- symantec releases antivirus for PDA. Joy! Now we have to worry about being virus susceptible with our cellphones and PDAs!
- Humor / game: at your next meeting play Bullshit Bingo
- Do a ton of cool things with Instant Messaging at http://www.ai-buddy.com/
- Ewan McGregor, AKA youthful Obi-Wan admits to hitting the bottle over Star Wars related pressures. The force of binge drinking is strong, it seems.
- MIT planning to put tons of course material online by 2006
- Cell phones really do cause problems on airplanes
- blogrolling not taking any more new user signups — maybe ever — citing server burden from too many free users
- Yahoo news now offers a huge assortment of RSS feeds And John Palfrey comments on the terms of service for these feeds. Dave made a handy page with coffee cups for Radio Userland users.
- The Blog Herald has posted that Yahoo is looking for a blog tools/utility acquistion to compete with Google (blogger) and AOL (AOL Journals).
- mathematical study by man on reality that he’ll find the woman of his dreams
- A couple guys went out and found the real locations in London that match the locations inside the PS2 game The Getaway and offer side-by-side pictures to prove it.

Coming soon: a significant amount of public accessible content! The BBC is planning on opening up all their content, which includes their radio and TV programs for free on the net. The only catch? No commercial use. This is very cool!

Don’t try to spell it, but Hallelujah from Sammy Hagar & The Wabos has arrived! Well, at least in part anyway. Hagar, affectionately known as The Red Rocker, is one of those rare musicians and vocalists who has enjoyed success both as a solo artist and with headline bands.

His resume is rather diverse ranging from Montrose to HSAS (featuring Journey guitarist Neal Schon) blues artist Roy Rogers to Van Halen (Van Hagar as some disgusted fans have coined)  to offering songs, production, vocals and/or guitar work for Heart, Alice Cooper and even, yes it’s true: Hank Williams Jr. (Lone Wolf). Not to mention appearing on numerous movie soundtracks like: Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Over The Top (that underwhelming Stallone wrestling movie), Footloose, Up the Academy, plus the classic adult animated movie Heavy Metal.

Sammy was a prominent popular rock artist in the 80’s gliding between hard rock and pop rock with such memorable songs as There’s Only One Way To Rock and I Can’t Drive 55 (both available on Hallelujah). The story goes that one day he got a call to replace Diamond David Lee Roth in Van Halen, of which he accepted and then went on to record several platinum VH albums. He helped usher in a new and somewhat unexpected VH sans Roth era only to leave the band in somewhat torrential times in the late 90’s and return to his almost forgotten solo career some 13 years later.

In Hagar’s absence Van Halen popularity waned not helped by releasing their worst studio offering to date with singer Gary Sherone behind the mic, then firing him after the sales went south, and then they went into sort of an unofficial retirement. Unfortunately, the world hasn’t seen or heard from Van Halen – no new album or live show– in 1,758+ days and counting. Ok, I guess you can hear a quick and somewhat recent soundclip of Eddie playing Joy to the World for 40 seconds here.

The good news is that Sammy Hagar is still out there recording, touring and playing loud and proud rock and roll. This man has a lot of fun playing and you can hear it on this live CD.

So what does Sammy say about Hallelujah inside the CD insert? Trying to put a live CD together was not as easy as I thought it would be. Clearly with his large catalog of songs he should have gone for the double CD set, but fans can’t tell by his limited and vexing explanation if this was a financial decision or a personal decision. Come on, Sammy.

Somehow in the space of a single CD he still manages to squeeze in a cross selection of songs, kicking the set list off with Shaka Doobie. Not the best nor well known song to start a live Sammy Hagar CD, but he bounces back by jumping right into the second song in the setlist with the familiar: suckers walk, money talks, but it can’t touch my three lock box.

To keep the momentum going he breaks into an ok version of There’s Only One Way To Rock which I was a bit disappointed in because we’ve already heard a better live version with him and Eddie trading solos – yikes, 10 years ago – on Van Halen’s CD: Live Right Here Right Now. If you already own that CD then chances are good that you will be disappointed in Hagar with The Wabos doing the VH stuff. However, he does have Gary Sherone — yeah, the same singer VH dumped – in for a guest appearance and Michael Anthony guesting on bass (which Anthony’s appearance according to rumours has caused a bit of a rift with the Van Halen brothers). It’s not that the Van Halen material played by Sammy & The Wabos sounds bad, but it doesn’t measure up to Van Halen musically except for Sammy’s vocals. It will be interesting to see if VH ever does play together again how they will deal with Sammy’s vocals. Touche`.

