I know it’s been a long time since I last  posted a music video. I said I wanted to do it weekly and it’s been months. Sorry about that! I’ll try to do this more often.

Lyrics:

Propaganda death ensemble
Burial to be
Corpses rotting through the night
In blood laced misery
Scorched earth the policy
The reason for the seige
The pendulum exchange the blade
for strafing air blood raid

Infiltration push reserves
Encircle the front llines
Supreme art of strategy
Playing on the minds
Bombard till submission
Take all to their graves
Indication of triumph
The number that are dead

Sport the war, war support
The sport is war, total war
When victory's a massacre
The final swing is not a drill
It's how many people I can kill

Be dead friend from above
When darkness falls
Descend onto my sights
Your fallen walls
Spearhead break through the lines
Flanked all around
Soldiers of attrition
Forward their ground
Strategy prophetic age
Old in its time
Flowing veins run on through
Deep in the Rhine
Center of the web
All battles scored
What is our war crimes
Era forever more
War

Propaganda war ensemble
Burial to be
Bones shining bt the night
In blood laced misery
Campaign of elimination
Twisted psychology
When victory is to survive
And death is defeat

Sport the war, war support
The sport is war, total war
When this end is a slaughter
The final swing is not a drill
It's how many people I can kill

Yes, ladies and gentlemen. We had the honor to go to the house where the all mighty and powerful Rafy Van Halen lives and plays his music. Here is a video of him showing us his magical powers on the plastic guitar.

Just amazing, isn’t he? Powerful moves!

Thanks to María José for the video!

Mwahahahaha!!!! You just wait!! Mwhahahaha!

I’ll explain this later on.

University of Puerto Rico in Humacao band, ready for a concert

Today, I will visit the past. In a few weeks’ time, Universities in Puerto Rico will celebrate a sort of Olympics-type competition called Justas de la LAI (Liga Atlética Interuniversitaria, or Inter-university Athletic League). As expected, most of the bands will participate. This year we, the University of Puerto Rico’s Humacao Campus Marching Band, got the chance to go for the first time and participate with the other bands (Mayagüez and Ponce campuses, along with another one I’m not sure which… I’ll update this later!). We each have to make our entrances with our teams as we would do by default in any random activity we do but the different part about all of this is that we will have a sort of intermezzo made of a few members of each of the bands. Today is the first practice for this intermezzo; it will be held in UPR Mayagüez Campus.

Now, here’s the thing. I studied for one year in the Mayagüez Campus. I loved it. I came to Humacao Campus for my second year and didn’t stop praising the Mayagüez Campus for nearly three years! I never felt I was a part of the Humacao Campus until just recently… and still have doubts. What I was studying there is so much more like me than what I’m studying here. Surely, one changes course over time and, since life works in mysterious ways, I now have a love / hate relationship with what I’m studying… but that’s not what I wanted to talk about here.

Yesterday, while working, I told my boss about this, that we’re going to visit El Colegio (as it’s called). Her reply? “Do come back, please. I don’t want you to fall in love all over again. We need you here.” Right… I hadn’t thought about that since she said it. Crap! But, you know, I’m trying not to worry. I’m going with *my* band. This band has certainly become a family to me. If I have to say something that makes me go to college happily, that I do my best in and actually enjoy… well, it’s got to be the band.

But, I don’t know, I’m just here rambling. Don’t know what got into me. I’d surely love to feel like this more often because I actually get to blog, hehe. I don’t know, I just feel weird. Hehehehe.

It is now 5:34 AM and I am getting dressed to go to college. The band will leave to Mayagüez (located in the west side, the other part of Puerto Rico) at 6:30 AM. It’s normally a two-and-a-half hour trip… but since we’re going in a bus, I think, it’ll take lots of time longer. Yes, I’m prepared: iPod is fully charged, with new games and the whole of the Watchmen graphic novel series in the Photo Gallery (lol); I’m also thinking of taking my Electric Circuits book to do exercises… you know, just for the heck of it. But, I don’t know, I’d surely fall asleep since I’m so tired.

