I did a cover of Duran Duran’s “Rio” that I was very happy with, recruiting local guys Clint Reid on vocals and Jason Stewart on bass.  These guys seriously raised my game on this contribution, as you can clearly hear.

You can listen to the podcast episode to hear the songs and color commentary from the hosts, or download the full album with cover art and liner notes.

Oh, and I also did the cover art for this one.

This is my sophomore effort.  Previously, I contributed an instrumental cover of Radiohead’s “Fake Plastic Trees” to the release “The British Are Coming”.  This was a large enough album that the podcast was in three parts.  You can listen here here and here.

Wow… I just…  There are so few times I am literally speechless…

This guy has arranged (almost) the entire Iron Maiden catalog for classical guitar.  With chipmunk vocals.

Right now I think the coolest practical joke I could conceive of would be to get a hold of someone’s iPod and replace all the music on it with this.  THIS.

Why?  Why do you force us to go through the Powershell interface to administrator Exchange whitelists?  What, did you think we don’t use them that often?  That we’ve all become such geniuses that we don’t really need GUIs anymore?  Is there any reasonable excuse for not including this in the Management Console?

Many thanks to this guy for writing a nice little GUI to take care of this.

Please add nested tasks to Outlook.  We have been begging for this since at least Office 2K.   I personally have ranted about it in MS forums at the release of every new Outlook version. It’s really not that difficult.  Add a Parent field to the task data structure.  Adjust the drag/drop action to assign it.  It should literally take a half hour and will make many, many of us outrageously happy.  Maybe you could pull the guy who’s out there compiling wallpaper packs for a half day or so.  Or ask Google if they have some extra interns to loan.

Please?

I know you’re a little afraid that nested tasks will cannibalize sales of Project. It won’t.  Project is too expensive a license for any of us to justify for this one function and anyone who’s not bound by job description to project management avoids it like the plague.  Plus, Project syncs with nothing and would be completely neutered in this capacity.  I promise you won’t lose a dime.

I promise.

And while you’re add it, please add tasks to the Exchange protocol for OTA sync.  I don’t know how difficult this would be for you, but we’d really like to keep them in sync between devices.   That would be great.  And if Jobs will answer your phone in-between Scrooge McDuck-esque scenes of swimming in the millions he’s made, you could propose it as the new insanely great feature for iOS 4.4.  I know it’s not nearly as great as new and improved 3D fart apps or tabloid-sized iPads, but business nerds’ money has gotta be good too, right?

If you will do this for me, I’ll buy another Windows laptop instead of a MacBook.   I’m getting ready to replace mine and I will totally go Windows again.  You don’t have to tell Jobs about this.  It can be our little secret.  There’s another OEM sale right there for you.  You can use that to pay for the nested tasks integration.  Chicken dinner!

Anyway, thanks for listening to your customer base for the last ten years.  We all appreciate it.

I can haz nested tasks? Please?

PS.   Can someone go ahead and buy Del.icio.us Delicious?  And please take Flickr away from Yahoo before they run it into the ground, too.

Never knew about this before today…

Dropbox is already my “I can’t do without” tool – has been for a while now.  But I just found their promo page at https://www.dropbox.com/free.   You can get an additional 768 MB of storage by just connecting your account with Facebook, Twitter and making a couple of random comments.

I’m really annoyed right now.  Let me tell you why.

I’m currently dealing with an outage from the telecom vendor for our workplace. Guilty parties shall remain nameless.  And not a self-righteous “How DARE you interrupt my services” kind of entitlement issue, but a problem that’s spanned 36 hours in which 100 monkeys at the typewriter could have generated the solution by now.   But that’s something you come to expect when a vendor has overshot its resources as widely as this one has over the last few years.  I’m disappointed, but this is not why I’m annoyed.

The whole issue is exacerbated by having to deal with a call center that can’t go even slightly off script.  Besides having to ask that every other sentence be repeated and the slight insult of my intelligence by proposing that their names are Tom and Tina instead of some multi-syllabic guttural utterance that I can’t reproduce, it’s absolutely frustrating to peel off a 30 second technical problem description that’s immediately met by a long pause and “ok, can you provide the hours of operation?”  But I can’t blame people in the third world for trying to get ahead and I’ve come to expect the vendor to value cost savings over good customer service.  This is not why I’m annoyed.

Even more frustrating is the fact that I have an account manager who takes a couple of weeks to return a call and has never even given me the dignity of an e-mail response outside of working hours, let alone having any concept of addressing customer concerns in a supportive manner.  He gets paid for sales, not service – so I can’t completely blame him for looking out for his own interests.  I would.  This is not why I’m annoyed.

After hours of no response, I have to go over his head to his supervisor, then to his supervisor. It’s an annoying trek up the chain of command that really should be taken care of automatically in this day and age.  If I were designing a customer service structure, it would analyze my employee’s email/voicemail for keywords, whether or not the contact was during business hours, the frequency of contact, correlating trouble tickets for the customer’s account and my employee’s response and automatically kick anything that’s not dealt with in a timely fashion up the chain of command until it was addressed.  But seeing that companies with a semi-monopoly don’t have to worry about people defecting to other companies, I can see why they’d prefer to put their earnings into bonuses instead of fixing a broken system.  That’s not why I’m annoyed.

I’m annoyed at myself for feeling bad for starting a process that’s very likely to get my account manager in trouble.  I hate the idea of this guy coming into the office tomorrow morning and getting ripped a new one.  I hate looking forward to that cowed, forced followup call tomorrow when he’ll offer me a dozen excuses for why he couldn’t do his job over the weekend and having to justify myself for bringing the sh*tstorm down his neck and signing off on this “it’ll never happen again” speech.  I hate that this company puts me in this position over and over again. I despise them through and through because this process just keeps repeating itself.

But I’m annoyed tonight because I like being a nice guy and they won’t let me.

I have never seen a statue dedicated to a critic.

Food for thought.

…

I’ve never been a fragrance connoisseur.  I think I used the same green bottle Polo stuff until I was in my 30s.  And I can’t tell you what I have in there now.  It’s in a square bottle, that’s about all I know.

But I know what I’ll be wearing next.  Eau Lando.

How can this not be awesome.  The bottle is wearing a cape.

Annoyances.

This week I caught up with the rest of the world and updated my main laptop to Windows 7.  As with most upgrades, there were a few things I forgot to move over that have come back to bite me a bit.  One of the more annoying ones has to do with Windows’ thumbnailing process.

My XP build had an add-on freeware to show a thumbnail of images in the right click menu.  That’s not really necessary in 7 since you have the option to adjust your thumbnail sizes in the shell view.  However, MS in its infinite wisdom decided not to include Adobe’s PSD format in that set of codecs.  That makes it particularly painful in that you have to crack open Photoshop to see which file is which.

But following a lead here made things happy again. You can borrow a DLL from MS’s Expression Blend, register it manually and with a reboot, PSDs are again part of the family.

Heavily grateful for an easy solution that didn’t involve yet another third party.  Heavily annoyed because they didn’t include support for perhaps THE most ubiquitous graphic format out there for professionals.