Playing With Sharp Objects

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Click the button below if you want to nominate MonkeyChow for the Community Choice Awards at Sourceforge.

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Free Comics Day

Today was Free Comic Book Day and Comic Fusion of Flemington was one of the sole stores in NJ participating this year that had appearances by local artists.  Free Comic Book Day is also a great tool in promoting literacy.  I took the kids there where they met a few characters and picked up some free books.  Apparently we were too late to catch Cyclops, but there were other characters on hand.  Artists Erica Hesse and Scott Barnett were available to draw portraits.  My youngest son now has a head shot of Wolverine drawn by Scott on his wall.

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Why I’ll Never Use IE8

Recently Microsoft began urging IE6 and IE7 users to update to IE8, even to the point of posting a notification through Automatic Updates as High Priority.  While Windows 7 may be seen as Microsoft’s saving grace, IE8 is still the ripe spot on the fruit that no one really wants to eat.  Anyone buying Windows 7 will be forced to use it, and if past browser usage patterns are any hint, IE8 will supplant previous Microsoft browsers within 18 months of its release.  Luckily, this update will be opt-in at this time.  However, with its inclusion in their operating systems, it is essentially a forced upgrade over time.  While Microsoft may force IE8 upon me in the future, I will never use it for my web browsing needs.

The history of Microsoft’s browsers is pretty muddied, with each being touted as more secure than the last.  In reality, IE8 is easily hacked and only offers more vulnerabilities to the web community.  While it is true that Microsoft’s browser problems come from being such a big corporate target, pouring millions into IE development has not changed their situation for the better.  It has, in fact, only resulted in reduced browser popularity due to lack of public trust in the product.

The introduction of Google’s Chrome browser along with Apple’s release of webkit based Safari kicked off a browser speed war.  All this will be getting a run for its money with Firefox 3.5’s upcoming new rendering engine.  There are plenty of alternate browsers available, so it is imperative that developers stop taking the lazy way out by coding to platform dependent architectures like ActiveX.  In order to serve a wider audience, web based services need to support all the choices.  Microsoft’s rumored Gazelle browser is a step in the right direction, but it’s a song we’ve heard from them before.  In the meantime, there are a lot of little browsers eating away at Microsoft’s share.  I made my choice to use Firefox a long time ago because of its flexibility.  What’s your choice?

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Watchmen and the problem with superheroes

Watchmen will be heading out of theaters soon, leaving on a quieter note than comic fans had hoped.  Its opening weekend, not quiet the number one movie ever, was very impressive.  But it quickly declined, and less than a month after it came out, it still hasn’t recouped its filming budget.  Why couldn’t Watchmen, one of the most loved superhero stories of all time, rake in the numbers that Dark Knight did?  It reveals a sad truth about the future of the superhero movie genre.

The story of Watchmen, published 1986-1987, is set in concrete.  Fandom would never accept anything less than the full rendition of the story.  From the tales I’ve read of Snyder’s road to keeping the script true to the story, this movie dodged a dozen bullets to get is this close to the original tale.  But a 12 issue series is a very complex lattice of story telling that no one will sit through for the full telling, scaring away all but the most rabid of fans.  Threads peripheral to the main story get left out, details leading to that are then removed, and fans are then disappointed that something they remember is left out of the original book.  The Watchmen craze filled bookstores with what now appears to be fodder for near-future firesales of graphic novels.  To those of us who have collected comics for some time, the story is very well known as evidenced by the dog-eared copy of the graphic novel we’re re-read many times.  I am willing to bet that most of those copies snatched up by the public, were quickly read part of the way through prior to the opening weekend, only to now lay forgotten and unfinished on a pile, where the final triumph of what is essentially Rorschach’s story will not be tasted.  They know nothing of the many layers of the graphic novel and its deeply woven threads.

To most people, Watchmen was something new, something most people would not know how to deal with.  The heroes don’t win, at least not in the way of every superhero story that has hit the screen.  In  fact, the ending may be morally distasteful.  The characters are not the brave, clean shaven, masterminds that we see in our other heroes.  The Watchmen are what the real world would produce in a person who would throw on a costume and run around in public while beating up other people: a sadistic killer and rapist, a megalomaniac, a violent psychopath, a coward, a recluse, a sexual masochist.  These were not your grandfathers’ heroes, which the film touches nicely on in the alternate history painted in the opening credits.  The first generation heroes of the Minutemen were as close as you come to the original costumed crime fighters of the golden age of comics and they pass the torch on to the next wave of heroes, the Crimebusters.  The fact they changed the name of the team for the movie highlights from the start that this story was something most people would not get.  These are all humans with human issues, the sons of New York, rather than the last sons of Krypton.

