ASD’s “Metamorphosis” was one of those demos that made us all “think” for a while. Very deep and meaningful, and also very fresh from the design point of view. “More of this please” is definitely something that I was thinking while watching that demo over and over again. Well, I guess somebody heard that, because now we can enjoy some more of that… or perhaps I should say “even better than that”. =)
Yesterday I woke up pretty early in the morning to check out ASD’s new demo “Midnight Run”, which happens a sequel to “Metamorphosis”. It’s very interesting that the demo didn’t only bring me back the “Metamorphosis” feeling, but I also experienced a bit of “Lifeforce” feeling too. The visuals of this demo are extremely beautiful, and the music is simply ingenious. As expected there’s a ton of depth of meaning, enough to again keep us all thinking for the days to come.
You can download the demo and read the related comments here.

In Greek:

Δέκα χιλιάδες αστέρια μπροστά μου
Γαλάζιες πινέζες κρατούν τα όνειρά μου
Αλήθινα
Ανέμελα

Στα δόντια κρατάω δύο φύλλα από δυόσμο
Τα μάτια μου κλείνω και βλέπω τον κόσμο
Με χρώματα
Διάφανα

Ίσως είμαι..
Ακτίδα φωτός, ξεχασμένος θεός
Αέρας Σιρόκος, της Αύρας εχθρός

Ίσως έχω..
Αφήσει ένα χτύπο καρδιάς να χαθεί
Στα χέρια σου μέσα ξανά κοιμηθεί

English Translation:

Ten thousand stars in front of me
light-blue drawing pins keeping my dreams
True
Carefree

Between my lips I hold a piece of spearmint
I close my eyes and see the world
With colors
Transparent

Maybe I am..
a ray of light, a forgotten god
the air of Scirocco, Aura’s enemy

Maybe I have..
Let a heart beat get lost
fallen asleep in your arms again

Winner of Euskal 2008! 😉

What in the heaven’s name just happened to the last.fm playlists?
On one hand, we now have the ability to create more than 1 playlist. On the other hand, now only the subscribers can actually play those playlists, and that is only if the playlist contains at least 45 tracks and 15 different artists!! As you can imagine I’m not happy about that at all! On top of that, what really ticked me off last night was that I noticed the new 200 track limit, which has already been applied on ALL playlists, even the ones that had been created before the updates. This of course means that large parts of some of my favorite neighborhood playlists have simply been annihilated. No backups, nothing. So now I have 5 playlists which I can do very close to zilch with, and I can no longer go swimming in the mighty playlists created by my friends.
And just to make my mood even darker, obviously the flash playlist player widget no longer works either… it did till 2 days ago… grrrrrrrrrr!!
So, anybody else sharing my mood?

Awwwwwwwwwwwww Wall-e melted meeeee! =) Well, yesterday I finally stole the time to go and watch the Wall-e movie which I had been waiting for…for… forever pretty much! And it was so worth the wait! =) This was probably one of the cutest animated movies that I have EVER seen in my life. Both the main characters, Wall-e and Evaa [Eve], were simply adorable, and the general plot was pretty neat too. I’m not going to say more since I want to avoid spoilers. I can only say this: don’t miss this movie! =)
Now I’m going to wait and see if I can get my hands on the toy robot that I’ve been reading about on Gizmodo. 😉

For the past few weeks I was constantly bumping into articles here and there, talking about the new last.fm beta and all it’s cool and new features, and of course that it would be available to the website subscribers. Well, I’ve been using last.fm for the past 2 years and can call myself a pretty serious user, although somehow I never found it necessary to subscribe, and I never have. So I guess you can imagine my sheer surprise when yesterday morning I received an invitation to the beta, regardless of my status. No clue how this happens, but I’m glad I got the chance to have a look inside, cause there really are some very cool changes. =) So let me see, where to start…

I guess I better start with the part that is the most important to me, the user profiles. When I first logged into the beta, it took my eyes a couple of seconds to get used to the lack of some of the previous version’s eye candy. There’s a very plain red strip on the top of the page which I’m not the biggest fan of, but perhaps that’s the only part that I’m not a fan of. The first thing that _really_ took my attention and put a smile on my lips, was the answer to my prayers, a perfectly working playlist player on the right column. YAY. YAAAAY. And guess what, my Loved Tracks are now actually good for something as they’re playable through the playlist player. This means that I can get much better a view of what my friends really consider loved music and not just frequently played music, and vice versa. [Yes, I can actually see everybody’s profile on the beta…] The charts are still there, only with more options to play around with. And now there’s something called “Library” that contains information about your listening habits, every artist you ever listened to and the track counts. The Library is customizable, you can have it show whatever you’d like, and it looks great too.

The artist pages also look neat and pretty much the same as user pages. Generally the information is a lot better organized, and it’s much easier to use features like tagging or making a recommendation. Both user and artist profiles have an “activity feed” lower in the page which again, is a pretty neat fature.

