Don't Take Life Too Seriously

New Dinosaurs Eat Everybody!

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 05:13:37 GMT

Well, it took a long time, but I finally finished the redesign of Dinosaurs Eat Everybody! I still need to flesh out the content on most of the pages, but I've got the blog up and working (thanks to hours and hours of hacking up WordPress). What this means is that I'm done with LiveJournal and now I'll be doing all my blogging from that site.

I repeat:
My blog has moved to Dinosaurs Eat Everybody (that's www.dinosaurseateverybody.com)! Update your bookmarks and RSS feeds!

More about the new site written there...

The Twilight Hours of This Livejournal...

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 19:42:21 GMT

Whoa! Maybe I'll actually finish building the new Dinosaurs Eat Everybody! I spent some solid nerdy time last week/weekend working on the new site (mostly functional, backend stuff, and some style tweaks I've been putting off), and it looks like I could actually launch the new site soon. Right now the blog is functional (after A LOT of hacking up WordPress and the WPGET PHP class I found) and my last.fm and Twitter AJAX is working pretty well. I still need to design the global navigation and make some content for the rest of the site, but I might just launch with what I've got soon. Why am I putting so much work into a site/blog that most people will just read through their RSS reader? I dunno! It's fun!

Keep an eye out here and I will announce when I make the switch over (this means changing your RSS feed links, kids).

Woo! Camping!

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 20:58:51 GMT

Hey! Time for another sporadic blog update!

So last weekend was The Annual (the yearly "camping trip" that my dad has been doing with his friends for the last 39 years). It was a blast, as usual. I drove up with Jessica and Rachel on Friday and we got there in time to hang out, have a few drinks, go on a pontoon ride, and hang out by the fire. On Saturday morning I tried barefoot skiing again. I couldn't quite get it, but I'm going to keep trying. Later I got some good wakeboarding in. I was using Eric's board (which is much newer and much nicer than mine) and I was able to land things better. I even forced myself to ride fakey for a bit after landing a couple of 180s. Later we did some tubing (which is always fun) and then layed around in the sun. As usual, weekends like this remind me of how much I wish I had access to a ski boat and good skiing lake (and more friends who were into in watersports).

Last night I finally signed the lease for our new place. It's really close to my old place (less than a 5 minute walk away). I'm glad I was able to stay in the same neighborhood. Also the apartment is REALLY nice. Like nicer than someplace I should be living in. We have 2 (count 'em TWO) decks! I'll post pictures when we get moved in. I'm down to 12 nights left of sleeping on the couch!

Now, I know I've been talking about moving off of this blog and onto a WordPress one at dinosaurseateverybody.com for quite a while, but as you can see, that hasn't happened yet. Hopefully tonight I will get some work done on the new Dinosaurs Eat Everybody site and get closer to being able to launch that.

Homeless (And Not In The Good Way)

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 17:07:49 GMT

So as of July 1st I have been officially homeless. I decided to move out of my current place to get a new place with Rich and Chris. Well, some things feel through and we haven't found a place yet, so I'm now sleeping on the couch in my old apartment (somebody has already moved into my old room). The girls are really nice to let me stay there, but it still really sucks to not have a room.

All my shit is staked up in the extra room in the apartment and I just sort of live in the living room. It's made it hard to get any work done or write any music lately. I really miss having my own space to get away from people and get stuff done. I might have found a place that I really like that will let us move in August 1st, so hopefully everything works out well for that place. I'm kind of sick of not being able to get to most of my stuff and not having a real bed.

In other news, The American Autumn has a huge show coming up...

Tuesday, July 15th
7:00 $6 (you can buy tickets from us before the show!)
@ Clearwater Theater in West Dundee
w/ Flowers for Dorian, Love Me Electric, Walrus, & The Alumni Club

These are some great local bands and some of them have started to get some good national attention. I think this could be a really big show for us, so you should probably come check it out!

Browser War In A Box

Fri, 23 May 2008 21:28:30 GMT

So I just set up a box at work for browser testing. It has...

Firefox 3.0
Firefox 2.0
IE 7
IE 6
IE 5.5
IE 5
IE 4
IE 3
Opera 9
Safari 3 (for Windows)

Well... I thought it was neat...

Help Save Chicago Music

Tue, 13 May 2008 15:00:28 GMT

So apparently there's a vote up tomorrow for an ordinance that will be pretty detramental to Chicago's music scene. I encourage everybody to do what they can to help prevent this from getting passed.