After that amazing opening credits crawl, the film itself takes about an hour to get to the Comedian’s funeral, flashing back to each remaining character’s interactions with the Comedian over the years.    This is too long to get to the point, but without giving some backstory, the public has no knowledge of who these people really are.  Spiderman and Superman have the benefit of decades of familiarity to bootstrap their movies.  There is no need to tell anyone that Clark Kent is Superman – we go into the theater knowing this and the director doesn’t spend a lot of time on this.  Most of our superhero movies these days consist of that first origin story, followed years later by a deeper story later on that usually draws less money.  The Watchmen had to hit the highlights of origins, entire careers, and basically the end of the superhero all in one sitting.  The story does benefit from the fact that only Dr Manhattan, as the only true superhero of the story, really had an origin story to tell.  Similar to Batman, everyone else’s origin story starts and ends with throwing on some tights.  And the average ticket holder had no freakin idea why that violent guy’s face shifted around under his hat.  In fact for today’s young audience there is a whole other series of questions that crop up: What was so special about 1985?  What the heck is a Soviet?  Who is Nixon?  This was a niche story – I love that they picked this story.  But I also know that this is a big hurdle to get over and the fact that it made $100mil so far is a great accomplishment for the makers of this film.

The ugly truth of all this is that the entertainment industry has fallen short of ideas, and after cranking out one too many sequels of its own old tales, can no longer regurgitate anythiing in a new form.  So they have settled on retelling our old comic stories, sometimes remixing them in ways they were not meant to.  They do not realize the rich tales that can be told by just Sandman or just Venom, so they mash them together with the Hobgoblin to give us an OK Spiderman movie with hardly any story that somehow turns out to be a blockbuster.  But that can be excused because the character is on loan to Sony Pictures from Marvel and is not driving at the same meta story that Marvel is aiming for.  Marvel is now working on producing movies for a number of well known characters, and then making the genius move of tying them together into a single Avengers movie.  This all hinges on getting the writing perfect for each movie, but as evidenced by Iron Man and Hulk, Marvel is not accepting any script without really scrutinizing it.  DC Comics on the other hand, also holding a rich stable of characters, has not yet coordinated its plans which I suspect will likewise culminate in a Justice League film.  These are all great characters that will provide profitable movies for years to come.

Once you get past the very well known heroes, the rest are niche characters like the Watchmen that essentially play supporting roles in the annals of comics.  And unless we are ready for the movie industry to produce an Aunt May film, we’ll have to settle for Iron Man 10 which will hopefully not be preceded by 7 or 8 terrible scripts.   The well of the superhero genre is quite deep, having lasted decades.  But the comic industry itself has gone through booms and busts during that time and the story arcs worth combining into a feature film are few if action is the only measure of a film’s success.  I believe Watchmen was as deep as we are going to get – I’m glad it was made at this time rather than earlier with meager effects.  But with it’s subpar earnings, the likelihood of another superhero story being produced on its literary merits is pretty slim.  There are actually very many comic stories from independent publishers that really deserve to be made into movies.  The trick will be not marketing them as superhero movies, but as a human story that can hopefully hold its own while still hosting some action.  And once all the good comic book stories are told, it is my hope that the movie industry is inspired to start creating again.  Maybe just in time before they decide to remake the Matrix series.

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The coming of iPhone 3.0 apps

The iPhone 3.0 is a mere four months away and the recent announcements have made everyone drool over copy and paste and enhanced Google Maps.  But knowing these new features, we can start to imagine what our current favorite apps could look like.