The VH songs on Hallelujah are (in order of the setlist): Top of the World, Why Can’t This Be Love, When It’s Love, Right Now and Dreams. In Dreams especially, the Wabos’ Vic Johnson proves to be a skilled guitarist supporting Hagar material, but is absolutely no match for a full-on Eddie Van Halen solo. If you listen to the two live solos for Dreams side by side you’ll hear exactly what I’m talking about. Vic shouldn’t feel bad because many accomplished guitarists have withered when trying to cover Eddie’s fiery fretwork without the assistance of overdubbing.

The song Give To Live which was from Hagar’s album where Eddie played bass on is a good live rendition of the studio song but there is something about Hagar playing the version acoustically live on the aforementioned Right Here Right Now CD that was stronger. Fortunately, Hagar delivers an unplugged version of Eagles Fly that is outstanding. But then comes the somewhat forgetable song, Little White Lie. Not sure what the story with the harmonica solo is, but with all due respect that is Neil Young, not Hagar, territory. I am also mystified why the extracted setlist covered so many songs from his VH days and newer stuff when he had plenty of outstanding classic material available on Standing Hampton, Three Lock Box and VOA.

Montrose fans will enjoy a solid version of Rock Candy and football fans will like Mas Tequila which I think has been played in more football stadiums in recent years than Queen’s We Will Rock You. Also worth listening to is I can’t Drive 55 where Hagar curiously urges the crowd to get with the times “it’s 65, not 55 … 65, you got it?”. Probably one of the best videos in the 80’s was this video and every time I hear it I think of the judge banging his gavel and them taking Sammy away with guitar in hand. Hard to shake that early MTV generation.

Hallelujah ends as unceremoniously as it started with his newest studio track and while this song isn’t bad, it isn’t worth buying the CD over unless you are a diehard Hagar collector.

At the time of this writing, for those who are interested, Hagar is also touring with members of Montrose and he has a pretty good official website, despite the use of those irritating frames (why do so many band websites use frames?).

In summary,this CD comes across as sort of an appetizer instead of the main course. If you want to hear Sammy doing great live versions of Van Halen songs then buy the VH Live Right Here Right Now CD instead. Hallelujah is certainly competent in both sound and production but not anything spectacular. The overall production has more than a rushed feeling to it and the song selection leaves you wanting to hear what songs didn’t make the cut. Don’t be surprised if you ask yourself at least once why he didn’t include one of his greatest commercial hits: Your Love Is Driving Me Crazy. To be completely fair, it seems from Sammy’s CD insert comments that he knew in advance that he was putting together a jigsaw puzzle with two thirds of the pieces missing and hoping that his fans would support this fragmented effort as being better than nothing at all:

“If this CD is commercially successful enough I plan a double live CD of the whole nine yards: raps, extra songs maybe even a 3 CD set in a limited edition. Who Knows? I could dig that.”

We could dig that too, Sammy.

In the meantime we’ll just have to take, or leave, this slightly above average live CD offering, since for whatever reason the full meal deal is still stored in the Three Lock Box. Maybe if commercial success isn’t reached, then the Red Rocker will offer for download these coveted missing tracks someday? Hallelujah, that’s what dreams are made of. Grade C+

 

Also by Sammy Hagar:
Hallelujah
Three Lock Box
Standing Hampton

But here’s the catch …

I think it is great that Dish is doing this new deal to offer essentially free PVR service to their customers but if I was long time Dish customer I’d feel like they should offer something for them as well instead of this ham-fisted offer: Existing customers can upgrade to the DVR receiver for $199, a Dish Network representative said.

Something that irks me with deals like this — and we are DirecTV clients (and long time TiVO clients too, for that matter), so it’s not sour grapes for me personally — but why are existing, loyal clients not given deals as good as — or better than — new customers?

New customer acquisition is expensive! Studies have proven that it costs much more to acquire a new customer than to provide better service to existing clients. So why so much emphasis on new blood and so little on existing gravy?

They should offer existing clients the opportunity to re-up their subscription agreements (get the $199 PVR receiver for free if you sign a 1 or 2 year agreement to stay on — which at $50+ USD a month they would certainly be making a profit) and get the same deal (or better) then they are offering brand new subscribers. It’s like existing customers are penalized for their loyalty (what’s customer loyalty these days? I know).

Two more examples:

Water service We were spending nearly $100/month (for years) for delivered water service between our businesses and when a recent merger took place the service went downhill. When I called to complain about the service and inquire about the price we were paying for water I was told, “sorry, nothing we can do for you.” So we switched to another carrier and saved 25% on the service. The account manager (not the sales exec or driver) stopped personally by our office and asked what he can do with the pricing. But he was too late for a “deal”.

