Category: Uncategorized

A big shout-out to my brother-in-law Andy, who’s celebrating his birthday today! Among other things, Andy is the bassist for The Ramoniacs, so I thought that the most appropriate tribute would be Happy Birthday, as performed by The Ramones for Mr. Burns on The Simpsons [286K, MP3]. Enjoy, and have a great one, Andy!

(I posted this to The Farm, but there are a fair number of techie readers of this blog, so I’m repeating it here.)

Hey, Bay Area folk!

Wanna get together and talk tech and other things with me and the boss

in February?

Boss

Ross and I will be attending the Evans Data Developer Relations

Conference in San Francisco. The conference

takes place on Monday, Fenbruary 6th and Tuesday, February 7th, but

we’re going to arrive early enough on Sunday to hold a meetup on the

evening of Sunday, February

5th. If you’re interested, drop me a line via email or in the

comments!

The conference is going to be held at the

Argent Hotel in

Union

Square, and Ross and I will stay someplace near there. It’s

been a while since I lived in San Francisco (when I did developer

relations for OpenCola back in 2000/2001, so if any of you SFO locals

have suggestions for where to hold the meetup, let me know — once

again, email or in

the comments is fine.

[via projectionist] You’ve probably heard of Creative Labs — they’re the folks behind the Sound Blaster card, which almost single-handedly brought Wintel machines into the multimedia age (kicking and screaming behind the Mac, which had better sound capabilities from the get-go). They’re not happy with the iPod’s prominence in the personal digital music player department, and as you can see on the page for their Zencast site, they’ve attempted to redefine the word “Podcast”:

Click this image to see a screen capture of the full page.

Contrary to what Creative will tell you, “Podcast” was not coined from “Personal on-demand broadcast.” It is a portmanteau (or if you prefer, neologism) of the words “iPod” and “broadcasting” coined by Ben Hammersley.

In the words of Jason Fried from 37signals: “A for effort, F for give me a fucking break.”

If there’s a Pavel Chekov award for getting history wrong (“Scotch was eenwented by lyeetle old lady een Leningrad!”), Creative Labs have a good shot at winning this year’s.

Full disclosure: As I make this entry, I’m listening to Johnny Cash’s When The Man Comes Around on the iPod nano that Wendy gave me for Christmas.

Guile hit it on the nose during the 2004 federal election, and his statement applies doubly this time around:

“I think the Liberals need to take a time out, stand in the corner and think about what they’ve done.”

Nag, nag, nag. Yup, it’s me again, shilling for nominations for the 2006 Bloggies, which

are open until Tuesday, January 10th at 10:00 pm Eastern Standard Time

(that’s 03:00 Wednesday, January 11th UTC). As I mentioned earlier, the rules are slightly

different this year — you have to nominate a minimum of three

different blogs for your nomination to be valid.

Please make The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century one of your nominations, and thanks to Randy Charles Morin for submitting a nomination for me!

Shown

here: Poop, Pug, Poop!, one of many drawings you’ll find at the

sketchblog with the weird name: Did You Just Call Me a Prick?!

While I’m talking about illustration blogs, be sure to check out

the excellent Drawn! and the blog of one of its contributors, John

“Robot Johnny” Martz.