Sebastien Grainger Setlist

At The Grog Shop 11/21/08
I got kicked in the arm (by Sebastien Grainger) trying to write this down...

Love Can Be So Mean
Who Do We Care For?
I'm All Rage
(I Am Like a) River
I Hate My Friends
By Cover of Night (Fire Fight)
(Are There) Ways to Come Home?
American Names
Renegade Silence
Meet New Friends
Niagra

Belated Wolf Parade Setlist

At the Beachland Ballroom 11/2/08

You Are A Runner And I Am My Father's Son
Call It A Ritual
Dear Sons And Daughters Of Hungry Ghosts
Language City
An Animal In Your Care
Shine A Light
Grounds for Divorce
Fine Young Cannibals
California Dreamer
This Heart's On Fire
Kissing the Beehive
-----
It's A Curse
I'll Believe In Anything
Fancy Claps

Kyoto PTQ Pittsburgh

Didn't go so well... I could almost play Bant (with Rafiq and Rhox War Monk) but didn't have enough other stuff so I ended up playing Grixis. If I got a good draw things went pretty quickly but otherwise a little slow.

Deck
Esper battlemage
Kathari screecher
Bone splinters x2
Death baron
Dregscape zombie
Executioner's capsule
Puppet conjurer
Scavenger drake
Skeletal kathari
Undead leotau
Goblin assault
Hissing iguanar
Magma spray
Soul's fire
Blightning x3
Fire-field ogre
Goblin deathraiders
Tidehollow strix
Obelisk of grixis
Esper panorama
Island x4
Swamp x7
Mountain x6

Board
Angelic benidiction
Angelsong
Dispeller's capsule x2
Excommunicate
Guardians of akrasa
Marble chalice
Metallurgeon x2
Rockcaster platoon
Soul's grace
Welkin guide x2
Cathartic adept x2
Etherium astrolabe
Steelclad serpent x2
Tortoise formation
Vectis silencers x2
Resounding scream
Shadowfeed
Bloodthorn taunter
Lightning talons x2
Incurable ogre
Jund battlemage x2
Ridge rannet
Vicious shadows
Behemoth's herald
Cylian elf
Godtoucher x2
Mosstodon
Naturalize
Naya battlemage
Savage hunger
Carrion thrash
Deft duelist x2
Hindering light
Kiss of the amesha
Necrogenesis
Rafiq of the many
Realm razer
Rhox war monk
Waveskimmer aven
Obelisk of esper

Similar Ideas

So I ran into this online...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/birdbrid/2912354750/

Definitely better than mine

Pinback Setlist

Live at The Grog Shop, Cleveland OH, 10/8/08.

Torch
Bouquet
Non Photo-Blue
Microtonic Wave
Penelope
Good To Sea
How We Breathe
Bloods on Fire
Walters
Boo
Offcell
Tripoli
Loro
Fortress
Devil You Know
From Nothing to Nowhere
Off By 50
Afk
----------
Rousseau
Sender
Manchuria
June

Belated Ratatat Setlist

Belated because I just decided I was going to start doing this.
Live at Oberlin, 9/23/08.

Bruleé
Mi Viejo
Mirando
Gettysburgh
Bird Priest
Snifters
Lex
Mumtaz Khan
Loud Pipes
Flynn
Falcon Jab
Wildcat
Shempi
----------
Montanita
Seventeen Years

This is a joke

It's not very funny, probably too obscure, and I lost interest before I finished it, but it's okay I guess...

Alara Prerelease

3-1, 2nd place

Caldera Hellion
Druid of the Anima x2
Elspeth, Knight-Errant
Flameblast Dragon
Ridge Rannet
Rip-Clan Crasher
Steward of Valeron x2
Vithian Stinger
Wild Nacatl
Woolly Thoctar
Yoked Plowbeast x2

Branching Bolt
Gift of the Gargantuan
Magma Spray
Obelisk of Bant
Obelisk of Naya
Resounding Silence x2
Resounding Thunder
Sigil Blessing

Arcane Sanctum
Forest x4
Mountain x5
Naya Panorama x2
Plains x4
Seaside Citadel

"Works as advertised"

While searching through the ever-growing lists of new iPhone apps, I have found an increasing number of reviewers giving (relatively) high ratings to applications simply for working "as advertised." At first this seems like a reasonable criteria to rate an application, but upon reflection it really isn't.

If a film were released called "Terrible Movie," it would not get the Academy Award for best picture simply for fulfilling that claim. Likewise, an application which does something pointless or stupid should not receive high ratings just because that's what it's supposed to do.

Bang on door first, ask questions later

Me: "What's going on?"

1 (banging on door): "He's been passed out in there for eleven hours."