1. Last.fm – With the iPhone 3.0, apps will now be able to read music directly from your synced music library.  Something I’ve wanted for a long time is to directly scrobble songs while listening to them.  I foresee a Last.fm app that will play my music and automatically scrobble it to the last.fm site.  No more syncing with the Last.fm desktop applications, which only works every other time on the Mac and hardly ever worked for me on the PC.
2. Facebook – As distasteful as I find it, in app purchases will allow Facebook to continue to support those people who have a need to spend real money on a fake flower to send to their friends.  There are tons of sites that similarly serve their online experience as a piecemeal offering, which I foresee will flood the iPhone app market upon seeing a new money making wellspring to dip from.
3. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter – Any social networking app will benefit from the peer-to-peer functionality that will come from the iPhone 3.0 OS. But bringing up each one of these when someone wants to trade contacts will be annoying, especially with some of the load times.  Instead I see a contact aggregator program and service coming that will trade all of them at once, including IM and meatspace info – maybe by a site like Plaxo that’s already accustomed to dealing with contact aggregation and syncing.
4. Google – Spotlight search will probably be extended to something like Google Desktop’s cross system indexing so that the Google app hooks into all your information for easy searching from the iPhone.
5. Evernote – Cut and Paste will make keeping records of everything we want to keep track of a breeze.  Connecting into Spotlight will make this even more useful.  Basically anything that can maintain an index in Core Data of what you currently host on some web site somewhere will probably be searchable from Spotlight.
6. Any IM service – as already announced, Meebo will be available to make use of push notifications.  Any IM and messaging service should be able to take advantage of this.  This is not the panacea we’ve made it out to be, however, as Apple has had its share of problems with push, including the Mobile Me issues.  Push notification could turn out to be a horrible repeat of that disaster.
7. Amazon, Ebay, and other purchase apps – I would love to see push notifications extended to where these shopping cart apps will alert you when an order updates, ships, arrives.  This would make the whole experience more interactive and provide them with another opportunity to get you back in the store, giving them another shot at your dollars with another “people who bought this item, also bought…”
8. Todo  and Omni apps -  again, push notification should be able to update the badges on the app icons, showing how many items I am currently behind on.  It doesn’t necessarily have to pop something up in my face in the middle of something I’m doing for push to be useful.
9. Brightkite – Anything with a map will be lots more useful once the Google maps API is opened up more.  I’m not too crazy about the turn-by-turn functionality because that leaves the GPS functionality at the mercy of receiving a call.  If the music and GPS and phone features can be balanced such that there is no conflict while in turn-by-turn mode, this will be really useful.  Then my position can be updated realtime, for those that want to get a hold of me – for benevolent purposes, that is.

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Battlestar Galactica: A Plan?

Battlestar Galactica has been a staple in our home since we were blown away by the original miniseries. I still have a Battlestar lunchbox from the original 70s series, now full of plastic green army soldiers, that I’ve passed on to my five year old. How the old series could even have evolved from that campy, sexist show into what we saw come to completion this week strains the imagination. Previous attempts to revive the series were either bad continuations of the series or complete derailments like Richard Hatch’s obvious attempt at ripping off Star Wars and various other scifi classics.

The old series was as ragtag as the opening credits claimed and at the time was too expensive for the limited audience it held. It’s daliance with aliens was kept at the very borders of the story, probably a bad stab at reliving Lucas’ hit cantina scenes, and eventually abandoned. The series completely sank when the Colonian Fleet arrived at earth and tried to make a series out of that. At 13, even I had to hold my nose to watch it.

My history with beloved TV shows has been such that if I liked it, it went off the air shortly after: Space: Above and Beyond, The Flash, Adventures of Brisco County Junior, Firefly.  Only this show has outlasted them enough to get to a smoothly flowing story.  Now, at the end of the fourth season, Battlestar has reached a conclusion that has wrapped up most, but certainly not all of our questions.  The final pieces have been left for a final 2-hour television movie to be aired by what will then be known as SyPhy, called Battlestar Galactica: The Plan.  After having waited almost a year between seasons two and three, and almost another year between seasons three and four with only a 2 hour movie (Battlestar Galactica: Razor) to tide us over, they again have me waiting until the fall to catch a last glimpse of a favorite universe.

