3/19/2006 10:26:00 PM|W|P|Jacob|W|P|That was a headline of an article in The Onion, supposedly by the CEO of Gillette, a month ago after Gillette announced the new Fusion. Obviously it is satire, but this has not stopped Jos and me from exclaiming the headline every time the Fusion ad is on TV. Now the Economist has run the numbers. By 2100, our son or grandson might be hefting a 14 blade razor! Or maybe that is why robots will be invented. Marketing and not need might be driving this but the engineers are slowing it. They have to figure out how to make new blade fit. The growth of blades is similar to Moore's law with predicts the grown of computing power to double every 18 month. I predict the Gillette Fission by 2008. No blades! It uses a small fission reaction to blast the stubble away.

read more | digg story|W|P|114282880953705422|W|P|F*** Everything, We're Doing Five Blades|W|P|jacob.tomaw@gmail.com3/14/2006 04:15:00 PM|W|P|Jacob|W|P|I have a couple things I am really into this week, IndieFeed and del.icio.us. IndieFeed is a network of podcasts for independent music. I am subscribed to their Alternative/Modern Rock channel and I really enjoy it. I have been listening for about 6 weeks. Every couple of days it comes out with a new show featuring a new song from an independent alternative/modern rock artist. It is always music I would not have heard otherwise, not because I don’t listen to the radio but because this stuff is not on the radio. All of the music is right on target for the type of music I really like, but it varies from totally kicking to just ok. Some of it has even inspired me to think about buying music again. There is also a little intro and extro commentary telling you a little bit more about the band, more about the album, and the bands website. There are 4 other music channels at IndieFeed. Alternative/Modern Rock is the only one I have listened to but I recommended Electronica to Rob. He is always looking for more Trance and DJ Mix music. He said he really likes the podcast. They also have Blues/Funk, Folk/Americana, and Hip Hop/Rap music channels. I would like to see an independent country music channel, but maybe there is no such thing and indie country. I also just noticed there are some non music channels, a couple of which I might take a listen to. So now, every couple of days I get this new music. Ideally I would like to be able to add each of these artists to a station in Pandora. Then if I hear some more from an artist then I can buy it. Also you can look at the list of artists who make up a station really easily. This solution also means I can listen to the music I like anywhere the internet is (i.e. everywhere but a small part of Burnsville, MN). One problem, this is IndieFeed, thus independent artists on tiny labels, thus they are not always in the Music Genome. What am I to do? There is no way I could remember all of these bands and then remember all their websites. I could create a bookmark folder in Firefox and add all the sites in there and then be able to go back and look for new releases and downloads from time to time. However, bookmarks only live in the instance of the browser where they are created. Also, some of the bands are in the Music Genome so I want them in a different categorization. This is where del.icio.us comes in. Del.icio.us has been around for a little while, but I just started getting into it last week! Not only do I want to categorize the links to bands but I also want to categorize at least a handful of other links every day. Over just the last 4 years of working I have lost the links to more informative programming sites than I want to think about. Everyday Ryan, Eric, or whoever is sending me some site I want to read, just not right now. My old solutions were to im them to myself at home, email them to myself, or to keep a tab open for each article, but, as great as Firefox is, after 30 tabs it starts to get angry with your RAM. Ok ok ok, so what does del.icio.us do? It lets you tag websites. You give it a web site you love like TFL. Then you give it some keywords you would use to describe the website like ‘tomaw’, ‘blog’, ‘funny’, ‘informative’, ‘mustRead’, and ‘veryWellWriten’. Then you can look up all of the sites you have tagged a certain way. So, I take each of the band's websites and tag them with ‘band’ and ‘indiefeed’. If the band is not in Pandora, I also tag it 'nonpandora'. I also tag links I want to read or keep in similar ways. Now when I want to see all the articles I want to read I can just go to my ‘toread’ tag. There is an extension for Firefox that lets you quickly tag your current page and to go to your tags. Also, because this is a web service, it is available everywhere. There are also more features that I have not explored fully yet, like rss feeds for tags, searching other peoples tags, and tagging for people. If you have any questions send them my way. Also, if there is a particular type of stuff you would like to hear me talk about let me know.|W|P|114237737027959586|W|P|Stuff I'm into Tuesday|W|P|jacob.tomaw@gmail.com3/20/2006 01:19:00 PM|W|P| Anonymous|W|P|I love listening to all the new music out. I found you can also go to cdbaby.com and hear songs for free. You don't have to buy them and you hear most of the song. If something really gets me I'll buy it. I found a great new independant county (well kinda rockish) band. The James Alan Band
