I have to be upfront about this: I HATE music videos. I like to listen to my music without the unnecessary baggage of some music vid director's "vision" (which oh-so-many times don't have anything to do with the lyrics, or simply ruin the song, period). My imagination is vivid enough, thank you very much. If a song cannot stand on its own two feet without eye candy, it goes straight to my recycle bin.

On the other hand, I must also admit that not all music videos suck. Some are pretty good (enough that I don't feel embarrassed watching them), and there are a rare few that are actually brilliantly done. Which brings me to the latest vid from the "new" Nightwish. I honestly expected to groan, but it was pretty cool, and the song wasn't half-bad either. Enjoy.

Here's the playlist I assembled with Deezer, a service located in France. From my end of things, it streams audio just as good as ProjectPlaylist, Imeem, and Finetune (except on a few tracks). It probably has less selections than Finetune. Still, there were enough to keep it interesting. As with the previous playlists, I scrapped the EMBED and OBJECT tags and replaced them with a call to SWFObject.

Some tracks don't stream for some reason (although they play in my Deezer account), but most of them do. From what I've read in their forums it seems that other people are having similar problems.

Finetune features an attractive player, and building lists with it is a breeze. Unfortunately, you are limited to three songs per artist/band, per playlist, which in turn can have no more than 45 songs (so each playlist will have a minimum of 15 artists).

I'm having trouble getting the player buffer the tracks smoothly (if they buffer at all). At first I thought it was my mediocre connection, but it plays smoothly in the Finetune website... so the problem lies probably elsewhere. Mea culpa. The problem was that I added the flashVars "pinst" incorrectly. The music now streams very well.

It's a pity that one cannot display a complete list within the player, but must cycle through all of the songs in order to see what's in it, or by opening a new window to my Finetune profile. This gives the player some minus points in useability IMHO, but I still like Finetune quite a bit, enough to put it in second place next to my currently favorite freebie, ProjectPlaylist.

Again, I switched the EMBED tags given to me by Finetune with a call to SWFObject.

After playing with ProjectPlaylist I decided to make a profile in Imeem.com and see how it compares. The following test playlist features the Metal/Hardcore band Killswitch Engage (warning: if you dislike growls and such, don't play it; if you don't mind that, you'll find it one of the most listenable hardcore bands around, with overall positive lyrics that actually MEAN something):

OK, pros and cons, first the cons. I find Imeem a bit slower to load than ProjectPlaylist, and building playlists didn't feel as intuitive or as customizable (you can skin ProjectPlaylist's player, for instance). However, unlike ProjectPlaylist, Imeem lets you upload your own songs to your account. ProjectPlaylist only adds songs already available on the web. In other words, you'll have to host them elsewhere. It goes without saying that to do that, you'd need authorization from the artist, of course... unless you want to join the ranks of hardened criminals that the RIAA has convicted, such as grandmothers and 14 year-old kids. The real pirates must be laughing in their jacuzzis every time news like that pops up, but I digress.

Another thing is that I could use Imeem's embedding code as given to have it playing in IE7, FF2, and O9, while I had to tweak that of ProjectPlaylist to make it work in IE. I'll probably scrap it later and use SWFObject anyway, both to get rid of the deprecated EMBED tag and so that visitors don't have to click on the object to "activate" it in Internet Explorer (you can thank that dumb Eolas lawsuit for that).UPDATE-- already applied SWFObject to the playlist.

I'll try to find the time to play with other two music playlist services, namely Finetune and Fiql, and test them it in my blog. [Update: changed my mind about Fiql; unlike the other playlists I've used so far, one has to purchase the songs to be able to have them permanently in Fiql's playlist. Yeah, I know, I'm cheap. However, Fiqul does allow you to submit song titles to generate MUSIC VIDEO playlists. Since I'm not really interested in music videos, I'll leave that for later.]

Just playing around with ProjectPlaylist, building a small collection of favorite songs.

There were two problems with the script that ProjectPlaylist gave me: (1)it used the deprecated EMBED tag to place Flash content and, (2)for some reason, I wasn't able to see the Flash content in IE7, but no problem at all on Firefox 2 or Opera 9. After much headscratching, I decided to scrap 90% of ProjectPlaylist's embedding code and use SWFObject instead, and it worked beautifully. I had to style the bottom images so they looked flush to the bottom of the player, but they need more work. I don't like them having a white background for obvious reasons, and the only thing you can change in ProjectPlaylist is the color of the buttons, and not the background of the buttons. I guess I'll have to make my own.

[Edit: I made my own buttons and they blend better with the blog and the playlist. If you want to see how it looked before, click on the small thumbnail on the right.]

Now, I do not know yet if the problem lies with the code itself, or the code combined with b2evolution (the application I use for my blog). I'll check that later.

One thing I disliked about the ProjectPlaylist Web site was the forum's glaring lack of a search engine. IMNSHO, a forum without a search engine is absolutely useless. Of course, I could use Google's advanced options for that (and I did), still I find it a severe omission.

