December 29, 2006
You’re asking me, “What are the ten songs you played the most in iTunes this year, David?” Unfortunately I’m not going to tell you that. I’d love to do it, but I can’t. See, the thing is that iTunes doesn’t store meta data in a true RDBMS; it’s just a flat XML file. There’s no way to determine which songs you’ve listened to the most in the last X number of days. In order to do that you’d have to be able to cross-reference the time you heard each song as a separate data point. iTunes only stores the timestamp of the most-recent instance of listening to a song. Bummer.
But I can tell you which songs I added to iTunes in 2006 that I heard the most. And I know you want to know that. And — because I love flirting with disaster — I can also let you download an mp3 of each one. Shhh! Don’t tell the RIAA!
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December 29, 2006
From TheBrad comes news of a project to put a Geostationary Banana Over Texas. Obviously I am in love with the URL. (It’s hard to believe that someone else hadn’t already registered that particular domain name.) Plus it gives me another reason to use my favorite banana image before the end of the year. And I’ve been a big fan of putting things in geosynchronous orbit ever since I was a kid reading about the JLA’s space station …
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December 28, 2006
The new year is almost here, and so ends a four (five?) year tradition.
Nobody got me a “You Might Be a Redneck If …” calendar this year.
To tell you the truth: I’m pretty much okay with that. My mom got me a “Far Side” calendar and I have been sensing a distinct lack of Larsonesque zaniness in my life lately.
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December 18, 2006
For a few weeks now my instant messenger tagline has been, “I’d give my right arm to be ambidextrous.” Lately I have been shocked at just how pathetically stupid my left hand is. If all my body parts were chillin’ in a schoolyard, my left hand would be the dork loser that always got picked last. I mean, seriously. It cannot do a damn thing. You ever bend over a sink and make a cup out of your hand to drink a little water? Yeah. I can’t do that with my left hand. I can’t put keys in a doorknob with it either. It’s really, really stupid. I am amazed that I can type so well. It’s the only thing this blasted hand can do. It used to smoke cigarettes, the rat. I do remember that I was a left-handed smoker. Figures. It had no problem helping me kill myself. I’ve wanted so desperately to play guitar since I was a wee little Gagne, and I blame this left hand of mine.
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December 15, 2006
One of my favorite sites is Metafilter (aka “mefi”). I found it way back in ‘99 and became a member in March of ‘00. For years it has consistently been wonderful. The users are infinitely more mature and intelligent than the ones at digg. It’s really quite incredible how mefi has managed to stay so respectable while digg seemed to get overcome by what are apparently mostly invective teenagers.
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December 15, 2006
Okay, Dean got me into this. The idea is to share five things about yourself that people may not know, then tag five bloggers so they can rinse, lather and repeat.
I was tagged by Speaking Freely, who was tagged by MarketingGuy, who was tagged by Aaron Shear, who was tagged by Avinash Kaushik. The game was started by Jeff Pulver.
I’m going to pass it on to Kelly, Josh, Sunil, Steve, and Mikey.
(It’s been a long, long time since I joined a meme.)
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December 13, 2006
A few weeks ago I saw an image on Chris Pearson’s Pearsonified that I just loved. He had taken a photo of something — I can’t remember what it was — and made it look like an old-fashioned Polaroid. “What a great idea!” I thought. Surely I can figure out how to do that in Photoshop. And I did. So now I’ll share.
How to Create a Polaroid Using Photoshop in 10 Simple Steps
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December 13, 2006
Contextless Content: A portion of a conversation, usually from an instant messenger platform.
Subtitled: “Everything I Own Is in a Box to the Left?”
He says: I don’t understand why she keeps mentioning “everything you own in a box to the left”. It doesn’t make any sense to me.
He says: What does the box’s orientation in relation to me have to do with anything?
She seems quite adamant that he understands that it is on the left.
She says: because she packed up all his s**t
He says: But why does it matter whether it’s on the left or right?
He says: She seems quite adamant that he understands that it is on the left.
