Liking Chinese music sucks. It's really hard to pirate something in a language you neither read nor speak.

I was listening to KALX a few weeks ago, and they were playing random CDs that one of the DJs had picked up from Hong Kong. There was a song on there I liked and wanted to look up again. Thanks to having a notepad in the car, I had this much info:

Song: Blue Hotel
Artist: A
Album: Chinese Challenge (compilation)
Label: Vowel Music

Now you'd think this would be enough information to throw at google and come back with something. However, most combinations only gave me back the web version of the KALX playlist. Stuck.

Ok, not exactly stuck. I know quite a few people who are fluent in Chinese. But asking them would be like, work or something.

Emailed the guy who was playing it, and he gave me back a URL for a Chinese auction site with the CD on it, and said he could email mp3s too. I replied, but have yet to hear back (this was 3 weeks ago).

Last night, I was cleaning out my email, found that mail again, and thought I'd try to hunt it down.

Here's a link to the auction site

From there, I pulled the song list and plugged that into Google Translate in order to figure out which song title was the one I was looking for. It's disc 2, number 7:

A(广州) -藍色旅館

which translates to:

A (Guangzhou) - Blue Hotel

With that available, I plugged the Chinese version of the term back into google, and started plinking around websites until I found a streaming version. It's amazing how much more interesting spam/squatter sites are when you can't read the text.

Here's the streaming version I found (WMV Format, unfortunately)

It's at this point I realized that I'd just turned my office into the Chinese Room. Literally.

I'm not sure how to feel about that.

Gesture Based Light Control using HandVu from qDot and Vimeo.

I was just gonna paste the videos together, and then I decided "Maybe some music would be nice", and two hours later, here I am. I'm pretty happy with the result, though.

RIP numberporn.com

July 16, 2001 - September 2, 2007

(Now redirects to nonpolynomial.com)