Check out this amazing band written about by Charlie Inman on his blog.

I have to big up the guys at Potion Factory for the iTunes playlist generating software Tangerine. It analyses your music library and determines the BPM (Beats per Minute) of every song. You can then create playlists based on BPM range and intensity, nicely displayed as album art… with a twist. As shown below, the album covers vary in size according to their BPM. The one I created was steadily increasing from 115 to 145 BPM over 1 hour. Perfect for workouts!

It could be said that we all live in a pretense, and that pretense masquerades as your reality. It could also be said that we all either live in somebody elses pretense, or that we create our own. It’s therefore how and achievable and believable your pretense is would enable others around you to buy into it or reject it. I believe we sometimes we fall into a pretense without realising it, and it takes external influence to throw it into question or change your own perception of it. This could happen on small things or equally on long term things in your life. This brings me onto mentors, and why I believe it’s always important to have mentors in your life. By having mentors you can constantly question and adapt the pretenses you create around you in order to make it healthier. By healthier, I believe the following qualities should apply: It should be wholehearted, ambitious yet realistic, compassionate, self-sustainable and growing in potential, cautious, playful, sincere when necessary, grounded and loving. Any more suggestions welcome.

Some people seem to spend a large part of their life living in a pretense that is unachievable. Such people will most likely become more and more unhappy until one day when they “wake up”. Have you ever seen a person that auditions on X Factor, is absolutely terrible at singing, yet seems to live in a pretense that they are good enough to be a star. It’s funny to watch, but they are sadly living in a false pretense, only to have their “world” shattered by Simon Cowell and the judges.

So how do you choose a mentor? There’s an old saying that “Nothing succeeds like success” (first put into print by Sir Arthur Helps, in Realmah, 1868). Whatever your chosen field(s) in life, choose mentors that are successful in what they do. You can’t go wrong by humbly intercepting some of their knowledge and wisdom and assimilating it to your own arsenal. However, never embellish your mentors more than nessassary. Everybody is human (i.e. imperfect) so you only need take note the winning elements and add them to your own. Good luck creating your own balanced pretense!

If you haven’t already tried Google Latitude, it is a service that tracks your every location via an app installed on your mobile phone. You can then add friends and find out where they are.

Google have just launched a new feature, “Location History”. Somewhat scary, it allows you to view your recent history and find out where you were at any given time.

Check it out here, and see the screen shot from my login below:

My sister and cousin recently went travelling to exotic countries, meeting and collecting rare and interesting textiles and artefacts from people they met along the way. The result is Madnomad.dk, an online shop where you can purchase some of these artefacts for yourself. Check it out!

Why don’t we have smoothie bars like this?

Ever seen a Capybara? They are oversized rodents that live in some cities in Brazil. I found some in a park in Curitiba. At first I thought they were sheep, until my Brazilian friend corrected me.

Want some lovely Saturday/Sunday morning vibes to fill your living room? Check out Sara Tavares on MySpace or Amazon

Photo courtesy of Kalamu.com

This is the first of what I hope to be many posts about one of my favourite topics.. Brazil. What started as a fascination has become an active interest. I like Brazil for many reasons. It’s has great weather, great music, great food, and importantly great people. This is not to say the country doesn’t have its’ own problems, but on the whole I love it. Enjoy this picture I took on the beautiful island of Florianopolis..

I was talking to a friend who has become close of recent, and we were discussing how it is so easy to “learn” about a new thing or “experience” it through images, videos etc by just going on the Internet and searching for it in Google. This thought was then backed up this morning when I was sitting in my sofa flicking from song to song in my iTunes library. The iTunes was on “iTunes DJ” mode, previously known as “Party Shuffle”. I flicked through about 8 songs before landing on one I wanted to hear. I then stopped and realised I had flicked past a classical piece of music by Edvard Grieg, a famous Norwegian classical composer. This music was lent to me by my grandmother, and I never really listened to it from beginning to end, always looking for something with a beat. I decided to skip back a few songs and fully appreciate the piece for what it was. I became surrounded by feelings of being in my grandmothers living room, and it was a fantastic experience.

The motto? Stop and appreciate as much as possible. You’ll be calmer and happier