Me: "Are you sure he's in there?"

2: "Well, his door's locked..."

Me: "...So?"

3: "If he'd left I would have seen him. I've been up since 10:45."

1: "Try calling him"

2 (on the phone): "Hey, where are you?" (pause) "In the lobby?"

Preemptive Photography

It's thinking about raining here in Cleveland (and it already has, a little), and whenever that happens the sky usually has some interesting things going on in terms of lighting.

Unrelatedly (but not for long), I used to take my camera around with me pretty much wherever I went, but then I stopped since it was slightly inconvenient. This is sort of like how I used to use Time Machine but then stopped because it was slightly unnecessary, and then my hard drive died.

So this morning on the way to work, as I drove west, the darker clouds started thinning out and as I rounded a bend in I-90 a relatively solid line separated a pretty dark cloud from a very bright blue. The surrounding scenery also seemed pretty nice, and there was a lot of light highlighting some green on some sort of tree-like object and red on a rusty bridge. As "dangerous" as grabbing my camera and haphazardly taking pictures while pointing it in the general vicinity of the horizon may have been, I wish I had it with me at the time....

The title of this post doesn't accurately describe that situation, but both words in it are applicable.

iPhone App Update

I've ditched Aurora Feint, Morocco, Yelp, and Banner, and am on the verge of deleting To Do, but I keep holding out hope that it will be improved. Aurora Feint has been getting very positive reviews, and I agree that it has impressive graphics for a free game, but the gameplay is extremely repetitive and boring. It's worse than Bejeweled.

Cube Runner is back in the App Store, and it's really fun. Also, Moonlight Mahjong Lite (which, unfortunately, shows up as "Moonli...Lite" on the home screen) is a very good Mahjong game, with impressive graphics and intuitive controls. The "Lite" version only has four layouts, but I don't really use any of them other than the "normal" (turtle) one anyway. It also seems to use relatively little battery, which is nice.

I also finally got on the Evernote boat, and I downloaded Yellow Pages Mobile, which I don't really use.

Hamlet and Watchmen

First, here is a picture of David Tennant rehearsing for his role as Hamlet with the Royal Shakespeare Company. I can't decide if it's really him, but the dude in the background looks like Patrick Stewart. It looks even more like him in this picture.


On a related note, rumors are flying around that Neil Gaiman is going to write an episode of Doctor Who. On his blog he wrote a humorous line referencing Tennant's role as Hamlet.

"To be, or not to be, that is the question. Weeelll.... More of A question really. Not THE question. Because, well, I mean, there are billions and billions of questions out there, and well, when I say billions, I mean, when you add in the answers, not just the questions, weeelll, you're looking at numbers that are positively astronomical and... for that matter the other question is what you lot are doing on this planet in the first place, and er, did anyone try just pushing this little red button?"

On an unrelated but even more awesome note, the trailer for the Watchmen movie is officially out, and is playing in front of The Dark Knight. It looks really good.

Cool iPhone Apps

Every blog everywhere seems to be doing something like this, so I figured I'd do it too: Here are my impressions of various iPhone apps, and iPhone apps in general. So first, the apps I currently have on my iPod Touch (they're all free).

Remote: Cool, and very well made, though I have yet to actually "need" it.

AIM: Seems pretty well done, though until September when the update allowing apps to run in the background comes out, it's relatively useless...

NetNewsWire: Not really that much better (or worse) than the web app (except for the icon, which is cool), but hopefully in September there will be a badge showing your unread count.

Last.fm: Since I don't really use Last.fm to listen to suggested songs, I don't really use this either, but hopefully the September update will allow scrobbling.

Twitterrific: Seems the same as the Mac version, except this one crashes my entire iPod when I open it, so that seems like kind of a downside. Update soon?

NYTimes: I guess if I read the news more this would be cool, but maybe this will make me read the news more...

WritingPad: Really cool idea, and the actual "writing" works well, but the layout/execution of the rest of the app is lacking, and it crashes semi-frequently... hopefully an update will come out soon.

Zenbe Notes: Pretty cool, and well constructed, I just hate the home screen icon. And the name is kind of weird too (especially since it just shows up as "Zenbe" on the actual iPod).

Loopt: Cool idea, works pretty well, but I don't know anyone else who uses it so that sort of blows half the point of the app.

Banner: Technically called "Banner Free," which my only real gripe with it, this is actually something I've been wanting to do for a while.

Yelp: Kind of like Loopt (since Loopt uses Yelp's servers), except not as cool.

To Do: A very simple to do app, which is cool, except it's kind of hard to use. For example, you have to make a blank to do, and then edit it. Everything is laid out somewhat poorly also. The icon is also way too light, not to mention boring.

