Rift on lstudio.com – A scientist creates random chain reactions in the continuum of time and space when an experiment goes awry.
New City – architectural considerations in virtual worlds. If you think Second Life is cool, get ready for some truly original thinking and the redefining of “virtual world.”
I don’t know what this lstudio.com think is all about, but I want to see more of it.
Rock and roll has and probably always will be about fantasy. I’m not talking about C.S. Lewis or Tolkien type fantasy (although if you ever listened to Man-O-War, there is a special little home for that type of fantasy), I’m talking about all the stuff you wish you could have done if you had a magic wand to make it happen, but you were too busy being responsible, having a life, and trudging through the daily grind to even attempt to accomplish it. There are many rock and roll fantasies, but the ones that come up again and again involve fast cars, hot chicks, growing your hair long (absolutely essential for the hot chicks to give you the time of day), and guitar-playing skills that would make even Paul Gilbert go “Dude, slow down. What was that middle part again?”
While indulging in fantasies is great, and Lord knows everyone needs the escape… especially now, reality looms like an oncoming freight train at the end of every fantasy to remind you how small you really are. However, every once in a great while, rock and roll not only serves as escape route, but also as therapist. Rather than showing you the things that you can dream about but never really attain, it will identify with you where you are. The reason for this is that anyone who has busted their hump to get where they are or has gone through a period of difficult times before having a measure of success can identify with a rock band. Whether you know you can or not. Everyone sees the excess and luxury that successful rock bands experience. Very few people see what a band has to go through to attain that success. If you want to know why bands often flip the double middle finger at their critics, that’s why. Teddy Roosevelt was right. What matters is the man in the arena… or in this case, the groups selling out the arena.
A prime example of a group celebrating the common man with there music and the common man celebrating them right back is the Vogues 1965 hit “5 o’clock World.” This song had to compete with the likes of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and nobody celebrated the fantasy of excess like the Stones. Mick and Keith practically wrote the textbook on it. But people so identified with the Vogues that they made their song #1. And much later, a certain stand-up comic turned sitcom star would not only use it as his theme song for an entire season, but would build a choreographed dance number around it.
I work in the marketing industry, particularly in the field of analytics. To criminally oversimplify my job, I take data, load it into database, and use software to allow users to analyze that data. Let’s say a client sends out a mailing to 10,000 people in order to illicit some kind of response, either a phone call, the mailing in of a form, or a visit to a website. We take that response data and give the client actionable information on where to more effectively spend their money to more effectively target those people from whom they are more likely to get a response, which can eventually translate into revenue for our client.
Web analytics is basically applying the same principles to tracking the visitors of a website, be that website a massive e-commerce site like Amazon.com or a site like mine… a blog. Google Analytics makes getting usable information from your site incredibly easy. This article will go through the basics of how to set this up. I’ve found two ways to set this up and they both work. I’ll call the first way The Easy Way, and the second way The Really Easy Way.
The Easy Way
If you have a site that runs on a particular piece of software, there are lovely people out there who may have written implementations of Google Analytics specifically for the software that you use. In my case, my blog is powered by WordPress. As luck would have it, Joost de Valk has written a nice implementation called Google Analytics for WordPress which leads us to our next section…
The Really Easy Way
It’s that simple. When all is said and done, you can take a look at your website’s statistics in your Google Analytics Account. Since my website is relatively young and I just implemented the code on my website today, you can see how immediately the results are registered (see screenshots below).
In front of the CEO of the company that makes it.
Right after the CEO claims that the phone is unbreakable.
And promises the reporter a free phone if he can break it.
The reporter breaks it in about 3 seconds.
Great article from Infoworld.
When Zeppelin broke up after John Bonham’s death, I finally knew how Beatles fans felt when that band called it quits. However, just like Lennon and McCartney went onto make their own separate brand of history, Plant and Page did the same thing.
Plant went on to do some incredible solo work…
and Page found Paul Rodgers and created The Firm.
And then they had a reunion (of sorts) with the Honeydrippers.
