The Space Between by Valencia is a fast pop-punk track that features urgent drums with a melodic moments. I think it’s worth a listen, or check out the music video.
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MySpace Profile Facelift
About a month ago, I followed the excellent guide to style a MySpace profile over at Mike Industries. He detailed many details about the challenges he faced in his blog that I shared when doing my own (still awful) modifications when I first signed up for a MySpace. I never thought I would be able to have my profile look as appealing as his styled goodness, however, he was nice enough to include some sample CSS for all to enjoy. Finally, I can seperate myself from the thousands of awful profiles that litter MySpace. Yay for Mike!I took his code and with some changes and my own graphics I finally have a MySpace profile worth looking at (see screenshot at right). I’m very happy with it: it’s about as good as it could look without overlaying the whole page or commenting out chunks of HTML. Check it out, and have a look at Mike’s guide to make your own.
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Social Currency
I just read an interesting article called “Social Currency” by Douglas Rushkoff. This guy really hits the nail on the head regarding the purpose of content to most people, both offline and online. Although the article is a bit dated (written in January 2001), the concepts he illustrates are still very relevant today.
He explains:
We think of a medium as the thing that delivers content. But the delivered content is a medium in itself. Content is just a medium for interaction between people. The many forms of content we collect and experience online, I’d argue, are really just forms of ammunition — something to have when the conversation goes quiet at work the next day. An excuse to start a discussion with that attractive person in the next cubicle: “Hey! Did you see that streaming video clip at streamingvideoclips.com?”
Social currency is like a good joke. When a bunch of friends sit around and tell jokes, what are they really doing? Entertaining one another? Sure, for a start. But they are also using content — mostly unoriginal content that they’ve heard elsewhere — in order to lubricate a social occasion. And what are most of us doing when we listen to a joke? Trying to memorize it so that we can bring it somewhere else. The joke itself is social currency. “Invite Harry. He tells good jokes. He’s the life of the party.”
I couldn’t explain it better myself. Check out the rest of the article.
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Getting Started with Ruby on Rails
Recently, I decided to try out Ruby on Rails and see what all of the commotion around Rails is about. I’ve managed to get it setup on my OS X machine by following several conflicting and confusing instructions. Only after I went through the pain and suffering of manual setup did I discover Locomotive, a simple tool to develop Ruby on Rails apps. It’s everything you need all in one elegant package and you should check it out if you’re at all interested in RoR on OS X.
Following ONLamps’ excellent getting started article (and it’s followup), I have been able to make a simple demo app that retrieved content from a database using the
generate scaffoldcommand as a foundation, but for some reason when I try to edit, delete, or do anything else I get mysterious errors relating to ActiveRecord after trying to change a few things. I’ve familarized myself with Ruby by reading some of Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby (which I highly recommend reading), but I’m confused when it comes to the vast Rails API. I think I’ll be ordering Agile Web Development with Rails before going any further.Nevertheless, I was impressed on how easy it was to create a custom template and how retrieving stuff from the database just worked in the template. I can only imagine what stuff you can do when you actually learn to use the framework properly. 😛
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Roland VS-840: Upgrade to EX
To remedy this, I’m going to add a hard drive to the VS-840. But before I can do that, I had to upgrade the firmware to that of the VS-840’s replacement: the VS-840 EX. The difference between the two is a larger Zip 250 drive and newer firmware with more features. Although Roland offered an expensive upgrade kit for upgrading VS-840 to an EX, the secret is that the EX firmware can typicially be applied to most plain 840s. Luckily, my 840 took the firmware upgrade without an issue and I now have a VS-840 EX sans the bigger Zip drive. The smaller Zip drive is okay though, because now with the new firmware I can install a hard disk. If you’re interested in how I did it, check out my success story on the VS Planet forums.
Now I have to save up for some good microphones and I’ll be set for recording!
