Internet

As you might have read, I want a PS3 real bad. Well, I ordered one today, paying more than I wanted to. Here’s with how it happened:

• About a month ago I learn of the PS3 MGS4 bundle and verify it’s a good deal at $500. The guy at my local GameStop says the demand won’t be huge so I should have no problems picking one up when it comes out on 6/12. I didn’t detect any sarcasm.
• Shortly after this, I register with Amazon to notify me when they’ll be getting it. I really don’t want to get it from Amazon because of shipping and waiting, but I figure this couldn’t hurt.
• Amazon sends me an email yesterday stating that they’ll have limited quantities on 6/6 at 10am. Wow, I can get one early! I call up a few GameStops who unequivocally tell me they will not be getting any early, and hint that even if they did they wouldn’t sell it to me. Bastards. Clearly, they’ve bought them all and have them at home already.
• I get ready to buy from Amazon, setting up One Click to use standard shipping. I see there’s a notice on the product page that there will be limited quantities and great demand across the country, so it will sell out quickly. Huh. That’s not good. Still, I’m ready get buy it tomorrow and receive it 6/12 the latest.
• 9:30am. I’m online and ready to buy, refreshing every few minutes. Computer clock is synchronized with the government’s atomic clock. I see comments popping up in the review section and product forum. Somebody brags that he pre-ordered it from GameStop. Pre-order? What a fool! Doesn’t he know Amazon will have them on sale today?
• 10am. After a few more refreshes, the page changes. “You can preorder this item for $499 and get Super Saver shipping.” Preorder? You didn’t say preorder, you said order! WHAT THE FUCK?!?! HULK SMASH!!!
• 10:02am. I check GameStop. As the braggart noted, they have it for preorder, but it’s $560. Someone in the Amazon forum notes the free shipping gave him a ship date of 6/17. I don’t want it to take forever to get here, and I don’t want a markup. This sucks.
• 10:05am. On Amazon, I click preorder. “The item you have chosen is no longer available from that seller.” You’re that seller, asshole! Aaaagh! It’s sold out. From the forum posts, it looks like it took maybe 2 minutes.
• I check Circuit City, they don’t even have it listed. Time is running out and GS is my only option. I call up the local GS again: can I order it in store to avoid shipping charges (and ensure it isn’t stolen off my front steps)? No, online only. I bite the bullet.

So I went from paying $500 plus shipping and getting it before 6/12 to paying $630 and getting it on Friday the 13th. I thought GS was price gouging with the $60 difference, but it turns out they forced customers to also buy the MGS4 bluetooth headset. While I’ll soon need a bluetooth headset for the California hands-free law, I was not planning on getting one that looks like it belongs in some little kid’s playset:

While I would have gone with something from Jabra or Plantronics, this is made from some company I’ve never heard of. On the plus side, I’m all set to play Buck fucking Rogers with the neighborhood kids.

Reading this security warning about mean people that use a virus to encrypt your data and then offer to sell you a decryption key got me thinking. How bout we start a Google Answers type service where people can donate for a “virtual” hit on these dirtbags. If you get infected with a nasty virus and you want to get even, throw $20 into the pool for the virus or exploit that got you, and when it gets high enough, someone will think it is worth their time to “disrupt” the life of the people that infected you. Sure, it is probably hard to track them down, but my guess is that for enough money, people could get pretty creative. Besides, how hard could it be to outsmart these guys (I hear they share a bed with their mother and are dating their neighbor’s goat).

Scott Hodson has created a Google maps mashup that displays wi-fi hotspots. I was surprised at the results, as I expected T-Mobile to dominate. In my area, AT&T has a much bigger presence. It’s like they got every business that wasn’t a Starbucks or convention center.

The Poetic Prophet, AKA Moserious, raps at ya about designing and coding your site. Yes, your web site. And yes. It is awesome.

Ironically, going to his site triggered a Quicktime update message that crashed Firefox. The message noted that the latest Quicktime fixes many serious bugs. Indeed. But even though I was in the middle of writing this very post, Firefox restored this edit page with all my text in tact. Oh Mozilla, is there anything you can’t do? (Other than not crash in the first place?)

Tip of the hat to Ray and Or.

Some big news from NBC:

• Knight Rider returns as a series. It’ll air Wednesdays at 8PM. No word on whether Val Kilmer will still play KITT.
• Merlin, a new series about Camelot, will air Sundays at 8PM. Better have a two-tuner DVR to grab that and The Simpsons, Family Guy, et al.
• Matthew Broderick will be in the season finale of 30 Rock. The show, of course, has been renewed.
• The Office is getting a… well, they’re calling it a spinoff, but I don’t see how you can have a spinoff when supposedly none of the current cast will be in the new show, and it will be in a different location. Sounds more like a copycat show to me. A special Office episode and the copycat pilot will air right after the Superbowl. Like last year, the first episodes of the season will be an hour long.
• SNL will have a spinoff called Thursday Night Live. It will consist of a half-hour of political sketches leading up to the election.
• Heroes is of course coming back. The new season will start with a 2-hour episode on Sept. 15th, following one of those lame hour-long clip episodes that Lost is always doing.
• Life is coming back! Annoyingly it will air Fridays at 10PM, but that’s what DVRs are for. I never watched this on TV, but caught them all online (you can, too - the whole season). Now I’m hooked. I really like the main character, and the supporting cast is great. Sara Shahi looks gorgeous when she’s not in butch cop mode, and I’ve always liked Adam Arkin. My big hope is that Christina Hendricks will return. She’s a beautiful redhead with a body that would make Barbie jealous. Seriously, one of the best bodies in the history of bodies… Where was I? Oh yeah, to top it off they’re getting Donal Logue as the new boss. If you’ve never seen The Tao of Steve, in which he stars, rent it now. A great guy movie.
• Scrubs is not coming back! Well, not on NBC - it’s expected to move to ABC. Looks like it’s getting replaced by the Office copycat and Last Comic Standing. Whatever.
• Over the summer, NBC is creating a bunch of webisodes for Chuck, Heroes, and The Office. Hopefully they’ll be in HD; Yvonne Strahovski and Hayden Panettiere deserve nothing less.

