Arctic Monkeys

Post ImageIf you haven’t heard of the Arctic Monkeys yet, you will soon enough. I was introduced to them a few weeks ago when I heard their single “I Bet You Look Good On The Dance Floor” (yes, like Fallout Boy they seem to enjoy incredibly long song names) and I have really started to like them since. And I am not the only one apparently:

The musical impact the Arctic Monkeys have had in the past six months, on a global scale, is astonishing.

Not content with creating the fastest- selling British debut album of all time in the shape of Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, the band have also made serious inroads into a fickle American market with a record that is based on the British vernacular experience.

That’s right, fastest-selling British debut album of all time. Faster than Oasis, The Beatles, you name it. If you know nothing about popular culture, that’s fast kids! Apparently the band still isn’t used to the celebrity parties, despite having already met stars like Jay-Z and Snoop Dogg.

I encourage you to check them out! They have a very unique sound (and a unique name for that matter) and have been getting rave reviews for their concerts. The band also seems to “get” the current trends in pop culture – they have a MySpace profile!

Read: Arctic Monkeys

Interviewed on the DNIC Podcast

Post ImageI was interviewed about a week ago by John Bristowe who publishes the Developer Night in Canada podcast (gotta love that name!) and the episode is now up. We talked about podcasting in general, about Paramagnus and our products, how we use .NET development, a little about the .NET community in Edmonton, and a little about me.

Mack Male chats about podcasting in this episode of Developer Night in Canada (DNIC). He also discusses how he uses .NET to build out a solution he’s working on for podcasters.

The episode is about 8 MB, and 17 minutes long – check it out!

Read: DNIC

Digital Newspapers – Coming Soon?

Post ImageA little over a year ago, I wrote that newspapers are one of my least favorite forms of media. To reiterate:

I hate almost everything about newspapers. I don’t like the size of the paper. I don’t like the way it makes everything black. I don’t like that every page has to be jammed full of stuff. I don’t like that the pages are not full color. I don’t like that once I find something interesting, I can’t do anything with it (like send it to a friend, or blog about it with a link, etc).

These things hold true today. So what has changed in the last year? A few things. The “magazine-newspaper” called Dose launched in some of Canada’s larger cities, and I have to admit that I like it better than a typical newspaper, probably because of the size of the pages and how they open like a book, rather than being folded horizontally. There’s lots of color and non-standard layouts too.

More interesting than that however, is that newspapers of the future, such as the one seen in “Minority Report”, are coming sooner than previously expected:

In the Tom Cruise sci-fi thriller “Minority Report,” a subway passenger scans an issue of USA Today that is a plastic video screen, thin, foldable and wireless, with constantly changing text.

The scene is no longer science fiction.

The so called “e-paper” technology is finally beginning to mature, making it feasible to employ for products like newspapers. Despite the recent advances, there is still a long way to go – there is no standard (not that we need one I guess) which means some e-paper is flexible and some is rigid, some can display full color and some cannot, some require a power source and some do not. I think it’s only a matter of time before the details are worked out however.

I eagerly await digital newspapers, and the editors of today’s publications should be excited too! The newspaper could once again be as “up-to-the-second” as TV stations, and the potential for advertising is immense – think Google AdSense, but in your dynamically updating newspaper. Digital newspapers would be better for the environment too! Let’s hope the technology advances and costs decline so that the digital newspaper will be a reality.

Read: CNET News.com

Upcoming Movies I Want To See

Post ImageThere’s a long list of movies coming out over the next few months as the summer blockbuster season gets underway in May. Here’s a list of the movies opening up in the next month that I want to see, complete with links to the relevant pages at IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes so you can check out reviews and such (and I can refer back to them later):

  • United 93 – IMDB, RT
    I think enough time has passed since 9/11 that we need a movie like this. It’s all part of the healing process.
  • Stick It – IMDB, RT
    If this movie is anything like Bring It On, I’ll happily call this movie my guilty pleasure of the summer.
  • Akeelah and the Bee – IMDB, RT
    It’s produced by Starbucks, how could I not at least check it out?! And it has Morpheus 😉
  • Mission: Impossible III – IMDB, RT
    Tom Cruise may be a nutjob, but he usually doesn’t disappoint in these movies.
  • The Da Vinci Code – IMDB, RT
    Who isn’t going to see this movie? Except for Sharon, because she’s weird.
  • Over the Hedge – IMDB, RT
    Looks like a funny animation film to me!
  • X-Men: The Last Stand – IMDB, RT
    Ah part three! So far I have really enjoyed the X-Men movies.

And further out, I am really looking forward to Superman Returns (IMDB, RT), Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (IMDB, RT), Cars (IMDB, RT), and Casino Royale (IMDB, RT).

Who knows how I am going to afford all of these movies, but that’s the list!

Speak Clearly Please!

Post ImageAs I mentioned a few days ago, my desktop computer sort of died. Essentially the hard drive that I installed Windows and all my applications to failed (but my separate data drive is fine). Easy enough to fix, but it kind of happened at a good time too. We needed some computers around here at Paramagnus to do various bits of processing, and our development machines were getting fairly sluggish. So with that in mind, we’ll use our old ones for the processing, and we ordered some new machines from Dell.

Now I have read countless accounts in the blogosphere about how crappy Dell’s support is, and I have some friends who love Dell and some who hate it. The reason we went with Dell is that the price was just too good, and I like how they list the details of every component on the site. Everything went smoothly online, but for some reason, they called me and I had to call them back. Dickson also had to call (we did a couple of orders for various reasons). That’s where things went downhill.

