If it weren't for those meddling kids.

(Warning: Will Suck Your Time)

The Attractors

Mingle² - Online Dating

Doolwind's Game Coding Site: Programmer Personality Test

Your programmer personality type is:

DLSB

You're a Doer.
You are very quick at getting tasks done. You believe the outcome is the most important part of a task and the faster you can reach that outcome the better. After all, time is money.

You like coding at a Low level.
You're from the old school of programming and believe that you should have an intimate relationship with the computer. You don't mind juggling registers around and spending hours getting a 5% performance increase in an algorithm.

You work best in a Solo situation.
The best way to program is by yourself. There's no communication problems, you know every part of the code allowing you to write the best programs possible.

You are a liBeral programmer.
Programming is a complex task and you should use white space and comments as freely as possible to help simplify the task. We're not writing on paper anymore so we can take up as much room as we need.

As a followup to this... I tried to take a picture of the actual goose in question, but my camera was uncooperative.

Also, I have no idea what compells me to use French for this exercise. It just feels right. Maybe they're Canadian Geese.

Ross a fait une promenade au bord du lac. Il y avait une oie sur la route qui etait au bord du lac. Ross a marché sur la route. L'oie a dit, <<Gonk!>> Ross a continué à marché. L'oie a dit <<Hiss!>> Ross marchait encore L'oie a couru à Ross. Ross a couru loin.

(With apollogies to my high school french teacher.)

This past weekend, Leah and I went up to visit her family and friends in NJ. Here's some observations...

• We watched Children of Man. There's a featurette on the disc showing how -- at the risk of a spoiler, I'll spoil you only this much: there is a baby in the move, and it was added using CGI, which is why it looks like Gollum -- they did the baby. At one point, the caption said "Rendering the layers of baby." Johnathan Swift would be proud.
• Friday night as I was going to sleep, something made my eye hurt. It was red in the morning, and has been watering ever since. I think I am allergic to New Jersey
• Many years ago in Maryland, there was a supermarket chain called A&P. They are now called SuperFresh. In New Jersey, I saw a "Super A&P". It's as if the name-change had just hit that town, and something caused it to tragically halt halfway through the transformation.
• There was a stretch of highway on the way home called "The Concrete Mile". It was made of asphalt just like every other highway.
• We passed a shop called "Andy Ferrigno's Equipment". The jokes to be made may well be endless. I'll start you off with "Don't make fun of his equipment: you wouldn't like it when he's angry."
• When you enter most states, there's a big sign welcoming you. Often, the sign will remind you of local laws: on the Delaware/Maryland border, the sign reminds you that right turns are permitted on red after stopping. In Delaware, it reminds you that shopping is tax-free. In New Jersey, it reminds you that you need to wear your seatbelt. And right below that is a greeting from Governor John Corzine. I assume the sign was erected by the New Jersey Department of Irony.
• There's a town, it seems, in PA called "Schrodinger". I didn't get a good look at the sign, because my brain insisted that the sign should say now "Next Exit, 10 miles on left", but "The town will not exist until you get there."
• Unrelatedly, I once took a class in public policy from Heisenberg's granddaughter. The class was taught by Distance Learning, because, unlike her grandfather, she could not be in two places at once.
• Billboard: Close deals between laps
• There is a section of US 222 in Pennsylvania called "MIA Highway", but we couldn't find it.
• Sign by a dairy farm in PA: Registered Holsteins. Thank god PA has cracked down on illegal cows.
• A sign at a gas station gave prices for "Regular", "Plus", "Super", "Deisel" and "Kero". For just a second, I read that as "Karo", and thought that it would be a truly wonderful day if we could make our cars run on high fructose corn syrup. Of course, the fumes would probably send me into a diabetic coma.

A roundup of things I've noticed or thought of lately...

• The squirrels used to like ot taunt Sarah. Being a small game dog, she'd have liked nothing better than to chase them. To my knowledge, she only ever got the chance once, when she was a puppy and managed to wriggle throuigh the railing around our pool deck to go after one. The squirrels seemed to work out that she couldn't get through the plate glass window in the dining room, and would congregate in the back yard, running up near the window and teasing her as she cried at her inability to go after one.
• The exercise regimen I've adopted to help control my diabetes involves a lot of walking, mostly on the network of pedestrian trails through Columbia, MD, where I spend most of my day. There's a jogger whose path I cross a lot. He looks just like the lovechild of William H. Macy and Jon Voight.
• The office park where I work consists of three buildings in a sort of triskelion configuration. A few months ago, a crew came through and gave one of the other buildings a good power-washing scrub. The sandstone exterior was left so bright and shiny that when it caught the light, it was almost blinding to look at. I can't help thinking that this is possibly the closest I'll ever get to knowing what it was like to look at the great pyramid of Giza when it was new.
• Once upon a time, I was walking Sarah in the back yard, and we came across a tiny little frog. Sarah and I followed the frog for a bit as it hopped along its way, Sarah with her nose to the ground, studying it. Suddenly, just as it landed after a hop, Sarah reached down and scooped it up in her mouth. A few seconds later, just as I was peparing to chastise her for eating the frog, she opened her mouth, and the tiny little frog hopped out and continued on its way as if nothing had happened.
• Another man I see a lot looks just like the love child of Wilford Brimley and Martin Mull
• Walking along the trails, you see a lot of strange things. I keep seeing bicycles, half-submerged in the stream that runs alongside the trail. I can understand how they got there, but why were they abandoned there?
• I'm going to a Cinco-de-Mayo party this weekend. My girl wanted to have a pinata at the party. Since I don't like candy enough to eat it in spite of my doctor's admonishions, I suggested a route that would allow me to take part in the pinata-y goodness: a meat pinata. She told this to her friend via instant messaging, and was asked "Do you mean a pinata made of meat, or a pinata full of meat?" When she indicated the latter, the response was "YES!!!!!!!"
• A few days after cleaning the building I mentioned earlier, the crew went back over it for a second go. The building ceased to shine, and actually looked ratty and dirty. The windows looked particularly streaked and spotted. I found myself wondering the the University of Phoenix had failed to pay its bill, and the crew was sent back to re-dirty the building.
• I also see a lot of abandoned shopping carts along the trail. These mostly belong to the Safeway about a half mile down. But some of them are for other stores which are nowhere near here
• There is a small man-made pond across the street from the office. During certain parts of the year, geese congregate there. About the same time, there are two geese who wander around on the far side of the parking lot of the office park, across the street, with the building between them and the pond. Are they lost, or have they just slipped off for a romantic stroll?
• At one bend in the stream, a shopping cart has gone off the edge and into the water. It's been down there a long time, I think, because silt has built up around it. The process of sedementation has done its work, and there is, right now, an island forming around this cart.
• I saw a blue heron last week. But I don't want to say where. When I was a kid, if you saw a blue heron somewhere, you could be assured that within a week, you wouldn't be allowed to go back there, as the area would be cordoned off to protect the heron. It's quite a pleasant spot, and I don't want it being destroyed by a big chain link fence to keep the heron safe.

Every once in a while, the little girl who lives across the alley from me will try to strike up a conversation. This is usually a little uncomfortable for me, because, while when you're a kid, you're always warned not to talk to strangers, no one ever tells you, as an adult, whether you're supposed to talk to strange children. But I guess technically we're not actually strangers: we're neighbors. Maybe it's just a symptom of the times that I should think there was anything at all unnatural about being on conversational terms with the children of the people who live across the alley.

But anyway, the reason I bring it up is to relate this conversation:

Her: (Talks a bit about her love of digging up bugs and worms)
Me: (Polite interest)
Her: What do you love?
Me: (after thinking) Well, I like video games. And movies. And I love my girlfriend.
Her: You're lucky you have a girlfriend.
Me: Yes I am
Her: If you had three girlfriends, you'd be the luckiest man in the world
Me: (after a bumfuzzled silence) I think one is about all I can handle.

Just found this lying around in a pile of pictures I had saved for a day when I needed the funny.

Saddam's parting message: "Be fair and don't hate. PS. Death to America." A politician to the end.

So, regular visitors may have noticed some strange error messages last week. Those should be gone for now. I was spammed so hard that the database which runs this blog broke, rather severely. I've managed to recover almost all the data to a new database, but the comments table was completely trashed. This means that old comments have been relegated to the status of "ghosts", and will vanish in the event old pages ever get updated.

