Circadian Shift

Somewhat less kludgy, but by no means elegant, here's another page of stuff that I'm playing with. Again, odds are good that it'll blow up in IE 6. More tweaking will be required at a later date.

Today's chronology, thus far:

• 6 am: clock-radio alarm sounds; turn off alarm, turn on radio
• 6.15 am - 8.03 am: buzzer alarm sounds; hit snooze button (repeat every 9 minutes)
• 8.03 am: drag self out of bed
• 8.40 am: leave hovel
• 4.30 pm: return to hovel
• 4.45 pm: check e-mail and web

Will try to avoid napping (have been consuming coffee at various intervals during the day), as I have other stuff I need to do before midnight.

Catching up on linkage from the last couple days:

• Disquiet has resumed publishing after a very long spring break
• two excellent tunes featured this week on Rare 1980s MP3 of the Week: The Damned's "Grimly Fiendish (The Bad Trip Mix)" and China Crisis' "Working With Fire and Steel (12 Inch Mix)"
• Would you lie to me? -- the history of uncovering truth in gestures (via Follow Me Here)
• a Slashdot book review of Single Sourcing: Building Modular Documentation
• Jeffrey Veen's IA Jargon Watch -- favourite new abbrevation: "S2BU", meaning "sucks to be you" (via Donna M, found via IA Slash)
• Why Do Some Societies Make Disastrous Decisions (first spotted on Slashdot, also linked on a few other places that I visit)

Also, here's a whackload of linkage related to blogging, knowledge management, and business:

• a quick post by Lou Rosenfeld on Blogging K-logging, which supplies more linkage in turn
• a Business 2.0 article discussing Management by Blog? (first spotted on BostonWorks: The Job Blog)
• Anders Jacobsen's short rebuttal to the Business 2.0 article (via, um, somewhere)
• and, just in case you care, my own two screeds on this subject from last summer:
  • Whither B-Blogs? -- "Blogging and business? Maybe."
  • Whither B-Blogs? Part 2 -- more about business blogs and knowledge sharing

Chronology:

• Monday, 3.30 am: go to bed
• 6.00 am: clock radio alarm sounds; switch off alarm, turn on radio
• 6.15 am: buzzer sounds; hit snooze button
• 6.24 am to 7.36 am: repeat above at 9 minute intervals
• 7.36 am: drag self out of bed
• 8.30 am: leave hovel
• 4.30 pm: return to hovel; check e-mail and web
• 5 pm: nap
• 9.25 pm: oops
• Tuesday, 12:50 am: vaguely out of it, but unable to sleep; write meaningless blog entry
• 6 am: clock radio scheduled to sound
• 6.15 am: buzzer scheduled to sound

sigh

This is kinda clumsy, but I thought I'd try it out. It's a work in progress.

[Addendum 28 April 2003: Ew, the page really sucks in IE 6. Sorry folks. Like I said, it's a work in progress.]

Oh, I so hate drivers like this one:

Saturday, April 26

7:24 PM - I constantly glare at people when they sit their car upon the crosswalk as we are crossing. Not only is there a well defined big white line but I think the idea of a busy intersection and cross lights is pretty much ingrained into society. There is no reason to sit on a crosswalk forcing me to step around your big fucking car.

Anywayz, this morning on the way to work, I am glaring at a driver in a grey minivan, as is the old lady with the walker. She is nervously stepping out in front of the grey minivan and just about into oncoming traffic. As I glare, the soccer mom behind the steering wheel gives me a sheepish grin and shrugs. The teenage daughter rolls her eyes.

Walking home from work this evening I am at the same intersection crossing with a family of 5. Dad is being pretty cautious as he guides his three rambunctious boys around the front of a ... grey minivan. Startled, I look at the driver to recognize the same soccer mom & daughter as this morning. This time she is staring off into space, doing her best to ignore me. The teenage daughter is rolling her eyes.

Stupid. Cow.

From this boy is toast.

