Prestação da casa

Treze meses depois de ter comprado a minha casa actual fiz uma asneira de todo o tamanho: Fui ao meu home banking e pedi um extracto, filtrado apenas pelas prestações da casa.

E depois vi a evolução da dita prestação com a subida constante das taxas de juro.

Não sei o que raio é que me deu para fazer tal coisa. Que grande estupidez!

Não que eu seja totalmente irresponsável, eu sei bem o quanto pago pelo crédito, mas ver aquilo assim, tão linear (ou será exponencial??), tão organizadinho, sempre a subir, todos os meses…

Aaaaargh!

New iPod Classic

The new iPod is in da house!

I finally made up my mind for the 160GB classic. It was a no-brainer, really, as my music collection alone was more than the 60GB of the old one and on this one I will also carry my photos, videoblogs and so on and so forth.

It is slim, grey, heavy and has a nice engraving on the back with a line from one of my favourite songs (it actually took me a while to decide what I wanted engraved in it, you know?)

So the advantages of the new iPod are:

• My car supports it (haven’t tested it yet, but it should) so now I can operate it using the standard car-stereo controls, which is way nicer (not to mention safer);
• My music collection can continue to grow at it’s own pace without me being in constant need of deleting and moving stuff around to make it fit into the iPod.

Soooo, I now have an old 60GB iPod Photo (third generation, if I’m not mistaken) with heavy, heavy use, which is still in perfect working condition (appart from the scroll-wheel which sometimes stops responding and requires a locking and unlocking sequence to start working again).
This baby has been with me through thick and thin and I was considering keeping it for the sentimental value (of which it has a lot), but then I realized how silly that would, so now I have to find a good home for it.

Can’t wait for the new one to synch up so I can start testing it! (It will take a while yet, that’s for sure…)

Diary 2008-07-28

The Kings Of Convenience concert was very good indeed. I didn’t know their songs (heard them once on my friend’s iPod and that’s it) but I am now a convert of (at the very least) their live performances.
As I already suspected, this is a friend whose musical tastes I definitely have to keep an eager eye on, she knows her stuff! ;-)

Then the Lisbon Calling show was also very, very fun. Marillion was nothing special (they’ve lost me after Fish left anyway), but they play a good, tight show. The Stranglers are still as powerful now as they ever were and they rocked the house.
And then came the B52s. Now I am known for dancing whenever I like the music, sometimes even enthusiastically, but these guys got me dancing and jumping around like a maniac. Definitely the concert of the evening!
Meat Loaf, on the other hand was… Meh… The guy can’t sing anymore (but then again, could he ever really sing? And the show was more eye-candy than good rock, even if there were a couple-three good songs (mostly due to the band who are —for the most part— really good musicians).

Then yesterday, I had the best day of beach I had in two whole years! And in Guincho of all places!
We got there in the afternoon and there was not a breeze. None. In Guincho!
And to top it off, I spent an inordinate amount of time jumping around and body-surfing on the waves. With no wet-suit. In Guincho!!
When we left, at around 19h30, there were some ugly clouds coming in, but until then, what an amazing day at the beach.

Diary 2008-07-20

Last week things weren’t going so great (and I wasn’t doing anything much with my time anyway) so I decided to cut my vacations short and went back to work on Wednesday. It actually felt good to come back after a week (and change) away, I felt a whole lot more relaxed about work and things felt into place much easier, their relative importance much clearer in my mind.
It turns out I really needed that vacation, even if I did fill it with music and other tiresome activities. Tired body, much more relaxed mind.

Last night I finally went to the Meninos Do Rio bar, near Cais do Sodré. Didn’t stay long because I desperately needed to eat something before going to the club and they didn’t serve food at that late hour (huge mistake, I think, but they should know better than me, I guess), but even in the short time I was there I really liked the atmosphere. Also it is open in the afternoon, so it may be a good spot to stop by on the way home and lounge a bit, maybe even eat a burger when I can’t be bothered to cook. (Which is something I hardly do at all these days —at home, at least— given that I eat out almost every single week-day. It’s getting to the point where I’m beginning to miss cooking a little.)

Sadly I must report that after having been to Nr. II and trying out the ponchas, it didn’t do much for me. (Neither the ponchas nor the bar, but it was just a time-killer on the way to the club I was going to, so the bar part was not so bad)
I tried three different ponchas and didn’t particularly like any of them. After having been told so many times how great they were I was rather anticipating it, but in the end it just didn’t taste all that good to me. Sorry Under and Lua, I know you’ll be disappointed. ;-)
But then it turns out I’ll be heading out to Madeira for some vacation time in September, so maybe if I try them out right there in their natural habitat things will turn out differently.

