For years, I would hear this one song in commercials and never knew what it was. But it would show up from time to time, usually somehow technology related. It sounds a little like Philip Glass. If you heard it you would recognize it right away. So tonight I was watching TV and a commercial came on for the restaurant Carrabbas and there was the music! I hoped it wasn’t too new to Google and searched the internet, knowing there are sites where people identify music in commercials. The answer popped up in no time! And from the responses this post got, I wasn’t the only one that had been looking for the name of this for a long time. Anyway, I’d never heard of the song or the group. The song is “Perpetuum Mobile” and it is by The Penguin Cafe Orchestra. You can see them playing it on YouTube. That led me to a YouTube video that makes a movie out 200 pictures that a pretty woman (girl? she can’t be that old) has taken of herself each day, set to Perpetuum Mobile. Penguin Cafe Orchestra has some other videos here and here. They made this one using a dial tone (not my favorite).
Month: February 2010
Wash Sale
I’ve known about wash sales for a while and what I always thought it meant was when you sell a stock at a loss and then buy it back within 30 days. The IRS sees this as just a way to harvest some losses without actually changing what you invest in, a move done solely for tax purposes. So what they do is say you have to defer that loss until you sell the shares permanently. But when I have shares bought at different times and then sell some of those shares, I would rather show a gain than hassle with deferred losses from a wash sale.
Snow Showers
Today we were forecast to get snow showers. I don’t know how or if snow showers are any different than just getting snow. But eventually we did get some pretty good snow. Downtown we watched as it snowed more and more and even started to build up. At about 4:30 our boss came through and said he hadn’t gotten the message that we had been dismissed at 3:00. In the city, the snow was nice, but not that impressive. But as I rode the train home I started seeing how it had built up in the trees. Here is a picture I took from my front yard looking across the street. It was really pretty.
Last Light of the Ox
Last Friday I ordered my first programmable flashlight, the Akoray K-106. This light has a lot of fans at Candlepower Forums and it was the first direct-shipped budget Chinese light I thought about getting back in November when I was thinking about getting some lithium ion batteries. You may recall that the first LED flashlight I got was a Fenix L2D, which could be converted to a L1D that takes 1 AA battery. That light has six modes but is not as bright as the L2D with its 2 AA batteries. However, if you up the ante further by inserting a single 3.6V lithium ion battery, you lose all of the lower modes and the light is stuck on High. For this reason, I wound up buying the budget Uniquefire S10, but I blew it out when I tried a lithium-ion battery. So I was still looking for a 1 AA light that could handle a lithium ion battery properly.
DX and KD reviews
Here is a list of product reviews I have written on DealExtreme and KaiDomain. They don’t have a way of looking them up on their site (or editing them once you have written them, which isn’t so great), unlike Amazon which KaiDomain bases its web design on.
Flashlights
Trustfire XP-E F23 1xAAA flashlight, DX sku.24291
Ultrafire WF-502B 1×18650 flashlight with XP-G R5 drop-in, DX sku.35074
Ultrafire WF-504B 1×18650 flashlight with XR-E R2 drop-in, DX sku.24200
Uniquefire S10 1xAA flashlight, KD ID 10303