Music Video Thursday: "White and Nerdy"

"Weird Al" Yankovic has long been a favorite of nerds - from "The Saga Begins" (Don McLean meets Star Wars Episode I), to his geeky flamewar rap "All About the Pentiums" (my favorite line: "You're just about as useless as JPEGs to Helen Keller"), to his recent satiric take on the battle between the recording industry and P2P networks "Don't Download This Song", Al has shown that he understands the inner workings of the nerd mind. But with his latest video, Al has stood up and loudly proclaimed that he is, truly, "White and Nerdy":

One of us! One of us! One of us! (as if there were any doubt !)

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go play Minesweeper on my Palm Pilot...

P.S. What the heck is up with Blogger? The spell checker rejected all the following words: nerds, geeky, flamewar, Pentiums, JPEGs, P2P - what kind of nerd-wannabes managed to write a spell checker, but missed words like that??? Bunch of posers...

P.P.S. ROTFLMAO! Guess what other word the spell checker rejected? Blogger!!

P.P.P.S. The spell checker accepted ROTFLMAO. (Cowboy_K walks away slowly, muttering under his breath)

Music Video Thursday: "JCB"

I lost my grandmother this past Sunday. We just got back today from Frontier, where her funeral was yesterday, and I'm exhausted emotionally and physically. So instead of my customary background and history regarding the choice for Music Video Thursday, I'm just going to point you to the Wikipedia article for "JCB" by Nizlopi, and let the video roll:

It feels like this song is what I needed today - sweet, gentle, sentimental. Next week will be fun again, I promise. :-)

Music Video Thursday: "Enter Sandman"

Ahhh, memories. Grade 11, fall of 1987, LCBI dorm, my room-mate Dave. Late nights staying up, listening to music, drinking Jolt, eating O'Ryan's "au gratin" potato chips. When Dave was choosing the music, it was almost exclusively Metallica. His side of the room was covered in Metallica posters, plus a glow-in-the-dark "Ride the Lightning" t-shirt that kept me awake at night the first week or so. And thus was my introduction to Metallica.

Metallica's first video "One", released in 1988, met with much acclaim, but "Enter Sandman" is still my favorite. And unlike last week's videos, I can guarantee that this one won't cause any nightmares. Unless you're afraid of falling. Or drowning. Or snakes. Or having your bed run over by a semi.

Dave, if you're out there, drop me a line - too long since I last heard from you, dude.

UPDATE 2009-07-30: just discovered that Dave died of cancer a week after I had posted this blog. I have no idea why I was thinking of Dave that day, but the timing was sure interesting...

QuickLogger Plus updates (finally!)

About 6 weeks ago, I posted a little utility online called QuickLogger Plus. I got a fair bit of feedback, pretty much all positive, and a fistful of feature requests. I started plotting and planning... and then nothing happened. I don't think I even replied to most of the comments or e-mail.

I'm happy to say that I've finally taken a little time to sit down with the code and do some more work with it. I've tightened up the configuration a bit, and managed to add a few new features:

• Flexible formatting: the formatting of the log entry is now controlled by a single configuration variable called entryTemplate - for example: "[[ISO_DATE]]" & VbTab & "[[ISO_TIME]]" & VbTab & "[[ENTRY]]" will create a tab-separated entry with ISO-style date and time, while "[[LOCAL_DATE]] [[LOCAL_TIME]] [[ENTRY]]" will format the line like the original QuickLogger script. You could also do HTML, comma-separated value, probably even RTF or any other text-based format if you like.
  
• New logging fields: with the entryTemplate system, there are a few new pieces of information that can be logged, including:
  
  
  • current logged in user with [[USER_NAME]] and [[USER_DOMAIN]]
    
  • elapsed time since the last entry [[DURATION_MINUTES]]
    
  
  
• Easier extensibility: need to log something else that I haven't included support for? Just create a token (i.e. [[MY_OBSCURE_DATA]]) in entryTemplate, add it to the validTokens array (line 158), and add a switch to the select case statement starting on line 161.
  

