Adam's Blog

Perhaps it was just me, but I had no idea how cool iTunes was until last night. I've used iTunes exclusively for my master music collection for about 5 years now, and, in that time, I've been very focused with my music collection. I can't say the same for my video collection. Only recently, as I began working with my AppleTV, did I actually allow video into my iTunes library. However, I've got a brilliant combination working now. iSquint, the gorgeous free video editor, converts my files into high quality mp4/m4v files and adds them to iTunes. iTunes then pushes them to my AppleTV. It's incredible to tell iSquint to covert several dozen videos and then the next morning they are waiting on my AppleTV. In the meantime, I just discovered something on iTunes that I hadn't realized existed. I went into the overcrowded "Movies" section of my iTunes library and found that you can convert "Movies" to "TV Shows." Here's the best part, by filling in the metadata - by adding the TV show title, the season, the episode, iTunes will properly group and organize them. Whereas before, I had a huge section of movies, randomly plunked down in...

I was a huge Guns N' Roses fan, back in the day. In 7th grade, in 1988, I got introduced to G'n'R, and I just loved it. I swallowed up every song on Appetite for Destruction and Lies. Hunted down Live Like a Suicide. Found all their demos like "Crash Diet." I stuck by them through Use Your Illusion I and II - got them both sight unseen on opening day. Saw them live in '92. I even bought The Spaghetti Incident?! in 1993. As the next album delay began, my interest began to wane. I went from superfan to fan to casual fan to indifferent to hating Axl's winded comeback performance to casually interested to seeking out Chinese Democracy. And now I have it. I'll spare you the reading: I'm a fan again. I could've told you well ahead of time how much this album was going to suck. After all, it's been 14 years in the making. Axl has gone through several line up changes and at least 3 lead guitarists since Slash. All of them have some appearance on the album, I'm told. 14 years of nonstop revision has got to lead to the inability to be objective. And it's gotta be overproduced as all hell as Axl does nonstop tweaking. So when I got my hands on the album and gave it a listen, I was surprised to find that it was actually... pretty damned good. Read on for the full treatment.

I just downloaded and installed WordPress 2.7 RC1. The upgrade took about 3 minutes, end to end, and the "several moments" database upgrade took less than 2 seconds. All in the all, there's very little to notice on the front end that is different, I haven't been able to test comment threading yet. However, the new admin site is really nice looking. The Dashboard is a HUGE improvement over the <2.7 series. Themes were entirely unbroken. Upgrading sethadam1.com may be a bit more of a challenge since I've manually changed a few fore WordPress files, which may prevent in place automatic upgrades. However, all in all, I think the 2.7 release is looking really great. When 2.7 final is released, I expect to be updating my live site pretty quickly.

Last night's episode of House, M.D. made little sense. Why would Dr. House, near the end of the show, give the patient back his gun? Why not just diagnose him but say he has the gun? Then something interesting happened. The guy almost killed Thirteen, and for a moment, House looked stunned. And I thought, "Oh God, please let this be it." What is it? It is the moment I've been waiting for. The moment when House realizes his inane behavior is getting unrealistic and unbearable. The House character is getting boring to me because he shows no growth whatsoever, never learns any lessons. He's just a miserable old sack. And the show was losing steam, until last night, because it's become so formulaic that Cracked magazine took a well-deserved swing at it. So, I'm hoping that last night, as the SWAT team blew away the walls of the CAT scan room and House, for a moment, was unsure whether or not his plan had backfired; as House began to understand that his silly actions may have led to Thirteen's unnecessary death; as House suddenly understood (I think) that he had behaved like an idiot, that maybe we have the...

1997's The Colour and the Shape by The Foo Fighters is often overlooked, or more often only remembered for "My Hero," "Everlong," and "Monkey Wrench." But it's got some fantastic songs on it. The intro, "Doll," is a great little warm up. Every song from "Hey Johnny Park!" through "New Way Home" is an interesting an solitary adventure. My personal favorite, "February Stars," is keenly emotional, as is the slow "Walking After You." At the same time, "My Poor Brain" and "Wind Up" make for poppish, faster tunes that really can inspire excitement. On top of that, all of the singles from the album have endured the test of time well, and all remain enjoyable rock songs that do not feel like overly faded denim. Quite the contrary: The Colour and The Shape remains The Foo Fighters' masterpiece, despite many subsequent hits. The Colour and The Shape proved that Dave Grohl could exist in a post-Nirvana band with its own identity.

Here's a quick clip to remind everyone that when you treat those with opposing views with obnoxious contempt, you can almost certainly count on looking like at a douche at some point. Watch everyone laugh at Peter Schiff who very accurately predicts events back in 2006. Great stuff.

Dr Pepper needs a new web host. I tried getting through for several hours minutes on Sunday to no avail. So the offer was extended, and now I get this, crappy availability on a crappy Windows server. Lame!

Every so often, I'm going to post an album recommendation. I have lots of "favorite" albums, but I'm going to share a few that I find especially good. Today brings an album that really captures the flavor of rock in the early 1990s. In the early 90s, Guns N' Roses had successfully killed off hair metal in favor of accessible heavy metal. That changed when the Use Your Illusion albums came out - as "rock" more than metal - and rock softened up a little. Bands like Mr. Big and Firehouse were suddenly relevant. A little known Southern band who had been around since the mid-80s dropped into the scene with a fantastic album called "Fly Me Courageous." Fly Me Courageous features several great songs besides the title track which became a successful single, most notably "Let's Go Dancing." Other songs such as "For You," "Look What You've Done to Your Brother," and "Around the Block Again" are really great songs that are a throwback to that period in rock music. While it certainly won't feel like current music, it will certainly prove to be a successful demonstration of just good, catchy song writing.

I got my new iMac in late last week - the 24" 3.06 Ghz aluminum one with 4GB RAM - and it *is* sweet. I've set up a Mac fresh, I've set up a machine using the Migration Assistant, and I've used target disk mode, but I've not yet had the chance to rebuild from a time machine backup. Did it work? Suffice it to say it was incredible. Using just my external hard drive, it read my backup, asked me what I wanted to restore (it found 4 things: Users, Network Settings, Applications, and "Files and Folders"). I checked them all. After a few simple questions, it told me that it would take just shy of 4 hours to complete. Surprisingly, it was done a scant 150 minutes later. When I booted up, I was amazed. Not only did everything come over, it was almost as if it was my exact machine. Barely a noticeable difference, save speed and size. A few things slipped by, for example, I had changed /System/Library/CoreServices/DefaultDesktop.jpg to a custom image, which it did not preserve. I had changed some system icons, and those new icons did not preseve, but, for example, my external time...

Someone please explain this to me. It was actually hosted on whitehouse.gov, so this is not a Photoshop. How did someone convince them this was for real?