(from an email I received)
Metro/Smart Bar asks you to oppose the Promoters Ordinance, which
would require independent promoters to get licenses to promote events.
Under the proposed law, independent promoters would have to acquire a
promoter's license at a cost of up to $2000 every two years, obtain
liability insurance for every event thrown, even if the presenting
venue already has liability insurance, be fingerprinted and background
checked, and maintain extensive records of each event.

Metro / Smart Bar believes that this ordinance is unnecessary, as
current regulation of PPA licenses and safety and security guidelines
are sufficient. The ordinance also unfairly singles out small venues
and venues without seating, with no justification for during so. The
goal for any additional regulation should be enforcement of current
laws and punishment of those who do not obey them, not increased
burdens on existing businesses. Additionally, the Promoters Ordinance
would negatively affect the Chicago music community. First, it would
affect the bottom line of small businesses like Metro and Smart Bar,
who make a significant portion of revenue from partnerships with
reputable, incident-free independent promoters. Second, loosing
independent promoters means Chicago music fans would loose out on many
small niche events important to minority groups. Third, restricting
independent promoters would drastically cut into the ability to do
charitable and political benefit concerts at Metro, as it would no
longer be financially feasible for non-profit organizations to
organize these events.

TAKE ACTION TODAY - Please email or call your alderman or alderwoman
and voice your opposition to the Ordinance today! Email or Call your
alderman and ask him or her to oppose the Promoter Ordinance. Be
polite. Tell him or her you support live music in Chicago, and feel
this ordinance would kill many great events. Say you want venues to be
safe, but this ordinance goes too far. Place a call to your
alderman's office today. This page will help you find your alderman
and give you his or her email address and phone number — quick and
easy and only takes a couple of minutes.

http://www.chicityclerk.com/citycouncil/alderman/find.html

The American Autumn Website Launched!

Sun, 11 May 2008 19:00:16 GMT

Alright! After a long time and a LOT of coding I've finally launch the site for The American Autumn! I'm really happy with this one. I've been working with generating and consuming RSS feeds, so now people can subscribe to a feed of our news and upcoming shows. I've also written a new front end for Word Press and built a band blog into the site, which should be pretty fun (and can also be consumed through RSS).

There's certainly more stuff I'd like to do with the site (mp3 player, more info on past shows, more picture display options, etc) but I think what I launched last night is a great place to start.

Let me know what you think. Enjoy!

www.theamericanautumn.com

Visual Studio 2008: So Far, Not Off To A Good Start

Tue, 06 May 2008 18:34:19 GMT

Seriously... this guys eyes are way too close together. He looks fake. It's unsettling.

Twerp

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 18:48:47 GMT

So, Twitter is much more fun when other people I know use it. Recently Jeff, Bryan, and Mike got accounts and it's livened things up on my Twittering. If you you've never tried it, it's worth playing around with. It's kind of interesting in a really stupid way.

For now I've been using this IM client called Digsby as my vehicle for Twitter, but I'm playing around with a few other things, too.

What Time Is It?

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 16:27:34 GMT

Alright! So yesterday I launched the redesign I had been working on for my company (Risetime). I started this about a year ago, but kept getting pulled on to other projects, so this site sort of dragged on. At this point I've been looking at the design for too long and I'm looking forward to doing a bit of a visual/information architecture overhaul when I have the time, but for now I'm happy to have it launched and it's a much needed improvement over our old site!

This site is built on SharePoint 2007, and is pretty much what I learned how to develop/style SharePoint on. It's been an interesting experience.

Without further adieu: www.risetime.com

In other news: The American Autumn is doing some recording in Dane's basement right now. So far it's sounding really good. Its kind of fun and relaxing to record this way. We're laying down She Likes The Radio, North and Damen, Ghost Town, & A Body For Arms. I'll post some stuff (probably on our MySpace) as soon as we get it done.

Artz!

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 05:44:56 GMT

So after a long talk with Mike I decided that I should try to learn to draw and maybe think about a web comic (as if I need another project). I started by drawing some people from comics I like and then tried to just come up with some characters based on those styles. Here's the rough sketches of what I've done so far. They turned out better than I thought they would. I'm installing Illustrator right now and I'm going to try my hand at digital inking. We'll see how that goes. Enjoy...

Gabe from Penny Arcade.

Blake from Nothing Nice To Say. Hands are hard to draw...

umm... a guy? I got kind of lazy as I kept drawing his body.

