Smoke alarm batteries always fail at night. Even if you play by the rules and change your batteries at the beginning or end of daylight savings time, non-direct wire alarms often fail before the year is up. All we ask is for a reasonable notification when it is time to change our batteries. A pleasant chime, a sexy voice, a cute icon, a reasonable hour ... it’s time for a redesign. I decided to use the 30 to 40 minute intervals between the chirps of my failing alarm batteries this very early morning to bring it up with customer service.
I’m finally WordPress free! thebigreason is now unified and powered by a 100% custom blogging engine. My blog, my portfolio and my music now live in the same place, and there is plenty of room left over for anything else I want to put here as well
After upgrading to WordPress 2.5, my blog's admin area has become mostly unusable. There will continue to be lul in new posts as I move to a custom publishing system. WordPress has regularly disappointed me for years. The fact that I stuck with it for this long is a testament to my laziness.
When I was 14, I got really into Wasted Youth. The band ... The English band from the UK, not the hardcore band from LA. They're kind of obscure. So obscure, in fact, that iTunes, Amazon.com, AllMusic.com, and Last.FM, can't seem to tell the difference between them.
In the United States, gays and straits currently have the same restrictions to marriage. Neither can marry their same sex, both can marry the opposite. What your actual preference is, is arbitrary.  Let’s stop arguing for a second and think about the logistics before we dive in.Â
The following is a re-published product review I posted to uptonbass.com. I'm not sure if it took or not, so I'm cross posting it here because I spent so much time on it.
I haven't been able to access my Google Calendar in Safari for nearly two months. I probably spent about 20 to 40 minutes a week over the past few months trying to track down the cause or a fix. Today I finally found the solution in the Google Calendar Help Group. It was posted on January 29th of this year. I don't know why it took me so long to find. I looked pretty hard.
Craig Hockenberry with one of the most concise and accurate analogies of the current state of the recorded music industry:
[...] the best thing for business is to make sure you have the best product available. That’s both the beauty and the challenge of any “try before you buy” system. Good products win, bad products are quickly forgotten. I suspect that the root of the music industry’s problem is this: they have been able to produce sub-standard product for many years. I know there are many albums in my collection that consist of few great tracks along with a bunch of crap that I’d rather not listen to.
Who are you voting for for the President of the United States? Many of the people I know seem to be pretty much decided, depending, of course, on the outcome of their party's primary. Most are affiliated with the Democratic or Republican parties. A handful are Greens. I'm one of those decline to declares (that's Californian for no party affiliation). There are two parties that I'm drawn to, but they are largely on the opposite ends of the spectrum. Neither one trumps the other with a significant enough share of the issues that are important to me to pull me in one direction or the other.
Microsoft will purchase Yahoo. It hasn't happened yet, but the bid is now officially on the table, and it will happen. My previous experiences with unsolicited takeovers have shown me that they are usually best measured in terms of when—not if.
The following is an example of how poor bar gigs can be for bands to play. What I have done here is calculated my portion of the expenses and share of the compensation for a recent Bottom Dwellers bar gig. It was our poorest bar gig to date.
My buddy Ivan and I ditched out on work at the last minuted yesterday and tooted down to San Francisco for Macworld. We missed out last year. Both of us had started new jobs and were wary of bringing up the subject of a frivolous day off to our employers. That was completely lame, though. Since both of us actually use, and make/help make purchasing recommendations for just the kinds of things they hock at Macworld, there is an actual professional benefit to us going. So we did, and these are my impressions of the things we saw.
I can't live without xScope. I use it every single day. It greatly increases my productivity and it is a pleasure to use. It does everything I want it to do, and there isn't anything that I wish it did that it currently doesn't.
Hoorah! I finally brought my household into the 21st century. A brand new shiny iMac is blazing bright in the corner of our living room. It replaces a dual 800MHz PowerMac G4 Qucksilver that was the super hotness back in 1999 or something.
I've been waiting two years to justify the purchase of an XBox 360, and justice finally came last Wednesday. Most of my friends have been killing each other on XBox live for years, and have urged me to jump on the band wagon at nearly every opportunity. Being the only breadwinner in a four-person family, it just wasn't an easy thing to work in. But a year of working multiple jobs has paid off ... almost.