Hope everything on your holiday is going well so far. for kelly and i it was good, for others, such as dave and geoff, it hasn’t been all that great. holidays are so rough for some, and so great for others. just keep yer chins up, and remember that life is its own reward. the journey is the thing.

i put up a gallery! it is powered by Gallery, a PHP gallery system which is feature packed and easy to use. All of the old thelocust galleries have been moved over. check it out.

a giant squid at the corvette museum, one of my favorite pics. i showed this to mr. coffeemonk, a colleague, to which he replied (verbatim, i might add):

(01:35:08) BenCorvus: so there was a giant squid at the corvette museum >
(01:35:21) BenCorvus: no reason, really

(01:37:46) MrCoffeemonk: well, you know that some corvettes were painted “squid red” right?
(01:37:48) MrCoffeemonk: hehe.
(01:38:06) MrCoffeemonk: and that those particular models were said to lea
ve “squid marks”
(01:38:23) BenCorvus: do you feel “wrong” for that one?

(01:38:28) BenCorvus: because you should.
(01:38:34) MrCoffeemonk: hehe.
(01:38:36) MrCoffeemonk: oh yeah.
(01:39:03) MrCoffeemonk: it’s such a sad thing that a lot of my humor depe
nds on things like that.

So, I was reading through The Onion’s href=”http://www.theonionavclub.com/avclub3745/bonusfeature1_3745.html”>Best Albums of 2001 today, and I came upon a
mention of the unreleased Wilco album, “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot”, which they noted borrowed
from the CONET Project, which was started by uber-indie label href=”http://www.ibmpcug.co.uk/~irdial”>irdial.

So, what is the CONET Project, you ask? It’s an encyclopedic
collection of recordings of shortwave href=”http://home.freeuk.com/spook007/”>number stations. Number stations? Yes, these are uber-secret shortwave
transmitting stations that broadcast people speaking numbers in a pattern that are assumed to be highly-highly encrypted
message (they have NEVER been broken).

Anyway, these are all VERY creepy, as you could imagine people reading off lists of numbers coming crackling through the ether
would probably be! Well, irdial has a very open publishing policy, and i managed to get all of their recordings, all four
discs, in mp3 from a mirror. I also yanked their 80-page booklet that went along
with it, that is VERY informative, and if you want to know more about number stations, I suggest read it.

disc 1
disc 2
disc 3

disc 4

CONET project booklet [pdf]

Just some links today. First up, I’ve been checking out transcode, a Linux video stream processing utility. ‘Whassat?’ you say. Essentially, it takes video streams, including DVDs and can do a number of operations to them. For example, it can take a DVD and compress it onto one CD using DivX, an extremely tasty video codec.
It’s a good piece of software, tho’ novices will have to do some reading as there are a gazillion command line options.

Oh, and I released another development version of MPy3 — go download v2.1-pre2! (It’s got joystick control now!)

Saw The Butterfingers Angel, Mary & Joseph, Herod the Nut, and the Slaughter of Twelve Hit Carols in a Pear Tree last night at the Bunbury Theatre.
It was tre excellent!
The whole cast was really well.. um, cast! Friend of friends Nick (who has no homepage, hence no link), played the Butterfingers Angel, something that he only had a week or two (or less) to get ready for, as the actor who was going to portray him decided to be a slacker. Welp, he missed the ROCKET TO STARDOM! Lemme tell ya.

Nick was excellent, and only backed by an excellent cast. The show was funny, but not bawdy. “Bill Cosby” sorta funny, ya know? Anywho, it runs through the 16th of December, and word is is that Nick is actually getting paid for this one! (w00t!)

i released v2.0 of MPy3, my car mp3 player system to the public last night!