Aurora Feint: Neat graphics, and pretty addicting, but the actual game isn't that interesting/fun (kind of like WoW). Also, it's around 30 megabytes. I'll probably be getting rid of this soon.

Morocco: Also known as "Othello" or "Reversi," you can play against the "computer" or another person (not over wifi though). I've never really played this before, but the app is well-written, and the computer beats me easily every time (on easy) so I must suck.

Overall, none of the applications I've gotten (even the ones I like) are really any better than web apps, with the exception of Aurora Feint which, as I mentioned, is kind of boring anyway. Without the ability to run in the background, most of the things I want to be able to do on my iPod (like IM, use Twitter, and read RSS feeds) will be somewhat limited. Hopefully the update in September will fix all this, but until then I'm very underwhelmed.

Sometime in the future, there will be a Spore game for iPhone, which I am varyingly excited about, as I am with all things related to Spore.

EDIT: This post ended up being a lot longer than I imagined it would...

Turnpikes and Trappers

I don't have my list handy here at work, but I played a pretty fast Red/White deck with no finishers. The only playable rare I really got was Puppeteer Clique which, along with a few removal spells, I should have splashed black for. My largest creature was a 4/4. I had several tapping cards (Ballynock Trapper, Somnomancer, and two Curse of Chains), a few solid burn spells (two Fire at Will and Puncture Blast), and some decent creatures (Boggart-Ram Gang, Duergar Cave-Guard, and Harvest Gwyllion), but if I didn't win the race, I didn't have anything to win later.
All in all it was still a fun event, and I managed to get the blue/black dual land which, I suppose, I could sell, but I was still somewhat disappointed with my pool.

Tree Observed

One of the early ideas for an X Newspaper X article, back when everything written in a passive voice was funny, was "Tree Observed." It was never printed, but (as Carey humorously pointed out to me) that article now has a photo to go with it, courtesy of The New York Times.


Here's the actual article.

Manufacturer Charges Owners of Product $10

In a striking example of ingenuity yesterday, a manufacturing company announced that all owners of a certain product they produce will be charged an "owner's fee" of approximately $10. This announcement comes on the heels of a recent report detailing consumers' willingness to blindly do whatever a particular company tells them to, even pay more for something they already own.

Trend Expected to Continue

The trend of the word "trend" being used to describe the general tendency of events is expected to continue, researchers reported Tuesday. Said one, "We expect this trend of using the word trend to refer to trends will stretch well into the foreseeable future." This news comes in the midst of rumors that the "trend" trend would end abruptly.

Eventide madness

No, not that kind of madness...

I wonder what the avatar will do... "When this creature becomes tapped, you win the game"?
UPDATE: Or maybe, "When this creature is put into a graveyard from play, if it was tapped, you may search your library for a copy of this creature and put it and this creature into play tapped." Confusing and neat.

Black/Green is looking pretty appealing also...

More Spore

I got the full version of the Spore Creature Creator, and while I am slightly disappointed in its lack of awesomeness, and the overall feeling that it's a worthless thing to have (it will be made obsolete when the full version of the game comes out), at least it provides several extra parts to make more interesting creatures. Here are a few more I've made.

Growling sounds

One of the things that I lost when my hard drive died was an edited clip of Ratatat's song Wildcat. I had cut out just the growl sound that they use repeatedly in the song, and successfully (to some degree) removed the background music. I then used the file as the error sound on my Mac. I have nothing against the error sounds that come with OS X (I like "submarine"), but it was kind of cool to have "leopard" growling at me.

So I remade the file, but it doesn't seem quite as good as I remember the old one being. Oh well. You can download it in mp3 or aif format (you'll want the aif if you're going to use it on a Mac... the mp3 isn't really useful at all, but you could convert it to wav I suppose).

Insane calendar

So I just found out about the new James Bond movie (Quantum of Solace), coming out November 7th, and I grabbed my iPod touch to add it to the calendar so I wouldn't forget. I switched to month view, and started flipping through the months to get to November, when suddenly my iPod decided that it would much rather go batshit insane and fly to the distant future, with no end in sight. Somewhere around 2015 I finally gave up trying to press the home button and held down the hold button to turn it off. After a few minutes of looking at the white Apple logo, it finally turned off/on, and everything was back to normal.

Another exciting day at work.

DELETE! DELETE! DELETE!

Diablo 3!!!

Imagine my surprise (and excitement) this morning when a link to this was sitting in my feed reader.


So now there are two games I'm looking forward to that work on a Mac? What is the world coming to....


(The other one is Spore, by the way.)

Web 2.0 action

I'm intermittently ramping up my use of Twitter and del.icio.us, for those who are interested in such things.