Presently listening to ClubEight: The Spring Edition by DJ Sten -- progressive trance, if you like that sort of thing.

Miscellaneous linkage:

• The top headache at work: Getting everything done (via Manifesto Multilinko)
• Revolution by remote -- "Invented as a way to avoid ads, the remote control has changed our cultural channels for good, from war coverage (click!) to relationships (give me that!)" (via Gizmodo)
• The difference between acronyms and abbreviations and More about acronyms and abbreviations (via WebWord)
• 7 Habits of an AntiBlogger (also via WebWord)
• Amaya 8.0 Binary Release -- I didn't know they were still making this thing (via Accessify)
• Who Ever Said Comedy Had To Be Fun? -- a look inside David Letterman's Pants
• WHO admits 'missteps' re: Toronto (via IA Slash) (you'd think I'd get my "normal" news through normal news channels, but nooooo....)

Yet another source of downloadable DJ sets:

Partyshots.Statix.Net (download menu is here)

Mixes that I've downloaded and enjoyed:

• T-Rob's Tribute to HouseQlassics -- Age of Love! Plastikman! Rob Armani! Apotheosis! Download! Download! Download!
• T-Rob's Live at Bijlmer, Amsterdam -- decent set, kicked off by 3 Phase's "Der Klang der Familie"

Also, it is with much sadness that I learned this week that The First Cut will no longer be offering weekly retro MP3s for download. sigh

Blake offered some truly excellent tracks over the years. He will be missed.

• Smart Heuristics -- "In order to make good decisions in an uncertain world, one sometimes has to ignore information. The art is knowing what one doesn't have to know." (via Follow Me Here)
• a Slashdot book review of How Would You Move Mount Fuji? Microsoft's Cult of the Puzzle - How the World's Smartest Company Selects the Most Creative Thinkers -- a good read on interviewing practices at Microsoft and elsewhere
• "invisiblog.com lets you publish a weblog using GPG and the Mixmaster anonymous remailer network. You don't ever have to reveal your identity - not even to us." (via Slashdot)
• Conceptual Presentations -- "Presentations are becoming increasingly visual and less textual. Converting every concept into an image is the challenge and, at the same time, the solution." (via IA Slash)
• What kind of thinker are you? -- CAUTION: I went through the entire bloody quiz using my Opera web browser, only to receive this assessment on the results page: "Your browser doesn't support our quiz, please use an alternative." Bastards! (via WebWord)
• at least the quiz thing wasn't a complete loss, as it led me to BBCi's subsite on Leonardo da Vinci

Awright, I'm curious.

What's up with all you people coming in from my old Blogspot site? How did you end up there?

groggy, very groggy

bit of calendar mix-up madness got me up, dressed, and out of the hovel before 9am both yesterday, and today

also foolishly went back to walmart today while sleep deprived

"d" -- sorry, i owe you a phone call -- i could phone right now, but i'm a bit too spacy for good conversation at the moment

someone told me today that i look better without my glasses; i like this person, but couldn't resist delivering my usual retort to such a comment:

"you know, you look better without my glasses too"

• An Introduction to Social Network Analysis (via paranoidfish)
• Semantic Networks (via IA Slash)

• Our ancestors had brains - for dinner -- "Spread of disease-protection genes points to cannibalistic past" (via Follow Me Here)
• Web Archive in Visual Anthropology -- "WAVA is an archive resource for people interested in the anthropology of visual communication. It features out-of-print and unpublished materials useful for teaching and research. We have secured permission to place works on the web so that interested parties can download and use them." (via xBlog)
• Women need widescreen for virtual navigation -- "Female architects, designers, trainee pilots and even computer gamers should be given much wider computer screens, a team of computer scientists from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Microsoft's research lab in Redmond, Washington, told a computer usability conference in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, last week. Wider screens and more realistic 3D animations, they say, will boost women's spatial orientation and 3D map-reading skills to match those of their male counterparts." (I dunno -- I think my visual/spatial skills are pretty damn good, actually, but I wouldn't say no to a nice big computer monitor.) (via Slashdot)
• The Art of Explanation -- "The events unfolding in Iraq often defy easy explanation. To take it all in, a reader must understand complicated military technology, vast cultural differences, great stretches of geography, and complex jargon. By working to simplify and define, a visual journalist can help a reader to better understand -- illustrating the way something works, outlining key relationships or creating a chronology of events, for example. Poynter Online would like to showcase the efforts of visual journalists as they help readers find clarity." (via IA Slash)

