Phish at Jones Beach

Phish’s tour is under way and it’s a good one.

Over the course of the tour thus far, they’ve been averaging more than one debut a night, which is news in and of itself!  The styles are far ranging, from the straightforward Ocelot, to the 70’s arena rock of Kill Devil Falls to the prog-rock epic Time Turns Elastic.  All good stuff, which should be changing all tour as they adapt them to the live show format…

Below is the list of all of the the new songs that have been debuted on this tour, along with an AUD recording of the first performance  – as new ones appear, I’ll tack ‘em to the list:

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Google's Kickass Product

I was lucky enough to have created an account with Grand Central back in the day (the day being about two years ago), so when Google purchased them a while back, I anticipated good things down the line.  Boy was I was correct!

With the new rollout of their Voice product, Google has made some great improvements and has created something that could change the way folks look at their phone service.

In a nutshell, Google Voice lets you choose a new phone number, and then gives you a well-crafted suite of online tools that let you decide how you want to use and manage your phone service.

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This week we discovered that we were no fewer than five episodes of The Office behind (that’s what happens when you drop your television service!).

As we were watching them on Hulu, the following ad for Intel came up several times, and completely cracked us up.

All hail the creator of USB:

I’m a sucker for a funny acoustic number…

Every now and again I like to step back and take stock of the technology I use daily to see if it needs reassessment. The current list I came up with this time around actually contains very few items that I’d consider necessary evils beyond the occasional headache with hosted services, which is hard to avoid (even that has improved dramatically in the last few years).

Right now it’s a pretty well-vetted toolset – an even mix of free and paid implementations of mostly open technology, and it keeps me relatively productive in Windows, with a minimum of forehead smashing and bluescreening. I use just about all of the following apps and services every day…
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A large part of the work the company I work for does deals with the conception, organization and construction of websites. In all aspects of this process, short of a repeal of Murphy’s Law, redundancy is something that cannot be ignored. In truth, that’s a great rule of thumb for anything computer-related.

Consider that virtual pile of digital photos that has accrued on your hard drive over the years. If you don’t maintain some kind of backup of them, you are one errant disk platter away from losing all those memories. While our websites may be cutting edge, we try work at a safe distance from the precipice. Given the reach of the web, the potential casualties of poor planning can be quite costly, and therefore all aspects of redundancy need to be considered. This means establishing reliable plans for retaining site data, access to it, and even process knowledge.
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Last night, I went on a hunt for more online resources that tickle the intellect in the same manner that TED.com does.  Among others, three stood out – fora.tv and bigthink.com and the video collection on poptech.org.

In this particular talk, Mike Rowe, the truly amusing host of Dirty Jobs, discusses a unique moment of epiphany at a conference in Silicon Valley:

Over the last year or so, the company I work for has begun utilizing a tool called CakePHP to build some of its websites. CakePHP is a PHP-based flexible framework which allows developers to quickly build web applications in a manner similar to Ruby on Rails. It has a large, very active community and is based on free, open source projects. Because of this, support for the framework is widely available and easy to come by, both via the web, IRC, or local and web-based user groups.

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One of my favorite TED talks so far: physicist Brian Greene explains superstring theory, the idea that minscule strands of energy vibrating in 11 dimensions create every particle and force in the universe.