It's pretty friggin' noisy in my office. Impromptu meetings in the cubicle next-door are a common occurrence, as are social visits and loud conference calls. So I am quite often doing my best to remain oblivious of everything around me courtesy of my Bose noise-reduction headphones.
So what's my point - am I just bragging about how awesome I am to have Bose headphones while the rest of you have those sucky non-noise-reduction things? Nope, that's not it.
Here's the point: I have a bunch of songs on my USB thumbdrive. Hours and hours of them. And I've often listened to them over and over again. Having the same few songs on endless repeat was a great way to block out the noise around me without giving my brain anything it needed to pay too much attention to - so I could instead focus on whatever coding nightmare I was facing (they're not all nightmares, but too many are inherited applications from former employees/contractors/vendors that are tricky to suss out). I used the past tense because while I still listen to music when I really need to focus, I've discovered a fondness for something that - on its surface - would seem to be just as annoying as listening to the cretins around me: podcasts.
It started with The Mikey Show - when Mikey was booted from his position as the 94.9 FM morning show host. The morning show immediately went down an endless spiral of suckage as the station eliminated one morning show person after another. The lone survivor was my least favorite of the bunch. So seeking something to listen to on the way into the office each morning, I downloaded buttloads of the show's earlier podcasts (for the uninitiated, a podcast is just a commercial-free version of the morning show). And then I started listening to them in the office. And then I discovered that Mikey had started his own independent podcast, so I downloaded those. Initially, it was just him doing what he did on his morning show, but with no support. And then he brought in a girl to help out and I found myself liking the piodcast more for her than Mikey.
And then I stumbled on other podcasts - Adam Carolla, Alison Rosen, Harland Williams, Chicks on the Right - so now that's what I listen to to block out the droning voices around me - more droning voices. I must be brain-damaged. I've given up on seeking out any others (the guests on these podcasts usually have podcasts of their own - that's how I found Harland and Alison). Just trying to keep up with these guys is about all I can handle.
Man, these entries keep getting lamer and lamer. It's a wonder I even bother. Even Dan's not wasting his time reading them anymore.
I saw this editorial cartoon on a site somewhere (the original was even more obviously anti-gun...so I might have removed a confederate flag and a snarky remark). And even thought it's not even a thinly-disguised attack on those of use who support the second amendment, I think there's a lot of truth in the statement being made by the portly gentleman in the cartoon - even if the representation of gun rights supporters isn't exactly fair or truthful.
Yeah, I know. You whiny lefties are going to go on and on about how Hitler only banned Jews from owning guns and how nobody in Cambodia had guns - even the military - and how all the Jews in Stalin's Russia were armed to the teeth. Save it. The fact is this - an unarmed populace is a victimized populace. Maybe not by the guvmint (since their weapons, numbers and unscrupulousness will overwhelm even the most heavily armed civilian), but by the criminal element that preys on the weak and the unarmed.
And to be honest, the argument really isn't about assault weapons (which the guvmint seems to be trying to define to be just about any type of firearm imaginable). It's about banning legally obtained firearms in general.
Okay, that's enough political ranting for...well, ever. Dunno what got into me.
Amongst the paltry few books I've read recently, I finished The Bloody Crown of Conan, another collection of Robert E Howard's Conan stories (just a couple of weeks ago). It's a collection of original, unedited versions of these three stories:
The People of the Black Circle
The Hour of the Dragon
A Witch Shall Be Born
It also includes a brief history of Robert E Howard's life up to the point that things take a distinct turn for the worst (he ended his own life at only 30 years of age - after creating an impressive number of diverse characters and fictional worlds), drafts of the stories in the book, an untitled incomplete story, and - what made it most striking for me - illustrations throughout by Gary Gianni.
I thought the illustrations were so interesting that I went online to find them because surely, I thought, someone must have posted them at some point in the many years this collection has been in print.
Negatory, good buddy. There were a few here and there in their low resolution glory, but no compendious collection.
So I scanned about 80% of them myself (you can definitely tell these were scanned from a bound book due to how blurry one side or the other of just about every image is). And now they are available on the interwebs - right here. So you've got that going for you. Which is nice.
"And what," you ask, "does Conan have to do with iGoogle?"
Nothing, of course. Other than it's about to become a thing of the past. Just like Conan.
I really like iGoogle. I set it as my home page on the browsers of all the PCs I use at work and home. I hit my iGoogle home page about 100 times a day (probably more) and have a whole bunch of RSS feeds coming into it. When it was announced (many moons ago) that iGoogle was getting the axe later this year (November 1, 2013) I started looking for a replacement with dismal results. The closest I could find was MyYahoo. But MyYahoo is extremely limited in its customizability and just kinda...clunky. So I set it up with my favorite news feeds, and dreaded the day iGoogle went away (popping in two or three times in the months since). I even made an attempt to create my own RSS feed reader. But I quickly decided that I didn't have the time to create something I would actually be happy with.
And then I received another reminder pop-up when I opened iGoogle this morning. My forgotten dread returned...I had to do something or risk losing all the news feeds I'd setup in iGoogle and hadn't copied to MyYahoo, so I searched again, expecting to find nothing new. But I came across a review and comparison of a few other non-Yahoo services that were similar enough to iGoogle to warrant a mention. One of these was Protopage.com. It sounded pretty similar to iGoogle, so I went to the site, poked around and then signed up. After playing with it for an hour or so, I had all my RSS feeds setup (in multiple tabs - I really like that feature) including Google news.
I no longer dread the demise of iGoogle. Good riddance...until Protopage decides to start charging for its services or close its own doors, that is. And then the mad dash to find a replacement will begin anew.
