Friday night Cynthia took me to see geek troubadour Jonathan Coulton play a show in San Francisco. The tickets were my birthday present. You might recall that he wrote the closing theme for Portal, the popular game about cake, companion cubes, interesting guns, and mad computers.
At least here, the cake was not a lie.
Dinah Sanders [...]
Now I know who wrote God Rest Ye, Unitarians, it was the Rev. Christopher Gist Raible of the First Unitarian Church of Worcester. Since my copy of the lyric is (as of this writing) the top result in Google for “god rest ye unitarians,” I’m glad I now have the correct attribution.
Tim Bray has a sensible approach to Yodobashi Camera. Go in the morning on a weekday with a goal in mind.
During our trip last August, Cynthia and I visted the Yodobashi in Akihabara on an early Saturday evening. But then, we were on vacation, our time was our own, and the packed mob scene was [...]
Michael Shermer talks about crop circles, science, Galileo, Led Zepplin, and Kylie Minogue at the TED Confrence in Monterey, February of 2006. A funny, snappy introduction to skepticism.
While I was not exactly the audience they had in mind, three things in Hot Fuzz made me smile:
Desk sergeant reading a Iain Banks novel.
Pub playing Sgt. Rock (Is Going to Help Me).
Skellingtons reference.
Dana Stevens has the best summary of the movie: Hot Fuzz is like an Agatha Christie novel directed by Michael Bay and [...]
Control the rights to your music. Imagine if Johnny Cash could had sold his music via iTunes or eMusic at the start of his career. [ via Lea Hernadez, who controls the rights to her comics. ]
Battlestar Galactica series composer Bear McCreary on adapting All Along the Watchtower for the season three cliffhanger.
Three things that worked great during 2006:
24 Hours, The Kleptones
2200 The Underground Hand That Buttoned The Widow was my most played track of 2006, according to iTunes.
WriteRoom, Hog Bay Software
I joined a short story a week writing group in 2006. WriteRoom allowed me to clear my desktop and focus on writing for a couple of [...]
Nostalgia ho! Thomas Dolby released a live album from his recent solo tour. When I saw him play back in 1985, in support of The Flat Earth, he had an engineer offstage managing a rack of computers (who he brought out and introduced during the show.) Shows you how far kit has come in the [...]
I was listening to Radio Paradise tonight, to take the sting out of the five to nil drubbing that the Sharks received at the hands of the Ducks, and they played Pretty Persuasion. That’s the first time I’d heard the song in years, and it reconfirmed Reckoning as my favorite R.E.M. album.
I looked up the [...]
bbum on Universal Music Group chieftain Doug Morris calling iPod users thieves: Must be great being in a business where you can so viscerally hate your customers and still make a buck. [ via Michael Rawdon ]
I recently turned my Civic into an iPod case. Navigating an iPod interface while driving isn’t a good idea, and neither is pressing skip over and over, so I need better playlists.
Jason Kottke’s discovery rule for things you haven’t heard in a long time (but haven’t skipped.)
Andy Budd’s rules for bubbling up newer materials, and [...]
I’m a couple of weekends behind on this, so here’s a quick one: Samba vocalist Sawa Kobayashi, covering Guns ‘n’ Rose’s Patience, animated by Scott Bateman.
Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society is the house band at 3 Quarks Daily (hey, I need a house band over here at More Like This.) Last month, the band played at a formal ball thrown by the editors of 3 Quarks at Flux Factory in NYC.
The Society’s provided MP3’s of the set. If you like [...]
