I Never Liked You

March 12, 2008 – 12:00 am

I just read through the graphic novel I Never Liked You by Chester Brown. It was a pretty quick read for me, and what the New York Times described as a “troubled youth” was - for the most part - a typical nerd youth. Although the story ended on a low note and left me feeling empty and depressed, it did leave me hungry for more of his work and I’ll be checking out Louis Riel from the library as soon as I get a chance.

By Justin | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Comments (0)

Cicada

February 9, 2008 – 4:38 pm

I was watching a time-lapse video of the assembly of a LEGO Ultimate Collectors Millennium Falcon, which I understand is the largest LEGO set ever released with over 5000 individual pieces. Personally, I’m still waiting for the DBZ set with over 9000 pieces… What really caught my attention however was the surreal, synthetic background music. Thankfully Boing Boing Gadgets editor Joel Johnson took the time to talk about the music in the post.

The band is called Cicada. It turns out quite a few musicians decide to name their group after the cacophonic insects, so make sure you’re looking at the correct group if you look them up. A lot, perhaps all, of their music is available to download - for free - from their website. I’ve grabbed 3 albums so far: Technology Crisis and Technology Crisis II seem to be in the style that they are best known for. The songs sound likey they’re ripped directly from video games except that they are original compositions. The third album I listed to, Choralsepctic is a completely different animal, being comprised of a cappella renditions of popular music and, in a few cases, more video game music. I’d highly recommend giving them a listen if any of the above sounds entertaining to you. After all, you’ve got nothing to lose except a few MBs of bandwidth.

By Justin | Posted in music | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (0)

EMail Encyption on OS X using GPGMail

November 13, 2007 – 10:00 am

Mail encryption has always been something I’ve wanted to do, but avoided because I didn’t have a seamless way to encrypt and sign my messages. After reading comments by Donald Kerr, Principal Deputy Director or national intelligence, where he says that american citizens need to understand that privacy means the government and businesses protecting their information, I set about taking matters into my own hands once again.

Luckily, I’ve been using Mail.app on my Macbook as my primary mail application for some time, and I found this article on setting up the GPGMail. The instructions there work almost flawlessly despite being over 5 years old. I’m still contemplating an eloquent way to start the entropy daemon to start on startup, and GPGMail doesn’t work with Leopard yet, but should be up in a few days according to the author.

My current public key is available on MIT’s Public Key Server, just search for 0xC339DB0B.

By Justin | Posted in Mac, Technology | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Desktop Tower Defense

November 7, 2007 – 3:41 am

Desktop Tower Defense

./ linked to this article on the most addicting flash games available. I can’t vouch for any other then Desktop Tower Defense, which is the most instantly-addicting flash game that I’ve ever played. Like all good flash games, it only takes a few minutes understand the mechanics, but you’ll quickly be challenging yourself to beat your own score and those of others. I’d write more, but I’m still trying to get all the way through a medium-difficulty game without losing a life.

By Justin | Posted in Video Games | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (0)

It’s about nerds trying to better each other

November 4, 2007 – 9:24 pm

I saw this on Gizmodo. There’s a great quote at the end of this clip from a woman named Taryn Fireside:

My favorite thing about New York Jedi is that it’s not about nerds trying to best each other, it’s about nerds trying to better each other and make their lives better through the dorkiness that makes them great.

By Justin | Posted in Funny | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Vint Cerf discusses the future of the internet

November 2, 2007 – 4:53 pm

Vint Cerf, current chair ICANN, will be stepping down from the post at the end of this year. He’s often credited as a founding father of the internet for his roles designing the internet and the protocols that it runs on. Mr. Cerf did an interview with NPR’s Day To Day that aired today. You can listen to parts of it here, but you’ll need to read the accompanying text in order to get the whole story.

Listening to his insight to the future of the internet was certainly enlightening, but I’m used to the Web 2.0 philosophy, so his “it’ll be ready when it’s ready” attitude towards domain names that don’t use the Roman alphabet or a left-to-right syntax was a bit of a turn off.