Another guy.... This was drawn on a post-it note!

If I get stuff "inked" tonight I'll post it!

Look What I Did!

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 16:03:30 GMT

Well, this week (only a few weeks late...) we launched the new Dollar General website. I didn't do the front end design (we had another company do that), but I did most of the development for it. It's kind of cool to have launch a site that I put so much work into and will get seen by quite a few people. Anyways... check it out at www.dollargeneral.com

So... Uhh... What's Going On?

Fri, 04 Apr 2008 18:25:19 GMT

Well, once again I've neglected this blog for a while. I swear I'll be better once I get my new site up (which will be after I launch The American Autumn site...). Anyway, here's a really brief summery of what's been going on.

I went to Europe! That was awesome. Jeff, Bryan, and I went to Barcelona and Paris for 10 days to hang out and visit my parents. It was really cool. I'll post some pictures soon (or try to find the link to where Bryan posted his pictures)
The band is going well. We've got a shows coming up on April 12th and May 24th. Be there. I've been working pretty hard on the website and it's turning out pretty cool. Hopefully I can get it launched soon.
I'm posting this from Firefox 3.0 beta 5. So far it seems pretty cool. I miss all my extensions, but I think once this is released I'm going to be very happy.
I've been playing with a new IM client called Digsby. It's pretty nice and ties into social networks to give updates on MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter. I guess I use those things, so it's pretty nice. I don't know if it'll replace Pidgin, but time will tell.
I finished up my first term (1 class) at DePaul. I got an A in the class, which is cool and I've started my next class which is about Flash and Actionscript. So far it's pretty cool and I think I'm going to enjoy it
I saw Zolof The Rock & Roll Destroyer on Monday night and it was awesome!
Jeff and I have been talking more about making the Team Hampser Hat site a reality. I'll have to work out the logistics after I finish up a few other projects. We'll see....
Work has been going alright. We've been trying to launch the site for Dollar General for about a week, but things keep slowing us up. I really want to just wrap this up.
Last night I ate 24 bonless wings from B-Dubs and felt pretty sick.

How Do Companies Make Money?

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 21:20:42 GMT

Hi! I'm a big company! I'm going to buy a big expensive platform for my website just because the company that makes it says it's great. Never mind that most of it's public facing site features are pretty half baked at this point. Now that we own this, let's not use any of its functionality. Let's just ask for simple things that are now much more complicated because of the platform!

To Quote A Platypus I Once Knew, "I want To Play Videogames!"

Wed, 13 Feb 2008 16:14:11 GMT

So, I have been interesting in Spore, for a while. It's a massive simulation game by Will Wright, the creator or Sim City, The Sims, and all those other Sim-type game. It looks really interesting; you start as a cell and evolve into animals, tribes, societies, then space travelers. It sounds like it is going to be really in depth, without being really hardcore. They're also doing some really interesting social aspects of the game by making it really easy to share created content (like animals, buildings, etc.) with other players.

Sim games have always drawn me in, but are much healthier and less socially detrimental than MMOs. Spore comes out September 7th and I'm pretty excited for it. Maybe it's a good excuse to buy a nicer graphics card... or build a whole new computer! Maybe? Here's some neat screen shots!

I'd like to let the record show that I loathe the undead

Tue, 29 Jan 2008 19:07:07 GMT

Shit... LiveJournal, I'm terrible at updating you these days... My current blogging plans involve moving over to a WordPress setup I have installed on dinosaurseateverybody.com, but it's part of the new version of the site that I have yet to finish. Other projects have been taking up my time and the redesign of dinosaurseateverybody.com has had to take a backseat. Until I can get that new setup launched I fear my blogging will be sporadic at best. Just out of curiosity, post a comment if you read my blog through LiveJournal, so I can figure out if I'd denying anybody their Dave stalking by moving to a different platform.

Here's a few things I've been working on lately...

The American Autumn Press Kit
The American Autumn store on Big Cartel

For those who don't know, The American Autumn has a few shows coming up...

Sunday, Feb 3rd @ Reggies
2109 South State St. Chicago
5:00, $8 cover

&

Tuesday, Feb 5th @ Clearwater
96 W. Main St. West Dundee
7:00 $6 cover

Come check us out, they should be good shows!