Way, way, way too much reading on stuff about the brain, courtesy of MeFi.

Hearing Colors, Tasting Shapes -- "People with synesthesia--whose senses blend together--are providing valuable clues to understanding the organization and functions of the human brain".

(via i am a cheeseburger)

• Leonardo da Vinci, Master Draftsman -- an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City
• Leonardo da Vinci, Disciple of Experience -- quick blurbage about da Vinci and CHI (computer-human interaction)

Why the Web Will Win the Culture Wars for the Left: Deconstructing Hyperlinks
"Like reading or breathing, web browsing itself is agnostic with respect to politics and culture. Unlike reading or breathing, however, surfing mimics a postmodern, deconstructionist perspective by undermining the authority of texts. Anyone who has spent a lot of time online, particularly the very young, will find themselves thinking about content -- articles, texts, pictures -- in ways that would be familiar to any deconstructionist critic."

(via Plastic Thinking)

[Addendum: Superkeen members of the viewing audience may also wish to read a response to the above-noted paper.]

• The Essential Difference --"According to this theory, a person (whether male or female) has a particular "brain type". There are three common brain types: for some individuals, empathising is stronger than systemising. This is called the female brain, or a brain of type E. For other individuals, systemising is stronger than empathising. This is called the male brain, or a brain of type S. Yet other individuals are equally strong in their systemising and empathising. This is called the "balanced brain", or a brain of type B." (via blogdex)
• The Emerging Mind -- a lecture series from the BBC (via WebWord)

• "But I can't draw!" -- a 12 page guide for the artistically befuddled (via IDblog)
• The Visual Telling of Stories Archive -- examples of visual communication, spanning centuries (via MetaFilter)

Eyeballs are fried. Must stop surfing.

SARS Watch.

(via Modulator)

I'm so tired, of playing
Playing with this bow and arrow

There is an echo in the back of my head, a ghost image on my mind's radar that tells me that something is somewhat less than right. I don't know what to make of it. Maybe it'll disappear.

I've twice attempted to write about Paris Trance by Geoff Dyer, which I was up reading until 4 in the morning a couple weekends back. I keep stumbling.

So why don't you just go and read a bunch of other reviews about Paris Trance? And how about this interview with Geoff Dyer from when the book was released a few years ago?

Oh, hell, just read the damn book itself why don't you. Here's what I had to say about another book by Geoff Dyer -- But Beautiful. Paris Trance also left me feeling like that, only more so.

For this is the beginning of forever and ever
It's time to move over...

Sheep that I am, I went and joined two more blog rings:

« # FlipBlogs ? »

<< ? # >>

Granted, joining multiple blog rings is a shotgun strategy for getting the word out about your page o' screeds, and I'm more of a rifle strategy person by nature. However, having all those ring widgets in the sidebar looks gosh darn neat.

This is neat:

For those of you who wondered just how many different kinds of blogs there are out there, 31 Flavors of Blog summarizes it for you.

Flavour #6 happens to be "Job Blogging", and the BostonWorks.com Job Blog has some interesting linkage on matters related to the workplace.

(Link to 31 Flavors via Mathemagenic.)

