Paul McCartney – Chaos and Creation in the Backyard

Ok, Paul McCartney is the bomb. It is amazing that this is Paul McCartney. An icon with an album that seems so great and fresh. Don’t even get me started about what people said about him on the SuperBowl. I thought it was great. This album makes him even more relevant to me, for today’s world, not that I’d care either way. This album reminds me of everything that I love about the Beatles, but it seems new. This album is a great listen, and it gets better with each one.

Ryan Adams – Jacksonville City Nights

Ryan Adams, Ryan Adams. Keeping me on my toes. Never one to rest on your laurels, you release yet another album (only the second out of the three you will release this year). I haven’t even absorbed the last one yet, and now this. I love it. I suppose you either love it or hate it, the fact that he is so prolific. This one is country-tinged, and it feels good.

30 Seconds to Mars – A Beautiful Lie

What can I say? They get no respect, no respect. This band freakin’ rocks. Nothing extremely new for the band, but still good.

Sufjan Stevens – Illinoise

A unique album. Not like many things that I’ve heard. A nice concept album, namely about the state of the album’s name. “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.” is a creepy song, and I usually skip it, but it is supposed to be creepy, so it does its job. I like this guy. I’d like to check out his other stuff. Wouldn’t listen to it all the time, but occasionally.

Nickel Creek – Why Should the Fire Die?

Pumping blueglass. Reminds me of ol’ Habersham nights.

So, I was just thinking about M.A.S.K. For you losers who don’t know, that means Mobile Armoured Strike Kommand, the coolest cartoon out of my youth. Well, perhaps an exaggeration, but I did used to love this freakin’ show. If you know not of what I speak, you must read this:

http://www.weaintcool.com/Articles/mask.html

I had Rhino, Condor, and Gator. They were so cool. I wonder what ever happened to those. I wonder if I could find them on eBay. That would be cool.

Now for the readers, what were your favorite cartoons? Chat it up.

I wonder how many “I like coffee” posts I’m going make. You know what I like about a coffee addiction. You can talk about it in public with little social stigma, it is relatively organized, and it is cheap. That’s got to reveal something about me! haha.

Our last SPAN 6600 was a vClass. I was kinda looking forward to it, but now I have mixed feelings about it.

On the one hand, I thought that it could be a great tool for distance learning. For instance, we could have done this last class with all of us in different parts of the globe. In fact, had that been the case, I think that we would have felt like we were part of something, some type of class uniting people from around the world.

However, we were not in different parts of the world. In fact, a great many of the students were in the Language Lab, seated not too far from each other. I was at home.

Oh, and people couldn’t (or didn’t know how to) adjust their mics. Hence, some people were very annoyingly loud, while others were barely audible. So, the entire class I sat with my hand on my speaker volume, adjusting it up for the low ones and very quickly down just in case some loud one decided to blare my ears. As such, it was difficult for me to actually pay attention and meditate on what was actually being said, for I was preoccupied with the format in which is was being submitted, as well as techincal issues.

I would try it again, with the correct training (or hardware) on the part of everyone. I would not want to do it again under the same circumstances, though. I would much rather just meet in a cozy little room together. There is something to be missed for interaction with people. No facial cues, no body language, no subtleties. Just loud blaring speakers, people with bad mics, and a cold computer screen. No wonder I changed fields.

First we reviewed the homework regarding the syntax trees. Then we went to the lab to do some activities with the corpora and morphological roots thingy. That reminds me: I’ve got to do some homework with that.