Willo O'Brien

Also posted are photos from the Continental/Heavenly States show we hit on Thursday night. Oh, and some more of Mr. Fuzzy Pants himself :) I even have a few videos of him going crazy over his mouse if anyone’s interested. I emailed the link to his die hard fans :p

UPDATE: Photos posted from 4 different shows – Kings of Leon, Scissor Sisters, So So Many White White Tigers and Erase Errata

Wednesday night, my girls Hez, Misty, Jem & I rented out a studio in SOMA and rocked out! It was sooo much fun. My first time setting up a drum kit all by myself, the first time playing with other people not to mention the first time anyone but my drum teacher seeing me play! It was GREAT!

We (they) chose to play Rock Your Body by Justin Timberlake. I had never even heard the song, and was laughing at the idea, but everyone raves about his new album – and actually that song has a pretty funky beat! The drum part was pretty easy for me to learn, albeit I sorta tossed out the 2nd bar that had this crazy bass drum part that was a little too complicated for my level :) but I’ll get there!

Hez & Misty had played a few songs together before so they would play those and Jem did really good about picking up the chords for it on the spot. Jem won’t tell you for months after you meet her (haha) but she’s been in a couple bands and has been playing for years. She’s destined to be a rockstar!

So ya, overall it was just so fun to play and goof around. We took some vids & photos, wanna see? I’m kinda excited to show my friends (and my momma :) the vids of me drumming, since they might normally ever see me play for who knows how long. Granted, I realize I’m totally new – but to me it’s way exciting even to have these beginner skills. I wanted to drum for so long and I get absolutely giddy behind a set, so it’s fun to feel like I’m getting better!

We’ll be playing again soon, minus maybe Misty who’s headed off to Korea for a few weeks… but we’re all pretty excited to play together and learn some songs and mess around… there’s no better way to learn! Plus, who wouldn’t want to be trapped in a small room with these 3 hottie girls? :p

Jeff just showed me the coolest thing: Amazon has these photo directories, so you can basically walk down a block and check out the restaurants! Want to eat at Suriya Thai (really yummy, near my house), check out what it looks like! Use the Yellow Pages search in the left to find the restaurant you’re looking for. They’re still matching up the photos to the locations, so you can help them out if you are familiar with the area. Either way – this is neat! (Read here how they did it, and what cities have it.)

These movies look good:

• Born Into Brothels
• The Chorus
• In the Realms of the Unreal
• Bad Education

I also want to see The Woodsman, A Very Long Engagement and What the Bleep Do We Know? All of these movies are playing at Landmark Theatres in San Francisco.

Anyone see any of them yet?

:::

As for bigger boxoffice movies – I still haven’t seen (but want to!):

• Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events
• The Polar Express: IMAX 3D Experience
• The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
• In Good Company (might be a rental)
• Closer – which I’m seeing tomorrow night at The Parkway in Oakland with Lucia! And then racing back here to hit Kings of Leon (ticket pending :)

stupid me didn’t buy my tix and now it’s sold out! garrr!

Can anyone sell me 1 or 2 tickets to this show? It’s Friday night at Slims.. and even 1 is fine cuz I only care about myself – muahahhaaa. (Just kidding, 2 would be cool cuz I do know of someone else I could wrangle into joining me.)

THANK YOU in advance! :)

P.S. My show calendar is updated (FINALLY!):

http://calendar.yahoo.com/sillywillo

I’ll warn you it’s slanted towards shows I’m interested in, so if you don’t see something on there it’s because I’ve already seen them, don’t want to see them or don’t know who they are. Let me know if I’m missing anything ‘not to be missed’.

I can’t seem to find where I can find a “buy” link for this awesome Orange Peel Milk sweater. That Leslie is such a tease! And she’s BRILLIANT. Shit, looks like art school did somebody good! haha Be sure to check out her beats!

Have you seen my photos on Flickr? As you can see, I don’t use it much, as I use Fotki for all my photo needs, but it’s a REALLY awesome site, and an absolutely impeccable example of the brilliant ways you can use flash!

