The Official Homepage of Club Awesome
From the monthly archives:
A few weeks ago a friend of mine asked me to build a WordPress plugin to display a Gunning-Fog analysis on his blog. The math part was pretty easy stuff. I was having a borch of a time getting the plugin to count syllables, so I hunted through Google and found someone else had written a pretty good function to do that. I squished it all together and it seems to be working pretty good.
You can download the plugin here and see it in action here.
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I don’t get addicted to songs very often. If you’ve spent any amount of time reading this site you know that I am infatuated with music and I love just about every genre. I have no doubt that I have spent the great majority of the last two decades with music playing. I love listening to music and I love hearing songs that I haven’t heard in a while. It’s rare that I listen to the same album or song more than once a day. But every now and then I get addicted to a tune and I want to hear it over and over again.
A few years ago it was Green Day’s Jesus of Suburbia. A few months ago it was The Killers’ Sam’s Town. (I’m going to see them next Monday, by the way.) Right now it’s Carrie Underwood’s Before He Cheats. Believe it or not, I had never heard of Ms. Underwood until I saw her on SNL last weekend performing this song. I, of course, immediately found it on LimeWire and have listened to it two dozen times this week. It’s the ‘07 version of Alanis‘ You Oughta Know — angry and nasty. I love it.
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A friend of mine recently asked for a list of good sports websites. If you’re only getting your sports fix from ESPN.com then you’re missing a lot of good stuff. I’ve had a Sports bookmark folder since at least ‘95. Here are the ones that I visit on a regular basis:
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Two weeks ago was the seventh anniversary of this blog. I meant to do something exciting to celebrate the event but I completely forgot. (Does that make this site one year old in dog years? Or is it the other way around?)
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Washington — At least two federal government agencies are refusing to upgrade their computers with Microsoft Corp.’s Windows Vista operating system, citing concern over costs and compatibility issues.
In a Jan. 19 memo to staff, Dan Mintz, the Transportation Department’s chief information officer, imposed an “indefinite moratorium” on upgrading desktop and laptop computers with the new operating system, Office 2007 and Internet Explorer 7.
Mintz wrote that there is “no compelling technical or business case” to upgrade to the new products and specific reasons not to upgrade.
Think I’m crazy for saying there’s no reason to go to Vista right now? At least a small village’s worth of friends and family have asked me if I’m upgrading to Vista, when I’m upgrading to Vista, whether they should get Vista on their new computer, and why the hell am I not all excited about Vista. I’ve told each and every one of them that I’ll upgrade to Vista someday, but not in 2007. XP works just fine for me, thank you. I don’t have the time or the patience to spend half my working hours for the next six months installing service patches and emergency updates. I’d never buy the first year of a new model of car and I’ll not upgrade my OS the same year it’s released. My operating system is probably the only thing in my life that I choose not to have on the bleeding edge. Sometimes it’s just not worth it to be an early adopter.
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Last night’s Saturday Night Live with Peyton Manning and Carrie Underwood was excellent. I am so happy that the show is in something of a revival right now. It’s a long-overdue, glorious return to funny. The last dozen or so SNLs have had me in stitches on more than one occasion. The digital shorts and the fake commercials are superb, the guest hosts are good again, and even the news is smart and witty. I miss Tina Fey, but whatshisface and Amy Poehler are doing a great job. I am kind of tired of so many recurring sketches, but I can live with it. I’m just glad that it’s finally stopped playing second-fiddle to The Daily Show and Best Week Ever. Those two shows are usually side-splitting and I had been more than a little bit sad that NBC’s classic favorite, the show I’ve watched since I was ten or twelve, had fallen into irrelevance. Now it’s back to being a standard and it’s worth watching.
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Late Friday night I finished reading Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. This one’s been in my personal queue for several years; I sort of randomly found it on the shelf while looking for something to read on the plane to New York last week. It’s a psuedo-scientific exploration of what it’s like to live on minimum wage in America, and I can’t say that I was very impressed. Ehrenreich is a competent author and she weaves a half-interesting tale, but as a Democratic-tainted exposé it was nowhere near as good as Rivethead or any of Michael Moore’s mockumentaries. More than anything it seemed like just a whining liberal complaining about how darn mean all those big corporations are. She comes down heavy on Wal-Mart — Who could blame her? — but there’s nothing earth-shattering in her story. I’ve worked plenty of minimum wage jobs in my day. It’s back-breaking and demoralizing and all that, sure. I know that. Doesn’t everyone? There’s just a lack of any true revelations or fact-reporting in this book for me to recommend it. If you want to read about the plight of the common American, the state of “the poor”, or anything truly brilliant concerning the U.S. economy you should grab P.J. O’Rourke’s Eat the Rich, Levitt’s Freakanomics, or Schlosser’s Reefer Madness. And this is as good a time as any for me to give another round of applause to Gregg Easterbrook’s The Progress Paradox. Read that.