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December 13, 2006
A short list of things I never (or at least unbelievably rarely) do:
- … wear a shirt to bed
- … wear “tighty-whities”
- … use deodorant / anti-perspirant
- … use cologne
- … wear black socks
- … use after-shave
- … get car-sick / sea-sick; vomit
- … use shaving cream
- … use my blinker
- … drink milk / eat cheese
- … bet on sports
- … floss
- … remember the Alamo
December 12, 2006
After eighteen months I was forced to consider my foray into the lifestyle of luxury car ownership a failure. Just after Thanksgiving in 2004 I traded my red 1990 Toyota 4×4 for a black 2001 BMW 330 CCi. It was a gorgeous car. I really, really loved it. It was a sport model and a convertible. The car had every option you could get on a BMW at the time: heated leather seats, six-disc CD changer, the works. The engine purred like a kitten. It handled like a dream. It was, in short, the best vehicle I’d ever owned.
I loved it, but it had to go.
The only real problem with it was the tires. The tires and rims were so sensitive — and the I am so accustomed to driving a truck, and the roads between my office and my home are so often blanketed in construction detritus — that they kept getting destroyed. In a year and a half I had to buy eight $250 tires and five $750 rims! There was just no way I could justify spending more on wheels for my wheels than I was spending on the car itself. I loved it, but it had to go. While driving home from a 4th of July weekend in Palm Springs this year I had a blowout on the highway. It was 114° F and I was so upset I decided it was time to end it.
The next day I strolled into the Marina Del Rey Toyota dealership and traded my baby for a black 2006 Toyota Tacoma 4×4. I could only afford the base model, no bells or whistles. I’m really more of a pick-up man, I guess. I do seriously miss having an intermittent setting on my windshield wipers, though. :0(
December 11, 2006
So I was reading a magazine this weekend and saw that Samsung has just released another slider type phone (1, 2). There are a ton of these style phones available and I keep wondering why. Every time a new one is released I hear nothing but bad feedback on how the slider system works; either they keep breaking or they’re just not as cool as the one from the Matrix. Gadget makers just keep producing new versions, though. Because everyone wants to be Neo.
Everyone wants to be Neo.
A few weeks ago I had dinner with a really nifty guy — a professional boxer — who has a new slider phone. It was cool. I wanted it. Why? Because everyone wants to be Neo.
In case you’re wondering, you can buy the actual Matrix phone. You can probably even find a carrier that will service it. But why would you want it? Even if some company decided to take this body style and add all the new GPS and mp3 and camera features that every phone has now, who would want this brick? It’s huge! But I know some of you are going to click that link and buy it. Why? Because everyone wants to be Neo …
Also, make sure to read “What code DOESN’T do in real life (that it does in the movies)“.
December 11, 2006
According to the tag help page at Technorati, all you have to do to have their system “find” your tags is (1) add a rel=”tag” parameter to your links and (2) make sure those links end with the word you are tagging (e.g. something.com/tag). The first part is simple. The second part is easy, but not very practical. More importantly, though, is the fact that neither of these seem to actually work. As far as I can tell Technorati does not read your entire post and strip any tags it finds. In fact it seems that Technorati only reads your RSS and analyzes that to determine how to tag your posts. That’s okay, though, because I can tell you how to convert your WordPress tags into rss category nodes so that Technorati indexes them.
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December 11, 2006
The December issue of Men’s Health includes a Tech Guide with what it says are, “100 products that will change your life!” If you’re looking for the latest news in men’s health, for exercise routines, for dating advice, or for fashion tips, Men’s Health is a great resource. If you’re looking for the latest trends in technology, go somewhere else. Most of the items on their Top 100 list are ridiculous. I can’t imagine a universe in which I’d describe a plastic spork or a chainsaw as something that will change my life. And choosing the Zune as the #1 gadget is simply insulting. I have 9,000 songs using 35 gigs of space on my computer. My 80 gig iPod handles that. A 30 gig Zune won’t. End of story.
