Garden Of Blog

No sarcasm. Thanks, Life. I dig how you always remain intellectually interesting to me. How do you do that?

Oh, Life. Sometimes you are such a bitch. The moods you put me through are so various. Wow!

What makes it all so awesome? How can there be a bottomless well of intrigue?

I love having fires out in the yeard. We get rid of excess cardboard that way, and it’s just so relaxing.

We haven’t done this for awhile, but today seems nice for it.

Hey, check out this Hubble photograph. Space rules.

I am glad Bill turned me on to the perl module HTML::Template. I’ve been converting some of my custom templating code over. Here is a new listing of the authors in the Mind Mined Public Library that hasn’t been available previously.

But there’s no reason to beat myself up about it.

01.21.2006 - Welcome back Neil Freer to the Public Library. As usual, Neil shakes our notions of where we came from and why. Thanks to Jessica Del Greco for the original image and for assuming editorial duties for awhile.

Frank Zappa’s 1979 Sheik Yerbouti made its way into my CD changer again. Oh, boy. Frank, Frank, Frank.

The lyrics on this album make MTV’s Jackass look like highbrow humour. With “jokes” (more like head-shakers) about tampons and “poop shoots”, titles like “Broken Hearts Are For Assholes” and “I Have Been In You”, Zappa really does top all his previous adolescent epics.

But the musicianship is among the best I’ve heard. He provides some really challenging material for his band, both instrumentally and vocally. There is a funny Dylan impression on “Flakes” among other interesting characters in what has the sound of a rock opera in many ways. Here is a more lengthy take on the album with some good song by song information.

… isn’t my favorite album title. But those saying Paul McCartney has made his best album in a decade might be on to something. Sure, the whippersnapper (read: under 50) who produced him this time might get some of the credit for the sound, but I think this batch of Macca songs could stand on its own with the “usual” production job. This is good stuff.

I especially like the lyric “waiting … for your friends to go” although you can tell Paul knows it’s good, too. He’s admirable for wearing his arrogance on his sleeve sometimes. He knows he’s the best songwriter of the (second half of the) 20th century. I’d be pretty pleased with myself, too.

The first Paul album I bought as it was coming out was Off The Ground which I still enjoy. This was quite likely one of the albums seen as less-than-spectacular to many, and I admit it’s no McCartney or Band On The Run. But I still find myself humming some of the tunes on it, and spontaneously. You know, when you have a song in your head which has not been planted there.

This latest album might be like that. We’ll see.

Not sure about the moniker, but homeshoring is a trend I’d like to see grow. Anything that reduces driving helps us off the hamster wheel.

How many people drive daily to work primarily so that they can get to a strategically placed phone? Didn’t the miracle of the telephone have something to do with not having to travel? For that matter, didn’t the internet promise similar? Why are we still driving so much?

Thank you, Mozilla folks, for releasing the new Thunderbird. RSS support is improved in this version including import/export of feeds using OPML files. Also, it looks like you can organize in nested folders.

Maybe now my September announcement of switching to Thunderbird for reading syndicated content will cease to be a bald-faced lie. What can I say, I was excited. I like my feeds close to my mail. If you’re an Outlook user, check out RSS Popper, a plugin methinks is getting it right, too. But if you can, just switch to the Bird O’ Thunder.

Update: the new ‘Bird has inline spellchecking too. Maybe Jessica can use this (since it’s already running) for her blog posts instead of launching Microsoft Word To Your Mother just for the check.

We have dropped our phone number, 776-0391, in favor of using our cellphones.

However, you may still call that number for a period of one month if you don’t already know my cell number. The automated service will provide it.

Jessica’s cell number is available on request for a small donation. Just kidding! Large donation.

Haven’t seen the movie yet, but Grizz did a nice job putting our faces (Jessica and me) in this interactive trailer. Hilarious!

The Pirate Bay, which I just found out is the largest BitTorrent directory, has an amusing “Legal Threats” page. The folks running sites like these are the new Robin Hoods.

I especially like the graph at bottom of the page, showing the relationship between number of legal threats and the resulting torrent files that were taken down (none, of course). Rock on.

Happy birthday, Abby! Hope you dig the new fish tank. It’ll be much better with fish.