Remember when I mentioned a song I recorded called Shelf Life? Sure you do…

Well anyway, thanks to the Creative Commons license I used (Attribution) others can put it to use, and now someone has…

Gabe has just uploaded Oh, Hai Pete, a little number he sent me via email last week, which I somehow talked him into publishing for real.

Enjoy…

Kelly and Jeff Fitzsimmons just launched ComicWonder, which is a competitive arena for joke-tellers. Their mission is to “scour the earth looking for the best joke-teller in the world and crown that person the Comic Wonder of the year.”

I was hoping to get one of them to a Web414 meeting to talk about ComicWonder, but you know, they’ve been a little busy lately. :)

Grand Opening: Apple Store, Bayshore 6:00 p.m., Friday, June 29, 2007. Yup, that’s right! Another Milwaukee Apple Store. A good friend of mine works at this one. Sadly, I don’t think I can make the opening, but I do look forward to stopping by as soon as I can.

Blogging may be light for the next few days, as I am getting married.

No, really. I am. I’m getting married to the lovely Dana today. Hooray for us! :)

Don’t worry, things will be back to normal next week, and then I’ll be writing posts as a married man.

Have a great weekend everyone!

(Oh yeah, there’s more coverage at pete+dana)

We just launched the brand new z-2.org, which is the first step in the re-branding of Z2 Marketing + Design. This site was a real challenge compared to most of the other sites I’ve worked on in the past year. There’s a decent amount of Javascripty/Ajax stuff, without overdoing it, and while we used some Flash-like things here and there, the only place Flash is currently used is for playing the audio and video pieces in the portfolio.

Take a look around, and let me know what you think. We’ll be doing various tweaks as time goes by, but all in all, we are pretty damn happy with the outcome. We hope you enjoy it.

Remember back in 2003 when I proposed Google-Free Fridays?

Looks like it’s making a comeback. See: This July: Try Google-Free Fridays!

Honestly I’m probably one of the few people I know who doesn’t completely rely on GMail, Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Google Floor Wax, Google AdSense, Google YouTube, Google Blogger, Google Sandwich Spread, Google Picasa, Google Groups, Google Shoelace Tying Machine, Google Analytics, Google Earth, Google Calendar, or Google Master Chef on a daily basis.

I do quite like their search and maps though…

I first mentioned the Blogging Summit put on by local broadcasters WTMJ 620 on June 12th, 2007 in a post title Citizen Blogging Summit.

The Summit was on June 14, 2007, and I recapped in a post title Citizen Blogging Summit Report.

There is a very good chance that in a few years, those links will still work. There are links to this site that still work nearly 10 years after I first created them. There’s an old saying: Cool URIs don’t change. WTMJ 620 doesn’t get that.

When we were at the Summit, someone mentioned they were re-launching their site in the next few days. The second I heard this, I was pretty sure all the bloggers they invited, who actually linked to the Summit page, would have dead links within a week. I was right.

I’m really hoping they fix this, but as of right now, links to http://www.620wtmj.com/blog_summit.asp get a 404.

And there are links pointing there. I mean, we’re bloggers! You invite us to talk about something, and we will, by linking to it. Will I link to anything on 620wtmj.com again? I don’t know, since there is a good chance it’ll disappear with the next web site re-design.

I might just be a little sensitive about this issue because I’m in the middle of doing some URL re-writing for a site that just underwent a major rebuild. But really, is a permalink so much to ask for? Honestly, I’m pretty disappointed. Just when you think someone is starting to get it, they let you down.

I’ve been looking for a trailer hitch for our Honda CR-V. I found a local shop that will install one for about $170, which sounds like a lot to a cheapskate like me, so I looked online…

I’ve found hitches ranging from $80 to $150. I’m not real concerned about towing weight, as we don’t plan on pulling anything, we just want to attach a 4-bike rack to haul the bikes around. (I believe we need to look at “tongue weight” which is what it can hold vertically, which should be the bikes plus the bike rack combined.)

All of the sites I’ve looked at ship the hitch to you with instructions, and say you can install it in well under an hour without drilling anything. A few have testimonials from people saying how easy it is, but I sort of feel lost… At least when researching technical stuff (computers, electronics, etc.) I have a comfort zone, but with this, I just feel like there’s a lot I don’t know. Maybe I’m over thinking it.

I’ll just have to do a bunch more research, and see if I can find people to answer some questions. The last thing I want to see is 4 bikes falling off the back of our vehicle while going 65 on the freeway.

I created another song and got it uploaded to Ourmedia using SpinXpress.

It’s called Shelf Life.

I’m getting a lot more familiar with GarageBand, and experimenting a bit now. I even recorded a few guitar tracks, the bass track, and a vocal track (which you won’t recognize as vocals) for this one. The drums mostly came from a loop.

(See Also: Wave Goodbye, and A Song at Ourmedia)

Well, we attended the Citizen Blogging Summit (Mike Rohde and I were on a panel, and Jeramey came along for backup) and it was… interesting.

As I mentioned in a previous post, we didn’t know what to expect, but Sean did a good job of moderating, and basically just asked us questions, and took a few questions from the (small) crowd. KeVron of Dork Factor Prime was there, but other than that, it was all people I’ve never met before. Kim and Jason of kimandjason.com came in from Madison and were on the panel with us. They seemed like nice folks.