More at Variety.

So I just posted a Facebook event for my belated birthday party. I had read that FB Events had surpassed Evite in usage by a wide margin. Facebook also proclaimed in the help that people who weren’t in FB could be invited and would be allowed to respond. What could go wrong?

First, the famous walled garden reared its ugly head. Yes, you can invite non-users, but their response is limited to yes/no/maybe. That’s it. I asked people to state alcohol preferences in the comments. It turns out that only FB users can write on “The Wall” for your event. Not cool. AND they can’t even specify that they’re bringing other people.

Then I noticed that the number of people who were confirmed didn’t match the list. This is because it only displays thumbnails for FB users. You have to click on a link to show both FB and non-FB attendees. And if you’re not a FB member, you can’t see the full list!

So Facebook Events treats non-FB users like second class citizens. As a host, I am embarrassed for its behavior. I strongly suggest it be avoided altogether unless all your guests are on FB. If you’re in HS or college, maybe that’s the case. But I’m too old to be in that situation.

Even if all your friends are on FB, there is another caveat: FB Events won’t send an automatic reminder. I learned about this tonight through a friend. He was invited to a party 3 weeks in advance. A few days before the party, he got an email from another invitee asking if he was still attending. As you might imagine, he and just about everyone else completely forgot about it. If they hadn’t formed an impromptu phone/email tree, most people wouldn’t have showed up.

Now I’m in the awkward position of having to create an Evite and spam my guests with another invitation. As far as I can tell, FB Events are only good for promoters who are publicizing events that are completely open to the public. For everything else, they suck.

So the writer’s strike is raging and there’s less and less scripted TV to watch. And the cable bill is past due, and the TV is broke, or at the very least, it’s all the way in the other room. Too much damn walking. What to do, nephew?

I have cataloged here all best the ways to legally obtain video entertainment on the Internet. So no jackbooted stormtroopers from the MPAA will kick down your door and haul away your computer. And your children.

Note: As much as I love Firefox, I find most embedded video players perform far better on IE. Many won’t work at all in Firefox, even with IE Tab.

Crack TV!
The Crack Team has been pointing you to great videos since this site was launched. Through the miracle of tagging (and the back-breaking labor of back-tagging over 400 posts), you can now see an archive of all video posts on TCT. Try to find good stuff sites like YouTube and you’ll end up slogging through one mediocre video after another - even when you stick to the popular and highly rated ones. Save your time and watch Crack TV!

Netflix
Netflix is awesome. Without a doubt the biggest DVD selection anywhere, including HD-DVD and Blu-Ray.¹ They also have a streaming service. While the selection of downloads is limited, it’s still good. I just finished season 1 of Dexter and next is Dead Like Me. They also have several NBC shows and a bunch of crap shows from the 70’s and 80’s. Best of all, they now allow you to download as much as you want! The quality is high, too. I’ve had no problems since signing up several years ago and they even give me an early adopter discount.

Broadcast
If you can, you’re probably best served by getting a good TV tuner card² and using DVR software like Windows Media Center. This way you can get everything and skip all the commercials.³

All major broadcast networks have some video content online, but vary widely in the quality, selection, and commercial content. It’s a great way to try new shows now that so little new stuff is produced. Journeyman would be a great example, if you didn’t watch it before it was canceled.⁴ You can now watch the entire series. Similarly, I recently discovered Life at the suggestion of a friend and now I’m all caught up.

Cable networks are much more conservative, choosing to only offer video clips like you might see on YouTube. Full episodes (for the cable channels I watch) are nonexistent.

Fox
Most TV shows I watch are on Fox, and they’ve done an awesome job with Fox On Demand. The selection is great:

• Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
• The Simpsons
• Family Guy
• King of the Hill
• American Dad
• House
• Bones
• Plus some crappy shows I don’t watch

New shows appear 1-8 days after airing; it depends on the show. The videos are high quality; some are even in HD. I find that cranking up the resolution to 1280 x 1024 on my 21″ monitor gives a great HD image for shows like Terminator.⁵ And most shows are commercial free! Rupert Murdoch is my homeboy.

NBC
NBC is the #2 network for online viewing. The video quality is excellent. The bad news is that all their shows run commercials during the normal spots for commercial breaks. The good news is that they only run one 15-30 second spot. The bad news is that it’s the same commercial, over and over. Better than watching it live, but not as good as a DVR. Like Fox, NBC also has a great selection:

• 30 Rock
• Bionic Woman
• Chuck
• Heroes
• Journeyman
• Life
• The Office

ABC
The only ABC show I really watch is Lost, but they seem to do a great job with it. Amazingly, they have all 4 seasons online in HD (1280 x 720), and when I boosted my resolution, full screen looked fantastic. Lost is easily the best looking show on the Internet. I thought I might try Pushing Daisies, as I heard that was good, but I found they only offer a few episodes of their other series.

CW
Smallville is one of my longtime faves, due in no small part to Kristin Kreuk. And Reaper is great. But CW’s online video offering is weak sauce. Very few full episodes and what they have is low quality. I have to admit, I am surprised they put online the director’s cut of the next new Smallville episode before it even aired. But it still wasn’t enough to get me to watch.

CBS
It sucks. First, I didn’t watch it when I had a TV. CBS has picked up Dexter, which is an awesome show, but they’re just airing censored versions of the Showtime series. When it’s all on Netflix, what’s the point? The only current CBS show I’m interested in is Jericho, as it was recently suggested to me by a few friends. When I went to watch past episodes, however, I found the video quality sucked. Full screen is almost unwatchable; it’s just stretching the original size, which is only 9″ diagonal on my monitor.

Headline News
I used to watch this more often to get a quick feed of major stories. This is still possible online through their Prime News segments. Personally, I can’t stand Nancy Grace, and don’t often bother with their other shows.

