DJ Afro is Jose Luis Pardo, the venezuelan guitar player, prodigy musician and composer of Los Amigos Invisibles.

This playlist is courtesy of El Blogo who could find this album somewhere in Mexico and was kind enough to share it with us at MyBloop.com

About DJ Afro (taken from his official website)

DJ Afro (A.K.A. Jose Luis Pardo)

If you go to a Los Amigos Invisibles (LAI), you will never listen to any Shakira or Enrique Iglesias because DJ Afro, the band’s guitar player, is in charge of heating up the party and making sure the night starts well enough to move your feet with really funky rhythms.

Time has passed and Dj Afro (a.k.a Jose Luis Pardo) has managed to get the party going even when LAI are not playing after him.

He is responsible for writing more than 80% LAI’s music, as well as playing guitar, keyboard and background vocals for all five albums. He has also been featured on Louie Vega’s “Elements of life” and Dimitri from Paris’ “Cruising attitude”.

Aside from his work with the band, DJ Afro also enjoys a respected career as a remix producer. He just released his first solo track, “Mala Idea” (look at you records). He has published several remixes for Dimitri from Paris, and in his remix’ reel you can find tracks of Beastie Boys, Fantastic Plastic Machine, David Byrne, Radio Zumbido, Fundación Tony Manero, Sonorama, Soul Coughing, Los Amigos Invisibles, John Scofield and others.

As a DJ with a bag full of records that can go from Samba to Boogaloo, from Rare Grooves to Organic House to Disco, he can make people smile and start dancing almost anywhere.

DJ Afro has been spinning all around New York City since he moved here. He has been a guest behind the decks in parties like Turntables on the Hudson, Giant Step, PS-1, Shelter, Cielo, Suba, Remote lounge, Nublu, Pink (SF), Knitting Factory (LA), La santanera (playa del Carmen), O bar (Dallas), Sala Arena (Madrid), The Basement (Australia) and others. He has opened for Dimitri from Paris and Little Louie Vega. Nowadays, DJ Afro’s afterparties in local clubs following LAI’s gigs are becoming a standard in every city they perform.

Afro is also part of expansion team, a prestigious agency of top of the line producers that create music for commercial spots and films. He has produced original music for brands like Mazda, Sears, Miller, General Motors, AT&T and Sony, among others.

He was also the mind behind CHILL OUT VENEZUELA (Gozadera Records, 2004), a compilation featuring the new scene of young Venezuelan producers that has been very well received by music lovers. He is now finalizing details on its follow up, “DANCE VENEZUELA”.

DJ Afro recently composed the soundtrack for “Sed en los Pies,” a short film that opened in Venezuela in late 2005, and he will be working on the music for Mexican director Luis Sanchez’ new film. Afro’s music will also accompany Crimanesa Amoroso’s new art piece.

For the past two years, he has recorded a weekly radio show, DJ AFRO Y SU RUMBA BARATA, which airs in Caracas every Friday on ATENEO 100.7 FM, with great feedback. Afro is also in charge of choosing the playlists at SUBA, one of the most prestigious restaurants in downtown Manhattan.

Jose Luis also has a life as a journalist. He writes a column for two magazines: PLAY (Venezuela) and EL HUEVO (México) and he contributes frequently to other Venezuelan magazines like TODO EN DOMINGO and URBE.

More About DJ Afro
You can read his curious blog (in spanish) at http://elafro.com/blog/, which he seems to often update whenever he sits at the airport, given the titles of “Airport Chronicles” in some of his posts.

Support this artist if you enjoyed this playlist.

Pictures courtesy of Juan Galvan Adriana Gutierrez Varela

Whenever I see the temperature go above 65F I feel a sudden urge to leave the house. Yesterday I decided to take a bike trip to the city and back.

On the way there, my ipod blasted two prodigy records, then while in Central Park I listened to a wonderful podcast called E01 (spanish) which judges TV shows based on their first aired episode, the E01.

After the trip I have one request for Mayor Bloomberg, please add bike lanes in midtown on 2nd Av. it’s really scary to bike anywhere up above 34th st, definitively lot better once you ride south of 14th st.

My next trip will be to Park Slope right here in Brooklyn.

Do you have any favorite bike routes in your city? Please share

Last night I had the opportunity to attend to my first NYPHP.org meetup. In this ocassion, Philip Antoniades formerly MySQL’s Sales Engineering Manager, now Sun-MySQL’s Sales Engineering Manager gave a talk related to Sun’s recent purchase of MySQL for USD $1,000,000,000.

Project Indiana
I must say at the beginning of the presentation he switched from talking about the MySQL acquisition to selling us a new version of Open Solaris called Project Indiana, which seems to be led by no less than Ian Murdock creator of Debian. I suppose its his job now to sell sun and he had to do it, but things got a lot more interesting specially in the Q&A.

