Anything goes

This here is the very first trance song I’ve ever heard: Cybordelics - The Adventures of Dama. It’s from 1993, but I only heard it in 1996. I still remember very well listening to it. Back then, the only source of electronic music I had was a weekly radio show made by DJ Horace Dan D. I remember staying late at night to listen to the show, even though I was always supposed to go to school the next day - the show was on Wednesday nights, from 22:30 until after 2:00 sometimes. Because of technical limitations, I had an awful contraption for recording it and the quality of the sound was appalling, but it felt great being able to listen to it later! I would listen to it every moment I could and I remember I would always run out of tapes to record on.

Before discovering electronic music, I had gathered tapes with all kinds of music, but then I erased them all to record the show on them. Horace Dan D had the very healthy habit of making a short introduction and history of an electronic genre during each show and I really owe my passion for various styles to that single fact. I think my interest in the history of all these things also comes from there.

It sends shivers down my spine when I listen to it. I had forgotten the title of the song until I heard it by accident on Digitally Imported’s Old School Electronica a couple of months ago and then I was able to look it up on youtube and I am really glad (and amazed) to find it there.

Boy, it’s great being able to listen to it again!

We can see in the song the very early ideas of trance and how it should be. I just love the way the song just takes its time, leading you into it, without any hurry (the first drum in the song is at 2:30!), and the minimalistic structure of the sounds. It really creates a trance inducing stream of sounds.

Perhaps I’m old fashioned, but having grown up with music like this, I don’t really like most of what is going on in mainstream trance nowadays. Of course, the fact that it is getting more and more commercial doesn’t help either, but the most important thing is that sometimes it really sounds awful.

Also, good as it may sound when listening to it in earphones going down the street or on TV, trance is not meant for meaningful vocals. It is just not compatible with the state it is supposed to induce while dancing. Listening to lyrics, sometimes even singing along, just takes that away because it forces you to focus on the music, whereas dancing to trance should be an unconscious experience, where you let yourself simply be swept away by the stream. From this point of view, I haven’t had the chance to dance to a good set of trance for a long time. The last good one I heard was DJ Sterbinszky some 4 years ago, the first time he was in Obsession in Cluj (I think the club was still called Tutankamon then). I think that may have also been the best , too. But I digress…

Anyways, this here is a great song.

I was writing the other day about the trouble I was having with the XHTML validation of the blog. And I must say: at one point I was getting pretty mad, going through the output of the validation and trying to solve issues one by one.

I mean, I understood that the code provided by youtube was not standard compliant, but then I tried to validate a post without clips and it failed too. I kept getting these errors about target=”_blank” in hyperlinks and that kind of cut my enthusiasm, because it all seemed just too complicated. I mean, I *am* an engineer, but I work with embedded stuff and that just seems more simple than all this XHTML stuff! This is not true, of course, but I was mad then and was feeling this way.

In fact, I had removed the link to the validation altogether at one point. I had understood the solution was not in removing all the reported errors, but the fact that the page was declared as Strict XHTML 1.0, but I really didn’t feel like modifying the template to Transitional. I had just tried too many things and was getting too tired to try this last one, too, which I wasn’t 100% sure about anyway.

But all that has changed, thanks to some very useful help from fellow Romanian blogger SaltwaterC. It was his comment for that post that convinced me to modify the template to Transitional. In the end, the change wasn’t very difficult and involved 2 fairly simple steps, both on a single line in the file header.php from the theme. Basically, it is just replacing Strict/strict with Transitional/transitional respectively in 2 places in the file. This simple thing made all the target=”_blank” errors go away.

Next, youtube embedding.

Again, SaltwaterC saved the day, with his cool plugin XHTML Video Embed. So I just installed the plugin, made small changes to the posts and voila: perfect validation for the whole site. So now I am able to place the XHTML validation link back on the page.

Let’s move on, then. There’s work to do, still.

It’s official: Youtube is part of Google!

You may think this is old news, but until now I always had the feeling that, aside from the occasional AJAX improvements of the interface and references to the mother company here and there on the site, Youtube was not bought by Google.

So how do I know? Well, one thing Google is known for is their theming of the logo to mark special days. For example, here’s the one they have today, to mark Earth day:

But this time, for the first time, to my knowledge, Youtube has adopted this approach too. Here is their logo:

So this is an interesting development. Have they done something like this before? Because this is the first time I notice it. Next, we are waiting for an April Fool’s hoax next year and some Easter Eggs and the picture will be complete.