For a while, I have used Olate Download to manage the downloads I have up on the site.

Lately, I’ve been working on some stuff on the site here and wanted to update to the latest version. Since I last updated, it appears Olate Download has gone Open Source, but been abandoned? Not sure about that.

Anyway, I wanted to add some sort of CAPTCHA on the “Report Problem”, because I get spam everyday from the link.

So, I decided to try to implement reCAPTCHA, which not only provides the CAPTCHA stuff, but also has a useful purpose (helping sort out OCR scans of books).

I will let it run for a while and see how it works - if it seems to be going fine I might turn on comments for the files. I haven’t done so in the past because I heard the spam was too great.

Also, be keeping my eye on the project at SourceForge and see if anyone comes back to it.

We are playing a show on Dec 30 at the new Koza Live House there on Gate 2 street! It’s a lot of the Spice record bands, including High and Mighty Color, so come out because it is sure to be a good show!

Details up on the abiroji live schedule page!

Rob and Roy told me about this series of YouTube videos, and I think my favorite is this one with Jake E. Lee and Ozzy.

Fantastic, and I nearly fell out of my chair.

I took some photos at the Koza Live House a while back last time we played there. Some of the guys who used to be around asked me what the place looked like.

Of course, my photos don’t do it justice, but it is very nice. The backstage area is righteous as well.

There is a new live event this year: Rocktoberfest

It is on Torii Beach, Sunday, October 7. Monday is a Japanese and American holiday, so you know it will be good to go! We are playing it, along with Bleach, Inclusher, Chuckwow, Noiz As Hell, 8-Ball, F.O.D, Liberty Risk, and Fake Kingz.

The event is FREE and it is open to the public! There will be food and drink, German Beers, and all sorts of good stuff…it’s the first year so come check it out and let me know what you think!

I added quite a few live dates to the abiroji live schedule page. We are playing quite a bit the end of the month, a bit unusual for us lately.

Anyway, there’s some good lineups in there and a couple of cool shows to come out for. One is “Big Wave”, which is a show we are putting on down at Okinawa Cyberbox in Naha on the 22nd. We are giving away some special T-Shirts at the show, I think.

Also, we are playing on the 28th at the new Music Town in Okinawa City. This is the new area, where they tore down the corner and have built up the new stuff. I’m super interested in seeing what the place is like and if it does well. Everyone on the street has an opinion, and I guess we will soon see how it does!

Another thing that’s cool is we are playing with our good friends in Chuckwow at Fuji’s back-to-back on the 27th and 28th! I don’t think abiroji has ever done that before, plus we are playing twice on the 28th…so, that’s a little neat for us. I remember back in the day I used to play every weekend regular, and often more than once a night. (I don’t mean more than one set at one club, either, I mean multiple sets at multiple clubs). I miss those days a bit, but more in the “it snowed uphill both ways when I was coming up” way, than a “I wish things were still like that” way.

Lately, I’ve been studying music theory a bit more seriously and one thing I’ve needed to reference many times is the Circle of Fifths.

I wanted to try to get a diagram of the Circle of Fifths that consolidated some of the information all in one place. Things like the little shortcuts for determining the key when looking at the signature, mnemonics for accidental order, and so forth.

So, I made my own little chart, which I have added to my download area. It is a .zip file containing a PDF, which can be printed onto one Letter-sized sheet of paper.

Like all my downloads, I may or may not update the file from time to time. If you have any suggestions on how to improve the diagram, please feel free to comment here!

I just updated the abiroji live schedule page, because we have most of the details now for our next live show.

We are in Naha again, at Milestone. This should be a good live, because I like Milestone and playing there is always fun. We’ve also got a lot of good bands, so everyone should have a great time! Also, this is our event so I hope it does well. Although the last event we played was great, it wasn’t our event. Yasu put this one together (everyone helped a little, though.) We are getting a little better at organizing events. Organization is not exactly our strong suit as a band.

Anyway, hope to see some people out there!

The band line-up for the live show Saturday has changed several times, but it looks like it will be Fake Kingz and Chuckwow with us. This is a pretty good line-up for Fuji’s I think, so I hope lots of people come check it out!

I think we play second, starting around 10p.m. Yasu keeps on saying we are going to play ‘Condor’, which we haven’t played out in a loooong time, and we still haven’t practiced with everyone. I’m a little sketchy on it myself - maybe we can practice after soundcheck, before the actual show?

Not that I ever post a lot to my blog, but I haven’t been posting anywhere much lately. The reason why? We moved!

Yes, from the big city lights of Okinawa City - just a heartbeat from the action on Gate 2 street - to the relaxed country atmosphere of Yomitan Village. That’s right, I live in a freakin’ village now!

