Japanese Theme Songs Part Four

With this latest entry, I'm just revealing the kind of person that I am. Yes, it's another electronics store theme song. Yes, I am a typical male in that I love my toys, despite currently not owning a cell phone or wrist watch, so shoot me (and I have ex-girlfriends who would probably jump at that chance so wait in line).

This installment's theme song comes from Yamada Denki, a slightly lower rent version of Bic and Yodobashi. The unique thing about Yamada is that you can actually barter for a cheaper price, just like in old school markets. When I went camera-shopping with a friend, she was hemming and hawing and the staff member said that he could take the price down US$100 or give her double member card points. She ended up getting the price down US$50 with double points.

One thing not so unique about Yamada is their theme song. Though cute, it's not much of a musical stretch from their competitor's theme songs as you will soon hear:

Finished

A late happy tax day to everyone. If you are like me, your "economic stimulus" payment check is paying for your taxes. Good job to the U.S. Government! Why not just save the stamp that will be used to mail my check and apply it to my taxes next year?

A little news, if you happened to follow my CD-ripping escapade last post (if not, here it is), you might be happy to know that I'm finished. Well, I'm happy anyway. So, here's a screen cap of the final tally:
56.6GB of space used. Far less than I expected.

One thing that I discovered during this whole ordeal: it seems that, in the earlier days of CDs, several Japanese record labels did not label and tag tracks. I'll assume this is because they thought there would never be a way to rip data from the discs or, for some reason, didn't feel it was important enough. Either way, I found about a couple dozen discs pressed in Japan that I bought over there around '97 or '98 which ripped as unknown artist, unknown album, track #xx so I have to go through each track and relabel it. Doh!

In contrast, I only found one U.S. pressed disc which was not properly labeled and tagged and it's one of those free magazine promo mix-CDs.

What is this...Spring...Break?

So, it's Spring Break and, in the grand tradition of this celebration of the Vernal Equinox, I'm in Mazatlan slurping down my sixth Corona and off to the daily wet T-shirt contest. And, hey, it's only 10:30 in the morning so plenty of time to hit the Red Hot Chili Peppers concert then a kegger before evening. Come nightfall, I'll be rolling on the sand with my tongue entangled with a hot undergrad (heck, make that two).

Sadly, though, the cake is a lie. No co-eds, no keggers, no beach, like a lot of other students, Spring Break just means the usual amount of school work: preparing a group presentation, two teaching evaluations, a teaching self-reflection, a reading evaluation, a paper rewrite, and a take home test. Yup, that's right, there's a real college student out there in Mazatlan chugging down the Corona while I'm here at home sucking on the lime.

Spring Break hasn't been all that bad, though. I've been able to catch up on some of my non-school related reading and even played a video game here and there, something I rarely get to do nowadays. Another project I started was converting my CD collection to MP3. I recently picked up a 500GB external hard drive and been working toward filling it up with all of the music that I've collected over the years so, every time I sit at my computer, I pop in a disc to be ripped into my ever growing MP3 collection. Winamp claims that I'm up to 395 individual album artists, 656 albums, and 5209 tracks and I haven't even finished half of my CD collection yet! The funny thing is that I have several CDs that I don't remember buying at all. When I was in Japan, I did make it a point to try and get as many rare jazz, funk, and hip-hop as possible but there are a lot of things that I wonder if I even listened to. If you want to follow these CD conversion shenanigans, you can do so on my LastFM account page here. You're going to find a lot of obscure and interesting stuff in there, I guarantee.

Speaking of LastFM, hope you all enjoy the radio widget I put up over on the sidebar. I'll be putting a custom playlist up as soon as I can gather enough tracks. Be sure to crank your computer speakers up to 11 when I do.