We couldn’t stay for the panel after ours, so I don’t know how it all ended, but on the way back towards downtown to drop off Jeramey, we ran out of gas. Jeramey and I managed to push the car about a 1/2 mile down North Avenue, in the 90 degree heat, to a gas station. After that it was smooth sailing… So all in all, it was a pretty exciting day. I can’t wait for the next Citizen Blogging Summit!

Every city has an open mic night, so why shouldn’t today’s electronic musicians take advantage of it?

I used to play live music, but I wasn’t exactly the stool-sitting, guitar-strumming type you’d find at an open mic. (I could be wrong, I don’t know what variety you see at an open mic nowadays.) Recently the music I’ve been creating has been on the Mac using GarageBand, Audacity, sound loops, etc… Does that make me any less of a musician? Why shouldn’t I perform for people?

So my idea is this: Show up at an open mic night, plug in the laptop, and start playing my songs. I have no idea what the crowd reaction would be, which is what makes the idea interesting. Sure the “playing” might only consist of clicking a mouse, but still, it’s music, right?

I can see this going in a whole nother direction as well. We all know that sometimes to entertain you must annoy (some would even say torture) the audience. So I suggest this twist, show up, connect the laptop, and just start a drum loop. Let that play for as long as possible (until they throw you off, cut the P.A., etc.) and for good measure, you will need some friends in the audience, who at first are unsure (obviously they should pretend to not know you) but a few minutes into your drum loop solo, they should start to go nuts, screaming “yeah!” and “owww!” and if possible, getting up and dancing.

Anyway, if you guys want to be the crowd, I’ll bring the laptop…

Somehow I got roped into participating in this Citizen Blogging Summit (or “Citizen Blogger Summit”) which is taking place Friday, June 15th, 2007.

Maybe Newsradio 620 WTMJ will learn a little about blogging, you know, things like permalinks, or even linking to the bloggers you invite, instead of just putting their domain in plain text.

I’m really not sure what to expect. Mike Rohde and I are on the 2:25-3:10 Panel, Beyond Politics, Beyond Milwaukee. I’m guessing we are the ‘tech bloggers’ or maybe the token ‘non-political’ bloggers. Anyway, I’ll just prepare for this the same way I prepare for BarCamp or Web414 presentations, wait until the last minute, attempt to do nothing, then embrace the chaos.

The event is free, and includes lunch (which I will miss since I can’t be there all day) and I’m reasonably sure it will be interesting. I’m also reasonably sure I’ll be the person there who has been blogging for the longest time, unless Dave Winer shows up. :)

If all goes well, I should have a new 20″ Apple iMac in a few days.

It’s really time for a new Mac. I mean, I probably would have kept on using my G4 for another year or more if it had not died. The last time I bought a new computer was 2001. I even got AppleCare this time, because honestly, I don’t think Apple builds machines as good as they did 6 years ago. (Definitely not as good as they did 10 years ago.) Anyway, I can’t wait to get it and see what it can do. Of course now I need to worry about Universal Binaries and all that Intel related stuff. (A quick check shows that a good number of apps I use daily already have Universal versions.) But honestly, even if the PowerPC apps run slow, they should still be faster than the old G4 was running them. I’ll let you know once I run it through it’s paces.

I created another song and got it uploaded to Ourmedia using SpinXpress.

It’s called Wave Goodbye.

I hope you enjoy it.

Or not.

(See Also: A Song at Ourmedia)

My main Mac, the PowerMac G4 (Quicksilver) is dead. :(

I got it in 2001, so it’s just shy of 6 years old. It was used (and abused) daily, and ran as a server, so it was always on. Still, I think 6 years is a short life for a Mac. I’ve got Apple hardware twice that old that still runs fine. Through the years I upgraded the RAM many times, put in new hard drives, added a second video card, added USB cards, upgraded the optical drive… It was a good machine.

The details are fuzzy, but Saturday night, Dana was using her account, and thanks to “Fast User Switching” was switching it over to my account when it froze with a kernel panic. I figured it was no big deal, as I get a kernel panic about once or twice a year, so we called it a night, and I rebooted it.

I didn’t realize until Sunday morning at 5:30 AM that the Mac never rebooted properly. I could power it off, and then power it back on, but the monitor would never show anything. Panic? Not yet… I tried many, many reboots. I tried zapping the PRAM, removing some of the RAM, disconnecting the hard drives, starting from a DVD, trying another monitor, trying both video cards, and then I even pulled out the processor upgrade card, and put in the original one. Still no luck. It would chime the startup sound, and I could use the keyboard since the PRAM zap worked, but no dice, just dead.

Now was the time to panic slightly. I checked my backup strategy. I had most of the files I needed for clients. They get backed up to an external drive nightly. There was one project missing, which I stupidly had sitting on the desktop instead of in the ‘clients’ folder, but I was pretty sure that was backed up on my iPod as well. (Yay for multiple backup plans!) So my backups were good, but didn’t have everything, just client essentials.

At this point, I carefully removed the two hard drives from the Mac, and connected them to my iBook with the connector from one of my external USB hard drives. It’s all good. No data loss. To be honest, I would have been devastated if I had lost all my data. That’s the irreplaceable stuff. The computer? Sure I loved it, but it’s just a computer. It’s not my digital life.

So now what? My guess is the logic board is dead, which means the Mac is useless. I’ll run with the iBook as my main machine for now, while I formulate a plan. I have a few, I just need to determine which is best.