How do other bloggers deal with spam? I've got spam filters, but those don't really help: a million spam comments an hour pouring into the Junk folder breaks the DB just as bad as a million a day going to the page -- and it's not just the spam being received that causes the problem: just by the act of hammering the server with their spam, they suck up my bandwidth -- and I do mean suck.

Anyway, I've got some redirects in place now to divert suspicious activity away from the comments pages. It's possible that you might accidentally fall into one -- make sure you never navigate your way to a page called spider-trap, as you'll fall permanently into my list of banned IPs.

In honor of my 200th post, I thought-- well, okay, this has nothing to do with it being my bicentennial; I just noticed it when I clicked on "Entries" and saw the number 199 next to it. So, anyway, on with the post...

You may not know the term, but you've probably seen a CAPTCHA by now. The acronym expands out to the not-really-meaningful-unless-you're-a-CS-guy "Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart". A bit of background:

Alan Turing, one of the founding bigwigs of the whole theory of computers as we know them, had this theory: If we stick a human being at a terminal of some sort (This was Turing, back in the fifties, so he was thinking of a teletype, but IM would work just as well) and have him chat for a bit with two other entities, one of which is a computer and the other one is a second human, if the guy at the terminal can't tell which is which, the computer has demonstrated actual human intelligence, or, at least, something close enough to it to be interesting.

So, in a nutshell, a Turing Test is when a human tries to tell whether something else is a computer or a human. This is fairly easy (The human is less likely to say "BZZT! DESTROY ALL HUMANS!" if you annoy it). A CAPTCHA, which is sometimes ambigiously called a "Reverse Turing Test" is when a computer tries to tell if the entity it's talking to is human or another computer.

That is to say, it's one of those things you get when you sign up for something on the internet and they show you a picture of some distorted random letters and ask you to type them in.

This is actually a pretty hard test. It's comparatively easy for one computer to convince another computer that it's a computer ("Perform these six hundred hard math problems in under a second" is a pretty simple way), but how do you convince it that you're human? The computer conducting the test can't measure your capacity to love, or detect if you have opposible thumbs or anything like that -- in fact, the reason that it's so easy for a human to distinguish computers and humans is that humans can perceive a lot of things that computers can't -- which, of course, means that that distinguish a human (taking the test) from a computer (taking the test) are things that the computer (giving the test) can't perceive.

So, the way to tell the difference is to generate the sort of problem that humans are good at solving and computers aren't, and ask the test-taker to solve it. Fortunately, a computer can indeed generate problems it can't solve itself. Or, a human can provide the computer (giving the test) with a crib sheet. The most common kind you see is the kind I mentioned above. Computers are pretty good at reading written words, but not if they've been distorted. So you print some letters in an image, mangle them a bit, and ask the test-taker to read them. This is doable, though it's not all that easy: mangle the letters too much and a human can't read them. Don't mangle them enough, and a computer can. Most of the letter-based CAPTCHAs you see on the internet aren't all that good, and throw up manglings that a very clever computer could work out, though there are some very good letter-mangling CAPTCHAs out there. Also, CAPTCHAs can often foil humans with vision problems (Like my color blindness).

Another CAPTCHA you see sometimes shows you several images and asks, say, "Which one is a puppy", since that's a hard thing for a computer to deduce. This works pretty well, but, unlike the letter-mangling test, the computer taking the test can't generate new pictures of puppies, so unless it's got a huge stockpile, the computer taking the test could just poke at random until it got in purely by coincidence.

I read a paper about CAPTCHAs back in grad school, and there was a really neat point they made. Unlike all the rest of computer security, if a CAPTCHA is broken, it's basically great for mankind. Let me explain: You've by now probably heard of the animated cursor bug in Windows. No good can come of exploiting the animated cursor bug. There aren't really useful things you can do by hacking an animated cursor. It's good for exactly one thing: compromising systems to the owner's detriment. Cryptography is largely based on number theory. Until modern cryptography was invented there was no practical use for number theory. People studied it purely for love of math. Aside from its mathematically interesting properties, the only practical use for the RSA algorithm is to encrypt data. Which means that if someone discovers a problem with the RSA problem, RSA encryption is broken. The problem itself has no positive use value, beyond breaking cryptosystems. This isn't the case for a CAPTCHA: if a computer manages to foil a CAPTCHA, it means that the computer can do something which computers are historically bad at. If it can consistently find the puppy, then we have created a computer that can identify puppies, and puppy-identification is a skill with unlimited commercial application. If our computer can consistently read mangled words, then the next generation of business card scanner software will be able to tell that the business card you ran through it isn't for "Lockheart Martini".

But this is just a comically longwinded introduction to what I want to show you. Woe be to all of us the day a computer learns how to break the new Hotness CAPTCHA. It uses AmIHotOrNot API to ask users to identify which of several pictures shows the hottest person. Personally, I think they missed a great oppertunity by not calling it amibotornot.com.

The other CAPTCHA I'd like to show you comes to us via Defective Yeti: Internet Access CAPTCHAs. This one is designed to tell whether the testee is a human, a computer, or an idiot. What's neat about this is that it's much more likely to be foiled by a clever computer than a stupid human.

Welcome to the internet. Enjoy your porn

As you may already know, I've had some trouble with my TiVo over the past few years.

Tonight, I had to reboot it; it locked up while I was deleting the jumk it had accumulated. Upon my reboot, I found that Something Was Wrong.

Specifically, whenever I pressed one of the arrow keys, the thing would go crazy, scrolling to the bottom of the list and then making the "You're at the bottom of the list. Stop pressing down, stupid" noise until I pressed something else. So, thinking maybe the remote was jammed, I stuck my hand over the business end. No joy.

So I googled. No joy.

So I reset the tivo again. No joy.

I reset the TiVo remote. No joy.
It was fine until you pressed a button, then it went crazy. Finally, I noticed that the yellow "I'm receiving an IR signal" light was staying lit. (I should note at this point that I'm colorblind, and only know that the light is yellow thanks to information I've found on-line; it looks the same color as the green "I'm connected to a power source" light to me). Whenever I hit a button, the light would stay on. Sometimes it would go off as I gesticulated angrily at it.

I replaced the batteries in the remote. No joy.

I tried standing up and placing my hand over the IR receiver. The yellow light went out. I tried zapping it from inches way. That worked fine. One down key, moves down once. Yellow light flashes then goes out.

I tried from further away. Yellow stays on. Key keeps repeating.

I got it into my head that maybe my ceiling fan (being reflective) or some other light source in the room was creating some sort of weird feedback loop. Turned off everything. No joy.

What I did find was that if I waved my hand in front of the receiver, the yellow light would switch off. This worked at close range only. At greater distances, I had to gesticulate more wildly.

I sat down, resigned to the fact that my TiVo was once again borked.

And then I worked it out.

Here is my reverse-engineered algorithm for how the TiVo remote control subsystem works:

if ((x=incoming tivo keypress))
 while (tivo is receiving any sort of IR signal at all)
   do x

You see, I wear ankle weights most days, in order to beef up my exercise regimen -- which turned out to be a double-edged sword, as I will explain in a later issue -- in the hopes of keeping my diabetes in check.

You're probably wondering at this point what this has to do with, well, anything at all. What it has to do is this: When I got home tonight, one of the first things I did was to take off my ankle weights. I set them on the couch beside the very spot which currently contains my ass. I set them on top of a small pile of paid bills that I have to file.

What I didn't know was what was under those bills.

The remote control to my DVD player.

You see, my weights had pushed one of the buttons on the DVD remote. That signal, on its own, was not enough to fool the TiVo. However, whenever the TiVo saw a legitimate signal from its own remote, the fact that it was still seeing an unrelated signal kept it going. When the remote operated normally at close range, it was because my body was blocking the spurious DVD remote signal. When I gesticulated angrily, I was cutting past the beam from the remote.