The music school closed down for the summer, so yesterday was the last class of the year. Let’s see if I can keep the study-plan going strong until September, for the beginning of classes. If I do there’s a good chance that I’ll jump ahead by a level or two which would rock. So now it’s all up to my will power.
Oh dear…

This week I’ll attend both the Kings of Convenience concert on Thursday and the Lisbon Calling mega 80s concert on saturday.
I also plan to stop by Ondajazz on tuesday for the Big Band Reunion concert. I’m assuming they’ll close up shop (the band, not Ondajazz) during August, as they did last year, so I want to be sure to check out their show one last time before that.
Should be an interesting week ahead…

And now, after a thoroughly miserable day, the sun seems to be breaking out a bit, so I’ll leave the laptop and head out to the beach to see if I can at least get a decent sunset (which is still a couple of hours away, anyway).

Music Festivals of 08 wrap-up

So now that the season for the music festivals is over (for me, at least, because there’s still plenty out there to be enjoyed by those who can. The bastards!) ;-) here are my notes on it.

I attended both the second part of the Super Bock Super Rock festival (the part in Lisbon) and the Optimus Alive!08 festival. One particular evening I attended both of them. The stupidity of scheduling them both in Lisbon and on the same dates hasn’t yet ceased to amaze me (yes, I now all about the commercial interests at stake but no one can convince me that the pie wouldn’t be bigger for both of them if they did it in another way).

Anyway, on the 10th of July I went to the Alive! festival in the afternoon and stuck around until after the Rage Against the Machine concert and then took off to Super Bock Super Rock, where I still got to listen to Digitalism for some half-hour and then caught Tiesto’s full set (my main goal for going there).

Other than that anomaly, everything went really smoothly. I was devastated that Nouvelle Vague canceled (it’s the freaking third time I fail to see them live. Come on! Someone’s got it in for me for sure. A friend of mine told never to try and go to a Nouvelle Vague concert with her again because she would really like to see them and it seems it is impossible to do so when I’m around. It broke my heart!) ;-) but as far as Cansei de Ser Sexy is concerned I couldn’t care less that they didn’t do the show.

In the end, then, this is what I took from the festivals.

What I liked (and already knew I did)

• Iron Maiden - UP THE IRONS! (not much else to say, read it here);

• Vampire Weekend - They sound just as good on stage as they do on record and they put on a decent show. Can’t wait for their second album to either fall completely in love with them or to forget them;

• Rage Against The Machine - You want to know what dynamite is? This is it!

• The Gossip - What can I say? I liked them last year and I loved them this year. For this I was definitely front-and-center, where the action was;

• Ben Harper - I’m a fan, so there’s not much I can tell that won’t sound like fanboy-ish praise. It was good. As it should be and it always is (this was my third concert). Dig it;

What I discovered and was a good surprise

• Hercules and Love Affair - Good beats, very interesting sound. A friend-of-a-friend told me they sound even better with Anthony (of the “Anthony and the Johnsons” fame), but they were not with him there and I still liked them. A must-check, for sure;

• Tiesto - voted best DJ in the world six years in a row…
  Well, I don’t know about that (I was really expecting something outstanding because of this factoid —what, I don’t really know), it didn’t blow me away all that much but it was still a very good set, it kept me dancing until the very end.
  But that ending was really weird, I guess he either had to stop because it was time (he stopped at 05h30 which was the time he was supposed to, but he began an hour later than scheduled) or else something went wrong, but either way that ending didn’t feel natural at all.
  Maybe electronic dance music really isn’t my strong suit. I liked it a lot, mind you, but this guy, being “the best in the world” left me wondering how bad the others can be… :-)

• John Butler Trio - A great surprise indeed. I didn’t know these guys at all but they played an extra-long concert (to make up for part of Nouvelle Vague’s absence) and I was left with the will to go and check out more of their stuff on record;

• Xavier Rudd - Another total stranger to me, I loved his music from the first moment. It is nothing short of amazing how he can transmit such calm and serenity with all of his songs, even the ones which have really high rhythmic beats.
  Very tribal in it’s essence, very “balanced”, very good;

• Róisín Murphy - I never knew Moloko to begin with, so the description I was given (“she was Moloko’s singer”) didn’t tell me much at all.
  Well, it turns out this lady is amazing on stage. She sings and dances like nobody’s business.
  Left me breathless —and that’s from all the jumping and dancing, it had nothing to do with the t-shirt. OK, almost nothing. Well…

• Donavon Frankenreiter - I already expected it to be a good concert, given the descriptions of his music I’d heard and read, but I’d never really listened to this guy. Turns out it was indeed a good concert with some very nice and smooth music;

What I didn’t particularly like

• Gogol Bordello - They might be dynamite on stage, but I just can’t bring myself to enjoy the music enough to get up there, front and center and get into the mood to jump around like a madman to their songs. “This is not about you, it’s just me”;

• Neil Young - I really tried to like his concert but I just couldn’t get into it for some reason. It wasn’t at all like Bob Dylan, mind you (read below), and he did end up with an amazing version of the Beatles’ “A Day In The Life” (which I would love to get my hands on a recording of), but in general the show just didn’t do anything for me;

What really sucked

• Nouvelle Vague canceled;

• The amazing whirlwinds of dust through almost all of the Alive! left all of us with sand and dust ingrained into our hair and clothes;

• Bob Dylan - I’m so sorry, but I can’t be charitable here. Such a great artist as him (in his day) should get a clue and stop milking it when it gets as depressing as this.

