Chris J Mears

13 Most Beautiful … Music by Dean & Britta for Andy Warhol Screen Tests

This evening, I attended the San Francisco Film Society‘s  13 Most Beautiful… during which indie-pop icons Dean & Britta performed live songs to rarely seen screen testings by Andy Warhol. During these 4 minute screen tests, frequenters of The Factory are filmed without sound and without speaking. Since these films are in slow motion, the scenes were only about 2 and a quarter minutes.The subjects just remain still, react to an emotion, or just do what they would normally be doing at that particular moment in time.

I took a couple pictures.  Please note that I had my hand slapped by some lady despite the fact that I didn’t have my flash on and my screen was dimmed.  So, these photos were taken under duress like a real journalistic photographer :)

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Canadian Album Releases 2009

Canadian indie album releases for the first half of 2009:

• Jan 20 – AC Newman Get Guilty (Last Gang)
• Jan 20 – Brent Randall & his Pinecones We Were Strangers… In Paddington Green! (Just Friends)
• Jan 27 – Geoff Berner Klezmer Mongrels (Jericho Beach)
• Jan 27 – Final Fantasy Plays To Please (Blocks)
• Jan 27 – Hannah Georgas The Beat Stuff (Upper Management)
• Jan 27 – In-Flight Safety We Are An Empire, My Dear (Night Danger)
• Jan 27 – Andrew Vincent Rotten Pear (Kelp)

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Best of Canadian Independent Music vol. 2

Album Art by Brynn Harris

Welcome to the 2nd volume of my Best of Canadian Independent music mix. Compiled each year, this mix contains my favorite tracks from the top Canadian independent artists.

You can download the mix in a variety of formats. However, I recommend the iTunes Optimized version.

Enjoy and let me know what you think in the comments!

Best of Canada 2008: O! Canada!

iTunes Optimized (79MB, Chapters included, M4A format)

MP3 Zipped (97MB)

Track list after the jump.

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iTunes Rating System for Album People

After I started to get very weird songs pop up in my “4-stars and up” Party Shuffle playlist, I decided to embark on a more stream-lined iTunes song rating system.

Here is my proposal:

No stars

This song is unrated and needs to be put in a smart playlist to be rated, even if they’re all 3 star ratings. This is a fire sale people. Everything. Must. Go! (out of that unrated smart playlist!)

1 star

Denotes a supreme dislike for the song that immediate deletion would not be totally uncalled for.

2 stars

This song is a’ight. Not the most inspirational piece of music, but not worth deleting either, if it flows with the rest of the album.

3 stars

This is a good song. Not the best, but you would be indifferent about it showing up once in a while during a shuffle. And hey, you wouldn’t be totally against bumping it up to 4 stars if it revealed a glimmer of potential to get stuck in your head.

4 stars

This song is great! Not only wouldn’t you mind hearing it in a shuffle of all songs in your library, but you’d be happy when it came on! Not only that, it warrants a place in your “Best of Artist” and “Best of Album” smart playlists.

5 stars

OMG! O-M-G! You love what’s happening to your ears right now! It’s, like, amazing and you can’t get enough. In fact, this is a song you want to share with everyone when you get the chance!

Add any additional thoughts or suggestions in the comments.

Remotely Uninstall Symantec Antivirus

I’m not going into the reasons here, but I recently needed to uninstall Symantec Antivirus from all client computers on our network (~25 computers) in order to install a new antivirus client. Since it was so few computers, I really could have just sat down at each one and uninstalled the program through Control Panel.  But what fun is that when you can do it remotely?

After reading an article on the subject, I did some more investigating and this is the process I came up with:

1. Download PSTools and unzip into C:\Windows\System32
2. Get the Symantec Antivirus uninstall registry ID from regedit by way of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Uninstall.  Go through the subkeys and search for the one that has Symantec in the Value Name.  For example, I had Symantec Corporate Antivirus v10.x and the ID was {78D891EF-9E2D-4FC8-A71F-E6F897BA1B21}
3. Remotely connect to Symantec System Center server using domain administrator account
4. (Optional: if you require a password to uninstall) Using regedit, remotely connect to each computer to edit registry.  What we’re looking for is under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ INTEL \ LANDesk \ VirusProtect6 \ CurrentVersion \ AdministratorOnly \ Security. Make sure the two values, “LockUnloadServices” and “UseVPUninstallPassword,” are zero.
5. Logged in as a domain admininistrator, using PsExec, run MsiExec to uninstall.  Example,
   C:\>psexec \\COMPUTER_NAME MsiExec.exe /norestart /q /x {78D891EF-9E2D-4FC8-A71F-E6F897BA1B21} REMOVE=ALL

Assuming all went well, you should get an error code of zero, which means everything went successfully.  Should you get any other error code, look it up.