Hopefully, googling this will help future generations. That's why I'm adding the following gibberish, it being things I tried googling in order to find out what the hell was going on:

tivo yellow light
tivo doesn't respond to remote
tivo remote light stays lit
tivo extra button presses
tivo remote spurious presses
tivo arrow buttons
tivo scrolling goes crazy

(Kind folks at Google: Please don't mistake this for a shameless attempt to pad out my page to attract hits. This is what I googled for to try to find the answer to my question, which means that it's part of the story about what I did to solve the problem. Thanks)

So, last night I caught part of VH-1's Some Number of Greatest Cover Tracks. I missed the end, so I don't know if they failed to acknowledge the proper winner or not. I had a look on teh internets, and found that the always-reliable retroCRUSH has a list of their own, which includes a few that I know in funny places and a lot that I don't, so it got me thinking, and I decided I ought to produce a list of my own.

I've decided to avoid noting more than one cover of the same song, since otherwise this list would consist of five covers each of two songs. I have also in some cases allowed cultural importance trump my personal preference.

10. The Boys of Summer, DJ Sammy covering Don Henley (The Ataris nearly take this one, though, because they included those nifty guitar seagulls)
9. Ol' 55, The Eagles covering Tom Waits
8. Blue, Sarah McLachlan covering Joni Mitchell
7. Because the Night, 10,000 Maniacs covering Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen
6. Layla, Eric Claption covering Derrek and the Dominoes (Yeah, I know, it's cheating. But still)
5. Love Me I'm A Liberal, Barenaked Ladies (ripping off Mojo Nixon) covering Phil Ochs
4. Along Comes Mary, The Bloodhound Gang covering The Association
3. When the Stars Go Blue The Corrs and Bono covering Ryan Adams
2. Hallelujah, Jeff Buckley covering Leonard Cohen
1. All Along the Watchtower, Jimmi Hendrix covering Bob Dylan

http://forum.newsarama.com/showthread.php?t=94511

After 60-someodd years of looking like they were supposed to, the Archie comics are getting a facelift in order to look more hip, cool, and, well, crappy.

And another bastion of distinctiveness hits the dust.

So, after quite some time, I finally clicked around on my blogroll and saw what was up.

As a result, Happy Palace is no longer listed. Happy Palace used to be this weird daily collection of pictures of strange things, like the covers of pulp novels of the 30s, or pages from instruction manuals, or whatever. Today, it's an ad for perfume. Anyone know what happened to the Palace, and if it's still around somewhere?

On the other hand, I've added mamster's excellent food-and-toddler blog, Roots and Grubs, and Stephen Granade's excellent physics-and-toddler blog, Live Granades (The links are actually on the blogroll, and not repeated here, in order that you will have to actually look at the blogroll to find them.). I've also updated Mike The Mad Biologist's address, and I've redirected the Woot link to the Woot main page, because while I feel slightly dirty for linking something that isn't a blog to my blogroll, linking to woot's blog instead of the actual item of the day just feels really, really stupid now.

Anyway, enjoy.

Perhaps you've heard about the ultrasonic ringtone? It's one of those neat synergies that James Burke would be proud of. A few years ago, someone discovered that the range of human hearing narrows with age, and deduced that there were, therefore, tones that teenagers could hear which adults couldn't.

The initial use of this was something very different than what we ended up with. The first thing that came to mind was that they could play this tone in front of convenience stores, annoying the hell out of teenagers, and thereby discouraging them to hang out there, while being inaudible to good-natured adults. Of course, the tone wasn't physically painful or anything. Nor was it even really that annoying; it was just bothersome enough that it made te front of the store a place you wouldn't want to go unless you had a good reason.

But it didn't take long before the teenagers worked out a way to use their superhuman hearing to their advantage: these frequencies, rendered into a ringtone, would allow them to receive calls which adults would not be able to hear. (Now, before you point out that the technology to make a phone indicate that an incoming call without alerting anyone else nearby already existed, I'm going to remark that I called my beloved on her cell phone the other day, and she had to rush off to answer it. The cell phone was set to vibrate. And inside her car. Halfway across the parking lot). This is a boon to kids who want to receive calls in school, where such things are forbidden (Where I went to high school, being caught with a cell phone was an expellable offense. You didn't just have it confiscated: you were sent to the office and the police were called in to arrest you. This was a silly outmoded law dating from the days when owning a pager was considered a 100% perfect indicator of being a drug dealer).

Anyway, I went to a webpage and listened to some sounds, and it guessed my age:

I imagine I should be a little offended.

1. (The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes, Elvis Costello
2. When It's Over, Sugar Ray
3. Crash Into Me, Dave Matthews Band
4. Down Under, Men at Work
5. The Ballad of Chasey Lain, Bloodhound Gang
6. Bad Day, Daniel Powter
7. Hot In The City, Billy Idol
8. Layla, Derek and the Dominoes
9. When the Stars Go Blue, Tim McGraw
10. Everything You Want, Vertical Horizon

Lord have mercy how'd she even get them britches on?

1. The Bad Touch, The Bloodhound Gang
2. White Wedding, Billy Idol
3. Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now, Starship
4. Go Your Own Way, Fleetwood Mac
5. Down Under, Men at Work
6. The Ballad of Chasey Lain, The Bloodhound Gang
7. Everything You Want, Vertical Horizon
8. Layla, Eric Clapton
9. Angel Eyes, Jeff Healy Band
10. Glycerine, Bush

1. Sussudio, Phil Collins
2. Bad Day, Daniel Powter
3. Dead Ringer For Love, Cher & Meatloaf
4. White Wedding, Billy Idol
5. Hungry Like the Wolf, Duran Duran
6. Turn the Page, Metallica
7. Free Bird Lynyrd Skynyrd
8. D'yer Mak'erLynyrd Skynyrd
9.Down Under, Men at Work
10. Brother Love's Traveling Salvation Show, Neil Diamond

Then Gandalf the Gray and Gandalf the White, and Monty Python and the Holy Grail's Black Knight, and Benito Musselini, and the Blue Meanie, and Cowboy Curtis and Jambi the Genie, Robocop, the Terminator, Captain Kirk, Darth Vader, Lo-pan, Superman, every single Power Ranger, Bill S. Preston and Theodore Logan, Spock, the Rock, Doc Ock, and Hulk Hogan, all came out of nowhere lightning fast and they kicked Chuck Norris in his cowboy ass.

Okay, so there's no karaoke tonight. Thus, you get your Random Ten early. But you also only get half of it.

1. One Headlight, The Wallflowers
2. Save Tonight, Eagle Eye Cherry
3. Glycerine, Bush
4. Down Under, Men at Work
5. When I Come Around, Greenday

I wanted to show this to someone the other day, and I quickly found that google could not find me a copy of it.

When the logo for the new Doctor Who series was first announced, there were a lot of complaints that it was "clearly" an attempt to capitalize on the Lord of the Rings franchise by making a logo that could not possibly be anything other than a rip-off of the eye of Sauron.

Now, as it turned out, in context it looks almost nothing at all like the eye of Sauron, so the naysayers were wrong. All the same, I don't find this logo all that great, certainly not as good as the logo used by the 1996 TV Movie:

But what seems to be very hard to locate on the internet is the newest Doctor Who logo. It was done by the Scifi channel, and only appears on their commerials. It's a shame, because check this out. It's a really cool logo.

And now, it's on the internet for all to find

So, normally I don't go in for the net.forward.memes, but my beloved thought this would be fun, and it was. Aside from the humiliation.

Here's how it works: Stick all the yummy digital music you have on shuffle, and repeatedly take the next song served to answer the following questions.

Obvious caveat applies: I haven't really updated my digital music collection in about five years. Damn you, RIAA.

