So last night I went to my favorite local coffee shop, Dollop, and I was horrified to discover that their typically open wifi was now locked down through some service that requires a password.  The friendly baristas were happy to provide me with a card that contains a key, which gets me online, but this expires every 90 minutes.  For those of us who plop down with a cup of coffee and work for hours, this becomes a problem.  They seem more than happy to give me a card whenever I go up there, but I do find it annoying.

My friend Adina, who is friends with the owner of the aforementioned coffee shop, emailed said owner about this new wifi policy.  Apparently he now gets a much better deal on internet service and will not be giving dirty looks to people who keep asking for new passwords so that they can sit around for hours.  I guess this will be ok, but I still miss the old way.  Maybe I can get them to give me cards 10 at a time.  I still love Dollop and will continue to patronize it for jittery productivity.

January 5th, 2009|3:01pm

most people say that a cup of coffee isn't worth free wifi. if you're gonna use their internet, at least make some sort of substantial purchase. I'd say about $1/hr should be sufficient. Plus, I never trust unsecured networks anyway.

bryan

So my Christmas and New Years were pretty good.  I got a new snowboard this year, so I'm really excited to get out and take a few ski trips this season.  Who wants in?

I've talked to several people who couldn't wait to be done with 2008, but honestly, it didn't treat me that badly.  It certainly had its ups and downs, but all in all I had a lot of fun.  I got to do lots of stuff with the band.  I got a sweet new apartment.  I went to Europe.  I got a nice raise.  I got to spend some good times with good friends.  I ran a half marathon.  I won the 2008 Easy On The Eyes Award.   I got this website launched.  I started on my grad level classes for my masters.  I got a new amp.  I started learning to draw.  I got a foosball table.  Even the stuff that happened last year that wasn't so fun was at least interesting.

So what does 2009 hold for our dashing hero?  Well... I'd like to get better at guitar, learn more about blues piano, become a useful vocalist, train for another race, go on tour with the band, contribue to a published piece of research, eat more chicken, build a few computers, get better at PHP/SQL/jQuery, learn Python, draw a web comic, finish one of the software projects I've been planning, write lots of music, take more roadtrips, and eat a can of pie filling.

I'm sure I'll think of more stuff I want to do as the year marches on.

So, as you may have read in my last post, The American Autumn has been in the studio recently.  On Monday night we approved the final mixes (through a complicated process of phone calls, emails, txt messages, and IMs) and we're finally done.  That was easily the most intense recording session I've ever been a part of, but it ended up producing some great results.  I'm incredibly happy with what we got from Gravity and George was a great guy to work with.  He taught us a lot of important things (mainly about David Hasselhoff and human-animal hybrids).   You can hear one of our new songs, You're So Speechless, on our MySpace or our website.  We'll be posting some more soon.

It will be a little while before we get a full release out with these songs because we're waiting for the guys in The Nominees Are... to finish their half of the recording for the split we're putting out together.  They should be done in January and we should have a disk (tentativly titled Roller Rinks and Stiff Drinks) out by February.

Hey, so I've been in in the studio all day working on the American Autumn recording and we've been working on vocals for a long time.  Recording takes for-fucking-ever.  Check out our blog for what we're doing (and also our newly founded VIDEO blog... yes fancy).  It seems like we're spending most of our time recording hilarious fuck ups and bodily functions then playing them back in slow motion.  Recording is awesome.

In other news, my butt is a mess.  I had surgery on my tail bone on Tuesday (like full put you under general anesthesia surgery), so I've been taking it easy and sitting on one of those stupid doughnuts for the last few days.  It's been a pain in the ass (pun intended) but I'm on the mend, and I worked from home most of the week (which was pretty way sweet).  When I woke up from the surgery I asked the doctor is they were successful in attaching a tail to me.  They seemed confused.

I finished up another semester at DePaul a few weeks ago.  That went really well (which is a nice feeling).  And now I'm starting to work on a research project with a couple professors and a few other grad students. It should be pretty interesting to get involved with some academic research, well see how it plays out.  Hopefully by the end I will have to grow some sort of pretentious academic beard and wear a tweed jacket.

