Pickabar Blog

Sometimes the links speak for themselves:

MC Hassle The Hoff and Ice T

I’m sure I pray for the collective psyche of our species that nothing will come of it. If worse comes to worst though, I guarantee his album goes platinum in Deutschland.

And off I rant…you know, sometimes “Legends” are just people who were at the right place at the right time. I loved “Cop Killer” as much as the next angst ridden kid of the 90s, but Ice T has got to be one of the fakest of the fake rappers. He’s also one of the worst actors I’ve ever seen…if you consider squinting and pouting acting. He also had the nerve to act as if he was against pimping while getting his hair curled in the Hughes Bros pimp documentary. Man, I hate Ice-T.

[via KnitLog]

I love the bookmark feature in Visual Studio .NET. It really makes it easy to navigate within a single class file, but that convenience doesn’t extend to navigation between pages. So here’s my suggestion. Why not have browser style forward and backward buttons? For example, the back button would take you to the last activated line of the last file you were editing. It would seem like an easy to implement feature, and would save tons of time…for me at the very least .

My grandma was sick last weekend, so we had a belated Mother’s Day Celebration this Sunday. Ray came out, and it was a beautiful day…things couldn’t have worked out better. Anyway, Ray and I were jamming to kill time when Grandma got to my apartment, and she said one of the best things I’ve ever heard. We were wrapping things up, so I decided to wank off a bit with some BB King style riffs.

“You wish you could play like that!”, said the lovely Mrs. Lindsay as she took off her coat. It took a few minutes to convince her that it was really me playing guitar and not a recorded songs, and it will probably take weeks for my head to shrink back to size.

On Friday Phil called to tell me he’d gotten two free tickets to the VP Records 25th Anniversary Concert
at Radio city Music Hall. I’d never been to Radio City before, I love reggae, and I love free stuff so I was in before Phil had finished asking me if I wanted to go. I was a tiny bit drunk, and I wasn’t music nerdy enough to bring a notepad with me, so here’s my somewhat hazy recollection of the proceedings…

“Young, Gifted and Black” was written by the late great Nina Simone, but the reggae version Bob and Marcia is the version I’m most familiar with. Phil and I were both psyched when Marcia Griffiths hit the stage to sing a duet with her son. The song didn’t do much to impress, but come on it’s Marcia Griffiths. On stage. In front of us. How hot is that?

The most educational part of the night was
Elephant Man’s set. I don’t own any of his music, but I’ve heard “Juke Gal” and “Pon the River” on the radio and they were catchy if forgettable. Seeing him live was a whole different ballgame. I’m not a hardcore dancehall fan by any stretch, so this was my first time experiencing some of the crowd participation dances that are super hot in Jamaica. Basically, the DJ yells out the name of a dance and everyone in the crowd complies. Most of the dances seem to just be hand and arm motions, but the crowd went nuts for it. Unfortunately, the only dance that seems to have stuck in my head is the “Scooby Doo”, so I’m probably still not ready to hit the dance floors of Kingston.

Do you remember the very first Dave Chapelle Skit? The one where he felt guilty for using his mind powers to cause a ahem wardrobe malfunction? I didn’t feel the least bit guilty when my burgeoning psychic powers had the same effect on Lady Saw’s skimpy top. To her credit she didn’t seem the least bit fazed, and she made some sort of off the cuff quip that amused the more patois knowledgeable part of the audience. I guess a certain degree of immodesty is to be expected from a queen of “slack” dancehall like Ms. Hall, or any lady wearing an almost not there top at that rate. Fun stuff, and entertaining music, but I don’t think I’ll be rushing out to buy her greatest hits any time soon. She also did a freestyle response to Mario Winans’ song “I Don’t Wanna Know” that was pretty humurous if forgettable.

I was really impressed by the T.O.K. performance. My friend Ray gave me their first album a while back and practically threatened my life when I hadn’t given it a listen a week or so later. I wasn’t impressed at the time. Their brand of oddly cinematic Dancehall (imagine Jamaican epic metal or something) has started to grow on me though, as I’ve heard an occasional song while shuffling through the collection. For some reason I was under the impression that T.O.K. was made up of a Wu-Tang-like gang of DJs, but it’s only four guys. I wonder where I got that idea? They did their notorious anti-homosexual song “Chi Chi Man”, which was pretty surprising as they seemed like they were trying to distance themselves from the song during their previous appearance on the Hot 97 morning show. I don’t fault anyone for having a politically incorrect viewpoint, but it seems pretty hypocritical to try covering up that viewpoint for crossover success. Oh well, who am I to judge? Lyrical content aside, it’s a pretty hot song.

The biggest crowd reaction of the night was definitely for lover’s rock hero Beres Hammond. While I can appreciate his talent, lover’s rock is probably the only type of Jamaican music I’m not into. I actually dosed towards the end of his set, but I’m sure that had a lot to do with the drinks and sitting still for so long.

There was an after party, but Phil and I decided to skip it and head downtown. I guess that’s where this show review ends. I saw a few other artists, but I don’t have anything insightful to say about them, so I’ll leave that to the professional reviewers.