Feature requests still on the back burner include:

• support for parsing embedded "tags" in the entry similar to those used in todo.txt - I've had a couple requests for this, but I haven't quite figured out how I'd like to handle it
  
• logging to Excel, ODBC, or other non-plaintext formats - I've had a couple requests for this as well, but I'm not planning on adding this in the near future. I guess I'm a believer in human-readable plaintext. With the new entryTemplate, however, it should be a lot easier to create a template that facilitates importing into other applications (comma-separated values, etc.)
  

Download here - quicklogger.vbs - and let me know if you run into any bugs, have any new feature requests, etc. Thanks again to everyone for the feedback on the first release, and hopefully I'll be better at replying and keeping everyone up-to-date!

Music Video Thursday - Scandinavian Invasion: The grand Finn-ale!

The final installment of our Scandinavian Invasion is a doozie tonight, featuring a fearsome double-feature of Finnish frightfulness. Spooooooooooky!

The Creature Feature: "Hard Rock Hallelujah"

We now return to the 2006 Eurovision Song Contest, and another controversial Scandinavian entry. When the winner of Finland's regional final was announced, many Finns called for officials to reconsider sending an artist with such "unusual musical style and stage theatrics". The calls were not heeded, however, and Lordi went on to perform at the semi-finals:

Unlike Iceland's entry, Lordi won the hearts of Europe, went on to the final, and ended up winning the competition with a record 292 points. As if that wasn't scary enough, Lordi fans in Finland went on to set the world's record for karaoke, as 80,000 people sang along to "Hard Rock Hallelujah". Truly frightening coming from a country where 83% of the citizens are Lutheran.

Second frightful feature: "Wanna Love You Tender"

The scene: a gothic castle on a dark, stormy night. In the cellar: a mad scientist's laboratory. A disco ball hangs overhead, a Finnish beauty queen and a Finnish musician are strapped to gurneys, and a large wardrobe full of red and white polyester stands behind them. With a maniacal cackle, the scientist opens the roof, lightning strikes the disco ball, and the monster comes to life:

I can't imagine anything more frightening - I'm going to have trouble sleeping tonight.

Next week on Music Video Thursday: something not necessarily Scandinavian! Stay tuned!

Music Video Thursday - Scandinavian Invasion: "Congratulations"

The Eurovision Song Contest has been going on for 50 years now. For those not familiar with Eurovision, imagine an Idol-style show, except that the contestants (solo or group acts) are selected by individual countries. Previous winners include ABBA in 1974 and Celine Dion in 1998. 24 countries took part in the 2006 edition of the contest, from Albania to the U.K., including Iceland, who, for reasons that may never be understood, decided to send Silvia Night, International Superstar:

Silvia's performance was unparalleled in the history of the contest - not only was she booed following her semi-final performance, she was booed before she started. After failing to make it to the Eurovision final, Sylvia had a complete meltdown (WARNING: PG-13 language) in front of the cameras, slapping her boyfriend, swearing at journalists, insulting other Eurovision competitors, and blaming the media for her downfall.

What most people outside of Iceland didn't realize at the time is that Silvia was actually Icelandic actress and singer Ágústa Eva Erlendsdöttir, who created the outspoken, flamboyant character for a TV show (in a similar vein as Ali G, Dame Edna, or Jiminy Glick) - according to her Wikipedia article, Silvia was meant to bring out "all the worst elements of human behaviour in modern society". Apparently she succeeded.

Yeah, I know - I should have played it safe and just thrown in a bizarre Björk video, or something a little more conventional like Írafár. - but this is just a warm-up for next week, as our Scandinavian Invasion comes to it's Finnish (sorry, couldn't resist).

Music Video Thursday - Scandinavian Invasion: "She's Made of Chalk"

Last week, I told you to be afraid of Denmark. I had the latest in Danish reggae/hip-hop bands (with a bizarre video that involves karaoke) ready to go for today... and then, on a whim, I decided to feed the lyrics through a Danish-to-English translator. As with most machine translations, it wasn't perfect, but it was enough to know that it would probably offend any Danish-speaking visitors to this site. Not that I have a huge Danish audience, but better safe than sorry, right? Besides, I still have my Finnish entry that you should still be very, very afraid of. But enough of that now.