By Justin | Posted in Technology | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

iPod Touch Commercial

November 1, 2007 – 8:56 pm

Since the iPod Nano commercial generated a great deal of interest in the band Feist, I figured I’d head off any questions that might come my way and point out that the song in the newest iPod Touch commercial is Music is My Hot Sex by Cansei De Ser Sexy, also know as CSS, a band from Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Various sources are reporting that the video was made by Nick Haley, a freshman at the University of Leeds. Apple touched it up a little and has been running it on TV, with permission of course.

By Justin | Posted in music | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Twitter(ific!)

November 1, 2007 – 10:00 am

Last April I started playing around with Twitter, but I didn’t really get into it until July after Adam showed me Twitterific by Iconfactory. I gave up on getting Twitter to work with IM and my cell phone and started tweeting through Twitterific exclusively.

I’ve been filling it with thoughts, annoyances, personally directed (but not private) messages, and links, several times a day, and my IM and Facebook status messages are set to my twitter url pretty much all the time these days. The Twitter application for Facebook is one of the few that I use and I’ve tried and failed to get Twitter Tools to work with Wordpress 2.3.1 so I could have my tweets cross-posted here as well.

By Justin | Posted in Technology | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (2)

Pile of Gold video redux

October 30, 2007 – 7:46 pm

Pile of Gold Music Video Screenshot

Following in the footsteps of yesterdays post, I’m reposting the compilation I made of the videos posted for The Blow’s Pile of Gold music video (which you can read about here). This time though, I’m posting the (mostly) uncompressed 163MB version. I can’t guarantee that will stay up forever due to the size, but I’ll be monitoring the traffic and I’ll update here if anything changes.

Name:Pile of Gold - Music Videos compiles
Size: 164MB
Download Link: Pile of Gold Music Video

By Justin | Posted in music | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

The Blow at The MFA

October 29, 2007 – 10:50 pm

Khaela Maricich, The Blow at the MFA

Adam and C2 came with me to see The Blow at the MFA in Boston back on October 6th. Although I am pretty biased towards The Blow, I think it was the most entertaining concert that I’ve ever seen. You can read Adam’s account here. For those that haven’t heard of it, The Blow currently has one member, Khaela Maricich who sings and dances to original pop music playing on a laptop.

A band called Saturday Looks Good to Me opened for The Blow and although their rock stood in contrast to Khaela’s pop crooning, I enjoyed them enough to pick up one of their albums after the show and I’d recommend giving them a listen if you’re into light, driven rock. You can download some of their songs from their webpage here, or if you just want a quick listen, check out their myspace page. Listening to their music feels like listening to The Polyphonic Spree and more recent songs by PUSA.

The Blow’s live show has changed quite a bit from when Jenny and I saw them earlier this year. In the earlier show, most of the performance was about putting each song into the context of a particular timeframe of a relationship. The performance this time was about still about relationships (since that’s what a lot of the songs are about), but Khaela also talked about how and why she writes songs, and even made use of some props.

Unfortunately, this was the last show of the last US tour where The Blow would be performing songs written in collaboration with Jona Bechtolt, who wrote the music for all of the songs on the albums Poor Aim: Love Songs and Paper Television. Jona left the band in oder to focus on his other band, Y.A.C.H.T. If that knowledge didn’t make everyone in attendance feel special enough, we were also made aware that Khaela’s mom was in the audience.

With the songs written with Jona not being performed anymore, I’m not sure how long I’ll have to go until I can get my next live The Blow fix, or even what it will sound like, but I really can’t wait to here what Khaela comes up with next.

Khaela Maricich, The Blow at the MFA

Both photos used in this post were taken by Steve McFarland (also check out his Flickr) during the show at the MFA and were released under a creative commons Attribution-Share Alike license.

The Blow, Khaela Maricich, MFA, Museum of Fine Arts, Concert, Music

Technorati Tags: , , , , ,

By Justin | Posted in music | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (1)