• How am I feeling today?
  • White Wedding, Billy Joel
• Will I get far in life?
  • Drops of Jupiter, Train
• How do my friends see me?
  • Wish You Were Here, Radiohead
• Where will I get married?
  • All along the watchtower, Michael Hedges
• What is my best friend's theme song?
  • The Remedy (I Won't Worry), Jason Mraz
• What is the story of my life?
  • The Prayer of St. Francis, Sarah McLachlan
• What is/was highschool like?
  • The Ballad of Ed's Shirt, Barenaked Ladies
• How can I get ahead in life?
  • Bittersweet symphony, Barenaked Ladies
• What is the best thing about me?
  • Peacekeeper, Fleetwood Mac
• How is today going to be?
  • Kiss Me, Sixpence None The Richer
• What is in store for this weekend?
  • When Doves Cry, Barenaked Ladies
• What song describes my parents?
  • Fastest Man on the planet, Barenaked Ladies
• What song describes my grandparents
  • Sleeping Satillite, Tasmin Archer
• How is my life going?
  • Come Back Tomorrow, Quiddity
• What song will they play at my funeral?
  • If I had a million dollars, Barenaked Ladies
• How does the world see me?
  • Morning Glory, Oaisis
• Will I have a happy life?
  • Black, Sarah McLachlan
• What do my friends really think of me?
  • Captive, Sarah McLachlan
• Do people secretly lust after me?
  • Silence, Sarah McLachlan
• What should I do with my life?
  • Leave Virginia Alone, Rod Stewart
• Will I ever have children?
  • i'm my own grandpa, Homer and Jethroe
• What is some good advice?
  • Simple Man, Lynyrd Skynyrd
• What is my signature dancing song?
  • You're No Good, Wild Orchid
• What do I think my current theme song is?
  • I ain't marching anymore, Phil Ochs
• What does everyone else think my current theme song is?
  • Lullabye, Shawn Mullins
• What type of men/women do you like?
  • When she loved me, Sarah McLachlan

Lying here in the dark, I hear a siren's wail. Sombeody's going to emergency, somebody's going to jail.

1. If You Leave, Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark
2. Champagne Supernova, Oaisis
3. When I Come Around, Greenday
4. Boulevard of Broken Dreams, Greenday
5. Down Under, Men At Work
6. 100 Years, Five For Fighting
7. Love is All Around, Wet Wet Wet
8. If I Had $1,000,000, Barenaked Ladies
9. Glycerine, Bush

They say that I have the best ass below fourteenth street.

1. The Sound of Silence, Simon & Garfunkle
2. Bubbletoes, Jack Johnson
3. Mr. Brightside, The Killers
4. One Night In Bangkok, Murray Head
5. Dead Ringer For Love, Meatloaf & Cher
6. Angel Eyes, Jeff Healy Band
7. She's Like The Wind, Patrick Swayze
8. Another Day In Paradise, Phil Collins

One part the fuerher, one part the pope, it's the inevitable return, baby, of the great white dope

1. Sex and Candy, Marcy Playground
2. Hook, Blues Traveller
3. Angel Eyes, Jeff Healy Band
4. Calling All Angels, Train
5. Another Night, Real McCoy
6. Champagne Supernova, Oasis
7. Brothers in Arms, Dire Straits
8. If I had $1000000, Barenaked Ladies
9. Stop Dragging My Heart Around, Stevie Nicks and Tom Petty
10. Joy To The World, Three Dog Night

So, it's Monday I guess. Better late than never. I think you readers will understand by now that you take a backseat to the woman I love, who was in town for a glorious three-day weekend.

I Just Called To Say I Love You Stevie Wonder DK18-10
Crazy For This Girl Evan & Jaron MM374-12
Love Is All Around Wet Wet, Wet DK333-8
Time of your Life, The Green Day PH518-3
Sex and Candy Marcy Playground PH518-5
Brothers In Arms Dire Straits HC523-4
Glycerine Bush SC524-5
If You Leave Orchestral Manouevers In The Dark HC523-1
Wonderwall Oasis SC524-6
Love Is Williams & McKnight MM377-2

Wild World Cat Stevens SC250-3
I Just Died In Your Arms Tonight The Cutting Crew MM380-1
Remedy (I Won't Worry), The Jason Mraz THM356-17
Rock This Town The Stray Cats SC307-7
Bed Of Roses Jon Bon Jovi SC450-5
Cowboy Kid Rock SC429-5
Stacy's Mom Fountains Of Wayne SC480-6
Time of your Life, The Green Day PH518-3
Sex and Candy Marcy Playground PH518-5
Hook Blues Traveler SC519-11

You might have noticed a new feature down the sidebar, M&M Karaoke MySongs. See, I'm the webmaster of the website for the Karaoke show I frequent. Hey, Blogtimore readers, if you're ever in the neighborhood, come check it out. http://karaoke.trenchcoatsoft.com. Their entire collection of songs can be viewed on-line, and, thanks to a clever little feature I built into the site, every time you visit my page, you'll see a random assortment of ten songs from my own personal favorites list. It's the closest thing to a proper random ten you're liable to see around here, last week notwithstanding.

Anyway, you can check out my own personal list in its entirety at http://karaoke.trenchcoatsoft.com/mysongs.php?u=rraszews. If you decide to become a regular (or, for that matter, just like fooling around), you can make a list like this for yourself and avoid all that tedious looking things up in the printed songbook.

In the mean time, though, here's this week's ten:

1. The Boys of Summer, The Ataris
2. Cradle of Love, Billy Idol
3. Straw Hat and Dirty Old Hank, Barenaked Ladies
4. Angel Eyes, Jeff Healy Band
5. Making Love out of Nothing At All, Air Supply
6. Crazy for this girl, Evan and Jaron
7. Someday, Someway, Marshall Crenshaw
8. You're an Ocean, Fastball
9. In a Big Country, Big Country
10. Superman, Five for Fighting

See you next week.

So, this showed up at BoingBoing.

One of the editors decided that the term "Rim shot" was a sexual euphemism, and that was what made its use in a CNN headline funny.

Now, as it turns out, "rim shot" is a sexual euphemism (here, something between "rim job" and "body shot"), but that doesn't make her right, does it?

I don't think it even counts as an unintentional double entendre, because it is an intentional, non-sexual double entendre.

But what it still leaves me to wonder, does the BoingBoing editor genuinely believe this was an intentional sexual euphemism, or did she just confuse "rim shot" with "rim job" and is now summoning a really obscure secondary meaning to, well, cover her ass?

Okay, so my gf came down this weekend. And while we did do some karaoke, I was really paying more attention to her than to keeping track of what I was singing. I mean, honestly, how can I be expected to keep notes when I'm enjoying the company of the woman I love? We had a pretty dandy weekend. Trivia. Dinner with friends. Frantic search for a misplaced grandmother. Dinner. Karaoke. Doctor Who marathon. Cooking. Dinner with some other friends. A hair more karaoke. Dog-sitting. In all, a weekend that would have been pretty pleasant on its own, elevated to nirvana because I got to share it with the woman I love.

So, the practical upshot is that I do not remember enough of what I sang to put together a ten list in my usual format, so I'm going to actually give you a random ten this week. I'm turning on my Rio Cali right now...

• 1.The Angels Wanna Wear My Red Shoes, Elvis Costello
• 2.Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover, Sophie B. Hawkins
• 3.Dr. Who On Holiday, Dean Gray
• 4.Summertime, Bachelor Number One
• 5.There She Goes, Boo Radleys
• 6.Breathe Your Name, Sixpence None The Richer
• 7.Daffodil Lament, The Cranberries
• 8.Ball and Chain, Social Distortion
• 9.Cheerleader, Dierdra
• 10.The Trouble With Tracy, Barenaked Ladies

See you next week...

All of ther friends tell her she's so pretty... But she'd be a whole lot prettier if she'd smile once in a while

1. American Idiot, Greenday
2. Mr. Brightside, The Killers
3. The Downeaster Alexa, Billy Joel
4. Lullabye, Shawn Mullins
5. In The House of Stone and Light, Martin Page
6. Faith, George Michael
7. Hanging By A Moment, Lifehouse
8. Boulevard of Broken Dreams, Greenday
9. Ol' 55, The Eagles
10. Stuck in the Middle With You, Stealer's Wheel

Courtesy of Boing Boing...

1. The New York Times has this article about "Indigo Kids", which, close as I can tell, is this new-agey notion that there's some recent change in humanity resulting in bunches of kids whose minds work a little differently from the minds of you or I (or, heck, maybe you're one of them. For that matter, maybe I'm one of them. As far as objective descriptors go, I seem to match some of the criteria), causing them to be intuitive, be impatient, be empathic, show high intelligence, and glow purple (If you happen to be able to see auras). Indigoness, they say, tends to present as either being what our schools call "Gifted and Talented" or what our schools call "ADHD", but hip new-agey thinkers are proposing that being "Indigo" is evidence of being a more advanced form of human, the salvation of humanity, maybe they've got psychic powers, and we've really got to nurture them and whatnot. Of course, it sounds a lot like crazy talk to more skeptical people (who one of the NYT's interviewees likened to Muggles. I'd have gone with Saps, see below). But who can tell?