So for Project Indiana, as you can imagine having someone like Ian Murdock there means Open Solaris will have apt capabilities (like Debian or Ubuntu).

The other thing that caught my eye about Project Indiana (coming from the Linux world) is that Sun will require all drivers to be open sourced, otherwise they won’t be accepted to the distribution. I’m not sure if this has done anything for projects like Debian where they’re really strict, but Sun is a monster with a lot of corporate influence, maybe their new Open source approach will help things change (manufacturers releasing drivers with open licenses), and finally we’ll get lots of drivers available for Linux as well.

They also mentioned an “open source” license called CDDL (”cuddle” as they call it), no clue about its differences, if its good or bad, it seems to me there might be something weird behind it, but I’m just talking out of my ass here, I’ve not read it yet. It’d be good if someone could complement this article with their thoughts on CDDL vs GPL2 vs LGPL vs others…

How things have changed

Quoting Antoniades:

“Basically we have an influx of cash”

MySQL AB went from a 400 employee company to being part of an organization of about 34,000 employees, and now they have a lot more cash, the purchase according to Antoniades was mostly paid in cash (and you know cash is king baby!).

Philip even mentioned they’re hiring 2 SysAdmins for their New York office, (contact him if you’re interested), also, when they need a feature, they just don’t put it in the wish list, if its important enough they get 30 engineers from Sun to help them.

He made a lot of emphasis about how they already got a guru focused on optimization of MySQL and how they’re pushing for more threading (parallel programming) on MySQL. He said that Sun has a lot of DB experience, that they basically helped Oracle in getting their DB to run spotless on Solaris and they have the knowledge about DB development problems as well as a lot of smart people to help them.

On the Q&A session I finally learned that Yes there’s plans between Java/MySQL integration (stored procedures in java could be a project to come, and they mentioned that a couple of the MySQL AB engineers had already done something along those lines, and as the acquisition was happening the people from Sun brought up the fact they knew about such efforts. MySQL AB has always been a good Java shop, and they claimed their jdbc driver was always one of their best products). MySQL basically wants to learn a little more of that engineering discipline from Sun, and it seems like a nice blend between 2 very different cultures.

Other interesting topics of conversation during Q&A were about using Memcached as a storage Engine, so that you can use MySQL as a client for Memcached, maybe it sounds as an extra layer with a certain overhead, but you could certainly do a lot of more complex stuff just by using SQL, seems interesting, didn’t know you could actually do that (actually opens a lot of possibilities in my mind for stuff we need in MyBloop.com that we were planning to use raw key-value-approach on memcached)

Also learned about a new storage engine called Maria, that will be the successor of Innodb.

So I think that now, we can be sure that MySQL will be churning out a lot more fixes (in shorter periods, maybe MySQL 6.0 will come out sooner now) given the cash and new added man power, probably the folks using MySQL enterprise will be even more benefited by this, they talked about a lot of enterprise tools to optimize queries, analyze queries, very interesting stuff.

This is the second year I assist to the Union Square Pillow Fight. This time I went with my family and took the SLR camera. During the shoot, by mistake I pressed the button for monochrome mode and serendipity stroke my photo set.

This post is to share with you my favorite pictures. Feel free to share them, they show the spirit of many New Yorkers, and they’re quite a good idea of something to do for free with lots of strangers of your own town.

The very start, in color, for your context

Girl smiling over someone’s shoulders

V for Vendetta

Yes, it’s a Macbook

Air full of feathers

Floor covered in feathers

Now the B&W’s

The battlefield

The arm of evil

Breathing from the top of the Pole

A Beautiful face

Luchador

Probably allergic to feathers

Come and get me, I’m dressed as a chicken (most hilarious moment, they beat him to the ground)

Gas Mask

Pure Joy

Click here for all the pictures.

We went yesterday on a school field trip to the Yankee stadium for a tour. The stadium is being torn down
they will open a New One next year (right across the street).

If you’re in New York and have the time, be sure to visit the stadium before its gone, its a great piece of history of this city and of this country’s culture, it’s awesome being there, a truly magical place where unbelievable things always happen, go soon if you haven’t done it before.

Girl reading her Amazon Kindle, 86st Subway Station, New York

Originally uploaded by Gubatron.

On our way back from the museum, back in January, I had to sneak out my camera to take a picture of the first Amazon Kindle I got to put my eyes on.

She was an asian girl who probably has something to do with amazon, cause this devices were sold out the minute they came out.

The device is pretty amazin, but I’m not sure If I’d spend $400 on it.

Eventually this is what the subway will be like in the future, everybody holding digital books, to read books, blogs, news… no more deciding which book to bring with us today.