Unsought Input

So, really quickly I found this cool forum, it tells the procedures of how to get your band’s name, album title and pic. Follow the directions below!

1 – Go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first random Wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2 – Go to Random quotations: http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.

If you want to do this again, you’ll hit refresh to generate new quotes, because clicking the quotes link again will just give you the same quotes over and over again.

3 – Go to flickr’s “explore the last seven days” http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/
Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

Put it all together, that’s your debut album.

Mine is: Kanak Mani Dixit, She Found in Giftshops.

Yes, I did it.  My band Killasaurus Visage (me, my brother the shig, my husband and the vic)  played through 58 songs and beat the endless set list on hard and expert.  The songs in the  set list goes can be found here.  Those are not in order  and include both the regular tracks and the bonus songs (I couldn’t find a list online of just the endless set list order and I don’t have the time to type it all out right now, sorry!). Thank god that we didn’t have to play the downloaded content as well cause 58 songs is really pushing the limit of what a group of people can do in one day.

Anyway, here are the facts and what we did to get through it.

• It took us 6 hours and 5 minutes (stopping only for refills and restroom breaks)
• Some of the hardest songs are the bonus songs since you don’t play them as regularly as the other tracks and they are not familiar songs (at least for us)
• If people are playing mixed levels, the lowest level is what everyone will end up beating it as.  The Shig on guitar and The Vic on bass played expert but Ry played drums on hard and I sang on hard (I should have gone on expert but I didn’t want to mess it up for my band!) so we beat the endless set list on hard.
• For your singer: mix lemon juice (I used from concentrate) in with something warm like tea. Don’t skimp on the lemon juice either, I put in about 1/4 a cup into each cup of tea.  Believe me, this works.  When we did the Rock Marathon (18 song set list) I did not use this method and after that your throat feels a little scratchy and achy.  I used this method for the entire 58 song set and my throat felt fine.  A little sore but definitely not as bad as it would have felt had I not done this.
• It’s okay if you fail a song in this set list.  Take a short break and try again.  You will lose fans but you gain them back when you finish the set list.
• Take it easy in the beginning and don’t take long breaks at all.  If you stop you are not going to want to start again.  And I am telling you, you will be exhausted after this (especially your drummer.  Our drummer runs in marathons).  But it’s worth it.

We got 261 out of 290 stars on this set list if you were interested in knowing.   And $34,000.  And 40,000 fans (we failed two songs in this set list so I think we were just earning them back, we had already maxed out the amount of fans we could have on the hard setting).

After you beat it you obtain legendary status and you can feel like a bad ass for playing a rock video game for 6 hours straight.

In a recent study the good old US of A was ranked 39th out of 149 countries in an environmental study that looked at countries overall environmental policies and emissions.  We were not the worst though.  I know I was saying stuff about China cleaning up for the Olympics before but they apparently have quiet a long way to go since they are currently competing with India for the least environmentally friendly country around.

Either way it’s probably time we do something about this, though.  I mean, where is our drive to win?  Our burning desire to fight and conquer and take over and WIN!!!? So, we just need to make this a challenge or a competition or a major TV show like American Gladiators.  If we had some type of zany game show to make people want to do environmentally friendly things we might be able to beat out other Costa Rica (who ranked fifth) or at least Japan (who ranked 21st).  I mean, all we need is a little bit of good old fashioned patriotism applied to saving the environment and people would just eat it up.  I know you could consider this technique to be  tricking the American public into doing something they wouldn’t normally do for a small prize or other’s amusement but I can’t really see any other way to make lazy people want to go out of their way do to anything.  Maybe I am not trying hard enough myself.  I know that if there was some crazy recycling game where I could win money or prizes I would totally be playing.

As far as corporations go, we could make a new TV show like The Office but with a company that has environmental hyjinks always ensuing.  Or we could just make them actually follow the regulations that would lower their emissions and pollution.  But hyjinks are always more fun.

Ultimate Tag Warrior is a great WordPress plugin that lets you add tagging to your blog and build your own folksonomy. You can use it to show related posts or a nifty tag cloud.

As of version 2.3, though, Worpdress has tagging built right in. That means that development on UTW has stopped, leaving us with a very nasty bug in the final version. After someone comments on a post (and the comment is approved), all the non-category tags are deleted.

This is a known bug in UTW 3.1415926. I’m not quite ready to take the plunge into WordPress 2.3, digging up new plugins to add the features I want and changing our theme. So in the mean time, I found an ugly hack to stop our tags from vanshing into thin air.

1. Go to your ultimate-tag-warrior-core.php file.
2. Find the SaveTags function.
3. Comment out the code that removes tags that are no longer associated with the post.

The end of the SaveTags function should look like this:

// Remove any tags that are no longer associated with the post.
/*
if ($taglist == “”) {
// since “not in ()” doesn’t play nice.
$q = “delete from $tablepost2tag where post_id = $postID”;
} else {
// lop off the trailing space+comma
$taglist = substr($taglist, 0 ,-2);

$q = “delete from $tablepost2tag where post_id = $postID and tag_id not in ($taglist)”;
}
$wpdb->query($q);
*/
$this->ClearTagPostMeta($postID);
}

Please note that this is an ugly hack.  It makes it much more difficult to remove tags from a post when you want to.  I find that we get comments on posts way more often than we ever want to remove tags, so it’s a god tradeoff for the time being.

Got a better solution?  Post it in the comment below.

Magician Criss Angel will join Uri Geller on Phenomenon on NBC. The show is billed as American Idol for magicians and “mentalists,” but that’s not really interesting. Within the next few years there will be an American Idol-style show for every profession, hobby, and pursuit in the history of man.

What’s interesting is that Geller, who has for years gone on TV all over the world claiming to have psychic powers, is still able to get on TV at all. He’s been caught cheating and had his powers debunked so many times it’s not even funny anymore.

He was probably most famously exposed by James Randi (The Amazing Randi). Watch the video below for some entertaining history.

Yes, that’s right, Geller is so busted that he flaked out on Johnny Carson. In 1973. That’s more than 30 years of being busted.

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