Main Characters:

• LMSGGwHoG - Leading Man, Somewhat Geeky Guy with Heart of Gold (he’s a Musician/Artist/Athlete)
• BHEGWIRHSTtM - Blonde Hottie Ex-Girlfriend Who Increasingly Reveals Her Shallowness Throughout the Movie
• FoLWWLtQWALoB - Friend of LMSGGwHoG Who Wants LMSGGwHoG to Quit Wallowing About Loss of BHEGWIRHSTtM
• PDWiNwHaARHSTtF - Popular Dude Who is Now with BHEGWIRHSTtM and Also Reveals His Shallowness Throughout the Film
• NPABWLGM - New Pretty Attractive Brunette Who Lead Guy Meets; Likes LMSGGwHoG for Who He Is and Really Supports His Big Project or Band; Also Has Heart of Gold

Synopsis:
Recently dumped LMSGGwHoG wallows about loss of BHEGWIRHSTtM for over first half of film. Eventually LMSGGwHoG gets over BHEGWIRHSTtM and eventually falls for NPABWLGM. A turn of events makes BHEGWIRHSTtM to come back to LMSGGwHoG, but in the end, LMSGGwHoG chooses NPABWLGM.

What? You say you’ve already seen this movie?

Nevermind.

Here are some of my favorites (all photos by David Katz/Obama for America). Click on any image for a bigger version at Flickr:

I remember seeing the funny name “Barack Obama” on a bumper sticker in my neighborhood in January 2004 when he was running for Senate. That was the first time I’d heard of him. Forward three years he announced his run for the presidency in February 2007. I made a small donation on the day of the announcement and purchased the shirt that Mary is wearing in this photo (this is the first time this original campaign shirt has been worn!). Due to our support status with the campaign, we were granted tickets to the big celebration rally and speech in Grant Park in Chicago.

I don’t do mornings, nevertheless, Mary and I walked to the polls at 6AM. I went to work (my first day as a contractor doing work as Zabada, Inc., the country and my work is changing ). I rushed home from work and was on the Metra at 5:15PM.

We made the 2 mile walk to Hutchison Field in Grant Park. The energy was super high all over downtown Chicago. It felt like … I don’t know … just good. As we got nearer, it was great to see the buildings lit up with red and blue lights and the various floors lit up to spell USA, etc.

We got into the event by 7:30 or 8 and it was really fun to watch the results come in on CNN on the big screens and cheer when another state dropped for Barack. The place went crazy when the news called it for Obama at 10PM. I was glad to be there.

It was weird to watch McCain’s speech at 10:20. For the most part, he gave a great concession speech (although it was disappointing to hear all of the booing from his supporters) … I really think that if McCain would have been himself, as he was in this speech, for his entire campaign and if he would have picked a reasonable running mate, then the election would have been at least competitive.

Anyway, we were maybe 50 yards back from the podium … being tall, I could see Barack in person as he gave the speech. I really liked how he reached out to other countries of the world in his victory speech.

We made the slow walk with the celebrating crowds back to the trains. Michigan Avenue was just packed with people. We took the Blue Line back home. John Stirratt and Pat Sansone of Wilco were standing right next to me on the train (don’t forget about my related tune Jeff Tweedy Turd ). I knew who they were but didn’t bug them … it seems like they can pretty much get around town without being recognized. I also bumped into them outside the Aragon Ballroom last month before the Beck show.

We got to our stop and the buses were no longer running, so we walked another 2 miles home.

It was a long day and I was tired … but I was happy to have witnessed history … and I was happy to live in a great city like Chicago.

That’s it … check out the rest of my photos election day 2008 and enjoy this video with one half of Wilco and Obama …

Here’s the native French speakers translation describing this creative project:

Here is a remake of the “Thriller” song that I’ve entirely recorded with my own voice, using 64 acappella tracks. There is therefore no instrument, synthétizer, beatbox, or even to sampler, but only the sound of my voice livened up with Reverb and slight Chorus on certain tracks. Regarding looping parts, Ive simply used the « looping » technique. Moreover, in the whole piece (which contains several thousand notes), I transposed 8 notes, which were impossible for me to sing in high-pitched . Because of my tessiture, I also must have resigned myself to sing certain parts in head voice, more particularly on the track corresponding to Michael Jacksons solo vocal.

Ive accomplished this non-commercial project at home only with a mobile PC, microphone, headphones and webcam - in nearly 350 hours. Its just an artistic challenge, accomplished during my hours of free time, whose purpose is to make smile my close circle and the internauts.

Well a sure-winner on that show is newcomer to the 2008 race for the White House: Joad Cressbecker. He’s got my vote! Check it:

I’ve always felt like starting a post like the awesome Jim Anchower, and now I just did.

Stuff is a little crazy and changing in my world, more about that later, but in the meantime, I really enjoyed this little ditty by Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain. They’ve got some other interesting ones like “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Life on Mars”, but this one’s my fave. RIP Mr. Shaft / Chef / Isaac Hayes. Enjoy:

One interesting thing that I noticed was that the Gotham license plates looked exactly like Illinois license plates. At first, when the bus backed into the bank at the beginning, I thought that they screwed up and left Illinois plates on the bus. But upon further inspection, they’d replaced the script “Illinois” with a similar script “Gotham”. And the picture of Lincoln from the Illinois plate was replaced with something else. Here’s an Illinois plate:

And here’s the bus plate:

It’s pretty obvious why they designed the Gotham plate to look just like Illinois plates … since it was mostly filmed in Chicago, the license plates on any non-prop cars that sneak into the film will, from a distance, match with the Gotham plates.

I watched them film a few of the big chase scenes in Chicago last summer. Seeing all of the equipment, personnel, security, props, etc. made me just overwhelmed when thinking about planning and project managing a project of this magnitude. Yowsa!

Here’s a handy dandy table:

Even Google tries to set you straight. Here’s what Google gives you if you if you search for “half a dozen”:

So save your breath or 11 characters of typing and just go with “6″!

Here’s Mary offering free “dragon tears” to anyone who can help us out:

Here’s a shot of Jermaine and Brett that I took once inside:

Mary got a hot tip from a security dude that the Conchords were playing a post-show gig at Schubas after the show… We went there and ate dinner, and sure enough, they showed up … but they were quickly brisked off to a private party; no special bonus show for us.

It was a fun night … kind of felt like a stalker like their #1 fan Mel … when we went to Schubas to look for them.

I was thinking that it must kind of weird being a celebrity of medium-level stature … Jermaine and Brett probably would not be recognized by 98% of Americans, but for stalkers like Mel, they’re the #1 rock stars in the world.
Oh, and speaking of medium-level celebrities, I walked out of the theatre next to Jim DeRogatis, rock critic of the Sun-Times, co-host of the excellent Sound Opinions, and soon-to-be R. Kelly trial witness. Being the rock nerd that I am, I recognized him and told him that I loved his show … he gave a curt nervous “thanks” and hustled out the door (I’ll cut him a break for not being more friendly, he probably had a deadline to issue his review for the morning paper).

This post brought to you by Flight of the Conchords Season 1 DVD and the Flight of the Conchords Studio Record!

If the mayor gets to put his name on fancy dancy things that he is proud of, he should also have to put his name on non-fancy-dancy things like the worst CHA buildings.

The end.

Once in a while, you run into a FANTASTIC piece of work. Grade “A” stuff. And that is great.

Most of the time, local and independent work is tolerable to okay, you know, like if you had to give it a grade, you’d give it a “C”. You take SOMETHING from it, but overall, it’s not so memorable or inspiring.

And then the rest of the time, you run in to stuff that is SO BAD that you are embarrassed for the artist. I’m talking about stuff that you’d give a grade of “F”, or maybe “D-” if you are feeling generous.

I’ve experienced my fair share of HORRIBLE musicals, independent movies, sketch comedy, rock bands, paintings, photography, etc. But what always happens to me when I experience this stuff is that I say to myself, “I could do 10 times better than that guy without even trying”. Even if it is an art form that I have zero experience in, I feel as if I could crank out something better than the drivel that I have just experienced. It makes me want to go home and write a movie. Or write a book. Or record a song. Or paint a picture. And sometimes I do.