Anyway – another fun thing on flickr is to check out all the tags. See all the photos under the “willo” tag? There you can see Eric posted a shot of us using the iSight tonite :) We virtually geeked out!! :) It was awesome. Also in there are a few shots Jason Shellen took of me at MacWorld05 that are really cool, because his camera is so NICE!

Oh, so Eric’s shining tip of the day for me was to solve my problem of wanting to have the finder window expand all the folders in it at once… and ta-da! He *enlighted* me that you just select the ones you want to do that with (in my case Select All) and hit the command with the arrow right or arrow left. YAY! I often want to cut & paste contents of my iTunes folder – or of a folder of artists/albums I’ve put on a disc. This is exactly what I needed!

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Recently I was realizing my Firefox was *really* buggy – so I exported my bookmarks and started brand new! And it’s FABULOUS!!!! Muuuuuuuuch better. So then tonite I got extensions happy – as I knew there were a bunch out there I didn’t have yet – and I have GOT to tell you about The Coolest Extensions for Firefox! :)

• Auto Copy – Often the only time you select text on a site is to copy & paste it somewhere else. This automatically copies whatever you select to the clipboard. I’m not sure I can stop my hands from doing the apple+c anyway, though :)
• Dictionary Search – I had this on my previous Firefox installation and I use it ALL the time. Love it.
• ColorZilla – this is RAD if you’re a Web Designer! Quickly grab hex#s, or the width of an object on a web page! FYI a paid tool of this nature, that looks pretty sweet, is XScope
• Download Statusbar – instead of the downloads window in Firefox, it’s in a small bar at the bottom of your Firefox window. Very cool if you’re like me and you get sick of either having the download window in your way, or what not. This keeps it all within the same window.
• Copy Plain Text – For Web Designers like me that just need the text sometimes and want none of the formatting that is associated with it. (often depends what you’re pasting it into, but handy if it comes up to not have to first paste it somewhere else, copy it again & THEN paste it where you need it… you dig?)
• downTHEMall – THIS IS THE COOLEST THING EVER!!!!!!!!!!!!!! So say you want to go to a band or a label’s site and download all the MP3’s they’re offering up (linking to). This does that!!! Do what I did and add a filter called “Music” and put the file type .mp3 in there & then when you hit the downTHEMall link again, select it as your filter & it will *automatically check all the mp3’s* (SO COOL!) and you hit download & wala! I even have it set to notify me when it’s done – that way I can go import them into iTunes and listen away! :)
• GooglePreview – When I saw this I just *had* to try it.. And it’s cool!! Instead of having to click over to a site, you get to see a little thumbnail of it right there on the search results page! NEAT!
• Sage – I haven’t tried this out yet, but found I don’t use my BlogRolling list anymore since it doesn’t seem to work as a sidebar on mac – so I’m looking forward to checking this out!
• TinyURL Creator – I heart tinyURL’s.

I meet a man who is: sexy, athletic, quick-witted, open minded, music loving (of course), creative, FUNNY (funny is a must for me), taller than 5’10”, loves animals, is good with kids, has an entrepreneurial mind and a good paying career, relatively fashionable, did I mention loves music? (preferably near the range I like and wants to hit live shows), fabulously geeky (aka knows his way around the internut and a computer), emotionally stable, and loves to have fun…. and he wants to:

• Swoop me up & take me to The Sundance Film Festival this weekend. I’ve never been & it sounds fun!

• Join me for SXSW in Austin, as he too needs a cohort to go out all night doing what we both love to do best: drink beer and watch live music! and then sleep in to do it all over again the next day. AND he would love to hit the Interactive and/or Film part with me too.. AND money isn’t too much of a concern (we’re fantasizing people!)

• Join me on one of my escapades overseas!