Discovery, TLC, Animal Planet
Decent quality full episodes, but very few shows (3 total at this time, none of which I watch), and only a couple episodes per show.

Comedy Central
More of a video clip outlet with no full episodes. Do you really need to see every second of The Daily Show or Colbert Report? Maybe not, especially now that the strike is affecting them. But I would like to see full episodes of South Park, Reno 911, and, should they ever return: Chapelle’s Show, Dr. Katz, Stella, Strangers With Candy, and Upright Citizen’s Brigade. I won’t be holding my breath.

Cartoon Network
They’ve produced some fantastic animated series, especially their superhero adaptations (Justice League Unlimited) and Adult Swim (Harvey Birdman, Sealab 2021). But the site seems very much geared towards kids, and only provides video clips. Nothing to see here.

1. If you tell them you have either player, they just automatically send you those. [↩]
2. Make sure it’s ATSC for HD [↩]
3. Except for the upcoming Agent Mystery-produced So You Think You Can Dance. Be sure to watch it live and soak in all the commercials. [↩]
4. Thanks for killing a great show. [↩]
5. They do force you to download a proprietary video player, but it seems harmless. And yes, I know it’s a tragedy to watch Terminator on anything less than a 50″ 1080P screen. [↩]

I’ve been really enjoying the web comic DM of the Rings by Shamus Young. It tells the tale of a dungeon master leading a group of typical players on a Dungeons & Dragons adventure based on Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Only the players have never heard of LOTR, much less MERP¹.

Yes, a little far fetched considering D&D stole heavily from LOTR, and I can’t imagine a gamer who hasn’t seen the LOTR movies. But no matter, the comic is very funny, and the actions of the players are uncannily similar to every group I’ve ever gamed with.

The real ingenuity is that it’s “illustrated” using only screencaps from the films with some occasional Photoshopping. The looks on the characters’ faces is often priceless. By the time you’re halfway through the series, you’ll be convinced Viggo Mortensen went through the whole trilogy with a blank stare.

1. I actually owned MERP some years ago, but never got around to playing it, or meeting anyone else who had. [↩]

Almost Famous was the first and last movie I saw in the theater alone. I’m one of those people who believe movies are a social experience. You grab dinner, see the movie, and then talk about it over coffee¹. I’m pretty sure I’m in the majority. When Almost Famous was released, of course I wanted to see it with friends. But either everyone had seen it, or nobody wanted to see it. Normally I’d just wait for it to be released on DVD, but something told me I had to see this movie in the theater. So after meeting friends for dinner at the Santa Monica Promenade² and failing to convince them to join me, I bought a ticket and went in alone.

It was practically a religious experience.

Seeing Cameron Crowe’s journey into the world of rock and roll at the age of 16 seemed like a wakeup call. A big “what the hell am I doing with my life” kinda thing³. The film immediately became one of my all time favorites.

And the music. Just fantastic. Complementing each scene so that hearing them again allows us to invoke Crowe’s memories as our own.

Of course, I bought the soundtrack right away. But even at 17 songs it only covers about a third of the music in the film. At one time I had ambitious plans to collect all the albums the songs had appeared on, allowing me to experience it the same way Crowe did. Luckily, procrastination sometimes saves you work. Eventually I discovered Rhapsody, which saved me from tracking down all those albums on half.com. And the good volunteers at the IMDB painstakingly entered the music credits⁴. All I had to do was find the tracks on Rhapsody and play them.

Unfortunately, Rhapsody doesn’t have the best search capabilities. But eventually I was able to find all the songs or determine if they weren’t available. When faced with duplicate tracks, I chose the one that appeared on the original album if it was available. This saves you the trouble of having to track it down, if you’re a purist like me.

In addition, I have listed below all the songs that were missing from Rhapsody. The great tragedy for this soundtrack is that Rhapsody doesn’t really have any Zeppelin⁵ . Considering that the fictional band Stillwater is a composite representing Zeppelin, The Allman Brothers, and The Eagles, it is a real loss. Or a great excuse to buy a bunch of Zeppelin albums.

I hope this inspires others to do the same, as there are many movies with great music, and only one of me. However, this won’t be my last - stay tuned!

Music from the Motion Picture Almost Famous (A Rhapsody Playlist)

Read the rest of this entry »

1. No coffee after a movie makes me sad. [↩]
2. Back when it was cool, not just some clone of The Grove [↩]
3. Unfortunately, my powers of procrastination and laziness are still as strong as ever, but at least I know I’m capable of being motivated for short bursts. [↩]
4. As I count 48 songs, I’m not sure if it’s missing any since I heard there’s over 50 in the film. However, it does look to be very thorough. [↩]
5. They must’ve really took “get the Led out” to heart. [↩]

The server migration is complete and I’ve added lots of cool stuff. While this isn’t as drastic a change as when I switched from Movable Type to Wordpress, it’s the biggest change since then. Here’s what’s new:

WordPress 2.3.1
I was way behind, but now we’re on the cutting edge. The upgrade includes tagging and auto-save, among other things. It also has a better visual editor.

Tarski 2.01
The latest version of this theme, which includes a new header image that nicely demonstrates The Crack Team’s plans for world domination. Most other changes are invisible to users. Mainly it’s compliant with WP 2.3 and supports tags. Of note to bloggers is an option to reverse your page title, so the post title comes before your site name. That’s good for search engine optimization.

Subscribe To Comments
When you comment on a post, you can request to be notified by email of any follow-up comments.

Social Bookmarking
When you view a single post, you’ll now see a row of icons to bookmark that page to del.icio.us, Facebook, Google, etc. Let me know if one you use is missing.

Footnotes
On longer posts I love to use footnotes, so this is great for me. You just wrap the footnote in double parentheses. For example¹. Just make sure there’s a space before the opening parentheses.