Seriously, Yomitan is very nice, and the area where we live is nice and peaceful. Although we’ve only been in the house for about a week, I’m lovin it (doo-doo-doop-doo-doo).

I put up our live dates this month on the live schedule page. It looks like we will be playing twice this month:

First, on the 20th we are playing the first day of a three-day “Earth Day” festival. This is the first year for this fest, so I’m not really sure what to expect. Also, I don’t know many of the bands that are playing. One lucky thing is that MIL-SIC is playing the same day we are, and I like those guys. They have a good demo out, too.

Next, we return to Fujiyama’s with Chuckwow on the 28th. Clay was kind enough to invite us to play with them (and another band to be announced), so we are happy to come back to Fuji’s! We had a really fun time there last time.

As a side note, we have started practicing some songs we haven’t been playing live, 2 from the “AD Jung” CD, and 1 old Zero Sen tune. We haven’t been playing the newer songs because they are a bit tricky to arrange live. (Overdubs sure are fun when you are recording, but they present a challenge when doing the song live!) The Zero Sen tune is a favorite of one of the guys, and he just wanted to play it again, so that’s cool too.

Well, we are back from our trip to Miyako Island - which was a ton of fun - and are now getting ready for Bloodfest Live Vol 1. this weekend (31 Mar) at 7th Heaven Koza.

There will be six bands there, with a pretty wide range of heavy styles, so I hope people will come out and check it out.

Also, we finally got in some abiroji merch, like T-Shirts and towels and stickers. So, I expect we will have that stuff out as well. I’m pretty stoked to finally have some abiroji stuff!

If anyone needs tickets or directions (not likely, since 7th Heaven is right off Gate 2 street), or more details, just let me know!

SEE YOU OUT THERE!

We played the St. Patrick’s Day event last night. It was a fun time and super thanks to Martin and Ikari for putting it on, and super thanks to everyone who came out and caught the show!

Now I’m going back to lay down.

Japan Update has a short article on the upcoming St. Paddy’s Day parade.

I updated the abiroji live schedule page - we are actually playing a few shows this month!

First up, on the 17th, we are playing Martin’s St. Paddy’s Day Event out on Park Avenue - this is sure to be a great time, and it’s super cool we are getting the chance to play!

Next up, the big one, is the “Hands Up” event we are putting on in Miyako Island on the 24th. As you can see from the flyer there on the left we’ve got a lot of our friends coming out with us to play:

1. High and Mighty Color
2. Bleach
3. Jigokuguruma
4. Chuckwow
5. Inclusher

We are actually putting on this one (with a lot of help from the guys in Inclusher), so everyone’s working that event pretty hard. (Side note: I saw that High and Mighty Color have a wikipedia entry - weird.)

The day after we play Miyako we return to Okinawa to play a show with our friends in Kakumakushaka at Mod’s. This is cool for me especially, because I haven’t been to the new Mod’s and it will be my first time playing there (there aren’t many live houses on Okinawa that I haven’t played, so I always especially enjoy playing a new one for the first time).

Last, but not least, we are playing the latest iteration of the infamous Bloodfest at 7th Heaven on the 31st. I should have a flyer for it soon, and I’ll try to put it up. However, my scanner isn’t hooked up anymore, so no promises.

Well, that’s lots of shows (for us, anyways), so I hope to see you out there at least at one of them!

Someone put up our PV (Promotional Video) on YouTube. This looks to be taped off an Okinawan television show “Mimi Gusui Hour”, which mainly covers the local music scene. The song is the title track from our CD AD Jung (Adrenalin Jungle).

Here is some interesting(?) trivia about the show and the video:

Gusui is Okinawan Hougen (dialect) for medicine (standard Japanese would be kusuri). So, roughly translated, the show means “The Ear-Medicine Hour”. The translation sounds dumb in English, but I think you can understand the meaning (it doesn’t sound dumb in the original language, of course).

Some of our members were on the show a few weeks ago, Yagi (singer), HDK (wood bass), and Hitoshi (bass).

The room where the intro dude is talking is one of our practice spaces. It also happens to be the room where we shot the video - at least the main part where you see the band. So, that is the same set of drums. That’s a pretty neat coincidence - or maybe it was intentional, the host moves around every show.

The video was Yagi’s idea - if you are a metal fan, you might be able to tell where the “inspire” came from. (In our band, we get “inspire” from other people.)

You might notice some of the lyrics are in English. Well, one of the English parts is “on stage…clap the hands”. You probably know the stereotype about Japanese people switching up r’s and l’s. Well, the draft printing of the lyrics in the CD booklet made that mistake there. We caught it before it actually went to print.

Also, if you are a metal fan, you can probably tell where the “inspire” for the very ending of the song came from. That was one of my small contributions.

Finally, if you can’t tell - that’s me playing the BC Rich Beast.