We hope that the creators of the series will answer some final questions such as what exactly were these angels and how was it that, if Starbuck was one of them, that everyone was able to see her.  Since she was dead and lived again, is she some hybrid cylon and human?  What was the relation to the hybrids on the basestars that Anders joined.  How was it that a society so entrenched in their technology suddenly agreed to live without any technology at all?  And are these angels the ones guiding these cycles of destruction by settling the humans down again and sending the mechanicals off, knowing that both sides will eventually forget the truce after hundreds of thousands of years?  And how do they explain another humanoid species, when ours only came about by lucky destruction of the previous dominant species by random world shattering comet/asteroid strikes?  Why would a selfish, plotting person like Cavil, a being that no longer had any chance at being resurrected, just kill himself in the opening shots of a firefight? What would prevent the centurions that flew off into space from rediscovering resurrection technology on their own as happened so many times in the past and returning en masse to scoop up the protohumans?  And why would Adama, knowing that Laura was dying on that final flight, decide to leave his son?  The behavior of the Colonials upon landing on this new Earth is puzzling, but maybe understandable and more realistic considering what they had just survived.  Why was this planet, our planet with its recognizable continents, not the real Earth, but just another Earth?  And for Hera’s only importance to be just to survive long enough to be the genetic Eve of our planet.

The final shots of the dancing robots did put a disappointingly corny touch on it all, but this is where I hope the fall movie will put a final capstone on it all.  The end season of the series seemed rushed, certainly not helped by last year’s writer’s strike. I wonder if they can really cover all the remaining details to leave fans fully satisfied.  This is certainly a series that I’ve enjoyed more than many others and I’ve loathe to see it gone.  The TiVo will surely be a lot emptier for it.  It may be some time before another series will match its brilliance as a whole, but this will be quite memorable.  For now I have DVDs of BSG Season One to keep my attention, and I’ll be able to look back and find those hinting seeds of story that may make even more sense out of that final two hour telling.

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Back to the comic book store

I’ve been collecting comics books since 1977 when I picked up a movie tie-in for Star Wars at my local Acme supermarket.  I collected random Superman, Hulk, Spiderman, and Captain Marvel (DC) issues that caught my eye (strangely this included a Captain Nazi issue), with no regard whatsoever for story continuity.  What passed for special effects in those days was better than what I saw on TV or movies, and that really grabbed my attention.  It was very short lived and I think I collected until around 1980, right after Empire Strikes Back.

Many years later I found myself checking out the comics stand while spending a summer at my grandmother’s.  I had stopped at a local library a few years before and spent hours reading through a Marvel Best Of hard back collection, which included a Captain America story with the Red Skull and a Thor/Loki story.  I think it was about 1984 when Secret Wars and Longshot miniseries came out.  I had a lot of time to kill and was guaranteed a good stream of comics each week because of their low cost compared to going to the movies all the time.  Marvel was coming out with a good number of acclaimed new titles such as New Mutants and I got wrapped up in the various cross-overs and tie-ins.  I really got into Captain America, and being a fan of mythology I also got into Walt Simonson’s Thor. After that summer I signed up for a number of mail subscriptions and later tried out a few delivery services which required a pick list.  I took my love of comics with me to college where I continued to collect through out the years.  I did get into the Batman series with the great DarkKnight Returns and Killing Joke, ironically right before the 1989 Batman file was annnounced.  Somehow I missed the original runs of great series like V for Vendetta and Watchmen, but caught them years later when they were first collected into trade paperbacks, probably around 1991. I continued to collect and grab back issues and trade for stuff missing from my collection.  I collected all the way back to the beginning of Walt Simonson’s run on Thor, all New Mutants issues, and some really old XMen titles.  I even was part of a group of comic writers on a mailing list COMICW-L run by Bill Hayes back in 1992-1995.

Having landed my first real job in 1994, I slowly began to stray away from comics as I found less and less time for it.  I had moved to a new place, dismayed at how many long boxes of comics I had t0 transport. The perennial problem was how to catalog all these and try to sell them off.  It turned out the comics market bubble was just bursting, reducing the value of that collection to pretty much zero.  Most of the small independents closed shop around this time.  Since they it’s been in the back of the same closet, moved once again in 2004 when we changed houses.  Slowly I’ve added to the pile during the years as I’ve collected a few interesting one-off issues.  But still I find it hard to catalog them, knowing that I’d have to pick and choose which to part with.

