June 2009
6 posts
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Do you really listen to all your music? : Lee...
You’re how old? 19! Jeebus, you’re the Sidney Crosby of Jazz, I guess. This album is surprisingly great. Although I would say it’s really the baritone sax of Pepper Adams that makes this album as good as it is. Still, friggin’ 19???? Overall this is a keeper — 4/5 stars
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Do you really listen to all your music? : Sun Ra -...
What a great album. I think the AMG sums it up best:
Blue Delight is a great late-period Arkestra recording, notable for several reasons: 1. This is a very large, impeccably recorded Arkestra featuring special guests Tommy Turrentine and Don Cherry AND a number of Arkestra alumni returning for the date. 2. Although synthesizers are present, the majority of Ra’s solos are on piano. 3. John...
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“He plays his song for one reason /
It’s simply what he loves /
The...”
– Chick Corea, ladies & gentlemen, Chick Corea
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Are you hyperinformed?
I know I am. It started off innocently enough. A newspaper RSS feed here, a magazine one there. I soon got enough to start using Google Reader to aggregate them all. Then it started to take a turn for the worse. I started accumulating feeds left and right. I was simply compelled to consume more and more information. I became hyperinformed.
I tried various techniques to reduce the amount of...
May 2009
2 posts
5 tags
Rebuilding Intellisense. Wow me.
According to a post at the VCTB, they are rebuilding Intellisense. All I can say is, it’s about time and I’ll believe it when I see it. etags works great for me. I incur the rebuild penalty when I’m idle and finding is instantaneous. If you can beat that, I’ll stop renaming my feacp dll to feacp.stop sucking up my cpu.dll
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Do you really listen to all your music? :...
Awesome 80s thrash disc. I haven’t heard this one in a long time. Check out the scream on the title track. Impressive!
April 2009
1 post
March 2009
16 posts
“EI: The Lion King: go.”
– DO THE MATH: King on Collins
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TFMSC: The Bikeshed Formula
A while back I ranted on Design Meetings are A Waste of Time. As luck would have it, I just had an opportunity to put my money where my mouth is. I had a new design idea that touched many areas of my company. We have a server side group and a client side and subgroups within each. Following my tips, I was able to have very substantive design meetings without bikeshed arguments and derailments.
In...
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Do you really listen to all your music? : Billy...
It sucks/It rocks. Every song has a slash title, I don’t know why. The first half of the slash sucks (sl)ash but the second part for all six songs are solid fusion. Very enjoyable…as long as you can fast forward through the first half of every song.
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My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2009-3-8) →
Simon & Garfunkel (20)
Phish (13)
Queen (9)
Nick Drake (8)
Frank Zappa (8)
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
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Top 278 Star Wars Lines Improved By Replacing A... →
I find your lack of pants disturbing.
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TFMSC: Design Review Meetings Are A Waste of Time
Here’s a few reasons why:
The Bikeshed
One common mistake is to not want to leave anyone out of the meeting. Especially if a team is tasked with designing something that affects many groups in the company. They’ll want at least one representative from all those groups if not more. Granted, these people are smart, but like most smart developers they can’t resist helping build...
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Do you really listen to all your music? : Sly and...
Still a little groggy after awakening from listening to this drowsy album. I’m quite disappointed as Sly has some true classics. This one is definitely one to avoid — I’m removing it from my catalog
“She calls it “Garfunkeling”
– Flight of The Conchords
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2009-3-1) →
Tom Waits (17)
The Who (14)
Traveling Wilburys (13)
The White Stripes (11)
Van Morrison (10)
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
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Do you really listen to all your music? : Townes...
It came to my attention that some people might not know of this country’s 2nd best songwriter (2nd to …) . If you don’t, stop right now and go buy his eponymous classic.
This album was a bit of a surprise, I thought I remember it being subpar but upon my recent listen, it delivers. It’s not his best but it is a solid effort with such classics as “Be Here to Love Me...
February 2009
19 posts
5 tags
Do you really listen to all your music? : Andrew...
I’m not sure I can even describe this album properly. It is subdued yet intricate, soft yet hard driving, mellow yet intense. The piano and composition provide a great canvas for the real stars — the bass and drum rhythm section. Andrew does one of my favorite techniques where the piano will provide a soft, mellow main rhythm while the drums and bass add their own, often quite...
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Using a Cisco VPN without the Cisco Client on Mac...
Cisco does have client for OS X, it does not give it away for free. (though, it can be obtained for free via a simple google search but you didn’t hear that from me.) In any case, I’d love not to be tied to its non-free client (and fugly UI). This eluded me until I found a couple of blog posts that combined enabled vpnc to be my new favorite program. For sources see vpnc HOWTO and...
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Oh Crap. My Parents Joined Facebook. →
Hilarious. And a fellow tumblr
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Presidential Rankings →
CSPAN lists a new survey of Presidential Rankings. I’m not sure I agree with Kennedy and Eisenhower’s high rankings. Clinton has gotten a big boost since 2000’s survey. Bush debuts in the lower ten.
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2009-2-22) →
The Apples in Stereo (28)
Tegan and Sara (11)
M. Ward (11)
Stevie Wonder (9)
Van Morrison (8)
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
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Meet the Chuck Norris of Ancient Greece →
“He would train in the off years by carrying a newborn calf on his back every day until the Olympics took place. By the time the events were to take place, he was carrying a four-year-old cow on his back. He carried the full-grown cow the length of the stadium, then proceeded to kill, roast, and eat it.”
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2009-2-15) →
The Apples in Stereo (62)
Sun Kil Moon (58)
Tegan and Sara (15)
Traveling Wilburys (11)
The Wailers (8)
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
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My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2009-2-8) →
Sun Kil Moon (72)
The Apples in Stereo (35)
Silver Jews (10)
Tom Rush (9)
The Who (7)
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
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10 Very Good Reasons Why You Should Grow a Giant... →
“great for sledding”
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No, you cannot has cheezburger →
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Do you really listen to all your music? :...
I have a lot of Monk albums and sometimes each one doesn’t particularly stand out. This is especially true, I think, of his later work. However, this is a nice exception. The pieces are mostly Monk classics but Charlie Rouse on Tenor Sax and, notably, Charlie Higgins on drums make these stand-out performances. The highlights for me are Epistrophy and Evidence but every track is good. The...
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TFMSC: Putting right people on Design team
This is a, unfortunately, a classic mistake. It is illogical, but I’ve seen it happen so many times.
Step 1: Create a project where a new design is needed from scratch.
Step 2: Management puts mid or low-level engineers in charge of the design.
Step 3: The senior engineers are left scratching their heads.
Step 4: The project a) fails or b) gets re-designed by senior engineers making...
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2009-2-1) →
The Apples in Stereo (198)
Sun Kil Moon (22)
Starlight Mints (9)
Stereophonics (8)
Jimi Hendrix (5)
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
January 2009
34 posts
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Attention developers writing email validation code
the ‘+’ symbol is valid. it is commonly used to sort email. see cyrus imap and gmail. I’m sick of my email addresses constantly being rejected. EORant
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You still can't get Intellisense right
VC++TB describes upcoming Intellisense enhancements. I don’t know how they could screw up something so badly in an otherwise good compiler. I had to delete my dll in order to actually use VC++ (which unfortunately my work forces me to use).
Two things:
XCode has ridiculously powerful “intellisense” features that don’t eat up all of my cores
ctags works so much better...
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Drunken Fairies - How To Be Happy at Work →
all it takes is a rubber band and some paper clips
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Six Musicians With Pasts They Hope You'll Forget |... →
Pantera, come on!