Contact Form
I added a simple contact form; you can see it at the end of my profile page. It uses both CAPTCHA and Askimet to prevent spam. I know CAPTCHA isn’t foolproof, but as far as I can tell Askimet is. It’s saved me from over 5,000 spam comments since I switched to WP. If any author wants, I’ll set up a form for them.

In addition to the software upgrades and plugins, Inmotion keeps separate server logs for each domain and subdomain I host, and separates out webmail. This means AWStats will report more accurately. Granted, I’m sure I won’t want to see them since they’re artificially inflated right now. But that which can be measured can be improved.

Hopefully all this is useful and not just a novelty. If you have any suggestions, just leave a comment. Thanks.

1. Here’s a footnote [↩]

Well, it’s more like server removal. I’m switching from a self-hosted server to one at Inmotion Hosting. It was fun while it lasted. Ok, so it wasn’t really fun, because I hate system administration. And that’s why I’m switching it out. Some things get worse when they’re out of my hands, but other things like regular backups, security and bug fix patches, etc. get way better.

They’ll be handling mail as well, and as a result I will be getting rid of my CrackTeam.org email address. I technically have 6 email addresses and by far the Crack Team one gets the most spam. Not that I see any of it - I have excellent spam filtering. It’s 97% accurate and has protected me from over 69,000 spam messages to date. I don’t know that Inmotion will be nearly as accurate though, since they use SpamAssassin, and I use the BayesSpam plugin for SquirrelMail. Anyway, I was worried about getting rid of it until I realized that almost none of my friends use that email; it’s mainly used to register for web sites. I can use my Yahoo account for that, since their spam filtering is excellent as well. If you were using my Crack Team email, please switch to one of my 3 main personal email addresses.

Anyhoo, the point is that the site will be going down, perhaps tonight, so don’t be surprised. Hopefully the whole thing won’t take long, and we’ll be running on WordPress 2.3.1. There should be some nice new features.

I’ve joined a few different social networking sites, and when I join I want to quickly add my friends who are already on the site. Many have a nifty feature that allow you to upload your Outlook contacts file, which they use to generate a list of existing users. Sounds harmless, right?

The problem is that some sites can be a bit aggressive about it, and if you’re not careful, they will sent invites to your whole contacts list. We often forget who we have in that list. People we haven’t spoken to in years, or those who we had one short conversation with. In short, people who might be little taken aback to find you still had their contact info. And even more creeped out that you want to add them as “friends” on whatever social site du jour. I just installed the latest version of Skype, which includes your Outlook contacts in your Skype contact list by default (you can turn that off, thankfully). It would suck to accidentally call some girl whose phone number I should have purged years ago.

So I created a personal Do Not Call List. I moved every contact that I’d feel embarrassed about contacting accidentally. As I’m a bit of a data pack rat, I cleared out 37 (!) old contacts. I still have them just in case, but I can now export my current contacts without fear. It also makes finding contacts a bit easier.

Thanks to Assassin for forwarding this. It’s a Microsoft technology that allows real time photo data mining. Remember that part in Bladerunner when Harrison Ford is watching a video like:

type type type
Enhance
type type type
Enhance
type type type
Enhance

(Yeah, they did it Super Troopers, too.) Well this is kinda like that, only with tons of photos instead of video, and a better interface. It’s seriously badass.

Now that Facebook is open to the public, I’ve joined up and wandered through. I’m a social software buff, so I thought I’d share my thoughts.

Networks and Exclusivity
Facebook started out as an exclusive network for college kids, and that still shows. It is still divided into networks based on schools, workplaces, and geographical regions (the last of which anyone can join). To get into the school or workplace networks, you need an email address that proves your affiliation. I don’t have one for my alma mater, and I’m not terribly keen on adding my work affiliation.

Profiles and Access
The clean profiles are more reminiscent of Friendster than MySpace. On the one hand, there’s less customization and personalization. On the other hand, you’re not constantly pulling up some garish vision of Hades, a cacophony of top 40 vitriol that will forever haunt your dreams. So you got that going for you. The message seems to be, “We’re a bit more civilized over here, a bit more mature, as evidenced by the many photographs of my alcohol drinking escapades, which is what grownups do.”
     You can only see the full profiles of your friends and those in your networks (and there are ways to further restrict your profile). To clarify, you can verify the existence of just about everyone on there, using browse and search features. But if they’re not in one of your networks, you only see a thumbnail and are limited to sending them a message or adding them as friends. So even though there are millions of members, I can only see the profiles of those in my regional network, which has about 50K people. You can switch regional networks, but only once every 60 days. This is especially annoying for those like me who live on the border of another regional network. I can switch, but I can’t be in both.
     This is probably another reason why Facebook has been called a “walled garden” and the AOL of today. In addition to the general Internet public being kept out, virtual walls exist between the different internal groups. It seems I also can’t see the profiles of those in my regional network who are underage. There are various search/browse filters that can weed them out for you, but I still appreciate the extra layer of protection, because you really can’t tell by the photographs anymore, and Facebook is filled with HS kids.

Identity
Once you start browsing profiles (or just looking at your own), you realize there is virtually no anonymity. Just about everyone goes by their full name. It also makes it much easier to find people by name, especially when compared to sites like MySpace.
     I think this also affects how you craft your identity on the site. You’re probably a bit more cautious. Not as cautious as you would be on LinkedIn, but still… Age, of course, is a factor; the younger the person the “riskier” the profile. This happens a lot: you’ll see a thumbnail of a hot chick in a bikini, instinctively click on it, and see the profile is blocked because she’s in high school. Perhaps this behavior stems from when the virtual walls kept all non-students out, most importantly parents and younger siblings. Or maybe there are just a lot of young girls with poor decision making skills, as Masterchief would say.