I can count on one hand the number of brushes I’ve had with celebrity, and the few that I’ve had have been pretty lackluster. When I was a kid, I met the Philly Phanatic. When I was older, I met Dennis Franks, a guy who is known only to the most diehard Eagles fans as the guy who used to snap the ball to Ron Jaworski. Why I even got an autograph. Things looked up when I got to see Brian Propp and Dave Poulin of the Flyers, but they didn’t see me as it was getting an autograph handed to me by one of the hockey team’s people rather than meeting the players themselves. I saw Jennifer Lopez’ ass (and a fine ass it was; she was doing some photo shoot at the hotel across from mine) from a distance while on a business trip to Chicago. That about sums up my meeting famous people. By contrast, my son, by age 7, met the guy that drives Gravedigger at a monster truck show and got a hug from Curly Neal and has an autographed ball signed by Big Easy Lofton of the Harlem Globetrotters. I suck by comparison.
A couple years ago, I went to a concert at the House of Blues in Atlantic City, NJ. After years of either no meetings or meeting the costumed or the b-list of the athletic world, I finally got to meet somebody who was famous, accomplished, and talented, and to top it off, a group of whom I’m a huge fan. I got to meet Megadeth. Not just Dave Mustaine, the whole band. And it was awesome. Got autographs there as well and actually got to talk to and shake the hand of Dave Mustaine.
After that, I was perfectly content with never meeting another celebrity again. Then I get this email from my wife right after Halloween this year that Thomas Keller is going to be at Williams-Sonoma at the King of Prussia Mall doing a book signing for his latest cookbook, Ad Hoc at Home. You foodies out there who know who Thomas Keller is, know that his cookbooks have two main characteristics: big and expensive. For those of you who have actually cracked the binding on The French Laundry Cookbook and/or Bouchon know that the recipes in them require the skill and steadiness most neurosurgeons possess. So imagine my chagrin when I found that in order to meet chef Keller, I had to shell out the $50.00 for his new book. I figured it would look good on my coffee table at least and I would get one for one of my good friends who actually did go to culinary school.
November 20, 2009 arrives and I head down to the mall so that I can get in line early. When I get there, I’m pleasantly surprised to find that although a crowd is forming, I’m fairly close to the front of the line. I go into buy the book that I’m going to get signed for my friend and as I’m flipping through the pages, I’m seeing recipes that actually look like things I’ve seen my grandmother or my friends’ moms cook before. No peruvian blue potatos or kafir limes… just stuff you can find at any supermarket worth its salt. This motivates me to buy myself one as well. I actually do most of the cooking at my house and found several of these recipes “approachable,” the new hip celebrity chef cookbook author term for “you can actually do this.”
My only real complaint about this book is that it’s so damn huge. My biceps got the workout of their life waiting in line to get these things signed. I really felt sorry for this elderly lady with a cane who was standing three people behind me who bought six… six of these monsters to ship to relatives. I held one of her bags for a while to give her a break. Fortunately, either Keller realizes this, or he was just being nice, because all of a sudden, a waiter shows up with a piping hot cup of absolutely delicious cauliflower soup (and I normally hate cauliflower) prepared by Keller himself. About 20 minutes later, a piece of homemade crispy something-or-other with homemade marmalade comes as well. Also delicious.
Anyway, the time comes to meet chef Keller. I’ll apologize in advance for using the usual platitudes that people say when they meet the famous, but in his case it was actual fact. He really was genuinely warm, engaging, and very easy to talk to. For a guy that is the Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky, and Cal Ripken Jr. of his field, you would never know it from talking to him. He answered far too many questions from me that I’m sure he’s heard a thousand times before, signed my two books (one of which is being sent to a former cook and culinary school graduate who is now a soldier who has served in Iraq, Afghanistan, and is now in Korea), and took a picture with me, and for that, I am very grateful.
By the way, a week after I got the book, I tried the marinated skirt steak recipe. Turned out fantastic. I can now say that I actually cooked a Thomas Keller recipe, and I look forward to cooking more of them.
