brykmantra.com

Check out this cool technology blog, Underdog of Perfection, by Room34, one of my RPM challenge friends. The latest is No Design is Good Design, a list of sites that make the best of minimalist design — and includes a shout to my Twitter persona regarding an obscure Simpsons onomatopoeia joke.

My wife says I need to post, but there’s not really any one thing worth posting. So here’s bunches:

1. Since the job I interviewed for is so contingent on my web networking skills, I’ve been spending even more time on those types of sites, including Second Life. If you’ve never experienced Second Life (and I’m really shocked at the number of friends of mine who have never heard of it, you owe it to yourself to check it out. It’s free, and surprisingly it’s not very hardware intensive. He’s a screenshot of one of my favorite hangouts:

2. The new Iron Man movie looks cool, but we’re waiting until Monday (5/19) to go see it.

3. Since I still can’t get my Creative Zen up and running, I got a temporary solution of a 2 GB Sansa Clip (that was on sale) for my evening power walks … except that the music I’m loading on it doesn’t show up. The troubleshooting guide suggests that it might be some DRM crap stopping the files from showing up.

So that’s still up in the air.

4. Lately I’ve gotten hooked on the Discovery Channel’s taxicab quiz show, Cash Cab. It’s amazing how little knowledge New Yorkers can get away with having and still survive in the big city …

Still though, it’s nice to see a game show where the contestants weren’t hand-picked by some control freak producers who thought they would look appropriate on the show. These are just ordinary people who needed a cab ride, and happened to pick the one with the rolling quiz show on board. Bonus points: On today’s show, they had two Nixon related questions. One was about who replaced Agnew as Vice President (duh!), and the other was the name of the cocker spaniel (again: duh!) that Nixon talked about in a televised 1952 speech to try to get public support for his place on the Republican ballot.

5. Oh, and speaking of Nixon’s historically significant dog, I’ll probably be finally giving the links to my RPM Challenge songs very soon. (What does one have to do with the other? Some of you already know, the rest of you will soon see.

Anyway, go to the Cash Cab link above and try your knowledge against some sample questions.

6. My friends will be tested in the next week. I can’t say what the test is, because that would defeat the purpose, but I dropped a subtle hint somewhere above. (I’m hereby exempting Kim, Pam and RennyBA from this test, because they’ve already proven their loyalty by posting comments here on a regular basis. I’m also exempting my wife, of course. But the rest of you are walking a thin line …)

7. And finally: Here’s something new you can try, just in case you haven’t already seen it: When you’re reading a message board, or you’re in a chatroom, and somebody says something incredibly stupid, all you have to say in response is:

[facepalm]

People who know what it means will know that you’re hip and smart, and those who don’t can just Google it.

You’re welcome.

I had saved this video some time ago, but YouTube is on the fritz tonight, so it might or might not be visible when you’re reading this. At any rate, it’s pretty funny, and cleverly illustrates the facepalm phenomenom:

I’m so thrilled to be able to blog again that I’m at it again after just five hours.

First of all I’d like to thank my friends Kim and Pam for already noticing I’m back without me even telling them, and to Renny, who didn’t know I was having problems, but who kept checking back anyway, and left two comments during the month while I couldn’t post anything.

And also a big thanks to Joni of WordPress forums for helping me troubleshoot and get back online.

I had more to post, but I have to go get ready for a job interview tomorrow (did I mention that?), so here’s what I don’t have time to talk about tonight: My adventures in Second Life, my music getting circulated around (I have my own ringtones! Woo-hoo!), developments in various shows, and my job interview tomorrow.

Bet you can’t wait.

(Click the picture to view the large size for full effect.)

Well, I finally did it: I finally broke down and checked into Second Life. I heard about it a couple of years ago, but never really got motivated to check it out, and lately I’ve been hearing that it’s over the hump, and was never really all it was cracked up to be.

Besides, I’ve done the Everquest thing, so I know how involving those virtual worlds can be, and I needed to put my time into other projects..

And I’ve done the There.com thing, so I also know how UN-involving virtual worlds can be. So I blew it off.

But now, Second Life happens to be intersecting with one of my other projects — and it’s free, and I’m unemployed, and on Friday it was an alternative to driving an 80 mile round trip — so I finally took the plunge.

