The Blamobile

Ok I know I promised pictures of the "Blamobile" a while ago, but it took me this long to get them from Goga... I guess some things run in the family lol. Anyways! Here are the pictures of the little BEAST!




Now one of the cool features that came with this car was a trunk fully loaded with fireworks! lol. And yes they are illegal in Ohio, but the guy had it packed and didn't take them (I even reminded him). I still have the biggest ones - the biggest one is a 119 shots in one! Me and the roommates were setting them off during September 11th, but someone called the cops on us so we didn't get to the bigger ones (the cop came right when we were setting up 4 roaming candles all together).

Air Car

A car which runs on Air !!

World of warcraft, obsessions and the impacts on our lives

I read this great post on a blog today about a guy who finally noticed how World of Warcraft has changed/ruined his life in the course of the year that he played it. Now I want to make it clear that I'm not a WoW hater or hater of the people that play it. My two roommates play it now and many of my friends do. In addition to that I don't see the thoughts of the guy simply a hit on WoW. It's more of a warning to all of us who get so sucked into the virtual world that we forget the real one and the great/problematic things that we have in our real lives. I'm also an ex-MMORPG player (played Guild Wars for almost a year) and even though I didn't play as much as the author of the mentioned blog post I understand and have seen the effects games like that can have on different people. Luckily for me I never joined a guild (many people thought that it was kind of stupid to play a game called "Guild Wars" and not to join a guild... I guess I agree to some point lol) and so I never had to deal with the "duty calls" stuff. Also I played with my roommate at the time and some other friends from Kent so it makes it a bit different, but not entirely. So read this and see what you think:

The View From the Top

Politics and Lord of The Rings?

Senator Rick Santorum apparently in one of his speeches used a Lord of The Rings analogy with the Iraq situation. And to help everyone understand exactly what Santorum meant by it here's a video of Colbert trying to disect the message on his show:

iPods with Windos Virus: Detection and Removal

Apple announced a couple days ago that a small percentage of their video iPods shipped after September 12th 2006 might contain a windows virus RavMonE.exe. The virus propagates itself through mass storage devices so if the virus is detected on your iPod you should scan all the other storage devices you plug into your computer as well. The good news is the virus is detectable through most of the current anti-virus programs. All you have to do is plug your ipod to your computer, run the antivirus and if your iPod is one of the few lucky unlucky ones the virus detector will find it. On more details read the apple article.

Secret Service on Myspace?

Apparently Secret Service agents are also myspacers! They paid a visit to the school of a teenager who had apparently a picture of Bush being stabbed in the hand as her myspace picture. Is this a job position there? I mean if I saw a job description "Secret Service hiring experienced internet browsers to browse MySpace pages and find inapropriate material" I'd be on it! Anyways here's the full article from The Register:

Secret Service grills MySpace teen

Searching for music, pdf and more via Google

I recently came across a number of sites that integrated google search to allow them to search for music online using Google's powerful search keywords. Here's a list of a few that I found:

http://www.ironlab.org/projects/findmusic.php
http://www.tyoogle.com/
http://www.g2p.org/
http://www.goofile.be./


In case anyone wonders what exactly some of the search strings are so you don't have to remember any of these URLs and want to go through google yourselves here's a couple links that talk about the search strings:

i-hacked
Mark and Angel

This video may spark some conversation

It's only a couple of minutes...the music is from a BYU choir.

Check it out:

The video - click me.

-Random (new screen name)

Music, Lyrics, Album art and more

As you all know I'm pretty picky when it comes to my music organization and with the newest iTunes you can actually download the album art. However to get the album art through iTunes, you have to have an iTunes store account. In addition to that I've been reading on forums and many people are coplaining that the album artwork feature isn't at its best yet. Today I discovered a widget which not only allows you to get the artwork for the song/album you're listening to on iTunes, but it also downloads the lyrics for you and much more. You can save the artwork and lyrics and if the widget doesn't find the lyrics, it has a nice little "Google" button which will open your browser and do a google search for the lyrics to the song. All you have to do is open the page, copy the lyrics into the widget and hit save! I was listening to my music today at work and it found the artwork and lyrics to all the songs but one. The widget also give you an option of denying the album artwork, in case you notice that the artwork is not correct. To use the widget you have to download the Konfabulator. Then once that's installed, simply get the iTunes Companion widget and voila! For those of you who would like to see alternative methods, lifehacker had a nice article today about a plugin for windows media player and winamp that allows you to get the lyrics to the song. If you read on in the comments you'll find many other applications (including iTunes Companion) that do the same thing and might find one that works best for you! The lifehacker post can be found here.