My Own Biggest Fan

A few weeks ago I created a logo for myself to accompany an endeavor I am embarking on with two friends of mine. The logo was of what I coined a Merlion. It was to go on my business cards, and t-shirts and various other goofyness I came up with. Unbeknownst to me, the Merlion is a symbol for the people of Singapore, a city I have no connection with, other than that my cousin and his lovely wife live there. I guess I should have ran a google search for it, I would not be in the dilemma I am in now. So I ask my readers to give me their opinions of my use of the Merlion, and I offer these pictures for you to compare the two…

Thanks to all that partook in the poll.

It seems everybody is going nuts over the last Outcast joint or The Grey Album. And yeah, I guess that’s alright, but if you want real street-level hip-hop you have to do a little bit of work. Luckily today I have done the work for you. Let me introduce you to Kamal.

This shit is hot.

You might think, “yeah this is just another half assed wack-mc, trying to make it big with music.” This is where you are wrong, Kamal lays down the beats AND the rhymes. One man show, this. Buck 65 can go back to his Tom Waits records because he has no idea what hip-hop is all about.

He has both instrumentals and singles for download. And when my man blows up like I know he will, tell them Mason was down before anyone.

is what they give you when your sinuses get invaded by aliens and they decide that they need your eyes as well. Over the past couple days I have been wondering why it felt like I had 30 grit sandpaper lining my eyelids, now I know. I also got antibiotics that will oust the rebellion going on in my upper sinuses.

My doctor was so surprised that i didn’t have a headache from the infection, he hit me in the face until I did have one. You think I am kidding. I am not. I don’t know what it was that he thought he was doing, but if I need an STD test, I am not going to him.

Anyways, yesterday was a big day for visitors, but today was nothing. I assume it is due to the lack of content, or the boring state the archives are in. I should get to work on that… after I have expelled the Martian sea creatures from my nose, throat and eyes.

I am currently a mac user, though for most of my life I have used some sort of Windows based Intel computer. When I switched I had no idea how painless my computing experience would become afterwards. During the past couple weeks I have had a re-introduction to the “joys” of using a Windows based computer.

I have been getting the Beagle virus in the mail constantly for three weeks. At first it was from only one person. This person seems to think that it is cool to just ignore the fact that their computer is spewing disease out towards anyone else who’s email happens to be on their computer. I have emailed them, politely, and told them that this was happening. No reply. What I find amazing is that this computer is used in this person’s job, not only are they screwing up friends’ and acquaintances’ computers, but people they have a professional relationship with as well. The ignorance is amazing.

To me it is only an inconvenience, I could open up the virus and do whatever I wanted, and I don’t have to worry about anything. What about the 95% of others that run Windows and are receiving this? Probably over half of those people have inadequate virus protection and an un-updated version of Windows.

Please, if you are one of the unlucky folk who don’t have the opportunity to use an alternative to Windows, make sure you aren’t gumming up the works for the rest of us. It is a responsibility that comes with owning a computer. Figure it out.

Update: I just got an email from the person who’s email address was attached to those viruses. Turns out it was their ISP that was infected. How messed up is that? I shudder to think that my email could be handled by a Microsoft mail server.

Welcome to the new site.

A few things you will notice:

a) No Pictures.
b)No links in the posts.
c)All the old comments are gone.

All these things will hopefully be fixed soon.

Feel free to comment on how good the new design looks.

You might recall my frustrating experience trying to get KungTunes to work with iBlog, my *ahem* blogging software. Anyways, there is a new solution and it’s called Sputnik, which is a multifunctional Konfabulator widget. I won’t get into what Konfabulator is here, you can go to the website for that.

The most immediate function Sputnik has is to display the album art for your currently playing song, a feature I don’t really need, but it is kind of cool. About 10% of the time this feature can be nonfunctional. If the song you are listening to is even slightly obscure, or even if it is just an independent release you often end up with an empty CD case on your desktop. I blame this on the fact that the source for the images is Amazon. Another odd glitch is that twice the widget displayed the cover to Nine Inch Nails, The Downward Spiral for albums that had no relationship to it, even in name. The ablility to pull the album art from the one that iTunes displays would be a bonus.

The feature that I was really interested in is the ability to upload a “recently played songs” list to my webpage, an example of which you can see to the right. Sputnik is a shining example of ease of use combined with functionality. KungTunes and other widgets that do the same thing require a way to parse the XML for it to do what I want, which is display it inside a CSS defined container. Sputnik uses a Javascript function to dump the titles in, which I am more comfortable dealing with than the PHP(?) it would take to get an XML feed to work. The process is extremely painless. Tell the widget where you want to upload your info to, add a javascript entry into your html and voila! A list that gets updated as the page is loaded. The simple switch from a XML or RSS based output to javascript makes Sputnik that much more useable.

I had some issues with the interface with Sputnik, clicking on it made iTunes do unpredictable things. I sent my concerns to the program author and he sent me a version of the widget that behaved more intuitively in my opinion. The author’s website shows what someone can do with a little more web authoring knowledge than I have The full functionality of Sputnik is displayed in a sidebar, album cover and all.

Another criticism I have of it is that the password you enter into the ftp preference pane is not dotted out so if someone has access to your computer, your whole iDisk is compromised as well. Not that it isn’t if they have access to your computer anyways, but if they don’t have time to mess things up right then, they will later. The picture below shows what the preferences pane looks like on my computer. I have used Shapeshifter to apply a theme to OSX so it looks a little different than you would see.

Sputnik seems to use less resources than KT, which always seemed to slow down my system slightly. I am no programmer, but I would think that Konfabulator may be more optimized than KT. That said, Konfabulator is not free like KT. So if you don’t want to pay for something so minor, then the choice is yours. Konfabulator is a great program on its own though, so you might want to check it out.

There comes a time where one needs someone around to take the computer away from them.

I believe the results speak for themselves don’t they?

I even retook the test, thinking I might have been a little harsh on myself. This is the result of the version of the test where I gave myself the benefit of the doubt.

As a reference, here are Eric’s results. Mike should post his too.

I may disable the comments function for this post…

Go here to do your own.

Found in my stacks of unsorted CDs and CD-Roms, saved from the horrors of oxidization, more gems.

Everything you have heard so far has fallen entirely in the realm of computer generated sounds. Aside from the odd sample, there was no venturing outside the box. The songs you are about to ignore are from my little known foray into 4-track recording.

I used a Tascam 414 (pictured) to record these ones off the computer and/or my Casio sampling keyboard. They were then transfered back to the computer at ACAD and burnt onto a CD, back when CD burners were still a thousand plus dollars and burnt at 2x. Holy crap… these songs are nine years old. NINE!

I don’t know the title of some of these, and the people that have the original run of cd’s don’t seem to want to talk to me right now, so I will make up new titles where appropriate.

Mandy, You Came And You Gave Without Taking – is an early version of Darling Mandy. Some people prefer this one.

Precious Fluids – flaccid industrial. This one was programmed the same way as the earlier stuff, just with the samples and maybe that bonking sound added in afterwards.

Abject – I was making abject art in school at the time and this is an audio embodiment of the same ideas.

Cling Clang Boom Boom Bang – I am sure this had a much more “meaningful” title before, but I like this one better.