Actually, I lie. It’s not Deep Space Nine (DS9), but instead The Original Series (TOS), but I’m taking some poetic liberty here on account of its awesomeness.
Star Trek + NIN Closer == Awesome.
In other news, I’m attempting to aggregate my social media again. Hopefully I’ll get my tweets, my delicious links, other RSS, etc. Oh, the perils of not giving in and just using facebook.
17:27 CST | category / entries / links
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Obama’s: “Yes Pecan” and Bush’s: “___________”
Some of my underrated favorites…
Nougular Proliferation
Strategeberry
Watermelonboard
Osama Split
Oh internet how you make my day.
13:02 CST | category / entries / links
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First of all Paco De Lucia is the bomb. Second of all, there is no second of all, he’s just awesome.
I’ll have to post the video of when I got to hang out with Carlos Barbosa Lima in somebody else’s kitchen, that was also a pretty cool experience.
Edit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmLxVlHZZZs … other user broke the link. “Paco De Lucia - Rumba” for future reference
13:37 CST | category / entries / links
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Heard this on NPR this morning.
Thank you Mr. McCain for your decency and honesty. I sincerely appreciate it and think that a respectful “tone” like the one you demonstrated is one of the most important issues for this presidential election.
I don’t want someone who thinks that suspending habeus corpus is the right thing to do. Or that ignoring subpoenas is the right thing to do. Or that warrantless wiretapping is the right thing to do.
I don’t want someone who (through inaction) tacitly condones these types of actions. I don’t want someone who sets that type of example. I want someone who sees something that is wrong and says: “No way.”
I think that Mr. Obama and Mr. Biden have at least talked about significant improvements in the tone or character of U.S. government. One video that did a lot to convince me of this was this one. It’s a standard “political promise” video but look at what the topics he chooses to tackle are. “I will put any bill that I’m going to sign online for five days before I sign it.” Who is asking for that? Why is he offering that? Do you want that? That’s what I mean about setting the tone.
08:15 CST | category / entries / links
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GBC Pro-Click Binding Machine Video Review
I meant to post this a while ago. My mom was asking me what I wanted for my birthday a while back and I couldn’t really think of anything. She pressed, and on a lark I said “a spiral binding machine” so I could spiral bind my music books. If there’s one thing I hate(d) it’s having to use paper clips and stuff to keep a music book open to the proper page. Especially difficult with the guitar, because you kindof need both hands on the instrument 99% of the time.
The Pro-Click is not exactly a spiral binding machine but the Pro-Click binding shares a lot of the positive qualities of spiral binding. It uses these little clicky-fish-spine things and a multi-hole puncher that will get all your pages punched (approximately the same spacings as standard comb-bindings). Under light usage it’s a fairly secure system, although if you do pull on the loops they will break open. Perhaps they could be closed permanently with some glue or the “gentle” application of heat. If you can find some spiral stuff of the appropriate width, the holes would work fine with that too, although I believe most spiral binding is graded at a slightly smaller width / distance between each hole.
Thank you mom and brother, as you can see it is uber-useful, and has increased my quality of life immensely … now I no longer fear playing any of my music because I know that the book will lay flat and I will easily be able to turn the pages at my leisure.
So, the reason that I did this video review in the first place was because I couldn’t find a video review of how this contraption worked. As an FYI, I also posted this to Amazon’s video reviews, kindof neat to compare and contrast how their system works with the other video sites.
Now, you can see how this binding machine works and decide for yourself if you think it would meet your needs. And for you, my faithful reader of this website, I give you the story behind the story. If you’re thinking of doing this yourself, you have to be aware of one thing:
This personal binder works great, takes up very little space, is solidly constructed, fits standard 8.5”x11” pages with ease, but it does have some issues with the oversized music books. I ended up taking all my books down to Kinkos and having them “rip” the spine, as well as make approximately 0.25” cuts on the top and bottom of each book. There was a very reasonable charge of ~$1.50 per cut and I was able to get all the books cut in two batches, so like $9.00 for (($1.50 x 3) x 2), but I wouldn’t want to have to add $5 to the price of each book in order to bind it.
If you plan on doing this at home semi-regularly, make sure you have access to a paper-cutter that fits your original paper size and can chomp the pages down to be ~11.5” on the side you want to bind. Ripping the spines can be done manually with an exacto or something and then cleaned up with the paper cutter, but a good paper cutter will be a necessity for prepping music books.