Just because I can, I went and threw a few more files up at The Outpost:

• "Dancing the Night Away" by The Motors (MP3; 6,153 KB)
• "Tae Kwan Leap", also known as the "Boot to the Head" sketch, by The Frantics (MP3; 2,783 KB)
  • the "Boot to the Head" sound (WAV; 17 KB)

The Motors were a late-70s/early-80s band who got lumped in with the early New Wave, thanks to their pub rock roots and guitar-driven pop sound; their later recordings featured string-like pseudo-classical synth riffs, which sealed their place in the New Wave pantheon. More info about The Motors is here.

"Dancing the Night Away" was their first single, and is a fine slice of honest-to-goodness rock 'n' roll. For those of you who are none too thrilled about my postings of house-y/synth-y/electro-crap of late, perhaps this will be more to your liking. Even if you like the techno stuff, give it a listen anyway.

And, WRT the "Boot to the Head" stuff, seeing as I'm already getting Google hits in response to this post, I figured I'd mirror the associated files on my own damn site.

Whenever the weather conditions fluctuate wildly over the course of a few days, the air-filled spaces in my head go batshit.

Like now.

sigh

More DJ mixes:

• Dylan Drazen has a number of mixes in deep house and hard techno styles. The ones that I've downloaded and burned are:
  • "Carry On" -- a smooth, jazzy set that works almost any time of the day or night, be it during a crimson and magenta sunset, a soft tangerine sunrise, the deep blue black of 1 am, or the hazy gold of a hot summer afternoon (I love it when music makes me see colours); if you liked "Nightfall", download this mix
  • "High Heel Tech" -- pounding bass-drenched percussion that's ideal for pissing off your neighbours if you crank it loud enough
• Kemical Kidd plays HardNRG and tribal house styles for the most part. At this point I've only downloaded "Helix", a propulsive set good for those of you who like your dance music fast and kinda twitchy.

Gee, I seem to running low on blank CD-Rs for some reason.

OK, so we're already more than halfway through the month of April, but I've finally gone and given Circadian Shift: The Outpost a facelift, and have uploaded another MP3 file.

This month's retro tune is:

"Pumpin' for Jill" by Iggy Pop (4,300 KB)

The song is from his 1981 album Party, which only recently was re-released in CD format. The melancholy tone and Hammond organ riff from the song have always stuck in my head.

I got this MP3 from a Russian music server, and the fact that I'm propagating here will likely mean that I am going to hell. Like that was a big surprise.

Well, lookit me now: I actually appear in the lower ranks of the Blogging Ecosystem -- #487 out of 500 "Most Prolific Linkers" (my stats here).

Likely of more interest to those reading this page (who are not me) is the Recommended Reading list for Circadian Shift -- if you like what I post here, you might be interested in these other blogs.

God, I'm reading over the last two entries and I can't believe how sloppy the writing is.

Perhaps a visit to some writing resources is in order:

• Purdue University's Online Writing Lab
• SIUC Online Writing Resources
• Garbl's Writing Resources Online

I'm pretty sure I'd run across this page before, but thanks to another.weekindebt for pointing me back to this page on horizontal menus.

The page shows different ways that you can use CSS to style items in an unordered list so that they display horizontally across the page. I especially like the fourth example, which incorporates a rollover effect when you put your mouse pointer over a particular menu item.

I'm really liking the new Opera 7.10 for Windows upgrade.

I've yet to try out any of the new features (FastForward/Rewind, Notes, SlideShow), but they've gone and finally fixed a few things that have been bugging me, namely, the busted bookmark functionality that resulted from trying to import IE Favorites, as well as the fact that I can now see the URL to which a link points when I mouse over it. Before, if a link included text that appeared on mouseover, the same text appeared in both the main browser window and in the browser status bar -- I couldn't see where the damn link was actually going. Now I can. Yay.

If you're already an Opera user, you really should download this upgrade. If you're not an Opera user, now's a good time to switch.

