Posts

Posted on

The 30 Day Music Challenge (Part 1)

If you’re on Facebook, you’ve probably heard of the “30 Day Music Challenge”. Basically, you post a link to a song or YouTube clip every day for a month. Some versions of the challenge have silly guides, like “Day 1 – A song that makes you think of your best friend”. While I have accepted the challenge, I’m not following those rules. I’m just making it up as I go.

Here are the songs for days 1-10; part 2 is here and part 3 is here.

DAY 1: “Making Plans for Nigel” by Headlights

Enjoy this fab cover of XTC:

DAY 2: “Balloon Man” by Robyn Hitchcock & The Egyptians

I chose this just because it reminds me of James Bolton, and our strange trip to Vero Beach, Florida in 1989. The highlight of the trip? We went to a video store to rent a couple of movies, but since this was Florida, I talked him into renting an adult film. We went back to the condo, ate dinner and first watched a “real” movie. I had a fake ID and had bought a ton of beer, so by the time we watched the adult film, we were pretty tanked. As soon as the “action” started, James started saying things like “Oh my God!” and “Ewwwww!” and “he’s putting it THERE???”. I stopped watching the movie and looked at James’ face as it contorted into all kinds of bizarre expressions. Somehow he’d managed 18 years without ever seeing a porn film, and the looks on his face were PRICELESS! He made me turn it off halfway through the film.

DAY 3: “Good Advices” by R.E.M.

I was driving somewhere with my high school friend Jeremy Wilms one day and this song came on. After the first line, in which Michael Stipe says “when you greet a stranger, look at his shoes”, Jeremy turned down the stereo, looked at me and said, as sincere as could be, “you know, that really is good advice”.

Continue reading “The 30 Day Music Challenge (Part 1)”

Posted on

COOL APP: Cache My Work

Nobody likes rebooting their Windows computer… especially when you have to do it in the middle of the day when you have 16 different programs running. Although Cache My Work won’t stop the reboots, it will make life a bit easier for you when you have to.

Just install the app, and before you reboot your computer run Cache My Work from the Start Menu. You’ll see a box that looks like this:

cmw_screenshot

Just check the apps you want to restart after the reboot, and CMW will automatically open them for you. Be sure to save your work, though: although CMW can restart apps like Word and Excel, it won’t save the data you’re working on, or re-open the specific documents you have open. Still, CMW seems to work well and is better than nothing.

Cache My Work is free and works on XP SP3 (32-bit) and Windows Vista\Windows 7 (32-bit and 64-bit). The .NET 2.0 CLR is required.

Posted on

COOOOL!

So the missus and I saw Sun Airway, Asobi Seksu and White Lies at the Variety Playhouse in Little 5 this past Saturday. Sun Airway was good, but their set was really mellow, too mellow to stand up for. So we sat. I, of course, rushed to the stage when Asobi Seksu came out. And, after they were done, I sat back down to check out White Lies.

During White Lies’ set, Lisa pointed out that Yuki Chikudate and James Hanna (the two full-time members of Asobi Sesku) had taken seats five feet away from us to watch White Lies. Being 40, I feel like I’m just too old to be going up to bands and saying “I like you guys! Can I have a picture?”. Lisa had no such problem (maybe it’s different for girls?), so as soon as White Lies were done and the house lights went up, she rushed over and took a picture of the two of them:

Asobi Seksu at Variety Playhouse
(click to embiggen)

Cool!

By the way, that’s me in the background, holding Lisa’s cup of Cheerwine (yes, the Variety Playhouse has Cheerwine on tap!) Here’s one more pic of Yuki Chikudate hanging around the merch table after the show with the part-time members of the band:

Yuki Chikudate and Seksu
(click to embiggen)

More pics (including many of White Lies) are available on my Facebook profile!

Posted on

Festive Friday Roundup!

– Those wacky Brits! I was all excited by the headline “British royalty dined on human flesh“, only to find that the actual article talks about how various human body parts were used as medicine. Mummies were ground up as powder to cure… something or the other, moss taken from dead soldier’s skulls was used to treat nosebleeds, that sort of thing. It’s an interesting article, but wasn’t quite the “Charles I feasting on leg of peasant” I’d imagined.