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I am sure that there are still plenty of people in the world that don’t know this yet, so I have a bit of an announcement to make. I am now officially off the market.
It feels a bit awkward to write about it here, which is strange because I have used this site to talk about almost everything else that’s happened to me in the last seven years. And getting engaged is certainly a biggie. Most everyone knows that Tricia and I have been dating for about six years now.
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Friday Five: My Last Five Dinners
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One of the all-time best stand-up comedians, Richard Jeni (official page, currently down), apparently committed suicide this weekend. My girlfriend and I read about his death on Perez last night as we were getting ready to watch Rome. Just the night before, while celebrating a friend’s birthday at the Dresden, a few of us were talking about his hysterical HBO special, A Big Steaming Pile Of Me, how difficult stand-up is, and how few real geniuses there are in the field.
I still have that show on the TiVo in the guest room. It will be that much harder to delete it now.
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I’ve often wondered how Alexa manages to get its data. Their stats never seem to synch with mine. It turns out there’s a fly in the ointment over there.
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When I have the opportunity I am apt to choose the underdog. Aside from the sinfully delicious Cinnamon Dolce Latte, for example, I dislike Starbucks and will generally go to the mom-and-pop coffee shops scattered around Los Angeles. More often than not lately, though, I am finding that Starbucks’ secret superpower is consistency. Mussolini kept the trains on time, and the Seattle coffee giant manages to use economies of scale and various other buzzwords I remember from my one college economics class to open earlier and provide better service than the little guys.
This morning I stopped at Bueller’s Bagels on my way to work. It was 5:55 and they don’t officially open, apparently, until six. A Mexican radio station was blaring, there was nobody manning the counter, and there was no coffee ready. I waited patiently for about five minutes — an eternity when you’re standing in an otherwise empty bagel shop at sunrise — and then walked across the street to one of the ten Starbucks located on my way to the office. They open at five. I walked into a store bustling with activity, with lovely music playing, and with a bacchanalian amount of caffeinated beverages to drink.
A medium coffee at Bueller’s, including tip, is about $2.50. A medium CDL at Starbucks is $4.00 with tip. This morning my coffee was free. The cash register was malfunctioning so the baristas had been instructed to just give customers their morning sustenance gratis. You can’t beat that. Sometimes the underdog loses for a good reason.
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Graaaagh! Welcome to the shambling, decaying world of unlife! As a newly-infected zombie, your raison d’être is to catch and devour the brains of the living, as clumsily as possible.
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The PicoPad® is pure genius. It’s a pad of sticky notes — with a tiny pen — in a case the size of a credit card that you can easily slip it into your wallet. The PicoPad and its refills are also incredibly inexpensive. I am always scribbling notes on the backs of business cards and receipts in my wallet, so this is a product near and dear to my heart. My girlfriend gave me one last week and I’ve already used it several times.
I love books, for example, and can’t enter a bookstore without finding more than a few that I am dying to read. Instead of spending megabucks at the brick and mortar, though, here’s what I do: I jot down the ISBN and then, when I get home, find the title at Amazon. If I simply must have it, I’ll grab a used copy there for much, much less. Otherwise I add it to my wishlist for a rainy day.
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The first thing I did after crossing the marathon finish line was call my girlfriend so she could come get me. It was the last call I would make with my trusty RAZR. My hands were slick with sweat and the phone was coated with the salt and grime that had evaporated from my body during the 26.2 mile run. When it smashed to the ground it shattered as if it had been dipped in liquid nitrogen. The stomping feet of dozens of runners crushed what was left of it into the asphalt. I would have laughed if I’d had the strength. Instead I just sort of stared at it and made a sort of grunted smirk.
On Monday morning I went to the Cingular store near my office and bought a new RAZR. I got the same model for $100 (with a $50 mail-in rebate). It took me a few minutes of trudging through the Motorola site, but eventually I found the instructions to pair my Bluetooth headset to the phone.
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