Crasymaker

If you’re interested in taking polls for absolutely no reason at all, then head over to the top of my sidebar and cast your vote. It’ll only let you vote once and unfortunately, for now, only one person per household (or office) can vote because it logs your IP address. Be sure and check the Polls Archive (link is under the most current poll) to see past winners.

According to the results of the first poll, it looks like not too many of you have tried the Sonic Hot Fudge Brownie Blast yet which is a good thing because it’s gross. Trust me. Now move your mouse over to the sidebar and tell me whether you want to see Snakes On A Plane or not. I do.

The great Paul Wardein has struck again. Head over to The Paper Hearts’ photo section for some excellent photos from the show at The Gypsy the other night.

By the way, the show was one of the best we’ve ever had. If you couldn’t make it then you missed an excellent performance by all three bands. Bryce Harrison and TRAT were awesome, The New Tragedies were awesome and all the fans were awesome. Basically, it was awesome. And awesome.

Cory Doctorow’s latest article for Information Week is filled with excellent points about how the iTunes Music Store is changing (in his opinion, in a bad way) the music business. You might be interested in reading it if you’ve been following any of my posts about the iTMS.

I’ve gone on and on about how people don’t understand that all you have to do to get iTMS songs onto another music player is to burn them to a CD and then re-import them. Cory doesn’t see this as a good solution, though, because he says that you have to re-enter all that metadata like song title, album title and artist.

I almost wrote a post about how this isn’t true because every time I re-import songs that I’ve bought from the iTMS, all of the metadata comes in with it. However, I only buy full albums whereas most people buy individual songs, and iTunes can recognize a full album but not a CD with all sorts of random songs on it so Cory is actually right. If you’ve bought a ton of songs from the iTMS and you decided to switch to a different music player other than an iPod, it would definitely be a tedious process to re-import and re-enter all of that metadata.

But in my opinion, the point still stands that if you don’t want to run the risk of not being able to quickly transfer your songs onto a non-Apple iPod, then maybe you shouldn’t be buying music from a store that only sells songs that play on an Apple iPod.

One of my bands, The Paper Hearts is playing this Friday night here in Fayetteville at The Gypsy on Dickson Street.

Also playing are The New Tragedies from Kansas City. Actually, it’s Aaron & Bev Weidner who are originally from here. Aaron co-founded The Paper Hearts with me and wrote a ton of our songs so if you were any sort of a fan of ours at all, you should be entertained thoroughly.

Finally, rounding out the bill are Bryce Harrison and The Rumors Are True who are from here and who also are really good so don’t miss out on the sweetness. Come to the show. Thanks.

In case you haven’t noticed, things are getting pretty crazy in the Web 2.0 world these days. So many brilliant ideas are popping up left and right. Many of them are copies of copies of copies that only offer one extra feature that the previous ones didn’t include. Every few weeks, however, something truly original surfaces that’s so simple yet so complex at the same time.

Enter Dandelife which is a “social biography network” that allows users to sign up and tell stories about their life by means of a time line which includes text, photos and even video. It sounds simple enough but the real meat to this one is that as a user, you will be able to license your writing to companies who are looking for real stories for use in advertisements, case studies, etc.

In other words, instead of paying a copywriter to come up with a fictious account of “my baby’s first time using the potty”, companies like Pampers could find an actual story written by a real mother on Dandelife.com and pay them for the use of their story. Or as a writer yourself, you could probably find some serious inspiration there as well.

So if you don’t mind the idea of possibly renting out pieces of your life, head on over to Dandelife and start up an account. You could get rich. Really, really rich.

From the looks of it, Springdale is one step closer to getting a minor league baseball team. The details seem a little fuzzy as of right now but apparently, the team they’re courting is the Wichita Wranglers, who are an AA affiliate of the Kansas City Royals.

GrandSlamForSpringdale.com has plenty of information if you’re interested. I haven’t done a whole lot of research so I don’t really have too much of an opinion at this point but it seems kinda sweet I guess. I can’t really see any reason why there shouldn’t be a minor league baseball team in Springdale, but then again, I can’t really see any reason why there should be one there either.

