Adam's Blog

Who can unlearn all the facts that I've learned? Here's what I've learned: music is a confusing scene these days. Not too long ago, the rise of pop and the emergence of rap as a genre with some extra-urban (read: non-Black) credibility, music starting getting diluted. It's evident today with the bland swill offered up by Usher, Li'l Jon, and countless other "I'm ghetto even though I'm Oh-So-Mainstream" wannabes. I just don't think you can have a bad boy street image and appeal to tweenage girls. Rap is best left to people like Doctor Dre and Jay Z, not signed-because-they're-fancyboys like Chingy. On the other hand, these days, you also have bands that are discovering some interesting corners of music, like Yellowcard and The Juliana Theory and Something Corporate, who are merging melody with an edge. You've got the new kings of jam, which include moe., SCI, DMB, and many others. You've got talented R&B artists who are appealing to wide audiences and yet, perplexingly, creating quality music too, like Destiny's Child (although only time will tell if their newest offering has got the goods). But in place of Phish, who, until maybe mid-2001 was a staple in my CD...

"Live by the foma that make you happy and healthy and brave and kind." -Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle "We have art to save ourselves from the truth." -Friedrich Nietzsche "People seem to enjoy things more when they know a lot of other people have been left out of the pleasure." -Russell Baker "Throw off those chains of reason and your prison disappears." -Neil Peart "You can live in faith and comfort in the world that you transform." -Neil Peart "There's no point in being grown up if you can't be childish sometimes." -Doctor Who, The Robot "A straight line may be the shortest distance between two points, but it is by no means the most interesting." -Doctor Who, The Time Warrior "Anybody remotely interesting is mad, in some way or another." -Doctor Who, The Greatest Show in the Galaxy "To the rational mind, nothing is inexplicable; only unexplained." -Doctor Who, The Robots of Death "You can always judge a man by the quality of his enemies." -Doctor Who, Remembrance of the Daleks "Fear makes companions of all of us." -Doctor Who "Courage isn't just a matter of not being frightened, you know. It's being afraid and doing what you have...

1. "Throw off those chains of reason, and your prison disappears." Love this one! From hemispheres, the perfect ale for any hyper-logical idiot like me is this little quote which reminds us that once is a while, you go with your heart, not your head. 2. "One likes to believe in the freedom of music, but glittering prizes and endless comprimises shatter the illusion of integrity." Oh man, if people only listened to the lyrics of "The Spirit of Radio" they'd be treated to an amazing story about the hypocrisy of popular music, record companies, and marketing. Emotional feedback on timeless wavelength bearing a gift beyond price. Too fantastic. 3. "You can live in grace and comfort in the world that you transform." The head says to the heart - DO SOMETHING, you lazy bastard. So few do, you can make a difference with a little effort and a little thought. Great balance to the first quote. 4 "Science, like nature, must also be tamed." From the epic, and unmatched, Natural Science, this little number is more powerful than you'd think at first glance. We must pursue pure, unadulturated science, but without letting it get the better of us. 5...

general information Although sethadam1.com is a site dedicated to Phish, there's really quite a bit going on in the background. As a somewhat experienced web programmer - there's a lot of not-very-complex but super powerful pre-processing going on on a lot of these pages, and for those of you interested, this page will give you a little insight as to what exactly is happening when you request a page from this server. I learned most of my HTML skills by reading the source code of the web sites I frequently visited. Of course, when I learned HTML most web sites were static and those that weren't almost exclusively used Javascript for dynamics and CGI for processing. Nowadays, reading source code is much less beneficial, as most web sites use server-side code and databases even to generate standard pages. Every page on sethadam1.com is dynamically generated, and as of version 6.0, nearly all pages query our central database for content. a little about sethadam1.com version 6.x A lot has changed since the rollout of the sethadam1.com 3.x series. sethadam1.com 3.0 was originally slated to be based on tubecode, a project I'd been working on for some time. tubecode, in short, was...

