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Links and News

According to W3Counter, which maintains a pretty good cross sampling of web site users (from what I’ve hear, anyway), the use of Firefox for web surfing has risen to an impressive 25%. That is so great to hear, as Internet Explorer is and continues to be the bane of web developers and designers everywhere. Good riddence, another 10% of IE users!

I have long been a scavenger for the best deals on items I am seeking to purchase. I was pleased to find one tool that encompasses many of the bargain-hunter sites I am used to visiting. Before you buy anything online, be sure to stop at Dealighted.com!

I discovered an excellent streaming radio station at pigradio.com. They play a delectible sampling of alternative and indie music. If you are into that sort of thing, then check it out.

More to come…

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A New One

At long last, I have come close to finishing Alicia’s web site!

Thanks to June for the spiffy background image based on Alicia’s art, I think it’s looking pretty good. Alicia isn’t very happy with the quality of the photographs of her paintings though, as they look different from monitor to monitor, and none seem to capture what the paintings look like in real life. That’s just the way it goes with web design, unfortunately.

I’ll be changing content on there regularly, so check back often for Alicia’s latest works.

And starting June 1, Alicia will have a spot at the Kress Emporium in downtown Asheville!

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Found Sound

In a previous post I wrote titled Searching For Songs, I lamented about not being able to find a song from an 80’s punk band about a kid getting trapped in a refrigerator. Every few months I would do a Google search to see if anything new had been indexed by that wonderful tool of discovery.

I finally hit the jackpot. Through some amazing eruption of forgotten information from my sub conscience, I recalled a line of the song and was able to locate this post by a guy named Glen Case. The song is called Refigerator Heaven, as it turns out, and the band that recorded it is called The Freeze – an outfit from Boston. Moments later, I had obtained the song from the iTunes music store.

How happy am I to finally be able to hear this song again after 22 years of absence? As happy as a baby Psychlo on a straight diet of Kerbango, dog!

On a side note, Mr. Jeter was able to supply me with the other long lost song I had been searching for. I need Mr. Jeter to contact me with his address so I can send him his LP’s back, along with the digitally converted versions from my USB turntable!!!

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Geeky Stuff

On the Dell website, they detail all the cool stuff Michael Dell has in his personal tech arsenal. I was suprised to see his primary laptop runs Ubuntu Linux, Open Office, and Firefox. Guess he’s as fed up with Window as the rest of us!

Speaking of (free) alternatives to (upgrades from) Microsoft products, Thunderbird 2 is out! I have been eagerly waiting for this, as it will introduce some cool new features, such as the ability to tag your messages with keywords. Ooh! I gotta go upgrade now…I’ll let you know how it goes!

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Kurt Vonnegut, Dead at 84

Ah well…Tingaling!

Sorry, I haven’t had time to make any Song Of The Week postings. Been running around like a headless chicken, juggling jobs, kids, and flaming kittens. On Tuesday I gave notice that I’m leaving my job with P3I, where I am working for the Air Force, and will soon be starting to do full-time contract work for a marketing company based in Raleigh. Luckily, this does not mean I will be moving!

I’ll post more info when I know more about it all, but in the mean time, make sure you check out the Top Ten ’80s Robots (We Expected to Exist By Now). It’s funny ha-ha.

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Song Of The Week: March 30, 2007

This week we return to that late-80’s Washington, DC sound. In the early 90’s, I was so into the DC music scene that I could tell you the member of just about every band going back to 1980, and I could count on one hand the number of Dischord Records releases I did not own, and had not spun at least a dozen times.

When I was playing with Substance in 1987, we had the pleasure of opening for this DC band I’d never heard of called Soulside, an insanely intense band driven by the things that made “that DC sound”: emotion, politics, and passion about playing music that meant something. The show was outside of Louisville on the back of a flatbed trailer by a barn on a farm in southern Indiana. It was hot, it was loud, and it was fun.

I had another chance to open for Soulside at Tewligan’s Tavern in Louisville, when I was in Cerebellum, which to this day remains one of my favorite shows of all time.