My sister-in-law recommended Mew for the Danish entry in the Scandinavian Invasion, but I decided to go with something different. Here's "She's Made of Chalk" by Kashmir:

Next week: Iceland!

Music Video Thursday - Scandinavian Invasion: Revenge of the Svensk!

Apparently Basshunter wasn't everyone's cup of tea, so at the suggestion of a conspiring Norwegian (you know who you are) I'm going to post an alternate Swedish entry for the Music Video Thursday's Scandinavian Invasion.

It's an incredibly annoying-yet-catchy tune, and the video is quirky and fun to watch. Any wonder that the video for "We're From Barcelona" by quirky and fun-to-watch 29-person Swedish musical ensemble I'm From Barcelona has become another Swedish internet sensation?

Next week: Denmark. Be afraid. Be very afraid. But not quite as afraid as you should be of Finland, but I'm getting ahead of myself. For now, just be afraid of Denmark. Plenty of time to fear Finland after that.

Music Video Thursday - Scandinavian Invasion Week 2: "Boten Anna"

Now we turn our attention to Sweden, home of a DJ who calls himself Basshunter. He spun up a little tune called "Boten Anna" that became all the rage in the northern lands this spring, including being voted the official Russ song in Norway. It's a pretty standard story - boy meets girl, boy mistakes girl for an artificial intelligence, girl tells boy that she's real, boy doesn't quite believe her. It's the same old story. If you don't like reading subtitles, by the way, I hope you understand Swedish, otherwise you're not going to get much out of this:



Programming note: I've got a Finnish entry lined up for the finale of Scandinavian Invasion, and I can probably drop some Björk in for the Icelandic entry, but I don't have a good candidate from Denmark. Any suggestions?

Music Video Thursday - Scandinavian Invasion: "Remind Me"

This week's Music Video Thursday marks the beginning of the Scandinavian Invasion - all the videos over the next few weeks will feature artists from the chilly north of Europe.

We begin the Scandinavian Invasion with Norwegian electronic sensation Röyksopp. The video for their single "Remind Me" ended up winning the 2002 MTV Europe Music Award for best video:

Thanks to Google Video for still being up and running while YouTube decided to take some time off for "putting out some new features, sweeping out the cobwebs and zapping a few gremlins."

You do not know the power of the pink side of the Force!

I find your lack of cuteness... disturbing...

Via BoingBoing

QuickLogger Plus

UPDATE 2007-09-26: Welcome again Lifehacker readers - it looks like a bunch of you have followed the breadcrumbs from the recent QuickLogger 2 article to the original QuickLogger article to get here. You may have noticed that QuickLogger Plus is a little stale to say the least - it's been well over a year since the last update. I feel like I owe you all an explanation for that, but I don't have the time to do that right now - I'll try to post something soon. Thanks for all your comments and suggestions, and if you haven't already, check out Joshua Tallent's QuickLogger 2.0 - it looks good!

UPDATED 2006-09-12: New features added (finally!) Read all about it here. If you still want a copy of the original, it's available as quickloggerplus.2006072801.vbs, but I highly recommend using the new version.

A few days ago, Lifehacker posted a neat little script called QuickLogger for keeping track of what you do during the workday. I downloaded, loved it, and immediately became dissatisfied with it. For starters, it didn't use the time format (ISO 8601) that I prefer, and it didn't automatically rotate the log file. So I made a few changes to make it work the way I liked it. Then, I started thinking of other things that I'd like it to do. One thing led to another, and the original 23-line script was now mutated into a 200 line monster (including comments and whitespace) that I dubbed QuickLogger Plus. The user interface remained the same, but under the hood there were a ton of configuration options.

I decided it was time to share my monster with the world, so on Friday (July 28 2006) I posted my changes to Lifehacker. So far, the response has been positive. According to my web server logs, it's been downloaded over 60 times since posting to Lifehacker - not bad considering that it didn't get posted until 48 hours after the original article.

