infrequent posts, mostly about tech, music, baseball, and beer.
Went to see My Morning Jacket in concert at the Greek in Berkeley last Friday evening. I have to say it may have been the best concert I’ve ever been to.
There weren’t any opening bands, just MMJ. They came out around 8 and finished around 11, so we got nearly three hours of live music. I’d heard that they were really good live, and have somewhat of a large and dedicated following for concerts. I was blown away with how good they sounded. I think these knuckleheads enjoyed it too:
I’ll be at the Search Engine Strategies conference this week in San Jose. This will be my first time as a speaker (panelist, really) for Google, and I’m happy to get a chance to represent and help others if possible. I’ll be a panelist for the Site Clinic on Thursday at 10:15 am. Come by and say hi, ask questions, but take it easy on me, it’s my first time!
Looks like the schedule is packed with lots of good stuff, so I’m sure the conference will be another success. If you’re attending, be sure to make it to the Google Dance Tuesday night at 7 pm. I’ll also be hanging out at the Google Webmaster booth. Very friendly people with lots of good advice. I also hear there may be some pretty intense foosball matches being played. Swing by Tuesday and Wednesday in the Expo Hall, booth 530. I somehow got picked to represent Google (along with Jan from the Dublin office). I’m going to need to shake the rust off. 
Just tried out the video downloads on the PS3 network last night. I downloaded a couple episodes of Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Since it’s just a cartoon, and a rather short one at that (around 12 minutes an episode I think), the download didn’t take very long at all, and only took up about 170 mb or so. They were $1.99 each.
The selection isn’t the biggest yet, but I have to say what is available is a decent selection. Poking around, I noticed among the HD movies available for download, the largest I spotted seemed to be just over 6 gb. I’ll be curious to see how long that takes to download and if it gets throttled by Comcast. I think I’ll need to look into upgrading the storage for the PS3 as well. Is this easy to do on the PS3? I haven’t looked into it yet.
Oh, and the episodes I watched were the first two episodes from season six. Wacky and weird as usual, but still hilarious. And Frylock, Master Shake and Meatwad don’t even show up yet.
I tried to register a couple of .me domain names today. Searching for the domain names returned “available!” messages, so I continued through the registration and payment process. Entered credit card info, etc. etc. Even got the confirmation email.
Then I got an email saying “The following domain name cannot be registered – reason: already registered”.
Well, that would have been nice to tell me WHEN I WAS DOING THE FREAKING SEARCH TO BEGIN WITH.
I know I’m not the only one this has been happening to. How can they not be prepared for this kind of surge? As the self-proclaimed “World’s #1 domain name registrar”, you think they would handle this better.
To top it all off, they send me an email asking to fill out a customer survey after speaking with their support on the phone. I filled out the survey which included some negative feedback. After I hit the “submit” button, I get a pop-up in the browser stating: “You are about to submit negative feedback. Are you sure?”
Wow. Seriously? You’re f$%&ing right I’m sure.
Time for a doomsday post, but first, a funny cartoon that’s been around for a while:
When you consider all of the things we worry about these days, it can really be quite depressing. Take the following for example:
Those are just things off the top of my head. So how are we going to fix these things (well, the ones that can be fixed), and continue to scale for the future?
I dunno. I was hoping someone knew. If you have an idea, leave a comment.
I’ll be taking a sabbatical from work July 1st through August 15th. I’m looking forward to decompressing and taking some time off. Some things I’ve got planned so far:
I’d like to get some improvements done to the condo as well; we’re thinking about hardwood flooring and maybe a couple other things.
I sure hope all the wildfires in California are put out soon; the haze in the sky from all the smoke is really a bummer.
I was shopping at Macy’s with my wife recently when, during a long wait at the register in which I consequently got bored and started snooping around, I noticed how incredibly old their computers were:
And this is the case with most of the department stores I’ve been to. I worked at Mervyn’s for a few years during college and always wondered, even back then, why on earth their technology was so dated.
I recently signed up for an account at MapMyRun to keep track of my running activities. Seems pretty cool so far. They’ve got a Google Maps mash-up for mapping out runs and saving your routes. You can also look at other runner’s routes which they’ve made public. Here’s a map I just made tonight, which I’ll be running tomorrow:
You can also do some cool stuff like track the mileage on your shoes, etc. so you know when it’s time to replace them. I think I’ve got about 100 miles on my new pair of shoes so far.
There’s also a new running store on California Ave. which will be opening soon I believe – Zombie Runner. Though it seems this store is more tailored toward ultra marathoners(insane), it will definitely come in handy for runners of all kinds.
This post is inspired by the Wysz and his hatred for idiot marketing.
I recently received a very official and important looking piece of mail. I get a fair amount of junk mail and quite a few pieces that try to get past the average person’s manual “junk mail” filter by putting things on the envelope like “official”, “important”, or even “time sensitive”. I’m usually pretty good at filtering these out, but sometimes they do such a good job of making mail look important enough that I shouldn’t take the chance of throwing it away and end up opening it. Here’s a recent example:
Whoah, what’s this? “Official Property Documents Enclosed”, from the “Administrative Offices of APF/OV”, whatever that is. Hm, I guess I should open it just in case.
Ugh. Gimme a break. It’s some company trying to get me to refinance my mortgage. I really hate this crap. I wish there was some way to make this illegal.
My wife and I celebrated our three year wedding anniversary tonight and enjoyed a wonderful dinner at Left Bank in Menlo Park. Do yourself a favor and have their Salade Nicoise. I’m pretty sure it’s the best salad I’ve ever had.