I can’t believe anybody thought they could come up with something lamer than Guitar Hero, but Microsoft’s research folks have hit one out of the park. I looked to check to see if this was posted on “April Jackasses Who Pretend They’re Funny Day,” but it appears to be a real research project, and one which almost conclusively proves two things:

1. Regardless of how great the software is, nobody in the video can sing an entire verse in the same key.
2. Computers will never replace real musicians.

MySong: Automatic Accompaniment for Vocal Melodies (emphasis and snark added)

Like to Write Music?

Most folks never get a chance to answer this question, since writing music takes years of experience… if you don’t play an instrument or spend lots of time around music, you’ll probably never get to write a song.

MySong, introduced in our CHI 2008 paper, automatically chooses chords to accompany a vocal melody, allowing a user with no musical training [or taste!] to rapidly create accompanied music. MySong is a creative tool for folks who like to sing but would never get a chance to experiment with creating real original music. Come on, you know who you are… you sing in the car, or in the shower, or you go to karaoke clubs, or you just once in a while find yourself singing along with catchy commercial jingles.

“You would never get a chance to experiment with creating real original music” only if you’re too fucking lame to spend five minutes plunking on a real instrument. At least you’d actually be trying to make music if you picked up an instrument. This is exactly the sort of lame bullshit that makes me immediately want to shoot down candidates I’m interviewing… (fictionalized version below)*

Me: “Have you used Tech. X?”

Lameass Candidate: “I haven’t had the opportunity to use it.”

Me: “Really? Because you don’t have a computer or access to the internet?”

Lameass Candidate: “No, I have those.”

Me: “Oh, so you haven’t had any opportunity to download free open source software and run it on your machine?”

Lameass Candidate: “No, any time I try to download it men in black suits break into my house and beat me repeatedly.”

This software really is kinda interesting even if the current incarnation produces accompaniments which basically sound the same (tink, tink, tinka, tink) and have the performance quality of a 1st grade piano teacher’s recital. (Click the link, watch the short video, and you’ll see what I mean… tink, tink, tinka, tink)

I think they’re overlooking a market which would absolutely adore this… Christians. Consider the following compositions:

Jesus!  You are Awesome  (tink tink tinka tink )
I'm sorry that I inflict pain on you  (tink tink tinka tink )
through time and space and that I  (tink tink tinka tink )
greaten your suffering on the cross  (tink tink tinka tink )
when I masturbate and think impure thoughts (tink tink tinka tink )

Or the other soon-to-be gospel hit: Jesus!

Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus!   (tink tink tinka tink )
Your name is Jesus, Jesus!   (tink tink tinka tink )
Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus!   (tink tink tinka tink )
Your name is Jesus, Jesus!   (tink tink tinka tink )
	
Hallelujah Jesus!  (A capella part)
	
Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus!   (tink tink tinka tink )
Your name is Jesus, Jesus!   (tink tink tinka tink )
Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus!   (tink tink tinka tink )
Jesus, I wish you could remember your own fucking name 'cause I'm tired
of having to sing it all the damn time to remind you!   (tink tink tinka tink )

Microwaves, televisions, the intertubes… and now automatic accompaniments for people who have no sense of rhythm, pitch, or style!

I’m still digging around on the site to see if I can find their MyOperatingSystem(tm), MyInstantBestsellingNovel(tm), MyGlamourMagazinePhotoshoot(tm), MyPainting(tm), MyMeaningfulLongtermRelationship(tm), and MyHomeSurgeon(tm) software projects. Why waste all that time and effort developing actual skills and an actual appreciation of music when you can buy a shitty piece of software?**

* My point here is that “I haven’t had the opportunity” is a lame, lame, lame answer and clearly indicates that the candidate has little-to-no actual interest in personal growth/development and is unwilling to take initiative… aka somebody I do not want to work with. The specific technology is irrelevant.

** Doesn’t look like you can actually buy this yet. Not like that’s a *bad* thing.

Hey, remember that song from Shrek?*

This is an interesting (and at times, wayward) analysis of the Leonard Cohen song “Hallelujah” and its apparent rise in popularity after it was “simplified and saddened” by John Cale and later Jeff Buckley.

Let me take you back to the long-ago time of mid-February, 2007. Popular emo band Fall Out Boy had the number one album in the country and, being a responsible music critic, I of course illegally downloaded it. As my train crossed the Manhattan Bridge, I reached track five on the album. And I heard this:

What they’re singing there, aside from what I believe professionals call “twaddle,” is the chorus of a Leonard Cohen song. This is mildly incredible. Twenty-five years ago, a character on the TV show The Young Ones named Neal–the hippie–said, “I’m beginning to feel like a Leonard Cohen record, cause nobody ever listens to me.” Today, in contrast, one particular Leonard Cohen song is featured prominently in no less than three separate episodes of teen uberdrama The OC, and can be heard in at least twenty-four separate movies and TV episodes, almost always as the soundtrack to a montage of people being sad.

What I hope to show today is how, exactly, that happened to a song called “Hallelujah.”

What’s now considered the definitive version of this song is by dreamy, dead troubadour Jeff Buckley. (Some people are even under the impression that Buckley’s cover is the original version.)

It’s an almost unbearably sad song in this incarnation—slow, keening, and heartbroken. But originally it was something different.

This is more like your uncle’s band playing in a warehouse, assuming your uncle was weird and labored under the impression that he was a crooner. It passed into the public realm almost unnoticed, and remained that way for some time; in the major Cohen biography, published in 1996, there’s no entry for the song in the index, despite the fact that the book’s name is the same as the album on which “Hallelujah” originally appears.

The article is pretty interesting and also contains clips/samples of numerous artists’ versions of the song.

If you have any love for the song and don’t want to hear the worst version that I could find then do not click on the video below*.

Since I’m on the subject of this song, I should point out that while I used to really like it I’ve overplayed it enough now that I absolutely loathe playing it and won’t, ever again. You’re welcome, Leonard… there’s now one less idiot doing a shit cover of your song.

* Sorry, but I couldn’t resist starting this post that way.

** I confess that I like Bon Jovi and that this isn’t the worst version of Hallelujah that I’ve ever heard (I have performances of myself playing it y’know?), but omfg Bon Jovi’s whispering-voice on this is some of the most overwrought and maudlin shit I’ve heard in a while.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be admitting this publicly, but I was excited to learn that the early-80’s TV show Square Pegs is going to be released on DVD tomorrow (May 20, 2008).

From IMDB:

Welcome to Weemawee High School, where being in the right clique can make one’s years in school memorable. Enter Patty Greene and Lauren Hutchinson, two freshman who tried hard to be accepted into these cliques. The only problem was they stood out like sore thumbs. Patty was brainy and wore glasses, and Lauren was overweight and had braces. Thankfully, two other “square pegs” accepted them. They came in the form of aspiring comedian Marshall Blechtman and New Wave rocker Johnny Ulasewicz (aka Johnny Slash). Still, Lauren and Patty wanted to be in with the cool kids who came in the form of Jennifer DeNuccio, a wanna-be Valley Girl; LaDonna Fredericks, the hippest black girl in Weemawee High; Jennifer’s boyfriend Vinnie Pasetta, a John Travolta carbon copy; and Muffy Tepperman, a Jewish princess who joined anything from JV pep squad to science fair organizer. Written by Pat McCurry

I probably shouldn’t be admitting this publicly either, but I remember part of the theme song:

Square pegs, square pegs, square, square pegs!
I don’t wanna wear my glasses, but I’ve gotta wear my glasses…

I definitely shouldn’t confess that I thought the Johnny Slash character was the coolest dude I’ve ever seen (hey, I was 10 in 1982, k?) and I made my mom look all over town for a clip-on thing so I could have a cool braided ponytail like him. For the record, we never found one, so I didn’t actually attain that level of dorkdom… but oh, so very close.

I seriously have not been this excited about a DVD release since the collector’s edition of Twin Peaks (Seasons One AND Two!). If you don’t see much of me online tomorrow, you know why.

While I am honestly excited about this, there’s a lurking fear in the back of my mind that time has made the series more than it really is, and that I might be as disappointed with it as I was with Krull after I watched it 10 years later. No way it could be as bad as Krull… no way. (Krull is still awesome in my mind though, even though I know it actually sucks… but let’s take a “don’t ask, don’t tell” stance on that… I’ve gotta hold on to something positive from when I was a lad!)

I think my fears are misplaced though… ’cause how bad could a TV show be if Devo appeared on it to play at a Bat Mitzvah? Also, Amy Linker is adorably cute (and she’s still hot!).

I’ve gotta figure out how to take “The Next Level” to the next level else I’ll have repeated it four times in a row and that’d be bad.

