curtis' blog

We came up with this song last night after a few inspirational ideas from the tree in the center of our campus and readers of our blog.  This is Robby’s post that sparked it all.

We made some sheet music for you so that you can follow along.  I would encourage you to print it out and use it for all your Thanksgiving caroling you will likely do this fine season.

Bret and Alistair have written a song to commemorate the (American) Thanksgiving season.  The Thanksgiving tree spreads its joy under its branches, and all those gathered around it feel more festive.  It helps remind us of that ancient story of the pilgrims on the first Thanksgiving Day.

(Remember that Youtube takes a while to process videos, so it won’t be up immediately, and you may have to wait.  Also remember that only newer browsers can play these videos.  I recommend Firefox 3 as the best for viewing our blogs.)

Enjoy your holidays!  We’ll back in two weeks (we’re on a school break at home, you know) with more wonderful Alistair & Bret humor!

P. S.  You know, it’s great being Canadian and American… I get to celebrate Thanksgiving twice!

I’ve put another techno song up, and I hope you like it. Head over to my music page and listen to “Digidance”, a happy techno tune (not nearly as hard as “Angry Keyboards”).  I’m also still working on it.  But, it is about 1:35 I think, so it’s long enough to be worth listening to.

In case you are wondering about the weird thing that happens near the end (it seems to shut down the song and restart), listen to it again.  See the differences before and after the “reboot”.  Tell me if you figure it out.  It’s pretty sweet.

Oh, and “Digidance” is pronounced with the beginning of the word “digital” and the word “dance”.

Bret Thompson shares his enormous wealth of knowledge with us yet again, this time astounding us with information regarding the importance of rats to our universe.  The rats he brings to the show mysteriously escape, and the set becomes disrupted in the ensuing chaos.

The entire show reminds us of how nice Antarctica can be with its lack of rattus rattus.

If you don’t have a fairly new browser, these videos may not work.  Who would want an old browser, anyway?  Especially IE 6.0?!

(Closed captioning provided by RFTU)

I’ve been working on some new music lately, and I’d like to share some of what I have done. You all should know by now that I wrote the music for our “Alistair Watkins Show” and a few piano songs. I have also been working on some techno.

Just go to my music page and listen to what I’ve uploaded.  It’s not much, but enough to get an idea of what I’m doing.  Enjoy!

Actually, I’ll just put what I have so far of the title song here:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

01 Angry Keyboards
(right-click and download)

Oh, and don’t hesitate to leave feedback.

And also, if you would like, go ahead and ask me to write something for you.  If I think I can, I’d be glad to help you out with a 15-20 second intro or something.  I’m good at those.  It’s also very fun.

Here is this week’s video.  It’s about another one of Bret’s jobs--as a paper salesperson.  Though all the papers look pretty much the same, he gives us some very good reasons for having such a large assortment of stationery.

(the video may still be processing--be patient)

Stay tuned for next week’s episode!

And in case you are looking for a link to Bret’s offer of free paper, just right-click the link below and “save link as”.  It is the cleanest white digital paper on earth!  For a small fee, we would be willing to offer you a bundle of five colors (your choice) of digital paper for all purposes.

FREE PAPER DOWNLOAD!!!

Oh, and if you absolutely have to watch these videos in higher quality on Youtube, I’ve put the episodes on an archive page for you in their higher quality:  HQ Video archive page

Finally!  This is the first episode of Alistair Watkins from room2593.com.  We hope you enjoy watching it as much as we enjoyed making it.  We will hopefully be able to do this every couple of weeks.  It helps having a video camera now.

I suppose I should tell you that Robby called Canadians “Canucks”, which is supposed to be derogatory, but I don’t really care.  I’m Canadian, and he was mostly directing it at me.  Don’t freak out.  I don’t think any Canadians care, anyway.  It’s like calling Americans “Yankees”.

We are hosting the video on Youtube because we have limited bandwidth and space on room2593.com.  This way we don’t waste our gigabytes.

Oh, and here’s an ad that Robby and I created to promote exercising your ears: