I didn’t want to like Birthday Cake (Remix) on principle. I even made sure I didn’t go looking for it on YouTube. Then I heard it on the radio this past Saturday and then on a mix by one of my favorite DJ’s. Damn it has a catchy beat.
The only way I can like this song AND still feel good about it is to image that the clapping sound on the beat is a backhand. Surprisingly it works.
I listened to my first DJ Private Ryan mix in the spring of 2008 when a pretty girl behind a red MacBook loaned me two CD’s that had Trinidad’s latest soca from that year and the year before. This is before I knew who DJ Private Ryan was or that we went to the same school and had mutual friends.
Over two years later DJ Private Ryan or “the Wizard” as I like to refer to him has been entertaining thousands (maybe even millions) including myself with his “versatile” mixes. He makes a point of exploring a wide range of genres so that he not only includes the standard, dancehall/reggae, hip-hop and soca but also gives his listeners a taste of genres they may not be usually exposed to like dance/trance/house, alternative and parang.
The time and dedication he puts into his work is clearly evident in his mixes and even more so if you’ve had a chance to hear him play live. He is by no means perfect or infallible but even when mixes haven’t lived up to the high bar he has set for himself you can appreciate his desire to always push the envelope and take the chances necessary to develop his craft.
So maybe you know all of this about Ryan and you’ve been listening to his mixes since before I even knew him but all the same I’d like to share what in my opinion are essential DJ Private Ryan listening. Without further ado here are MY
Top 5 DJ Private Ryan Mixes of all time. (So far.) (with links where available):
5. Reggae Magic (Old & New) 2009
4. Best of Summer Dancehall 2008
3. Private Ryan Vs. The Music - Sep 15th Virgo Birthday Edition 2009
1. 2008 Year in Review Megamix - 2hr iPod Version
Honorable Mentions:
Be sure to check out the other great mixes he’s published on http://djprivateryan.libsyn.com/
And check out his Facebook page for the latest updates on new mix releases.
Hey Ryan keep up the great work.
For reasons not necessarily relevant to this post I recently switched from an 4GB Apple iPhone 2G to a T-Mobile branded Blackberry Curve 8900. This is my second attempt at switching to a Blackberry and this time I intend to give it my best try.
Coming from an iPhone I understand that there are things that will work differently, I understand that I may need to change the way I think about doing things on my phone that are substantially different from the conventions I am used to on the iPhone. I am doing my best to understand where these differences are and adapt to them. That being said, I wonder what my fellow Canadians in Waterloo are thinking sometimes when they designed this OS and some of these applications. I tried to switch to this very same phone last summer and failed miserably mainly because of some minor pet peeves that were deal breakers for me (at the time the biggest one was lack of threaded SMS). Since then some of these issue have been addressed but today I wish to challenge RIM and Facebook to seriously consider the following suggestions regarding the Facebook for Blackberry Application.
The following is taken from a review I posted on the Facebook for Blackberry page:
1. Notifications should sync with facebook so that if you receive a notification on the blackberry device and check it, it it marked as viewed the next time you log onto the facebook website and vice versa
2. Notifications do not work for “likes”
3. Clicking on the Message icon within the app should show all messages currently in your facebook inbox regardless of read status and have a button to allow to compose a new message.
4. Notifications for “Pokes” are inconsistent.
5. Wall posts/comment threads are unintuitive. When viewing a stream of comments on a wall post simply put the original wall post at the top and then the comments in chronological order. This will be much easier to follow than the current implementation where the original post is at the top followed by the most recent comment, followed by a comment input box followed by the thread in reverse chronological order
Other suggestions:
Possible UI tweaks like moving the news feed filter to the menu or as drop down on the News Feed button in the top navigation.
Thanks.
Fellow Blackberry users did I get all of the Facebook for Blackberry application quirks and peeves? Click here to comment.
“Friendly Competition”
Audi has been doing some great ads lately, first with the Green Police ads (more on those later). This ad is fun, and honestly makes me proud to be an Audi owner. Truth in engineering right?
“Happening Now”
Goodby Silverstein & Partners is at it again, this time with my new favorite ad. Sprint has done very little to disappoint me as of late. Now if only the company and their offerings were as good as their ads.
Slate.com has an excellent write up on one of my current favorite ads another is Sprints “What if [blank] ran the world?” series. They analyse the campaign, including the previously linked Sprint ad featuirng the firefighters.
Check out the ad and slate.com’s take on it.
my OTHER blog, and by ‘other’ I mean first. More expansive, creative, personal content. Feel free to browse the archives.
Sorry about the multiple twitter/facebook/blog updates. I had a rss import loop on the blog and twitter. Accept my sincerest apologies.
