Nov
30
2006

Earl Quote #

(Add / View Comments) (0)Thursday, November 30, 2006 - 08:19:07 pm
(Posted Under: No Category)
"Feliz Navid Bah. It might not mean anything to you, but to us American's it means 'Merry Christmas' in Mexican"
Only just knocking out
Give it to me like you gave it to the terrorists!
Nov
25
2006

Countrysides

(Add / View Comments) (0)Saturday, November 25, 2006 - 05:54:21 pm
(Posted Under: Music Music)
Today I headed into the city, to get some Christmas shopping done, and use a HMV gift voucher that was about to expire. I'd tried to use it a couple of weeks ago, but couldn't find anything at local HMV / Sanity stores that was worthwhile buying. I expected the city store to be better, and it was, but still, there wasn't anything I must have. Particularly, not one Cracker in the whole store, which is what I wanted to spend most of the voucher on.

After finally settling on some CD's and getting some of the Christmas shopping down, I stopped at a second hand music store - and finally (after almost forgetting to look in 'C' and walk out) I finally found the only Cracker CD I've seen in Melbourne - Countrysides. Which score, has Duty Free! On the way home I noticed, it, and everything else on it is a cover - Countrysides being the album which they do country covers. On getting home I mentioned this to Katie, and she mentioned that she'd seen Ike Reilly (writer of Duty Free) open for Cracker, which I'm really jealous of. It's funny, because since Mexico I've thought of the lyrics as relating to David.
Now Playing: Cracker - Duty Fee
Nov
21
2006

Do You Think It'd Be Alright?

Gin Blossoms @ Yucca Tap

(Add / View Comments) (0)Tuesday, November 21, 2006 - 10:04:41 pm
(Posted Under: Tempe Music Scene Tempe Music Scene, Music Music)
On the way home from work tonight, I got a call from Katie @ Yucca Tap Room where the Blossoms turned up to Johnson's open mic night for a secret show.

The J called me for Hey Jealousy, which absolutely rocked my world! I'm quite accustomed (and spoilt [smile] ) with show calls these days, but this, particularly Hey Jealousy, really rocked! At first I couldn't tell what the song was, thinking it was something off Major Lodge Victory, and then everything was so right with the world for about 3 minutes when I realized it was Jealousy.

In particular, the crowd participation, taking lead for the third verse was amazing. I can only imagine how packed those tiny walls of the Yucca Tap Room were tonight (even as a "secret" show).

Never let it be said that all the cool stuff doesn't happen in Tempe, Arizona. Never let it be said! [smile]
Nov
16
2006

Earl Quote #something

(Add / View Comments) (0)Thursday, November 16, 2006 - 08:19:35 pm
(Posted Under: TV)
I don't know what number I'm up to, because the Earl quotes fell off the wagon. But neither the less...

Stupid Carson Daily!
Nov
15
2006

Don't Be So Sad

Dead Hot Workshop Ain't That Bad

(Add / View Comments) (0)Wednesday, November 15, 2006 - 10:00:30 pm
(Posted Under: Tempe Music Scene Tempe Music Scene, Music Music)
Don't be so sad, California's not that bad. Start gathering up the ocean, I'll start rounding up the sand.
Dead Hot Workshop's Heavy Meadow is out. Katie went to the listening party tonight, and I'm listening to it via her, pending getting my own copy.

The CD kicks off awesomely, with Nixon Saves. It's so cool that it's on the record, having known it since 2000 from an acoustic Brent Babb recording. Despite seeing the band play it back in 2005, and assuming it could be on the album, it's still somewhat surprising seeing it on there, given it's age.

I was excited to see it on there, it being one of the ones I know, but I was actually very dubious of how receptive I'd be to a full band electric version, being so used to the acoustic version, which often biases me. I can say only one thing upon hearing it - the album version makes me blow my load! Amazing, and absolutely full of Tempe goodness! The next time I'm cruising down a desert highway, it's going to be with Nixon Saves blasting. That alone totally makes the album!

Mexican Jones is great, and I know it from somewhere, but I'm not sure from where, despite discussing it with Katie a few hours. "I'm going down to Mexico, rememberin' the Alamo", really familiar . Maybe from a demo. Maybe from Katie singing it. I'm not sure.

It's A Shame and World I've been listening to both of these constantly over the last 3 songs. After listening to the whole album, the remain at the top of my list of favorites.

