How the Other Half Lives

Last night, for James' birthday, people sang some karaoke at Owen's place. It was interesting to see how the Standard dudes get their aoke on, so I figured I'd post about it. Here are the bullet points of what I noticed:

• They use some sort of media center OS on a modded XBox, as opposed to using a standard PC running Windows.


• When songs are displayed, there is an overlay of animated party dots, like a simple Winamp visualization or something. This I envy tremendously.


• Owen has a dog that can't get enough beer and sometimes tries to sing karaoke by barking, especially if everyone looks at it.


• Pretty frequently, the words of their songs are clipped by the edge of the screen. I'm willing to bet there's a setting though, where they could fix that if they wanted.


• Their songlist is highly focused and contains songs that one might describe as "Not overtly British." Each song is a hand-picked karaoke standard. This is nice because you don't have to sort through a lot of crap, but it's also a little limiting. I would compare it to a really awesome version of Karaoke Revolution, but without the game aspect. I think the way they work, they just download whichever songs are requested, as opposed to my strategy of downloading whatever I can find and also downloading requests.


• Whereas they have no H. Duff, I have lots of H. Duff.


• They have only one microphone and it is a sort of crappy XBox one.


• This one's big. For some reason, there's a sound delay with their system. I don't know if it's intrinsic to the XBox or if the problem was with the TV, but it was pretty annoying. I remember we had a similar problem with Cort's TV and K-Rev for a while.


• No cops. And because it's a house, you don't feel as guilty about the neighbors.

Not an April Fool's Joke

Deckens has 23 cdg disks worth of Disney songs.