

Here are some pictures I took.

In other news, I’ve upgraded my wordpress website to the all new version 1.5. I must say, Wordpress is where it’s at. It will now keep all my static content pages in the database and allow me to do lots of new & neat stuff. I might reimplement my user-changeable themes, but for now you’re stuck with this new one I’ve cooked up.

The picture shows Freezha, MC Dozha, and then DJ Serpico (who didn’t spin in this particular set). This picture was taken at a club, but they do their dnbradio set right out of Dozha’s house.

I’ve been listening to the dnbradio.com for a while now, and still I think one of my favorite shows is that of Freezha, sometimes Serpico, and MC Dozha. They always seem to have really good track sleection, and Dozha adds some flava without being annoying (like some of the MC’s). They wouldn’t record it for me, so I had to settle for the 128 kbps coming to me from the stream. Once live from Denver, Colorado, I now release last Tuesday’s set for your enjoyment.

So I went to this really cool house party last night that was apparently organized only 3 hours in advance and listened to my favorite local producers go at their machines for a few hours. For such quick organization, there sure was a good turnout; there were plenty of people around enjoying the sounds. Scottfro played a great set, followed up by the unique IDMish sounds of Carson, aka Flybrains. Next came the wicked gabber-core styles of Mourning Side Excursion, then finally the equally as unique Blaerg (with the special ae glyph, I believe) came on with some more heavily abused audio. There was one last set by 000 (triple-zero) that was said to be a real treat, but unfortunately I was with some other people who had had enough by the time it became after 1:00. So, we had to miss the show, but hopefully I’ll be able to hear him next Saturday night when I hit up this Venetian Snares show in the Detroit! (flyer: front / back)

I’ll post a couple of the pictures I took. First, one of Scottfro. Then another one of the other three guys I recorded. From left to right, they are: Mourning Side Excursion doing his live pa (aka Barron when he’s on the decks), Blaerg just setting up his stuff, and then Flybrains playing with the kaos pad equipped mixer.

And of course, I had to record the sets with my iRiver… and why not post them on torrents for all to hear? Not a damn good reason I can think of… so here they are! (in order of their playing)

Actually, I think the levels were a bit high because it gets distorted when it’s kicking hard… still listenable, though. In the future, I think I’ll try and aim for low levels, cuz I can always normalize. And I also forgot to mention that Scottfro’s set ends abruptly when some hardware, still unknown, failed. Also, Blaerg’s set ended when the cops came after receiving a complaint and asked us to turn it down. That was about when we left.

Update: According to Flybrains, I am to refer to this house party as Jungle Chainsaw Massacre V! So make a note of it! Also, the party was actually organized in “3 minutes flat.”

Update: Mourning Side Excursion has remastered his set, and asked me to repost it. So, here it is:

Rapid fire blog posting!! I just signed up for thefacebook.com the other day, and I’ve been accumulating some friends since then. It’s a very neato social networking site, a la Friendster. You form friendship connections your friends, and then you can see your friend’s friends profiles and… be a social networker! They even let you export an SVG visualization of the social interconnections of your friends. Unfortunately, they only open it up to a handful of colleges. (They require your school’s email address.)

If you go to one of the listed schools, I would recommend this site.

Oh, and as of about 1:05, I have been out of my last exam. I will now enjoy myself on campus until Friday afternoon when I go home to enjoy myself at home for a few weeks. wo0T.

So my suitemate, Nick, noticed that there were these chalk writings at various places on campus that say “www.whoisnickballard.com”. Not knowing any idea what it was all about, he visited to see what was there. Someone set up a flash movie and comments feed on this site that appears to be dedicated to none other than the mighty Nick Ballard! Dying to know who it was, I whois’d the domain name and the true identity of the author was revealed! Nick didn’t want me to tell him we knew though. Hopefully he doesn’t read my blog.

My good friend Jason, aka Slyde, has launched msuunderground.com , a phpBB forum created to provide a casual place for MSU students, and anyone interested, to come and discuss whatever they feel like. If you’re an MSU student, or you’re looking for a nice forum to discuss something of general interest, come on over and say hi!

On a not-related note, Jason has barely lifted a finger for KMP in a month… It includes all basic functionality with the exception of the ability to add files to the playlist. Without this feature, I don’t think I would redeem it ‘release worthy.’ Nag him to work on it if you know how.