December 2004

My pal Joe Toledo remixes the current header, perfectly, geniusly.

He’s been funny before, too.

Joe & Jean Crawford 60th Anniversary

Originally uploaded by artlung.

That’s so impressive. Check out Leah’s Photo Site for more.

Sixty years dude!

I’ve been slowly migrating content from the smorgasborg to either the blog or to /dev/null. I’ll let web.archive.org handle maintaining all these little crappy bits. Really though, the smorgasborg was a bit of a blog. I just kept adding, and it was random. It was a little like a memepool, but I didn’t keep it up or format it as a blog.

Anyway, here’s the latest item to be killed from the blog, and moved here.

Why a website?
1. Customer support
2. Extension of companies current advertising
3. Name recognition
4. Customer feedback
5. News (Keeps clients up to date)

This was originally posted April 13, 1999. Still applies now.

Good, if busy day today. Multiple projects on multiple fronts.

My folks left this morning (early!) for Virginia.

It was great to see them, even if briefly.

The party for the 60th Anniversary for my Grandparents was awesome. Poker til late. I lost money but had fun.

Poker game names are bewildering. So much to learn for a novice (which I am not, but this does not prevent me losing). Texas Hold ‘Em (of course, what with the fad for it on TV); Baseball, Change-The-Daiper; Low Hold Card Wild; Stud Poker: 7 card stud, 5 card stuf; Spit in the Ocean; Lowball; and many others.

School, the last week of it, is this week. I’ll be ready for it soon enough.

I’m actually doing some Flash work these days, er, yesterday. I’m coming back to it pretty well.

Also I’m exercising my ASP skillz lately. Yes, for skrillz.

My favorite Frank Zappa song is “The Ocean is the Ultimate Solution”—manic instrumental.

It was foggy last night, but not too cold. We got home late.

Electric blankets are awesome.

It’s cold again tonight.

Had some fun working and visiting and stuff with a good friend today. Excellent to combine work and play, sometimes.

Don’t be afraid of bologna.

Hot carrots are tasty and hot. And carrots.

Be well.

Captain Kangaroo Name Record "Joseph" Front Cover

Originally uploaded by artlung.

Captain Kangaroo Name Record "Joseph" Back Cover

Originally uploaded by artlung.

My very own name record! From sometime in the 1970s on “My Name Records.”

The story goes that my father had faith in me that I could run a little turntable even though I was like 3 or 4 years old. I’ve been trusted with technology ever since. My former roommate Erin recorded it to mp3 and I encoded it for the web in February 2003.

You can listen to the RealMedia file here: “Joseph, Joseph”

...in case you were wondering.

The worst candy I ever ate in my life was called “Giga” and came from Sweden from my co-worker Ingrid. This is what the packaging looks like so you can avoid it:

It was salty, very salty. I don’t remember any “sweet” to speak of.

That was back in 2001.

Conceptual Art At EduPoint, 2000 Originally uploaded by artlung.

Davenetics checked the alphabet with the new Google Suggest. I had to check the numbers out.

1 – 1
2 – 2004 Election
3 – 3m
4 – 411
5 – 50cent (hollah!)
6 – 60 minutes
7 – 7th Heaven
8 – 89.com (which seems to be some kind of porn portal—likely an oversight)
9 – 911
0 – 02

And even the period gets into the act:
. – .com

Other characters like comma, percent sign, and dollar sign and pound mark (sometimes known as “hash”) didn’t do anything. Google Suggest just laid there like a dead fish.

And slashdot got dissed: “/” brings no suggestions. Poor /.

I’ve talked about my old Amiga 1000 before, and I’m talking about it again now. It was a great computer for its time. One of the great parts of it was the software.

There was an awesome music-making software called Instant Music for the Amiga which allowed one to compose music as easily as one can draw with a mouse, in color. Different colors represented different instruments, and the timeline ticked along. Not unlike how GarageBand works. The screen looked a bit like this, though this is a screenshot from the Apple IIgs:

I found this blog post which talks about the similarities between ACID, GarageBand, and Instant Music.

Well, a few weeks ago I uploaded two songs I made in my teens with Instant Music. They are being made avaiilable on the Internet Archive: Audio Section with Creative Commons licenses.

So here’s the actual downloads to the songs, for your quizzical listening “pleasure.”

(If anyone has a reader for the Instant Music let me know, I have files I want to decode.)