Amazon Prime

I signed up for Amazon Prime's free trial, and then I forgot to cancel it, so now I'm stuck with a year membership. Even though I wasn't planning on keeping it, it really is a great deal -- for $79 a year I get free 2-day shipping on all Amazon products. (Only products that come directly from Amazon are included, so used items or items from 3rd party vendors are not included).

I can also share the membership with up to 4 family members, so you might be receiving an invitation to share the account. If you are not one of the invitees, but you need to buy something from Amazon that has expensive shipping, feel free to let me know and I can order it for you.

When ordering yourself, don't forget to use my affiliate link.

Rock Star Family

Now I have not one but TWO brothers with albums available on iTunes. Naturally I highly recommend them. Benj actually has 3 songs that show significant popularity on iTunes! (Each song shows a popularity rating in the iTunes store.) Mark just released his but I'm sure his songs will catch up soon.

Benj's group is called Cows Never Die, so you can search for "Cows Never Die" on iTunes, or the album name, "She Usually Wears Mittens." Or you can link directly to the iTunes store page for the group. The album features smash hits such as "Snow Fort Heaven" and "Polydactyly".

Mark's album is called Tomorrow. Search iTunes for "Mark Tanner Tomorrow" or link to the store page here. More info available on the official album website here.

Iridium Still Flying

My first job out of college was with Motorola, in 1999. I was working on software for a satellite system called Iridium, which was created for global satellite phones and pagers. After I'd been there a year Iridium went into bankruptcy, and Motorola offered me the options of taking a job in another department, or taking 10 weeks of severance pay. I took the severance.

Over the years since, I'd heard rumors about whether the Iridium service was still being used, and whether the "birds" were still flying, but I hadn't seen anything very concrete recently, until I stumbled across this article on Computer World.

Apparently business is booming, relatively speaking. So that's pretty cool to see. I was disappointed though, that the article didn't mention me, or whether my code was still running. :)

About As Much As Meets The Eye

I decided to go see a movie on my birthday. I couldn't go see Harry Potter 5 without seeing 3 and 4 first, and 6 plus hours of movies sounded like a lot, so I went with Transformers. [Spoiler alert. And by the way, Voldemort kills Hermione in book 7.]

I thought Caveman did a pretty good job in the lead role. Some of the saved-by-the-bell-esque juvenile drama was a little annoying, but overall not too distracting. And the effects were very cool.

Some of the Transformers' dialog killed me:

OP: It's you and me, Megatron!
Megatron: No, it's just me!

Megatron, first words after waking up from an 80 year coma: You've failed me again, Star Scream!

Classic stuff.

I was a little confused by some plot points though. For example, why did the government try to hide the evidence of the Transformers, when there were hundreds or thousands of eye witnesses who saw them fighting in the street? And why did they think the best way to protect the cube was to give it to a human and have him try to run it up to the top of a building and deliver it to a guy in a helicopter? Um... wasn't the human a little more likely to get stepped on than an Autobot? And if they wanted to take the cube to the roof, why didn't they give it to any Transformer who could hop up there in seconds? And weren't all the helicopters and planes getting shot down anyway? What was the helicopter guy supposed to do with it? Kind of a strange plan. But it all worked out.

Pixels, Jerry! Pixels!

Eric D. Snider contemplates how Seinfeld would spin the latest technology if it was still on the air.

In the Clutches of Clutch

I went to a concert Wednesday night. It was my friend Dave's party. He's getting married on Saturday, so this was his last vestige of freedom. He chose to go see a band called Clutch. I didn't really know what I was getting into, but I figured it out quickly at the gate, where everyone I saw had extreme tattoos, body piercings, and hair styles out of the 80s punk scene.

There were four bands that played. The genre I can only classify as "loud" (kind of like Dave's band :). I had to roll my own earplugs using toilet paper. Aside from the noise, another fun thing about the venue was that there was no place to sit. I guess people don't mind standing for 3 hours after they've had enough to drink, but for a perpetually sober person it got pretty tedious. A few times I sat on the concrete floor.

The first band was pretty talented but loud. The second band my other friend Dave labeled as "zepplinesque". The third band was Irish, with a fiddle and a banjo. Very talented, but I thought it was funny that the band members all looked really angry while they were singing, even the violin girl looked disgruntled. They were good but they went on way too long. By the time Clutch got on stage it was close to 10:30. This is a school night people! Surprisingly, Clutch didn't seem to be any more talented than the opening acts. I think the key to their popularity was that they had a really big banner, while the other acts had small banners or none at all.

A little bit after Clutch started playing I was leaning against the barricades in the back of the room and some drunk guy came back there and started puking his guts out a few feet away from me. I was wearing flip flops and I felt a few drops splash on my feet. ECHHHH!! I went in the bathroom and washed my feet off. I didn't really feel like going back in after that so I went and sat on the dirty floor in the lobby and waited for my friends, who were busy injuring themselves in the mosh pit.

I'm not really sure what scene I was a part of, but it was fun to experience a different world for one night. But I think I'll wear shoes next time.

Good luck Dave, we'll miss you!