
Check This Out: Something Corporate's Leaving Through the Window
Adam Scheinberg, January 13, 2009
In the early 00's, there was a flood of what I call "new punk" or "candy punk" on the music scene, fronted by several bands, some of which I really liked. Yellowcard, New Found Glory, and many others were amongst the successful, and they brought a combination of punk, rock, and run-of-the-mill pop music together. Amongst that group was a band that was unfairly seen, I think, as one of the "candy punk." Something Corporate demonstrated, on their two major releases, some brilliant song writing, some beautiful composition, and great musicality. The singles released from "Leaving Though the Window," their first album, include "Punk Rock Princess" and "If U C Jorden", both of which, I think, hold up well today. But the masterpieces are in between: the gorgeous harmony of "Hurricane," the slow rocking of "Fall," the bounce of "I Woke Up in a Car," the humor of "Drunk Girl." Something Corporate was able to convey a sense of humor balanced against their strong composition. For example, without sounding didactic - the way they build up to the first chorus but pull it away in favor of another verse; or the way a first chorus will only give you half...
Some Flickr Favorites
Adam Scheinberg, January 9, 2009
Picasa for Mac Beta Arrives!
Adam Scheinberg, January 6, 2009
Last night, after several years of waiting, the beta version of Picasa for Mac was released. I've only had a short time to tinker with it thus far, but in short: so far, so good. Picasa is tightly bound to Picasa Web Albums, the first 1GB of which is also free, in contrast with Apple's MobileMe, which runs $99/year. In addition, in my experience, Picasa Web, while it has its drawbacks to be certain, worked pretty much everywhere, whereas I've had problems getting MobileMe's photo gallery to work properly. I've chronicled my wish for Picasa for Mac for about 3 years now. As you can see, the post continues to receive comments and remains, to this day, one of the most visited entries on my site. Clearly, there is demand for this product. What I believe makes Picasa such a successful product is just how powerful it is. Although iPhoto works very well on the Mac and the iLife integration across applications is priceless, the fact remains that for serious editing and effects, the Mac user must venture outside of iPhoto. Picasa, on the other hand, has an entire suite of tools for photo finishing. Furthermore, Picasa features Google's search...
Happy 2009
Adam Scheinberg, January 2, 2009

Back to Google Reader
Adam Scheinberg, December 31, 2008
I've chronicled my adventures with Bloglines before, several times, in fact. I was not happy when their new "beta" was released, but after several revisions, it proved to be a worth successor. Some time ago, I switched over full time to the beta version and never looked back. It's better looking, smoother, with a much more modern feel to it. However, from time to time, it's done weird things. Most recently, I realized that it simply stopped updating certain feeds. One, in particular, was TUAW. I later found that TUAW had moved their feed to Google, and were 301 redirecting requests to their RSS URL, http://tuaw.com/rss.xml. Bloglines is supposed to follow 301s, but in this case, it just stopped updating the feed. Other feeds has items that were clearly missing. All of this came to a head yesterday when I was having regular troubles just getting into Bloglines at all. The lack of any sort of Sync API and the lack of tools being developed around Bloglines forced me to make a decision: am I going to stick to Bloglines, which has worked well for me for a long time now, or jump ship? Suffice it to say, I'm back...
Ham Fail
Adam Scheinberg, December 29, 2008

Recap of Heroes "Villians"
Adam Scheinberg, December 18, 2008
Well, the third major arc of Heroes, entitled "Villians," has come to a close. I've discussed Heroes before, and, except in Volume 1, been pretty disappointed. So now that we're begun Volume 4, "Fugitives," how do I feel? To put it bluntly, Heroes sucks worse than ever, and yet, I'm still watching it. Heroes is a brilliant concept executed as poorly as possible. It's of of the worst written, poorest plot-bearing, illest planned, silliest scripted series ever to grace Sci Fi. Everything about Heroes stinks except the actors and the core concept. The rest blows. Let's examine: 1. Firstly, we've got a science problem The science of Heroes is always screwy. Some might argue that there must be a certain suspension of disbelief with science fiction, and I'd agree. We suspend disbelief about the fact that there, for example, is space travel in Star Trek, but we expect the writers to follow the known laws of physics in space. We expect the ship to be sound. And we expect that when the rules are bent, there's a reasonable and semi-believable explanation. With Heroes, we have a day long eclipse that occurs everywhere at once. We have someone who can run...
Whose Clues? Blue's Clues!
Adam Scheinberg, December 17, 2008
Rarely does an entire day pass without me watching at least some span of the Noggin channel. The host of Noggin, the animated Moose A. Moose, is my daughter's favorite. She's gone through phases of enjoying Pinky Dinky Doo, The Backyardigans, and Jack's Big Music Show, but she has been captivated by Moose since she was just 4 months old. She also has shown a lot of interest in Dora the Explorer. Steve: Lame, But He Knows It, Thus, Cool Lately, due mostly to Noggin's schedule change, she's been watching a lot of Blue's Clues. At first, I hated this show. It's about as dumbed down as a show can get, at first glance. But lately, I've been realizing something: I've picked up a lot of sign language in passing glances. Blue's Clues is not that interesting. As a show, it's really basic, and not very interesting. Unlike, say, Sponegbob Squarepants, where after 40 seconds, if the kid walks away, I watch the rest, Blue's Clues is completely boring. I'll happily shut it off. And yet, when she is watching, I love that she's getting the sign. I have to admit that I like Steve much better than Joe. Steve...
RSS Cloud
Adam Scheinberg, December 12, 2008

firsttube.com Upgraded To Wordpress 2.7
Adam Scheinberg, December 12, 2008
So far, one problem, two gripes. My problem is that I can't seem to get posts with dots in the slug title to work right, even though I once solved this problem before. What's worse is that it won't fetch those posts anymore, which really sucks. Onto my gripes. I can't get inline replying/threading to work. There is very little documentation on it so far. The functions are called comment_reply_link() and get_comment_reply_link(), and there's nothing anywhere in the codex that helps, there's little on the internet, the only place to get any real detail is the code itself, which explains: from wp-includes/comment-template.php starting at line 949 on WP 2.7.0 * Retrieve HTML content for reply to comment link. * * The default arguments that can be override are 'add_below', 'respond_id', * 'reply_text', 'login_text', and 'depth'. The 'login_text' argument will be * used, if the user must log in or register first before posting a comment. The * 'reply_text' will be used, if they can post a reply. The 'add_below' and * 'respond_id' arguments are for the JavaScript moveAddCommentForm() function * parameters. * * @since 2.7.0 * * @param array $args Optional. Override default options. * @param int $comment Optional. Comment...