Dave Kellam

**Guided by Voices**
**Blimps Go 90** (2.10mb)
Alien Lanes (1995)

I downloaded this mp3 three years ago. I thought it might be incomplete, and wanted more, so I went out and bought Alien Lanes. This has been followed by obtaining many more albums and songs by GBV, as well as the attending of three live performances. I have a lot of their music, what could be a very large catalog for most artists, but it represents a fraction of the band’s output.

The band will cease to exist soon. Or Bob Pollard is retiring the name, take your pick. He’s the only consistent member and unlikely to stop song-writing any time soon.

Introducing Song of the Moment, stealing from the world of mp3 blogs. It’s not quite perfect and probably has some kinks to be worked out. The songs will stick around for a week or two or until I remember to remove the link. Unless they start sucking up a huge amount of bandwidth.

**Ted Leo & The Pharmacists**
**Me and Mia** (2.48mb)
Shake the Sheets (2004)

This song is pretty damn catchy. I must keep listening to it.

I downloaded some mp3s from the band’s website, listened to a few tracks and then purchased Shake the Sheets and Hearts of Oak from their label. Unfortunately, the source is taking it’s time getting the product to me. So, I have to kill time by creating a website to showcase whatever song I happen to be listening to at the moment. I thought downloading music was supposed to be bad for an artist. Hmm…

Update: My cds have arrived and have been encoded with AAC at a nice bitrate. I haven’t used AAC for anything else yet.

It was ugly outside yesterday, the school board (or bus company) canned the buses and rightfully so, the roads were unsafe. We were about to head for Brockville this morning and discovered that the buses had been cancelled again. It was a pretty nice day, we even had sunshine in the afternoon. I’m not going to complain, but it’s hard to be productive.

I’ve been pretty lazy about updating my reading list, I guess it’s because I found All Consuming kind of sluggish but was too lazy to convert it to weblog format. I should do it soon. The drop-down lists are gone for Archives, they’ve been consolidated into one page, along with the feeds.

There’s been a stink lately about EA’s development process and the hours they force their employees to maintain. Here’s a good article from the New York Times that talks about the company not being much different from any other game or software developer.

Here’s my favourite quote from the article:

Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, spent a sabbatical last spring as a researcher at the company, he wrote, “I am 43 and I felt absolutely ancient during my time there.” He said the place felt to him like “Logan’s Run,” the 1976 science fiction movie in which no one is allowed to live past 30 – and he felt even older when he realized that the 20-somethings were too young to know the reference.

It made me laugh, it just seemed like something i’d read in the Onion or some other rag.

And then a largish post swoops down to save a floundering front page from the depths of quicklink hell. I’m in to my second practicum stint and will be doing that for the next four weeks. A good chunk of any given day is given to teaching, prep and commute. And sleeping. I also spent a good chunk of my day dealing with computer problems and tend not to spend as much time it when I’m home. Beyond that, nothing outrageous to report.

Some things I’ve been playing around with lately:

Adium – has replaced Proteus as my messaging client. I used Proteus for two years but development has slowed and Justin has moved on to work with Apple and iChat. Check out some of the Adium Xtras too (I’m using the Big Icons (Shrunk) message theme).

Smultron – a text editor that Riz pointed out. I haven’t used it that much, but it’s handy to have everything that you’re working on grouped together. It’s a pretty solid replacement for my everyday use of SubEthaEdit.

Texshop – I haven’t used it much, but I’m planning on learning the basics of TeX in the near future.

Growl – Is a universal notifier. Meaning that you can have consistent notifications from Applications like Mail and Adium.

Carbon Copy Cloner – want to make easy and complete backups? This’ll help you out.

FoxyTunes – not strictly a mac app, but pretty cool none-the-less. It’s a music controller that resides in the status bar of FireFox. Handy, considering the browser is one of my most used/open programs.

QuickSilver – I’ve been using this one for awhile, but I’ve been making more frequent use of their plugins directory, they have tons of them.

Well, the election seems to be over for now and Bushy seems to have won. This is a major concern for some people, especially those in the northern states that seemed to vote for the other guy. So, what do we do about the problem of all these disenfranchised people? Why look at the pretty coloured map, all of the blue states have a direct path into the frigid nation to the north. Except Hawaii of course, but it’s a backwater and doesn’t have any roads.

The obvious solution for the blue guys is to join Canada. It’s not like Canada controlling the North-Eastern US is a new idea, we captured and burned the White House during the War of 1812. Those western states would be a nice addition though — through them Canada would control most of the west coast (minus Alaska) and the United But Somewhat Fewer Number of States of America (UBSFNSA) would have to have to go through us to get to the Pacific.

It’s not going to happen, but adding New York and California to Canada would effectively triple the size of the nation. After the states have joined us, the newly formed Canadatu could unilaterally declare war on the UBSFNSA and bring democracy to the embattled nation.

I really haven’t had much to say over the last month or two. The news seems to be all about the American election and I’ll I can do is bash Bush. It’s too easy. One of them will get elected eventually, things won’t change much. Even if Kerry wins, he’s not going to coming running out the front door to tell you all of these dark secrets he discovered.

I managed to go through a few site layouts through October, I’ll hold onto this one for a little while. I need to be less lazy about getting older work up and creating new stuff.

I think Cogeco is acting up again. If it isn’t squirrels pulling cables out of the wall, it’s the monkeys that work there messing around with things.

At the moment though, I’m not really sure if it’s just them or it’s Akamai. I’ve been noticing that a lot of my google searches have been timing out, but I haven’t been doing much browsing so I didn’t notice many other things down. Today, a whole slew of sites are taking forever to load, including the Weather Network and Apple.

At first I thought it might be Google AdSense which a lot of them seem to use, but upon further research I figure it’s either Cogeco screwing up Akamai or Akamai themselves screwing something up. Akamai is the host for Google, Lycos, Apple and other major internet sites. They also used to host Yahoo and Microsoft. A lot of non-Akamai sites are screwing up because of AdSense.

Akamai has had a few cockups already this year though (May 26, June 15), so I wouldn’t put it past them. But Cogeco has taken 5 days to send a guy over to climb up a ladder, so I wouldn’t put it past them to screw up either.

Just a few things, first off, I changed the look of the things. I was sick of the old green and blue, this was a quick style sheet change to appease me. I have something else waiting in the pipes, but the CSS isn’t playing nicely, and I haven’t had time to sit down and fix it.

I started the practicum portion of teacher’s college this week, so I’m up by 6 every morning to head for Brockville. It’s been going well so far, it’ s draining mentally and physically, not unlike a lot of other jobs.

Lastly, it’s my birthday today. Doesn’t really feel like it though, so in my head I’m celebrating on Friday.