Social Focus
The user base skews young, as you’d expect from a site that was students-only until a few months ago. I’m pretty far from ancient, but after uploading my Outlook contacts file it only found two friends already registered. I’ve also seen other user data that shows most members are in school or within 5 years of graduation. You also see a mix of people like me with very few connections, and college students or recent grads with over 100 friends. You hear a lot of buzz about how this is going to be the next big network, but if so, it’s going to start with students and move forward. A lot of people will have more friends on MySpace, and that will continue until the current teens and 20-somethings start aging.
     It also has more of a dating feel than MySpace (closer to Friendster, I guess). Probably because the basic profile questions are similar to sites like Match.com. At the same time, it doesn’t go nearly as far as a dedicated dating site, and seems a little strange to use it as one. I did find a rather brilliant 3rd party application called Matches. It allows you to anonymously communicate your interest to someone. They get notified they have a secret admirer, but your identity isn’t revealed until they indicate they’re also interested in you. If this sounds familiar, I blogged about this feature earlier when American Singles added it.
     Perhaps because of the dating feel, it feels weird to include work related info - like mixing business and pleasure. I’ll leave the professional networking to LinkedIn, which I’m also on.

User Communication
There are a few ways to interact with other users without resorting to messaging them. Networks have message boards and something called “The Wall”. Walls are like MySpace comments, and your profile has one too, but you’re not prevented from writing on your own wall - a nice improvement. And there are groups, but they’re listed alphabetically, so it’s hard to find popular, active groups, unless it’s a top 10 group in your network. That’s included in the basic network stats.

3rd Party Apps
Garnering recent buzz in the developer community was the Facebook Platform, which allows you to create plugins (”applications” in Facebook parlance) for Facebook users. So far the popular ones include those that display your music playlists, what states/countries you’ve been to, a virtual white board for visitors to scribble graffiti, and the aforementioned Matches app.

Conclusion
It’s interesting, and I can see how it’s a must for college-oriented people. As these people continue to enter the workforce and interact with older peers, membership will grow. Right now, I’m not sure that all regions have reached the critical mass to offer a real community experience, and you may find you want to switch to an outside region just to have access to more people. Or you can just stick with MySpace until I build something better for the rest of us.

If you’ve got time to kill, check out the Clark and Michael show. Heard Kevin Smith recommending this on KROQ this morning. It’s Michael Cera from Arrested Development and Clark Duke from, apparently, the apartment next door. Amusing web show peppered with some brilliant lines:

[They] rested their balls on our chins and brushed our teeth with their dicks!

I cannot wait to use that line at work!

I was just poking around and came across this Christmas themed skin for Firefox.

Tinseltown 1.1 (Firefox Theme)

There’s some nice animated Christmas icons for when pages load and some cool translucent graphics throughout the tabs and text fields. The candy cane scroll bar is a nice touch. Well, at least I can enjoy this for the next week and then it’s back to default.

I just learned of last.fm and their Audioscrobbler plugin. Basically, if you have a compatible player, Audioscrobbler will capture everything you play and upload it to the last.fm mothership, where it will create a net radio station with stuff you should like, unless you listen to a lot of stuff you hate. It can also create you charts, hook you up with similar listeners, and offer feeds to embed in web sites or blogs like this one. Sadly, there’s no plugin for Rhapsody, but that already offers RSS feeds (see my page for an example). Rhapsody also has a radio station creator, but it’s pretty weak compared to Pandora’s, and possibly last.fm’s.

A couple years ago I attended the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive and Film festivals, and they were a blast. Austin is a cool city, and everyone at the conference is really friendly. I don’t know if it’s because everyone is happy to be there, or they’re playing it safe in case you’re someone who can get them a job or financing.
     Well, I didn’t make it this year, but they have posted videos and podcasts of the events. Notable videos feature Craig Newmark (craigslist), Henry Rollins, Sleater Kinney, The New Pornographers (I just saw these guys open for Belle and Sebastian - good band), Harry Knowles (Ain’t it Cool News), Peter Bart (ed. in chief of Variety), and many more. The podcasts cover the moderated discussions and have more of a techie/business slant. It includes people like cybepunk author Bruce Sterling (who gives really cool “State of the World” rants), and reps from companies such as Six Apart (they make Movable Type, which runs this blog), Zimbra, Adaptive Path, Yahoo!, 37Signals, frogdesign (they design cool Apple gear), and others. If you don’t recognize those companies, they’re pioneers in stuff like AJAX, which is used in really slick web apps like Google Maps and Gmail. I still wish I could have gone, but this eases the pain a bit.

My friend Or pointed me to a page with some great file search tips for Google (other search engines may work, too). It’s targeted towards MP3s, but can also be used to find PDFs and other file formats. Now play nice…

By now you’ve already read my article on why you should use Firefox, and how you can customize it. (I’ll continue like you didn’t just disagree.) In that article I was remiss in omitting a great extension that lets you download embedded videos. The obviously named Download Embedded places a small red arrow in the lower right part of the window frame, allowing you to download embedded content. It reportedly doesn’t work for Flash, but I’m usually after regular video content (and I think Flash kinda sucks for video that isn’t animation). This is really nifty since I have a bigger monitor set to a higher resolution; now I can download the videos and resize them to something reasonable. Most newer codecs, especially Divx, allow the video to be doubled in size with little artifacting/aliasing. With Divx I can often go full screen and it still looks great.
     Another advantage is that you can now email the videos instead of the links to the hosting page, which often has NSFW ads. Of course, it’s probably not all that important for NSFW videos. But you’re not emailing those anyway, ’cause you’re all good and stuff.

MSN has a map mashup that displays the cheapest gas prices in your area. In my area, there was a 8-12 cent price difference, depending on the grade. With prices so high, I wonder if it matters.

I’ve been using Firefox since it was Firebird, and I’ve never looked back. I only use IE for pages that use custom IE features, and those are getting very rare as Firefox gains market share. Here is my personal setup:

Firefox - The latest version at this time is 1.5.0.1. This offers several advantages over IE, including tabbed browsing, tons of extensions, image blocking by server (kill tons of ads), and a built in search engine box that works with over 6,000 databases.
     For some reason, embedded files (Quicktime, PDF, etc) annoy me. Firefox allows you to easily disable those plugins so they launch externally, and they seem to launch quicker that way. More importantly, the standalone viewers allow you more control. I usually play video at 2x original size since I run at a higher resolution, and you can’t do that when it’s embedded.

