Hey people.

I haven't updated in a while and no one took part in the lyric/band matching contest so no one wants that shake from Culver's eh?

Well, stuff has been pretty boring as of late. Cousin Felice came a couple of weeks ago and she looks bored. Her face looks bored, her arms look bored, her legs look bored, even her stance looks bored. I don't blame her for being bored. It sucks being here in the good ol' U.S. of effing A. You have to drive everywhere. What's missing here are some colorful characters. Like the pure heart of Chrissie, the awesomeness of Pam, the rebel side of Kat, Wency's drunkeness, Ramon's subtle homosexuality, Tita Mimi's awkward nature, Powie's hilarious laughter, Ambé's thievery, and the asshole-ness of Furby. That's what's missing.

In other things to talk about, just saw Park Chan-Wook's Joint Security Area. I was bound to be underwhelmed after watching his masterpieces Oldboy and Sympathy for Mr. Vengenace but Joint Security Area ranks up there among the best of Asian cinema. It's close to the greatness of Oldboy but misses it by a couple of notches.

I wonder where all my cousins have gone (except for Felice, because she's here DUH). I no longer see them on Yahoo! Messenger or MSN Messenger. Hey guys, if you guys are still there, give me a comment or something. We haven't spoken in a while.

In other other things to talk about, when Felice arrived she was given a Video CD. It was kinda like the small notebook that Pam made for Christian and myself when we left the Philippines. It was cool to see it and the ending made me laugh out loud. Most of the comments about Fifi were in Tagalog and while I was trying to read it and translate Tagalog --> English but it was going too fast. My brain was getting tired just by reading those comments. I think I saw a "You're cool" comment in there somewhere, I think.

In other other other things to write down and talk about, music CDs now are mastered horribly. I was reading an article on how albums now are mastered loudly. Too loudly in fact that some subtle qualities of the recording are destroyed. To find out if a recording has been mastered badly, I used ReplayGain on Foobar2000 on each and every song I have. If the song goes past the track gain of -9 (i.e. -10, -11, -12) decibels then it's badly mastered. -8 decibles is really pushing it in terms of loudness and fidelity but -9 db is the cutoff. I think the best mastered album I have right now is the Batman Begins soundtrack. The second best mastered album I have is the Norah Jones album. No wonder she won all those Grammys a couple of years ago, she has a beautiful voice and it's mastered correctly. The worst albums I have that are horribly mastered are Garbage's "Bleed Like Me" album at -13 db, Keane's "Hopes and Fears" at -12db, and Linkin Park's "Hybrid Theory" and "Meteora". Linkin Park has among the worst mastered songs ranging from -10.1db to -16db! The best mastered track of Linkin Park's has to be "My December" which has a ReplayGain master of -6db. I think it's still LP's best song lyrically, musically, and emotionally.

Finally, one more thing to say. If you haven't read my brother's blog yet, it's pretty funny what happened to him and Melanie and a goddamn little spider. I was sitting the seat in front of Christian and Melanie and I began to hear Melanie making a noise. "A spider!" She began clutching at Wency's arm as it began moving at the top of the minivan. I asked my mom for a piece of tissue to kill it with and when I tried to grab it, it fell next to Melanie. Melanie's body clutched my brother's so tightly. The funniest thing was that Christian was horrified as well. He was clutching onto his side of the van so hard. Man, you can't write this shit up.