The Great Pretender

Porque é adequado. Porque tem de ser. Porque ainda dói (e já não devia).

E… E porque sim.

Mas isto é para apreciar com toda a teatralidade, o dramatismo e o “flair” do Freddie, nada das versões dos Platters ou Roy Orbison ou afins, hein!

Oh yes I’m the great pretender
Pretending I’m doing well
My need is such I pretend too much
I’m lonely but no one can tell

Oh yes I’m the great pretender
Adrift in a world of my own
I play the game but to my real shame
You’ve left me to dream all alone

Too real is this feeling of make believe
Too real when I feel what my heart can’t conceal

Ooh ooh yes I’m the great pretender
Just laughing and gay like a clown
I seem to be what I’m not (you see)
I’m wearing my heart like a crown
Pretending that you’re still around

Yeah
Too real when I feel what my heart can’t conceal

Oh yes I’m the great pretender
Just laughing and gay like a clown
I seem to be what I’m not you see
I’m wearing my heart like a crown
Pretending that you’re
Pretending that you’re still around

Diary 2008-07-10

These last few days I’ve been on vacation and I stayed home getting ready for the summer concerts and getting some beach and pool time in.

• Friday evening I went to Plateau with a bunch of friends. Amazingly enough (given my dancing music tastes) I’d never been there before. I don’t know how I can love dancing to 80’s rock music and never having been to Plateau but well, that’s taken care of now. Anyway, my friends tell me that the songs they played were more or less the usual stuff for the place and as far as I’m concerned they could ditch the disco stuff and stick to the rock and pop but, well, I can’t bring back the thursday (or was it friday?) nights at Coconuts with Miguel Simões pumping out rock’n’roll like there was no tomorrow now, can I?

• Saturday I went with a couple of friends on a lighthouse-seeking quest near where I live. It was fun and the Farol de Sta. Marta in Cascais, near the marina (the one in second life) has an interesting museum. You can not (yet) visit the lighthouse itself, but apparently that will change in the near future.
  Unfortunately I didn’t know that Cabo d Roca’s lighthouse was being renovated so that was the main disillusion of the day…

• After our little lighthouse-hunting excursion we went to Sintra to the Fire & Ice “and friends” concert. I didn’t know any of the bands and went there on my friend’s Marcos suggestion.
  My take on it is that Àrnica sucked, Barditus did an excellent job supporting the other two artists and they, in turn were quite good. Orplid put on a great and powerful show (it made me really sorry that I don’t understand german, but most of it you could understand perfectly just from his small —english-spoken— intros and the way he sang it).
  As for Fire & Ice, well, there was a gentleman who really knows how to move an audience. I loved his songs with Barditus and also liked very much the two traditional folk songs he did on his own during the encore (when Barditus decided that they’d had enough). I think the best way to describe his voice is haunting.

• Meanwhile I’ve been to Lisbon a couple of times this week and ended up visiting Louie Louie’s Chiado store, again on a recommendation from a friend. So I came away with a few LPs under my arm and I’ve been listening to them over and over. There’s no scrobbling for vinyl, but I really don’t care, what I found there were some real gems. I even bought my very first vinyl copy of Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band (yes, I know, I’m unbelievably late to the party, sue me). ;-)

• And just yesterday the festivals started, with Super Bock Super Rocks’s second act. I skipped all the other bands and went there just for the Iron Maiden show.
  What a show! As expected, of course. These guys are so great, even after all these years, it’s eery! An excellent concert, appart from a time in the middle of it when the usual stupidity set in and they stepped the volume up so loud that the bass and the guitars started sounding all distorted. Can you imagine Maiden with a crappy bass?? Urgh! Fortunately they decided that it was best to turn the volume down a bit and have decent sound (it still left my ears ringing, mind you, as any such concert should).
  A friend I met there told me the line-up for this concert was exactly like the on all their latest shows and DVD and I can see why. It really, really works. Both the main show and the encore (surely one of the most powerful I’ve ever seen).
  Amazing show, filled with only the classics —the Bruce Dickinson songs mostly— that everyone knew by heart (I surely did and I screamed like a madman through it all.)
  UPDATE: See another wildly emotional review of this concert (in Portuguese) here.

Now I have to go rest by the pool to get my throat back in shape for this evening at the first day of the Optimus Alive! festival. It’s tough being on vacation during the festival season… :-)