Month: October 2005

You have to love any spam that starts out like this.

Link exchange request

Hello,
I have found your website bengarvey.com by searching Yahoo for “chipotle mexican grill identity theft”. I think our websites has a similar theme, so I have already added your link to my website.

For the past few weeks I’ve been working on and testing a system that allows Odd Man In players to donate money to the development and expansion of the game and get something back in return.

I added a section to the Odd Man In FAQ explaining what donations are for, how to do it, and what you get in return (tokens).

Also, anyone who donates in the first week gets double tokens since they’ll also probably be helping me squash the last few bugs out of the donation process.

1. My face. That photo is at least 3 years old and it needs to be replaced with something more current.

2. The clutter. There is entirely too much text on the front page. In the next redesign I’m going to eliminate everything but the essentials.

3. Not having anonymous comments anymore. Spam forced me to kill anonymous posting, but I need to get it working again. I know it’s a pain in the ass to log in.

4. The width. I spent a long time making sure the design would span the width of everyone’s browser, unlike most sites that are viewed at a fixed width. I’ve come to the conclusion that this was probably a dumb idea.

Anyone have any other criticisms? Disagree with any of mine?

I like Franz Ferdinand, but I’m not a huge fanatic. That said, I’ve seen them live twice and they are really tight in person. My ears are still ringing, too. They played just about every song from their first CD and a bunch from the new one.

Sons and Daughters opened up and I didn’t recognize them until they played Johnny Cash (link opens up their video), which gets some airplay on Sirius 26.

Saturday morning I got up and played football with some co-workers and I barely made it up the stairs to make this post on account of the soreness.

Wow, what a great t-shirt for a record store. Robot Johnson.

Wow, those new iPods look awesome. They’re thinner, have bigger screens, play video and have a video output jack for a TV. You can also buy TV shows from iTunes 6 for $1.99.

Oh well, here’s an MP3 link to the new Cardigans song.

About a week ago I finished Neal Stephensen’s Cryptonomicon and I thought it was great, although a bit long. I felt like I was reading it for a year, but the pacing picked up by the end.

It’s the story of three people, two set in World War II and a third in the present day. Connections between then come to light and they are all somewhat related to the science of cryptography. An exerpt from the prequel, Quicksilver, is included at the end so now I’ll probably have to read that, too.

If you’d Cryptonomicon, I highly recommend you check out this site, What’s up with Enoch Root?.

Thankfully Congress has woken up to the fact that our interrogation policies have been unclear and that they’re hurting opinions of us around the world. Torture doesn’t work anyway since the person being tortured will just tell you want you want to hear.

In a sharp bipartisan rebuff to President George Bush, Republican and Democratic senators alike defied intense White House pressure to insist on clear limits on interrogation techniques on suspected terrorists and other detainees in US military prisons.

By a 90 to nine vote, the Senate tacked the demand on to to a $440bn Pentagon spending measure, despite a personal lobbying effort by Vice- President Dick Cheney, and a threat by the White House to veto the bill if it still contained the restrictions.

Has President Bush vetoed a bill yet?

Did I seriously hear a Stephen Malkmus song in a Sears commercial?

When I left for the Bamboo Bernies open mic last night the flyers were tied 3-3. It was 5-3 by the time I got there. What the hell?

Anyway, I had a good showing at their open mic. Justin has been requesting my cover of Gomez’s “Get Miles” for a while so I finally gave it a shot. It’s a really loud song for me to sing and I haven’t been able to handle it, but I think I did a good job with it last night. It definitely sounded loud to me. Justin, Keith, Sapp, Halfling, and the lefty who plays an guitar strung upside down were all there. I met a guy who claimed to be a hacker/ventriloquist, but he couldn’t be coaxed on stage.

Justin swears it’s only dead when I’m there. I actually thought the crowd was decent for a Wednesday night, but according to him it’s usually packed.