MSN’s preview of the anniversary show.

p.s. The absolute worst part of the night was finding out that Sir Coxsone Dodd has passed on May 4th. A huge loss for anyone who considers themselves of Jamaican music, even dancehall fans who wouldn’t consider listening to anything on Trojan Records. Half of the dancehall songs I’ve ever heard were based on classic Studio One hits from the 60′s, even if he never received credit for those contributions. Oh yeah, he also gave Prince Buster, Bob Marley and Lee Perry the starts to their careers. Not too shabby. Here are some links that I really hope you consider visiting:

Jamaican Observer: ‘Sir Coxsone’ Dodd is dead
Trojan Records: Coxsone Fan Tribue
The Guardian: Clement ‘Sir Coxsone’ Dodd

The rumors were true! EA and Microsoft have announced that EA is bringing it’s line of sports games to XBox Live. EA has the most popular sports franchises, and XBox Live is the best online console gaming experience. It’s sucked seeing review after review of great EA games that would only be online for PS2. Time to start pre-ordering Madden 2005.

P.S. XBOX owners, this is a chance for our platform of choice, and more specifically XBox Live to really take off. Everyone and their mother should make sure to order a copy of Madden 2005 for the ‘box. Let’s make this the top selling console game of all time!

Sarah’s Dad David is a really cool guy. He’s an artist, collects model trains, and coolest of all…he chases storms. He was actually featured in a documentary about storm chasers in the 80s (along with a gangly Sarah ). He’s also got a stamp coming out shortly.

David, check out this Storm Chasing Blog, I’m sure you’ll love it.

[via Scobleizer]

Hey, have you ever noticed how baseball bases are just blank white squares? What a waste! Let’s slap Spider-Man 2 ads on those puppies! Ugh.

ESPN on the base ads.

I usually take the Holland Tunnel and then the West Side Highway home from my current project site. It takes me about an hour or so to get there in the morning, but getting home takes anywhere between 1:30 to 2:00. On two occasions it’s taken me close to 2:30. The first 30 or so miles of the trip are usually pretty quick. It’s the last 5-10 miles, from the point where you begin to approach the Holland Tunnel crawling all the way up the West Side Highway that really slows things down.

Well, last night I took the George Washington Bridge since I was headed out to Shea. I didn’t check the clock during the trip as I was sure that I was going to miss at least a few innings of the game and I didn’t want to stress myself out. Imagine my surprise when I arrived at the Shea parking area and notice that the trip had only taken 1:20 minutes. All the way to Queens!

I decided immediately to give the GWB route a chance tonight, and it worked like gang busters. About 1:20 from door to door, which works out to about 1:05 minutes on the road. Ah the small pleasures of life..

Last night Sarah and I headed to our first game at Shea this year. And it was a win over the Bondsless Giants! Traschel pitched eight strong (and fast paced for him) innings, and lots of two out hitting including Mike Cameron’s two run dinger.

The weather wasn’t great, but wasn’t as bad as it had been for our first games in previous years. We brought a blanket with us for once, but it never got cold enough for us to need it.

Man, I hate the wave and the people who do it. At one point in the game Trachsel was wavering and the 1-1 tie seemed like it was about to break. The mo-rons in the crowd began doing the wave, and I could barely concentrate on the action as Steve wiggled his way out of danger. Why in the world would you go to a baseball game and do stupid crowd participation tricks during one of the most important parts of the game? I really don’t understand people.

Another thing that confused me was Piazza’s removal for a pinch runner in the seventh. While he was batting I used all of my non-existent psychic powers to try to get Mike to hit the record-setting homer. Instead, Piazza got a base hit and Art Howe pulled him for Vance Wilson. The Mets wound up getting some hits and Piazza would have gotten an additional at bat in the game. Oh well, Piazza will have to become the altime leader in home runs by a catcher without me in the stands.

The biggest surprise of the night was the new big screens they’ve installed at Shea. The new screens support high resolutions, and tons of colors. The new animations were really amazing, especially compared to the old two color animations they used to have.

Anyway, Barry had a sinus infection and Piazza didn’t get his record, but it was still a fun night all around. Can’t wait for the next game.

A co-worker was looking to find urls in a bunch of text files, and had limited success with the examples at the Regular Expression Library. Here’s a quick little expression that I whipped up for him. I’ve also added it to the library for the 6 billion or so people in the world who aren’t subscribed to my feed.

[a-zA-Z]{3,}://[a-zA-Z0-9\.]+/*[a-zA-Z0-9/\\%_.]*\?*[a-zA-Z0-9/\\%_.=&]*

It doesn’t include every possible pattern, but it works flawlessly for the following sample text:

this is my url http://test/test.jpg?test=1&foo=bar EndProject ftp://products/ and how about http://someserver or http://www.msn.com/default.aspx#test ok? ok http://www.nothere.com/index_file.html ha ha ha <a href=”http://dev1″>Dev1</a>

I’ve only tested it using .Net, but it will probably work with any regular expression engine.