Anyway, this notion, or, at least, the term "Indigo kids" dates to the 1970s. About the same time as...

2. The Tomorrow People (wikipedia, tvtropes), a 70s British Sci-Fi TV series about the emergence of a new subspecies of humanity who were intuitive, impatient, empathic, highly intelligent, and glow purple (Well, not purple, I think, but they did glow from time to time). They were also telepathic, and had the power of teleportation. As well as all the associated weirdness of being British teenagers.

Probably it's just a coincidence. Or, perhaps more likely, both were tapping into some cultural meme that was big at the time. But reading the NYT article, I get this very spooky "OMG! Tomorrow People Are Real!" feeling. Maybe I'll have a nice cup of tea and hope it goes away.

(Oh, and the "saps" thing? It's what the Tomorrow People called plain old homo sapiens.)

Well, I guess it's about time I did another roundup of the point-scoring answers for the past year. Check out the extended entry for the points awarded in 2005...

• February:
  • Retirony Redux:
    • .2 points: (link)"cromulent": Simpsonsism meaning "legitimate". Only ever used ironically.
    • 3 points: (link) "LIONS!!!". David Cornelson, Cattus Atrox
• March:
  • But the chicken, on the other hand...
    • 1 point: Billy Joel, We Didn't Start The Fire
    • .5 points: The 95 Thesis of Lake Wobegon in Lake Wobegon Days, which the author claims (and I have no reason to doubt him) is the longest footnote ever in a work of fiction
  • Forty-Two
    • .1 point: The answer to the ultimate question of Life, The Universe, and Everything, according to The Hitch-hiker's Guide To The Galaxy
• July:
  • Inappropriate Thoughts 1
    • 4 points: (link) Refers to Archie's inability to avoid mentioning Sammy Davis Jr.'s glass eye in an episode of All in the Family, also the tvtropes.org term for gags of that sort
• August:
  • IT 4
    • 1 point: (link) tvtropes term for the thing that is patently, glaringly obvious, but which you under no circumstances are allowed to acknowledge
• September
  • Reverse Psychology
    • 1 point: character from GI Joe, who would often appear in the closing sequence to deliver a moral message, which invariable ended with the phrase, "And knowing is half the battle."
  • Spinoff!
    • .5 points: Troy McClure, The Simpsons: "The Simpsons Spin-off Showcase"
  • I am, as it turns out, the man
    • 1 point: Rick, explaining why he doesn't like Ugarte in Casablanca
  • Volcano Day
    • 2 points: Doctor Who: "The Empty Child"
    • 4 points: Arthur, when asked for a hint about any potentially useful swag to be found in a blacksmith's shop in The Journeyman Project 2: Buried in Time
  • Everybody Lives!
    • 99 points: Doctor Who: "The Doctor Dances"
  • We are TiVo
    • 3 points: DEVO, "We are DEVO"
• October:
  • Random 012
    • 3 points (link) No explanation, just read the link.
  • Random 10 times 2
    • 4 points: Tonight And The Rest of my Life

  • Looks like a fish...
    
    • 3 points: Ford's description of a space ship's handling in episode 6 of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To the Galaxy
      
  
  
• November:
  
  • Little Jackie Paper
    
    • 3 points: Little Jackie Paper is from Puff The Magic Dragon. "That deaf dumb and blind kid sure plays a mean pinball" is from Pinball Wizard
      
    
    
  • Eternity Alone...
    
    • 2 points: Bender, Futurama: "Godfellas"
      

Hope you did well.

So, it's a holiday. No random ten this week on account of that. But in its place, I'm going to offer something else.

At Karaoke last night, one of the regulars offered his own adaptation of a Christmas comedy classic, making up his own words to a well known song. I'll post more on that later, but in the mean time, here's a mutant version of a well-known non-Christmas song that I coposed for use at karaoke. There are some in-jokes which you won't get, though most of them you'll be able to deduce by having a look at the M&M Karaoke webpage.

The Devil Went Down To Dundalk
With apologies to the Charlie Daniels Band

The devil went down to Dundalk,
He was looking for some cash to win,
He was in a bind, fifty bucks behind,
So he saw a bar and went on in.

When he came across a bald man,
Playing at a karaoke spot,
So the devil grabbed the microphone
And said, "Let me tell you what:

"I bet you didn't know it,
But I'm a karaoke singer too,
And if you'd care to take a dare,
I'll make a bet with you:

"Now you sing pretty good karaoke boy,
But give the devil his due,
I'll bet you ninety-three Sound Choice CDs,
I think I'm better than you."

Now the man said, "My name's Joey,
And we might look like fools,
But I'll take your bet and you're gonna regret,
'Cause M&M Karaoke rules!"

Joey get your CDs out,
And raise a little heck,
'Cause hell's broke loose in Dundalk,
And the devil is on deck.
And if you win you'll get yourself
The best CDs around,
But if you lose, you're buying the next round...

The devil jumped up on the stage,
And he said, "I'll surely win,"
And fire flew from the monitor when he put his CD in
And he turned the volume too far up,
And it made an evil hiss,
Then he hit the "play" button,
And it sounded something like this:

Regrets, I've had a few,
But then again,
Too few to mention.
I did what I had to do,
And saw it through,
Without exemption...

When the devil finished, Joey said:
"Well you're pretty good old son,"
But get down of the stage right now,
And I'll show you how it's done:

Fire on the mountain,
Run boys run,
Devil's in Dundalk having fun
Chicken in the breadpan,
Picking out dough.
Granny does your dog bite?
No, child, no.

Well Joey hung his head,
In disbelief that he'd been hurt.
And we knew something was fishy,
When we saw the devil's shirt.
We saw the network logo,
And we knew he wasn't fakin'.
Now we know who the devil is:
He's freaking Clay Aiken!

Fire on the mountain,
Run boys run,
Devil's in Dundalk having fun,
Good thing Joe didn't bet his car,
Now we know how Clay became a star...

Happy holidays.

Boing Boing: Unusual stuffed horse on eBay

That is indeed an interesting stuffed horse. But it reminded me of something. A few months ago, my best beloved and I went to the Maryland Science Center. There, we saw an exhibit on how the mind works, and it had some brain teasers. This is one of them, translated into a game.

Compare:

Maybe he was just trying to build the world's most extravagant brain-teaser.

Put on my blue suede shoes and I boarded the plane,
Touched down in the land of the delta blues
In the middle of the pouring rain

1. Pink Houses, John Mellencamp
2. Another Postcard, Barenaked Ladies
3. Run Around, Blues Traveller
4. Slide, Goo Goo Dolls
5. Walking In Memphis, Lonestar
6. Karma Chameleon, Culture Club
7. Life is a Highway, Tom Cochrain
8. Steal My Sunshine, LEN (with my sister)
9. We Didn't Start the Fire, Billy Joel (ditto)

Number ten is a little different:

10. (Music)House of the Rising Sun, The Animals
(Lyrics)O Little Town of Bethlehem Traditional

Scientists have analyzed the Mona Lisa's smile. Here's what they found...

Mona Lisa smile secrets revealed (via the BBC).

Here's the first thing I thought of:
National Smiles

Maybe all this means iis that the Mona Lisa's secret is that she's really British.

You might have noticed that I'm trying to get into folksonomy tagging. When I think to do it, articles will now be followed by a list of Technorati tags (sometimes these will be bizarre, since I will from time to time attempt to auto-generate these using Yahoo's Term Extraction API). I'm not actually very good at working out what makes a good tag just yet, but I'll improve with time.

Toward this end, I'm also going to start posting my del.icio.us links here. This is another thing I'll probably forget to do, but hey, at least I'm trying.

You can find all these by clicking the del.icio.us badge in the sidebar, but if you're lazy, here's the latest...

(Disclaimer: Nothing here is meant to suggest that I advocate any of the activities or products listed below. In fact, a lot of it I find kinda anathema. These are just links I found interesting. "Interesting" is a word whose meaning encompasses both "nifty" and "disturbing". Which are which is an exercise to the reader)

Till next time, enjoy!