Extensions
These free addons improve the functionality of the browser. Here are ones I can’t live without.

Adblock Plus: Web sites cost money to create and run, and are supported by ads. Without ads, they would either die, or go subscription, and I usually prefer they did neither. However, I cannot stand animated ads (esp. Flash ads), and this plugin makes it easy to block servers who provide them (filter suggestion: *doubleclick.net*). For animated gifs, you can simply hit Escape and they will stop.

IE Tab: For those few times when you need to use IE, this offers a button to switch to IE to render the current page, but keeps it in the tab. Press it again, and it’s back to Firefox as a page renderer.

Redirect Remover: Some sites don’t provide direct links, in order to track your behavior. If the link is of the form http://OriginalSite.com/foo.php?site=http://ActualLinkImInterestedIn.com, it will scrub it so it goes to http://ActualLinkImInterestedIn.com. Sometimes that does screw things up, but you can turn it off, or right click and have it open an uncleaned link.

Search engines
In addition to the standard ones I use (Google, Amazon, Answers.com), I added these, so I don’t have to bother visiting the page before searching. Yes, I’m that lazy.

Wikipedia - Free encyclopedia.
IMDB - Internet Movie Database.
Pricegrabber - Compare prices on everything.
Shopping.com - Another price comparison site.

Some stuff submitted by Agents ZBalance and MasterChief:

Super Friends meets Office Space
Dungeons and Dragons taken to uncomfortable levels The term “hobbyist gamer” never sounded so good.

I recently signed up with CD service yourmusic.com, and so far it’s the best deal in music I’ve seen. If you’re familiar with Netflix, the concept is similar (no, you’re not renting CDs). You go through their catalog and add CDs to your queue. Every month, the CD at the top of your queue is sent to you and your credit card is charged, until you quit the club.
Here is the amazing part. Cost of the CD? $6. Oh, cost with tax? $6. Cost with tax and shipping, you ask? $6. Wanna buy more CDs? $6. Cost per disc for box sets and double albums? $6. Cost if your queue is empty at your “time of the month”? $6 (and they don’t ship you anything).

That’s it. Frankly, I don’t see why you couldn’t just sign up, buy all the CDs you want at $6 each, and then quit. At worst, you leave one CD in the queue if they require a 30-day notice (which they don’t state, I’m just speculating).
My price threshold for CDs at a store is $12 for a disc I really want, otherwise $10 because they?re gonna tax me. Half.com has some great deals, but their shipping charge is $3 per disc. So, for me, this is a pretty stunning deal. Heck, I just saw Coldplay?s X&Y at Sam Goody (yeah, I know) for $20! Who the heck pays that? Hmm, yourmusic.com doesn’t offer that CD, so perhaps that’s a bad example…

The catch? None, really. Shipping isn?t instantaneous. I signed up on a Sunday morning (1/15), they shipped it on Tuesday (1/17) and it arrived today (1/26). About average for free shipping. Their selection isn?t stellar, about 14,000 CDs, but I was still able to find a few good ones. Reviewers elsewhere pointed out that CDs sometimes disappear from your queue, so if you really want something, you might want to order it while you know you can still get it. The only issue for me is that Rhapsody fulfills most of my listening needs, so I?m only buying CDs that are great as a whole, and something I?d want to listen to in the car. When I get a subscription-capable MP3 player, my need may disappear altogether. Until then, my queue is loaded.

I guess this is old news, but Google has a video site now. I didn’t even realize I’d been there before, but my browser completed the URL as I typed it. Some pretty amusing videos there, and the big hullabaloo over them actually charging people for stuff. I got cable, I got Netflix. Why would I pay for crappy internet videos? Even if I didn’t have those, who’s paying $2 for an episode of the original Twilight Zone? For that price I could get it on DVD. However, it is a good source for viral Internet video clips, hosted for free (for now). Like iFilm, but without the mandatory commercials, and with potentially higher quality video.
     There are a few annoyances, like no true browse feature. A link that says “Another 15 popular videos” is a big fat liar. All it does is refresh the page with another random video assortment, so some of the same videos keep popping up. It forces you to use a proprietary video viewer for DRM purposes, but it scales poorly compared to Windows Media Player. And some videos are only available through an embedded Flash player. Being Google, you can of course search, but also like Google, you’ll get a lot of irrelevant videos in the results.

Some of the more entertaining videos:
A reasonable attempt at deciphering Fall Out Boy. I’m not sure if emo can be translated to English, but a solid effort.
Dumbest dog you will ever see.
Bored Russian kids that could teach the Olympics a thing or two about making feats of senseless athleticism entertaining.
The system administrator song.

On a lark, I subscribed to the Rhapsody Unlimited music subscription service, lured in the by their 14-day free trial ($10/month after that). I had fun with Pandora, but wanted to try something that gave me more control over what I listened to. In this case, complete control. Rhapsody has over 1.3M songs, and gives you the power to listen to any of them in any order. That sounds like a lot, and it is, but you’ll still run across missing albums, and occasionally missing artists. At least they have a button that reveals all of an artist’s missing albums.

Listening on the go

One of the benefits of the Unlimited service is Rhapsody To Go, which allows you to download tracks to a compatible portable device (the ones that say Subscription). There are 3 catches in that statement: 1) you are a current Rhapsody Unlimited subscriber, 2) your MP3 player is Janus/PlaysForSure compatible (iPods aren’t), and 3) you’re using Windows XP. And 4 catches if you include the fact that not all Rhapsody tracks are Subscription tracks, but in my experience almost all are. The quality of purchased and downloaded tracks is 128K, in WMA, AAC, or MP3.

