January 20, 2010
I write about music a lot; and for good reason. Like so many people, I adore music, and no matter what I’m doing, music is either coloring or being colored by my circumstance. And like so many people, after a hitherto existence’s worth of hearing, loving, learning, and exploring hundreds of thousands of songs, trying to narrow it down to a single favorite song is impossible. The question hardly even makes sense. When asked, my weight shifts back onto my heels ever so slightly as I cock my head slightly and stare back blankly. It’s like being asked your favorite letter of the alphabet or the best breath you’ve ever taken.
With that in mind, I decided to narrow it down to five instead of one, which somehow seems slightly less absurd. Though being asked your five favorite letters or your twenty best breaths would seem even more foolish than narrowing it down to one, so that analogy just crumbled before my eyes. Moving on.
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Posted in Personal | Coldplay | Favorites | Feedback | Five For Fighting | John Mayer | Last.fm | Lists | Music | Sondre Lerche | The Killers
November 25, 2009
A long, long time ago, in 1993, AT&T ran a campaign called You Will, that showcased a few visions of where they predicted telecommunications would be in the next 10-15 years. And wouldn’t you know it, they were pretty danged close on most of it.
My friend Molly sent me the link, and I found it absolutely captivating. I couldn’t stop thinking about it afterwards.
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Posted in Websinal | AT&T | Commercials | Future | Mobile | Technology | The 90s | The Internet
October 29, 2009
Friend, entrepreneur, and well of sarcastic wit, Jacob Morse recently introduced me to a sleek little free Mac app called I Love Stars. It has a single, minimal purpose and that is to help you rate your iTunes library.
I know of very few iTunes users that have taken the time to rate their library, and even fewer that know the merits of doing it. The main benefits of having your library rated are in the making of Smart Playlists and Party Shuffles. Both create playlists based on various criteria; one such criteria being song rating. For instance, if you were suddenly hit with the urge to listen to some good jazz (some GOOD jazz), you could create a Smart Playlist of only music in the Jazz genre with a rating of 4.5 or more stars. Boom. Done. Consider yourself well-jazzed.
But of course, this only works if your library is rated. Otherwise, you would either have to manually create that playlist or just skip through the playlist when a sub-good song came on. Lame.
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Posted in Websinal | Applications | Free | I Love Stars | iTunes | Mac | Music | Ratings
September 29, 2009
I thought I start this post off with a solid, immaculate truth. I’m not gay. Now there’s truth if ever there was such a thing. Moving forward, let’s all keep that irrefutable fact firmly placed at the forefront of our minds. Because the rest of this post could possibly be used to refute said irrefutability without proper context. That context being that I’m not gay. Apologies for the redundancy; I just want to make sure that we’re all on the same page here.
But, seriously, I’m not.
So, I have a crush on Chris Martin. And Tom Welling. Mat Kearney. Gerard Butler. Sean Bean. The list goes on. Man crushes. Some may deny it, but in my almost complete lack of experience on the subject, most men have them. If not, they’re either foolishly blind to the charm, wit, and coolness of other men, or they’re actually gay and trying to hide it.
It’s a strange thing, a man crush – or a “mush” as I’ve never once heard anybody call it. In fact, the name “man crush” is a little more provocative than it should be. But what was first a concept that, by name alone, disgusted me and caused me to rebel against it, I now understand and embrace whole-heartedly.
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Posted in Personal | Beauty | Celebrities | Insight | Inspiration | Man Crush | Manliness
September 27, 2009
I develop quite a few sites in Wordpress. Being that many of these sites are not “blogs” and need to behave like a traditional, static website, I’ve come across and worked through several obscure and (understandably) poorly documented issues and quirks in Wordpress.
This is one of those stories.
I had a page template with a simple contact form that was posting to # (itself):
<form name="contactform" method="post" action="#">
<input name="name" />
<input name="email" />
<input name="phone" />
<textarea name="comment"></textarea>
<input type="submit" name="submit" />
</form>
Looked great, but when I submitted the form, instead of reloading the page with the form posted, Wordpress would display the 404 error page. Looking at the address bar, the URL was identical (except with a # at the end), and if I reloaded the page without reposting the form data, the unsubmitted page would load fine. I was both baffled and maddened.
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Posted in Technical | Errors | HTML Forms | POST Variables | Wordpress | Wordpress Development | Wordpress Forms
September 19, 2009
Earlier this year, I came into possession of a journal of my great grandfather’s. It’s not a full-on, soul-baring journal. It is – as the front cover displays in gloriously deco font – a Line a Day Five Year Journal. While Poppy didn’t write in it every day – and he typically wrote more than one line on the days that he did – it did end up truly being a 5 year journal. The first entry was New Years 1945; the last was New Years Eve 1949. Wow.
As the story opens, Poppy (christened Houston Epps Sr.) is 42, Jerry (my grandmother) is 18, my great aunt Glenna is 14, my great uncle Houston is 20 and fighting against the Japanese in the South Pacific. My great grandmother, Maurine (affectionately known as Mimo), is age unknown at this point. I’m guessing 40, give or take a year or two.
A lot had happened between then and the last time Poppy put pen to paper five years later. Poppy and Mimo had celebrated their 25th (Silver) Anniversary. The war had ended (marked by a simple entry “Japan Surrendered Unconditionally To-day”), and Houston was back home and had started dating, become engaged to, and married his wife of over 50 years. Glenna had dropped out of high school (with her parents’ consent), then re-enrolled and graduated on the recommendation of her new employer. Jerry had become engaged twice, called both weddings off, and started dating my grandfather; they were married in mid-1950.
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Posted in Personal | Family | Genealogy | Grandparents | History | Insight | Journaling | World War II
