Author: corey

Saying “everybody’s talking about them” is highly subjective, but indeed, lots of people are talking about Vampire Weekend.

Describing their sound as “Upper West Side Soweto,” New York City’s Vampire Weekend mixes preppy, well-read indie rock with joyful, Afro-pop-inspired melodies and rhythms. Ezra Koenig, Chris Baio, Rostam Batmanglij, and Chris Tomson formed the band early in 2006, when they were finishing up their studies at Columbia University. Taking their name from a movie Koenig made during his freshman year, the band started out by playing gigs at the university’s literary societies and at parties.

My only contribution to this is to point out the album is coming out in a couple of days and they have a couple of interesting live performances posted online.

• Take a way shows, the band performing songs on the streets of Paris. The first one is just okay, but the second is great and the end of the third one is amazing — be sure to scroll down.
• Other Music had them perform in-store. Okay, but is there anything more annoying than splicing an interview in during the songs!

While struggling to figure out which link to point to, I remembered Musicbrainz has a “relationships” feature which lists a bunch at once.

If you read Engadget, you might have seen this yesterday. It is a video featuring the Force Dynamics 401.

Funny enough, on our way to visit my brother in Toronto, we stopped at the Force Dynamics headquarters in upstate New York to check these out in person! My father was interested in the flight simulator version, which is about 85% similar to the driving version and can be converted back and forth with a little bit of work. The video demonstrates the motion much better than I could try to describe — it needs to been seen (ideally felt) to believe.

I drove a few laps in Live for Speed and RFactor — the sim itself supports lots of different games, but these two strive for realism, where many of the others are more fantasy/arcade style. The neat part is the games are completely standard, so all the online racing features work, you can race real people all over the world, as well as upgrade to newer games and PC hardware as the software improves. Apparently one of the tricks is you don’t tell anyone you are playing with that you are sitting in a simulator that has such dramatic motion or else you’ll get bumped without remorse.

The other neat thing about a simulator as compared to driving in real life is you can drive cars that you’d never be able to drive in real life on tracks that are impossible to get on or even don’t even exist anymore. For instance I drove a 1955 Mercedes F1 (Wikipedia link: W916), a beast of a car which won the world championship in ’54 and ’55 (Mercedes got out of racing for 30 years after a crash killed a driver and 82 spectators at Le Mans) on the legendary and dangerous Nordschleife.

For those not willing or able to accommodate a 750 pound simulator in your home, may I suggest something along Jeff Atwood’s rig?

You might have heard that Hasbro has finally gotten around to trying to sue the makers of Scrabulous, the incredibly popular Facebook app. 

As these things usually go, this is probably a mistake.

Thanks to Scrabulous+Facebook suddenly millions of people are talking about Scrabble again. Take a great example from this past weekend: My parents, Emily and I were visiting my brother Kevin+family in Toronto. Over the past couple of weeks I have been playing Scrabulous with my mom and with Emily, so it was fresh in our minds when we were looking for indoor activities, it being Canada in wintertime after all.

We drove to Toys R Us and purchased Scrabble — from Hasbro, with real cash money. I hadn’t even been to a Toys R Us in twenty years or so.

Now the Scrabulous folks should undoubtedly work out some kind of deal with Hasbro, but really the motivation on Hasbro’s part should be to get the real branding plastered all over the app, and remind people to buy the physical version too. (We had to settle for the cheaper version at the store, there was no deluxe (the one that swivels) model available which we would have gladly paid for.)

But probably they’ll f’ it up and I’ll end up hating them for ruining my good time and never buy another board game from them ever.

Many people don’t appreciate how a snap works.

It is not about the fingers.

A snap is your middle finger hitting the fat part of your palm. The actual snapping motion is just a way to pre-load tension on your finger and releasing it quickly.

In my technique I use my ring finger to pull down on the skin on my hand to create a more flat landing pad — a method I developed without even understanding what I was doing.

If you know any Persians (Iranians) ask them to do the Beshkan for you. It is a two handed snapping technique that is 5x louder than our western version. Here’s a Persian site that explains it, even includes a video (link on the right): http://ajabanzaban.com/culture/beshkan.html 

photo from whatbettertime @ Flickr 

ffffound is basically Digg for arty images. This just brought me back — I had this exact one and a few others as a kid, loved the colors and thought I’d share.

[via ffffound]

I just bought this chair for my new office.

Dan, one of the guys here was sharing his experiences with the essentially back-to-school-shopping-for-adults process involved with moving into your own company’s office for the first time. He sat in “at least 10” chairs and deemed this one to be his favorite. And it was priced reasonably at $189 and the store was right around the corner, so I went for it.

Now, three other people (making five of us) in an office of 16 desks all have this same chair.

The power of recommendations… none of us know about chairs, we all needed one, someone we know in real life did some basic amount of original research and that was good enough for us. Buying things, especially ones that you use every day and cost more than $20 or so is a stressful proposition and is a principal driver for peer reviews.

