rickshangle.com

I am acquainted with this guy, Jeffrey T. Meyer, who does a podcast out of Muncie, Indiana called Good Beer Show, and if you like good beer and local music, you should check it out. Not to mention that JT is a good guy.

Jeff and his friends basically sit around a large beer house caller the Heorot, drink and discuss good beer (i.e. not Miller Lite aka “Football Beer”) without pretense, and and listen/talk to local bands. The podcast’s gone from standing still to essentially national phenomenon (in the podcasting world) in around 18 months, so that’s all good.

PodCastAwards.com is having it’s 2nd (3rd? whatever) annual award thing, and Good Beer Show is again nominated in the food/drink category (they won last year).

Go out there every day from July 28th through August 11th and vote for the Good Beer Show. If you don’t feel good about that, how about going and getting the g.d. podcasts, listening to a few, and then voting? While you’re out there, vote for some other shows. Don’t listen to podcasts? No problem… pick a few names at random that sound cool.

Anyway - you’d be doing yourself a favor (if you like indie music and beer and people shooting s**t) to listen to Good Beer Show, but barring that, you’d be doing JT a favor with your vote. DO IT!

Good Beer Show on About.com, so you can get a quick feel that jt and co do not support devilry (any more than the standard person)…

Hot news, to be sure.

My initial impressions:

1. I don’t know how I will ever be able to travel with all this additional weight. I may need to jettison something from my laptop bag to compensate, like the two AA batteries I keep in there for whatever reason may arise.
1. Scrollball is as responsive as the original. That is a good thing. I expect that, as with the original, I will need to harshly clean this one with baby wipes every two weeks to keep it functioning. That, or stop picking my nose and then immediately using the mouse/scrollball.
1. Side-buttons are much tighter than the original. I’ve read (and a friend has mentioned) that the side-buttons on their wired MM were so tight as to essentially be unusable[1], but mine were actually so responsive they tended to go off at times I didn’t want them to. Maybe this is what they’ve been referring to, or maybe it’s just newness.[2] Or maybe they’re jerks.
1. The tracking in general was, until a few minutes ago, awful. Not when compared to Mighty Mouse v.Wired, but in general… as in, to the point of near-unusability. I went into photoshop in order to draw a “straight” line I could paste in here (expecting it to turn out as a sawtooth sine wave), but… then everything started working. Stay tuned, I guess.
1. Urgh - the retuuuuuuurrrrrrnnnn of blluuuuuuuuuetoooooooth keeeeeeyyboaaaarrrddd goingggggg ouuuuut toooo lunnnnnnnch occasionallyyyyyyyyyyy. I guess one wireless mighty mouse is, indeed, one wireless device too many in the pan.

[1] Unless willing to crush/destroy the mouse in the process, which is a funny, sort of corner case of “use”, I guess.
[2] Or maybe said friend, who will be nameless here as to avoid shaming, has the hands of a four year old girl-child

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Rawrowrowow! Not-Rocker-Aimee-Mann-chick’s points are legit: i’ll be surprised if Supernova, the band (not the show; rockstar!), lasts long enough to name a singer; ie, for twelve more weeks, or whatever.

But if they do, it will be Dilana[1], Aussie Chip[1] or that bald Ron Halford-sort-of-guy[1]. I feel like Lukas is a dark horse now due to his nascent one-dimensionness. Storm Large was never in the running because Tommy Lee would never accept being in a band with someone with a larger member than his wooooooeeeauuuurrrgggggggghhhhhh! woeah!

Last night’s show was boring and unremarkable, as is probably indicated by the fact I can’t remember anybody’s name beyond Dilana, Lukas and TELL ‘EM STORM LARGE SENT YA!.

[1] Voted for him/her five times last night.

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News flash, overdue:

My friend Neil is the brainchild and driving force (rising force?) behind the Future Rock Hall, a web site that, via combination of user input and statistical secret sauce, aims to predict the likelihood of future Rock and Roll Hall of Fame nominees.

Think Hollywood Stock Exchange, for music, and without (for the moment) virtual money. With commentary. And more than a few dedicated and extremely, uhr, knowledgeable Deep Purple fans.

I think Neil’s idea is extremely cool, since I like things that are representations of lasting and/or eternal truths. Not to mention it is the only place on the web (now, probably forever) where this site appears next to Malcom Gladwell’s on a blogroll. And, again, those deep purple / stevie ray vaughan fans are… committed.

There is a deeper, personal lesson here, I think: Neil’s generally technical (having worked both in publishing and as an architect for over a decade; those are technical professions; his degrees are in architecture), but I never considered him to be in the top tier of techiecomputer / geekness among our friends. Case in point: until last year, I don’t think he ever owned a computer at home during his adult, post-college life. Anyhoo, in March we were talking about the idea for the site, and I think my comment was something pretty deep, like: “yeah. you could totally do it. and people would come to it. for sure. g***mn it, this line for the bellagio buffet is moving slow, and the whiskey from this microflask is going down way too smooth.”

Neil got back home, signed up with a web hoster, sat down and put the site together over a few months. To me, that’s a valuable lesson in triumph of the will. Also, I clearly need to write about Stevie Ray Vaughan.

The site ramped up in April, and this September will be the first year the science can be compared to the voting committee’s nominations.

Tne Future Rock Hall [about] is not associated with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum.

Geeze, finally.

I was a late jumper re: the Mighty Mouse bandwagon, but since locking in I’ve never looked back. The scrollerball is OOTT[1].

And on the topic[3] - re: said Mighty Mouse scrollerball, and the inevitability of it getting dirty and no longer working:

1. Acquire electronics-friendly moist towelette (ex. monitor-cleaning cloth)
1. Use it to firmly and repeatedly wipe across the scrollerball again… and again… and again…
1. … and again…
1. … until function resumes.

You’ll know (good) things are happening when crud starts to come off of the ball and get picked up by the towelette. Trust me[2].

[1] One of those things.
[2] Caveat emptor.
[3] And this is discussed a lot in the comments for the TUAW article