Star Wars: Retold (by someone who hasn’t seen it) from Joe Nicolosi on Vimeo.

From a spam comment:

Thanks for writing, I really enjoyed your latest post. I think you should post more frequently, you obviously have natural ability for blogging!

Damn straight, spammers, quit insulting my allegedly undersized manbits and well-developed midsection and compliment me on my writing for a change. Eyes up here boys.

“Control your own definition of success and don’t ever let anyone else try to alter that for you. Make yourself happy and let everything else bubble out from there.”

From Balticon.

“I’m happy to see the cynical leave the field for having not gotten rich quick.”

From End of an Era?

I deleted my Twitter account today because I just don’t have time to fill my head with more minutiae. Of the 98 tweets on my page since my last login/tweet (late last night), 95 are meaningless. Of the three which were directed to me, two were a continuation of the same thought broken apart by Twitter’s character limit. So really, two of the messages of the almost 100 were relevant. That’s a very, very high noise-to-signal ratio.

Facebook has become similarly noisy, and worse, is a huge perpetual time sink. I’m not quite ready to exit from Facebook though.

I’m in a transition period right now and am reevaluating my priorities and goals. I’ve decided that spending a lot of time on services like Twitter or Facebook isn’t serving me. I’m interested in pursuing more meaningful interaction with a smaller number of friends than I am in maintaining less personal interactions with a large number of acquaintances. I don’t see how using something like Twitter and limiting my interactions with others to 140 characters helps me accomplish that goal.

I have enjoyed blabbing with a wide number of folks, and I’ve actually virtually met someone who I now consider to be a friend via Twitter, but I’m ready for human interaction outside of the matrix.

I can definitely see some uses for Twitter which I might explore in the future, but for now I’m glad I deleted my account and have that many fewer distractions, that much less noise to read.

Also, I’m just reporting… not telling you what to do.. It’s stupid to feel like I have to type that sentence, but I feel like I had to type that sentence.

I may start blogging here and at a2sg more often. I’m turning off comments on all my blogs until I can find an effective way to defeat the spambots and the fucktards. When I do, I’m going to patent it, sell it to a huge company, and retire a super-super-super wealthy man.

Until then I’m going to work on being a super-super-super wealthy personally developed Dan. Wish me luck.

I think it’s soooooo awesome that we have a once-a-year day to celebrate the awesome band Frank Zappa put together. Over the years that band was literally a who’s who of musicians who went on to virtuosic heights in so many different genres of music. It’s impossible to understate Zappa’s influence on music as a whole.

That said though, I find it a bit curious that Zappa isn’t specifically highlighted or named on this special day.

I took some pictures and shot some video of my friends Lynne Bartholomew and Dave Allender (of Tin Cat playing at Red Rock Coffee Company in Mountain View this past weekend. I’m sincerely impressed with Lynne’s fingerstyle playing and Dave is at his awesome sideman best (as always… dude’s a pimp).

For some funky reason the titles don’t show up properly in the widget above, nor do all the videos in the playlist appear. Time to find a better widget, though this one will do for now.

Thanks to some heavy bribing action I’ve managed to convince Keith Sutton to allow me to present at this coming Wednesday’s Silicon Valley Flex Users Group (SILVAFUG South) meeting. WOOT!

This will be a cool opportunity to share the awesomeness of Ruby and I’m hoping to be able to do so in an informative and entertaining way. Full meeting details can be found here: http://ria.meetup.com/12/calendar/9894685/

If you can attend I’d really appreciate your support.

There are a number of really cool people in the Ruby/Rails community and today I was encouraged by how Jamis Buck (Ruby Uber-Ninja @ 37 Signals) answered a pretty rudimentary question:

I also really dig that the comment following Jamis’ included a link to the documentation, etc. In other communities I think the question would have been answered with “google it” or RTFM… but instead Jamis and Benedict go the legitimately helpful route. It really impresses me when people at “the top” reach out to help somebody “below” to help them “get up.”

High-fives to you both.

One of the IT dudes at work just offered the following as a Help Desk Question of the Day:

“Do you think a wireless mouse would slow us down?”

You just can’t make this shit up…

It looks like it’s time to pony up a few bucks for Ruby Inside:

Ruby Inside rules… and I’m overdue to show ‘em some love anyhow.

YouTube Contest Challenges Users To Make A ‘Good’ Video

I meant to add “and by ‘best regards’ I mean ‘go fuck yourself’” to an e-mail I just sent to an assmunch on a meetup.com mailing list. So it goes.

Yup…

The “every form of witchcraft is what we rebuke” part is the only thing that he seems to have prayed over her. Is he telling us something about the VP candidate we need to know?

Seriously, wtf?

NoMethodError (You have a nil object when you didn’t expect it!
You might have expected an instance of Array.
The error occurred while evaluating nil.collect)

My friend, via IM:

Can you imagine if John Mayer and Shakira had a kid? It would sing like fuckin’ Chewbacca

I’ve been enjoying the Failblog quite a bit. It’s fun to see lots of pictures of human stupidity and ironic juxtapositions, especially stuff like this, this, this, this, or even this.

While some of them are obviously fake (you can tell that it’s poorly photoshopped ’cause of phone cord bits on his tie), overall they’re pretty darn funny. My #1 favorite though is this one (which I just submitted):

(h/t to Brendon Wilson for tweeting about Failblog.)