Webhosting - I have had hosting for two separate domains at this one host, which shall remain nameless (until I’m out of there, that is), for 5+ years now. They have been charging an excess account overage fee — it’s not much, a couple bucks a month, but the account hosting fee is only $5 a month. So the bill for the overage has risen to meet and exceed the monthly cost. I called them up to recommend to us alternatives and the tech department told me they couldn’t turn off the email — so when viruses went out this last weekend, the pop boxes got filled and this cost me $$$ in overage fees on these rarely used accounts. Nice racket! Guess these two domains will be switched over to my preferred (and much better) host: Cyberwurx as soon as I can get to it — which will be much quicker than the 5+ years we’ve patronized this host. All that other host had to do was call and offer some alternative plans — I even asked for the tech to have the sales department call me. After 5+ years of service you think somebody could pick up the phone. No call. No loyalty. No more business from us.

There might be times when having a private RSS feed would be worthwhile, and therefore allowing only authorized users access. This could be for something like a private blog, a member blog, or something along those lines. Perhaps a real world example might be a sports picking blog where specific picks were given daily via a weblog and then syndicated via RSS to registered members. The content itself could be protected behind a basic htaccess gateway just like the rest of the member’s area, but what if you wanted to publish an RSS feed for your member’s direct access and convenience using their favorite newsreader?

It appears that there are already several solutions and individual newsreaders that can handle HTTPS/SSL encryption and HTTP authentication with protected RSS feeds, though I haven’t personally tested any of them. Steve Garrity researched and published a list of aggregators that support this functionality. Andre Radke posts this information about HTTP Basic and Digest Access Authentication RFC 2617. I’m curious if anybody has written a step-by-step study on how to do this. With some minimal searching, I didn’t find anybody that had done this. Maybe somebody reading this will comment or trackback to a tutorial on this.

10 possible attributes by John Robb for adding videos to RSS feeds to launch either a P2P program download or directly start downloading the video file. I think this is a pretty good idea considering that doing video across the web can lead to expensive bandwith bills. The commentary thus far centers around #5: The classic search feature of P2P systems should be disabled or unavailable. The only way to access the files on the network is via a link on a weblog or via RSS subscriptions. which Robb explains is necessary to separate itself from the piracy attention that P2P has generated. In the past I have thought about doing some video blogging (vlogs as I’ve also seen them referred to) and putting them behind a membership gateway, another way to defray the costs of doing video over the web. Yes, I like this video blogging - P2P - RSS idea. Will be interesting to see how this progresses.

Over the weekend we needed to buy a new graphics card for one of our computers and I selected the lower end <a href=”http://www.pny.com/products/verto/geForceFx/5200pci.asp”>Verto GForce FX 5200 (PCI)</a>. In the process of unpacking the card and readying to install I came across a bright orange STOP notice explaining the following:

Lifetime Replacement Warranty does not cover items out of production if PNY no longer stocks them . (Lifetime is defined as the lifetime of the product on the market. Outdated technology is not covered by lifetime warranty if the item is no longer available on the common market as a new product.)

Are they kidding? LOL What is the actual lifespan of a graphics card in today’s computer market? Before I even bought this card it’s lifespan was over! This isn’t even a nice thought, PNY, having a warranty as empty as this. It would be easier and make much more common sense to just say: if you open this and it doesn’t work when you bought it brand new, regardless of whether we still “stock” this, we’ll replace it. That might actually have some teeth and be worth promoting. No wonder they hide this warranty inside the box; out of sight where it belongs.

- Overture expands their index, supposedly larger than Google
- SoBig F began on an adult site in Arizona When people clicked to download the picture their computers unwittingly became infected and spread the virus which emailed copies of itself from their accounts
- spray-on computing … a reality?
- Scams to watch out for linked by Rebecca
- Finnish Video Parody: Star Wreck with English subtitles
- Are wikis ugly? Here’s what Tom Coates has to say

PC World reports on a study that shows surfers — even experienced ones — still have trouble telling the difference between free and paid-for-listings. In search engines like Google, AOL and Hotbot, I think the words: “sponsored links” and the tiny separate table along the right might be a good hint. In Yahoo they use the enigmatic word “Advertising”. MSN does make it a little more tricky by putting sponsor links either at the very top, graphically along the right or at the bottom beneath the search results. Ask Jeeves and he’ll tell you “Sponsored Web Links” is in a separate table above the web results. What about Overture? They include the sponsors with the results but still put sponsored links in parenthesis. Maybe in this study they found experienced surfers who don’t know what these words mean? I don’t get it.

<img src=”/images/seasponge.jpg” border=”0″ align=”right”> This Scientific American article about Sea Sponge inspiring better Fiber-Optic cables is fascinating. This is promising for scientists to deal with the breakdown in material. On a not so scientific note, am I the only one who looked at the picture and thought that this sea sponge looks disturbingly like a vibrator?