Not all the features are working as of yet. As you can see in the screenies, Videos, Charts and Events are yet to be added. But from what I’ve seen on my 1st day, I can say that last.fm did manage to make an even  bigger fan of me than I already was. Way to go guys, and thanks for inviting me. =)

Well well well, I was notified this morning by Optimus [thank you!] that the actual entries for the IDC 2008 are finally released and ready to be voted for. And I have to say, oh boy, aren’t they awesome! I mean I started with the Cocoon demo and the music caught me right away, and of course the graphics were nothing short of marvellous. Then the Firlight & TBL demo with those cute little buttons [dude, I want some of those! =)] and the scary dissolving faces gave me round eyes. Next was the MFX demo and it’s cool style, I specially liked the beginning of this one. Then came the Inque demo with again fantastic music, and all the orange juice. I mean they even have ASD labeled orange juice. 😉 Last but certainly not least was the beautiful beautiful Still demo. The music is just otherworldly, and the visuals, oh, the visuals… no words, I’m speechless. As I mentioned before, Still always has a way of making me happy. =)
So, big Kudos to all the competing teams, and now it’s time for you all to go and see the demos for yourselves. You can either watch the demos on the IDC website, or download the real-times here. Enjoy. And, well, wish me luck too as I have a competition of my own to face, tomorrow. =)

=””( I read the news last night on GateWorld. Don S. Davis, one of my favorite actors, and the player of the role of General Hammond, one of my favorite Stargate characters, passed away on the 29th. It appears that the cause was a severe heart attack. This made me very very sad….

I’ve been using RSS Bandit as my feed reader for a few years now and I’m a big fan of it. I even posted an article about there here [in 2005], and I like it now as much as I did back then, or even more. The cool thing is, apparently these folk never stopped working on the project and making improvements to the software, and now as a result, there’s RSS Bandit Phoenix. This is a new version of RSS Bandit who’s alpha installer is now available for download through the RSS Bandit Website. Phoenix has all the old Bandit goodies, as well as a whole bunch of kool and new features that make it even more of a joy to use. So whether you’re already a Bandit user or you’ve never heard of it before, and if you’re as much of a feed freak as I am, do check Phoenix out. =)

The great sea battle off Cape Trafalgar in October 1805

So, the martial discord randomness meme got me too. =) I have been tagged by Hrafn Thorisson to come up with 7 random facts about me and post them here along with a random photo of a martial discord [above].

Of course I have to mention the rules:
1. Link to your tagger and post these rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 facts about yourself on your blog, some random, some weird.
3. Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they are tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.
5. Present an image of martial discord from whatever period or situation you’d like.

Now we have a technical glitch. =P I can’t exactly tag 7 people for this! Why you ask? Because I already did! =)) Less than a year ago, Optimus passed something to me that was similar to this meme, and at that point I asked “who wants to do this?” and I ended up tagging every English speaking blogger I know!! So I’m afraid I can’t have them do it again, although the rules are different and so I’m writing this. [There may be overlaps though! =P] So I guess I’ll leave it open. If there’s anyone who would like to re-write this, let me know! Or maybe I’ll figure out who didn’t write it last time. =)

As to my own 7 random facts… there we go:

1 – When I’m asked about my origins, I usually say “Persian – Welsh”, cause those are the major 2. But if I go into the details, the answer will look more like this: “Persian – Welsh – Turkish – Indian – Russian”. =) Oh, I also am legally Canadian.

2 – When I had just turned 9, one day in school the comp-sci teacher of the high-school kiddies caught me messing around with QBasic in the high-school computer lab. And that’s how my coding career started. [She started teaching me stuff and….]

3 – I have a sort of an affinity with the colour blue. I loved the colour ever since I was a kid [apparently it was the first colour I showed reaction to as an infant], which is why my friends put the “Aasemoon” nickname on me. Aasemoon is Persian for sky. [And I love height too!]

4 – I hate coffee with a passion. And everybody I ever come across, guess what, loves coffee!! My friends, family, colleagues, class-mates and school buddies…. somebody rescue me!

5 – I love LEGO. I’ll never grow out of this. =)) I still buy LEGO, build stuff with LEGO and enjoy it. Yeah.

6 – I’m an optimist by nature. I believe in a higher power at work and I believe that everything happens for a good reason.

7 – I’m a proven and recognized musicphile. I listen to music from morning to night, while working, studying… doing whatever it is that I may be doing. I enjoy almost all genres, types and styles of music, and I can effectively change my own mood or improve my energy levels using the right combination of tracks. I’m however not an audiophile, because although I love high-quality sound, but I enjoy music regardless of what sort of device its coming out of.

Ok, that’s it. Now since as I said I can’t just re-tag everyone, if you’re up to writing this, give me a shout and I’ll tag you! =P

So today’s supposedly the FF 3 download day, but up to this moment I haven’t been able to get a hold of Mr. Firefox 3 due to apparent server overloads. I mean, come on, when you get _that_ many people to actually _pledge_ that they’re going to download the same thing on the same day, why wouldn’t you see to it that they actually _can_ do what you so badly want them to?

What I would like to know right now, is whether any of you, dear readers of this blog, have actually been able to download the oh so popular FF 3. Let me know if you have! =)

Update: Late at night I was finally able to download FF3. What makes me very very happy is the fact that the problem with Silverlight is solved! Yes! Silverlight now works with FF3.