Okay, I will call this a blag: blah-blah-blog. Take care, all!

Do you have any experiences in life that are something like mine? Are you afraid to go someplace that might make your feelings go on a roller coaster ride?

It seems the new fad in Facebook is to create Notes with 25 random things you can think about yourself and tag your friends so they can learn a bit about you. Well, I did one of those a few days ago. I was so bored, I ended up writing a couple more than asked for. Just for the heck of it, here they are:

1. I have three “first names”: Raúl Antonio Mario. Raúl is for my father, Antonio Mario for my grandfather on my mother’s side, Domingo Antonio Mario.
2. I’ve worn glasses since I was in first grade, if I’m not mistaken.
3. I once had light blue glasses which I considered being too girly for me. I was in first or second grade. I’m not sure if I lost them or “lost” them.
4. The oldest memories I have are of the day my grandmother on my mother’s side had a heart attack. I remember being at the entrance of her house with some family and neighbors calling my grandmother’s name and her not answering their calls. Dad climbed onto the wall where my grandmother’s room’s windows were as if he were Spiderman: “Está ahí, está en la cama, está ahí”: she’s there, she’s in bed, she’s there. House door was taken with with an axe, I think. Then she was carried away to the hospital. A neighbor of hers a couple of houses down carried me while I saw the ambulance drive away. This was the first day I ever played with LEGO bricks. I was four to five years of age.
5. My shoe size is 13. I’m actually a 12.5 but since that size doesn’t really exist in stores I have to buy 13.
6. I’ve been using computers for ~17 years now.
7. First OS I ever played around with: MS-DOS.
8. I remember telling my mother about what I wanted for Christmas and seeing her type away on the computer. I was amazed at how fast she typed. I was ~5.
9. Computer OSs I’ve used: MS-DOS, Windows (3.11, 95, 98, 98 SE, ME, NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Vista, 7], Mac OS [7, 9, 10.0 beta, 10.0, 10.3, 10.4, 10.5], Linux [Ubuntu 6.06-8.10, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, gOS 1.0, Fedora Core 8-10, Damn Small Linux, Yellow Dog Linux, Linpus]. I don’t remember others.
10. I’ve owned three computers: two desktops (Dell, Intel Pentium I 200MHz, 32MB RAM, 2GB HDD, Win 2000; Dell, Intel Pentium 4 HT 2.6GHz, 512MB RAM, 80GB HDD, Nvidia GeForce FX5200 128MB, Win XP Pro) and one laptop (MacBook [2,1], black, 13.3″, Intel Core 2 Duo 2.0GHz, 1GB RAM [currently at 2GB], 120GB HDD).
11. I love kids.
12. I’ve worked at my college’s summer camp three times already and am shooting for a fourth one this summer.
13. I play bombardino or baritone horn. It’s a type of brass instrument. I’ve been playing it since ~2001.
14. I’m learning to play the sousaphone and tuba. I will be the sousaphone for the University of Puerto Rico in Humacao marching band.
15. I learned to play music with maestro Germán Peña Haddock. I also learned a bit from maestro German Peña Plaza, his father.
16. I’m a self-declared geek: band geek, technology freak.
17. I love Star Wars.
18. For years I’ve dreamt of designing a car. Pagani brought my dream to reality when they released the Zonda: just like I had dreamt it! (RIP, Zonda)
19. I suck at fighter games.
20. I love zombies.
21. I hate receiving spam. Email, IM, text messages, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, blog comments, phone calls. I hate them all.
