East v. West. Two XKCDs in a row; I know. I'm lazy.

I instantly identified with this, although it took me a few minutes to realize why. (Easy answer follows the images)

Perma link: http://sqrl.it/?petvc
Original: http://xkcd.com/503/



Perma widget:


Why? "The East" and "The West" were named before anyone knew of the various continents in the actual Western hemisphere. Thanks Europe. That's just great.

The Observable Universe, From Top to Bottom

I found this comic amusing and impressive:
http://sqrl.it/?vfug4

For some reason I have a Facebook profile

Too many people were bugging me to get on Facebook, so I did. Yes, I got peer pressured. I am both strong and weak enough to admit that.

What ev. Here are various ways to get to it:
http://profile.to/dilbrent/
http://profile.to/brenttucker/
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1384374689

As long as I am selling out to the social grapharati, here is my LinkedIn public profile:
http://www.linkedin.com/in/brenttucker

And my pathetically unpopulated MySpace page:
http://www.myspace.com/dilbrent

FATS Chorus, plus wtf happened to Haim and Feldman? Remember them?

As most of you know, I write a lot of choral music; so much, in fact, that I have been awarded the fictional National Institute for the Preservation of Choral Music’s most prestigious award: the “Chory” which, previously, has inexplicably been held by such notables as Cory Haim and Corey Feldman, neither of whom ever show up at the annual reunion.

Anyway, that’s obviously not true. (Haim and Feldman come every year.) However, I did actually write a single piece of music arranged for chorus several years ago which I recently rediscovered on an old backup DVD, and is actually (in my massively un-humble opinion or “IMMUO”) quite listenable.

Here’s the catch: I’m not saying what the lyrics are, but if you understand them you will know that they are NSFW, or NS4W (or “Not Safe for Work” for those far less hip than I), but only if you work at the prudest prude shop on prude alley during prudefest, and are feeling a little prude when you play it.

It’s called “The FATS Chorus” and the first person to tell me why I named it that gets an expired coupon for $5 off an appetizer at participating Chili’s restaurants. (Offer not valid in Alaska and Hawaii, and for some reason Idaho.)

Archive.org link:
http://www.archive.org/details/FatsChorus
MP3 file:
http://www.archive.org/download/FatsChorus/FATSChorus.mp3

Deus ex Machina: A Human Excised

As most of you almost certainly don’t know, I like to arrange music for fun and profit. Mostly fun. Profit would be better. Anyway, the attached audio is from a piano duet I put together about three years ago and just recently rediscovered the midi file for which after I thought I had accidentally deleted it in the great hard drive crash of aught-five. (Kids: save early and often.)

Some interesting notes about this piece (hehe, get it?): I didn’t play a single note of it. At the time I originally made this I was trying to create a song using nothing but my midi sequencer and various utilities designed for improvisation, accompaniment and basically just being lazy about the simple parts. The title is a reference to the fact that it is mostly computer generated, although I did have to put considerable time into post-processing, and I created the chord progression because it turns out that machines suck at that.

As a bonus I have also included the sheet music as a PDF file. If you have any interest in actually performing this with a friend, let me know and I will split the score into two separate pieces of sheet music; one for each piano. (Note to self: figure out how to do that.)

The audio file from Archive.org:
http://www.archive.org/details/DeusExMachina

The sheet music:
http://www.archive.org/download/DeusExMachina/DeusExMachinaByDilbrentgmail.com.pdf

Life imitating art, or vice-versa?

I am a big Wikipedia fan and an occasional contributor. It’s an amazing resource, but certainly subject to abuse. One of the more trivial but amusing abuses is the frequent overuse of the “In Popular Culture” sections for users to expound upon completely tangential topics, usually because they are a fan of some show, movie, music, etc. Today’s XKCD comic (7/7/08) mocks this by satirizing the pop-culture references of “wood.” I laughed when I read it.

What is truly hilarious about this, however, is that someone reproduced the joke in the actual “wood” article, essentially verbatim. Of course it was marked as vandalism and posts were temporarily disabled, but it lead to a highly ironic and amusing discussion in the Talk:Wood section about what exactly the point of the joke was supposed to be.

XKCD Comic: http://xkcd.com/446/

Wood article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood

Talk:Wood: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wood (you have to scroll down)

This just makes me laugh

Let's be clear: Sometimes I post stuff here so I won't forget where I found it so when I talk about it at lunch I am not like "uh, well, it was on this site I saw, uh, you know, with the rabbits, or something." When I post these things here I can say it's on "Brent's Ironic Blog" which is at, uh, well, I don't actually remember the URL right now, but if you just go to...






http://www.toothpastefordinner.com/040908/the-eating-spectrum.gif

This is not what I want

I just wanted to check compatibility with the new Server 2008 install. That's not an option apparently, but I can almost certainly upgrade my current operating system to, um, well, also my current operating system.

Now I am just pandering

My dog had two surgeries today, so maybe this is funnier to me than it actually should be, but I like how the context clues and the incredibly specific diagnosis play off each other...

Ironic self-referential post #1

It occurred to me that to maintain credibility as an ironic blogger I must, at some point, post something ironic. Then I looked up the word "ironic" which, it turns out, is more complex than you might have thought.

So let's go with pseudo-self-referential instead.

(http://www.marriedtothesea.com/mtts-archives/mttsarchive-nov07.php)

xkcd: Alice is the real problem

xkcd is hilarious, but it may not be for everyone. If you read a lot of crypto-related material, which seem to recycle the user names quite a bit by design (Alice, Bob, etc., actually there appear to be only four. :)) then this comic will hit home. Poor Eve, it really isn't her fault:

Bonus: http://www.xkcd.com/202/

Frist Psot

By now you have almost certainly heard the old axiom that (paraphrasing in improperly used quotes) “if you want to hide a needle you don’t hide it in a haystack, you hide it in a box of needles.”

That’s what the entire blog-o-sphere is. A gigantic box of needles; and the needle I need to find is trapped, buried in the box somewhere, completely overshadowed by the other needles. Every time I search for something I find about 500 blog posts about it, and swirling in the sucking eddy of crap through which I must dive is the one gem of information that solves my problem.

Newsflash to 99.9% of the bloggers in the world: No one cares what you think. Do you care what I think? No. You do not. Neither do I care what you think. And yet here we are writing a bunch of stuff, plugging the tubes of the Internets, sadly assuming that someone wants to read what we have to say.

But here I sit, responding to the siren call of just one more fad.

This blog will rarely be updated, and when it is it will almost certainly be some semi-coherent rant about something fad-like or stupid that I want to get off my chest. You can safely ignore it, and if you do not please note that you were warned.

Your friend,
-Brent