A little while ago, I posted about Dean Gray's American Edit. Some time later, as we knew it would be, the album was banned. Well, today is Dean Gray Tuesday, when protestors are making the album available once again. As protests go, this one seems peaceful, well-organized, and isn't shutting down any major local streets, just as the framers intended.




But the reason I post is less to lend more attention to the event (as it will be nearly over by the time I post this) and more to call attention to the link you'll find in tasty image form to the right of this paragraph. I noted in my original post that one of the American Edit songs mixed Holiday with The TImelords' Doctorin' The TARDIS. In honor of this song and the subsequent banning, Matt Arnold did the graphic which graces the top of this article (click on it for the original context). And it's from him that I found the link behind the other graphic. Someone's made a music video of Doctor Who On Holiday. It's a little rough around the edges, but cute. And based on the fact that the car used in the "Dalek" parts appears to be the same car as on the cover of my copy of Doctorin' The TARDIS, I'm guessing that the footage used is -- despite the production values -- from the original Timelords video (which, apparantly, exists).

Anyway, enjoy it while it lasts. And Happy Gray Tuesday.

1. Father and Son, Cat Stevens
2. Sunday Bloody Sunday, U2
3. Boulevard of Broken Dreams, Greenday
4. I'm Still Here (Jim's Theme), Johnny Reznick
5. Fall Down, Toad The Wet Sprocket
6. Walk of Life, Dire Straits
7. Ol' Red, Blake Shelton
8. Save Tonight, Eagle Eye Cherry
9. Cradle of Love, Billy Idol
10. I Don't Want To Be, Gavin Degraw

For those who might be interested in joining us in these little outings, there's now a web page for the karaoke host with the most, and as I'm the webmaster, I get to promote it. Check out http://karaoke.trenchcoatsoft.com for showtimes and info (and pictures of us, so you know what you're getting into).

Previously, on A Mind Occasionally Voyaging...

Dean Gray's American Edit was a great little free release that mixed some Greenday songs with some non-Greenday songs.

Today, BoingBoing reports that the music industry has killed American Edit.

Okay. I kinda saw this coming. But it still hurts. The creative force behind American Edit wasn't making money at someone else's expense. He wasn't hurting sales of anyone else's product. No one was hurt. No one was deprived of anything. But the music industry disapproved. So this art must go.

Somewhere along the line, we lost track of things. The entire justification of copyright and patent law in the United States is, "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts," (Article 1, Section 8 of the US Constitution). I can't even remember the last time I heard of copyright law being used that way. And this case points out that what it's become isn't even "To ensure that the maker of something extracts the maximum possible money from it." Today, intellectual "property" law exists for one reason and one reason only: to suppress the creation of new art. The idea today is that you stake out a claim on an area of the noosphere and put a fence around it, stopping anyone else from using it. It's a notion that might make sense for resources that are exclusive (like land), but makes zero sense for an inexhaustible resource like thought. Could you imagine someone buying up all the air, and then denying it to anyone who couldn't pay (or, for that matter, denying it to people who could pay, but who the owner wanted dead for whatever reason)?

The whole point of copyright, in the beginning, was to ensure the existence of a creative commons -- that common pool of background thoughts and ideas which inspire new creation. Look at the patent. The point of the patent is not to stop other people from using your idea -- there's a much better way to do that. Guess what: the formula for Coca Cola isn't patented. The exclusivity that a patent grants is not its purpose: it's the reward. The decade head-start you get on your competitors is your payment for not keeping your invention a secret. The whole idea of a patent is that the government effectively "buys off" an inventor to release the full details of his new invention to the public by selling him a temporary monopoly.

And likewise, the whole point of copyright was to make it possible for an artist to make a living at art without the patronage system. See, back in the day, the way artists got paid was that they were hired by rich people to make some art. You didn't need copyright laws, because there was no money in copying existing art: the market for portraits of the Duke of Florence is pretty well exclusive to, well, the Duke of Florence himself. The idea behind copyright, again, was to ensure a creative commoms. It meant that, as an artist, I didn't have to wait for a commission to paint a painting. I could paint whatever I liked, and if the Duke happened to like it, he'd have to buy it from me, instead of hiring some other guy to make a copy of it (Of course, the money was probably better with a patron anyway, so long as you only intended to work when there was an interested patron nearby). With copyright, I could paint things that were not of immediate value to someone specific, and still make a living at it. Hence, more paintings get made, and everybody wins. And there's the key phrase: more paintings get made.

Copyright doesn't do that any more. In fact, what copyright does now is institutionalize a kind of "uberpatronage". Under the old system, the most a patron could do is not hire you. Now, the patron (read: the music industry) can go out and stop you from creating new stuff. We used to have a creative commons, and it used to get bigger as each artist added new material. It used to be about making the noosphere bigger. Now, it's about putting up walls and saying "this part of human experience belongs to us, and no one is allowed to expand it."

But read the BoingBoing article. It says most of the same things without the incoherence brought on by my annoyance.

For what it's worth, there are some folks who plan to protest the disappearance of American Edit by posting the albumb on-line en masse. I'm not participating, since I don't believe my disapproval of the system gives me license to break the law (Of course, not being a lawyer, I'm not actually sure this would even be illegal). But this certainly seems like as good a time as any to share your concerns over intellectual property laws with your local lawmaker.

By the way, if this article inspires you in some way, and you come up with your own thoughts using this as a starting point and want to print them somewhere.... As far as I'm concerned, that's a win for both of us. Go to it.

Mommy's all right; Daddy's all right; They just seem a little weird...

1. Somebody Told Me, The Killers
2. The Lion Sleeps Tonight, The Tokens
3. She's Like the Wind, Patrick Swayze
4. Hungry Like the Wolf, Duran Duran
5. Bubbletoes, Jack Johnson
6. That'll Be The Day, Buddy Holly
7. Surrender, Cheap Trick

8-10 have been omitted in light of the length of last week's list.

[3 points -- but only because my Jackie Paper identification skills netted us some extra points at trivia this week]

Hereabouts, Boingboing -- probably the fastest way to find cool stuff on the internet -- brought my attention to, surprise of surprises, a cool thing on the internet.

Dean Gray's American Edit. It's an album of remixes of the songs of Greenday's latest album with an assortment of other songs which could only have been chosen by a random number generator. If you found "Eminenya" (A medley of The Real Slimshady and -- I am not making this up -- Orrinoco Flow) halfway as amusing as I did, you'll want to give this one a look.

One thing I've always liked about Greenday is that all their songs sound different. I mean, seriously, it's not all that easy to accept that Good Riddance, When I come around, American Idiot and Boulevard of Broken Dreams are all by the same group. Contrast that with some other groups. Heck, I think most of Ace of Base's songs are pretty good, but if you play the album from one end to the other, unless you're paying close attention, you won't even notice that you've heard more than one song. And Dave Matthews, seminal though he was to my experience of music during my college years, is even worse. But Greenday's stuff all sounds different. And now they sound even more different (Though it's a little scary how well Boulevard of Broken Dreams mixes with Oaisis's What's the Story Morning Glory).

As the Boingboing link points out, there's even a Doctor Who remix. But what they don't point out is a bit of wonderful recursion (recursive (adj.): see recursive). The song isn't being mixed with the theme from Doctor Who. It's being mixed with Doctorin' The TARDIS, an 80s single by "The Timelords" (which was originally released on the gimmick of gimmicks, a square CD), which is itself an experiment of the very same sort, mixing the Doctor Who theme with Gary Glitter's Rock and Roll Part 1. It's a remix of a remix.

Dr. Who On Holiday is a pretty good song, but of the ones I've listened to so far, I think my own favorite is Boulevard of Broken Songs. But check it out, see what you like.

One last bit of metaness in this whole project. One of the best known -- in addition to being my personal favorite -- songs on the original album is Boulevard of Broken Dreams. It takes its name from a pretty famous painting of the same name, which shows Humphrey Bogart, James Dean, and Marilyn Monroe in a diner with no doors. Boulevard of Broken Dreams is a medly of sorts itself. It's a parody of Edward Hopper's Nighthawks.