Since I don’t see myself dropping the service anytime soon, I’m highly motivated to get a Subscription compatible player. Because I’d like an expandable player, I’m leaning towards the Sandisk e200 with a microSD slot, removable recharbable battery, FM tuner, and voice recorder, due out in March (happy birthday to me). [Attention Sandisk: when your marketing dept. launches a product at CES, without so much as a press release on your website, it’s time to fire them.]

Listening at home

You can listen two ways, through their web interface or their dedicated client. I usually use the client/jukebox software for its interface and convenience features. If you add a track to your library, it can download it so you can listen to it even when the site is down (which happens occasionally). Assuming you’re a current subscriber, of course, and are using Windows XP (I’m guessing it’s a DRM issue). You can purchase tracks for $.89 and albums for $7.99.

I don’t know how much music I listened to before, but I find with Rhapsody I listen to about 3 albums a night. It allows me to more thoroughly explore artists and genres. I find I’ll listen to classic rock musicians from past to present, until they start sucking (which happens pretty consistently as they approach the 1980s), and indie musicians from present to past, for pretty much the same reasons. I’m generalizing, but there’s definitely a pattern there, and it’s cool to see how the artists evolve (or devolve).

They also have several pre-programmed radio stations to help you explore new stuff, and allow you to create a station based on your tastes, like Pandora. I haven’t tried the custom station feature, and would be impressed if it was as good as Pandora, but I’ve been too busy albums to check.

Within a day of creating an account (had to use work, I’ll be fired soon I’m sure), I am getting solicitations from hot ladies! They all want me to email them, which can only mean they are really interested. Not all of them live near me, but for these ladies, a long distance relationship would be just as rewarding. I submit, for you reading pleasure (and imminent jealousy!), a missive from a lovely young woman with the handle “irin”:

Hello!!!!
I want will get acquainted with male.
I saw your structure and you have very much interested me.
I very much would like to find out about you more.
It would be very pleasant for me if you will write on mine email: irin-73@mail.ru
I shall look forward to hearing from you.
Irina.

And there’s more where that came from!

When I was in college, I was a database of certain types of music. Mainly alternative, especially industrial. I’d actually keep handy a two page typed wishlist of albums to get, if I could find it cheap/used. If you mentioned bands or songs you liked, I’d be right there with, “well, if you liked that, give this a listen.” Since college, I’ve backed off a bit (and I have a theory that most people’s interest in music peaks when they’re in college). However, with a wide variety of net radio stations available (and working on a screenplay that involves, in part, the music industry), my interest is again rekindling, especially with indie music. So I could really use a music geek to advise me, based on stuff I know I like.

Enter Pandora, a web version of said geek, but without my endearing arrogance. Give it a song or an artist, and it creates a radio station filled with similar music. It’s powered by the Music Genome Project (I hadn’t heard of it, either), which catalogs musical attributes of songs and artists, so it can find similar ones. It also accepts your feedback to help sculpt the station; if you don’t like a song it plays, it’ll never play it again on that station (but it might show up on another). You can also combine artists/songs on one station to create hybrids. For instance, I’ve combined Elliot Smith and Jon Brion to form a station I call Pop Genius. For the record, I am not a genius. Just brilliant. Anyway, I also created a KMFDM station, which has so far played Static-X, NIN, and Rob Zombie. Hmm. I wonder if I can recreate AOL’s WB channel by entering the best tracks from the Smallville soundtracks. Uh, not that I’d want to… What? No, you’re gay!

The interface is Flash, and is quite smooth and intuitive. You can pause and skip tracks, but not rewind. The sound quality is excellent! I listen to a lot of net radio, and this is probably the clearest, cleanest feed I’ve heard, even though others are also listed as 128Kbs. I have a hunch that the ones I’m accessing through iTunes are streaming 128K MP3, whereas Pandora might be using a variable bitrate format utilized by Flash. It is currently commercial free, but they warn they’ll be ramping up the advertising. I don’t know if this means radio commercials or not, but they’ll give you an ad-free version for $36/year. That seems reasonable, and well under the $10/month Rhapsody/Listen.com charges (although you can directly choose songs and albums with those services, whereas Pandora you can only “steer” the selections with feedback).

The only issue is whether they’ll be able to keep up with cataloging new and old music. Obviously, if a song’s attributes haven’t been cataloged, the software can’t really recommend it. They claim they don’t pigeonhole artists, which is good considering the range some of them have (how I miss Leeb and Fulber, who created a new band for every variation of industrial they tried: Front Line Assembly, Delerium, Intermix, and a few others). However, their catalog is 10K artists, and 300K songs, so you’ll probably be good for quite a while.

Stay tuned, I plan to experiment with some software that may complement Pandora frighteningly well, as well as necessitate that MP3 player I’ve been eyeing for a while now…

To paraphrase Milton, if I have to hear one more Geico commercial, I’m going to blow up the building. I don’t care if I’ll save hundreds of dollars on my car insurance. If I do switch from 21st Century (who’s getting way too expensive), it won’t be to Geico. Because AOL Radio plays their commercials on every one of their stations. All. The. Freaking. Time.
     Since they only have two sponsors (Dorritos being the other), I have to drop them to retain my sanity. I previously wrote good things about them, and I’m officially taking them back. I wish I didn’t have to, because I did like the music and the easy links to AMG. Anyway, this is what I’m pimpin’ now:

SomaFM
I found these guys through iTunes, and listen to the Indie Pop Rocks station. Very few interruptions, and a good music selection. Belle and Sebastian, Guided by Voices, Elliot Smith. They also just introduced me to The Go! Team (no affiliation with The Crack Team… as far as you know!), which is next on my pickup list. Also check out the Secret Agent channel, a modern take on 60s lounge music, Bossa Nova, and Connery-era James Bond. And occasionally a little Bollywood flavor throw in. Very chill.

3wk
They have a couple indie stations, one modern and one classic (which the announced with King Crimson background music, so it must be good). More cool music, no commercials (although they do remind you they’re listener supported, but that’s way less obnoxious than an insurance commercial).