You can hear the music here
http://cdbaby.com/cd/jamesalanband
I'd like to find more feeds to listen to also. Enjoy it on the internet and not just what's pushed down my throat buy somebody!3/13/2006 10:18:00 PM|W|P|Jacob|W|P|Lewis sent me this video of the Video Game Pianist playing a medley of themes from The Super Mario Brothers. It is long, but worth every second. It you are like me not only is ever pixel of the NES classic burned into your retina, but the tunes are imprinted on your Cochlear nerve.|W|P|114231081546868576|W|P|Super Mario Piano|W|P|jacob.tomaw@gmail.com3/11/2006 08:47:00 AM|W|P|Jacob|W|P|Yesterday was a great early spring day. It also must have been a great day for a people to exercise their right to peaceably assemble. After work, I normally have to fight against the suburban masses trying to catch their trains on the west side of the river while I try to catch the el on the east side of the river. Typically they want to run 8 abreast on a bridge that only holds 6 people across. Last night was a little different. I was still fighting against a mass of people, but this mass was distinctly Hispanic and carried both Mexican and American Flags. My first thought was World Cup qualifier, but they were gathered for a more American sport, marching and rallying in protest of legislation. The HoR has passed HR 4437, The Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005, and recent immigrants, 1st generation Americans, and according to the CBS2 coverage at least one plain old white girl with grown out pink hair are not too happy about it. All of the people I saw were carrying Mexican flags and so I assume of Mexican decent, but the Poles and Irish had a contingent there. I did not even know there was still a significant Irish (as in people from Ireland, not the South Side) contingent still in Chicago. I don't know what this bill is supposed to do exactly. However, I do think that the laws we have right now are not being enforced and we do not need to make it more illegal to come to America if we are not going to enforce the laws we have now. We need to talk about if we think there should be a thing called illegal immigration, because we do not seem to be agreed on that point yet. There was a time when we just let anyone come who wanted. Maybe for good or bad that should be our policy. One of the supporters of the bill was saying that American tax payers are being drained supporting the immigrants. I think that concern is understandable. If you are here illegally it seems unlikely you are going to pay taxes and governments are going out of their way to make sure illegals get the same services as everyone else. I think the way to solve this problem maybe to cut back on the services offered by the government, not cut back on the people who want to come here and work. We also need to think about how we integrate immigrants. I don’t have any solutions here but like I said, we used to have a policy of open borders and we were very effective of adding these new people into America. This involved moving them closer to American and move America closer to Irish, German, Chinese, etc. We did not strip them of their identity and replace it with ours, but we also wanted them to integrate and not remain a bubble culture in our greater American culture. Here is the story and it has video on the right. UPDATE:Wow! I just realised that CPD estimates 300,000 people were there.|W|P|114209095002407995|W|P|Hey! Ho! What's up with all these flags of Mexico?|W|P|jacob.tomaw@gmail.com3/10/2006 02:53:00 PM|W|P|Jacob|W|P|'cause that's where Chuck Norris is going to be! This is a video from The Best Damn Sports Show Period of Walker Texas Ranger himself reading some of the hilarious facts from an internet list about Chuck Norris.

read more | digg story Here is the complete and hilarious list. There are eight pages of fun! Also, adding to my belief that the Wikipedia is the culmination of the entire human existence, at least all that can be expressed in English, there is an entry just for the facts.|W|P|114202399491535351|W|P|When you are anywhere look behind you|W|P|jacob.tomaw@gmail.com