Rock Star alter egos are growing in numbers "You're forming a fake band -- that's what you do," says Sadri, calling the game "the best part of karaoke, adding in a drummer and guitars."
The Magpie Developer Jeff Atwood is one of the best programmer/writers around. I love reading his stuff, some I agree wholeheartedly with, other stuff we disagree, but this post is about a dead-on as they come. This idea has been floating in my head for a long time, but it is hard for me to conceptualize it in words, Atwood does a brilliant job at it. Must read for any developer.
Andy Olmsted's Last Blog Entry. (Warning: Pretty rough) No matter how you feel politically about the war, this reminds you that each number people throw around as statistics is a human life. This is extremely well written, and pretty rough on your soul towards the end, but something everyone should read. Its a shitty situation all around, but there is always a human face behind the statistics and I want to make sure I never forget that.
To preserve his body during the voyage home, the second-in-command stored Nelson's body in the ship's vat of rum and halted all liquor rations to the crew. Not a bad idea, but when the ship reached port, officials went to retrieve Nelson's body and found the vat dry.
Disregarding good taste (in every sense), the crew had been secretly drinking from it the entire way home. After that, naval rum was referred to as Nelson's Blood.
making vodka pills in 24 hours Recently, Chef Fabian was experimenting further with the Adria/Torreblanca technique of making 'vodka pills.' I use this word to describe the process of making liquid-filled candies by pouring flavored alcohol syrups into cornstarch and letting it set until a hard outer shell forms.
Strategy Letter VI - joelonsoftware.com As a programmer, thanks to plummeting memory prices, and CPU speeds doubling every year, you had a choice. You could spend six months rewriting your inner loops in Assembler, or take six months off to play drums in a rock and roll band, and in either case, your program would run faster. Assembler programmers don’t have groupies.
Entire Article is Dead On. A must read for anyone in the software biz.
The second I saw the paintings on the wall in the Senior Widmore's office, I knew it came from Claire's boyfriend and I told the wife. Nice to see someone went out and got the visual confirmation. So here is my part of my theory up until now:
Claire's boyfriend Thomas (Aaron's father) is either the twin brother of, or IS Radzinsky (the guy who shot himself with the shotgun and most probably painter of the murals in the swan hatch). I don't know if the timelines are correct for Claire's boyfriend to be Radzinsky, so thats where I would have to suspect there is some kind of twin involvement a la Alexander and Arthur Widmore from The Bad Twin. If Thomas and Radzinsky are twins, I think the senior widmore is their father, which would make them brothers to Penny Widmore. Had Desmond decided to marry Penny, he would in essence be trying to protect his nephew at that point (Aaron, the air of Thomas Widmore) who could potentially be the heir to the entire Widmore fortune.
One other thing that bothers me though is that there is the striking resemblance between Thomas AND Benjamin also. If there is one thing that the writers/directors do is that nothing is coincidence and the attention to detail in the show is almost startling. This throws a kink into my theory but which only leads us to one possible explanation:
Someone is building a clone army, they just are not as cool as the Fetts.
"Both the Seattle PI and the Seattle Times have details about a group of technology companies -- including Microsoft and Google -- seeking permission from the US Federal Communications Commission to test a prototype device that uses 'white space' radio spectrum freed up as TV stations go digital. Could it potentially be a way for these companies to offer mobile services without having to work with mobile carriers?"
To be fair the telcos have known this for awhile, hence all the merging going on. A War is-a-brewing, and I for one can't wait. Nothing better than competition for the consumer (and probably some damn cool phones to boot).
So as everyone probably read, I was pretty downed by the first 6 episodes of Lost this season. They just didn't seem to have that umphh that season's 1 and 2 did (with the exception of the Sawyer-centric episode where the Con man gets con'd, I thought all the other episodes were just fair. The writing just didn't seem to feel like the same writers or something, it just didn't hold my attention as well as season's past. I actually felt this way so much that I really wasn't that excited about this last episode, and had completly forgotten about it till the wife reminded me it came on. So we sat and watched it, and it was good. It was season 1/beginning of season 2 good. It was very well written and the new twists were added very well and seemed logical. Also the fact that we had a backstory on Juliet (one of the others) was a neat twist also. So I thought I would pass this along, D sent it to me earlier today, and man is it neat. Nothing amazing, but I love the attention to detail because they KNEW people would poor over the episode and this would come out days later.
The desmond episode quite literally fried by brain. I'm glad its back to kicking some major butt like I remember... the soap opera crap earlier this season got on my nerves.
