The Jedi Academy has opened in Romania.
GMail Invites
I have 6 GMail invites to give out. If anyone wants a GMail account, post in the comments below and let me know why you deserve one 😛
Don’t forget to leave a valid email address for me to send the invites to.
Pressure Chief
The new album by Cake, called Pressure Chief, is due out very soon, and being on their mailing list, I was lucky enough to get a cool pre-order special. Their last album, Comfort Eagle, made it onto my All-Time Top 10 list of favorite albums without a problem. Every song on it is nothing short of excellent. It’s rare to find an album by any musician where every song is great, especially in this day and age of prefab musicians and calculated formulas for getting big hits on radio and MTV.
So how’s that for setting a high level of expectation for Pressure Chief? Somehow, I doubt I will be too disappointed, though it might not be the masterpiece that Comfort Eagle was.
Here is my All-Time Top 10 list of Best Albums (in no particular order):
- Cake – Comfort Eagle
- Run DMC – Raisin’ Hell
- Red Allen and Frank Wakefield – The Kitchen Tapes
- Fugazi – Fugazi
- Dinosaur Jr. – You’re Living All Over Me
- Jimi Hendrix – Axis, Bold As Love
- The Pixies – Surfer Rosa
- Slint – Tweeze
- Soulside – Trigger
- The Orb – Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld
Runners up:
- Jimi Hendrix – Electric Ladyland
- Public Enemy – It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back
- The Flaming Lips – Soft Bulletin
- King Face – King Face
That’s a difficult to compile, but I think back to what records, cd’s, or cassettes I wore out the most, and those would be at the top. So who is on your list?
See? I told ya so
As recently noted here, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has been getting a lot of bad press as of late. Even though the much-hyped Windows XP Service Pack 2 is due out this week, security holes have already been found.
Yes, you should install Service Pack 2, because it does patch a lot of known holes. However, you should still Browse Happy and Get Firefox.
Have I drilled this point home yet?
Layer Me Not
When Macromedia created what it calls “layers” (really just CSS div tags positioned absolutely) in Dreamweaver, it did a world of damage to the field of web design. This is largely in part because people tend to think of layers like those you use when creating complex images in Photoshop, and expect them to behave similarly.
Furthermore, the way they implement these so-called layers, by using absolute positioning, works against forward-thinking CSS design.
I bring this up only because I see people everywhere (everywhere being Yahoo web design chat and some Web Design forums I frequent) stuck in the layer way of thinking asking questions about why their layout works in IE, but not in Firefox, or vis-versa.
A Small War Won
Today the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals (known as the “activist court” by conservatives who get upset when they interpret the law correctly) ruled that Grokster and Streamcast are not liable for the illegal swapping of files on their networks since there are no centrally located servers that house the files. This is a good thing.
Why? Not because I condone the illegal trading of music and other copyrighted material, but because a technology that allows people to communicate and share information has not been shut down. There are plenty of legitimate uses for such a network, and some day, we might just see them take the forefront over the illegitimate uses.
Stop The Pain
I have written here before about my disdain for the open wound that is Internet Explorer. The folks at StopIE.com are doing some good work to help promote the cause for other browser usage. Pay them a visit.
Last Stop for Web Radio
I have been a devout user of Apple’s iTunes software for quite some time now. Recently, I read somewhere about LastFM, an online radio service that customizes itself based upon your musical preferences.
The cool thing is that they have a plugin for iTunes that will report to LastFM what you have been listening to. Based on that information, they do several things. First, they build a playlist of tunes you can listen to from anywhere you can log into your account, tailored to your favorite artists. Second, they build a ‘neighborhood’ of other members that have similar tastes to you. You can listen to their personalized radio streams too.
In this capacity, I continue to find a lot of new music I enjoy. The LastFM service is more or less free (they ask for a donation after a 30 day trial). It’s definitely worth a checkin’.