Random thoughts on Life, Music, and Beer.

Slowly Joining the 21st Century

Saturday, August 18, 2007 - 12:01 PM

George Krueger, now on Flickr.

In many, many ways, I’m way above the curve when it comes to the “interweb”.  I was online before there was such a thing as http://www - who here remembers dialing into a local BBS to access your email and usenet?

But on the modern web (I love how the young-uns, the “blogosphere”, and the ever clue-less media call it Web 2.0 - to some of us it’s more like Web 6.0), it’s taken me a while to adapt.  It took me forever to convert the old web page (which was hand written in straight HTML to the very end) to a content management “blog” format.  (It’s funny how my old site was like a blog in format way before there was such a thing - just, like I said, done by hand in HTML).

But I’m slowly progressing, I’ve finally got my Flickr account set up!  I do plan on eventually getting more up there besides Anubis, but for the time being, you’ll all just have to deal with looking at the most handsome cat in the world.

Best Buy - Now serving bootlegs.

Tuesday, July 03, 2007 - 09:09 PM

So, I was at a Best Buy today, and I was browsing through the music DVDs, as I’m wont to do from time to time, and I came across something interesting.  I happened to see “Led Zeppelin Live at Earls Court, 1975”.  This caused me to do a double take, as I was unfamiliar with this title.  Naturally, I picked it up to check it out…

“This is clearly a bootleg”, I thought to myself. The label said “Masterplan” and the producer credit said “Can A Puss”.  I contemplated buying it (it was only $14.99) to check it out, but after researching it on the web I’m glad I didn’t.  It is most definitely a bootleg, and apparently a poor quality one at that.

I snapped a couple quick pics with my camera phone (sorry about the quality, I accidently had it set to the lower setting).

Hello, Darkness, My Old Friend…

Friday, June 29, 2007 - 10:22 AM

Say goodbye to the internet as we know it.  Say hello to outrageous fees to do the things we take for granted everyday.  Say hello to AT&T and Comcast limiting your ability to do what you want, go where you want on the internet.  Say goodbye to the internet startups that end up changing the world, ‘cause they don’t stand a chance now.

FTC Nixes Net Neutrality

Is it really any shock that they sided with Big Business on this one?

New Google Maps feature

Friday, June 29, 2007 - 08:57 AM

I always thought it would be cool (actually, more extremely practical than cool) if you could change the route that Google gives you when you look up directions in Google Maps.  Well, now you can!  Don’t like the route Google gave you? Know that there’s construction on a certain road, or that traffic always sucks on a particular street?  Just drag the blue line to the road you’d rather take.

It’s a little flaky right now, but give it time.  The main thing is that it tries to route your “detour” back to it’s original route as quickly as possible, so you might end up having to drag different sections of the route to your preferred one to get it right.  Hopefully it’ll get better (and since it’s Google, I expect it will).

What it does seem well suited for, though, is if you’re planning a trip you can easily plot side trips for sightseeing purposes.  Maybe this is what the programmers had in mind, but to me it seems much more practical as a way of telling Google I’d rather take the Eisenhower to the west suburbs than the Kennedy today, because I know traffic out to O’Hare is going to be a bitch.

Minor site improvement

Friday, June 08, 2007 - 06:30 PM

Well, I finally got around to changing the poster page to utilize the Lightbox effect to display the images of the posters, getting rid of that stupid javascript popup that would cause the browser to flip to the top of the page when you clicked on the links.  Also, this eliminates the possibility that some pop-up blocker might get in the way of displaying the images.

Eventually I plan on updating some of the poster images.  Some are just crappy images, some are too small, and some are too big.  The plan is to get the best possible image for each poster (even if that means scanning them in - which is a pain in the ass on a letter size flat bed scanner because you have to scan it in sections and stitch those sections together in Photoshop).  Also, I want to decide on a standard size - not only for the sake of consistency, but also because the ones that are too small don’t really show any of the detail, and the larger ones take too long to load and can be a bit cumbersome since you have to scroll down to see the whole thing.

I’m not sure when I’ll get around to any of this, but that’s the plan.