I was definitely surprised by Ella Bussa (Touch The Sky) being track #6. I really expected this to be the closing track.

Curve, which I also know from the same acoustic show as Nixon Saves; though don't overly remember for some reason, is awesome. There is one huge problem with it - it's too short at 1 minute 33 seconds. I love it, I really wish it went for longer, particularly the interlude at the beginning and end which is just a musical feast!

Tangled - again - LOAD - BLOWN. 2006's answer to 257. Love it, it absolutely rocks. This and Nixon Saves definitely takes the cake for me as the best songs that I hadn't previously heard from myspace. Hell, it even rivals World. Rock n' fucking roll! Love it! After cruising down the desert highway blasting Nixon Saves would be yelling "Darby Crashes!".

Radio is another short one, weighing in at 1:56, but it's great. Certain it takes some getting used to listening to 3 songs (this, Elly Bussa and Curve) under 2 minutes (and It's A Shame, just over 2 minutes) on one album. But hey, when has listening to a Dead Hot Workshop record ever been like listening to any other album.

Pacifist Fight Song is the other song that I've been listening to for 3 weeks now. Like the others, this is still on my list of favorites.

Houston Is Dead is a welcomed slow down. Another awesome Dead Hot song in the vein of Mosquito Coast or Oh Well. It's not per se a favorite yet, but in pure Dead Hot Workshop fashion it's one of those songs where even not being an absolute favorite, it blows you away.

To be continued....


Now Playing: Dead Hot Workshop - Nixon Saves
Nov
14
2006

Firefox 2.0

(Add / View Comments) (0)Tuesday, November 14, 2006 - 10:36:39 pm
(Posted Under: Firefox Firefox)
For about 2 weeks now I've been running Firefox 2.0 on one of my machines.

There are some great new features. Spell checking r-o-c-k-s. Especially when it comes to blocking. Which as a result I've only been doing in version 2.0 exclusively.

They new look I'm quite a fan of too. Session restoring is also an awesome plus. Just yesterday I was working on some Javascript that had an infinate loop, and after freezing, I left Firefox for a while hoping it would give a dialog to abort the javascript (I'm sure in the past a version of Firefox did this), but no dice. So I eventually killed Firefox, re-opened and was reminded of this version had session restoring. Too cool - I would have just killed Firefox much earlier if I'd remembered that.

The only thing that is not sitting well with me is the new way tabs work. Close buttons on each tab look really nice (I've used the TabMix extension on some installations which didn't position the close buttons nicely) but having to move the mouse over each close to tab it when I go on a tab closing fest is annoying. Having the old close button on the tab bar (in addition to on the tabs) would rock my world.

Additionally the hiding tabs, rather than shrinking each tab bar as new tabs are opened to always fit them across the window is annoying too. The new widget to display a list of tabs is sweet, but I wish this was in addition to always displaying each tab on a window.

But overall, Firefox 2 is pretty sweet!
Nov
09
2006

Photobox Updates

(Add / View Comments) (0)Thursday, November 9, 2006 - 01:42:56 am
(Posted Under: Web Development)
Tonight I updated my live version of Photobox with the recent development I've done (actually spanning a couple of months).

This was somewhat premature, hence I made it a release candidate. Tonight I had gotten things to a place where I felt I could start to think about marking it as a release. Not that I don't have plenty of development still in mind and pending, but a place where I could mark a release, and then bump the revision number and keep going. So I fired up the current release installed on my server, to do some side by side comparisons. It only took a few seconds before Winamp stopped playing what it was playing (off my server), and the whole server starting to creator!

So the whole side by side comparison thing went out the window. While I could have done some stuff to make things cope, I decided that this was more than enough sign that I needed to get the latest code online.

Over the past 2 or so weeks I've made some significant performance tweaks, which have become apparent since June...well, the performance issues have become apparent - in two parts, no doubt. The first would be being snap happy in Arizona and Mexico and going from albums with around 500 photos to albums with over 5000. The second would be the code changes that I made in April (before the trip) to facilitate editing photo pages through a web interface. This week I also came across a ridiculous server side caching bug, which may have also contributed. (If cached thumbnail is dirty, regenerate, but only write to the cache if there isn't a cached file already. Okay, but the fact that the cache file is dirty means there is. So effectively, never cache if we get into this scenario - nice! [smile] I love bugs!)