Well, the pictures are the same, but the engine that runs the general gallery is different now.

I switched from the Menalto.com Gallery to the much lighter and far simpler ZenPhoto. Don't misunderstand me, I love the Gallery project a lot, but I always felt it was overkill for my insignificantly small gallery.

ZenPhoto was a breeze to install, mere minutes. Integrating the gallery with my site, well, that's another matter. It wasn't overly complex, but it took hours of trial and error to get it all done. My previous experience integrating both Gallery and b2evo helped me a lot with that. I still have to tweak a few things, but I like the results... it even loads faster than Gallery.

I considered using it for my personal portfolio to simplify things even more, but I think I'll leave it as it is for the time being.

Once I finish tinkering with ZenPhoto, I should work on the Links section to make the PVII tab script blend better with the page. I never liked leaving it so blindingly white against the dark blue background.

Swedish Chef FTW!

Probably the only thing about the Muppets that I truly miss. Well, maybe Dr. Bunson Honeydew and Beaker too

I've been a four-eyed geek since childhood, and I'm also a heavy PC user. There have been some studies linking heavy computer use to eye disease. Now, what can a heavy user like me do to lessen the burden to my eyes? Maybe this is nothing new to most of you out there, but it is something that has been going around inside my head for some time, especially since I'm not getting any younger.

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I had to ask my web host to rollback my site to an earlier version.

Therefore, many customizations I've done through the months were gone. It took me some time to put everything back the way it was... but at least the site is functional again.

I also lost some blog posts but, like they say, Google is your friend. I found a cached Google page of my blogs and restored them from it. Then I will do what I should do more often: backup my databases.

My thanks to Ian at Arvixe for all the help.

Added a few works to my portfolio of illustrations: three recent horror-themed drawings colored in Photoshop (two of them unfinished), and several pencil sketches of yesteryear. The Illustration and Design portfolio is currently a mixed bag of sketches, illustrations, and page design, and I'm seriously considering on splitting it on three discrete parts.

I also edited the comments corresponding to the "Fantazine" mockups in the Portfolio, adding information on the authors of the photos and illustrations I used to compose the pages in InDesign. I should've Googled for "Fantazine" as well, since I discovered the name was already being used (not that I was too surprised to find that out). Still, it's an imaginary mag, so it's no big deal (I hope).

Also, I'm planning on scrapping the Gallery application used in my gallery, switching it with something simpler (such as the slick-looking Zen Photo). After all, there aren't that many illustrations there to justify using something so feature-rich (or complex, or bloated, depending on who you ask) as Gallery or Coppermine. I like Gallery and Coppermine quite a bit, but I have to be practical about this. Also, the growth of the gallery has stalled since the friends I asked for samples of their work are either too lazy, too busy, or both, to contribute to it. Yeah, I'm talking about YOU Carlos.

Well, that's about it for today.

Posting the YouTube vids of my niece made me realize I hadn't implemented a way to showcase images on my blogs. I didn't want something as exuberant as yet another gallery (the site already has one, two actually if you count my portfolio), but neither I wanted to just plop an image in my blogs without finesse. Thus I installed Lightbox. I'm going to test it with a promo for the Iron Man movie.

I've used this countless of times and still think it's a cool script.

I also adapted Scott Schiller's excellent rounded corners dialogs to the blog section. I discovered Mr. Schiller's tutorial a couple of weeks ago, and I simply feel in love with the visual results. I wasn't 100% sure if I wanted to keep that look or just experiment with it, but I like the way it make the blog section look less, well, like a blog... so I'll probably leave it as it is now.

NOTE: this is a backup copy of the original post and the Lightbox plugin is not yet functional so please don't click on the image until I find the time to fix it

NOTE 2: OK, now it works. It turns out that the Lightbox2 plugin conflicted with another plugin (a Gallery plugin) which ALSO installed Lightbox elsewhere. It's so nice when things just work.

My niece always surprises me with how talented and smart she is. Having her whole life ahead of her, she has the potential of becoming a great illustrator and multimedia expert if she keeps at it.

Heck, I'm biased of course, and proud of her, and when she, out of the blue, without having any previous experience, and under the nom de plume KakashiFanGirl, just whipped her first YouTube vids, well, I couldn't help but to post them here (make sure to pump-up the volume in the YouTube player).

Her first AntiSasuSaku vid (AntiSasuSaku= slang to describe people or works that reflect a strong dislike of the initial pairing of the character Sasuke and Sakura in the Naruto anime).

Mood music: I'm sick, by one of my currently fave alt-metal bands (and openly Christian to boot), Flyleaf.

Her second AntiSasuSaku vid.

Mood music: Losing Grip, by Avril Lavigne (before the BrineySpearization of her image... ok, I know, low blow...)

If you are not familiar with either the Naruto manga or anime, you'll probably won't understand her vids . Made more sense to me than 99% of MTV videos though.

My friend and fellow artist Javier Lugo posted at his site that he was on August 25 at the Comics World signing in Largo, Florida, showcasing his work and networking with other artists. Looks like he had a great time over there.