Monthly Archive: April 2009

That chorus kept running through my head, and I thought about how this and other RMB songs have inspired me. And I realized I should go. I should rearrange my “plans” and do something different. I wanted to support the band, do my small part to help make their dream come true, and maybe find some more inspiration toward my own dreams. I suspected I would see a great show.

So I headed out to The Cedar Cultural Center on April 14.

And oh man am I glad I did. It was nearly a religious experience. I’ve seen the light. My goal with this post and at least one more to follow is to share the joy with others; to persuade you to listen to their music. Give them a try. What kind of music is this, you ask? I have no idea what category to place it in. It’s just good. Great. Reviewers describe their style as folk, blues, soul, R & B, ragtime, and rock.

I think I first learned about the web site Zen Habits when my sister sent me a link to this post: Open Source Blogging: Feel Free to Steal My Content, in which the blog’s author, Leo Babauta, places all of his writing from the site and from his ebook Zen To Done into the public domain.

It was music to my ears, coming from someone enjoying success (financial and otherwise) with their blog and their writing, and it really showed that he “gets” Free Culture. Since then I’ve subscribed to Leo’s blog and have found many things to inspire me there.

Given Leo’s generous and enlightened attitude about his own work and the importance of sharing freely, it made his post from yesterday even more disappointing. In “Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway (or, the Privatization of …

I think I found the first three of these while catching up on Jason Kottke‘s feed. Jason’s site is a great place to lose vast stretches of time find interesting web pages. Many of my Twitter links are uncredited Kottke finds. :-)

For the Lost watchers out there: Vintage DHARMA ads from 70s magazines.

Detroit street with 60 out of 66 homes in foreclosure. Sad to think of happier times for this neighborhood and better times for Detroit overall. Sometimes when I see things like this I get a feeling of being an observer from another time, here to witness… something. Hopefully not the ultimate decline of our society/civilization.

Disturbing Strokes: Creepy alternate music for Different Strokes opening.

Susan Boyle on Britain’s Got Talent. I had seen …

NetBeans speaks Python now! In my first pass at learning Python last year, I had looked around at IDE options and noted that NetBeans didn’t seem to support it yet. Eclipse probably had a Python plugin at the time, but it may have seemed too daunting to try out. I can’t remember now. In any case, I wasn’t needing a full-fledged IDE then. Python’s interactive prompt and IPython were good for my purposes, but I knew eventually I’d want something more.

Now I’m back into learning more Python, and was excited and happy to see all the work that has been done for the language in NetBeans. I downloaded a standalone installer for NetBeans 6.5.1 which painlessly installed the IDE on my Ubuntu 8.10 machine, and then from Tools » Plugins selected Python, and that was that. …

A Google Trends graph of searches for “treadmill” and “elliptical” reveals an unsurprisingly persistent annual pattern:

Look at that mid-year surge in search volume for treadmills in 2006: What happened? Was Britney Spears photographed in a compromising position on a treadmill? (And I wonder how many people will now find this post in a search for compromising pictures of Britney Spears?)