This tune comes from Soulside’s second record, Trigger, which is in my all-time top 10 list of favorite albums. Enjoy.

Soulside – Trigger.mp3 – from the Trigger LP.
Click arrow to play, or right-click and “Save As” to download

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Song Of The Week: March 23, 2007

In 1991 I was playing drums with Crain, having just recorded our Speed LP, and heading out on a month-long, coast-to-coast, book-your-own tour in a big-ass 70’s Dodge Ram extension van.

Our first stop on the tour was in Washington, DC, where we had some studio time at Inner Ear Studio, and where we were to meet up with the band we would be touring with, Circus Lupus.

I had seen this band about a year earlier when they came through Louisville, and I knew the singer, Chris Thompson, from the band Ignition and other DC-based punk acts.

Anyway, this song, Pop Man, comes from the then-unreleased LP they had just recorded, Solid Brass, which happened to be produced by none other than Joan Jett. This became my favorite song by Circus Lupus, and I always ended up singing along from beside the stage each night when they played it. It’s catchy, it’s edgy and raw, and of course, it rocks.

Pop Man by Circus Lupus, from the album Solid Brass.
Blue arrow to play, right-click and Save As to download.

If any of you ex-Circus Lupus folks stumble across this, drop me a line!

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Song Of The Week: March 16, 2007

I’m gonna start something ambitious here, and feature a Song Of The Week. The songs I’m picking will likely be from way off the beaten path, but are songs that I think need to be heard for one reason or another.

The first song I am going to feature is by a band called The Didjits (more at Wikipedia), who were a Chicago-based trio from the late 80’s to the early 90’s. I was way into their first two albums, Fizzjob and Hey Judester. My first exposure to The Didjits was when the band I was playing in at the time, Cerebellum, opened up for them and Squirrel Bait on new years eve, 1988.

This tune pretty much summarizes their almost rock-a-billy, but still punk-ish, and a wee bit surf-ish, style of insanity. Whatever the case, they were all about rocking. I had the pleasure of seeing them two more times, once in Louisville when I was asked to come up and sing a song on stage with them, and once in Lexington, Ky. Wish these guys were still around.

King Carp – from the album “Hey, Judester” (1988)
Right-click and “Save As” to download, or press blue arrow to stream it.

Lyrics:

Pull my line, pull my line
I dive the deepest, I’m King Carp
And you know I really dig your sexy legs

Yeah I’m the fish with the bad drug problem
I’m the fish with the brand new car
It’s a 1964 ‘Cuda, I think

I am the king of the fish King Carp, King Carp
I am the baddest dude, King Carp
And you know what my fins can do
I’m driving just for you

On my way back to land and I have to reach out my hand
To cushion my fall as I hit the fine, warm sand
(something something) baboon
And a fish joins in on basoon
And he sports a stylish hairdo, like Vidal Sasoon

I am the king of the fish King Carp, King Carp
I am the baddest dude, King Carp
And you know what my fins can do
I’m driving just for you

Big bad fish goin down to the bottom
(repeat first verse, chorus)

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The Biggest Shot In The Foot Ever?

For the last few weeks, the techie blogs have been circulating stories about how Microsoft Windows Vista can be installed and used for free for 120 days. You see, Microsoft gives you 30 days to try it out for nothing, but then they will disarm it and require you to purchase a license to continue using it.

Someone found out that Microsoft had built in a way to extend that 30 trial to 120 days through a little registry tweak.

Well, now someone has figured out how to extend it indefinitely, not by hacking or cracking the operating system, but by using the built-in tools that Microsoft included in the operating system.

From DailyCupOfTech.com:

“It appears that crackers need not break Windows Vista activation because Microsoft has done it for them! Brian Livingston of Window Secrets writes in Microsoft allows bypass of Vista activation about how to allow you to keep your Vista box running indefinitely without activating it.”

It is likely that MS will try and fix this through some future patch, but what will they break in doing so? They obviously had a need to provide this functionality for some reason.

Now that I’ve abandoned Winders on the home desktop completely for RedHat Fedora linux, this makes me chuckle. However, maybe I’ll give it a shot and see what happens!

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