The American Autumn In The Studio

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 21:18:47 GMT

Last weekend The American Autumn recorded 3 songs at Semaphore Recording in Chicago. It was a pretty grueling experience, but a fun one, too. We got to use some nice gear (I played my new Gison SG played through a Marshel JCM 800!) We still need to get the tracks mastered, but for now you can hear what we have so far on our MySpace. Check 'em out. Let me know what you think.

I Fell Right Off The Blogosphere!

Wed, 12 Dec 2007 16:40:21 GMT

Yea... I've been a pretty bad blogger as of late, but no matter I will do better. Here's a quick update of what I've been so busy with.

Work: My project with Dollar General is dragging ass, so I'm back to working on our company website, it should be launched soon.

Freelance Work: I've been redesigning and rebuilding the website for the company my uncle works for. It's turning out pretty nice and it's been a fun project so far. It's sucking up a lot of time, but it's a good project and it's always nice to make some extra money doing something you enjoy. I'll post a link when I've got it done.

The Band: Things have been going well for The American Autumn. After playing our first "show" at Josh and Chris's 21st birthday we've been even more motivated to keep things moving. We got our MySpace put together (the restyling of which briefly consumed my existence) and threw up a roughly recorded version of Doctor Doctor. Check it out at www.myspace.com/theamericanautumn . I still hate MySpace, but it is a good resource for bands. I guess I just have to deal with the "filth you can't wash off" feeling of it and embrace all the kids on there who probably want to love our music.

We've also set up time with Semaphore Studios in Chicago at the end of the month to record a 3 song EP. We went to go check the place out last Sunday and they seem really cool. They've work with some cool bands like Alkaline Trio and MU330, so we're really excited see what this place can do for us.

Sleep: nope.

I guess if you don't count cartoons, web comics, and mac & cheese, that's been most of my life lately. I feel like I've been really busy lately, but it's almost all really fun stuff.

iPhone? Don't Mind if iDo!

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 17:34:03 GMT

Well, Lil Chris getting a job at the Apple Store was enough of a push over the edge for me. It TOTALLY justified buying an iPhone. I've had it for about a week now and I love it. It's great. The interface is sexy and enjoyable to use. I like having a QUERTY keyboard for txting and email. I love having email and internet whenever I want it. I can poop and read web comics AT THE SAME TIME! The future is now!

Now, while keeping my undying love for our Apple overloads in mind, here are my grievances...

1) IM Client: Come on. Don't make me use Meebo (which does have a pretty nice mobile interface) for my IMing. This seemed like a pretty obvious omission. Hopefully some future software update will toss iChat in there.

2) Calendar Subscriptions: Let me syn the calendar app with ical feed. Specifically, I want to subscribe to my Google Calendar.

3) Email attachments: I want to be able to attach files to an email. Can I do this? I don't think I can do this. It would be nice.

4) Edge: Seriously, get the net. I don't have all day to wait for my pages to load. Lets get some 3G in this bitch!

5) Battery Life: Look, if you're going to force me to check my email every 30 seconds and watch videos and goof around online ALL DAY it's going to take its toll on the battery. I understand there is a delicate dance between battery life and slim form factor. I'm just worried that my iPhone is going to lure me into watching a season of Entourage and then my phone will be out of juice and I can't make any calls.

6) GPS: Built in GPS would be cool. Don't you think?

7) Adding media via iTunes: What happened here? If you're going to add movies and music through iTunes (like you would on an iPod) make it work like a frickin' iPod. You can't just drags songs or videos onto your iPhone the way you do with an iPod, you have to sync with a play list or selected movies or TV shows. It's weird. I dunno if thats an iTunes issue or iPhone issue (maybe both), but get on the ball Apple. iTunes works great for moving media to an iPod, don't take a step back on the iPhone.

8) Recent Calls List: On the recent calls list, there's no separation of recently received calls and recently made calls. Am I missing something? This seems like a major oversight. I know this is Apple's first attempt at making a phone, but I would assume most of the designers have used a cell phone before.

I think that a lot of these things can be corrected via software updates and might find solutions when the SDK is released later this year and people start developing Apple sanctioned apps. Also, correct me if I'm complaining about a non-issue. It is possible that the features I'm looking for exist and I just haven't found them yet.

Even with these issues, I'm still really happy with the iPhone. It's fun to play with first gen technology. Safari is amazing. I never thought I'd want a phone that doubled as a music player until now. It just feels natural. I love you iPhone. Your beautiful interface and ability to keep me online ALL THE TIME has captured my heart. I look forward to a wonderful future together!