I knew that I'd done good with the performance tweaks of late, getting page load times down from 47 seconds (for a large page in an album) to 8 seconds. But even so, it took loading the old software version (after using the newer code a fair bit of late, through development and testing) to hit home what a significant change I've made to the performance over the last week.

In addition to this, the new version has got a lot of new features, which are cool to have online. Particularly the reading EXIF information out of photos, which is a cool ass feature to have, as well as putting more effort into navigation of photos, and new fancy icons. That being said, of course, the reason for rushing this release is in an effort to stop my server crashing under the load of the v2.0.1 code.
Nov
09
2006

Spotted In Mexico

(Add / View Comments) (0)Thursday, November 9, 2006 - 01:27:22 am
(Posted Under: Travel)
A few days ago I was surfing around some photo sites, looking for design inspiration for Photobox. The easiest (and most fun) way to do this was looking at people's Circus Mexicus May 2006 photos.

I can't say I found too much design inspiration, or any that I ended up applying to Photobox, but it was pretty sweet coming across someone's Mexico photos with me in them. [smile]

http://ckjohn.com/g2/main.php?g2_itemId=6304. Right down the other end of Senor Shrimp.

Speaking of which, I really could do with having a Señor Shrimp chicken Fajita and Tecate with lime again!
Nov
07
2006

Rove Live?

(Add / View Comments) (0)Tuesday, November 7, 2006 - 09:54:38 pm
(Posted Under: TV)
Over the last year, I've seen Rove Live on and off, enough to know it's certainly gone down hill - first it was the change to the set, then the lowered class of content; which has been pretty obvious this year, the few times I've seen it.

Now, if there was any doubt the show going to the dogs, tonight confirms it, seeing Rove McManus with a creepy, creepy mostache. Scaaaaaary. Save me Jesus! Save me Tom Cruise!
Nov
07
2006

Those Delta Blues

(Add / View Comments) (0)Tuesday, November 7, 2006 - 04:37:19 pm
(Posted Under: No Category)
Being into Tramps & Thieves has paid off.

This morning, looking over the listing for the Melbourne Cup, it wasn't too hard to pick Delta Blues as the horse I was going to back. Nice little win.

Interesting it's the second year in a row that I've picked the winner.

I guess that answers the question "what's the Mississippi done for you?" Thanks Tramps! [smile]
Nov
05
2006

Sanscon

(Add / View Comments) (0)Sunday, November 5, 2006 - 01:58:03 am
(Posted Under: Web Development)
This afternoon I've been doing more work on Photobox, which I've been doing a fair bit of lately. While doing so, I decided it was time to replace some text links with icons, basically navigational ones and what not. Which prompted a search for some free icon sets.

Before long I came across Biticon, which seemed like the could work. But then I noticed Sanscon, which is basically the same icon set, but is colorizable via CSS.

The way this works is that all the GIF images are white icons on transparent backgrounds, and hence the background-color CSS property can be set accordingly.

In this way, colors of the icons can be adapted accordingly without changing the icon/image files at all. Very very cool.

It's possible that there are other icon sets that could fit my need a bit better, but this colorizable property makes Sanscon win out by far. In addition to how easy it makes theming, it also makes making mouse over color changes a piece of cake.

I like it a lot, it's a quite smart concept, and definately the right way to do things™.
Now Playing: The Piersons - I Could Never Tell
Nov
01
2006

Sticks And Stones

(Add / View Comments) (0)Wednesday, November 1, 2006 - 11:47:30 am
(Posted Under: Tempe Music Scene Tempe Music Scene, Music Music)
I remember a conversation with Katie last year about the Marc Norman songs Sticks and Stones, and how it reminded me of Dead Hot Workshop and sounded like a song Brent Babb would write.

Listening to Pacifist Fight Song reminds me of this conversation, because of the lyric - yes, you guessed it, "if you're stuck between sticks and stones". [smile] Pretty cool.

On a related note, I really enjoy World. "Just making conversation out on the reservation". It's great. Really love Curtis going to work on the crash cymbals on this one.

And another somewhat related note - the photo on the Myspace player for It's A Shame is awesome. My new goal in life is to grow a fro that rivals Mark Norman! [biggrin]
Now Playing: Dead Hot Workshop - Pacifist Fight Song

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