26 posts from 2007

Sarah and I have realized that New Years Eve is nearly upon us, and we have no plans.  We have also found very few people who seem to have plans.  So our question is, does anyone have any plans?  Can we come?

Anyone have some suspenders I can borrow for Halloween?  Trying to be the "80's guy" from Futurama, and it's the last piece I need for the costume.

I've been working at the Kojo Nnamdi Show off and on for a bit as a freelance producer.  A while back I got to produce a pre-recorded interview with William Gibson, partly about his newest book Spook Country

(which I was lucky enough to get him to sign) but mostly just about his thoughts on technology and society and such.  This was needless to say VERY exciting for a nerd like me.  Anyway, that interview will be airing today on WAMU at 1pm EST.  If you have the chance and are interested please do listen, it's a fun interview, and Gibson is a fun guy to listen to and talk with (he's also very very friendly).

You can listen on the radio if you're in the DC area at 88.5 FM, or you can listen online at wamu.org.  You can even listen later on at the website or through the podcast of the Kojo Show.  Unfortunately because we had to do this interview as a pre-tape, you can't call in.

Also the interview with Paul Haggis beforehand at noon is pretty interesting, and the rebroadcast of the discussion on "Uncontacted Tribes" is pretty interesting as well, and I did most of the editing on it.

PS Spook Country is a lot of fun, and I'd highly recommend it to all of you!

So Sarah got me a Wii for my birthday!!!

That being the case here is my Wii friend code. 

2611 9874 9525 1874

I've added a bunch of you from the post Novak made a long while ago, but I'm sure there are some of you who I don't have.  So what's your Wii friend code?

I just e-mailed a lot of people, but don't have everyones e-mail so I thought I'd try to hit as many people as possible by posting this as well.

I'm finally leaving ABC.  I'll write more of my thoughts on that later.  But I wanted to be sure that everyone who was interested and able knew that after my last shift ends this coming Saturday around 10pm, I'll be heading up to The Big Hunt in Dupont celebrate.  If you'd like to join me please feel free!

And if you can't make it out on such short notice, don't worry I'll hopefully be having a summer-themed outdoor party sometime soon, and I'm going to have weekends again!  So hopefully there should be ample opportunity to see me soon if you want to!

I know I'm a little late to the party on this (had a very busy weekend at work, then Sunday after spending a few hours at work in the wee early hours to be sure the show didn't need anything from me, spent most of the rest of the day working in the yard), but I'm pretty excited about iTunes offering DRM free songs, and the fact that it looks like they're letting all the labels to choose to offer songs DRM free on iTunes.  This should spell the beginning of the end of DRM for digital music at least I certainly hope so.  I'm also pretty excited about the oft-overlooked addition that these tracks will be encoded at a much higher bit-rate than the standard songs on iTunes.  I'd prefer the option to download lossless tracks, but I'll take what I can get.  I don't really mind the slight price-hike as I perceive it will be a temporary thing and I've often said I'd pay a little extra to get higher quality tracks.
I'll still probably get most of my music on CD (because of the slightly higher quality) or from eMusic (because it's great and cheap), but this makes it much more likely I'll occasionally buy stuff on iTunes more often than I do now.
Of course just today I was taking a survey from eMusic and they asked what feature I'd like most added to it, and I completely forgot to say I'd LOVE to have the option to get lossless tracks.  Completely slipped my mind.  Damn.  Oh well!

For anyone who doesn't know (I didn't until last weekend) there's a new NIN CD coming out in April called Year Zero.  Yes, Trent finally got off the 5 year plan.  I'm pretty excited about it, and the marketing is pretty amazing.  The album is a concept album set about 15 years in the future.  They are running an alternate reality game based around the world of Year Zero, I've gotten pretty into it.  As part of the game/promotion they've been releasing songs and videos and other things on USB thumbdrives that people at concerts in Europe are finding, as well as other clues in things like concert t-shirts and such.  The most recent such leak contained this video.

There are a number of clues in the video that lead to various websites and such, but I won't go into too much detail here.
More info on the ARG can be found at the NIN Wiki, discussion on the Echoing the sound forums (Most of the ARG stuff is in the Art Is Resistance section) and a good place to start if you want to check out some of the websites involved before you start finding out everything that people have dug up on them, is the Wikipedia Page for the album.  Pretty fun stuff and I'm really liking the sound of the leaked tracks so far.

So apparently Vox doesn't like the html for embedding the comedy central player.  So I will point you all to my LJ entry with the same content I'd have put here.

http://droct.livejournal.com/135408.html