Recently in 2008 I came back to the comic scene.  I found a number of quality titles, like Kingdom Come, Superman: Red Son, and The Dark Knight Strikes Again.  With the Death of Captain America story in the news, I thought I would catch up on my old favorites.  I found out that Marvel had killed off some of the old series in order to relaunch.  Thor was gone, as part of the Avengers Disassembled series, but soon came back.  I soon got all the Civil War and World War Hulk stories, since Marvel now quickly republishes their titles in graphic novel format.  Secret Invasion just came out and ran through a number of titles to be followed up by Dark Reign.  And then I stopped collecting altogether.  I realized I was falling into the same trap of following the publishers’ cross-overs ad infinitum.  I lost track of how many Wolverine titles there were, and how many X-Men family titles, and all the threads that run through the Marvel universe. The first few Marvel Ultimate books were interesting, but then it just became another origins rehash like Marvel 2099 which silently died away. It always became too complicated and confusing to collect these titles.  Seeing the upcoming Wolverine movie, I have no interest in the Deadpool character, which I saw as one of Rob Liefeld’s lesser creations (an author/artist that I always avoided), and for the first time I feel a disconnect with the character.

In order to keep it simple, I decided to go back to the basics of my collecting.  I’ve decided to stick to the Captain America and Thor comics.  I want to go back and check the Miller-Lee Batman and Robin stories, which are a prequel to the Dark Knight Returns series.  I’ve caught up on those few titles and plan on raiding the graphic novel shelves of my local stores (Comic Fortress and Steve’s Comic Relief in Mercer).  But for the time being, I can only see myself buy a few real favorites and trying to keep a lean comics diet, saving my attentions for those really special comics that will provide some literary sustenance.

These days I’ve also been paying attention to a lot of web comics.  Check out my favorites and pass on those you might recommend.

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Webcomics Winners

As a big fan of drawn serials, I’ve enjoyed the following over the past few years.  Not all are regular series, but I have them in my RSS reader to catch whenever the artists push something new out.  Below are RSS feed links for these sites.  Do you have any that you would like to recommend?

Penny Arcade

PVP

Basic Instructions

Ctrl Alt Del

Dilbert

Least I Could Do

Looking For Group

User Friendly

VG Cats

XKCD

Pearls Before Swine

Lately I’ve also kept up with collections from the above web comics.  You can catch up with them any day for free, but it’s nice to contribute to these artists whenever they put together a paper edition.  My favorite has been Penny Arcade which now has 5 books collecting their panels from the early days.  My habit of collecting these goes waaaay back to Berkeley Breathed’s Bloom Country collections.

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Favorite iPhone apps revisited

Back in August 2008, a mere month after the iPhone was released, I published my list of apps that I used.  I had quite a list back then and still have the personal rule that I won’t have more than 4 pages of apps since it’s too hard to find them.  I try to organize them by most used kept on the front page, especially now that the iphone allows you to use the home button to flip to that first page.  Here is what I currently have on the iPhone, other than the included apps.  You’ll find that there really aren’t any games on here.  I prefer my games full screen on my PC or plasma TV rather than shrunk down, but to each his own.