Updated 11/25: D'oh. I incorrectly identified the Oaisis song used in Boulevard of Broken Songs as What's the Story Morning Glory. It is, in fact, Wonderwall. I apologize for all the pain and suffering caused by my lack of research. My Bad.

You wear those shoes and I will wear that dress

Please excuse any typographical errors. My girlfriend is visiting this weekend, and her head is on my lap. For obvious reasons, I am easily distract... Where was I?

1. Sunny Came Home, Shawn Colvin
2. Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go, Wham
3. Georgia, Carolyn Dawn Johnson
4. Accidentally in Love, Counting Crows
5. Breathe, Faith Hill
6. Summer Nights, John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John
7. Hooked on a Feeling, BJ Thomas
8. Alone, Heart
9. Kiss Me, Sixpence None the Richer
10. White Wedding, Billy Idol
11. That's What Love Can Do, Boy Krazy
12. Somewhere Out There, Linda Ronstadt and James Ingram
13. Hallelujah, Rufus Wainright
14. Mr. Brightside, The Killers
15. Boulevard of Broken Dreams, Greenday
16. Stacy's Mom, Fountains of Wayne
17. Falling for the First Time, Barenaked Ladies
18. Breathless, The Corrs

And now, AMOV presents the Random Ten FAQ (Check out the [read more] for the answers)

Q. Hey, that's eighteen. That's not ten! What gives?
Q. Hey, isn't it traditional to do a Random Ten on Fridays, not Sundays?
Q. Hey! These aren't random at all! You're supposed to put the first ten songs produced by shuffle on your iPod. If you're not cool enough to have an iPod, you're not allowed to play!
Q. Hey, you keep listing the same songs. How lame is that?

A. It's my damned blog and I'll do as I damned well please.

Till next time...

Okay, so the rotation at karaoke was long this week, and I only got to sing a very few songs, and they've all appeared on this list too many times recently. So instead of the usual ten, I'm going to depart from the normal format and present you with ten links to the Random Tens of other people of whose taste in music I approve. It's a Random Ten by Ten.

1. Slacktivist. Brothers In Arms is probably my favorite song these days.
2. snooble dot com. Sunday Bloody Sunday is a song of which I approve with great vigour.
3. Thistles For Breakfast. Okay. Bob's Random Ten this week turned up both Fall Down, which is one of my Karaoke songs, and The Theme From Knight Rider, thus qualifying his list as excellent.
4. Rox Populi. Brian Wilson is an old favorite of mine, but what puts this one on my list is Bathwater, which is my sister's favorite song to sing at Karaoke.
5. Blatherskite , mostly for Don't Fear The Reaper, but Bush as Dictator is funny enough to merit a mention.
6. Super! Geek's 27 because In The Car has been stuck in my head for days. Also, any song about Metroid is okay in my book.
7. Stitching For Sanity for That's Just What You Are, which I would totally sing at karaoke if I were a chyk and they had it (And based on what happened last week, that first one is not really a dealbreaker). The inclusion of Jeremy causes this one to make the list instead of the most recent edition.
8. Randon Ravings For including U2's cover of All Along The Watchtower which is my non-current favorite song. The U2 cover is probably my third favorite version at the moment (my favorite is sure to appear in a regular ten in the future).
9. A Likely Story! Back in may, randomly produced not only American Idiot, The Middle and Brian Wilson, but also my favorite Karaoke Host's regular song, Wherever You Will Go, not to mention a song by Toad The Wet Sprocket.
10. B12 Partners Solipsism They got I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles), they got What I like about you, they got I got you (I feel good), but most of all, they've got Ice Cream. And I've got my ten.

See you next week.

Maybe some of my visitors from one of the Baltimore-area aggregators (see badges) can fill me in on what's up in the city this week. Karaoke attendence was much lighter than usual. Where was everyone?

Since it was such a slow night, two nights in a row, I got a little reckless and sang some songs totally inappropriate for my person. I also sang some songs that weren't but that's neither here nor there. Here's the list...

1. Alone, Heart
2. Tonight and the Rest of my Life, Nina Gordon
3. There She Goes, Sixpence None the Richer (Which is originally a male vocal, but that wasn't available)
4. Smooth, Santana featuring Rob Thomas
5. Another Night, Real McCoy
6. You Belong to Me, The Duprees
7. My Best Friend's Girl, The Cars
8. Mr. Brightside, The Killers
9. Boulevard of Broken Dreams, Green Day
10. Reason to Believe, Rod Stewart

Incidentally, I have decided that the original version of "There She Goes" is the optimal Meet Cute song.

I like clocks. I'm not sure why, especially in light of the fact that, like most people in my age group, I find analogue clocks difficult to read (more on this someday). But I just dig clocks.

So, if you hang out on the internet, you have to deal with time zones other than the one you live in a lot. What's interesting is that Microsoft has no real sense of this. This led to a great fiasco when, at a place I was working, the secretary tried to use Outlook to schedule meetings between people at the office (In Baltimore) and people in California, which were to take place in Las Vegas. So, the secretary would type in "Meeting at 2 PM", and Outlook would "helpfully" tell the person in California that the meeting was at 10 AM. And, of course, on the east coast, the meeting would really be at 5. And there was no way to convince Outlook to *not* do this. Of course, everyone says "Well, you want to schedule it for 5, because that's what time it will be where this computer is." But (a) No one works like that, and (b) it would show up in the Californian's schedule as 1 PM, which isn't what he wanted either.

Anyway, back to reality. I deal regularly with websites who schedule events on their own local clock, or on GMT. Now, honestly, in my day to day life, there is no reason I need to know what the current time is GMT, so, no, you arrogant geeks, I am not going to just set my own personal clock to GMT and insist that everyone I do business with act the same. So I found myself wanting a multi-time zone clock. Now, personally, I wouldn't mind having a bunch of clocks on the wall set to different times, the way they used to in news rooms (and probably still do, but they keep them off camera now), but even I realize that's a little geeky.

There are numerous programs on the interweb that can do this, but I really wanted something small and unobtrusive that wouldn't take up any real estate when I wasn't using it, that would be available at a moment's notice, and that wouldn't leave me spending six hours resetting all the clocks after a power failure (this is the downside to my really digging clocks),

Suddenly, I remembered something important: I am a programmer. Why not just write my own?

And so I did. This is beta software, and my goal was to go from 0 to working as quickly as possible, so there may be things I haven't accounted for, but it does seem to work. Check it out: TimeMan.

Here's how it works: Run the program, and a little clock will appear in your system tray. When clicked, a balloon will pop up for several seconds, displaying the current time in UTC, Eastern, Central, and Pacific (Some day, I'll enhance it to display the time zones of your choosing, but for right now, it displays the ones that I personally find useful). To kill it, right click the icon (this will make the balloon pop up too, because I was in a hurry) and select 'Close'. You can stick a shortcut in your Startup folder to automate the whole thing..

Anyway, all I ask for the use of it is that you drop me a line saying what you think. It does require the .NET framework 2.0, because making it work without it was more effort than I wanted to put in for this. In any case, enjoy.

Updated....
If you get an error when trying to run TimeMan to the tune of "couldn't find mscoree.dll", it means you need to download the .NET runtime stuff. You can get it here: Get the .NET Framework.

Lying here in the darkness, you hear the sirens wail: sombeody's going to emergency, somebody's going to jail.

Well, severe back pain prevented me from attending Karaoke Friday, but I managed to get out tonight, and here's what I sang:

1. Boulevard of Broken Dreams, Greenday
2. Mr. Brightside, The Killers
3. Power of Love, Huey Lewis and the News
4. If I had $1,000,000, Barenaked Ladies
5. Turn the Page, Metallica

Now, next week's list will probably be conspicuous in its absence, since I will be forsaking Karaoke in favor of going to visit the woman who sets my life to music. So, rather than stiffing you guys for two out of three weeks, I'm going to super-size this week's list with the contents of the CD I am mixing right now for a couple of friends, on the occasion of my having remembered that they asked me if I could provide them with a copy of a particular song a few weeks ago. (For [4 points], guess which one it was. The rest are just there because I hate to not fill a disc to something near capacity). So...

