iDallas!DreamHost is having a crazy sale for our 7th Birthday (I started it with some friends way back when so I have more than a passing interest). If you sign up with Promo code ‘777’, you can get our Crazy Domain Insane plan for only $0.77/mnth. You have to sign up using a credit card and you have to sign up for a full year to get the sale price. Oh, and we’re only giving this sale price to the first 777 people who sign up. Yay!
Tonight I was out and I saw a guy named Kid Beyond perform. He started out with a fun bit of multi-genre beatboxing including some breakbeats, some drum n bass, some techno, and a cover of Nine Inch Nail’s “Closer”. Then he incorporated a multitrack audio looper into the performance and did a cover of a Portishead song that sounded surprisingly close to the original. He also did a few of his own original songs and they were all pretty good to very good. He has an album coming out next year, too. Overall, he’s a really entertaining performer and worth checking out if he plays near you.
The company behind Virgin Megastores and Virgin Atlantic has announced it will begin offering commercial space flights to well-to-do types for £100,000 a pop. They’ve secure a licensing deal with Mojave Aerospace Ventures, the company behind SpaceShipOne and the current front-runner to win the $10M X-Prize. According to the Wired article, the new venture is to be called ‘Virgin Galactic’. How cool is that? I love it.
I went to see the Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow movie on Friday night. It’s very cool looking and has a great period feel to it. I love anything that’s retro futuristic and you can’t go wrong with giant robots. The movie was not full of deep moments or multi-faceted characters, but I had fun watching it nonetheless.
On Saturday night I saw the Pixies play a show at the Greek Theater in Berkeley. I was a relatively late-comer to the world of the Pixies so it was great to have a chance to see them play. The crowd knew every word to every song for the most part so it felt like a big sing-along at times. Overall, it was lots of fun and the Pixies definitely still have that special magic that makes them great.
On the way to work this morning, I started thinking about the line between ‘growing up’ and ‘growing old’, and how thin it really is. That time of your life is when you are best able to realize your dreams and actualize anything you can think of. Before then you are still learning too much about the way things ‘are’ to really put all of the information to use. After then you are too concerned with everything going on (family, career, etc) to have much time left to do anything new. This is all generalizations and simplifications, of course. The main theme is to enjoy whatever life brings you for what it is and don’t worry about the little things. Well, maybe that theme wasn’t in there, but it’s a good thought anyway. Have a nice weekend!
Sony has developed a 200GB 8-layer version of their Blu-ray disc technology they are pushing as the successor to the current DVD format. The forthcoming Playstation 3 will most likely use the 54GB version of Blu-ray Discs. The competing technology is called HD-DVD. It only holds about 30GB of data, but it is much easier (read cheaper) to produce and existing DVD production plants can be converted over with little effort. A couple of years ago my money would have been on the Sony format, but they’ve been increasingly flailing with their proprietary formats… witness Minidisc and ATRAC-3. Sony is also pushing their new SACD format as the successor to the CD, but I suspect the competing DVD-A format will ultimately win out due to the large technical hurdles present in creating SACD content. Blu-ray does seem pretty darn cool, but I don’t think it’ll end up as the next generation DVD.
I signed up for Vonage Voice over IP (VoIP) service last week and the package arrived this weekend. I set it up and got us up and going within about an hour. The only sort of technical part was setting up port forwarding on my DSL router. Most people wouldn’t have to do that as the VoIP box is supposed to go between the DSL/Cable modem and any consumer router you have so it can do Quality of Service (QoS) on your network traffic to make sure there’s always enough bandwidth for phone calls. In my case, the DSL box is also a router/firewall so I had to forward a number of ports to the VoIP box (which I gave a static internal IP). Right now it’s not set up in a way that lets it do the QoS but we haven’t had a problem so far… we don’t really do a lot of large downloads most of the time and it works fine along with normal web browsing and email. Anyway, I have to re-arrange the home network a little but I probably won’t bother until our old home phone number is switched over in about a month. I picked Vonage because they had our home area code available as an option so we could keep our existing phone number. So far it’s working well! For the average DSL/cable user (it requires something better than dial-up) the set up is pretty easy. Best of all the VoIP service comes with all the goodies (voice mail, caller id, call waiting, 3-way, etc) for free and we’re getting 500 ‘anywhere’ minutes (local or long distance) for 15 bucks a month. My favorite feature: As a $5/month add-on service you can get a ‘virtual’ phone number in any US area code. Any calls to the virtual number count as local calls from that area code so you can help other people avoid long distance charges, too. It’s a nice gift for the folks … “Call us for free!”
Paris police stumbled upon a working modern cinema in the catacombs underneath the city. I so want to be one of the Paris ‘cataphiles’ mentioned in the article. I think I need to visit Paris pronto! (via Zannah)
The Submodern album Art and I were working on for about half of this year is now fully done and available. It’s called Object Oriented Mood Management and has 10 original tracks totaling about 50 minutes. We’re happy with it on the whole and the feedback we’ve gotten so far has been very positive. It feels really good to be done with such a large project. We’re now planning on working on some more songs to release as a short EP online. We also have a live set we’ll be putting up on the site soon. Get on the mailing list to find out when that’s up. Also, let me know if you’d like a copy of the CD.
A company called Transitive has developed software called QuickTransit that allows software written for other operating system and hardware combinations to run on basically any other. It’s essentially an emulator, but they have made some significant breakthroughs in performance. Sounds pretty cool. They’re going to target the server market first and then look towards the consumer desktop.