Articles
Scarlett Johansson's Anywhere I lay my head
Until a week or so ago I didn’t knew about Scarlet Johansson’s steps into music. It isn’t rare for actors to do a cross-over to a musical career, most of the times with very bad results. Anyway, it isn’t strange, specially when the actors have all the fame and media attention Scarlett gets, and not just for having a pretty face (and even more awesome body), she is famous for being a talented actress.
When I found about her album I thought it was going to be just a commercial junk like the ones any regular blond sings on MTV. Then I found that her 2008 record was full with Tom Waits singles and that even David Bowie sang backing vocals on two songs and came to the conclusion that I could be an interesting album. After listening it once I thought it’s not that bad, then I listened it again and thought it’s not bad at all, and just after the third time I came to the conclusion that it is in fact a great album.
The album was produced by Dave Sitek and he did a great job with the music creating the perfect atmosphere for every song. Scarlett did a good job too. It’s always hard to sing a Tom Waits song, even for Tom Waits. For once is good to hear Tom Waits with a sweet soft voice like the one Scarlett has, but there are times when she sings with a low tone too. Her voice gets a little lost on Sitek production, something that doesn’t let her standing very well, but it works for the album.
Scarlet doesn’t have phenomenal voice, it’s more like a regular tunned voice but overall Anywhere I lay my head is a record to have an listen every once in a while.
Checkout my review on Scarlett Johansson’s Debut Album on Associated Content.
Posted by the one who pulls the strings on Tue, 25 May 2010
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Associated Content, a place for freelance writers
This may be the first of the “making money online” series of articles. A few weeks ago I found out about Associated Content, a site that pays freelance writers for their articles. At first I didn’t think about writing an article for them, mainly because I didn’t think it would be published. A few days ago I was reading an article (precisely on Associated Content) and decided to give it a try.
The first thing I did was to gather as much information about AC as I could to get an idea of how the site works. They have a few guidelines for publishing articles, but basically all you need to do is write about something (it could be anything) in minimum 250 words (they recommend to keep the articles between 300 and 500, I recommend you to write at least 400 word per article), in either english or spanish, submit it and wait for the article to be reviewed.
There are two ways of making money with the articles, one is to request an upfront payment and the other is to get just performance payments for your articles. The upfront payment means that you’ll get paid when you publish an article, they don’t pay much, I have just published my first article (recommended reading: Simple Steps to Make Money at ReviewStream.com) and they paid me 2 dollars, not much but it is a 400 word article that I wrote in about 30 minutes. And there are the performance payments too. AC pays you about 1.5 dollars for every thousand views of your articles, that too sounds like a little but it’s really not that bad, specially considering that if you publish an article requesting an upfront payment you’ll get performance payments too, so if your article gets a lot of audience you’ll make a lot of money too.
So, what do you think about Associated Content? It isn’t a way of getting rich one day to another, but it could be a nice way of setting an income stream that will give you some money month after month. If you are good at writing don’t think much about it and just join Associated Content and start making some money there.
Posted by the one who pulls the strings on Sun, 23 May 2010
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Forgetting useful information
I’m an electronics engineer and a true electronics hobbyist. One of the things I enjoy the most is programming PIC microcontrollers, or at least I used to do. I’ve been working for two years now and at work I’ve never needed to code anything. Now we’re in the need of controlling one room’s temperature and I though on programming that controller into a PIC so I fired up the newly installed MPLAB IDE 8.5 and start writing code.
I remember I have to define some header file here… but was it with include or with list directive? I just can’t remember!
Good thing I had all my notes (and that lost blog) to remember how to write assembly code…
Am I getting old?
Posted by the one who pulls the strings on Tue, 27 Apr 2010
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MIT OpenCourseWare
A few days ago I found out about MIT OpenCourseWare, wich is an initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to make all the materials from its undergraduate and graduate level courses online, available to anyone using a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike license. The material includes, among other things, audio, video and lecture notes from the courses. You can access to all the available courses or just the most visited ones.
The MIT is not the only institution with an initiative like this, many others around the world are doing the same or at least something similar. And also there is the OpenCourseWare Consortium wich groups a large number of Institutes and Organizations with OCW activities.
OCW are nothing new but I didn’t knew about them and maybe there are others didn’t knew either. They are a great way to have access to education, although you don’t receive any certification at the end.
Right now I’m checking MIT’s 6.00 Introduction to Computer Science and Programming as taught in Fall 2008, sure I’ll learn lots of new things.
Posted by the one who pulls the strings on Thu, 1 Apr 2010
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Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds Guitar Tabs
I was just wandering on the internet when found this site, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds Guitar Tabs, full of guitar chords and tabs of Nick Cave’s songs. Now I’ve work to do over the weekend!
Keep it rocking!
Posted by the one who pulls the strings on Sat, 27 Mar 2010
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