Canon Rock

Have you seen the YouTube video of the kid ripping up Pachelbel’s Canon on an electric guitar? It's worth the five minutes if you haven't. The NY Times figure it was worth a bit more than that and actually tracked down the guy that did it.

Guitar fanatics are perplexed: “How the hell does he gets his harmonics to sound like that?� Some praise specific components of the performance, including the distortion, the power chords or the “sweet outro.� Overall a consensus emerges: This guy iz great.

“I’m shocked at how much you rock,� one fan said. “Funtwo just pure ownz the world,� said another. “Somebody just beat JerryC at his own song,� tinFold44 said. Carrie34 gushed, “funtwo’s version makes me want to hold up my lighter and *hug* my inner child! :)�

Nice.

Farecast Adds Denver

Farecast.com is probably the coolest travel site I've seen yet. It tells you when airfare is going to be cheapest and whether you should go ahead and buy your tickets now for that trip to Las Vegas in November or if you should wait a while for optimum pricing. It can also tell you which departure days (or which destination) will get you the best prices, if your schedule is flexible. When the beta first launched they only had Seattle and Boston as departure cities, so it wasn't really useful yet. Now they've just added Denver, so they have 55 or so cities. All the destinations I've cared about recently are in there.

Check it out if you might be travelling anytime soon.

Geeks in a Theater

Today the software team took off early to go see Snakes on a Plane. (It's quite the phenomenon on teh internets, y'know...) Much to our surprise, the movie had a 73% on Rotten Tomatoes before we left. (It's down to 63% now, which is stull hugely high for this particular motion picture.) It really is a fun, campy pic. Don't get me wrong, it's bad. It's tremendously stupid, and it certainly isn't art, but it's a good time if you want to go get rowdy in a movie theater.

More than anything, I can't get over how much fun Sam Jackson has had being part of SoaP. Good for him.

DSC00032

WTF, MySpace?!

For the past week or so, MySpace has been flakier than your pain pill-addicted cousin. They blamed a power outage in LA, but the errors I saw didn't really jibe with that excuse. Anyway, after the weekend it was mostly back up. Until now... Now When I log in, I get this message:

Invalid Friend ID. This user has either cancelled their membership, or their account has been deleted.

Holy crap! They've flat-out lost accounts?! What the hell is going on over there? Hardly the kind of behavior I'd expect from the #1 site in the country. (Hmm... I wonder if they got all those extra hits because people were refreshing error pages hoping to finally get logged in...)

KnuckleRockers.com Plan of Action

I've actually be having a lot of fun thinking about this and getting ready to move into planning and design. First and foremost, I'm going to use this as a learning exercise to teach myself some new technology, so don't expect a very rapid turn around. I figure I'll either build the site using Ruby on Rails or Django, so that'll be cool. I think I have the option of using PostreSQL on the backend, so I might do that, as well. (Not that I expect this to be a big test of a database...)

As for features, I think we want the following for submissions: tagging, commenting, searching, ranking, and maybe a "favorites" pool (favorites could work as a binary ranking system... the more a submission is "favorited", the more popular it is...). Ideally there would be an RSS/Atom feed for the latest submissions.

Users need profiles with optional links to blogs, Flickr accounts, MySpace pages, etc.. They could also have some semi-social functionality like "buddies", and so forth.

Hopefully we can run out some t-shirts/stickers/whatev from the best submissions. There's some vague potential for some actual goods, but that's nowhere near reality at this point.

What else do we want/need?

Winos R Us

So, cork'd is pretty cool. Nice to see Dan & Dan doing cool stuff together. I'm not a real wine aficionado - my wine tastes aren't very refined. I like it that way, though. I tend to enjoy $10-15 bottles as much as something that costs $70+. I figure that's a good thing.

Anyway, I'm on there as JakoBlah (or you can search for "Sutton"), even though I don't expect to use it very much.

I do wish something like this existed for beer. I'd have some fun with that. Unfortunately, as far as i know, there aren't any good online beer merchants you could partner with for some commerce kickback (cork'd is hooked up with wine.com). Booze would be fun, too, though, and I know there are plenty of decent online liquor retailers...

GCal

Google Calendar is out and it's good. Compared to 30 Boxes, the only thing it seems to be missing is tags. The behavior of the interface isn't as fun either. It's still got single box entry (which even seems smarter than 30B's), and the sharing is way more powerful (except for the lack of tags - that's one of the best things about 30B, you can share events with certain tags with certain people).

After more playing, I've found I am unable to add my Upcoming events to the Google Calendar, even though I should be able to...

Ed was right...

When Miracle Ed came to visit he bought us Firefly and Serenity. To get me to watch it, he told me "You'll like it. You're in it." Meaning the Captain Malcom Reynolds character reminded him of me.

It turns out he was right:

You scored as Serenity (Firefly). You like to live your own way and don't enjoy when anyone but a friend tries to tell you should do different. Now if only the Reavers would quit trying to skin you.

Serenity (Firefly)
 
94%
Millennium Falcon (Star Wars)
 
81%
Nebuchadnezzar (The Matrix)
 
75%
Bebop (Cowboy Bebop)
 
69%
SG-1 (Stargate)
 
69%
Moya (Farscape)
 
69%
Babylon 5 (Babylon 5)
 
69%
Deep Space Nine (Star Trek)
 
63%
Galactica (Battlestar: Galactica)
 
63%
FBI's X-Files Division (The X-Files)
 
44%
Enterprise D (Star Trek)
 
38%
Andromeda Ascendant (Andromeda)
 
31%

Your Ultimate Sci-Fi Profile II: which sci-fi crew would you best fit in? (pics) created with QuizFarm.com

For the record, Ed's in it, too (in the form of Jayne). At one point I turned to him and asked "How did they make a show with both of us in it?" He answered, "How could they not?"

