Kenyan hotel where giraffes lean in through upper windows for food: “Cory Doctorow:
A hotel in Kenya is situated in the middle of a giraffe preserve, and the tame giraffes lean their heads in through the windows of the second-storey breakfast room and get fed by the guests:

The Giraffe Manor, built in 1932 by Sir David Duncan, is situated on 120 acres of land just a few miles from the centre of Nairobi, Kenya’s capital city. In 1974 Jock Leslie-Melville, grandson of a Scottish earl, and his wife Betty, who also founded the African Fund for Endangered Wildlife (AFEW), bought the Manor. They then moved five babies of the highly endangered Rothschild giraffe to their property where they have been successfully reared and they now have their own babies.

Link

(Via Boing Boing.)

Crumpet is in the other room playing Guitar Hero. I never thought I’d see her playing White Zombie.

Hurray, the party for Crumpet went smashingly! She’s a happy, happy young vegemite. Thanks to all who showed up, and special thanks to those who brought her presents without being asked.

It’s like somebody knew that there was a BBQ happening for Crumpet’s 27th tonight…

Hope to still see you here tonight… indoors.

Reading Giz’s post about TED got me following some links, and lo and behold, here’s the speech Al Gore made about global warming (in both MP3 and AAC formats). Who would have thought the US government would have been covering up something of this magnitude?

/sarcasm

The torrent file for the bands featured at this year’s South by Southwest festival has been released. It’s 2.5Gb of music in pretty much every genre. I love these things - they’re the only way I seem to find new bands to obsess over.

So I guess I have some kind of work lined up through a friend, doing the mobile repair tech thing… part time for the moment but building up to fulltime. There’s also a Mac tech position that may or may not eventuate. More as it comes. It’s hot today, isn’t it?

Crumpet’s birthday present arrived today, and she doesn’t know what it is, mwahahahaaaaa!

It looks like we’re going to get some people actually showing up this year, which is lovely.

So, this is my humble studio. Not much to look at, I guess, but it’s what I named this site after.

Korangar = Ragnarok backwards. From Encyclopedia Mythica:

Ragnarok (”Doom of the Gods”), also called Gotterdammerung, means the end of the cosmos in Norse mythology. It will be preceded by Fimbulvetr, the winter of winters. Three such winters will follow each other with no summers in between. Conflicts and feuds will break out, even between families, and all morality will disappear. This is the beginning of the end.

So, Korangar logically would be a fresh beginning, which seemed like an appropriately filthy-hippy way to think of a place to create art.

In the picture you can see my G4 PowerBook, the MOTU Traveler (the small blue unit) and the Alesis monitors. In the foreground is the Evolution MK-461C, which is just a master MIDI keyboard, it doesn’t have any sounds of its own. It connects to the PowerBook via USB.

Neither the Traveler or the keyboard require their own power supplies, the Mac is driving them both. All up the studio only uses three spaces on a power board, one for the Mac, and one for each of the monitors. The StingRay lives just to the left of me when I sit at the desk, and my guitars sit to the right.

This is a song I wrote about 2 years ago when I first got my PowerBook and wanted to try out GarageBand. There are two versions, the original and the version I worked on today, with a better bassline recorded on the StingRay (you may notice in the parts just after the chorus that I’m starting to figure out which end of a bass is which. I also played it fingerstyle instead of with a pick). I’ve remixed it in Logic Express and I think the parts are fighting each other much less than they were… see what you think.

About the song itself, I wrote it in 20 minutes, don’t be too harsh on me!

edit: Just added another guitar part, fixed the chorus vocals and remixed the track… more guitar frenzy = good!

edit 2: Final remix done on 23/2/06 - nothing more I can really do to this except get it mastered properly! Time to give it its own song page.