I just don’t think it can be said more betterly than this:

I hate April Fool’s day. It is to humor what New Year’s Eve is to drinking - the day a lot of people who aren’t very good at it feel empowered to give it a spin. With either, vomiting is a probable outcome somewhere.

A picture is truly worth a thousand words:

You’d be well advised to avoid Max’s Restaurant. Here’s the review I just posted on Yelp:

If it were possible to give a restaurant negative stars, this review would be a negative five (-5).

It’s very obvious as to why there are “Critics Not Welcome” signs/notices posted everywhere… Max’s Restaurant is obviously worried that people will find out how absolutely shitty the food and service is… oh, yes… it definitely sucks.

Periodically my coworkers suggest going to Max’s and I reluctantly agree. Today, I actually suggested going there so I have noone to blame but myself. One of my coworkers ordered the Asian Chicken Wrap. I’ve seen him eat things that I personally would avoid like the plague, but he left half of his plate untouched.

I ordered the home-made Gardenburger*. What I got was a pseudo-burger with minimal vegetables (a slice of onion, a single piece of lettuce, and a pathetic slice of tasteless tomato). The concoction of vegetables that Max’s staff pathetically attempted to create a patty from made plain oatmeal seem like a spicy Indian dish in comparison. The “patty” fell apart immediately and seemed to be undercooked. After a few bites I decided that it was a lost effort and flagged down the waiter and asked for a grilled cheese sandwich or something as a replacement.

After my coworkers had finished eating, I again flagged down the waiter and suggested that instead of a replacement that we should just cancel the order altogether. He replied “oh, well they cooked it and it’s ready.” Then why was it still sitting in the fucking kitchen?

In all fairness, Max’s is probably a great place for the geriatric crowd to dine, as the food is bland and tasteless. If one can’t handle anything that tastes like food, then a hospital cafeteria is probably second only Max’s restaurant.

–

*Gardenburger is actually a trademark for a vegetable “burger” which is normally quite good. Had I not known the difference (and not noticed the “home made” description on the menu) I’d likely have confused the slop they serve at Max’s for an actual Gardenburger. This is a prime example of why a company should sue the fuck out of a restaurant which infringes upon its trademark.

I got an e-mail today which is an impressive display of audacious scumbaggery (emphasis/commentary added, in bold):

Recently, (domain name I had registered and let expire) expired and went into a domain name auction. We acquired it and, since you own the .net version of this domain name, we wanted to provide you with the opportunity to own the preferred .com version.

Our company specializes in recovering preferred expiring domains and either selling them to individuals such as yourself or building out our own web presence on those valuable domains. I’m flabbergasted that he’s proud to be a scumbag… amazing.

…

If you’d like to own (domain-name-that-we-ganked), you can buy it now by covering our acquisition costs and a modest profit. (What a motherfucking bargain at $257! Wow, thanks Ken!)

If you have any interest I encourage you to act quickly because this domain name will only be offered for sale for a limited time.

If you have an affinity for scumbag assholes, here’s Ken’s contact info. Sounds like he’s interested in making friends:

Ken Palm
ken@securethatdomain.com
(aka “secure-that-domain-before-we-steal-it-from-you.com”)
tel: 563.823.4644

iTime Marketing, Inc
322 N. Main Street
Davenport, IA 52801

No need to thank me for the free advertising Ken. I’m so impressed with your 20-lb. balls of brass that I’m willing to share your outstanding offer to sell me something back that you snapped out from under me (or that I intentionally let expire ’cause I have no interest in developing).

Hell yeah, I’m going… last year’s RailsConf was just too damn fun.

Buddy: Hey, did you ever get your iLemon working right?

Me: It’s still fucked up

… from the last firmware upgrade which somehow fucked up my AT&T account.

Buddy: Wow, really makes me not want to get one. I was thinking about it for a split second,

Me: Dude, don’t get one

They’re overpriced

And standard Apple bullshit

Buddy: but I really really want a phone/ipod that holds ALL of my music. I do not want to do that oh I’ll swap this music for that today

Me: Great design / lame-ass quality control & service.

Buddy: Yeah, typical with apple

ALL HAIL Apple

Me: I was on the phone with the tech. support guy for almost 55 minutes before I got “it’s an AT&T billing problem.”

The support guy was cool (spoke English, even!) and he connected me to the right guy at AT&T

But OMG

Buddy: wow

Me: He didn’t know shit about what was up.

Buddy:That is cool he did that

Me: Yeah, he treated me like a person.