Stuff to read:

• BBC Learning -- online courses in a variety of topics, including building a robot, building your confidence, gardening, first aid, and others (via Librariana)
• Understanding your mental models can help sharpen PM skills -- although the focus here is on project management, the principles discussed can apply to many business settings

Also two quick shots (via IA Slash):

• differentiating between implicit, tacit, and explicit knowledge
• the most commonly misspelled word on the web

How well do you know the globe? Go find out at Test your Geography Knowledge.

(Should anyone care, my scores are here.)

(Quiz link via blogdex.)

Two very handy links, found via IA Slash:

• CSS Layout Generator -- shuffle your 3-column layouts the quick and easy way
• Styling Form Elements -- form alignment without tables - yay!

I'm sure you always wanted to know:

• why scrollbars are on the right side of the screen (via WebWord)
• why wine costs what it does (New York Times article -- free registration required) (via xBlog)

**shaking head** I don't... I don't believe this... **shaking head**

"On one of the bleakest days since the invasion began, US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld yesterday shrugged off turmoil and looting in Iraq as signs of the people's freedom.

'It's untidy, and freedom's untidy,' he said, jabbing his hand in the air. 'Free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. They're also free to live their lives and do wonderful things'

Mr Rumsfeld insisted that words such as anarchy and lawlessness were unrepresentative of the situation in Iraq and 'absolutely' ill-chosen."

Will somebody please cap this ass-clown already.

(Link via Manifesto Multilinko.)

Two food links, just 'cuz:

• Recession Recipes (via The G Spot)
• Snackspot.org -- keeping an eye on UK snack foods, so you don't have to (via plasticbag)

Also stumbled this very cool-looking music blog (via Blogarama):

NewFrontEars
"A resource for artful and demanding music in many genres, especially contemporary and C20th classical, jazz, Baroque, improv, the outer fringes of rock, electronica, global... and a little Early Music too."

Damn, I can't remember the last time I listened to any of my classical CDs. Really should give them a spin more often.

Two resources for RSS enthusiasts, courtesy of seblogging:

• RSS Feed Reader / News Aggregators Directory
• RSS Readers -- a wiki page; you might also want to read the entries on RSS Syndication and RSS Feeds

Linkage:

• The Washington D.C. pizza index -- "Delivery people at various Domino's pizza outlets in and around Washington claim that they have learned to anticipate big news baking at the White House or the Pentagon by the upsurge in takeout orders. Phones usually start ringing some 72 hours before an official announcement." (via MemeMachineGo!)
• Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance -- "In the Clausewitzian view, 'shock and awe' were necessary effects arising from application of military power and were aimed at destroying the will of an adversary to resist. Earlier and similar observations had been made by the great Chinese military writer Sun Tzu around 500 B.C....Sun Tzu was well aware of the crucial importance of achieving Shock and Awe prior to, during, and in ending battle. He also observed that 'war is deception,' implying that Shock and Awe were greatly leveraged through clever, if not brilliant, employment of force" (also available as an e-book download)
• Conquest and Neglect -- "One has to admit that the Bush people are very good at conquest, military and political. They focus all their attention on an issue; they pull out all the stops; they don't worry about breaking the rules... But after the triumph, when it comes time to take care of what they've won, their attention wanders, and things go to pot." (New York Times article -- free registration required) (via Follow Me Here)
• American War with Iraq: Justification Process -- a process flow diagram, for the graphically inclined (via plasticbag)

My latest contribution to The Big List:

Appetizers *are* a meal, dammit

Omigod, I love this mix.

Download it! Download it! Download it!

(It also fills up an 80 minute CD perfectly.)

Some links, no narrative:

• The shape of World War IV, by number (via blogdex)
• Taliban Reviving Structure in Afghanistan (also via blogdex)
• A Nation of Voyeurs -- "How the Internet search engine Google is changing what we can find out about one another - and raising questions about whether we should" (via blamblog)

I'm thinking of joining this webring

when I get around to it.

[Addendum: Indeed, have gone and join the webring -- behold additional linkage in sidebar. Also went and installed a widget to show recent referrers to the site, just to see how it looks. If it slows down the page load too much, I'll take it out again.]