As it turns out, it was a great time, both Friday night and all day Saturday, with several RPMers and even a few civilians gathering their avatars in a virtual nightclub and having those avatars boogie down, as shown in the above picture, to music that WE wrote and recorded.

A great feeling it is, to see people (virtual in this case) dancing to your music.

The dancer in this case is not one of the fellow musicians, but rather a lady named Mazzie from Australia. (I’m posting this particular picture because she didn’t believe that her normally silver outfit was giving off a distinctly green hue for an hour or so.)

I also promised several people a shout-out, including Mazzie, Gwenette Writer (another non-RPMer, but something of a mover-and-shaker within Second Life), Fence Flatley (our DJ for the evening and an RPM musician in Omaha, whose artist name is One Inch From Midget), Ruby’s Cannon (who wrote me a very complimentary email about my music), Jigjaw from London, England, Sister Savage from Bristol, England (I told her, “We have a dog named Bristol!”)
and … well, I can’t remember the others right now, but there were lots of us, and lots of strangers getting exposed to our music.

Oh, and Domestic Science wasn’t there at the party, but she also gave me a nice compliment about my music in an email, so I’m giving her a mention and a link as well …

Go to the RPM Jukebox, click Library, and check out these artists and others. You’ll be glad you did.

(Note to old college buddy Terry: Find Ruby’s Cannon in the Jukebox and listen to their stuff, especially 442, and see if it reminds you to Pat Travers.)

I still don’t feel like posting anything today — I’ve had the out-of-work blahs this week — and I’m not posting a direct link yet to my own RPM Challenge album, so here’s a link to the new >2008 Challenge Jukebox.

But if you really want to hear my songs, you can look in the jukebox for a song called “Ferriswheel”; that and the other songs on that album are mine.

But you’ll have to earn it.

While you’re at it, search for Dogs Are Weird, by Emergency Pizza Party. It’s a funny little nerdcore group rap (and no, it’s not about dogs at all, it’s about food; long story).

And just generally browse the jukebox and listen around. The amount of creativity and great material that came out of this one month is staggering.

The worldwide listening parties were today, but the one for the DFW area wasn’t centrally located (i.e., an 80-mile round trip for me), so I blew it off and watched the live webcast from New Hampshire. It was fun chatting with other RPMer’s in the chat room (a lot of whom I knew from the message boards) and watching as the guys in NH moved the camera over the table with all of our CDs.

The NH guys asked us to tell them where we were, and they were amazed at the varied locations: Texas (3 of us in the chat room), Pennsylvania, and several from Ireland and England.

There’s another live listening party later tonight in Second Life, so I finally bit the bullet and signed up for that after all these years of resisting.

Anyway, check out the songs; I’m going to get back to it now …

Hmm … looks like I posted something after all … oh well …

We’ve been a very musical family lately, my wife having been reviving her interest in singing in the last couple of years, and with me having the RPM Challenge last month, her own work has increased in pace as well.

So now comes MySong, a program from Microsoft Research that supposedly puts instrumental music to your singing — seriously, you sing, and the program sings along.

That sounds nice, in theory, for those who can actually sing. For the rest of us, I don’t know, I haven’t watched the video yet.

This video:

(The actual demos start at about 2:45, so skip forward if that’s all you’re interested in.)

Read the article here.

(Via Geekologie (which in turn was via Attack of the Show)

Some quick things before I have to get back to the music (just 1 more day to go!):

I’m using the clover bullet point in anticipation of the Irish Festival this weekend!

I promised a shout to the fine folks at Hurricane Glass and Mirror, with whom I had an interview today. It probably won’t amount to anything, since I’m vastly overqualified for this particular job (I’m hearing that a lot), but on the other hand, they’ll be expanding their operations soon, and my skills can come in handy.

Anyway, it was a good interview, and the main reason I tried out is because the office is 2.5 miles from my house.

After almost 13 years of driving 27 miles to toil on the corporate minefield, it would feel like a paid vacation to work in a small office right here in my own town, even if I would be vastly underemployed.

In other news, I’ve been meaning to mention that William F. Buckley Jr. died this week.

Buckley was what you call a classic intellectual consevative — as opposed to what we have now.

RPM Challenge (my music project) progress report: With just one day left, desperate times call for wacky measures, thus the book you see at right.

Seriously, though, I saw this at the library and couldn’t resist; I posted a picture on the RPM message boards and got a laugh from some of my similarly desperate fellow challengees.

