I’m back in the acoustic game again. It felt weird playing a set of Al Foster Jr. Hip Gig drums for three solid hours tonight, but I finally got into some tasty grooves by the end of the night. This video is actually the first real song that I played on them. The christening so to speak. Enjoy.

Sometimes, when I get bored and thirsty, I just start throwing random stuff into my blender. Unfortunately, nine-times-out-of-ten, the result ends up being a complete disaster. I now realize that trying to blend a lone flip-flop with some potatoes and a whole can of CheezWhiz back in ’77 was a bad idea, and I have paid dearly for that one by way of a two-percent loss of equilibrium. Tonight was nothing like that fateful day. Blendius, the Greek God of Blending, must have loaned me his entire emerald shotgun/sceptre full of good blending karma to me. Old boy has been pretty stingy with it ever since I invented that new alphabet. At any rate, for tonight’s mortality distraction, I heedlessly tossed a cadre of hand-selected Central Market strawberries, what-was-left of a bottle of Kahlua, a half-cup of yogurt, and three tablespoons of confectionary sugar into ye olde 1.21 Gigawatt Osterizer. I cranked that sumbitch up to 11 (the only speed) until I smelled burning. Then, I enjoyed what is sure to be the new over-21 smoothie phenomenon of 2006. I’m calling the beverage “Bullet Bob’s Strawberry Infinigon” until Coor’s or the metasnazz files a lawsuit. Also, mitya000 please note that my new pride-obliterating blender technique is most unstoppable. Do-da-do-da-do.

I know there’s like 10 libraries to do this already, but they all seemed a bit heavy to me. I just wanted to grab the items from an RSS feed. Plain and simple. What’s amazing to me is that it could be done in 10 lines of Ruby. This parser reads an RSS feed, and stores the descriptions, items, and links into a hash of arrays.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require 'http-access2'

h = HTTPAccess2::Client.new()
element = Hash.new {|h,k| h[k] = []}

while urlstr = ARGV.shift
  response = h.get(urlstr) { |data|
    data.gsub(/<(description|title|link)>(.*?)<\/(description|title|link)>/m) {
      element[$1].push($2.gsub(/\s\s+/m,' '))
    }
  }
end

site_description = element['description'].shift
site_title = element['title'].shift

Stupidly, I wrote the same code in C++ first because I thought it would run faster. After starting down that path, I found myself wanting to use ActiveRecord. So, I ported over to Ruby.

The C++ version is here if you really want to see it. It’s 121 lines of C++ with a 32 line h-file. Truth be told, it actually took me less time to code the C++ because I made a couple of mistakes in my Ruby version at first. All said and done, the Ruby version is a helluva lot easier to maintain than the C++ which I think is why I spent the time to do it in the first place.

This was Minor Spark’s first (and only) gig. The inauspicious thunder of VDrums and AM noise was heard at the first stop on the “Hell Bent for Naugahide” tour. BJ arrived on his trademark Vespa wearing a Shriners hat with some kind of animal in tow that was somewhere between a goat and a moose. We rocked out for a good hour. Then, we did a second set of old Appalachian favorites with overdubbed slam poetry. The footage of the second set was immediately locked away in the Minor Spark 3DES vault in Des Moines lest our reputation be tarnished by the heedless decision for the rest of our days.

I found this laying around unpublished on my WordPress backend. I think it’s some discussion about Halloween costumes that me and BJ had last October, but I don’t remember the context. Nonetheless, it amuses me, and I needed to do something to respond to Februween.

<mitya000> you could be the limit of the speed of light.
<hoyhoy>  I'll just get a suit with italic 'c's all over it like that question mark infomercial guy.
<mitya000> I would dress up as division by zero and we could have a fight to the death.
<mitya000> If i win, the universe implodes.