Don’t get me wrong, I have all the respect in the world for EVERYONE who is willing to put themselves out there and show the world their work. It often takes balls. Lots of folks who want to publish a song or write a novel or make a movie never even TRY. Usually fear stops them cold … fear of inadequacy, fear of failure, fear of ridicule, whatever. They never even try. So my hat is off to everyone who even tries.

But sometimes it is SO sad when an ambitious project that someone has sunk hours and hours and hours into is SO BAD. The good thing about experiencing this embarrassingly horrible art: it often inspires me.

So next time you’re stuck, go seek out a horrible play or indie movie or rock band. It may just give you the inspiration to produce something that is at least a “C” and who knows, you may produce an “A”!

this is a cross-post from acidfreeink.com

A technical support person comes to me and says, “I’ve got a customer whose lamp doesn’t work, you’ve got a bug in the logic that handles time zones in the timer.”

“Hmmmm” I say. What makes you think that there’s a bug in time zone stuff?

“Well, our customer was living in NYC and he moved to Chicago. When he set it up in his Chicago loft, it didn’t work. NYC is Eastern time, Chicago is Central.”

“Hmmm. Couple of questions. Is the lamp plugged into a working AC outlet and is there a working bulb in the lamp?”

“Yep” says support technician.

“You verfied this?” I ask.

“Yep”

“How did you verify this”.

“Oh, the customer said that it worked in his NYC apartment.”

I say, “OK, humor me here. 1.) Plug some other electric powered device into the outlet that the lamp is plugged into and verify that it the outlet is delivering power. 2.) Take the bulb out of the lamp and make sure that it works in another working lamp.”

“OK, just a minute” says technical support technician. “Oh, it wasn’t plugged in. Now it works.”

Support technician does not say thanks. He does not apologize for prematurely playing the blame game and saying that we coded a bug into our product and I don’t hear from him again until there’s a new problem in which he has prematurely come up with a hair-brained explanation as to what the problem is.

It never ceases to amaze me how few technical folks are good at asking the fundamental questions to themselves when trying to figure out a problem. When I am presented with something that does not work, the first thing that I ask myself is “What are the things that make this thing fundamentally work?” 80% of the time, the problem can quickly be solved after asking this question. The fact that time after time after time folks come to me saying they’ve found a bug with something deep in the product and 80% of the time they not correct, is very disheartening.

Now, sometimes there ARE problems. The 20% of the time that the problem brought before me is indeed a bug, I will be the first one to climb on to the mountain top, say “we’ve got a bug!” and take responsibility whether it was directly my fault or not.

On a side note … folks need to learn to leave their ego at the door and always be open to the possibility that they made a mistake and fess up when they screw up. We all screw up. People trust you and like you a lot more when you fess up when you screw up … people who play the blame game for 45 hours a week at work are universally hated, whether they are correct in assigning blame or not.

Ok, that’s enough of a rant! Have a joyful weekend and I hope that you don’t run into any problems that you have to troubleshoot. But if you do, please first ask your self “what are the fundamental things that make this thing work?” There’s a decent chance that you will find that the “broken” lawnmower can be fixed by putting a $4 gallon of gas in it

Well, someecards.com probably did a much funnier job than I would’ve ever pulled off. There are TONS of good ones.

Here are 11 of my favorite workplace cards

This one is totally the current situation at my work:

I am notorious for not turning my timesheets on time. I am sure that there are some folks in my company who would love to send me this one:

I tend to speak pretty freely at work. Sometimes, in trying to warn me to watch what I say, some folks say things that are ten times worse than anything that I would even think of saying in their effort of trying to warn me:

I’ve got one of the better cubicles in my workplace, but some other folks have got to feel like this:

Everybody’s run into this person before:

I never feel like this on my projects, but I have observed many projects from a distance that makes me appreciate this:

George Costanza would be proud of this guy we’ve all met:

I haven’t first hand experienced this, but Mary did way too many times at her previous job:

Two words at my office complex … “Deli Time”

It’s really funny to listen to all of the Blackberry scrolling/button punching in the bathroom stalls:

Some people, you’ve just got to wonder about:

Clearly the big thing here is hosting your stuff with Google who have proved that they can make things perform well and scale and all that. Hmmmmm …. where to focus my limited time and resources ….