Hey Spook, tell your mom Happy Birthday for me tomorrow!

And Now For Something Completely Different: Tron footage remixed with the sounds of nerdcore master YTCracker.

Here’s how caught up I’ve been in the RPM Challenge: It’s only 3 days until the North Texas Irish Festival, and this is the first time I’ve mentioned it!

I had started to not go to it this year, since I’m still out of a job, but my wife insisted that I go, because it’s the only thing I look forward to all year, and I had to miss it year before last because I was freshly missing half a lung.

Isn’t she wonderful? (As if we needed further proof …)

I’ll probably go on Sunday this year, since I still haven’t finished my 10 songs (and since I’m not smart like Yay Kim, pacing herself last November when she did a similar musical project). I have to get my album postmarked by noon on Saturday, so Friday could be a late night for me if I don’t progress remarkably in the next couple of days.

Plus, there’s alot of peer pressure on the RPM message boards to do cover art for our albums.

Yes, I know I should resist, but it’s going to be bad enough that playing instruments and writing lyrics and singing on their albums (and some have even recorded in professional studios!), and now many of them have professionally designed album covers.

I had no idea the standards would be so high.

Anyway, I’m going to go back to working on the music thing now and try to leave some time for my usual psyching-up for the festival …

Yes, it’s been almost a week since I’ve posted. Music is a cruel taskmistress, and even crueler when she’s in the employ of a limited-time project, like the RPM Challenge that I talk about so much. If I didn’t have my headphones off so I could watch Lost right now, I probably wouldn’t even be posting now.

No, it’s not that I’m composing that much music, but actually avoiding doing the work is very time-consuming in itself.

Also, there are auxiliary tasks associated with the challenge that are very tempting too. There’s the message boards, and the challenge profile blogs, the whole community thing. Plus, everybody’s posting pictures of their equipment and their bandmates and their album covers — seriously — so, you know how peer pressure is …

And then the system periodically puts random pictures in a horizontal scroll along the bottoms of certain pages, and here’s a scroll with the first one I posted:

Mine’s the one of the far right, with the musical animatronic dolls on top of my wife’s mixer.

The joke’s on them: I’m not actually using the mixer, nor the Boss BR900CD (I think that’s the right model number) that I’ve shown here previously.

Anyway: It’s a wonderful thing being a part of this one-month community. There’s a certain panicky kind of camaradarie when 3000 people under a time crunch face almost certain public embarassment.

But enough of this idle, nonproductive nonmusical chitchat; Lost is almost over, and I’ve got to get back to punching squares into a grid and calling it music.

I haven’t uploaded anything in a couple of days, but this last one, the third one, kind of rocks, as best I can remember at this point.

Yes, yes, it’s only the third song, with 8 days left to go. But I’ve got more material simmering on the back burner, I just have to get it in the boat and knock it on the head, then get it across the finish line.

Hey, what do you want, consistent metaphors, or MUSIC??

And yes, this is another song heavy on the Hammond Soul organ, plus it’s yet another instrumental. But this time there’s an “acid guitar” solo to mix things up.

It’s kind of an old, old, old skool rock, early 60’s, sort of Wild Weekend meets Green Onions meets Telstar meets none of those things.

Aw crap, JUST GO LISTEN TO THE DAMN THING.

Oh wait, you can’t, because I’m not posting the link yet.

Just let me know if you want the link, either in comments or email.

Meanwhile, I have to get back to my stuff on the stove.

You know, the stove on the boat, down by the track meet.

I didn’t post last night because I was busy cramming for a job interview that I had today.

Yes, I’m such a nerd I study for interviews.

Anyway, I won’t go into detail at this point, but it was actually an enjoyable interview, because they seemed to really be impressed with my wide variety of experience.

It’s good to have your abilities respected every now and then, especially when I’m job hunting, and especially after I was having to do all this random stuff that had nothing to do with my skills for my last two years at my previous job.

Also, it’s a great little company with smart, friendly people, and I learned a lot of fascinating things about the business they’re in. Bonus points: The owners love dogs, and often have their poodle at the office. Unfortunately, they don’t have a health plan, so I don’t know if we would be able to work out enough to pay compensate, but it would be a chance to use both my creative abilities and my office skills.

Anyway, there’s my obligatory post, and now I’ve got to get back to working on the music thing …