Last Minute Hold Steady Show

Thu, 01 Nov 2007 18:36:48 GMT

I LOVE that I can decide at 9:30 (an hour and half after the door open) that I want to go out and see if I can't get a ticket to the (sold out) Hold Steady show at the Metro. 20 minutes later I'm in the show. Awesome.

The General Is A Great Man

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 04:15:01 GMT

Living in Cary, I think I took for granted how good the China House's General Tao's Chicken was. I've been looking for good General Tao's in my area and so far all the places I've tried have let me down. It's been very disappointing, but I'm not giving up on my search for a great Chinese place in the area. This one's for my homies at China House [pours some soy sauce on the curb].

IMAP for Gmail!!

Wed, 24 Oct 2007 03:49:18 GMT

I looks like Gmail is getting IMAP support! Yes! Yes! Yes! Woooo!!!!! [link]

It hasn't been rolled out to everybody's accounts yet, but a few people have reported seeing it show up in their Settings. This is very cool.

Hello, Thunderbird (or perhaps Mail?), again!

Let Your Computer Do Good Things So You Don't Have To

Wed, 17 Oct 2007 20:41:39 GMT

A long time ago I played around with the SETI@home project, which basically used people's computer to examine radio waves looking for aliens. A cool distributed computing idea, though perhaps a little ridiculous.

Well, I started looking into some systems like this that work towards more pressing issues and one of the most promising I've found is Folding@home. It uses your computers extra processing power to examine protein folding. This information is used to study Alzheimer's disease, cystic fibrosis, BSE (Mad Cow disease), an inherited form of emphysema, and some cancers. There's more information about the science behind all of this on the web page.

The basic idea is that you download their little program HERE. When you set it up you put in a username (just so you can track all the work you've done) and you can put in a team number (I've started a team... 90234 , please join it.... this is just a way of tracking all of the work that one group of people does). Through the configurations, you can set up how much of your CPU you want it to use, or if you only want it to come on as a screensaver (which is nice if you don't want it to slow things down while you're doing work). For those of us who leave our computers on all day, we could get some good work done. Once everything is setup, you just let it run in the background (or while you're idle) and you don't ever have to really think about it, unless you want to check on how it's doing.

This is great geeky way to help out a good cause. I seriously recommend checking this out and joining team# 90234. I'm still working on my first work unit on my computer at work, and I'll be installing this on Slimer and Sully at home.

Chicago Marathon...The Aftermath

Tue, 09 Oct 2007 22:02:50 GMT

Some of you may have heard by now, but the marathon went a little bit differently than I expected it to. I started off feeling really good and had a nice time at the half way point (around 1:42, under 8 minute miles). As the race progressed I started feeling crappier and crappier, but I just assumed that marathons were supposed to feel like death and the heat certainly wasn't helping. It was about 90 out and I felt worse than I had ever felt in my life even though I got water and Gatoraid at every available stop. It was horrible, but I refused to let myself walk.

Apparently (I don't remember any of this) I passed out some time after the 19th mile. The next the I remember is waking up in an ambulance (vomiting and asking how far into the race I had gotten). Then after that I remember waking up really dazed and in a hospital room. At first I couldn't remember much of anything (except my name, what I was allergic to, and that I hated needles, all of which I told to the nurses). I had collapsed from heat stroke and severe dehydration and my heart rate was over 150. They told me I looked really clammy and gray. I laid around in the hospital bed while they pumped fluids into me (at least 4L through an IV in each arm) and started to remember things such as my phone number, address, and what month it was.

Eventually my parents found out why I hadn't finished the race and where I was at and came to pick me up. I took it easy for the rest of the day and didn't go into work on Monday (though I hadn't planned on doing that anyways). Despite collapsing, I don't have a single scrape on me, so maybe somebody caught me as I was going down. All in all it was a very strange experience. I never expected the marathon to end like that. I read that over 300 people were hospitalized and 1 person died. The marathon was eventually canceled and people were told to walk the rest of the way in, due to lack of water and ambulances.

I'm feeling fine now, except for my legs being sore and my feet being totally destroyed from blisters, but it was very weird to be in that bad of shape for a little while. I'm going to look into training for a half marathon next spring and take it easy on my legs for a bit now.

This is how I finished my marathon

It's A Nice Day To Die McDoogle...

Sun, 07 Oct 2007 01:28:36 GMT

Tomorrow I run the Chicago Marathon. If I'm alive afterwards, I'll tell you all about it.