REACTIVEradio

This weekend was absolutely killer. It was only 2 days long, but it seems like I accomplished so much.

Friday, other than going grocery shopping, we all just chilled out at home. In fact, I’m pretty sure I was in bed before 10pm, if you can believe it. There was no particular reason for my drowsiness, but regardless, I’ve matured enough to know that going to bed early is fine.  And so I did.  I slept, then I slept some more. Then I slept even more just to make sure I had it down. By the time I had woke up, I had been asleep for damn near 14 hours.

I woke up so refreshed, that within 15 minutes of waking up, I decided that I’m going to start training for the half-marathon rollerblade race on May 24. So I laced up my boots, and took off for a brisk 2km ride. Of course I had all but forgot that mainland Bermuda is about as flat as a mountain isn’t, which meant that while the first kilometer was mostly downhill, the return kilometer was almost all uphill. Eventually I made it home, sweating profusely, but nevertheless, I had done it. Other than the extreme lack of oxygen my lungs were now experiencing, I felt fantastic.

After relaxing for a bit, Matt and Hazen woke up and we made our way downtown for the customary 2 egg breakfast at the bistro, followed by some shopping. While downtown, Sarah (our British nanny friend) saw us from across the street and came over to chat. She was just bumming around downtown too, so we invited her to tag along while we made use of the beautiful day by spending it inside a bunch of different shops.

I picked up some tea towels for the kitchen, because I am sick of only ever having one clean one to dry dishes with. I picked up a whole new outfit, consisting of some Liz Claiborne grey and white pin stripe pants, a nice black belt, some Tommy Hilfiger socks, and a really nice white Calvin Klein shirt. I looked at some blue Dolce & Gabbana leather shoes (the color looked like denim) but after seeing the $620 price tag, relegated them to my next month list. I also managed to buy a cowboy hat  from Makin’ Waves (first of all, cowboy hat in Bermuda? and secondly, if anyone down here could pull off a cowboy hat, it’s me) after Vane and Joel told me it suited me, which may or may not have had something to do with the fact that I hadn’t shaved in nearly a week.

After doing most of our shopping, we stopped at a second hand furniture store on the way out of town to look at some beds, as Matt was getting sick of me sleeping on his futon, a fact he never failed to remind me of daily. I found a really comfortable futon, and just as I was paying, Matt called us up (he had just lost the invitational poker tournament that he’d been looking forward to for months) and met us there. I paid for the futon, and he bought 4 kitchen chairs for our previously chair-less table, and a dresser for his bedroom. $65 to get everything delivered that afternoon; not bad.

We got home and just relaxed after our long day of walking around, anxious to get our new furniture delivered. In preparation for their arrival, we brought Matt’s futon out of my bedroom and to living room (to bring our total living room futon count to 2), and after putting it off for the past 3 months, mounted our projector to the ceiling so that people wouldn’t trip on the cord.

We barbecued hotdogs and hamburgers (well, I barbecued; they just ate them) and out of seemingly nowhere, my ex-fiancee Ashley sent me an MSN, to say hi. After nearly two years of being apart, it was weird talking to her. Not because it seemed foreign, but rather the opposite: it felt like no time had passed. We ended up talking about how much our lives had changed in two years, and how well we were both doing. Funnily enough, we both mentioned that even though we know that we’ll never get back together, 2 years later we still think about each other daily. I guess first loves are like that.

Saturday night was rapidly approaching and after taking my gramma’s advice (which was conveniently written in her Christmas card to me) and toning down the amount I’ve been drinking (if you’ll notice, we only went out once last weekend, and once again this weekend), we got all prettied up to go out. (I feel as though I should mention that I made it a point to wear the cowboy hat out to the bar. Not because I feel like a cowboy or anything, I just felt like being different.)

We got downtown and were going to head into Legends (the sports bar in behind Flanagan’s) to watch Hockey Day in Canada, but the entire place was full to the brim with people watching the NFL playoffs. We decided that we didn’t feel like hunting around downtown for a place to start off our drinking so the four of us (Hazen, Matt, Sarah, and I) just walked back to Flanagans and sat out on the patio and had a couple drinks and just talked about random things, like the 1km race that was taking place this weekend.

We finished our drinks, and walked down Front Street to Square One where we got our drinks from the bar but yet again decided to sit out on the patio. Here’s where things get interesting. A girl who was inside with a bunch of her girlfriends came outside to ask about the cowboy hat (why? who? etc.) and after making some small talk, had her bring all her friends out. We had a table of about 10 people all hanging out and drinking, when I made the smart (read: stupid) decision to do shots. And when I say shots, I don’t mean those girly passionfruit/mango schnapps shots or whatever, I’m talking “GET MY SOMBRERO BECAUSE JOSE’S HERE!!! ARRIBA!!!” shots.

