Al's Blog-o-Sphere

Someone went to a lot of trouble to collect these. I just found this site yesterday, when I got a tweet from Robby Takac about a Shonen Knife Christmas song there. I love this collection. You can play one after another for your Christmas day…

Visit this site: Stuff and Mutterings

I guarantee, it’s all good (well, except for the ones he says are bad) and not the same old, same old you’ve been hearing on the radio since Halloween.

Here’s the Shonen Knife video:

Shonen Knife has been a guilty pleasure of mine for many years. I was elated when Robby became affiliated with them and has been promoting them in the US. We went and saw them play in Buffalo a few months back and got to meet them after the show.

Just the other night, my wife and I went out to hear some live music. We went to the Sportsmen’s Tavern for Robot Holiday, which is a loosely-formed group of local musicians who put out Christmas songs every year and give them away for free on their website. Jonathan Hughes has been doing this for ten years and each year, the list of contributors gets bigger. For the first time this year, they got together for a live show. It was great.

As we left, someone at the door was passing out sample CDs from Scott Celani, The Corrections and The Filter Kings. It was an EP and a couple of the songs on it were Christmas songs. I remembered that those groups had a show at the Tralf recently and said so to my wife. She said, “Is the Tralf still around? I haven’t heard much about it lately.” Of course it is, but I haven’t been paying a lot of attention to the shows there of late. Continue Reading…

One of the shows I have been DVR-ing and watching pretty regularly is CBS’s Undercover Boss.

The first show I saw had so much promise. It was the episode featuring a CEO of Hooters. When he found a manager who was mistreating his female employees, and exposed him for the misogynist he was, I thought the show had a future. Besides the fact that I would have dropped my cover and fired him on the spot, if I was the boss, it looked like the show would be interesting.

But ever since, it has gone downhill. I just don’t get much out of watching it anymore. Here’s why: Continue Reading…

Imagine if every computer manufacturer designed their own operating system. If you used a HP computer, you’d have to learn everything all over if you bought a Dell. It would be chaos. And it’s why Windows still is the OS of choice for the majority of personal computers. They made the OS a separate product from the hardware and enabled manufacturers to sell the hardware but with an OS that had a familiar human interface.

I’ve had my new Android phone for less than two weeks now, but I can see where the same thing is happening in the cell phone world. Of course, cell phones are more than just phones now and are approaching the point where they can do nearly anything a PC can, so it is just in time. Continue Reading…