Stumbled across Mandarin Design Daily, where the feature article for the month of April is "Accessibility is Boring!". Actually, it's not -- there's a quick list of things to keep in mind when designing pages so that people with less-than-perfect vision can read them easily, but the real gem is the link to VisCheck, where you find out how your web page looks to people with different types of colour-blindess.

I ran Circadian Shift through its paces, and discovered how it looks to someone with:

• deuteranopia (a form of red/green color deficit)
• protanopia (another form of red/green color deficit)
• tritanopia (a blue/yellow deficit - very rare)

and I daresay it doesn't come out too badly (the most marked effects are in the sidebar graphics). In the case of usability for tritanopic members of the readership, it's a good thing that I went with underlined links -- the "blue" used for unvisited links is nearly indistinguishable from black.

Interesting thread over at Slashdot on putting together a software "survival kit" for when your computer misbehaves. For instance:

"Glonoinha" writes

Boot disks - make an emergency boot disk in Windows98. This thing makes a 2M RAMdrive, copies enough utils to jumpstart any computer, and CD drivers for every computer that can run 98 (which is pretty much all of them still running today.) I recommend this on a 3.5" floppy and also create a bootable CD using this as the boot image.

XTGold 2.0 or 2.5 - runs on DOS

ZTree 1.41 - in case they have a Windows environment 95 or higher running. Doesn't run in DOS but doesn't puke when the hard drive has more than 10,000 files on it.

McAfee Virus Scan, command line version.

"dtolton" shares this list of resources

M$ Boot Disks
If you have to build a boot disk for a M$ machine, putergeek is invaluable since M$ doesn't seem to want to you to boot to a DOS prompt any more. You can find Win95B, WinME and Dos Bootdisks.
http://www.putergeek.com/downloads/

RegClean
If you do any development using COM or ActiveX components then RegClean is a must have tool for fixing registry problems.
http://download.com.com/3000-2094-881470.html?tag= list

PsTools
Listed in the Article are FileMon and RegMon from Sysinternals.com, but I would add PsTools to that list. This suite of tools is incredibly useful for diagnosing and solving a vast array of problems. PsKill is probably my most frequently used tool when I need to actually KILL a process instead of politely requesting it to exit via End Task.
Oh and nearly everything works on remote machines as well.
http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/pstools.shtml

MDAC Utility
If you have to deal with programs accessing a variety of Microsoft Data Access sources, the MDAC Component Checker is essential. It's unbelievable to me how typical it is that MDAC get's corrupted.
http://www.microsoft.com/data

There are plenty of other good suggestions, as well as the requisite amount of Slashdot drivel (Slashdrivel?) -- go check it out.

Meanwhile, Richard supplies linkage to a page of more links to hardware router/firewall reviews. If you have a home network of computers that's hooked up to the internet via a high-speed connection, you're insane if you don't have one of these.

Lastly, just for fun, go gaze at the computers of yesteryear on the Obsolete Technology Website (link via blogdex).

I'd spotted Accordion Guy's tale of dating hell earlier in the day, but imagine my surprise to find it at #1 with a bullet on blogdex tonight.

Damn, Joey -- sorry your rise to blogging fame couldn't have happened under different circumstances.

Hi, folks. Sorry for the lack of posts over the last couple days. I know how much you all missed me (haaaaaaahahahahahaha).

Here is some linkage for your entertainment/edification:

• The Frantics' "Tae Kwan Leap", also known as the "Boot to the Head" sketch

  [Addendum: For those of you not familiar with the skit, you really need to download and listen to the MP3 file -- the online transcription doesn't do the piece justice. You can also download a WAV file of the "Boot to the Head" sound.]

  [Addendum 17 April 2003 -- I've gone and put the "Boot to the Head" files on my download site, Circadian Shift: The Outpost, so you can snag both of them from the same page.]