6.. The Angels Wanna Wear My Red Shoes, Elvis Costello
7. Tonight and the Rest of my Life, Nina Gordon
8. Brothers in Arms, Dire Straits
9. New York Minute, The Eagles
10. Behind Blue Eyes, Limp Bizkit
11. Somebody Told Me, The Killers
12. Hallelujah, Jeff Buckley
13. Feed The Tree, Belly
14. Maria, Blondie
15. Get Out of This House, Shawn Colvin
16. Only In My Dreams, Debbie Gibson
17. Save Tonight, Eagle Eye Cherry
18. Take Me Home Tonight, Eddie Money
19. Bittersweet Symphony, The Verve
20. Live Anyway, Quiddity

I hurt my back today. Work faster, guys.

Wired News: Mighty Mice Regrow Organs

I like big spiders and I cannot lie. [3 points]

And in case you didn't get the joke in the title:

Partial Karaoke Lineup (omitting some recent duplicates):
01. Scar Tissue, Red Hot Chili Peppers
02. She's Like the Wind, Patrick Swayze
03. I don't want to be, Gavin Degraw
04. Nowhere Man, The Beatles
05. It Had To Be You, Harry Connick jr.
06. Paycheck Woman, Cletus T. Judd

In lieu of repeating the same entries I've been making for the past several weeks, this week's list will be padded with "Songs no one knows the proper name of". (Random schmandom)

07. The Bad Touch, Bloodhound Gang
010. Bring Me To Life, Evanescence
011. Indian Reservation, Paul Revere and the Raiders
012. The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down, Cliff Friend and Dave Franklin [and 4 points]

Random X will be on vacation next week (or, perhaps, truly random for once), since Karaoke is on vacation. I will instead be taking my sweetheart to the Maryland Renaissance Festival. Mmm.... turkey legs...

And even though I know how very far apart we are, it helps to think we might be wishing on the same bright star.

So, Karaoke, as it turns out, is way less fun when your girlfriend isn't there. But she knows I miss her, and now the rest of you do too.

1. Boulevard of Broken Dreams, Greenday
2. Superman, Five for Fighting
3. Hot in the City, Billy Idol
4. Somebody Told Me, The Killers
5. Don't Dream It's Over, Crowded House
6. Accidentally In Love, Counting Crows
7. The Boys of Summer, The Ataris

Plus three songs I have to learn:
8. Mr. Brightside, The Killers
9. I Don't Want To Be, Gavin Degraw
10. Wake Me Up When September Ends, Greenday

Spent an amazing, wonderful weekend with my beloved. As a result, this week's posts are going to be late, since I am several kinds of tired and sore and happy. Sadly, she had a cold, and therefore wasn't able to sing so much as she'd like, but she did manage to get a couple in. Also, this week's list guest stars my sister, who accompanied us to karaoke Saturday night. I'm not going to tell you who sang what, because I'm a bit of a rogue like that.

1. Hooked on a Feeling, BJ Thomas
2. You Were Meant For Me, Jewel
3. Steal My Sunshine, LEN
4. Accidentally In Love, Counting Crows
5. Me and Bobby McGee, Janis Joplin
6. Brown Eyed Girl, Van Morrison
7. American Idiot, Greenday
8. One, U2
9. Bathwater, No Doubt
10. White Bird, It's a Beautiful Day

tongodeon: The "Work Blind" Curtain

I don't even have a cubicle, and I want one of these.

Best Idea Evar.

Will ya hose me down with holy water, if I get too hot?

Me:
1. Falling for the first time, Barenaked Ladies
2. Hallelujah, Rufus Wainwright
3. Bed of Roses, Bon Jovi
4. One Headlight, The Wallflowers
5. Friday I'm in love, The Cure

My Girlfriend (Man, do I love saying that)
1. No Mistakes, Patty Smyth
2. Borderline, Madonna
3. The Warrior, Scandal
4. The Shoop Shoop Song, Cher

Us:
1. I'd do anything for love (But I won't do that), Meatloaf

The first song we ever danced to was What a Wonderful World. Wish I had a better song for that memory, but today I can really get behind the sentiment of it.

You're an angel in a see-through dress.

From Tonight's Karaoke Lineup:
1. If I had $1,000,000, Barenaked Ladies
2. Dancing With Myself, Billy Idol
3. Peacekeeper, Fleetwood Mac
4. Bohemian Rhapsody, Queen
5. Touch of Gray, Greatful Dead

To make the list come out to ten:
6. Second Best, Barenaked Ladies
7. Heart of Gold, Neil Young
8. More Than This, 10,000 Maniacs
9. Kiss Me, Sixpence None the Richer
10. There She Goes, The Las

Went to a Labor Day Party today at the home of some Friends From Karaoke. A wonderful time was had by all. Good food, public nudity (Don't get all excited. I'm the youngest of my karaoke friends by about a decade), free booze, and Karaoke. So, as part of my "start blogging more often" kick, I've decided to start relating what songs I sang each time I go karaoking expect these lists to be short, dull, redundant, and redundant. All the same, here you go...

With one exception, none of these songs were chosen by myself: I gave the list of songs I know to the masters of ceremonies, and they chose what I'd sing next.
1. I'm Still Here (Jim's Theme), Johnny Reznik
2. Alcohol, Barenaked Ladies
3. 867-5309/Jenny, Tommy Tutone
4. Somewhere Over The Rainbow, Judy Garland
5. Hallelujah, Rufus Wainwright

(Lest anyone think I don't know this, (a) The Jeff Buckley cover of Hallelujah is way better, but it's not available for karaoke, and (b) Rufus is covering a Leonard Cohen song)

As you might have noticed, this blog looks a lot different than it did a couple of days ago. This is because I've switched to Movable Type, since it seems like a way more impressive package than Blogger.

The down side is that I haven't got all the kinks worked out yet. It looks like MT might be out-pacing my web server, and sometimes producing broken documents for its work. So if you find a link that goes to a broken or missing page, don't sweat it. I'm sure I'll get it all sorted out eventually. As you can tell, I've had a higher than usual quotient of drama and angst in my life lately, and hopefully, this new platform will allow me to share my angst with you more efficiently than ever.

So I came across this as I was wandering the web, and it seems to be an example of a phenomenon (But then, what isn't? I'm reminded of a conversation of several years ago wherein someone described one of the early bloggers as "a phenomenon". He was promptly told "I'd hardly say this counts as a phenomenon! It's just some guy's thoughts. Look up "phenomenon" you twit!" His point, of course, was that "phenomenon" should mean something far more spectacular. Of course, if you did look up "phenomenon", you'd discover that it actually does not mean that at all). I'm a little (okay, a lot) amazed by the choices of songs in this random ten, and in the others surrounding it. See, I'm not nearly as hepcat cool swinging indie with great love of obscure music as a lot of people, but my tastes are far from mainstream. And yet I know a lot of these, and rather like them, especially the Elvis Costello song which donated the epigram and which, until now, I believed I was the only person in the world who remembered.

So anyway, it got me thinking. As well you know, I'm always the first to jump on the bandwagon two years late. I don't know how long I can keep it up (but hey, I've been on time with Inappropriate Thoughts for a whole month now), but for the time being, here they are, a Random Ten...

1. Fable, Robert Miles
2. Tonight and the Rest of My Life, Nina Gordon (Prettiest Song Ever)
3. The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, Gordon Lightfoot
4. Mona Lisa, Shawn Colvin
5. Joey, Concrete Blonde
6. In The House of Stone and Light, Martin Page
7. Knightrider 2000, Jan Hammer
8. Across the Universe, Rufus Wainwright
9. After the Rain, Nelson
10. Never Been to Spain, Three Dog Night

• The semicolon is the difference between, "My dearest love Duncan comes here tonight," and, "My dearest love; Duncan comes here tonight."
• The comma is the difference between, "Eats shoots and leaves," and "Eats, shoots, and leaves."
• The apostrophe is the difference between, "Some can sing, and some cant," and, "Some can sing, and some can't."
• Capitalization is the difference between, "Helping your uncle Jack off a horse," and, "Helping your uncle jack off a horse."

I once saw a sign in a store that said, "We 'don't' take credit cards." I can only assume this means that they take credit cards only if you know the secret handshake.

Eye dew sew love my spell chequer. It safes alot of thyme. Aviary word eye trie on it, it tales me eye spell write.