1. Todo – list and project tracking (paid app) that links with Toodledo, or optionally with Remember the Milk.  
2. Evernote – Note taking app that includes photos and allows searching photos and PDFs.  The best part is that it syncs with the Evernote web site so that your notes are safe.  Unlike the built-in iPhone Notes app that syncs with nothing and risks the loss of all your notes.  Here is just one of the many uses.
3. Nambu – Twitter and FriendFeed application that I replaced Twinkle with.  It includes posting photos via pic.im, tr.im as well as Identi.ca, Laconi.ca based streams and Ping.fm.  It’s being very actively developed along with a desktop version.  This seriously works a lot like TweetDeck, so it’s really useful.
4. Livestrong – Weight and diet tracking application.  This is part of my new year’s resolution.  My exercising is still very irregular, but adjusting my diet helped me lose almost 20lbs now.
5. Characters – World of Warcraft character tracking app.  I play it a lot, but this probably doesn’t belong on the front page anymore.
6. Facebook – Great app that complements the Facebook site for interacting with friends from high school.
7. LinkedIn – Great app that complements the LinkedIn site for interacting with professionals.  Not as shiny as the Facebook app and a fair bit buggier.
8. Mint.com – This is THE application for tracking personal finances.  I can’t rave enough about this. Put all your credit cards, loans, bank accounts, 401Ks into their secure system and get the depressing outlook all in one screen.  The web site has great graphs and stats on your usage and can really help remix your finances and identify spending habits that can be trimmed.
9. Brightkite – This is part of my flow for posting to my social networking sites.  Brightkite posts to Flickr, which is monitored by FriendFeed which posts a list to it into Twitter.
10. Phoneflix – tracks my Netflix queue for whenever someone recommends a movie.  It could use some interaction with imdb.com.
11. Amazon.com – Lets me check prices instantly while in stores.  Why pay more than I have to?  The interface is just right for quick browsing.
12. Wikipanion – This is a better interface for looking up facts than directly hitting the Wikipedia site, which is frankly half of what you are looking for when searching through Google.  Wikipedia needs to work on their mobie device interface, but this makes up for that.
13. iHaloStats (web link) – This tracks my Halo acheivements.  For linking to my Twitter account, I use http://twee60.com/.
14. DISQUS (web link) – This lets me moderate comments on my Wordpress web sites which use Disqus for comment management, as well as post replies to those comments. FriendFeed monitors Disqus as well, so these make it into my Twitter stream as well.
15. Ebay – I can do auction searches and keep tabs on my sales and account status.  You know… for when you get that mail that tells you “Your accesses has been limited.  Pleasing to click link below to updating your account.”
16. MonkeyChow (web link) – This is a web link to my RSS reader’s iPhone interface.  Very useful for catching up on the latest news when on the go.
17. Wordpress – I really only use this for composing draft posts to my various web sites.  I find that Wordpress’ real web interface is much handier for finalizing posts.  It works well for jotting down blog ideas before they escape my brain.
18. Now Playing – App for looking up reviews and movie times.  Very handy.
19. Last.fm - I don’t use this as much as I’d like, but now that WXRK has switched to pop and hiphop, I’ll be using it much more.
20. 1337pwn – Great for checking up on XBox live friends and gamer scores.
21. FriendFeed (web link) – This is just for those occassions that Nambu doesn’t render something right for FriendFeed.
22. Twitter (web link) - This is just for those occassions that Nambu doesn’t render something right for Twitter.
23. Simplify – Wonderful app that taps into my music collection at home to extend what I physically have on my iPhone.  It requires the SimplifyMedia app running on a system at home, which I have running on a Windows XP VM.
24. BofA – not as useful now that I use Mint.com, but sometimes the actual Bank of America site posts charges quicker than Mint.com can catch it.
25. Mint (web link) – (not the finance app) Web site analytics for http://www.shokk.com from haveamint.com
26. Bookmarks – Del.icio.us bookmarks app, which works well with the built-in safari browser, and posts to Twitter.
27. Remote – Very useful for controlling my iTunes playlist without going over to the computer.  I just wish it could access DAAp sources somehow, like the one streaming in my home from Firefly Media Server.
28. NewAmBible – I like to catch up on my faith every now and then.
29. Constitution – I like to catch up on the rules of the state every now and then.
30. Palringo – IM app for iPhone.  Has been sitting there waiting for Background Notifications to make it useful.  For pete’s sake, my crappy Blackberry 8700 could do it for a number of chat services, why can’t this do it?  What is broken in the iPhone architecture?
31. Easy WiFi - This came in use while traveling.  The airport had AT&T WiFi, which is free to iPhone users, but for some reason I had trouble logging in.  Luckily I had downloaded it while it was free.
32. Drinks Free – Every once in a while I like to host a get-together for friends, mostly in the summers when I can use my deck and the nice deck bar.  This has soooooo many drink combinations.
33. iTalk – Great for voice notes.  This functionality really should have been built into the phone frmo the start.  You can pull the voice notes off the iPhone with the Mac app.   Again, my Blackberry does this right out of the box.
34. Dog Whistle – We got a dog last year and this seemed like a good idea for training the dog.  Now it just serves to annoy the kids since the dog just looks at me funny.  Luckily it was free at the time.
35. Pandora – Same story as Last.fm, though I wish it linked into social networking apps more.  The service is a little too simple, but it often carries music that Last.fm might not have.
36. iBreviary – Another faith based app.
37. RK Free – I’m still looking for a replacement app for using when I run ever since I gave up my iPod nano that was used with Nike+.  I’m jealous that Apple put that functionality into the 2nd gen iPod Touch but did not make an accessory to do the same for the iPhone.  We’ll see soon how this performs.
38. iThoughts – Mind mapping tool.  I haven’t made great use of it, but it has potential.
39. ZumoDrive – this was a great alternative to all those apps that required you to share files while on a LAN.  Not only does this app mean you won’t have to store the files on the iPhone itself, but you can share between PC, Mac, and iPhone when no wireless is available.
40. Watchmen – this probably won’t be on my phone much longer, but it’s a tie-in to one of the greatest superhero movies ever.
41. Kindle – this is to keep me from buying a real Kindle.  No PDF support?
42. FlightTrack Pro – Came in very handy while traveling this month.  Also posts to TripIt.com which is monitored by 
43. TagReader – This is a curiosity that I found on the back of the Halo Wars box.  I haven’t really seen any other uses of these tags, but it looks interesting.