Most of the non-technical concepts in this video I have figured out over the past 2 to 3 years. This is a short, concise and extremely well done lesson though, that is honestly probably one of the best "educational" videos I have seen in a long time. (and Woot! for Netvibes and Del.icio.us being in it. I have been using both for the last 18 or so months and they are an indispensable tools for my research and info gathering escapades). [via Battelle]
When she found out that Shipman was flying to Orlando from Houston, Nowak decided to confront her, according to the arrest affidavit. Nowak raced from Houston to Orlando wearing diapers so she wouldn't have to stop to urinate, authorities said.
Hey baby, Once you go into the black, you can never go back.
This is the first time I had come across this, and wow it is an interesting read. It is an article written by Courtney Love for Salon.com about record contracts and the music industry. I saw it on today's most popular del.icio.us posts and read about half of it before I realized it was written back in 2000.
It looks like she mentions her "seven-year contract law California labor code":
I want my seven-year contract law California labor code case to mean something to other artists. (Universal Records sues me because I leave because my employment is up, but they say a recording contract is not a personal contract; because the recording industry -- who, we have established, are excellent lobbyists, getting, as they did, a clerk to disallow Don Henley or Tom Petty the right to give their copyrights to their families -- in California, in 1987, lobbied to pass an amendment that nullified recording contracts as personal contracts, sort of. Maybe. Kind of. A little bit. And again, in the dead of night, succeeded.)
I don't know the law she is referencing, but I assume maybe it means that the longest timeframe a company can keep someone who broke a contract from doing whatever is stated by the contract agreement if they were to terminate it is 7 years. So assuming this, maybe Love backed out of her contract in 2000 and she is unable to record or produce a new album till 2007 (hence why this resurfaced) because of her contract with which ever record company she was with, or maybe this is just in reference to the band Hole (since it looks like Love had a solo cd in 2004).
Regardless, it is a very interesting read about the music industry. I have absolutely no love for it, even though I do buy probably about 2 or 3 albums a week.
It wouldn't say the industry has come a long way since she wrote this, but you can see some glimmer of hope in smaller labels doing better and at least some footprint in iTunes and other music services. Also, with certain TV shows (Gray's Anatomy, the OC, etc) we are starting to see smaller bands that generally would be regulated to the internet start to gain momentum from soundtracks to these shows (which sometimes propels them into larger record company contracts, but at least it is a start).
I would be neat if Love wrote another article sometime in 2007 to reflect back on the last 7 years in the music industry and if she feels it has changed any (for better or worse).
This is definitely worth the read though, and extremely interesting:
Travis - The Boy With No Name Travis is back. I wouldn't say I hated 12 memories, it was meant to be very political, I just thought it went a little overboard and was somewhat preachy. Then when the greatest hits CD came out to be honest I was really hoping it didn't mean the end to one of my favorite brit bands. Boy With No Name is everything they were capable of. Supurb CD all the way through. Every song is brilliant. Big Chair is probably my favorite song and the opening to the CD on 3 Times is as good as it gets in music imho.
Pop! Why Bubbles are Great For The Economys (Gross) One of the better economic books I have read in while, where the author gets their premise across in a well written, clear and concise manner. Basically Gross believes that the infrastructure left over after economic bubbles, provides companies with the ability to move forward (maybe more than the original bubble did). Not a hard read, I would definitely suggest it for a day and the beach/lake.
Feist - The Reminder I CANNOT GET "I feel it all" OUT OF MY HEAD. Period. Great album, angelic voice.
Catan - Xbox Live Arcade I am hopelessly addicted to this board-turned-video game on the xbox360. I had never played the board game but had seen it being played in some comic shops growing up. Click the Pick and play the demo, it isn't the 360 interface, but same game.
Arctic Monkeys - Favorite Worse Nightmare No Sophomore slump here. Just as good (if not better) than Whatever they Say.
Beautiful Evidence (Tufte) Tufte reads like a text book, most people would say bleh, but the information about "information" that he can deliver is top notch. My first Tufte book was "A Visual Display To Quantitative Information" and it was extremely well done, albeit confusing at time. I think beautiful Evidence is a little easier of a read (I am still only half way through it) and a little easier for myself to understand the ideas he is presenting..
Fountains of Wayne - Traffic and Weather Fountains of Wayne are the Gods of pop music. If Welcome Interstate Managers was a collection of short stories in song form, then Traffic and Weather is an even better collection with more humor. I already feel like CNN has the hottest female anchors, imagining them throwing their lust around like the Title track to the CD makes it even better.
Game of Thrones (Martin) I started this book assuming it was going to be a high fantasy novel. Elfs, Dragons, Magic and the like. It isn't. It IS fantasy but more surrounding the politics and cunning of a few high ranking families. Incest, Murder, Intrigue, unscrupulous midgets. It has it all and more.
