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Nov 29, 2004 7:40pm

worst. band. ever.

I saw "The Invisibles" perform at the Rickshaw Stop saturday night. I thought the group might be a clever joke on the coke-fueled electroclash scenester plague, but I found this today:

For those who haven't yet heard The Invisibles' first single, "Liebeschokolade," Langan describes the band's sound as "definitely dance oriented with some techno influences and punk influences. (It's) two-parts no wave, two-parts Detroit techno, one-part goth, one-part electro, two-parts punk rock, two-parts glam, two-parts post-punk, two-parts '86 Chicago house, one-part new wave, one-part synth pop, one-part industrial, a half-pint of gabber and a pinch of ghetto tech."

...and ten parts suck. Turns out they were merely the worst fucking band I have ever had the misfortune to witness live, and I like pop music.

So I don't sound like a complete grump, I should point out that Doormouse and 396, two other performers that night, both completely rocked.

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Nov 25, 2004 6:02pm

buy a mac, john

- Make it simple, The Economist


Nov 23, 2004 1:41am

announcing reBlog 1.0

Michael and I have been working on this one for the past few months, and we hit 1.0 this weekend.

The reBlog concept includes a super-sexy online RSS/Atom Aggregator/Reader (play with an example) that is geared towards filtering and selecting items for re-publishing/re-syndication.

This is accomplished with an outgoing RSS feed, and through plugins into your favorite blogging software (Movable Type, WordPress) that allow for the importing of selected posts, and the publishing of those posts with the appopriate meta-data for attribution to original authors.

If you're into blogs, feeds, personal publishing, and/or syndication, we think it's worth your time to check out reblog.org, and maybe even install and try using the software.


Nov 23, 2004 1:32am

birds and dogs

From Aquarius Records' review of Caninus:

We know you've been waiting for this one. At least judging by the rabid (tee hee) reaction to the recent 7" by the band Hatebeak, a death metal outift fronted by a parrot. Well now, along comes Caninus to up the stakes. Sure, the parrot in Hatebeak is able to squawk up a storm, and his maniacal screechings fit perfectly amidst the churning riffs but a parrot on its own is hardly a scary proposition. But with Caninus, you've got the same crushing, downtuned metal juggernaut, only this time the vocals come from the drooling fanged mouths of Budgie and Basil, two snarling pitbulls! That's right, pitbulls. Thankfully, barking is kept to a minimum, and instead Basil and Budgie spend most of the time growling furiously, their gutteral grunts and grrr's WAY more evil than even the scariest of death metal vocals. Courtesy of Tomas.


Nov 17, 2004 8:45pm

welcome, dogg

Snoop Dogg made his first appearance in In The News today. From running drills with the USC Trojan football team, MC'ing on Spike TV, to starring in movies or video games, he's a busy guy.


Nov 16, 2004 8:07pm

everything is right with the universe 


Nov 16, 2004 3:24am

clockwise web traffic Design Weenie writes:


Nov 15, 2004 11:52pm

books by color 


Nov 13, 2004 8:02pm


So, we've been working on a new website for Patron Tequila (with local design agency Gershoni for some time - the initial soft launch was last week, and we're polishing off some final elements this week.

It's a great site, etc. etc., but it's built in flash and has an age verification entry screen, so it's not quite as "google friendly" as it could be. Yesterday I discovereed that our page about the project had a higher PageRank for the term "Patron Tequila" than the company's own site: If that weren't enough, we also received a phone call from a bar owner in New Orleans who was hoping to deal with some interruptions in his tequila shipments. Could we put him in touch with marketing? How did he find us? Google, of course.


Nov 10, 2004 11:47pm

three about the uncanny valley

Some last thoughts stolen from Imomus:


Nov 9, 2004 2:07am

flash won, followup



Nov 8, 2004 6:16pm

video riot 2004 photos up

Dimension 7's Video Riot came off smoothly for the third time last night. Instead of my involvement from past years, I chose to spectate and photograph this time around.

Photos can be found here, in a variety of sizes, freely licensed.


Nov 6, 2004 9:44pm

flash won the election

Fernando Cassia of The Inquirer writes:

...perhaps this presidential election will go down in history as the first one where Macromedia Flash was widely used for reporting the progress of the election count with Flash based "interactive maps". Some had nice animations, some were simple, and in one case... they were done in *shock* DHTML *shock*. Yes, you can do animated "mouse-over" interactive maps with DHTML, and ABC News did just that.

What great news. Eric and I spent a large portion of this election season working on interactive maps for MoveOn's various campaign efforts, and the heavy use of maps in all the election-night reporting we saw validated the strength that visual displays of information can have. It's also worth noting that some of these maps could deceive as well as enlighten: compare USA Today's busy, disinformative county-by-county map with Robert Vanderbai's more nuanced version based on the same data.

I plan to use our planned November downtime to work on a few other map-related projects, including the PEAR Map Projection toolset I'm working on to try to make complex flash-based map projections more accessible to users of PHP.


Nov 5, 2004 1:07am

political signage


Nov 2, 2004 6:30am

three moves

I'm undertaking three simultaneous, short-distance moves right now:

