Activesteve.com is Born…

Wow, to think I call myself a music fan and didn’t know about this fantastic service available online! Have I got your attention yet? I decided that I had better write a blog post about a most excellent music service available for free on the good ‘ole cyberspace. I’m talking about Pandora, and my best advice to give any readers right now is to just go there and learn about it. What’s that? Not enough information you say? Okay, how about this in a nutshell: Pandora is a music-matching service of sorts, call it musical ESP. You like a certain song or band? Well, pop in that name, and instantly, the service creates a ‘radio station’ for that kind of music. First, they play you a tune you likely know very well, then the fun starts. Pandora will follow that up with different songs and artists which fit into the musical genetics of the song or artist you input. How is this possible you ask? Well, the roots of this service has to do with the Music Genome Project. To quote wikipedia:

The Music Genome Project, created in January 2000, is an effort founded by Tim Westergren, a 1988 graduate from Stanford University and spearheaded by a group of musicians and technicians to “capture the essence of music at the fundamental level” by using over 400 attributes to describe songs.

Yup, each an every song in the database is catalogued on many different levels to classify it, like a unique living creature. This enables the new stations you create in Pandora to play music you are highly likely to enjoy.

So, a couple weeks back we finally had the official Nanaimo Bar wetting party. This was a combination grand opening of the bar that I built, along with a birthday party for me. Yup, I’m another year older. 31 years old and it turns out I still know how to party! Good for me, right? Hee hee. At any rate, it was great to finally have a party with the fully renovated basement, and what a great excuse to invite people over, and see some people that I haven’t hung out with in a long time. I’d like to say a big thanks to everyone who made it out at various points in the evening, and a special thanks to those who brought some tasty additions to the liquor cabinet! It was totally unexpected but highly appreciated. I started the night off a little grumpy, as my sister will attest. I was very hungry, and had been training earlier in the day, and suddenly felt rushed to get everything set up for the party. Luckily, after a couple hot dogs and some gin, I settled down quite handily. From that point on, I pretty much moved to behind the bar, which you can see in the picture to the right. If you’d like to see more shots of the party, they’re all over on Flickr (as per usual). If you go through the pictures, you’ll probably recognize some faces from long ago, and you might even notice some eerie differences between this party and parties past. Yup, it’s true, we’re all getting a little older, and it seems the invasion of the little people is upon us all! The first half of the celebration night was happily punctuated by several of our friends’ babies, including my own niece Helena. At one point, I looked around and asked myself what happened to the raging keggers, throwing forks at rare earth magnets on the fridge, while dressed in crazy outfits. Now, it’s all about toddlers pulling themselves across the floor, and laughing at the older ones who are now already getting lippy with us 😉 Crazy stuff. As a result, we had to keep Jonah off by himself till the latter portion of the party, which was the appropriate time to release the ‘party animal’. You know when that is of course. It’s when Matt and Rob started throwing random beer and liquor in the blender, expecting to come out with a delicious drink! Such was not the case. However, it did prompt the transformation to the type of party I’m more used to.

Welcome back to the ongoing tales of excitement from my life! It’s been a few weeks since my last post, and I know that I’m due, as usual. Sorry to keep you all waiting, but it’s been an exciting few weeks for us over here. I’ve actually been doing some travel for work, as well as having a nice long Easter weekend. Instead of going anywhere far away, Jody and I opted to stay in the area, and do touristy things in our own neck of the woods. The picture you see to your right shows you one such little event. This shot is from the famous Diefenbunker, , Canada’s cold war museum. I’ve been wanting to go there for quite some time, and Easter Friday was finally the time for it. We actually had a 2-for-1 coupon from the Ottawa entertainment book, which made it even more of a reason to head out. If you don’t know what the Diefenbunker is all about, head over to the website and read up on it. Or read on for a bit more from me.