– You know who is pretty enough to eat? Yasmin Le Bon, who’s still got it at 46.

– Hey look! Scientists in Canada have apparently cured cancer, but no one cares! [insert “Big Pharma can’t make money off this so they’ll suppress it” conspiracy theory here.]

– And look! Farmers in China applied a “growth accelerator” called forchlorfenuron to their watermelons. Only they applied it much too late, so now much of China’s watermelon crop is exploding.

– Guess what, Americans? The Supreme Court ruled that cops don’t need a warrant to search your house! And the Indiana Supreme Court recently ruled that citizens do not have a right to resist illegal entry by the police into their homes. Wonderful. Way to overturn 800 years worth of common law, Indiana!

– Perhaps the folks in Indiana will begin pay homage to their Fearless Leaders, like Saparmurat Niyazov, president of Turkmenistan. Niyazov “had his parliament officially name him Turkmenbashi, ‘father of all Turkmens’, named streets, schools, airports, farms, and people after himself, as well as vodka, a meteorite, the country’s second largest city, and a television channel, banned the Hippocratic oath and demanded that doctors swear allegiance to him” and had a 40-foot gold statue built of himself. Nice!

– A dog in British Columbia survived a fall after being dropped from a considerable height by an eagle or some other bird of prey. It all worked out well for”Miracle May”, as she’s being called: the stray was apparently in poor health when the bird attacked her. She fell to the ground near a nursing home, and the residents took her to a shelter. When news of her story hit the media, donations poured in, and now May’s making a full recovery.

– Work in a dingy office? Use an Altoids tin to create a mini garden!

– Check out Christian Schallert’s crazy, 258 SQUARE FOOT apartment in Barcelona! It’s a bit too cramped for me, but I’ve gotta admire the guy’s ingenuity in getting that much stuff crammed in to such a small space:

Posted on

Georgia: Why so many counties?

When the Romans came to Great Britain, they built a bunch of forts called castra, which was Anglicized to chester. So, English cities whose names end in -chester, -caster and -cester were once Roman settlements, places like Manchester, Cirencester and Worcester.

When the Anglo-Saxons arrived in England, they divided the land into shires, which is why so many English place names end in -shire.

Finally, the Normans invaded England in 1066, and they subdivided the land into counties, from which we get the title of “Count”.

Of course, English settlers to North America brought the county system with them. And thus, every state in America is subdivided into counties, except for Louisiana (which is divided into parishes based on an old Spanish system) and Alaska (which is divided into boroughs).

Texas, being one of the largest states in the Union, has the most counties with 254. But Georgia, inexplicably, has the second-most with 159. Texas is huge, so one can easily understand the need for so many subdivisions. But why does Georgia need so many counties?

The short answer is that it doesn’t. But how the largest state east of the Mississippi River came to have 159 counties is pretty interesting. It involves philanthropy, corruption, war, genocide, urban legends and Progressivism.

*     *     *

Georgia’s history begins with an English politician named James Oglethorpe. Born on December 22, 1696 in Surrey, Oglethorpe attended Corpus Christi College at Oxford before leaving early to become aide-de-camp to Prince Eugene of Savoy during the Austro-Turkish War of 1716-1718. Afterwards, he returned to England, where he was elected to Parliament.

There Oglethorpe took an interest in the state of London’s prisons. What he found shocked him, but he became especially distressed at the plight of debtors. As hard as it might be to believe, people who owed debts were often thrown in prison back then. Oglethorpe understood how the threat of prison worked as a motivator for people to pay their debts, but he also knew that bad debts often happened to good people. It was manifestly unfair, he thought, that a hardworking, yet down-on-his-luck family man should be locked up with murderers and thieves.

This gave Oglethorpe an idea, the idea of a colony in North America where “worthy debtors” would be given farmland to grow silk or indigo. The colony’s trustees would then take the crops and sell them, paying down the colonist’s debt. Eventually, the debtor would be debt-free, and would have a productive farm to show for it.