Recenty Apple announced that iPhone OS 3.0 would be detailed soon, probably for release in July with the new iPhone model.  I think everyone would agree that managing the apps is a giant pain in the ass.  There should be a list view in iTunes or on the iPhone itself where we can bulk delete these rather than letting them collect.  Managing the installed apps should not be this hard.

Posted in 360, amazon, apple, delicious, ebooks, flickr, friendfeed, google, halo, iphone, ipod, itunes, mint, monkeychow, nikeplus, rss, social networking, todo, twitter, xbox | Comments

Top 10 Most Influential Albums for Me

In previous posts I’ve mentioned a number of albums I like.  Taking a hint from various list memes making the rounds on the web, I decided I’d make a list of what I consider the most influential albums in my life so far.

0. Prehistory – My exposure to music early on consisted of random radio hits from bands like the Eagles, Journey, Boston, ABBA, Queen, Village People, etc.  I was even one of the unfortunate people whose parents dragged them to see “You Can’t Stop the Music” in 1980.  It was campy stuff like that which began to turn me away from mainstream pop at a tender age. 

1. Styx’s Mr Roboto and Quiet Riot – These two share a spot because they emphasize my two worlds of 1983.  Mr Roboto was released in early 1983 when I lived in Middlesex, NJ attending Saint John the Evangelist in Dunellen, NJ.  It would be the first and last pop album I ever bought, although I liked the idea of the concept album.  Soon after finishing the 8th grade, we moved to Coatesville, PA where I started at Bishop Shanahan High School.  The kids I hung with at the back of the bus liked blasting a new band, Quiet Riot and it turns out I did too.  Motley Crue’s Shout at the Devil came out that fall as well, though their glam metal roots kind of put me off.   I was hooked on metal.

2. Iron Maiden’s Powerslave, Dio’s The Last in Line - Back in 1984 the record stores, then a great place to hang out at the mall, had big beautiful albums hung on the walls, like big advertising posters.  Iron Maiden’s Powerslave and Dio’s The Last in Line really caught my eye and thus my ear.  The kids in the back of the bus were listening to Van Halen’s 1984 which was receiving a lot of radio play at the time.  I moved on to my own tastes, although 1984 was an OK album.  A friend of my brother’s in the 6th grade already had a bunch of Iron Maiden albums and I used a dual cassette boom box to copy those tapes.  Twisted Sister came out this same year, popularizing metal with their frankenstein hooker look. 

3. Metallica’s Master of Puppets, Megadeth’s Peace Sells…, Led Zeppelin IV -  By 1986, I had picked up an electric guitar at a music store near my house and was listening to anything with powerful guitar work.  During my junior year, my good friend Dan Smith happened to have a copy of Metallica’s Master of Puppets.  I loved it and got copies of their previous two albums.  Megadeth’s Peace Sells… was in the record store and I picked it up, not knowing that the two bands had some history, and probably due to its neat cover art.   He also had Led Zeppelin IV on hand, which I played the heck out of, as a contrast to these other two bands.  By that time Zeppelin was a dead classic band, Megadeth was just starting to rise, and Puppets was what I consider Metallica at its peak.  Dan would later introduce me to Ozzy Osbourne’s Tribute to Randy Rhoads which was another great album.

4. Anthrax’s Among the Living, Guns N Roses’ Appetite for Destruction – This was another year emphasizing different worlds for me in 1987.  While on an end of year class trip to England a few classmates had a new album on hand with some blazingly fast tracks.  Like Metallica, Anthrax’s thrash metal style grabbed my attention.  I enjoyed a raft of bands like Overkill, Exodus, Testament, and Nuclear Assault in the years after that.  Once I went to college that fall, my roommate Dan Baker played some Guns N Roses, which I liked as a brighter alternative to the thrash bands.  I heard a whole album of hits that I still enjoy to this day.  That would later lead to bands like Dangerous Toys, Cinderella, Whitesnake, although very briefly.  Ozzy Osbourne’s No Rest for the Wicked with new guitarist Zakk Wylde was also a big favorite, with his impressive guitar playing really making an impact on me.

