I just finished watching and reading Antique Bakery, a Josei manga by Yoshinaga Fumi which has also been adapted as an anime. The story revolves around Tachibana Keiichiro, who, one fine day, decides to quit his high profile corporate job to open a bakery.

Today's SotD is off a collection of B-sides by Def Leppard. An outtake from their Hysteria sessions, Desert Song is simple in structure and largely feeds off a catchy riff and some piercing and slightly melancholic lead-work. A good song that's been continuously running in my head over the last couple of days.

If you, like me, are not fond of the new Veoh interface, this post is probably of interest to you. Veoh's new Web X.0 interface sucks eggs esp. with respect to its search functionality, but, thankfully, considering the large number of users with IE6, the old interface can still be accessed if you are one of the lucky (?) users who still have IE on their systems or if you set up your browser to identify itself as IE6 by modifying the user-agent string.

To modify the user-agent ...

I came across Forvo today. It's a community-driven database of word pronunciations which appears to include multiple languages and accents and also accommodates proper nouns such as names etc.

Quite nifty.

I've been a huge fan of Nodame Cantabile ever since it was released. I've watched the live-action series, read the manga and also watched series one of the anime. This review deals with the anime sequel, dubbed "Nodame Cantabile: Paris Hen", which deals with Nodame and Chiaki's stay in Paris.

You should probably not be reading further if you are yet to see the first series.

Today's song of the day is off Jeff Beck's 1975 album Blow by Blow. Titled "Scatterbrain", this track is one of my favourite all time tracks.

It starts off with a jazzy drum intro which subsequently builds up into this high speed rhythm into which is merged Beck's intense driving verse riff... a series of pressure-building scales that are just about to take you off into space. The second repeat also sees the keyboards being introduced, playing the same scales.

Today's song of the day is the Funeral March aka Piano Sonata no. 2 in B-flat minor, Op. 35 by Frédéric Chopin. What can I say about this piece that hasn't been said already ...

Upgrading KTorrent from 3.1.2 to 3.2 RC1 on Kubuntu 8.10 Intrepid with KDE 4.2:

1. Install cmake and related tools:
   sudo apt-get install cmake automoc build-essential gettext
2. Install other required libraries:
   sudo apt-get install kdelibs5-dev libqca2-dev libgmp3-dev kdebase-workspace-dev kdepimlibs5-dev libkrosspython0 libkrossruby0
3. Remove the existing ktorrent installation as a precaution: sudo apt-get remove ktorrent. This should not affect your configuration files.

The joy of discovering a great new song
The feeling of sadness and emptiness when the song becomes stale
The joy of rediscovering the magic of the same song a few years later

Music (and our brains) is certainly magical.

Today's and yesterday's song of my day has been Prokofiev's Dance of the Knights (also known as "Montagues and Capulets" in his orchestral suites) from the ballet Romeo and Juliet. I've always been at a loss for words to adquately describe this piece.