I told him “I don’t think it’s fair for me to have to pay for 55 minutes of tech. support.”

The AT&T guy reversed the charges for the call (over $20)

My phone is still fucked up.

I get billed any time I do anything on Edge.

Since it’s set to check my mail every 10 minutes I get billed 15 cents every 10 minutes.

I used it last night to reply to an e-mail: $1.50

Buddy: Good God

Me: AT&T dude says they’ll reverse the charges (and they better damn well reverse them… I pay for an unlimited data access plan), but I have to call in and ask them to do it.

After this experience and my previous iBrick experience, I would suggest that you find a phone made by a company that doesn’t suck ass.

Buddy: Heheh, I have heard horrible exp. with AT&T

Me: Yeah, AT&T sucks ass too.

No wonder they partnered with CrApple.

updated….

Buddy: hey that would make a great Snapple flavor…

Crapple from Snapple

Me: LOL

Buddy: then have kids just like the ovaltine comm. saying “MORE CRAPPLE PLEASE”

and instead of milk mustaches they could have chocolate pudding ones.

Me: Now with 30% more crap!

Adobe has been busy making cool new tools, and one of their upcoming tools, Thermo, looks like it’s going to be absolutely amazing.*

Part One:

Part Two:

Part Three:

*Granted, like all new tools which generate code, it’s bound to generate some smelly code… but wow, the fact that they’re working in this direction is awesome.

Adobe sure seems to do a lot right. Quite unlike a certain fruity company which is rapidly losing my affection at a rate much faster than Microsoft ever could, Adobe underpromises and overdelivers. There have been numerous moments recently when I’ve seen a demo of some upcoming Aodbe technology that just wows me… and they deliver.

Since the firmware upgrade for my iPhone has now put me on a phone call with Apple Technical Support (a nice guy who doesn’t seem empowered to actually accomplish or know anything… I’ve been on hold for at least 1/2 of the call) for the past 45 minutes, I’m bound to be writing a lengthy screed about how amazingly suckass Apple is to deal with. Yeah, YET ANOTHER ONE.

Do yourself a big favor… DO NOT BUY APPLE PRODUCTS. From an engineering perspective, they’re awesome. From an end-user experience, you’re fucked up the ass with a 2×4 the minute you have a problem with them unless you’re willing to pay a company to fix a defective product you bought from them.

Wait, I was going to rant about that later…

Adobe is appropriately named… they provide foundational building materials that you can use to build great things. Apple isn’t appropriately named, though. They’re right to name themselves after a fruit, but they’ve got the wrong one. They should call themselves Lemon, since that’s what they sell.

This is EXACTLY WHY you should NEVER buy stuff that’s been mutilated with Digital Rights Management (DRM) crap… because you’re more-than-likely to get screwed in the end.

If You Purchased MLB Game Downloads Before 2006, Your Discs/Files Are Now Useless; MLB Has Stolen Your $$$ And Claims “No Refunds”

Dear Tyra Banks and Oprah Winfrey,

GROW THE FUCK UP.

Female genitalia is called a VAGINA, not a va-jay-jay or whatever other toddler name you come up with for it. I find it pathetic that two remarkably successful women such as yourselves have to use baby-talk to refer to your own body parts.

The down side of this is that you’ve conclusively proven to the world that you’re both morons. The up side is that at least you have each other.

- Rev. Dan

(Dude with a penis, not a panini [that’s a kind of bread those are sandwiches].)

Update: This is what I’m talking about…

This is just stupid… Peachpit Press charges the same amount for a .pdf version of a book that they charge for the print version… but if you buy both you save a whopping $3!

What kind of crack are they smoking? Guess which Flex 3 book I’m not buying?

Peachpit needs to read a page from the business practices of the Pragmatic Programmers, where they sell .pdf versions of their books for less than the print version, and are super-smart and sell you a bundle of the print book and the .pdf for only a few dollars more than just the print book. It’s a no-brainer to spend another $10 or so and get the beta .pdf now and the print version when it ships. The only pisser is that the PragProg folks don’t have any books on Flex.

However, Flexible Rails is only $20*, and it’s an awesome book. Manning seems to have this down too… their book + .pdf bundles are only a few dollars more than the print version alone.

Somebody at Pragmatic Programmers needs to thank Peachpit Press, actually. I was so annoyed to see their absurdly overpriced .pdf book that I blogged about it and went to the PragProg.com site so I could link to it… and I ended up buying three books (bundles of the print book and the .pdf) that caught my eye:

** ***

I just gladly spent ~ $200 on print and .pdf bundles. The books themselves are a majority of that… and then a little bit more for convenient, offline-accessible versions which fit on my hard drive.