5. Tool ’s Ænima – After the birth of our son in 1990, I didn’t have a lot of spare cash for music,even selling my guitar and equipment for rent money one month.  The grunge scene was not anything I really cared about.  It wasn’t until 1996 that I found Ænima while listening to WXRK on the way to work.  Their unique, experimental sound would lead me to expand my musical taste.  However, I eventually lost my interest in much of the pop syrupy stuff that was being released by the music labels.  My only peeve with this band is that they take years to release an album, often filling the interim time with side projects like “A Perfect Circle”.

6. Iron Maiden’s Brave New World – In 2000 I was surprised at the news that one of my favorite bands was reuniting.  After what I felt was a peak in 1984 with Powerslave, I saw Iron Maiden decline in quality with a rock bottom crash landing with the stinker Virtual XI.  Their new album, Brave New World, restored my faith in the band and in metal.

7. Korn’s Untouchables – For the first time in a long time, radio hit me with something heavy.  While Korn tended towards rap stylings in their earlier albums, by this point they had a unique and really heavy crunchy sound that I could get behind.  Their subsequent albums have gotten better and better.  I’m looking forward to their next album by the end of this year which they’ve said will be more like their original “nu Metal” work.  Shortly after, Metallica would betray their fans with the rock bottom terrible “St Anger”, turning me away from the metal scene for a while.

8. System of a Down’s Mesmerize/Hypnotize – One day in 2005 I was returning home from a work trip to NYC when I decided to stop in at the Virgin Megastore in Manhattan.  I ventured down the escalators to find a line forming to get autographs.  While I hung around the aisles, the store played some of the songs from the Mesmerize and a few from Toxicity, which I recognized from radio play.  I was later surprised to find out that the band was releasing another album six months later, Hypnotize, which I immediately scooped up.  Both albums, were a great unique sound experience.  It would later turn out that this would be their last album.  Serj Tankian has since continued touring with a solo band, which sounds exactly like System of a Down.

9. Megadeth’s The System has Failed – In 2004, two years after Dave Mustaine had publicly disbanded Megadeth due to a freak nerve injury, Megadeth was back.  While their albums since 1997 had been pretty subpar attempts at making the band a commercial hit, this new album was a true return to their heavy roots.  A new album is in the wings, although the revolving door of band members remains as a question mark over whether it will pass or fail and how soon it will happen.

10. NIN’s Year Zero – Nine Inch Nails is a band that I’ve listened to on and off quite a bit, but it wasn’t until 2007 that I really began to listen to them. Around this time, the movie 300 was being released and “Just Like You Imagined” was being used as background music in the trailers.  It turned out I already had The Fragile in my collection, having purchased it through one of those “10 albums for a penny” clubs.  Shortly after, my brother turned me on to Trent Rezner’s return album With Teeth from a few years before, which I thought was a fresh change.  However, once I heard Year Zero, I was amazed and went back into the NIN archives for more gems.  Year Zero works well as a concept album and seems great as a whole.  The subsequent releases of Ghosts and The Slip were not as exciting, however.  This is at the same time that Metallica announced Death Magnetic, which I felt has made up for their previous decline.

Lately I’ve found myself getting greatest hits albums for bands like the Eagles, Boston and Journey for keeping on my iPhone.  My music tastes have come full circle, while embracing many different styles.  I typically like to listen to albums as a whole, associating one song with the ones before and after, enjoying the fdlow from one to the other.  With bands like NIN releasing what seem like collections of random songs rather than full albums (Ghosts and Slip), and other bands stating they believe the idea of the album is dead, planning to release a couple of songs at a time, the album seems like a thing of the past, with the concept album on the endangered species list.  It will be interesting to see where music goes in the next few years as artists decouple themselves from music labels while new online avenues of revenue and distribution are developed.  Potentially, bands could post individual songs to their fans with links to purchase, similar to how we are utilizing blogs today.  Without the filter of how songs fit together into a group as we do today with albums, we could potentially see a lot more low quality songs in artists’ catalogues along with their great hits.  At the same time, there is no pressure to create terrible filler material to round out an album when the creative juices aren’t flowing.  This would seem more like a writer releasing a book a chapter at a time, which we do see today in some cases.  We’ll take the good with the bad.

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