Continue reading “Georgia: Why so many counties?”

Posted on

COOL APP: HTC Home

I’ve loved desktop widgets since Konfabulator was ported to Windows. But then Yahoo! bought Konfabulator, and Yahoo! Widgets have spiraled out of control with bloat and frequent updates. Windows Vista shipped with the Windows Sidebar, which allowed widgets to exist in a bar on the side of the screen. Windows 7 improved on that by allowing widgets to live anywhere on the desktop. But come on… the Microsoft widgets just suck.

Like a lot of folks, I really like the old-school clock widget on HTC devices. So imagine my joy when I found HTC Home, a free app which adds a similar looking widget to the Windows desktop:

htc_home

It’s pretty, it’s easy to install and use, it’s well-behaved, and it even has nifty animations (lightning bolts and thunderclaps during storms, for example).

Don’t like the HTC look? That’s cool. The same folks also offer Metro Home, a similar widget based on Windows Phone 7’s interface. But I’ve been kickin’ HTC Home for some time now, and I really like it.

HTC Home (and Metro Home) are free and require Windows Vista or Windows 7 (32 or 64-bit). Microsoft.NET Framework 4 is also required.

Posted on

COOL APP: Lazy Droid

Have an Android device and a Wi-Fi network at home? Then I’ve got something nifty for you! It’s called LazyDroid, and it gives you access to much of your phone from your desktop computer!

How does it work? Click the LazyDroid link in the last paragraph from your Android device (or just search for it on the Android Market). Install the “server” software on your device and start it up. You will be given the IP address and port number you need to access your phone. So you then go back to your desktop computer and enter that IP and port into the address bar… and you’ll see this:

lazy-droid-desktop
(click to embiggen)

From here, you can do all sorts of nifty things. “FileManager” is a Windows Explorer-type file manager that allows you do upload, download, delete or rename files on your device’s internal storage or SD card. “SMS” lets you read or send text messages from your phone via your desktop. “Contacts” lets you add, remove or edit any contacts on the phone. “Camera’ lets you take pictures from your desktop. “Clipboard” adds a needed cut-and-paste feature to the OS. And “Sensors” lets you muck around with the GPS and accelerometer settings of your phone. What’s more LazyDroid offers pop-ups for events like SMS messages and phone calls. If you have LazyDroid running on your phone and a Bluetooth headset when you receive a phone call, LazyDroid will pop a message up with the caller information so you can decide whether to answer or not. Similar capability exists for text messages, making LazyDroid a kind of convoluted instant messaging client.

Continue reading “COOL APP: Lazy Droid”

Posted on

Quote of the Day

“Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth’s mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life’s quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result – eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly – in you.”

– Bill Bryson
A Short History of Nearly Everything

Posted on

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2011-05-15

  • @heyred704 Tell that to Indira Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher and Golda Meir! #
  • @BelmontRocks It's FEWER misspelled words! :p #
  • I'm doing a LIVE Internet radio show tomorrow night! Details here: http://tinyurl.com/3avvav6 #
  • Not an Obama fan by any means, but THIS pisses me off in a big way: http://tinyurl.com/3dsr4gv 🙂 #
  • Driving home today, I saw a guy who looked EXACTLY like Gary from "Bachelor Party". The hair, the 'stache, the clothes… everything! #
  • The news said Bin Laden lived in that compound with 3 wives and 19 kids. Jesus, he probably BEGGED the SEALS to shoot him! #
  • The news says Bin Laden lived with 3 wives and 19 kids at that compound. Jesus, he probably BEGGED the SEALS to shoot him! #
  • You know you're getting older when you stop adding the phrase "for an older woman" to comments. Dana Delany is just "hot" now. #
  • Lisa: "Is he gay?" Me: "He's singing Nina Simone. What do you think?" #
  • On the way home: Lisa: "OMG! You're NOT playing Katy Perry!" Lisa then sings every word of "Teenage Dream" and "California Gurls" #

Powered by Twitter Tools