Whuzzup?

Just some randomness:

  • Man, it seems like Google has de-listed the BlahStuff (or at least ranked me down a ton). My traffic has dropped by more than half starting last Wednesday. If any of y'all that get regular Google hits felt like mentioning BS in a fresh post in the hopes to re-upping my Google-juice, I'd appreciate it.
  • Hey, look! It's Mars!
  • Monkey pictures are fun.
  • Started working on a new double desk set-up for our office on Saturday. Got some nice 3/4" maple veneer plywood and glued some half-inch MDF on the bottom to strengthen it up a bit. Got to use my flush-cutting router bit for the first time, but then it got all cold and snowy. Gonna treat the edges with some strips of this cool laminated oak I have, so it should give a cool effect. Photos when there's something to see.
  • My tattoo has a few spots that will require touch-up. I wonder if it's just me, in general, or the forearm location, specifically, or a combo that cause me such problems in healing my tattoos.
  • Saw Murderball on A&E. Good stuff (except for all the Dog the Bounty Hunter commercials). Zupan's the man.
  • The BU Terriers swept UMass and will meet UNH in the Hockey East semifinals.
  • My friends at the Exchange Tavern managed to shoehorn a dart board into their fine establishment. I'm excited. Now if only they'd update their web site.
  • What with Miracle Ed's visit and the fresh tattoos, we've been out of the hot box for over a month now. Time to get back on the horse real soon. Luckily I haven't slipped much (yet).
  • The biggest crawdaddy you'll ever see (thanks Brandon).

30 Boxes, on the Hillside

30 Boxes has taken its beta public, so if you're looking for a Web2.0-hipster-compliant online calendar with a crazy feature set, check it out. In truth, I was hoping Google would have something like this out by now. I have a hard time imagining them doing a better job than 30 Boxes has already done, though.

(I'm signed up with my Gmail account, if you want to make me a buddy, yo.)

The Resurgence of Chuck

Chuck Norris. I'm sure many of you figured he had faded into a halcyon semi-retirement of Total Gym hucksterism, anti-drug campaigning, and... um... praying after the demise of his Walker, Texas Ranger series. I'm doubly sure you all had figured Chuck had strayed far, far away from his Lone Wolf McQuade martial arts badassedness of yore.

Well, I'm here to set you straight, boys and girls.

Chuck Norris' return to glory was first hinted at when he became the subject of one of the most entertaining internet memes of the past ten minutes:

To prove it isn't that big of a deal to beat cancer. Chuck Norris smoked 15 cartons of cigarettes a day for 2 years and aquired 7 different kinds of cancer only to rid them from his body by flexing for 30 minutes. Beat that, Lance Armstrong.

That was just the beginning, though. Now it has come to light that Chuck Norris is the driving force behind an all new form of ass kicking for entertainment known as the World Combat League:

There is currently no full-contact martial arts team sport in the United States. The WCL will be the only venue to offer the public full-contact martial arts fighting. There is literally no competition for the services and products the WCL will offer to the public. There is a huge demand for martial arts in the United states and the WCL will be the first sports league to offer the excitement and unpredictability of full-contact martial arts fighting.

Sure, Chuck is only a "suit" at the top of the WCL ladder. And yeah, it looks like the fighting is just glorified kick boxing -- hands and feet only (stick to the UFC if you enjoy elbows, Muy Thai knees, and grappling). But they have women on the teams (WCL is a "team sport"... kind of like Davis Cup tennis...?), and the whole contest is supposedly set up to encourage action. In fact, there are penalties for being too passive or stalling.

Might be worth checking out.

One is only left to wonder if all of this is happening because of the fact that Chuck Norris is Dubya's favoritest actor in, like, ever!

Jake Sutton: MIA

So, yeah... I'm still here. Here's a little catch-up:

  • My efforts at work on the superultramegaubercrazy-high priority project have come to a rather frustrating result so far thanks to interoperability problems between ColdFusion 5 and Oracle9. Every time we hit the Oracle9 database it causes the memory usage of the ColdFusion server to climb, with that memory never being released. This eventually causes the connection to the database to die with an S1001 Memory Allocation Error, which requires a ColdFusion restart to fix the problem (until the memory allocation builds back up again). Super-fucking-duper.
  • The Big Blue Couches rock. While we are trying to keep the pets off them, it's obviously futile. At least the puddles of Mingus hair come off the ultra-luscious blue microsuede without a problem. I'm just extra-pleased with the fact taht I can lie completely prostrate on the big sofa without touching either arm.
  • The Wife and I have been to the hotbox yoga a total of three times so far. I am enjoying it quite a bit, though I think I may have overstretched my back the last time out. We hope to squeeze a couple more classes into our two week trial period.
  • My motorcycle wrenching buddy Erik and his wife are inches away from having their baby boy. Very exciting times for them!
  • I'll be brining the second turkey of the month for Thanksgiving festivities starting tonight. If you haven't brined a turkey or at least eaten the product of said process, I can't even express how much you need to try it.
  • I'm almost done with the Tales of the Otori trilogy. I highly recommend all three books.
  • Now let's turn the lens outward a bit:

And thus concludes today's category smorgasbord.