22. I love dragons.
23. I love capacitive touch screens; hate resistive touch screens.
24. I would love to own an T-Mobile HTC G1 with Google in white.
25. My current workstation is an IBM ThinkCentre connected to a 17″ IBM ThinkVision CRT monitor. This is the longest time I’ve used an IBM computer.
26. I used to want to work for IBM. And NASA. And Lockheed Martin. Now, I don’t know where I might end up.
27. I love Twitter. I’ve been using it for two years now.
28. I love movies: comedy, action, animated, kids, horror.
29. I passionately love cars.
30. My all-time favorite cars, in random order, are: Ferrari F430 Scuderia, Koenigsegg CCX / CCXR, McLaren F1, Nissan Skyline GT-R R34 V-Spec II / Nür, Lamborghini Gallardo LP560-4, Lamborghini Murciélago LP640, Caparo T1, Ariel Atom, KTM X-BOW, Porsche Cayman S, Porsche 911 GT2, TechArt Porsche GTstreet / GTstreet R… and the list could go on.
31. I never really liked the beach until I snorkeled in Culebra island on July of last year. Fell in love with it.
32. I’m a photography hobbyist. I’d love to practice more and become a professional photographer.
33. I have four cameras of my own: two film SLR (Minolta and Yashica), one digital point-and-shoot (Sony) and one digital SLR (Nikon D60, my precious).
34. My favorite colors are red and black.
35. My favorite colors for cars are bright red and dark / gunmetal grey.
36. I want to learn how to drive a Formula 3 car (yes, I said it right, Formula 3… Formula 1 is another thing).
37. I want to build my own kit car. My eyes are glued to Factory Five’s GTM Supercar, Type 65 Coupe and ‘33 Hot Rod. Incredible kit cars.
38. I type really fast when I’m on a comfortable keyboard.
39. I love orange Tic Tacs. I don’t buy them anymore though.
40. My favorite sodas are: Mountain Dew, Dr. Pepper, Coco Rico, Malta India, Sprite, Coca Cola, Cherry Coke (I miss it so much), A&W Root Beer, and Old Colony pineapple.
41. Whenever I’m at a hotel, I love to go fill up the buckets with ice cubes.
42. I’ve only eaten one Krispy Kreme doughnut. I fell in love with it.
43. I always have to drink a glass of water after brushing my teeth.
44. I love chocolate: milk, dark, white, almond. I like them all.
45. I sometimes wish I had the power of the Force. Yup, I’m a geek.
46. There’s been Internet at home since December 27, 1997.
47. My first wireless Internet experience was with a Mac and an AirPort wireless modem.
48. Some of my favorite video games are: Left 4 Dead, Portal, Super Mario World, Super Mario 64, Super Mario Kart, Super Mario Kart 64, Re-Volt, Gran Turismo 4, and Phantasy Star Online.
49. I started my first blog back in ~2001, following a recommendation by Alejandra Reuhel aka. Miss Narco / n3cr0phelia.
50. I hate it when people change lanes without using their turn signals.
51. I have a 16GB first generation iPod touch I like to call Satisfaction. It’s named after Benny Benassi /The Biz hit song, Satisfaction: “push me, and then just *touch me* til I can get my *satisfaction*,*satisfaction*,*satisfaction*,*satisfaction*,*satisfaction*”.
52. I want an iPod classic in which I can carry all my music collection (and others) around.
53. I’m compulsive with my Mac’s Trash. I can never see papers on the icon, so I empty it out constantly.
54. I’ve met some of my best friends *through the Internet*. That includes you, Awilda.
55. I love black and white photography.