Anyway, I’d bet that the Google App Engine will help push Django over the edge and more into the mainstream …

[BTW, I have cashed in $14 in instant lottery ticket winnings from fools who bought these things and didn’t even know that they won a few bucks and threw them on the ground!]

I honestly haven’t paid much attention to NIN since the early 90’s. I’ve got Pretty Hate Machine, Broken and The Downward Spiral which are each great in their own way, but haven’t bothered to pick up any NIN releases since. But I am downloading the new record as I write this.

Man, the old school record industry is screwed. I don’t think that ANY kids buy CDs anymore. Early adopting forward-thinking artists like Trent Reznor and Radiohead will probably become forever remembered for moves like this and 2007-2008 will go down as the end of the record industry as we’ve always known it.

Rock on.

photo credit: cinealoido

There’s a great story of Jonathan Coulton on Yahoo: How To Become a Rockstar.

Jonathan is a kindred spirit in that he’s a software geek … and he quit his job to be a rock star. He eventually self-made himself into an artist making more money as a musician than he did at his software job.

One of the keys to his success was that he forced himself to write and release one song every week for an entire year. It is amazing what can be produced with artificial deadlines like this. It’s the same power wielded by nanowrimo and rpmchallenge.

I gotta make me myself some creative artificial deadlines and goals …

Read and watch : Jonathan Coulton’s story on Yahoo’s “People of the Web”. It’s good stuff.

A few notes on these “tutorials”

1. These are not necessarily “safe for work” or kid friendly … watch at your discretion.
2. Note the images he scrolls by when starting new projects through Adobe Bridge, ha!
3. This guy is kind of a Dane Cook rip-off, who I don’t like so much, but oh well.
4. I love it when he starts a new task and he yells at the listener “Stop! I saw you reaching for the eraser tool (or magic wand or whatever).”
5. It is interesting that he is using a Mac for the first four tutorials, but on the fifth one, when he is “at work in the corporate world”, he is using Windows.

Okay, watch ‘em. Laugh and maybe learn something.

You Sucjk at Photoshop - Volume 1: Distort, Warp and Layer Effects

You Suck at Photoshop - Volume 2: Covering Your Mistakes

You Suck at Photardshop - Volume 3: Clone Stamp and Manual Cloning

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You Suck at Photoshops - Volume 5: Select Color Range

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I really found his exposure of Hillary’s “Rovean” tactics to be disturbing. Now, I don’t hate Hillary Clinton, and in fact I may even like her a little better today than I did a few months ago. But I am 100% behind Barack!

The last third of the video talks about Barack’s potential to “inspire towards peace”, and I couldn’t agree more.

Watch the video:

When did marketers decide that we were so pulp obsessed? I’m with Tony Soprano. In one episode, he complained to Carm that he likes his orange juice with some pulp.

Tony: (looks at orange juice) This says “with pulp.”
Carmela: You like it with pulp.
Tony: Not this much. I like the one that says “some pulp.”
(Carmela throws phone at him)
from The Sopranos Season Three

So here it is!

Now, by me saying that your code is suboptimal, I am not necessarily saying that my code is 100% optimal, it’s just probably a hair more optimal than yours

This post was sponsored by:

Eric Sink’s great book, the Business of Software!

Man, it is cold right now in Chicago. It seems weathermen and weatherwomen get really excited when talking about extremes. In the winter, they talk about the wind chill to make it seem even colder. In the summer they talk about the heat index and the humidity to make it seem even hotter.

But why don’t they ever factor in the wind chill in the summer? For example, “It’s currently 95 degrees at O’Hare but with the nice summer breeze, it feels like 86″.

I think they don’t do that, because then there’s less drama of the extreme temps.

The end!

Hi, this is Billy Mays for Zabada the Album, now available on vinyl!

This posting is a joke. There is no Zabada on vinyl and Billy Mays is not my pitchman. I just needed an excuse to work Billy Mays into this blog and shamelessly get you you go listen to the song Zabada!

Happy New Year!