Sunday, March 21, 2004

Concerts and such

I took my daughter to see her first rock concert. Well, okay, you might not consider John Mayer as rock, but it was a decent event. As Marty Piletti would say, it was a "real nice affair." Yeah, that was is a good description for it.

Some of my problems may be with the Sovereign Center in Reading, PA. The seats were bleacher-like. When people were running up and down the aisles, the seats adjacent to them would bounce up and down. That got really old.

Then there was the fact that the security guards were yelling at people to sit down. This is the easiest way to tell whether your concert is rock or not. If everyone is sitting down, then you are enjoying James Taylor or a Pops orchestra, and not rocking. Just try to sit down at a Nugent or AC/DC concert...

The sound was only so-so, which may also be the fault of the Sovereign Center. But I think it is the band's job to supply the sound.

Musically, it was better than average. From the radio or CDs, I was not sure if the guitar work was his, or studio musicians or another band member. In concert, he does a majority of the guitar work. And he really is that good at acoustic guitar.

My daughter thought it was awesome, so that is all that matters to me.
--gh

Sunday, March 14, 2004

The Great Gathering of the Banana Men

Okay, it seems that Pork&Beans is back on the blog. He always has such vivid dreams. Sometimes you can tie them to events when you look back on them. Sure, you can probably do this with most anything, except my dreams.

Last night I dreamed about comparing different samples of data with potentially different variances. I used Excel to test the probability of variance difference (F-test), then the t-test difference of means analysis... Later, when I woke up, I went to work and did these exact same things.

Of course, I solve problems in my dreams, I wasn't really prophesizing. But I would trade a dream about Excel with a dream about a sword-yielding fire horseman any day.

--gh

Sunday, March 07, 2004

Suck on this, spam bots!

Now, ordinarily I don't cotton to "language" expressed by the author of www.billism.com, but check out this potenital 'bot deterrent.

If you don't get it, then you should know that an email address on any web-page will eventually be detected by a web-bot for purposes of gathering addresses for SPAM databases. You need to MUNG your address, such as happyman-AT-hotmail-DOT-com, or even use letter substitution. (hxppymxn@hotmxil.com <--substitute a for x). If you like newsgroups, then you should know that those are web pages now.

Of course, to post your email, you should encode it in javascript, or have it as a picture, like a GIF file. This will create a script version of your email. I could not get the fancy code to work within this blog, though. I did find this to create a code for email addresses. Although this looks like my dog's email address, it isn't: terrahound@hotmail.com
(View source on THAT one!)

I wish Billism all the best of luck

Saturday, March 06, 2004

It says that my inner child is 16

This rules, because I got this from a 12-year-old's blog...
My inner child is sixteen years old today

My inner child is sixteen years old!


Life's not fair! It's never been fair, but while
adults might just accept that, I know
something's gotta change. And it's gonna
change, just as soon as I become an adult and
get some power of my own.


How Old is Your Inner Child?
brought to you by Quizilla

Kingdom Hospital

Uh, I was just, you know, browsing around and came across the page for Kingdom Hospital of Maine. What gives. Try a few of the links, like STAFF, PHr34k3D me out the first time I saw it.

Then it gets all whooshy. (Sorry for the travelocity link.)
--gh

PR3F3R3N(3Z

Okay, who knew that Google.COM spoke L33t?

I am embarassed that I can read that stuff quickly. It really is nothing to be proud of.
--gh

Wednesday, March 03, 2004

musicplasma : the music visual search engine

How do I miss stuff like musicplasma: the music visual search engine?

Enter Led Zeppelin, and you will see ALL of the stuff that I used to listen to in High School. Better yet, you get little snippets of music with a fast enough connection that fades in and out.

Is it true that Ursula 1000 connects Tipsy to Gorillaz? Maybe that explains the part of me that likes Gorillaz, but tries to hide it. (Please don't tell anyone about that. No, I don't own their CDs.)

I am not happy with how close Rage is with Smashing Pumpkins, that's just sad.

Also, I don't buy the fact that the largest circles represent more popular entries. For goodness sakes (pardon my language) look at the HUGE circle for Maury Yeston! How can she be bigger than Beck, Percy Faith, or the Norman Luboff Choir. (Not to mention Sting or Hendrix!)
--gh

"comparison inconspicuous mcclellan buckle geographer"

Okay, at the bottom of a SPAM message, I found the words "comparison inconspicuous mcclellan buckle geographer
." Since I am a geographer, and I like the word "buckle," I thought that this could not be a coincidence. However, a Google Search shows nothing that indicates why I received the message, or where else these five words appear in cyperspace. (There is a good link to www.buckle.com, that should be an alternative metal band name, not a fashion shop.) This leads me to think it was really meant for me.

The advertisement was for cheaper insurance, by the way.

I don't know what a "mcclellan" is. (Besides being a fort, or a "George B."...)

--gh