A shot of tequila later (well, one plus one for good luck) and everything tastes purple for a second.

It was at this point that things start to get a bit hazy. I know sometime after the tequila, we migrated one door down to Cafe Cairo. I remember sitting at this really cool, really low table with Moroccan decorations all over.

And then I remember being at home. (Score this one: Memory – 1, Justin – 0)

Anyways, I figured I’d deserved a good night out from all the stuff I had managed to get done earlier that day. Plus, I knew that Matt and Hazen were going golfing Sunday morning (which was apparently hilarious, because it’s an 18 hole, par 3, and even though Hazen scored a cool 120, he managed to hit a freakin’ duck in the process) so I knew I could sleep in.

Long story short, I didn’t sleep in, but I woke up feeling like a hundred bucks. So I got up, cleaned up almost the entire kitchen (did the dishes, etc), cooked breakfast for myself and Sarah who had stayed the night thanks to her scooter being at our place, and spent the rest of the day being lazy. We half-watched a movie we had of this Irish comic Dylan Moran doing standup, in between glances to our respective laptops doing whatever happened to grab our attention at the moment.

All in all, I’d say it was a great weekend. Apparently, Matt got the number of one of the girls who came to talk to me about my cowboy hat (and if Matt actually kept it, she must be damn hot), Hazen hit a duck with a golfball, and I have my own bed.

Now I just need those shoes.

This is just a quick note, but Google just posted that they’re working with the New York Stock Exchange and the Securities and Exchange Commission to be allowed to have up-to-the-second last price quotes available throughout their website cloud. That means that instead of having to either pay lots of money for an up to date ComStock feed, or being left with the 20 minute delay every other site has, you’ll have the most recent prices to make your trading decisions with.

More info here.

I am 23 (soon to be 24).  Of those 23 years that I have been walking, breathing, and generally being a drain on society, I have been DJing for almost 11.  I remember living with my dad in Calgary, with 2 Realistic (Radio Shack’s house brand) turntables with faux-wood finish, a pizza box in which I kept my 5 or 6 records, and a crossfader that I somehow jerry-rigged into working.

I remember in Grade 10 at Central Memorial High School making my first ever “mixtape” which consisted of perhaps 9 or 10 songs, where I attempted to beatmatch, but failed miserably.  While it didn’t phaze me back then, I would distance myself as far away from that recording if someone brought it up to me today.  The songs were a mash of dance, trance, and hip hop, which anyone under the age of 30 could tell you should never ever be mixed together.

The reason I’m writing about this today is that this weekend, I managed to compile every single set I’ve ever recorded (except for one which I’ve yet to track down a copy of) on to my Zune (Microsoft’s answer to the Apple iPod).  This anthology is a collection of the mixes I’ve recorded over the better part of the past 10 years, which has given me some serious perspective on how far I’ve come in a hobby that originally started because my friend had a turntable in his house that we would pretend scratch with when listening to Foxy Brown – I’ll Be on repeat.

If nothing else, I’ve at least mastered the art of beat-matching.  For those not “in the know”, beatmatching is what a DJ does to a record that he’s about to play so that the beat matches the speed of the record already playing, which allows the DJ to literally seamlessly mix from one song to the next.  When done correctly, the listener shouldn’t have any idea that the song has even changed; it should just flow from one song to another.

It sounds like it should be easy enough to mix a 4 on the floor beat (4 on the floor is a beat in the basic pattern of: bass drum – hi hat – bass drum – hi hat), but being able to adjust a record making 33 revolutions per minute do 32.9999 to make up for the slight differences between record presses for example, is quite a daunting task when you first approach it as a newbie DJ.  Slowly but surely though, you figure out when a song sounds too fast or too slow, and you learn how to compensate accordingly.  It’s a long task, but it’s an incredibly proud moment when you have two records playing but sounds like only one.

Finally, you master the beatmatching, but then you move on to measure-matching.  Measure-matching is the art of getting not only the beat to match, but whole musical measures/phrases.  This is important because like all music, each dance music sub-genre has it’s own structure.  It’s important to figure this out (although it’s usually not too difficult to decipher if you listen to it enough) because by knowing the structure of the music you’re playing, you can plan out when a bassline is going to cut out of one song so the bassline of the next song will start immediately after, providing the listener with an uninterrupted supply of the full range of audible frequencies they’ve been experiencing for the past X minutes/hours.

I guess I just think it’s kind of funny how 10 years ago I thought I was the hottest DJ to ever walk God’s green earth yet couldn’t mix two records to save my life, yet nowadays I could take two of the most unrelated records and mix them well enough to not sound like boots in the dryer but I wouldn’t even put myself in the top 10,000 DJs in the world. 

Which brings me to my next question: is that maturity?  Going from thinking you know everything and actually not knowing anything, to knowing a lot and realizing you don’t know anything?