ChroniX Aggression
What’s sometimes referred to as “alternative metal”. Fear Factory, Slipknot, System of a Down. Good music to get the heart pumping, before you rip it out and wolf it down.

What I like about these stations is that they display the artist and song while they’re playing, so you can punch it into your search bar and get more info. 3wk will even tell you the album and the label its on.

Now I just gotta find a replacement for the WB station… not that I listen to any of that really catchy pop music. You can’t prove it!

There is a lot of talk these days about rich web client interfaces with AJAX, and I’ll admit I find it exciting. However, there is an alternative
called OpenLaszlo. It has the same goal as
AJAX (desktop feel and response time in a web application), but uses Flash
instead of JavaScript/DHTML. While most web developers know JavaScript
already, the advantage here is that you only have one target platform:
the Flash plugin. The word from the trenches is that it’s very
difficult to overestimate the amount of time you need to test AJAX apps,
especially cross-browser. And I hate testing. Another advantage for bigger web
shops is that the backend/middle tier guys rarely do the front end
stuff, as they’re tied up with business logic and data access issues,
which is quite a handful already. For these apps, they have to master
XML and/or web services, too. At the same time, your front end guys are
often professional graphic designers who know Flash about as well as
they know JavaScript, if not better. So OpenLaszlo can help leverage
your existing skill mix.
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp AJAX is not without support, though. There is a JavaScript
library called Rico (developed by
Sabre Airline Solutions) to help developers get up and running. It was a
Sabre lead who made the comment about the difficult testing, so it looks
like they’ve open sourced their framework to get the community to help.
I don’t know if you want to open source a competitive edge, but the rest
of us are the better for it. I’ve also heard good things about DWR, but it’s a Java library.
My current goal is still to concentrate on the middle tier,
getting up to speed on Spring and Hibernate. I figure once I’m
comfortable with those technologies, my choice for a rich client will be
obvious (or simply won’t matter).

I listen to a lot of net radio, since I’m on the computer a lot and a crave variety in my music. One of my main sources was Netscape Radio, which apparently is now AOL Radio. For a while now, I have experienced problems with my Radio@Netscape player, where it basically won’t start. When it was working, I saw occasional ads for unlimited listening at AOL Radio, and since they’re the same company (until Time Warner gives AOL the boot) I thought I’d check it out. Turns out AOL has the same stations and an interface that looks identical, but offers unlimited listening (Netscape cut you off after a couple hours). The new interface appears to be pure web-based and launches in a popup, unlike Netscape’s, which required a separate downloadable executable. Unfortunately for now, Firefox is not supported, but they promise it will be next month. So it’s time to dust off your IE.

I listen to it often due to the good selection of stations and the ability to rate songs. I have no idea how much my vote counts, but I like to feel listened to (hence this blog). In addition, they link the artist, song, and album to the AOL’s music page which licenses data from the All Music Guide, making it easy to learn about artists I’m not familiar with. My staples are Indie Rock Mix and Electronica, but other notable stations include Melancholia, for when your misery wants company; The WB Radio, the music of Smallville; Xtreme Alt Rock, hard but not boring; and a variety of single-artist stations for bands like The Ramones, The Doors, Yes, and others. Plus just about every other style of music you can think of, and several promotional stations for things like the Warp Tour and Live 8. Overall, a good one-stop music shop.

I’ve recently been attacked by comment spammers. This is where they post comments in your blog that advertise a product. The goal isn’t to get you to buy said product, it’s to increase their pagerank on Google (although a few might not be smart enough to realize this). It’s very annoying, and removing comments with Movable Type (MT), the software that runs this blog, is like a 5-click process (per comment!).
     This is why I am weeping with joy over MT-Blacklist. Since the evil, scum-sucking spammers want to increase their pagerank, they must use the same site name, which becomes the chink in their armor. You can now add that to your Blacklist and have it automatically blocked. Furthermore, a centralized collection agent processes MT comment notification emails, so users can forward spam to the list and have it automatically added to the master blacklist. Unfortunately, that part is down for reasons explained on the site (Perl hacker needed to optimize the collector; I’d consider it if I had the time). So for now, you have to update your own list, but some nifty catch-alls help out a lot. Like if you wanted to comment about any drugs that enhance your bait and tackle, you’d have to email me directly… and immediately.
     It gets even better! The plugin is really easy to install. And if it doesn’t block something, you can add it after the fact, and it will back-check your comments! It shows you what it’s about to delete, and even automatically rebuilds the site for you (although you can uncheck that box if you want).
     Thank you MT-Blacklist. Thank you.

So when I tell you about the awesomeness that is the Strongbad email, you should be saying, “duh”. ‘Cause you knew about it like only a million years ago. Pfffffft. But if you’re not saying that, you have a crapload of hilarious web pages to go through. And also, you’re not as cool as me (but you knew that). So get crackin’! Also, there are a lot of easter eggs, especially at the end of the episodes, so you end up waving your mouse cursor all over the damn screen like you’ve got Parkinson’s, searching for a cool extra tidbit. And it’s worth it.

Apologies to those with Parkinson’s. Peace.

I received yet another “new feature” notification for a web site I’m registered with. Difference is, this is the first one I’ve ever been impressed with. American Singles has a new feature called Click! that acts as a mutual friend. It’s dead simple, and so brilliant you’ll wonder why I didn’t think of it first. As you view the personals, you can mark them as Yes, Maybe, or No. If you mark a profile as Yes, and its the author does the same for your profile, you “click”, and the site let’s you know you’re interested in each other. If you marked her Maybe, and she marks you as Yes, you’re sent a subtle hint: “Are you sure she’s not a Yes?” No’s are treated like you never viewed and/or marked the ad, so no hurt feelings.

This is so much easier than real life, where I assume a girl’s not interested unless she actually smiles at me. Consider that a warning.

I’ve just been informed about a new site called