(more of my “what I’m looking for in a man” are listed out in the comments)

Emailing w/ my friend Lane today about SXSW, I was telling him how I might forgo that trip this year and spend that money getting my ass overseas (FINALLY). It’s been too long since my last trip to London/Spain in ’98 (!) and since I hit shows all the time here, and don’t exactly have a true show buddy to join me in Austin, like I did last year.. I am thinking: TRAVEL!

So Lane asked where is it I would go, which was great cuz it made me write it down. Again, I would love to find a good travel buddy – so we’ll have to see what shakes out there – but I’d say these are at the top of my list:

Brazil
Japan
Amsterdam
Greece
Ireland
Thailand
Indonesia

2nd tier:
Turkey
Italy
Paris
Vietnam
Africa (somewhere)
Central/South America (somewhere)
Australia or New Zealand

I LOVE Spain, but already went there, so I need to hit a few more countries before I can go back :) However, I also want to make a trip to NYC and Toronto – and Vancouver! And New Orleans – and I’ve never even been to New England, Boston or the Grand Canyon!!

Umm ya…. why again aren’t I independently wealthy yet so I can just travel ALL the time? :)

Dance To The Underground from the album “Live At Southstreet Seaport, NYC, 13.08.2002” by Radio 4

I’ve been pretty sick this week, but amazingly my spirits are very, very high. I’m feeling great about life! woohoo!! Pretty wild really, when I haven’t had a voice for 2 days, and I’m hacking up… well, you get the idea. Through it all I’ve been giddy and truly enjoying every minute of my pajamarama party I’ve been having here in the comfort of my sweet little home. yay for homes!

Alright, so besides some work.. I’ve been playin around with some more iTunes “now playing” goodies. I checked out Kung-Tunes (thanks leen!), but it looks like it has sort of died and the wave of the future is in AudioScrobbler. However lastnight, when I was messin around with it all, I was listening to 97X (streaming radio) and since it’s not sending out correctly formatted songs in iTunes, AudioScrobbler would accept it. Which sucks, really, cuz I’m listening to a lot of great tracks through them! And also that means it wouldn’t work with my other fav internet station, Bagel Radio. Total bummer! I probably listen to streaming radio a good 3 days/week, so it’s a bummer it won’t report that – but oh well!

Alright, so Kung-Tunes doesn’t care about the reporting, so it would at least report that I was listening to the station (which is placed in the song title field), so then I was thinking maybe I’d craft up some PHP include to display my last 5 songs on my site. And then I tried to do that with the AudioScrobbler for awhile, too… and basically I’m too much a geek for my own good here. I want it, but I want it to be customized the way *I* want it. And after trying a couple things and not having them work, and then trying a couple more things and not having them work – and being a total newbie PHP person – long story short, I looked back at my pretty AudioScrobbler page and said, aah to hell with it – that’s good for now. So without further ado – check this page out to see what I’ve been listening to!!

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So guess what?!?! Me and my girlfriends are getting together at a recording space and playing tomorrow night!! My friend’s Misty & Hez on bass and Jem on guitar and me rockin the drums!! Kick ass, huh? I’m STOKED. Unbelievably we’re going to play Justin Timberlake’s Rock Your Body. HAHAAA! I had never heard the song before downloading it & grabbing some tabs for it, but it’s got a pretty funky beat. I’m excited to just play with these hottie girlfriends of mine. It’ll be the first time I’ve played with anyone else – let alone having anyone else *see* me play besides my drum teacher!! Should be fun!!

I also made a quick CD of other songs that would be fun to learn the drums on. Most indie music type songs are relatively the same beat structure, so I’ve got that down pretty good, and I have been practicing doing fills and some open high hat “accents” (for lack of a better term), and it’s been fun! I totally feel like I’m getting better and am so psyched because recently had that big huzzah of “oh my god, if I commit myself to learn something and go for it – I can actually learn it and get better!” hahaa I know that sounds simple, but faced with this challenge I was sure I would never get it, ya know? So it’s so incredibly kick ass for me to feel like I’m making progress. YAY!

At the time of this post, my iTunes was playing:

Harnessed in Slums from the album “Vee Vee” by Archers Of Loaf