I’m totally happy with my new chair purchase, but I got lucky — lucky that I had a resource right here to ask. Notches is working on facilitating this interaction in an organized, intelligent way.

Just wanted to reiterate how cool my Griffin PowerMate is. I wrote about it in a post about analog computer devices a couple of years ago.

I had it mothballed for a while, but I’m setting up my new desk space and installed it again. It works in 64-bit Vista which I wasn’t expecting and the latest software update is much nicer than it used to be. iTunes integration is built in now, no hacks required.

They even lowered the price, $36

On a related note my brother Kevin and I have been talking about the Chumby. I think he’s close to getting it, I’ll be sure to get him to write a guest post on his thoughts once he gets it set up.

1) Gave (to Emily): Brompton M3L folding bike. Part of the actual gift many times is the research involved with picking the gift as much as the thing itself. Such was the case with folding bikes. If you’re in the market for one, don’t hesitate to ask, because now I know.

I ended up with the Brompton because it met the following criteria: a) It folds up the smallest of any bike around b) it has an internal gear change mechanism, meaning there’s no external derailer to get tangled or broken. c) it can carry cargo. The Strida is wicked cool, but you really can’t carry much gear on the bike itself and Emily needs to cart photo equipment around. d) It is British and they make cool stuff e) it rode the best of any of the bikes that I tested f) Sturdy enough to ride on New York’s pockmarked streets. g) Should last a long time.

2) Got (xmas): Foodsaver Advanced Design V2840 Kit. I’ve been asking for this every year since, according to my mom, high school.

If you’ve ever had the joy of using the Space Bags for your winter clothes or what have you, this is like that, but for food. It is hard to explain the appeal, but it is undeniable. So far we’ve vacuum sealed cheese, fancy fresh gnocchi, true cinnamon (did you know that 99% of what you get in America is a related spice called Cassia), and whatever else we could find in the cupboard. Next up, a trip to BJs where we’ll make questionable value based purchases and vacuum seal everything. I knew I was in some trouble when it came with a DVD and suddenly the accessories that I absolutely must have became known to me.

3) Got (for birthday – Dec26): Xootr Mg. This was a surprise gift and really I think the only way to get a scooter. Since it was unprompted, I’m spared the “am I scooter riding type person” dilemma and am free to scoot all over town chest held high.

So far, I’m totally digging it. I’m exploring the new neighborhood by my office with speed and flexibility that you really only get from something like a scooter. I’m able to be more strategic when it comes to taking the express subway and scooting the rest of the way.

Also got Yaktrax Pro – snow chains for running shoes, a Nathan Quickdraw Plus Water Bottle, and some other things that are equally great, but less blog-interesting.

Thanks to TJ, Matthew and Jeremy for hosting this year’s Ugly Sweater party.

Emily and I made the trek from NYC up to Cambridge, MA specifically to attend the festivities. (Priceline’d “3 stars”, anywhere on route 128 for $60, got a great Doubletree room out of it)

Can you readers shed light on whether you’ve heard of the ugly sweater party concept before? I have no heard any mention of it locally, but some of the attendees said the Garment District second hand shop was busy with sweater-party-seekers. I love it — nobody can take themselves too seriously wearing something so silly.

You can’t see it in the picture, but on Emily’s sweater, those skiers are three dimensional. She took that sweater all the way to second place in the competition, winning an nine hour long, three DVD set featuring Roddy “Rowdy” Piper.

Studies have repeatedly shown that multiple monitors lead to increased productivity. Enthusiasts out there will tell you that three monitors is ideal [Scott Hanselman]. 

For our needs right now, I needed a monitor solution that gives us the absolute most pixels we can afford on our pre-funded startup budget. There are lots of monitor configurations to choose from at different price points, but which was *best*?

I’ve done the analysis. (All prices and models are Dell)

higher res**

If you allow that adding additional monitors horizontally is an option*, then you find that the 20″ standard aspect 1600×1200 gives you the highest density DPI at the lowest price with the most flexibility to expand. However, if you are looking for something to play movies or games which don’t scale across monitors well, then the calculus changes and the 24,27 and even the 30″ all start to look more attractive. 

And so, I’ve ordered dual Dell FP2007 LCDs for Tim and I. At some point down the road, we’ll add the third head.

* dual monitor video cards are very common today. Quad capable cards exist, but it usually easier and cheaper to add a second card. Don’t mix brands. Make sure that you have enough available PCI-X(1x,2x,16x,etc) slots available. The Gigabyte motherboards I’m ordering have two full bandwidth slots available and I made sure of that first.

**There are higher density displays out there. My laptop for instance is 1920×1200 in only a 15.4″ widescreen, which is gorgeous btw. It is probably just economics and market research that keeps these screens out of full size desktop configurations. And there are some really high DPI displays out there that are used for medical imaging and such, but you can’t even buy them from mainstream retailers and the prices are not even close to competitive.