Getting Google Love

I'm back on the first page when you search for me with Google. I'm not entirely sure why this excites me, but it does.

Beyond there are few others of interest:

• A movie with the my name as the main character. It's BAD.


• My listing on the alumni page for the ISU Drumline - my newly VEISHEA-less alma mater


• and lots of other links to things that have nothing to do with me. Who knew I had such a common name?

Good music and samples

Hi. My name is Corey, and I'm a music addict. Anyone that knows me is already aware of this, but a good chunk of my life revolves around music - programming, teaching, playing, and just listening. I gotta say that I love discovering things about music through the web, and the iTunes Music Store rules for anyone that enjoys music. Here's what I went through today.

I read Macsurfer daily - for some reason I don't think it's as good as it was a few years back, but I still get this weird feeling inside if I don't check it every day. It had a link to a Slate article "Beyoncé, Your Mix Tape Sucks" which, in addition to supporting the title, also mentioned that there is a great iMix from the Thievery Corporation. Track #17 from their list is a cool old track from the Jungle Brothers (circa 1988). Their name sounded familiar, so I listened to a bunch of their other stuff and found samples that Fatboy Slim has used - most obviously "Because I Got It Like That", which is track #4 from On the Floor at the Boutique (which is a great album that isn't on iTMS - check Amazon).

I got hooked on FBS back in college, before everyone else in the world heard of him (well, in Iowa at least - ha!). I was amazed that I could find an artist that had so many great tracks that all sounded so different - most electronic/dj groups I had heard at that point would only have a couple of songs that I enjoyed. But FBS was the exception, having only a couple of songs that I DIDN'T like ("Praise You", and others I can't think of at the moment). I grew tired of the direction he was going as time went on, but that seems to be the way things work when some obscure thing that I really like goes mainstream. Songs also started to have a single sampled lyric that was played over and over, and I really hate that ("Praise You", "Fatboy Slim is F*ing in Heaven", and "Bird of Prey" - to a certain extent). In some later post I'll probably talk about what makes a piece of music interesting to me (if anyone cares), but I'm straying far off the topic at this point.

Anyway, lets just say that FBS does a great job of sampling from really great music. And I LOVE that stuff. I've always loved hearing a piece of music and figuring out where it came from: the Beastie Boys song that sampled from Sgt. Pepper, another from Tower of Power's "In the Slot", the old surf versions of "Apache" (redone by FBS later), and on and on.

And these days we can easily search, preview, and individually purchase them - things that couldn't have been done a few years back. Hrm... the direction of this paragraph was sounding too much like a marketing note, which is not what I originally intended. I think I should go to bed before it gets any worse.

My main point is that all of this stuff is really cool and really exciting for music addicts! And I did it without an exclamation point in the title! :) The double-edged sword to this means that I end up spending more time looking around for this stuff (and later much more time for the blog entry), and then spending more money on music. Worse things could happen, I guess.

Also, Blogger's great and all, but I'm getting sick of manually typing in (or copying, usually) the html tags for links. Bleh.

Exclamation points!

Couple of miscellaneous things today...

• I seem to use exclamation points in a lot of my entries. It's annoying, so I'll stop doing it..... tomorrow.


• The comments pages might show up saying that they don't allow anonymous comments, but they actually do (the link/button does work). I'm going to republish the site to see if that fixes it. I apologize to anyone who is forced to deal with the newsreader implications that come along with this change.


• I'm slightly distressed that I can no longer be easily found from a search on my name. I'm gonna have to do something about that.


• I will point out Travis' blog with the hope that it will encourage him to write more. At least he has an rss feed, unlike Matt. Wait, actually Matt does too. Bloglines just doesn't find it. Hrm.
  

Bike to work day!

I rode in today to join in the festivities - like getting a free box of apple juice. Mmmm, juicy.

Since we moved into the new house I've been trying to ride my bike in at least once a week, and it's working out well so far (on average). It takes me about 30 minutes to ride the 6 miles each way, helped by the semi-decent timing of the lights on DeAnza, and hindered by my out-of-shape-ness and the fact that I ride a mountain bike. Biking seems to be the only way to remind myself to get exercise, since the bed gives a more convincing argument that stops me from going to the gym in the mornings.

If you didn't ride to work today - there's still time! Drive home right now and ride your bike back!
UPDATE: ok, there probably isn't time anymore.

Interested in Everything (Design Eye for the Usability Guy)

One of the things that bugs me about myself if that I can get interested in anything, and at times it seems like I'm interested in everything. While this may be good from an open-mindedness point of view, it usually means that I feel like I have too many things to read, too much to do, not enough time, etc. It's not enough for me to just be a programmer all day, which could easily fill all of my free time with various books on the subject. I also feel the need to write, teach, and practice music (drums mostly).