Also, watch this space … October is coming soon!
14:54 CST | category / entries / links
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The website formerly known as http://del.icio.us/ is now simply http://delicious.com. And just when I was getting good at remember where the dots go.
In the words of Monty Python - “Say no more!” Just go forth and bookmark. Them and Flickr give me tons of hope!
23:36 CST | category / entries / links
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INGREDIENTS
DIRECTIONS
I’m gonna state that adding the butter last is a good idea (otherwise the flour wants to stick to it and get a bit clumpy), but that you might try the wet-first, then dry method.
These crepes are neutral in flavor. It sounds interesting to do a bit of savory crepes for maybe chicken or potatoes. I’d hesitate to make them sweeter if you’re doing a sweet filling because you really do get enough sweetness from the ingredients and the neutral flavor of the crepe keeps your teeth from falling out.
Bon Appétit!
22:49 CST | category / entries / links
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Burlington Coat Factory, I Love You
Your search for “bowtie” did not match any of the products we carry.
We searched for “potties” instead. Did you mean “bow tie”, “bow”?
[source…]
I almost spit up coke when I read that.
21:49 CST | category / entries / links
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The guitar is one of the hardest instruments, right up there with orchestra conductor and concert pianist, because of the the high level of “personal leadership” that is expected of us. If I were an orchestra player, I would have a conductor to start me and stop me and bring me back in if I got lost, to show me what tempo, where the beat is, to write in the bowings, breathing and articulations, to tell me what phrasing and dynamics are expected of me, and so on — you know, the 130 things that the conductor does.
And then I would have someone sitting next to me doing the same thing as me. Someone I can peek at to see what I’m supposed to be doing; if I play a wrong note, I can catch it before it becomes apparent to the world. And if I get lost, they can play a little louder to cover for me until I get back in. As guitarists, we are expected to do all those jobs: start yourself, stop yourself and bring yourself back in when you get lost before anyone notices; cue yourself for entrances. And everyone expects you to smile even though you wish you were at home with your loved ones.
[source…]
Thank you, Kevin.
23:39 CST | category / entries / links
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Kicking and Screaming Towards Lisp
A great article, worthy of it’s own pullout (not just an anonymous del.icio.us bookmark link):
My point is that it may be too late to start with Lisp so you don’t have to reimplement all of its features. Because all of those new languages have already implemented them. At least what most people consider the important ones.
I imagine people will disagree with this view. People might say that although Java and C# have many of the features that made Lisp great, it doesn’t have the essence that makes Lisp still the best choice for discriminating programmers. That essence might include meta-programming facilities, or first-class closures, or macros.
Macros let you subsume more code into less code. Macros let you write more functionality with fewer lines. Macros let you abstract away boilerplate into new syntax.
But the corporate manager will say: if everyone writes their own syntax, my programmers can’t read each other’s code. So instead of having to learn a language once, they will have to learn a new language each time they approach a program for the first time. And the value of macros is lessened.
Code as data lets you manipulate code at runtime. It means you can optimize it, count it, store it, send it somewhere, and more importantly, write it in itself. The possibilities are endless.
But the corporate manager again has an answer: Java is already written. Why would I want to rewrite it? I have a program to develop—-and you’re worried about optimization? Let the folks at Sun worry about that. We’re not language developers!
And so do each of the features fall like dominoes. Either they hinder some unforeseen corporate best-practice, or they just aren’t really as powerful in that environment as one would really hope their expressive purity would like.
[source…]
…really great article talking about essential lispy-ness. C and C++ are dead to me (an interesting thing to say, and I’ll probably regret it :^). Java replaces C++ … C is OK, but it’s like adding salt to a dish- put it into a well-written library off to the side and write everything else in a different language that is ~easier~ or ~better~. The cases where machine efficiency outweighs development or maintenance efficiency are limited (and valuable!), but brutal machine-efficiency is steamrolling the less-people-efficient languages for many cases.
People seem to groove on Objective-C, I haven’t had a chance to use it and comment, but perhaps it strikes a better balance between people-efficiency and machine efficiency. Certainly any language that drives against people-efficience is now doomed to failure. I just hope we don’t go to drag+drop flowchart programming. :^)
16:54 CST | category / entries / links
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