• How a Krispy Kreme Donut Is Made (via The G Spot)

More soon. I think.

I want one of these:

(Via Gizmodo.)

I'm such a junkie for anything that can be used to depict concepts visually, so a site like this is total braincandy for me:

The Mind Mapping Resource Center

As I've rambled on before, I think the ability to understand and to render information visually is a skill that is presently undervalued, but is becoming ever more important as the volume and complexity of all we have to process increases.

Heck, there's someone out there thinks that even law schools should start using a visual approach in teaching and learning.

And, because I know a good chunk of you won't bother clicking through to the archives, here are a couple links I posted previously:

• The Diagrammatic Reasoning Site
• Index of Graphic Organizers

(Link to The Mind Mapping Resource Center is via xBlog. Link to "Teaching and Learning Law With Graphic Organizers" is via excited utterances.)

A few quick links:

• Programming for Information Architects -- well, not really, but it does provide a handy overview of the ways in which IAs and programmers think along similar lines (via InfoDesign)
• ACCENT Principles for effective graphical display -- "six aspects which determine the effectiveness of a visual display for portraying data" (via Mathemagenic)
• Parsing Techniques - A Practical Guide -- a book of interest to linguists and computer scientists alike, available as a free download in PDF; I doubt I'll read the whole bloody book, but Chapter 2 sounds interesting -- it covers Noam Chomsky's theories on Natural Language (via this MeFi comment)

What does a "thumbs up" mean in Iraq?

Perhaps we ought to send Celine Dion over to investigate.

I wonder -- does Celine dance like Elaine Benes?

(First two links are courtesy of Mookie and The G Spot respectively.)

tbit notes on his obsession of late with downloading DJ sets and burning mixes to disk (I'd link directly to your post, dude, but your archives seem to be FuXd). It's a malady I know all too well.

Sources of downloadable DJ sets that I recently discovered:

• mix of the week -- a very eclectic selection
• Deep House Mixes -- had found this once before, a long time ago; has some real historical shit, dating back to the early days of Chicago house, with mixes by the likes of Frankie Knuckles, Farley Jackmaster Funk, and others

Also found the following songs on MP3 today:

• Steve "Silk" Hurley's "Jack Your Body" (scroll about two-thirds of the way down the list) -- Whoohoo! This was probably the first house record I ever heard. Real old school shizzat!
• Shannon's "Give Me Tonight" (like the page says, you'll have to rename the file as 'mp3') -- Relive your break-dancing days (track pants are optional) with this extended mix.

Haven't done a damn thing with The Outpost yet, but hopefully that'll hold you over for a while.

The latest Search Engine Report has an article on Making An RSS Feed. Also check out the companion piece RSS: Your Gateway To News & Blog Content.

With all these online toys to play with, who the hell has time for real life?

Yeah, it's April already, and I have yet to put up a retro MP3 for this month over at CS: The Outpost. I'm working on it; the whole site's due for an update, anyway.

I went and claimed my blog on Blogshares -- behold the nifty graphic in the sidebar that tells the world that I am listed.

I also went and joined Blogarama, another blog directory.

Gosh, aren't I special. Not.

Bear teaser loses arm

Hong Kong - A drunken zoo keeper in China lost his right arm when he reached through the bars of a bear's cage to tease the animal, a news report said Thursday.

Yan Peiwen, 43, was mauled by the bear in Jilin as he tried to prod it after a drinking session and had to have his right arm amputated, the South China Morning Post reported.

(Via The G Spot.)

The Not in My Name Music project bills itself as "a collaboration of artists dedicated to forwarding a culture of resistance worldwide".

The site offers MP3s of protest, as well as graphics and Flash files for download. Be sure to check out their links and statements as well.

(Thanks to tripledoubleyou for the link.)

It would appear that SARS has landed in the Philippines. My parents are scheduled to come home this weekend.

Meanwhile, Accordion Guy shares a few anecdotes of his own.