Egg Radio

I've never liked conventional radio stations for their music. For that matter, I haven't liked radio for much of anything. When someone complains that the iPod doesn't have FM capabilities, I think, why the hell would you want FM on an iPod, other than maybe for public emergency announcements? (As of Tuesday, they now have FM capability.)

I typically don't like radio stations for the same reasons that other people that don't like them: they play music that is popular so that they can get more advertisements. 95% of all popular music sucks in my opinion. Yeah it may have a catchy beat, but it just seems so hollow and soulless. All a radio station exists for is to make money. It is a business, just like any other. That is not to say they can't have good music, but most of the time they don't. About the closest thing to a radio station that I would like that is actually a paid radio station is the Henry Rollins segment Harmony in my Head on Indie 103.1 FM in LA. The only problem is that no matter how much I try, I can't get into punk music, which is a lot of what he plays. I like some of it, but overall the feeling is bleh. I like a lot of Henry's stuff, but his taste in music can be a bit much for me. I usually listened for whatever tidbits of talking I could find between the music. Maybe I should give it another try, as my taste in music has tended to grow. We'll see.

But for now, the best music station I've ever listened to is an Internet radio station called Egg Radio. To sum it up, this is from their site:

If you're new to the Egg, here's the quick scoop: this is an online radio station that plays an eclectic (egg-clectic?) mix of music. Mostly rock and alternative, but not what you're used to hearing on FM or Satellite.

I'd have to agree with that. I like rock and alternative, but not what you'd normally hear on FM or satellite. I like some stuff that was popular, some stuff that isn't. My musical tastes are all over the place, but maybe not quite as eclectic as some. What I love about this station is that about half the music they play is stuff I either own or I'm familiar with, and the other half is stuff that I really like, even though it's new to me. Yeah, sometimes they play crap, but mostly it's decent or at least listenable. What I really like is that they don't play the indie stuff. I'm pretty sure that they aren't playing that stuff, but if they are it isn't often and I don't notice it. If they ever played Coldplay, I think it would mar my opinion of them forever.

Listen here.

Another shameless promo, taken from their site:

Egg Radio is an internet radio station that plays an eclectic mix of rock, alternative, classic new wave, ska and all sorts of other things that should be on real radio (but aren't).

If you listened to "alternative" music when there really was such a thing, then you've come to the right place. The Cure, Morrissey, The B-52s, They Might Be Giants, Dinosaur Jr, XTC and Depeche Mode were bands that the weird kids listened to. Were you a weird kid?

So were we.

But just because we know good music doesn't mean have to be locked into a teeny-tiny alternative playlist. We're smart. We know that good music occurs in all kinds of formats.

We've mixed great classic alternative music with modern rock, ska, mainstream rock and few surprises to create a station that is the perfect soundtrack to a day of work in the office, or a party at your Soho apartment.

So, click the listen link and give us 20 minutes.

Do it. Seriously.

Can We Get Something Straight?

What makes people think that our troops are the ones making the war decisions. If I hear another dumbass person say that it's the troops that have got us in this mess, I'm gonna punch them. It's the overpaid, under-qualified civilians who make the policies of the war, not the troops. Can't we all just agree on this, for once?

Missoula Photos

This Flickr photo slideshow from Chris Lombardi is some of the best photography I've ever seen. His Missoula photos are easily the best I've seen on Flickr by one person, from any of the 10+ tags I follow via RSS.

Flip4Mac is Now Free

Aha. Finally I can be rid of Microsoft Windows Media Player. Flip4Mac allows your Quicktime player to play Windows Media files and it is now FREE.

Hallelujah.

Larry David is a Godsend

From the Slate article, The Year in Culture 2005.

