Hee hee

I just discovered a video game sample in an Eurobeat song.
The track I'm talking about is "Super Kaiser"* by Garcon (Super Eurobeat Vol. 169).
It uses the Pac Man dying sound as a transition between the intro and the riff.
Interesting.
And it kind of proves my theory that there's nothing the Eurobeat people won't sample ^_~

* The title already denotes that it's a mecha (parody?) song. It's by HI-NRG Attack (my favourite label) and therefore really weird and wacky.

My new FTP client

FireFTP (Mozilla addon)
It works just as well as any standalone client. Brillant :D

Some thoughts about stand-up comedians

Sometimes I feel like we Germans didn't really take over the concept of stand-up comedy very well.
As far as I understand it, one of the main qualities of a stand-up comedian should be spontaniety - as in "the ability to react upon the audience, change things and invent new stuff on the fly".
Unfortunately, most German comedians are simply unable to do that. This becomes especially clear when, as a guest in some late night/talk show, the only thing they do is repeat the same lines from their programs over and over again.
Another good test are improv shows which have become a real trend over here during the last few years (Actually, in the German rendition of Thank God You're Here, the guy who keeps surprising everyone with his funny acting is the only recurring guy Oli P. - and he's NOT a comedian AT ALL! I think this says something).
Of course, there are some awesome and notable exceptions, like Knacki Deuser, who is just amazing at audience interaction and baffled me each time I saw him performing on stage (2004 and 2005).
But the great mass of German stand-up people is just made up of trained monkeys who just lack that geniune funny-ness that a lot of UK/US guys seem to have.
It's a bit sad, really.

Not bad at all

I just took my last entry (the one about stand-up comedians) and let a Vista Sidebar Gadget named Say it! read it to me.
And I have to say speech synthesis really improved from the good ol' Soundblaster 16.
The Vista speech engine sounds kind of good. I mean, it's still far from human speech, but compared tot en years ago, I was pretty impressed!
(And talk about American accent! Lovely ^^)