December 14th, 2008|1:57am

I was across from you while you were writing this. I'm still across from you....

YOu are spinning in a chair. I hope you fall..

Also you are an asshole.

You're An Asshole

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(comic/insight by Toothpaste For Dinner)

December 2nd, 2008|5:14pm

Does this count websites I no longer update? Because I've got three blogs, two comic sites, two myspaces and a facebook. Of those, I've only really used facebook in the last month.

Mike

December 2nd, 2008|5:15pm

Check that.
Four blogs.

Mike again

Hey everybody.  My Thanksgiving was good, thanks for asking.  I took off last Wednesday to give myself a nice Thanksgiving break (just because I have a job doesn't mean I shouldn't get a break anymore!).  I spent most of it hanging out with family and reluctantly going to townie bars with old friends.  It was nice to see some people that I don't get to see that often, so I suppose I can't complain too much.

On Saturday night we went out to Steak and Shake on the way home from some dive bars in Woodstock.  Rolling deep with Millses and Marcantis (and Gina) we claimed a table and began obtaining cheese fries.  Before our food could arive an irate manager comes over and asks us to leave because we were "pretending to take our pants off".  Now, in many situations I'm very guilty of taking my pants off, but THIS WAS NOT ONE OF THEM!  We were joking around and acted like we were undoing belts (I forget what the context was, but I'm sure it was appropriate) but our belts never came off!  Never in all my years of public indecency have I been accused so unjustly.  I wonder what they did with all the food they made for us.  I can't help but to think about the cheese fries that could have been...

In American Autumn news, we've finally booked studio dates at Gravity! Wooo!  We start drum tracking next Sunday and work on guitars and vocals starts the following weekend.  I'm really excited about this session.  We also got together with the guys from The Nominees Are when we played down in DeKalb.  They are awesome guys and I think we're going to have a lot of fun working with them.  I'm hoping that we'll have this split out by February, hopefully with a big release show to back it up!

So, you know how you're supposed to back things up on your computer before you make major changes?  Yea, there's a reason for that.  I came home from class last night and thought I'd quickly upgrade my MacBook Pro to Leopard then spend the rest of the night leisurely playing with Delicious Library.

This was not the case.  In my infinite foresight, I forgot to back up things on my Mac before starting this upgrade.  Things hit a snag.  The OSX partition became upbootable.  There was some reformatting.  Some complete loss of data.  Things got a little crazy near the end.  Long story short, I lost everything on my Mac, but now have Leopard installed.  This sucks, but most of the code I had on there was already up on a server somewhere, I probably lost some Photoshop files that I would have liked to have around, and I have to restart my Penny Arcade Adventures game from the beginning now.  Oh well.  At least this reminded me to update my backups for my desktop (which I want to do some serious upgrades to soon).

I got everything up and running by about 1:30 last night.  Tonight will be spent reinstalling apps and trying to find the desktop wallpaper I had before.  It was pretty sweet.

So this week during the first half of my class we got to go over to the Microsoft office downtown and play with the Surface they had there. (I wrote a review about it for Team Hamster Hat!) I had read a bit about it when it first came out, so it was cool to get to play with one in real life.

Then on Wednesday I went to an IxDA meeting (an interactive design organization that I have been attending on and off) hosted at Motorola (that takes me back...). The topic was visualizing web dashboards on mobile devices. What that really meant was "how best to turn MySpace and Facebook into software for a bunch of phones."

There was a lot of talk about pressure from branded partners (MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, Last.fm, etc) to keep certain features and certain characteristics on the mobile implementations of their products, which seemed like a frustrating position for developers to be in. Also, I understand the pressure for more mobile device manufactures to do this with Apple have such success with their app store. But here's my issue with this whole concept. It's bad and unmaintainable! Sure, as an interface designer I see the benefit of making a custom application to work best with whatever platform you're trying to run on, but as a software developer, the idea of turning a web page into a bunch of individually maintained programs is a nightmare! What happens when Facebook adds a new feature that all their "official" interfaces need to have. This could be 20 separate programs that need to be updated (by the developers) and installed (by the users). It's just not going to happen. Versions will get abandoned as the amount of "supported" platforms grows out of control. The point of these "Web 2.0ish" sites is to use websites more like applications, not the other way around.