I've got one feature request that I hope to implement in the next day or so - I could probably do it now, but since I can't really test it from my Linux system at home, I'll have to wait until I'm back in the office on Monday to test it under XP. If you've used it and have any comments, feature requests, bug reports, etc. please post a comment here, or drop me an e-mail (address in the script comments). I'll make this page the semi-permanent home of QLP - any updates, etc. will be posted here.

Music video Thursday: "1985"

All right, here we go - the second installment of "Music video Thursday". I'm actually looking forward to these - I've got a number of videos lined up for the next month or two already. And now... on with the show!

"1985" - a poignant examination of a middle aged lady, looking wistfully back at her life, at opportunities missed, dreams forgotten, the changes in the world around her...

Well, it could have been poignant, coming from someone other than self-proclaimed "drunk rock" group Bowling for Soup, but at least they manage to bring back the beauty and grace of 1980's music videos:

Ahhh, Video Hits - the memories come flooding back...

Music video Thursday begins: "Technologic"

I've decided that Thursday is the day to post music videos to my blog. Just because. You got a problem with that? Oh yeah? Well come over here and say that.

And now, for your viewing and listening pleasure, we are proud to present our feature presentation: "Technologic", by Daft Punk. Don't try to understand what's happening, just sit back and... ummm... watch, I guess.

Buy it, use it, break it, fix it

Llllllllllolipop Jones!!!

The Pig and the Box is a fun kids story, and a decent fable about the pitfalls of DRM - distributed as a free PDF download, with a Creative Commons license.

Officially kid-tested by three of our in-house story testers, resulting in smiles, giggles, and three thumbs up.

Jump?

I can only assume that David Lee Roth was abducted by aliens, or at least dropped on his head as a child... repeatedly... it's the only logical explanation for this:



EDIT: Upon further review, it appears that Diamond Dave has always acted like a mildly retarded monkey. Or maybe everyone acted that way in 80's music videos. Whatever.

Hey Anonymous!

At 10/6/06 00:25, Anonymous (who the heck are you?) said...

Ummmmm, I thought u were going 2 keep this up 2 date?????

Yeah, I thought I was going to do that too. Ever hear of a certain road that's paved with good intentions?

So, does this count?

Idiot.

2005-11-10: "Hey, watch this, I'm gonna keep this blog up-to-date and stuff"

2005-11-20: "Hey, look, I'm posting and stuff! w00t!"

2006-02-01: "Ummmm.... yeah... where was I?"

The beatings will continue until morale improves I get back to this. Lots of stuff happened in the two "silent" months - not sure how much of it I want to talk about online, let's wait and see...

Holy Flock!

Well, it's out - I just got my invitation to download Flock, the new web browser. Actually, I'm posting this right from Flock's built-in blogging tool, and playing around with the full integration between Flock's bookmarks and del.icio.us (which I just started using a couple weeks ago, and loving it). It also looks like it has integration with Flickr, but since I don't really use it I haven't played with it yet. I'll post more later once I've gotten a better handle on Flock.

Bring out your dead! [clang]

DEAD PERSON:

I'm not dead!

CART MASTER:

What?

CUSTOMER:

Nothing. Here's your ninepence.

DEAD PERSON:

I'm not dead!

CART MASTER:

'Ere. He says he's not dead!

CUSTOMER:

Yes, he is.

DEAD PERSON:

I'm not!

CART MASTER:

He isn't?

CUSTOMER:

Well, he will be soon. He's very ill.

DEAD PERSON:

I'm getting better!

CUSTOMER:

No, you're not. You'll be stone dead in a moment.

CART MASTER:

Oh, I can't take him like that. It's against regulations.

DEAD PERSON:

I don't want to go on the cart!

CUSTOMER:

Oh, don't be such a baby.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Scene 2

In a related note, I'm not dead either. Just this blog. Steps will be taken shortly to remedy this, most likely followed by tripping and falling on my face, as seems to happen whenever I make pronouncements online.