A few weeks ago we did an radio interview on a FM Chatan program, “All Because of You”.  This is a show where you talk about your music and influences and so forth. It’s a pretty cool show that primarily showcases local artists.

For whatever crazy reason, they wanted me to participate so I did (usually I sit out of the media promotion side, not because I’m modest or anything, but because I can’t understand what is going on). Believe me, it is not false modesty when I tell you my Japanese language skills are very poor, and trying to participate in something like a radio talk show is just about impossible. However, I gave it a try and had fun doing the best I could.

A portion of the show was edited into a podcast which you can check out if you like. It was a lot of fun.

The Tower Records Indies Station charts just came out, and our CD “AD Jung” is #1 on the Naha chart!

Of course, it probably won’t stay up there very long (the time counted in the chart is 1/8-1/14, and our CD came out on 1/11), but in any case it’s still pretty cool.

If you don’t have the CD…GO GET IT! And if you do have it: thanks so very much!

Just a reminder that abiroji is playing at the Fuji Fest this weekend at Club Fujiyama on Gate 2 Street.

I will have some details up on the abiroji live schedule page, but I think things kick off at 7pm and there are 5 or 6 bands playing. We are close to the middle, so I think we play around 8pm or so. Not sure about that.

Anyway, it will be the first time abiroji has played Fuji’s (or anywhere on Gate 2 Street, if you don’t count 7th Heaven) so come out if you can!

Ok…there is now a site up with videos from our CD Release party a few weeks ago. The site is “doing.tv”, some sort of video/entertainment news/outlet type of site. I don’t know the whole story there.

I took me forever to figure out how to watch the videos, but I finally got it working. Here’s what you need to know if you want to watch them (and you should because they are pretty cool, even if I am well-hid behind the speaker stacks on stage.) I’ll do my best to make it simple, but I’m not sure I’ll succeed.

The videos require Internet Explorer 5.5+ and ActiveX. (I use Firefox myself by default so it took me a few failed attempts at getting things working to discover this. I don’t like it, but it’s not my site.)

Anyway, here we go!

Go to the abiroji page on doing.tv. You’ll see 5 “movies” with buttons to the right of the image. The buttons are blue right now, because you need to register and get the video player.

Here is a list of the movies: Screwdriver, Wall, Tyrannosaurus, Daiichikarano, Rinen. (Here’s something interesting: most of these aren’t on the CD, as they are Zero Sen songs…only Screwdriver and Daiichikarano are on the Abiroji CD. Another interesting thing is that we didn’t know - or I didn’t at least - these videos were going to be posted.)

Registration doesn’t require a username, password, or email validation - so don’t worry about those things.

At the bottom left of the page, click on the “Be A Member” graphic. It will take you to the registration page .

Next, you see the Terms of Agreement, and have two choices. Select the “I Agree” choice (the one on the left), and then click on the blue button at the bottom of the page to proceed. Here is a high-resolution image I painstakingly created to illustrate:

Next is the registration form. Don’t worry, because you can click on the thumbnail on the right to see a larger image with my crappy translations of what the fields mean. Keep in mind it is a pretty simple form as registration forms go, so you can probably figure out most of it yourself.

Really, you only need to fill out the fields that have the red asterisk-like mark beside them, as those are the required fields. The rest can be safely skipped. Again, refer my highly detailed and fully rendered graphic for a beautiful illustration.

When you are done, click on the right-most button to proceed to reviewing your input on the registration form.

And so the next step is to review your input. Really, since there isn’t any email confirmation or username or password, there’s not much to worry about here. At the bottom are two buttons: the left to back up and re-try, and the right one to proceed. Don’t worry if your answers (the non-bold portions shown) are different than mine. Again, I have a helpful graphic:

Almost finally, here is the message that the process is complete and the player will be installed. The message indicates that the installation will take about a minute, but that wasn’t the experience I had on the two machines I tried. First, here is the message so you know what it looks like:

What did happen for me is that things just sat on this screen for a long time. I tried re-registering several times, and eventually one time I tried to re-register, but instead of seeing the Terms of Agreement, I saw this screen:

Apparently, the page never refreshed but the player was finally installed. This was very frustrating.

In any case, once the registration process is complete, the movie buttons on the abiroji page will now be red instead of blue. You can click on them and the player will open. Then you get to actually install the ActiveX control needed to show the videos. Wow. Not the smoothest system in the world.

But anyway, keep a stiff upper lip, because once that’s done, you can actually watch the videos! Woo!

(I am well aware of how ridiculously difficult this is, especially for non-Japanese speakers - it just took me so long to get it all working I felt like I had to post about it to help make all the time I spent on it worthwhile. If anyone else actually goes through with the process and watches a video, I would love to hear about it!)