Said ramping may be due to de-ramping of work responsibilities. Although those have been slightly ramped lately. Overuse of the word ramping to de-ramp in 3... 2... 1...

Doctor Who 204

Cool time travel episode - accelerated portrayal of the consequences of The Doctor never getting old while everyone else does, which they're building on a lot this season.

For those of you who haven't been keeping up, I haven't been keeping up with Doctor Who, so I'm catching up.

My computer is ready

My MacBook has a new hard drive and is ready to go. Unfortunately the old one was unrecoverable so I lost a few things... I guess I will have to start using Time Machine again...

Great, now this is going to be the longest work day ever...

...Or not

Well it turns out the hard drive is pretty dead, so they're replacing it (for free), and are going to attempt to recover its contents (not for free, unless it doesn't work). All this is going to take 5-6 days unless I'm very lucky, so it looks like I'm going to have to rediscover my Vaio.

I am not particularly thrilled with Apple right now (however irrational that may be).

Now I want one of these (yeah, right).

MacBook trouble

As a few of my recent Twitter posts allude to, upon returning to Cleveland last night I discovered that my MacBook no longer booted into OS X. After trying the few things I know how to do with Macs (or, depending on your opinion of Macs, the few things that are possible to do with Macs), I decided that I would pay a visit to the Apple store and see what they think.

Today at work I Googled around a bit and found someone who had a similar problem, and resolved it by taking out the hard drive and putting it back in. Since my problem happened after driving back to Cleveland with my laptop, I'm hoping the hard drive just rattled loose a bit and this will do the trick, which would agree with the symptoms I've observed. Unfortunately, I don't have my set of small screwdrivers up here with me, so I may end up having to go to the Apple store after all.


Updates, for those concerned, will be posted later today.

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Created at wordle.net

Grand Prix

So I didn't do extremely well, but whatever... 3-3-drop... here's my list

Plains x7
Forest x10
Rune-Cervin Rider
Windbrisk Raptor
Devoted Druid
Spawnwrithe
Woodfall Primus
Safehold Duo
Wildslayer Elves
Loamdragger Giant
Medicine Runner
Mudbrawler Raiders
Scuzzback Marauders
Swans of Bryn Argoll
Tattermunge Duo
Wort, the Raidmother
Scuttlemutt
Thornwatch Scarecrow
Wicker Warcrawler
Prison Term x2
Barkshell Blessing
Manamorphose
Runes of the Deus
Safewright Quest

UPDATE: I checked online, and I ended up 613th out of 1124, which considering I only won 3 out of 9 possible games, doesn't seem that bad.... I am also now officially tied for 2nd with lots of other people in the Dayton/Springfield area in Pro Points ranking... with 0 Pro Points.

MXH178, now with bookmark power!

For all of you (which, judging by the number of comments, is a lot of people) who have been wanting to bookmark an individual section of my website, the wait is over! Each of the links to a different section, while still just hiding/unhiding a div now changes the url, which can be linked/bookmarked/stared at. For example, if you want to look at my icons, all you have to do is go to http://filer.case.edu/mxh178/?icons. Hooray for javascript. Also, while far from novel, I came up with this on my own. Besides being self-congratulatory, that means that it might not work exactly as planned.

Spore

I got the Spore Creature Creator demo today. It's pretty fun. Check out these guys I made.

RATAWHA??

OH MY GOD WHY DIDN'T ANYONE TELL ME RATATAT HAD A NEW CD??

Okay, to be fair, someone did, but I didn't believe them, and then I forgot about it. But apparently it's the truth.



UPDATE: It was Dan.

Keeping your applications fresh

There is nothing particularly wrong with the icon for AppFresh, an application which figures out which of your applications have updates available, but I don't think it really conveys what the application does. Yes, it's a modified version of the little internet/network globe thing that Apple's Software Update application has in it, but that same icon is used for network disks, and networks in general (among other things).

So since I fancy myself something of an icon person these days, I made a sketch icon for AppFresh, but I didn't just remake the original like I usually do. Instead, I made this:

If you can't tell what it is, it's because I'm not actually that great at making icons. It's a ziploc bag with an application inside/on it. I like this idea enough that I'm going to attempt to make a more "normal" realistic-looking version of it. Someday.

Some more Helvetica

I finished making the Helvetica icons (the letters, anyway, which are available on my website), and it occurred to me that a single letter might not be the most useful thing to differentiate applications. So, taking a page from Adobe's book, I made a few icons with two letters.

From left to right: Address Book, iTunes, Firefox. I think they still need tweaking...

A few more icons...

I just finished a few more icons for my "sketch" or "drawing" icon set.

I also started making "letter" icons, which seemed like an interesting idea at the time.