Woohoo

Posted on March 29, 2008

They finally released Wordpress 2.5. jwiltshire.org is fully updated now, after a slight hitch with one troublesome plugin that I stopped actually needing a long time ago (Disable Wordpress Widgets was the plugin, if you’re curious). I rather like it so far, it’s much prettier (though still too much soft blues, I think I remember seeing something about different color schemes for the backend, I’ll have to check) and the Dashboard is actually useful, chockful of information. One thing that kind of irks me is that in 2.3, when I went to write a post, there was a list of my drafts, that no longer appears in 2.5. I have to go to a separate page for my drafts. I’ll live though.

Oh and it’s my birthday. Free dinner tonight. Frickin’ sweet. Now to go upgrade MacFags. I should really get around to posting there too.

Birthday Wishlist

Posted on March 18, 2008

Since I’m coming up on 25 years (or “a quarter of a century”, as my younger friends like to put it), I thought I’d put together a nice little list of presents I would like to receive. Start saving.

• Lagavulin guitar – I posted this one on futurabolditalic the other day. It’s a guitar made from the barrels used to make Lagavulin scotch. There were ony three made, so it might be hard to track down. But it’s frikken sweet.
• Audi R8 – A badass German coupe, a monster of a car with a 4.2L V8 producing 414 horsepower, the Audi R8 isn’t available in the states until summer, so I’ll accept this one as a late gift.
• Nintendo Wii – Not much to say here, ‘cept I really want one. And whenever I have $250 laying around to spend on a Wii, nobody has one. It’s very annoying. Someday either Nintendo will ramp up production enough so that they actually have them in stores, or else every single other person will have already bought one and therefore will have no need of buying any more and I’ll be able to get one.
• An Asus eeeeeeeeeeeeeePC – I have no use for one really. I’ve got my iMac for home use. I’ve got my MacBook Pro for portability, and more and more for number-crunching-heavy applications. So I don’t really need an ultra-lightweight, ultra-compact laptop, but it’s just so keen. And it runs Linux. And so little, you can just throw it in a bag. A buddy of mine has one and it makes me jealous every time I sneak it away to play with.

I’m sure there’s some other shit I want but I’m tired and can’t think of any. Oh well.

Sunday Listening Post

Posted on March 9, 2008

For today’s Listenin’ Post, I thought I would dig through YouTube for some great videos from The Old Grey Whistle Test, a classic BBC2 music show along the same lines as the Midnight Special (I will give guest post status to anybody who buys me that set of DVDs…) Anyway, here’s some good stuff here.

David Bowie’s Queen Bitch, a rollicking classic from The Life Aquatic soundtrack. If you poke around YouTube you can find an excellent duet with Lou Reed.

Roxy Music comes at you with Ladytron, and with some costuming so fruity, the BBC ordered that it could only be shown after ten pm. But still, it’s a good track, and it’s got a lot of vintage synth porn.

Read more

Concert Footage

Posted on March 6, 2008

At the risk of becoming a video blog, here’s some video I recorded from the show at Duffy’s last night. The opening band was Amy Ana Huffman and the People’s Family Band. I’d never seen them before, but they were quite good. Here’s a video of them, uploaded to Viddler because I used up my Vimeo upload quota for the week.

Good stuff there. Then Weezil Skweezins took the stage. They are definitely a fun show. And once you hear “Up the Butt”, it will get stuck in your head for two days. I should mention, there’s some NSFW language, but you probably figured that out from the title.

Weezil Skweezins – Up Your Butt from Joshua on Vimeo.

There are a few more videos up over at my Vimeo. It was a fun show, and I drank nasty bar scotch. Good times.

Oh, and I should mention, I followed DB’s lead in incorporating video comments. (DB hat-tips me in that post, and now I’m hat-tipping directly back to him. It’s a blogging reacharound.) Iffin you have a webcam, and a Viddler account, you can record video comments directly in the browser window. It’s pretty keen. Thanks, Colin Devroe!

New Adult Swim Game

Posted on March 3, 2008

Adult Swim, purveyors of fine (and lots of crappy, too) tv shows, has a website with a number of excellent time killers. For a while my favorite was Viva Caligula, wherein you are the emperor Caligula, running around Rome killing with 26 different instruments of death. I pretty much rule when armed with a zampogna and a torch, but turning into a bear was my favorite form of attack. Anyways, I may have a new favorite now. Fairway to Hell is a golf game, set inside a house, where you have to use your set of clubs to destroy different rooms in the house. It’s pretty dang tricky, but a good way to kill 15-20 minutes.

Catharsis

Posted on March 2, 2008

Okay, it’s confession time:

It’s a hard thing to admit to. But I have a problem. I cannot let fonts go. I’ve gone through my typeface collection many a time to clear out the cruft. But a lot of it I just can’t bring myself to delete. There’s always the thought, “But what if some time I’m working on a project, and I just need GM Londinium Ornaments or Celtic Lion AOE or even Hobo STD (quite possibly the worst name for a font ever). There’s going to be a time when I need something to look old western-y/medieval/mid 70’s retro and I just won’t have the right font. Of course, none of these times have ever really come up, but that doesn’t stop me from deleting them from my hard drive. Maybe I just have issues with letting go.

I read an interview with a designer once who said that when he first started out, he forced himself to only use a core set of about 10 or so type families. That way he would have no choice but to use those font faces for all they were worth to get what he needed out of them. Perhaps this is an experiment I need to try. But getting started, taking the first step, that is what I can’t do. Perhaps some day, but not now…

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