More to come.

This is a good one for musicians like me. You know you need staff paper to write down your music on but you never have an empty notebook to annotate it all in. I should know, it’s happened to me before.

Well, problem solved, buddies! The guys and gals over at BlankSheetMusic.net have a Flash application that lets you create and print our your own staff paper, all for the low, low price of FREE!

Are you a musicican? Did this site help you out?

Read the rest of this entry »

Today I start a new series of blog posts directed at Mac users called OS X Tip. These will, as the name implies, offer tips that OS X users might find quite useful. I’ll compile a series of the handy tips and shortcuts you can use to make your OS X life more productive.

Today’s tip was something I found about just a few days ago. I had downloaded a .dmg file and needed to extract something from it inside Windows. Having my Windows 7 Boot Camp image running on VMware Fusion (more on this on a later blog post), I decided to mount the .dmg using VMware’s Choose Disk image option. Alas, I couldn’t: VMware doesn’t let you mount .dmg images! What to do now, what to do now?

I knew VMware could mount .iso files, so I searched around the Internet for a way to change .dmg files to .iso; gladly, I found what I was looking for and I’d love to share it.

I’ll demonstrate with a file in the Desktop, so, to make things easier for you, make sure you have your file in your own Desktop. Fire up Terminal.app and type

hdiutil convert ~/Desktop/filename.dmg -format UDTO -o ~/Desktop/filename.iso

Here’s a rundown of what we wrote:

• hdiutil  —  a command used to manipulate disk images (attach, verify, burn, etc)
• convert — what we want hdiutil to do; in this case it’s convert an image file
• ~/Desktop/filename.dmg — this is where our original image is located. The tilde is simply a time-saver that tells Terminal to look in the current user’s user folder (in my case, it would be /Users/ramcosca). Notice it ends with the file format .dmg!
• -format — this tells Terminal “Hey, convert the file I just mentioned to the file format I’m about to tell you!”
• UDTO — this is the specified format we will change it to. In this case, it’s a DVD/CD-R master for export.
• -o — telling Terminal “What comes after this command is the output file.”
• ~/Desktop/filename.iso — this is the location of the output file we wanted. Notice how it ends in .iso this time around.

Now, Terminal will work it’s magic and convert the file for you. It should look something like this:

Of course, this will vary from disk image to disk image. It depends on the content of the image, the size, the different parts for different OSs, etc.

Let me know in the comments if this tip helped you out. Also, if you have any questions you’d like me to answer, please do so in the comments!

I know you like movies. If you’re here, you’re family, and in my family we love watching movies. Now, the type of movie we see differs, of course, by the experiences in our lives, the non-movie things we like… you know, they differ by our personal tastes. For example, my favorite types of movies are comedies —especially digitally animated ones, à la Pixar—, action, adventure, and, although it’s only some, horror movies.

Drama, on the other hand, is one of those genres that I “meh” to. I seriously don’t like drama movies, I’m sorry. You have a compelling story to tell me, you have emotion, you have great scenery… blah. As previously stated: I seriously don’t like drama movies. Seriously.

 

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

I do have to say, though, some drama movies compel me. It’s all a mixture of great advertising posters, word-of-mouth, the trailers, the actors, even the titles. This is what comes in defense for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. It was the movie posters, the actors in it (Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett) and, yes, even the title which sparked my interest. I never got the opportunity to watch the trailers, though, so I had no idea what I was going to watch.

In The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which is based on a 1921 short story by North American author Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, you get to see life the other way around, in backwards motion. It’s a very… interesting proposition. Indeed a compelling concept. It’s a pretty long movie in comparison to most others at 2 hours, 46 minutes. Unlike other long movies, I never felt like the movie was feeling too long; I enjoyed every minute of it, never wanting the movie to end. I wanted more of the movie at the end… even though it was pretty obvious it had none. The movie ended. Period. I wish it didn’t. That’s how good it was.

 

The movie is rated PG-13 for brief war violence, sexual content, language and smoking. I give this movie five out of five stars: excellent and highly recommended!

I think I might have found the real reason why I want to buy Guitar Hero: World Tour. No, it’s not because it has some awesome songs that you can play with your friends. No, it’s not because the drum set is so awesome. No, it’s not because it’s part of the Guitar Hero franchise. Want to know why? Well, it’s real easy: Guitar Hero: Metallica. Take a look at the teaser video for the game. Clickthrough to YouTube for HD version.

The game will contain 45 songs: 28 will be by Metallica themselves, while the other 17 will be from Metallica’s favorite bands or bands which have influenced their style. It will be available for PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, Wii, and Xbox 360. Expect to see the game is store shelves in the first quarter of 2009.