Stephen J. Dubner, co-author, Freakonomics
I am grateful, nearly every day, for Larry David. (It should also be said that HBO's best show of any given season is reliably better, by a factor of at least five, than anything else coming out of that noisy box on my dresser.) At long last, we have been given a suitable replacement for the Woody Allen who made us laugh. And that would have been enough. But David is even better than that. A lot of the Freakonomics work that Steve Levitt and I do is about abritraging the gap between people's declared preferences and their expressed preferences—that is, the difference between what people say they will do and what they actually do. Larry David simply eliminates that gap. He says what he thinks and does what he wants. He makes the rest of us look like a bunch of phonies.

Shameless...

iTunes has, for the first time, actually perturbed me. It's a minor annoyance, but they added a "Mini-store" to the bottom of your library window. If you are playing, for example, Nine Inch Nails, it shows a little window with links to other music by that same person. Not a bad idea, totally, but turning it on by default just annoys me. I know how to get to the store. I know the music is there for .99 a piece. I don't know, maybe I'll use it once in a while for a preview, but thankfully, it can be turned off.

This was the first time I felt that something by Apple was being a little bit forceful with the advertising. It can be turned off, but still.

Religion is Bad for Society

An old post I never finished.

"“The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so.”

Here is an article about a study proving that religion is bad for society.

I'm not sure what to make of the article, as it doesn't go in depth to the actual correlation between religion and the degradation of society. But I think I have an idea.

It's the same reason why people who live under stifling religious conditions tend to rebel the most. It's why a rock concert in Salt Lake City or the Bible Belt tend to evoke an intense response from the crowd, especially one for a band that is stridently anti-religious. It's why the preacher's daughter is usually more prone to become a bad girl.

Because people often do what they are told not to.

Religion has been telling people what to do with their lives since the beginning of civilization.

Macworld 2006

For this year's Macworld, I wasn't highly impressed with the software offerings. Yeah, I'll probably pick up iLife sooner or later, if only for the faster iPhoto and improved features. I don't really use GarageBand. Since we got a video camera for Christmas, we'll be using iMovie more often. But mostly I use iPhoto. A lot. Some new features and a speed boost will help.

But the big mamma jamma for me was the new iMac announcement. I've had my eye on one since my friend bought one last year and let me play around with it. I've got a G5 PowerMac 1.6 and it does fine, but I've got my eyes on the iMac. I like the idea of Front Row and the built in iSight, as well as the power boost. Not to mention the big Apple widescreen monitor instead of my crappy 3rd party monitor that goes well with my G5, but is small and boxy, rather than widescreen. Fortunately, money is an issue right now. Besides, I want the kinks to be ironed out before I spend that kind of money. I'm sure it would work fine regardless, but I would still wait.

Other than the iPhoto update and the new iMac, the rest doesn't concern me. I do really like the ad they posted, though.

Meth Part 2

Good ol' meth. Where would the world be without it. Another article about meth, complete with good photos, like this one.

No Smoking on Apple's property

From 1 Infinite Loop, the Apple campus. I wish it were like this everywhere.

WTF is This?

Yeah, so I transferred my whole website back to my original Blogger site, but gave it a different name. This is now my official website.

Why the switch? Because wasting $9.95 a month on hosting a site is bullshit when you (1) don't update it, and (2) can do the same thing with Blogger, but without the nifty domain name. Now with Flickr, everything is pretty much free. I can host photos there and post them here. The only downside is I won't be able to host anything else, like movies or music, but who cares. There were only a few posts about that, anyway. But the other downside is some of my photos were hosted on my old site, so those will be gone. I'll have to update the site with that later. For now, it's up and running.

This will probably purge me of old readers and add some fresh meat to the audience. Not that there is one...yet.

Anyway, I decided to bring this site back online because as soon as I dumped Dreamhost and lost www.therealitystudio.com, I still felt some weird need to have a site. I just don't want to spend $9.95 a month on it when I can do it for free.

So this thing is back up. I've been up for 3 hours for no good reason and I'm tired as shit. In an hour and a half I take my rabbit in to have his nuts lopped off because he's turned into an evil monster who likes to bite me for no good reason. Hopefully this will cure his aggression and keep him from furiously humping the cat like it's the end of the world. One can only hope.

Next will be some major link dumps.