So Kanye, Lupe, and Pharrell put out this track as CRS on Kanye’s new mixtape “Can’t Tell Me Nothing”. It’s nice, even Pharrell’s verse! Na, Pharrell makes tight beats but his lyrics usually end up a little wack but Kanye and Lupe can help him out. Apparently, Lupe leaked some info to Billboard a while ago when he told them he was working on a “top secret project” with “another superstar rapper and someone who is a rapper/producer”.

The mixtape is one of the best mixtapes I’ve ever heard, so check it out if you listen to hip-hop. If you can’t find the official mixtape on a corner near you, the scene release was Kanye_West-Cant_Tell_Me_Nothing_(The_Official_Mixtape_Mixed_By_Plain_Pat)-(Bootleg)-2007-C4 and it’s probably on most torrent sites, albeit transcoded and retagged all to hell.

When I first listened to the mixtape on Sunday. I was going to write a review for each track but I was feeling ill and I ended up sleeping for the next 20 hours. The whole thing kind of flows together through different artists and even genres. It made me wonder why its only hip-hop (and R&B to some extent) that uses mixtapes as form of marketing when I think it could be used in most other popular genres to a degree.

Here is the CRS track, if it’s still on youtube. I seriously hope that they actually go through with a full album or even an EP.

This page has some good old print ads. Here is the best one (please let me know if it doesn’t show):

During my first year in Seoul, South Korea television crews visited the institute I worked at, Daechi Wonderland, several times. On this day, they wanted to shoot a video of my class. So I got to be on Korean national TV doing “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes” with some of my kindergarten kids.

My Korean is pretty awful so I don’t know what the report is fully about but I’ve been told that its pretty negative.

http://customnews.blogspot.com/2007/05/photos-people-lived-here.html

The Google Photos Screensaver is pretty damn nice! I don’t really use Flickr or Picasa Web Albums so all I care about is showing photos from a local directory. Actually it may be better than Slickr, especially because their API key is currently expired! Why don’t they have it in an encrypted file on the website and that gets automatically imported when a key expires? You would have thought the developer would have learned by now. It has been expired for 6 days.

I wish I could complain about such lack of planning, my projects have gone nowhere for a month or so. I think I might play with some of that Slickr GPL’d code sometime soon.

UPDATE: Slickr is actually very, very nice. Slickr outshines Google when it comes to panning and zooming, by far!

Unsurprisingly, I don’t remember the first time I walked the whole 70m to buy beer from a vending machine from my apartment in Japan. I miss being able to buy fresh Asahi beer for 200/220 Yen only 2 minutes from my house on foot.

Here is a Google Earth Folder with more details. And here is an image for you lazy non-nerds:

This article just proves how different Japan is from the rest of the world. As much as I love Japan, it can definitely be a crazy place.

UPDATE: Someone is a genius…