ogg-vorbis 101 Despite the multitude of information available on the internet, still, the most frequent e-mails I recieve are about ogg-vorbis, how to use it and how to convert them to burnable format. So, to make things easy, I'm going to break it down step by step for the most common tasks. The way I see it, there are four major tasks people want to perform. So, let's take it one by one. Playing ogg Vorbis Files Playing ogg-vorbis files is getting easier with each season. While the vorbis format has been supported on Linux platforms for some time through the often bundled XMMS player, it has only recent gained adoption on Windows and Mac OS X. Windows Media Player, the piece of garbage player included in all new version of Windows, not only enforces digital rights management, but also sends a small packet of information to Microsoft that includes every song or movie you watch or play. Makes you think twice about internet porn, doesn't it? That's why there's good ol WinAmp, the incredible Foobar 2000, the growing FreeAmp, and a host of other multi-media players too numerous to mention. For Mac user, check out the following websites: macosxhints.com...

Jeanne, hurricane number 6,049 to hit Florida this season, was not supposed to be a big deal. It was a tiny storm, and it was very clearly headed out to sea. Then, just like a woman, she changed her mind and actually turned in a complete circle and began her westward crawl.Aside: I hate when there's a hurricane and people refer to it as "he" or "she." That's stupid. It's a friggin hurricane.So, Friday, miles and miles away, we had to decide how to prep. Since most of our higher-ups were off on some major acquisition tour, I was left here to make decisions about the prep myself. I can tell you that although flattering, I hate the responsibility of deciding how to prep a 50 million dollar company's network for a storm, especially when the day to day work, in many ways, revolves around the network. I took it pretty lightly - the storm was far away, it was slated to cruise the coast, and it had only light winds. I decided to have everyone unplug and wrap up their stuff but barely touched the server room. Instead, I ran a good backup and that was it. I figured,...

It's now Saturday, and it's been over a week since Frances hit. We got power back THIS MORNING, so I've been living at Danielle's again, sleeping wherever, eating out every day, and coming back to Deltona only to find a hot, slightly-moldy place and the incessant hum of generators.After another night of poor quality sleep in someone else's bed, I'm exhausted. The hurricanes bring a strange air about - the frenzy and stress, sure. The rush to gather water, canned goods, bleach, generators, plywood, drill bits, all that stuff, sure. The people waiting in 1970's style lines for gasoline, sure. And strangely, a weird mix of fear, excitement, and antici......pation.Watching people prep for Frances was an amazing experience. You get to see real community - community at best and worst. For days, it was hurricane-mania here. It was the topic of every conversation in every restaurant, it was what strangers chatted about on the sidewalk as they waited for the bus, and it was doubtlessly what the county cleanup crews swore up and down at as they continued to remove debris that was leftover from Charley. For us it was different, unlike anything I'd ever seen. The prep work began...

Has anyone ever blogged a hurricane? I wonder. Every damn house is boarded up. Home Depots are all closed. Everywhere is sold out of water, ice, plywood, drill bits, essentially everything you'd need. This is crazy.

Murricane, shmurricane, double burricane, I hate hurricane! I'm sick of this bullshite. Charley kicked our collective arse, and now Frances is going to do the same? Lame! It's been hurricane fever here for days, and now we're just finally getting to the outer-outer-outer-edge of the outer-outer-outer-rim of it. More when I'm not a wee bit nutzoid.

So this is the first mention of it online - 3 simple words: Flip. Is. Done. Not done as in dead, but done as in reborn! Flip will be regally euthanized death with Flip 3.0 and Flip Lite 1.2 (actually, I may release a final Flip bugfix Flip 3.0.1, but that isn't going to be right now). And Flip will be reborn, in a way, with dah dah dah dah! ....Celery Blog. There's more in the Celery Manifesto, which you will soon see online. Either way, Celery is essentially what Flip 4 was going to be: a complete and total rewrite. Aside from a zillion reasons why this is a good idea, the retarded numbering scheme can be properly repaired to a more sensible 1.x for pretty much everything until the next complete rewrite. It's actually pretty functional at ninjafoot.com, and hey, did I mention that NINJA works (even though it's now the Celery Configurator)?!In other news: K is a distant memory. She may be busy, but I sense she was leading me on anyway. It's too bad, she was really fantastic, but even if she was being straight with me, even a girl that hot can't be in relationship...