Wow, I just realized that this weekend is Memorial Day Weekend, which means The Cutting Edge of Campfire at Club Passim. And they’ve got some interesting names this time. Along with lots of regulars I see names like John Wesley Harding and Peter Wolf, veeery interesting. Anyone else heading out to this over the weekend?

Since I’ve been watching the second DVD for FLCL I threw the soundtrack into my TiBook and have been listening to it all morning. It’s done by this band called The Pillows, who just plain rock. It really doesn’t sound like it would be music used for an animated show, but it works sooo well. mmmm.

OS X has a built in spell checker that lots of programs use. When you’re typing in Mail.app it will put a red underline under words it doesn’t know. For ages I’d been wondering if you could add words into the built in dictionary. I happened to right click (ctrl-click with a single button mouse) and you can choose ‘Learn Spelling’ or ‘Ignore Spelling’. Very handy. Blogging wasn’t in there, but it is now.

Dave writes,

Scoble, who works at Microsoft now,…
Scoble, who works at Microsoft now, says he likes using a desktop app to write his internal weblog. Right on. I’ve been using a desktop app to write Scripting News for years. The browser is not a great writing tool. Ironically, MS is the best company to solve that problem. They don’t want to do it, clearly. [Scripting News]

I’ve got to agree that I like using a desktop app too. I’ve been using Kung-Log for the last month or so and I now hate going to the Movable Type entry page to make a post. Now, Kung-Log is a bit more for the person who knows some HTML, it has some support for putting in tags, but for me it’s usually easier to just add them in while typing. The one exception is URLs, which it handles in a very cool way (you hilite the text for the link and when you choose the url option it creates the link puts what’s in the clipboard as the destination for the link).

The thing is I’m still undecided as to the place of the browser in making entries. Having used the three big blogging systems, all of which have a web interface by default, I think it’s fine for the basics. But it really bites for anything beyond that. Kung-Log gives me a lot of options. Like being able to save a draft of a post if I’m not ready to post it right away. The only thing I might want is some kind of WYSIWYG editing mode, but that really isn’t a priority.

Oh yeah, and I’m on a Mac, so I’m not sure that MS is the company to solve the issue of the browser not being a great writing tool. Actually, Safari has one thing that did make the whole blog entry editing thing easier. In TEXTAREA fields you can use emacs navigation keys, even things like ctrl-k and ctrl-y. If you could combine that with something like htmlArea you might have something pretty cool. For now though, Kung-Log is where it is at for me.

Robert Orben: “There’s so much pollution in the air now that if it weren’t for our lungs there’d be no place to put it all.” [Quotes of the Day]

It’s about that time folks. It’s finally all nice and warm out, the sun’s been shining, all the more reason to slip out at night and hear some funky tunes. This week we’re going a bit more into the realm of downtempo stuff with Chris Barakat. So some on out and chill and have a nice raspberry chocolate martini. mmmmm. And if you feel like dancing, you can always slip downstairs for a few to take in a bit of Anitya. Oh, and first three people to drop me a line get guest listed this week.

Changmian and Dubcoast present

*~The Analog Lounge~*

The relaxed side of things. Join us every Wednesday for a mix of
music styles in the lounge at Vertigo, with lots of mellow mixed in.
This week we bring you another one of Boston’s up and coming DJs:

Chris Barakat [Boston, MA]

The Analog Lounge with resident dj’s
Gregory Blake (Changmian) Boston
Special Pete (dubcoast music) CA
Peter Ellis (ttb) Boston
Pete Yagmin (Changmian) Boston

Wednesdays
@ Vertigo (upstairs)
126 State St. Boston, MA
617-723-7277
10pm – 2am
21+ with ID
$5 cover (gets you into both the Lounge and Anitya)
No dress code
www.changmian.com
www.dubcoast.com
www.vertigoboston.com
www.mapquest.com (directions)

Upcoming Guests:
May 28 – Chris VanWart [Boston, MA]

To view our calendar online (with support for you iCal and Mozilla
calendar folk):
http://ical.mac.com/gblake99/The32Analog32Lounge

This week at Anitya: KARAN (Third-eye Records, India)

Are you a DJ in the Boston area? Are you interested in playing out some Wednesday night? If so, drop me a line at lounge@ezoons.com.

For the most part, the idea of live action versions of anime leaves me a bit very uninspired. There have been some fun exceptions like You’re Under Arrest TV show, but I really don’t have much interest in seeing things like Dragonball Z with real people. The latest show due to make the translation to live action: Evangelion. Please, no. I really don’t feel the need to be subjected to that as a live action movie.

(oops, posted this to my blog first by mistake.)

For the most part, the idea of live action versions of anime leaves me a bit very uninspired. There have been some fun exceptions like You’re Under Arrest TV show, but I really don’t have much interest in seeing things like Dragonball Z with real people. The latest show due to make the translation to live action: Evangelion. Please, no. I really don’t feel the need to be subjected to that as a live action movie.

Searching for “How Soon is Now?” on the iTunes music store only has one match. The cover of it done by t.A.T.u. This is so wrong. So very very wrong. Please, Apple, you must do something about this.

Dave came up with some new software for searching weblogs running on Manila (At least I’m assuming on Manila). The way he does it is pretty cool, and one that works well for how Manila is designed. It uses the Google API to send a query and then uses the results to pull entries from the blog database. I could actually see something similar being written for Movable Type, as I’ve found the searching they have built in tends to be a bit slow. That’s the reason I replaced it with ht://dig. ht://dig isn’t necessarily the solution for someone who isn’t that much of a programmer, it takes a bit of effort to get it installed. But I could also see using something like Dave’s software using ht://dig too (since you can format the output however you want). Does ht://dig give as good a set of results as Google? I’m not sure. But does it give search results that are good enough? I bet for most people it does. I’ve never had any real issues with it at least.

I really don’t have any a bit problem with using Google for something like this. That’s what’s it’s for. But I tend to think of how things work when third party services aren’t around. What happens if someone goes to search and Google is down. With something like ht://dig, the site would be running it locally so would have a bit more control over it.