Which publishers won by providing me value, creating a win-win? Yeah, not Peachpit Press.

* I bought the print and .pdf bundle of Flexible Rails today ’cause I didn’t have the print version, and another legal copy of the .pdf is totally worth $5 more.

** This is my second hard copy of Agile Web Development with Rails: Second Edition. The print version I have now is beaten up, and it was impossible not to add the .pdf version ’cause it was only $8 more.

*** Design Accessible Web Sites: 36 Keys to Creating Content for All Audiences and Platforms is a book I’ve been wanting to read since I met and talked with the author at RailsConf. (Dude knows his stuff… and is hella-cool to boot.)

Once again, I’ve been taught the “don’t be an early adopter” lesson, this time courtesy of CrApple.

Around the middle of last week, my lovely iBrick “Smudgy” decided to become remarkably unresponsive… only seeming to acknowledge the sliding action to unlock the phone and display a completely pointless inactive “desktop.” I could accept calls (as long as I didn’t try to put anybody on hold or use any of the phone’s features) and well, that’s about it.

(Image submitted to Worse Than Failure by a reader named Daniel [not me].)

My lovely $400 iBrick (what else would you call a tragically broken iPhone [besides “yet another example of CrApple’s lack of commitment to quality”]?) is sitting on my desk, demanding to be connected to iTunes. When I connect my iBrick to iTunes I’m presented with two options: 1) Upgrade to the latest firmware, or 2) Restore, which requires an internet connection and demands the installation of the latest firmware. The latest firmware: 121+ MBs of crap that downloads over and over and that iTunes completely fails to install, yielding an obscure and pointless error message.

Hey, you there in the Cupertino mothership, isolated from reality… here’s a new marketing slogan for you:

CrApple: sweet design ideas that almost make it slightly past true mediocrity.

This is what happens when you suggest a good blog post title.

I haven’t dropped Evil Genius Chronicles from my aggregator… Dave posts nuggets o’ awesomeness a little too often… even if the bastard didn’t invite me to his birthday party.

Is Jason Calacanis Polyamorous? In a recent post he states (emphasis added):

….. like it’s not interesting to go to that club you used to love once you’ve found the women you want to spend your life with… that kind of done.

Honestly, I don’t actually care… either about him turning off the comments or where he sticks his weenie. The “turning off the comments” thing sounds just like the “I’m not going to blog for a long time” which turned out to be, oh 15 minutes or so.

Pretty funny Freudian slip/typo.

I’ve been more focused / less scattered lately, which seemed like a big mystery until I realized that I’m only reading about 5% of the blogs I’d normally read. I’ve just been marking huge chunks of stuff as “read” and quickly scan the titles of the remaining stuff for anything that’s really interesting. The only podcast I’ve listened to in the past several months is Out Of Fellowship.

The other major contributor to this mini productivity boon is that I’ve unsubscribed from several very noisy blogs with frequent content (many daily posts) of little actual interest to me, and those who can’t seem to show me only new stuff (I don’t need to be reminded of the same posts every week since before Christmas which weren’t interesting enough to read in the first place, thanks). Oh, and blogs which were presumably about politics but are actually mostly about gratuitous pictures of dumb panties… yeah… gone too.

Since I’ve never got anything of value to say (unless you’re one of my 1.5 personal friends), you might as well follow my lead and delete at least one blog from your aggregator.

So, while I wasn’t really expecting this to happen, I’ve managed to land myself a new girlfriend. Since she’s uber-sexy, I thought I’d post a picture of her and brag:

Yes, I realize that several of my friends will mock me for phrasing things this way, but damn it, she’s the sexy.

Once again Apple proves itself to be awesome… at Marketing:

I wish they’d reallocate some of the money they put into marketing into hardware Quality Assurance and Testing… and well, training the anime-haired freaks who man the “Genius Bars” in their stores. Yet again, I went into an Apple store and met with absurd stupidity from one of their elitist moron “geniuses” whose attitude was not only absurdly condescending and patronizing but who capably demonstrated a complete lack of product knowledge. I had to check twice… I thought I’d somehow been teleported to Fry’s Electronics.

If only Apple would learn that Customer Support was as important as Marketing, they might actually be “acting different” from their competitors.