2013 – it was basically 2012 except one numeral higher.  Yay.  😛
The YouTube channel saw a rather mellow end to the year with an audio commentary where I answered questions that folks had been asking, though judging by the length it looks like playing “20 Questions” was a tad too much.  🙂
The video’s description on YouTube has a clickable program guide to use for listening in bits and pieces by allowing folks to skip around.  🙂
Finally in a rather mellow end, I came back with a new entry in the old Epic Fail Jokes series where I lampooned a terrible joke I’ve heard about New Year’s over the years.  🙂
Time to see what assorted garden variety nonsense 2014 brings.  Here in Southern New England we’re looking at an obnoxious New Years Snowstorm to start the new year off on exactly the right foot.  Yay.  It may not be Snowmageddon 2011 all over again yet but who knows.  New England + Winter = ? is usually how it goes around here.  🙂
The Classical Crossover music scene on YouTube is nothing short of awesome if you’re looking for a refreshing change of scenery from the cliched overplayed pop fluff that dominates our radio stations these days.  If you want to hear some real creativity in action instead of mass-produced autotuned-to-heck pop fluff, musicians and groups like Aston Classical, Lindsey Stirling, and today’s featured YouTubers ThePianoGuys can give you reasons to radically change what you blast on your music players and sound systems.  🙂
Channel Overview:
ThePianoGuys’ channel is an unabashedly musical one.  They basically post music videos and behind the scenes clips of said music videos that usually feature someone on a piano and quite a bit of creativity with usually classical instruments.  Like other musicians who do what they do, the Piano Guys do an incredible job of blending and fusing together classical-sounding instruments with other genres of music and a hearty dose of creativity to boot.  🙂
What First Got Me Watchin’:
I’ve been a fan of these guys for so long that I actually forget which video first got me interested in what they do, but their oldest video that caught my eye (and perhaps the one that caught my eye in the first place) is their take on Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata featuring electric cello pizzicato that does a splendid job of making supposedly “classical” instruments sound like a strange electric guitar.
Videos I’d Recommend:
Besides Moonlight, I’d also recommend their holiday songs, including their rendition of Angels We Have Heard On High and O Come O Come Emmanuel, the first of which has become my official song of Christmas 2013, the second being one that I listened to a lot last year in 2012.  🙂
Outside of holiday tunes, their takes on various pop songs are also quite interesting, such as their interpretations of Coldplay’s Paradise, Phillip Phillips’ Home, Swedish House Mafia’s Don’t You Worry Child, and of course, Cello Wars, their take on Star Wars.  😀
…but perhaps the video that really says a lot about these guys and just how much they love what they do is their surprise concert at a senior citizens’ home.  In a day and age where the elderly and even middle-aged folks have never been more ostracized, to see these guys go out of their way to brighten their days like this is simply nothing short of awesome.  🙂
This Channel Today:
The Piano Guys continue to post on a somewhat regular basis to this day with excellent production value, even though they do unfortunately adhere to the YouTube SOPs of bugging people to subscribe every video.  Nonetheless, I think out of all the classical crossover groups I’ve listened to on YouTube, they’ll be the first folks I buy actual CDs from.  🙂  I highly recommend this channel.  Even if you’re not into classical music or classical-sounding music, these guys have more than enough talent and creativity to make a great album with the instruments they have.  🙂
The “Radio” series (with quotes of course) had a riproaring start focusing much of said riproaring on YouTube’s latest developments. Â The site runs the very real risk of losing its top dog video site spot if things don’t change, but for now, here was what I chimed in on…
Since the kickoff, I had seen various YouTubers ranting about the sad state of vlogging on YouTube these days, so that made for a fitting second topic in the audio commentary series…
YouTube’s ContentIDmageddon was also highly featured in the news with people getting Content IDed for all kinds of nonsense and some organizations even abusing the system to help themselves to other people’s ad revenue.  This warranted a rant of course.  😀
…and even the subscriber system seemed long in the tooth these days…
To my surprise, I thought I would have a lot more audio commentary segments than tech videos since I can easily record one when there’s a big news story, but it looks like I’ll have to work on that a bit.  I’m thinking of perhaps becoming like ReviewTechUSA minus the goofball stuff and gaming footage when it comes to news commentary sometime in 2014.  🙂  That sounds like fun, if I can come up with a better microphone setup to record with.
…okay.  I’ll confess.  I’m a moron who didn’t post enough updates on here to keep this blog and the YouTube channel in sync, so it’s time for a mass-update to catch things back up with regards to my main tech-related video series.  🙂
When we last left off, I had brought back the Dellasaurus from retirement to try once again to get a new OS running on that tired old thing, and NovaBench wouldn’t complete.  Following that mixed-results mess, I decided to change things up a bit by talking about work shoes, and took a nice dose of Randomness.  🙂
…after which I found out about the wonder of video-encoding technology that is H.264 (finally) and decided to finally go HD after blowing it off for many years when compression efficiency was forcing me to upload in “Fake HD” because the file was smaller.  🙂
Thanksgiving featured an odd mix of tech and vlogging, as I talked about the goofball holiday I had and took the new camera for a spin.  🙂
…and shortly afterwards, I unboxed a snazzy “Darth Vader Air Purifier” from Honeywell.  🙂
December featured some tweaking and “modding” of my Sandisk Sansa MP3 player, still working A-OK after over 5 years since getting it in 2006.  🙂
…and on a bittersweet note, December also featured the sad death of my original Canon Elura camcorder, my first real camcorder that I used for YouTube back in 2006-2008. Â :-\
…then finally, with the surprise discovery of iTunes’ somewhat-hidden support for digitizing CDs into 320 kbps MP3s, turning my various computers into a CD-digitizing factory of sorts.  🙂
…so what will 2014 bring? Â That’ll be interesting to say the least what with YouTube’s continued messes and the upcoming launch of my Dailymotion channel, which depending on how bad YouTube gets, will either become my new channel completely, or I’ll split the various series between the two channels. Â The ball’s truly in YouTube’s court here, and where I go from here depends largely on what they ultimately decide to do.
Love this one.  🙂  It’s a nice medley of various Christmas songs and very creatively done.  Plus the whole happy holiday aesthetic of how they have this house or set decorated just makes me wish I could celebrate this holiday in a setting like that.  🙂
MultimediaJay - A Geek's Perspective 