Mark’s blog

Barack Obama's Victory Speech in Iowa

nobody@vox.com(Mark) — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 00:06:35 -0600

I am usually very apolitical, but I really liked Obama's win in Iowa tonight (well, I guess it is early Friday morning as I type this, but you know what I mean). I thought his speech was really good. I watched it on CNN and actually got chills watching it. I hope he does well in the other states, too.

Obama's victory speech in Iowa

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An M.I.A. Birthday

nobody@vox.com(Mark) — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 21:46:36 -0600

Well, I have posted these pictures and videos in various ways on the internet already, but I might as well organize it all here. I went to Borders in Austin, TX on my 30th birthday (11/3/2007) to see M.I.A. signing CDs. I actually got there way before she did. She was supposed to be there at 4pm, but she got there closer to 4:40pm. Here are the pictures from that event ...

M.I.A. signing stuff at Borders in Austin, TX

Mark and M.I.A. at Borders bookstore in Austin, TX on 11-3-2007

I told her that I was going to her concert that night (at Hogg Auditorium on UT campus in Austin), and that it was my birthday so she signed my Kala CD booklet like this ...

I used my little Canon PowerShot SD750 to take video and some pictures of the concert. The videos and pictures did not come out that great, but you can make out what is going on.

Here are some pictures of the concert ...

Here are some videos (this is not all of them because most of them cannot be uploaded because they are larger than 50MB. Give me a break, VOX! Who has videos nowadays that are smaller than 50MB?) ...

Here is a video of M.I.A. singing "20 Dollar" that I could not upload to VOX or YouTube (I don't know why I couldn't get it to upload to YouTube ... every other video was uploaded to YouTube ... even really large ones) ...

Here is a link to the YouTube Playlist I made of all of my M.I.A. concert videos ...

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=6B05B2A2FB6447CF

I can also embed it ...

There are 23 videos of the concert on YouTube that I uploaded. The coolest one is the Sunshowers video, I think.

M.I.A.'s opening act was The Cool Kids who did not impress me that much, but maybe they sound better on their album. Rye Rye also performed with M.I.A. She is a young girl from Baltimore who raps very quickly.

OK, that's all I got for now.

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Austin photos

nobody@vox.com(Mark) — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 00:03:16 -0500

Here are some of the photos I have taken of Austin in the last two weeks ...

The above photos were taken at Town Lake Park (or maybe it will be called Ladybird Lake Park one of these days) on October 7, 2007. The park is very new. There were water sprinklers going, which you can see in a couple of the pictures.

The above photos were taken on October 20-21 at Mt. Bonnell Park, Town Lake Park/Pedestrian Bridge, Mansfield Dam, and Lake Travis (near Volente kind of). My sister was wondering what the red plant was at Mt. Bonnell Park. I have no idea.

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Video of M.I.A. performing "Paper Planes" on Late Show with David Letterman

nobody@vox.com(Mark) — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 19:18:15 -0500

Here is the video of M.I.A.'s less than great performance of "Paper Planes" on David Letterman (9-13-2007). She had to take out the loud gunshots from her song, and I think her heart wasn't in the performance because of this censorship. Thanks a lot, Late Show producers!

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M.I.A. on Perez Hilton's 2007 VMAs show on VH1

nobody@vox.com(Mark) — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 10:41:00 -0500

The quality of this video is very bad because I used my digital camera (Canon PowerShot SD750) to record the segment this morning off of TV. I know some people know how to hook their TV up to the computer to capture flawless video quality, but I have no idea how to do that. Anyway, here is the video on YouTube and I also uploaded it to VOX ...

M.I.A. on Perez Hilton's 2007 VMAs show on VH1

And, yes, Perez annoys me to no end, but I will give him points for having M.I.A. on his show.

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Little City Tunes

nobody@vox.com(Mark) — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 17:27:07 -0500

My friend and I went to Little City, a nice coffee place in downtown Austin, last Sunday. I really liked the music they were playing. Here are the songs ...

01 The Letter

Box Tops

The more I listened to this song, the more it reminded me of another song. I finally figured out what song it was. See if you hear the similarity ...

Butterfly Collector

Garbage

A cover of "And I Love Her" by The Beatles was also played ...

01 And I Love Him

Esther Phillips

The last song that was played is one of my dad's favorites(but I like it, too) ...

06 Alone Again (Naturally)

Gilbert O'Sullivan

We also went on top of a parking garage and took some cool photos of Austin ...

It was pretty cloudy that day.

For the Fourth of July, we went to the same parking garage to watch the fireworks at Zilker Park/Town Lake. I couldn't get my camera to go into the correct mode so all of my pictures came out bad, but the video worked ... sort of.

Fireworks in Austin, TX on 7-4-2007

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