Go Terk Yourself

I played my real guitar through my GT-8 for the first time in a long time last night. It was awesome.

... to go help her sister give birth. Good luck Margy and Dan!

No "Best Picture" nomination for The Wrestler. Grr. WFT is Forrest Gump doing up there anyways?

I just subscribed to the White House Blog.

I should not have seen this (via. BoingBoing. I especially love how much time (about half the video) the creator spends elaborating on why freebase caffeine is "completely legal".

Note: This post should not be interpreted as suggesting that freebasing caffeine is a Good Thing To Do. If you want caffeine I suggest you consume it like a normal person: drink far too much coffee.

Too much Indian food. Real post tomorrow.

I'm a longtime fan of Consumer Reports and a big proponent of sticking up for your own rights when it comes to interactions with various retailers, service providers, etc. I like The Consumerist a lot too - they provide nice real world tips for negotiating problematic situations as a purchaser of goods. Sometimes, however, their insistence on restitution for being inconvenienced seems a little too much like advocating feeling overly entitled:

... the Zune Dock (a 100 dollar product) is certainly moving in the right direction. (source)

I'm all for demanding a refund or repair but insisting that a business has not done right by you unless they throw some extra money your way goes too far.

The (almost) always entertaining Daily WTF has an article today about my favorite pair of standard C functions, setjmp and longjmp:

If goto is considered harmful, then longjmp() should definitely be considered dangerous. As in, thermo-freakin-nuclear bomb dangerous. Fortunately, its complexity and frequency of use seem to be on par with that of a nuke, and most C developers have not brought it in their everyday. Most.

Andrew pointed out today that I get a large amount of indie rock cred for pushing Fleet Foxes as the best band/album of 2008 way before Pitchfork did the same thing. So how do I redeem these points for cash?

Andrew is committed to posting a photo a day. I will post once a day as well. Let's do this.

I vacillate between being incredibly impressed that a video game about playing a fake guitar can be so much fun and convincing w.r.t. seeming like there is an audience excited about my performance and being disgusted that I spend more time playing a fake guitar in front of my oversized television than I do playing a real guitar through my oversized amplifier.

To expand on my "switching to SmugMug" comment from a few days ago:

1. If you're a big nerd like me and you subscribe to people's photo RSS feeds the firehose for my photos is now at this URL. There are a bunch of other feeds available too...
2. The most interesting photos, if I do what I want instead of being a lazy slob, will be in the Email gallery. This is where all the stuff I take with my iPhone will go. Hooray for having the internet in my pocket.
3. Switching to SmugMug was super easy. There's a Firefox extension called Smugglr that does the job easily.
4. If you sign up for SmugMug I encourage you to use a coupon code to get a discount on the first year. If you're coming from Flickr use the code flickr to save 50% or, if you feel like helping me pay for my subscription, use hwrh3klDBOGlI - this will save you $5 and send $10 to me - it's win/win!

Addendum

Cool SmugMug feature: resizing images via URL. Take the photo above. The default size is accessed via the URL http://gty.smugmug.com/photos/442170176_d5a4f-L.jpg. Everything after the "-" tells SmugMug what size photo you want to see. You can use some predefined sizes, like "-L" (large), "-O" (original), etc. But you can also tell it to resize the photo on the fly by giving it the desired dimensions, i.e. "-250x250". So the URL for embedding the above image is http://gty.smugmug.com/photos/442170176_d5a4f-250x250.jpg.

Kerri has a blog and I updated the photo on Amelie's little web page.