But wait - there's more! I've always been interested in UI design and usability, but I never had much of a chance to do anything with it back in my old QA job. Now I actually get to design things I've gotten back into it, and I feel sligtly upset that my dream major from college does actually exist - I just didn't know about it at the time. Grr.

Ok, back from the tangent. Blogs have allowed me to get back into the swing of things pretty quickly, but of course it gives me other interests. Like web page design. I don't think I've ever created a good looking web page (thank goodness for Blogger templates and .Mac), but that doesn't stop me from being interested.

Anyway, on to the link and the origin of this post. There are some really great sites out there that talk about usability in web page design - Design By Fire, Superfluous banter and others. A few of these guys got together to redesign a post from Jakob Nielson's site, and you can find the results in a post on Design By Fire. It's pretty funny, if you're into that sort of thing.

Cleaning house

Work on our new place is progressing slowly. TiVo seems to want as much attention as it can get, which doesn't help our cause. Last weekend (3 days ago) we went off shopping for furniture, and ended up with a dresser, tv stand, stereo cabinet, and other random stuff. It was a pretty good haul, but of course that meant we had to put it together and fit it in with everything else. The weekend before that we grabbed a barbecue, so we of course had to try that out this week.

Maybe most importantly, the foosball table got set up a couple of weeks ago. We haven't played that much yet, since two player games tend to be less fun than four player ones. Make sure to let me know if you need a foos fix though! (and are in the area :)

Leave a comment!

Now that I have the comments working, I'm interested in seeing if anyone aside from the 5 people I've mentioned my blog to reads it. So leave a comment if you get a moment - thanks!

Blogger updates

Blogger has a whole bunch of updates today that I am happy to start using: new themes, comments, profiles (which I'll get to eventually), and others. I ran into a couple of problems doing the actual update, but it seems to be running fine now. BTW, it looks like comments are only available for new posts (and maybe old posts that you edit, I'll have to try that).

UPDATE: Yes, you can enable comments for old posts, but it looks like you have to modify each entry individually. Meh.

Urban Dictionary

It's a site I stumbled across last night when I was looking up the definition for a phrase I heard from the Daily Show on Google. I thought I knew what it meant, but I wasn't sure. Unfortunately the definition had in my head meant that I didn't want to get links to really really nasty content - what to do? (You'll also note that I'm not putting the word/phrase here, because I don't need to show up in any searches on the subject)

Well, I searched for and "meaning", which got me to the Urban Dictionary, and I spent the next half hour reading through it. It's a site where people submit definitions for a word, and others vote on it. Kind of like the rankings for Amazon, except that you (well, someone) submit(s) the actual content. And it's very funny/informative. Here are a few good ones:

omgwtfbbq
urbandictionary.com (defined: the entry with the conversation between bobby and his father is great)
metric shitload
...and many more.

Exciting!

I'm not sure if it's because I'm no longer a teenager, or because I've been in the software industry for a few years now, but I just don't get excited about things anymore.

But TiVo has been exciting - and it picked up the M. Night films that have been on the past two Mondays - both of which contained previews for his new movie: The Village. I must say, I haven't been this excited about a movie since Signs, which (surprise surprise) was his last film. Very cool. I know where I will be on July 30th :)

Internet at home - it's ALIVE!!!

Our DSL got hooked up on Thursday, and my lack of previous experience setting up DSL prompted a call to tech support. They don't have much official Mac support (problems getting their site to work with Safari, not supporting multiple machines through Airport, etc), but the technician knew what they were doing and got me set up with one machine without too much trouble. I tried setting up multiple machines later on, but it wasn't working, and I was barely able to get the one machine connection working again by the end of the night.

I finally had another chance to look at it today, and I got it all worked out. I first added the Airport base station to the mix (with WPA encryption) and got that working for my Powerbook. Then I had to turn off the encryption to make sure Lisa's laptop would work, and then turn it back on - all of which took a couple of hours (interspersed with dinner).

There are still some weird things, such as how I have trouble connecting to web sites if another machine is downloading big files.

My biggest annoyance/complaint/issue is with the amount of knowledge and work this still takes. It took probably 4 hours of work, a tech support call, and a bunch of searching on the internet (at work) to get this to work. And if you found this blog from Google or something, it's worth mentioning at this point that I'm a software engineer - I work with computers ALL DAY LONG. I feel sorry for anyone over 30 (well, maybe 40) that tries to do this sort of thing without a kid in the house - it's not fun.

Part of the problem may be my setup - 2 Macs and a Windows laptop, all wireless. It's a bit outside of the norm. Providers these days seem to have everything worked out pretty well for the 1 home = 1 machine case; unfortunately lots of homes are getting multiple machines (though I have no hard evidence or even links to back that statement up). I'm sure they will start supporting this stuff eventually, but for now it just supports the "law" that I have in my head:

more technology = more problems

Weird Al should do a parody song about it. Maybe "could" is a better word for it.