Why can’t I speak to someone I can understand?! Everyone I have spoken with at Dell except for one person had a heavy Indian accent (or whatever nationality they are, it doesn’t matter). So much of an accent, that I can’t make our most of what they are saying! If you’re going to hire people to talk to customers, at least make sure the customers will be able to understand them!

Now don’t go getting all huffy at me. I’m not complaining so much about the accent as about the fact that I can’t understand the representatives. Whether they have a heavy accent, are slurring or mumbling, or for whatever other reason cannot speak clearly, it’s all the same to me – they shouldn’t be working in customer support.

Podcasting Legal Guide

Post ImageA new legal guide for podcasting has been released at the Creative Common site with the purpose of providing “a general roadmap of some of the legal issues specific to podcasting.” The document is quite lengthly, and while I haven’t read through it all, I did notice that it only applies to US law:

This Guide covers only US-based legal questions. Since podcasts are typically distributed world wide, legal issues from other jurisdictions are relevant for you but we are unable to include them at this time. We have released this Guide under a Creative Commons license that permits derivatives works and so we hope that practitioners in other jurisdictions will translate and adapt this Guide for their jurisdictions. Please let us know if you do by emailing podcasting@vogelelaw.com so that we can link to your version of the Guide.

Interesting project, but due to the length, I question how many people will actually read it. Tip of the hat to Geek News Central.

Read: Creative Commons

IE7 Beta 2 Released

Post ImageMicrosoft has released the latest test version of the new Internet Explorer 7 browser, this one titled simply Beta 2 (what the heck was with that Preview anyway). From the official IE blog:

We acted on a lot of the feedback and bug reports from the previous public releases. In particular, I feel good about changes we made based on reports from web developers around some CSS behaviors, application compatibility feedback, reliability data (yes, we do analyze the information that comes when you click “Send Error Report”), and user experience feedback. People on the team will post additional details about changes over the next few days.

Unfortunately you have uninstall any previous IE7 releases before installing the new one, but this is the last release that you’ll need to do that for. Apparently the rendering engine is now complete, which means that the way pages look in this release is how they’ll look in the final release too.

Most of the UI is the same as older releases, but it’s funny how small things make a big difference. The tabs now have a gradient that I didn’t notice before, and when you open a new tab, there is a “help” page displayed which is great for new users. A couple other things I have noticed:

  • If you right click a link and choose “Open in New Tab”, the new tab opens right next to the current tab, even if you have a bunch of tabs. Makes it easier to organize them which is nice!
  • When you press CRTL-T to open a new tab, the address bar does not receive focus which is incredibly annoying. I want to open a new tab using the key combo and then immediately start typing the address!
  • I still don’t get the “multiple home pages” feature.
  • I really love that the menu bar and stuff auto-hides when you enter full screen mode (F11).

So far, I quite like IE7. This release still uses quite a bit of memory, but that’s not really an issue at the moment considering Firefox ALWAYS uses more.

Read: Internet Explorer

Notes for 4/23/2006

Funny how it’s always the weekend that has cold weather, though it did get sunny today at least. Here are my weekly notes:

  • Thank you everyone for your kind comments, both online and offline, about Dante.
  • Tomorrow is my last final exam of the year – I can’t wait to get it over with!
  • The Oilers played very well today and tied the series with Detroit at a game a piece. It was weird to see them play the trap though, and kind of funny that MacT and everyone was so against the use of the word “trap”.
  • Also on the topic of sports, Michael Schumacher won the first F1 race back in Europe today!
  • It has been a light blogging week, with lots going on, but things should return to normal this week.
  • There’s a big crack in my windshield! And I don’t know where it came from either. Kim and I noticed it yesterday – it was like it came out of nowhere. Fortunately it’s at the bottom and not blocking my vision or anything, so hopefully it doesn’t get any worse, otherwise I’ll have to get it fixed.

Goodbye Dante

Today was a sad day for my family. We had to have Dante, our black, nine year old Portuguese Water Dog, put down. My Dad (on his way to the U.S.) brought him down to Edmonton last night, because his health had taken a turn for the worse. According to the doctor, Dante had a degenerative joint disease and possibly also some sort of endocrine disease. He was in a lot of pain when he moved around too much, and had lost a lot of weight recently. He was on pain medication over night so that he could have some tests done. Today, the doctor thought that euthansia would be best for him, as there was nothing to be done for him and he was in a lot of pain. We didn’t want him to suffer anymore, so we made the decision.

Dante was such a good dog, if a little funny at times! He was a water dog, yet he was a big chicken when it came to lakes or rivers or even large puddles! He had this habit of running into things wherever he went – he’d always bang his head on something. Whenever there was food in his dish, he pretty much vaccumed it down, and he always came running the moment he heard the snap of banana being opened. Dante didn’t drink water, he tanked up like a camel, and always came over to get your legs wet from his dripping beard when he was done. And funniest of all, he definitely had the “lap dog” complex. He thought he was a lap dog, just like Bijou, even though he was a pretty big dog!

So now Dante is gone. It will take some getting used to for all of us, even Bijou and Cisko (our other two dogs) who have been wandering around looking for Dante. They could tell right away that something was up! Dante is the third dog our family has lost over the years, and it never gets any easier. We decided to have him cremated.

Goodbye Dante!