[mpy3 home]

[mpy3 @sourceforge]

[mpy3 @freshmeat]

Went to see Ben Folds and Clem Snide at Atlas@Jillians last night.
On the way home, kelly asked me “is it possible to rock too much?” — a question answered in spades this night! We both ache like mad. Both bands were excellent, with Clem Snide throwing down a 1/2 hour set (after coming on an HOUR LATE, due to some reasons that were not and are not apparent at this moment). They only had two of their apparently usual four, guitar and drums, but it worked, and worked well! Warming up, the guitarist/vocalist played a little Zeppelin “Over the Hills and Far Away”, and i knew then, as i know now — this is gonna ROCK. Clem Snide is listed under “No Depression – Alt Country” at ear x-tacy, though that wasn’t immediately apparent from the show. They played a number of cool little songs, like “Lifeguard”, which was “written whilst watching Baywatch”, and was wryly funny. Though, the thing that really sealed my love of this band was their rendition of Daniel Johnston‘s “Casper the Friendly Ghost”. Pretty cool stuff, indeed.

and folds seemed to be in a more playful mood than the Cinci show we saw him at last. He mentioned George Harrison’s passing, noting that “all things should pass” as being one of his faves, and playing “Evaporate” from Whatever and Ever, Amen (not often played). The bassist drank Ale8One. He also played “Santa is a Big Fat Fuck”. Really cool. Some older stuff, too — 200 Angry Dwarves…, Philosophy, Song for the Dumped, and a punker called “Make Me Mommy“.

During “Rockin’ the Suburbs”, Folds dons his Fred Durst backwards baseball cap, and rocks the house down with his strap-on keyboard. He chucked the hat into the audience, and I CAUGHT IT. I’m not usually one to swoon over celebrity, but I just kept thinking “this has been on Ben Folds head!”, and then I promptly shoved the hat into my pants to avoid a hat-theft.

The crowd at the show was reasonably tame, though the 2 hour wait had its low points what with the pushing, and the teenage girls getting crushed and claustrophobic. After the came on, it was all fun. Thats the great thing about a Ben Folds show — everyone knows the words, fills in the backing vocals — even on his earliest stuff like “Philosophy” (which he did unaccompanied). He’s a great performer, and really enjoys these shows. Like Kelly said afterwards, “it’s not so much a show as it’s a big sing-along.”

new site design is up. the old one can still be found here

Sometime in the near future, I will be relegating this tired old blog to a sub-directory, and a new design shall be in its place. I’ve been working on something that isn’t so bloggy — it’s more personal, more stylish, and will hopefully not languish as this one has. As much as I enjoy this “community style” blog, and the coding I put behind it, it is a community of little greater than one, and there are some projects I’ve been working on that I’d like to get out into the open, give them their own pages on theLocust.org, etc.

In other words, make this site more about me, and less about my pathetic attempt at creating a “weblog”.

Essentially, it will lie somewhere in between ben.thelocust.org and what you see now. There will still be links and what-not, sure. However, the login will go bye-bye, etc. theLocust as it is known now will be put in dry-dock. I’d say a day or two, or the weekend shall see this happen.

Anyone who knows anything about me knows my love of the art of breakdancing. It’s a talent that I’ve never attempted to hone, and frankly it looks difficult. Oh, and I have NO rhythm. Let’s not forget that.

But you say “Hey Ben, I’m a B-Boy poseur, too, and I wanna ‘bust a move’”. Well, Junior, now you can with the Flash Breakdancing Tutorial. It’s a step-by-step Flash Tutorial on breakdancing! How great is that. You can view the move in motion, or step through it frame-by-frame! Text descriptions help a lot, too.

And if that hadn’t whetted your appetite for 80′s kitsch, enjoy this.

If you’ve never been to Leisure Town, then you’ve never lived. Okay, maybe you’ve lived, but you sure as hell haven’t experienced some truly accessible and yet genious comedy. The author of Leisure Town is a one Tristan Farnon — who is currently attempting to do Leisure Town full time, and not have to resort to bussing tables.

Anyway, the site has a brand new design, and is starting to get daily/weekly content going, and it has already sent me into a humour-fueled stifled-laugh fit here at work.

The writing is excellent, with a style reminiscent of The Onion for it’s gut-punching style, and yet there is MORE than just that. The art itself, a mixture of real-world photography and little bendy animals is breathtakingly complex and funny in it’s own right. Well, I can’t say enough about it — you should check it out, and while you are at it, give the guy $3.