30-Day Song Challenge: Day 02 – Your least favorite song

>> The 30-Day Song Challenge <<

It was a bit challenging thinking of a song I really disliked. It's pretty rare for me to say that I dislike a certain song because I usually just consider it as "not my type" instead. But I was able to identify 2 songs for today's theme. The first is "Apologize" by OneRepublic and the second is "Sorry 2004" by Ruben Studdard.

The first time I heard "Apologize" playing on the radio it sounded fine until I heard the chorus - "It's too late to apologize. It's too late." It just sounded so wrong, for me, because I don't think it's ever too late to apologize. So there, I don't like the idea of the song, but the infinite times I've heard it on the radio made the song grow on me. I don't dislike it as much anymore, but I still disagree with the idea of the song.

Similarly, I don't agree with the idea of "Sorry 2004". Okay...I just realized that both of these songs I'm talking about are about saying sorry, haha, weird. Anyway, at first listen you'll just hear a guy apologizing for all the wrong things he's done. So, what's wrong with that? The reason why I really dislike this song is because he apologizes in advanced if ever he messes up again in the future. Wtf!?

30-Day Song Challenge: Day 01 – Your favorite song

>> The 30-Day Song Challenge <<

It's difficult to choose a favorite song, especially since new songs come out almost everyday. At one point in my life "Brown Eyes" by Destiny's Child was my favorite song. "Stellar" by Incubus was another favorite, as well as "Aozora no Namida" from the Blood+ anime.

I chose this song as my favorite song because it was the first thing that popped into my mind. The song, by itself, is already awesome, but additional awesomeness is added when you watch the music video.

The energy that the song has is just amazing. One part of the video struck me was when the girl said:

"Some people believe in God, I believe in music.
Some people pray, I turn up the radio."

30-Day Song Challenge

I've seen several Facebook friends doing this and it seemed interesting enough when I first encountered it, but I was too lazy to start my own list. Basically, the idea is to choose a song, for 30 days, matching the theme or topic assigned for each day. It's a pretty easy task, I hope, and will help in adding more activity to my blog.

My 30-day song challenge starts today!

If you're going to start or are already doing your own 30-day song challenge, comment below and tell me so I can take a peek at your list, too.

Here's the list of themes:

• Day 01 – Your favorite song
• Day 02 – Your least favorite song
• Day 03 – A song that makes you happy
• Day 04 – A song that makes you sad
• Day 05 – A song that reminds you of someone
• Day 06 – A song that reminds of you of somewhere
• Day 07 – A song that reminds you of a certain event
• Day 08 – A song that you know all the words to
• Day 09 – A song that you can dance to
• Day 10 – A song that makes you fall asleep
• Day 11 – A song from your favorite band
• Day 12 – A song from a band you hate
• Day 13 – A song that is a guilty pleasure
• Day 14 – A song that no one would expect you to love
• Day 15 – A song that describes you
• Day 16 – A song that you used to love but now hate
• Day 17 – A song that you hear often on the radio
• Day 18 – A song that you wish you heard on the radio
• Day 19 – A song from your favorite album
• Day 20 – A song that you listen to when you’re angry
• Day 21 – A song that you listen to when you’re happy
• Day 22 – A song that you listen to when you’re sad
• Day 23 – A song that you want to play at your wedding
• Day 24 – A song that you want to play at your funeral
• Day 25 – A song that makes you laugh
• Day 26 – A song that you can play on an instrument
• Day 27 – A song that you wish you could play
• Day 28 – A song that makes you feel guilty
• Day 29 – A song from your childhood
• Day 30 – Your favorite song at this time last year

Windows Command Prompt

I can get pretty OC when I'm in the mood. Since giving Jex his new Creative X-Fi2 for his birthday I've been trying to organize my music collection. Folder structure, filename formatting, album art - these are some things I've been thinking about in my quest for file organization.

For those who are curious, I use Mp3tag to modify the tags of my mp3 files. I used to use Helium Music Manager, but it was too bulky for my purposes, and buggy, too. I only wanted a tag editor and Helium was a full-featured music player and manager, so I uninstalled it.

I like how simple Mp3tag's interface is and how quick and easy it is to edit tags and rename files. Only recently did I discover that the explorer context menu can be enabled upon installation. Having a context menu in Windows explorer makes it so much easier to selectively manage your files, instead of waiting for a long time for your whole music library to load in Mp3tag.

The biggest issue I encountered was managing album art. It's not that difficult managing the album art using Mp3tag. You can set album art via files on your computer or from online sources, like Amazon. For some reason, though, even when I already manually set the album art of some files another image shows as the album art. And this same image is also what is displayed as the album art of other files. It was really annoying so I researched and found that I can get rid of the problem by deleting all the hidden image files, possibly, being referred to by the files for album art. Good, I like starting with a clean slate. So...how do I do that for each and every folder in my music collection without going crazy?

The answer: Google. Nah, actually the answer is the Windows command prompt. But Google was still part of how I created the solution because I suck at memorizing attribute syntax.

Beijing Part 3: 2nd Day

Dongzhong Street

East Gate Plaza is the service apartment we stayed in during our Beijing vacation. It's located along Dongzhong Street in the Dongcheng district of Beijing. It's around 45 minutes to an hour away from the Beijing Capital Airport 2. The area reminded me of the inner streets of the Makati CBD (Central Business District), except with wider roads. It felt like a nice area to live in. It was clean, had small shops and food places, near the mall and subway station, and, overall, felt like safe place. If ever (though, I doubt it) I get sent to Beijing for long-term work I'd like to stay in this area.