The point of websites is their ubiquity! To turn a web page into an application is taking a step back. I understand that not every phone has a browser that can play nice with all webpages and take full advantage of all their functionality, but trying to solve this by branching the page off into individual pieces of software for every phone platform seems like a terrible way to solve this. Why not develop better browsers for your platforms?! Ones designed to render killer features in the webpages that you wish support!

Apple may be setting a bad example by infulencing other device providers to turn webpages into software, but at least they have the good sense (and influence) to make MySpace build and maintian their own application! If MySpace wants to add a feature they add it themselves and they have to conform to the design guidelines set by Apple (one benifit of Apple's infelxable obession with controle).

Well, after a busy week, I've had another long lapse in blogging.  Since I've been back in the office at Risetime I've had a lot of project thrown at me and it's making for a little longer days at the office.   Not all of my busy schedule has been bad, though.  Band practice got moved from Thursday to Monday (parent/teacher conferences affect your schedule when your drummer is an English teacher) so Chris got us all tickets to this side show at the Metro called The Most Interesting Show In The World.  It was pretty cool.  I saw a man balance a running lawn mower on his face while people threw heads of lettuce at it.  Also a man stuck a spoon in his nose.

Following no chronological order at all, the previous weekend was Halloween.  Russ, Katie, Kyle, and Jessica came out and some how we ended up downtown at a fancy club where we had to "know someone" to get the bouncer to let us in (fortunately, I actually knew someone!).  It was pretty fun and I got to wear footy pajamas and half a child's dinosaur costume out in public with minimal judgement from the rest of the population.

On the following Tuesday (election day) I went out to Grant Park after class to check out the Obama rally.  It was pretty cool to hang out and watch the election results with all those people.  It felt like a sporting event.

Last Friday Mike introduced me to the song Code Monkey by Jonathan Coulton.  Since then I haven't been able to get it out of my head.  It's starting to effect my personal and professional life.  I'm worried about how long I can go with out singing it loudly at work.  I wrote a review of it for Team Hamster Hat.

Ooooo! Also the site I finally launched the site I was working on with Juli!  She did all the pretty front end stuff and I made all the gear turn behind the scenes.  Check it out!

What's in store for me this week?  Well on Friday I'm going to try to go see The Hold Stead at The Riv and on Saturday The American Autumn is playing a show at Just For Fun (oh yea! another roller rink show!), you should come check it out.

So it looks like it's been a little while since I last posted something here.  I wish I had been doing more interesting things so that I would have a better excuse for my neglect and more content for this post, but alas, I've mainly been just busy with normal stuff.

The band is going well, we're starting to write again, while regrouping for our recording plans.  It feels good to write again and it will be nice to play some new stuff at our upcoming shows.

I'm back to working from my office in the loop for work.  It worked out well that I'm back to taking public transportation about the time of year when scootering is starting to seem like to cold an option.  When I got back to the office for the first time my desk was exactly how I had left it.  Absolutely covered in papers.  I have no idea what most of them were for.  I threw most of them out.  I did keep all the stupid drawings on post it notes I have all over, though.  They seemed important.    I'm pretty settled in now and I'm enjoying taking the train to work.  It's nice to have more time to read.  I've been getting into Christopher Moore books lately.  He's got a very good dry sense of humor and his stories are fun, light reads.

Last Wednesday we did the Mario Kart experiment I had planned for Team Hamster Hat.  I still need to crunch the data and do the write up for that.  Maybe I'll get to that tonight.  I'm excited to finally have a Science! article to put up.  We still need a steady flow of material for that site.  Jeff, Bryan, and I have been writing almost everything lately and we would love to have other people write some reviews.  I'd like to have at least one new post every week day.

So what's everybody going to be for Halloween?

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