Springdale’s a fairly ugly town and everyone around here knows about the smell it can’t seem to shake so bringing in a baseball team seems kinda weird but then again, I suppose anything it can do to cover those things up can’t really hurt.

What do ya’ll think?

Just as I was about to give up on Cox Communications, they completely surprised me by sending out the nicest and most genuinely concerned repairman I’ve ever encountered in my life. No kidding, ya’ll. This guy came out and vowed to fix our problem come hell or high water (in not so many words).

First he replaced the caps on all the coaxial cables in our house. He came back the next day to see if that had solved the problem, which it didn’t. Then he left us a new router to test out overnight to see if it was our Linksys WCG200 that was causing so many outages, which it wasn’t. Then he replaced some stuff on the poles outside our house to see if they were the culprit, which they weren’t. Finally on the fourth day, he spent most of the afternoon running brand new wiring from our house to the pole. Guess what…it worked!

We haven’t had a single problem since that day and I couldn’t be happier. In fact, the internet is actually faster than before. Not bad, Cox. Not bad at all.

Have you ever bought polaroid film? If so, did you get upset because it didn’t fit into a 35mm Kodak camera?

How about this one: If you had a Schick Mach III razor and you used all of the blades up, would you consider purchasing a pack of Gillette Fusion blades and crossing your fingers in hopes that they would fit even though they’re Gillettes and not Schicks?

Finally, let’s say you are a Cingular customer and you want a cool new ringtone for your Cingular phone. Would you entertain the idea of heading over to the Sprint website and trying to download one of their songs to your phone even though you’re not a Sprint customer?

I would be very surprised if any of you answered “yes” to any one of these questions. Therefore I can’t understand why people are so pissed off over the fact that songs purchased from the iTunes Music Store cannot be played on a non-iPod music player, especially since it isn’t even entirely true.

The iTunes Music Store is specifically designed to give iPod owners a way to easily purchase, download and play music on their iPods. ON THEIR iPODS! Not on their Creative Zen nano players. Not on their Phillips portable MP3 players. Not on their SanDisk digital audio players and certainly not on their Oregon Scientific 256MB MP120 Waterproof MP3 Player with up to 8 hours of playback time players.

These kinds of walled gardens have been around for years. Whether they are good practice or not is another discussion but whether they work or not and whether or not we have been used to them for a long time is a completely ridiculous argument.

Besides, there are plenty of possible reasons behind this kind of restriction. It is fairly common knowledge (or should be) that the record labels have a big hand in defining the terms of the DRM that is attached to music purchased on online music stores.

The fact that Apple offers a convenient way of purchasing music for their iPods is a luxury that we should not take for granted. But then again, so is the fact that you can burn that music to a CD and then re-import it which completely strips the song of all DRM (enabling you to put it on any MP3 player you want).

But most of us are too busy complaining to figure that one out…

I’m always getting asked about software/gadgets and what I use and where to find it and how well does so-and-so’s program work, etc. So this will be the first of many posts about hardware/software/gadgets that I use and that I’d recommend using. You should be warned, however, that I am a Mac user and that most of the software I use is not available for Windows PC users. Sorry.

Adium is easily the best instant messaging application I’ve found. It connects to AIM, MSN, Yahoo and many more. It’s also open-source and free so that makes it even better. There are a ton of ways to customize it to your liking and so far it hasn’t crashed once or given me even the slightest bit of trouble at all even when using the beta versions. Yes, this one is Mac-only.

Audio/video chatting currently isn’t supported and most likely never will be. This isn’t a fault of Adium’s, however. Since each client (AIM, MSN, Yahoo, etc.) has it’s own way of defining how audio/video works, there’s really no way to make a “universal” instant messaging application that will do audio/video across the board. There are plenty of applications out there that will allow you to do audio/video chatting but you’ll be limited to which clients you can connect to.

So if you’re looking for a way to chat with pretty much anyone, Adium is your answer.