I am truly sorry dot dk

'Brozy got me wonderful CDs: Amber Pacific's The Possibility and The Promise and the All-American Rejects' Move Along. I actually discovered Amber Pacific through Pandora, so it would have been polite to buy it at Amazon through them, but 'Brozy and I decided when we bought two Simpsons collections at FHE...er, EFY...er, FYE that we were getting their Backstage Pass and buying all our music and movies there. (They have a better movie selection than Blockbuster anyway, and Hollywood Video is of the devil.) (Huh. Apparently they have video games too. Rock on.)

You really should look at Pandora; my coworker was hooked within ten minutes of setting up his station. You enter a few songs and artists you like, and it plays musically similar songs, including, occasionally, the songs you originally entered. It claims to find musical qualities transcending genre, and I'm convinced; it does a really good job mixing Ben Folds, Queen, Jimmy Eat World, Everclear, and Eve 6 on my Pandora station. (Apparently I like vocal harmony, vamping, hard rock roots, punk influences, pop rock qualities, dynamic male vocalists, electric rythym guitars, electric guitar riffs, major key tonality, and a vocal-centric aesthetic.)

You should also try out Amber Pacific, if you haven't heard their stuff yet. (You likely have, I suppose; I'm generally out of the loop, and they were on Vans' Warped Tour.) In the Amber Pacific bios page, they list as influences Fall Out Boy, All-American Rejects, Newfound Glory, Simple Plan, Death Cab for Cutie, MxPx, and Green Day, to give you a rough idea. Save Me From Me is the specific song Pandora recommended for me, and they were right; I'm pretty sure it's the most beautiful thing I've ever heard, though I'd like a little more overt, Jimmy-Eat-World-style harmony.

Another really cool thing about Amber Pacific: they're not, to my knowledge, categorized as Christian music (except insofar as "Christian" means "awesome"), but the band members are individually explicitly and emphatically Christian. Perhaps that seems like selling out, but I think Christian music makes the specious assumption that Christians should only do Christian things, where I think it's more reasonable to do all good things as a Christian. Not like worshipfulness is the only emotion we're allowed to feel. And besides, I think it's a much more effective witnessing technique making music all people can relate to and then doing cool things like Dango, the Amber Pacific drummer, sponsoring Rebel Brand Clothiers.

I'm at work, and I really need to get on the clock, so I'm going to call this an entry. Not terribly much is new. Going to Arizona this weekend for Geneva's reception. My office bumped me up to full-time (and hired 'Brozy, if you don't read 'Brozy's blog). I have a hard time wrapping my mind around the fact that a dollar's raise is not small. I wish they'd tell me it's a $2,000/year raise instead. But yeah, life is basically amazing. I love this work. It's ideal: I have fast Internet, a salesman going and getting money for what I make and giving me lots of it, a boss smart enough to properly appreciate my work and humble enough to often follow my recommendations, and my girlfriend working beside me. Also a very pretty potted plant on my desk, which is beside a window. Hurrah, hurrah. (In fact, the only sad part is that I can no longer empathize with noble Theric's view on work: I now plan my next day's project as I drift off to sleep. The philosopher in me, rather than fighting for his fair share, seems to be atrophying with each passing day.)

Top 10 Strangest Lego Creations

Spore Gameplay Video

How to Do What You Love

Javascript includes

The InnerHTML dilemma--one of the few things I doubt my boss and I will ever agree on. His AJAX uses PUT and DELETE and XML; mine uses query string commands, HTML snippets, and JSON data. I rarely think it's semantically appropriate to return a document for an RPC, and I hate using DOM methods to access my returned data. (See Quirksmode: The AJAX Response for more thoughts.)

Wikipedia: Time Travel

Bridges, Bridg-It, or Gale. I'm considering making a Python, two-player AJAX version of this, similar to WEBoggle. (My boss is considering making an improved Web Sudoku, which sounds really cool.)

So apparently wardriving is named after the movie WarGames. Huh. Neat.

Wow, this is hilarious. Wow. Over 85% of your thoughts are coming from your subconscious mind and controlling your reality.

The Daily WTF. (Hope I'm not betraying the brotherhood of programmers by sharing this.)

"We'd be lucky if we were as sterile and disease-free as an ant."

Naming variables for unmaintainable code. Riotous.

The Benefits of a Fixed-Width Design

Sand game, from oudeis. Amazing.