Now stop harassing me and stop sending Dave to harass me.
On today's Daily Source Code, Adam Curry played a promo from a cool podcast I'd never heard of. Coverville is a podcast dedicated to playing covers of all types of music. On today's show, he had a cover of Oasis' Wonderwall by Paul Anka. The big difference is that this is a big band/swing rendition of it. I did a bit more research and it turns out Paul Anka just released an album entitled, "Rock Swings", which is a collection of covers of popular rock songs, notably Smells Like Teen Spirit, Eye of the Tiger, and Tears In Heaven. I highly suggest that everyone take a look at it. You can hear Wonderwall in its entirety in Coverville 111 or check out the clips on the iTunes Music Store.
Dreamhost is having a promotion where you can get their Crazy Domain Insane Package (the same one I have) for $9 a year. This is the same package I have, with the small exception that I paid $120 for it. All it takes is five easy steps:
- Go to Dreamhost.
- Sign up for the Crazy Domain Insane Package.
- Enter "777" in the special promotions box.
- ???
- Profit!!
For this price, I am very tempted to sign up for another account (which is probably against their ToS). Maybe Veronica would like one, though.
Also, remember to put me down as a referral, I get some cash if you do.
What a weekend it was. Friday night I saw Charlie & The Chocolate Factory, and though I wasn't expecting much, it exceeded all my expectations. The jokes were good enough that the mostly-adult theatre was laughing most of the time, but I can still see them appealing to kids. The visuals were outstanding, both the sets and the CG props and Oompa Loompas. Johnny Depp did a great job as Michael Jackson Willy Wonka. I'm glad they added some back story to explain why he became such an eccentric recluse who invites kids to live with him in his fantasy land (see the connection now?).
Saturday and Sunday were the DMB shows in South Florida and they were nothing short of amazing. The first night was packed with energy and there were no slow songs really except Where Are You Going and the opening trio of One Sweet World/Crash/Dreamgirl. I got to hear two songs, You Might Die Trying and American Baby, from the new album that I hadn't heard at SPAC, as well as Granny, which I've never heard, and the return of You Never Know from it's two year hiatus. This performance of Smooth Rider was the best I've heard to date, and Louisiana Bayou has a cool new 3-chord progression in the jam that's very groovy that Noam pointed out to me after the show that I hadn't picked up on but noticed it the second night.
Night two was more laid back. They didn't play any of the three slow songs from Stand Up the first night, so I knew the had to play them the second night. Everyday is a good opener because it gets the crowd interacting with the band, but to go into Steady As We Go right after wasn't so great. After hearing Stand Up and Stolen Away last night, I have heard every Stand Up song the band has played so far. Stand Up really gets people jumping around, dancing and singing. At the very end the audience and the band were trading "Stand Up"'s back and forth. I hope that's audible on the tapes. Stolen Away is a sweet song that Dave played sitting down. Solid, but nothing spectacular out of it. It is my favorite slow song on the album, however, and it was great to finally hear it.
Other highlights of the night include hearing my first Pantala Naga Pampa > Rapunzel and #34. Before it was played for the first time in 12 years on the 9th, not even in my wildest dreams would I have expected to hear #34. Once it came back, however, I knew we were going to get it on one of the two nights. Though the songs were really upbeat on the first night, none of them were really taxing on Dave's voice. After Bartender and Hello Again on the second night, I knew it was due. It's hard to compare its performance to other versions since it's only been played 4 times since 1993, but both Leroi and Boyd were spot on the entire song.
I do have to say that it was fucking hot both nights. I think night two felt a lot worse than night one because it rained right before the show and the humidity shot up to about 175%. I was soaking wet after the show. We had great seats and the people around us were really friendly. Definitely the best time I've had all summer.
It's summer vacation and with it comes lots of fun in the sun sitting by the computer. So if you're tired of checking away messages, Facebook profiles, and blogs, distract yourself by playing some Good Experience Games. From the site:
These are online games that, in my opinion, offer a "good experience" - good game design with an overall attention to quality. Unless otherwise noted, they're all free, online, and available right now.
Since Michael Faridi has set up a program to IM every 5 minutes (okay, more like every few hours) asking me if I've put up the pics from the trip to the DMB concert in Saratoga, I'm debating whether I should put them up because it's about time I did so or if I should hold off a bit longer just to piss him off :)
Maybe a little bit of both; I'll try to have them up sometime before the weekend is over.
My goal for July is to have an average of 1 post/day. I don't mean to start postwhoring, but this seems like a convenient benchmark to use. I'd like to get my thoughts and experiences out there into the world, not only to share with everyone else, but also to serve as a public collection of personality that I can look back upon in a few years and see how much (or how little) I've changed.
So far I'm at 9 posts in 12 days (including this one), so it looks like I've got some catching up to do.
…
I first learned about regular languages (at a high level) in a formal linguistics class I took first semester freshman year. A big part of the class was Finite State Automata, their design and the interpretation of strings they accepted.
Regular expressions are somewhat similar in the sense that one can describe a language (a set of strings) by a pattern (which can be described by an FSA). From the Wikipedia on regular expressions:
A regular expression (abbreviated as regexp, regex, or regxp, with plural forms regexps, regexes, or regexen) is a string that describes or matches a set of strings, according to certain syntax rules.
I've previously used regexps in the great Mac OSX utility, A Better Finder Rename to rename files to fit a certain pattern. For example, I used ABFR to batch rename TV episodes from "s01e12" or "s1e12" to "1×12 - ". Regexps save me a great deal of time by being able to define a pattern and then replacing it with something I want all at once. I've also used it in a small Python script I wrote for my own edification that pulls stock info from Yahoo! Finance and also in a DMB Setlist Dashboard Widget. They are also used in mod_rewrite rules to rewrite ugly URLs into something a bit nicer.
Recently, I've been using them to parse some text I've pulled from PDFs and HTML tables and rewriting it in a format that Excel can understand easily, usually CSV (comma seperated values) or just adding tabs. I spent a little too much time yesterday morning fooling around with regexps, including trying to find a good text editor that'll do regexp find and replace. Having found one, I saved myself from a lot of time in what could have been the creation of a 50 x 6 Excel spreadsheet cell-by-cell by copying and pasting from a PDF. Today, I put together a large spreadsheet in less than half an hour by pulling text from the FDIC, stripping away unnecessary text (row titles and row totals) and then putting it into Excel. Granted, I could have probably automated the entire process (I still cut and paste into EditPad and then into Excel), but it would have taken me far too long to find and learn a scripting language that would have been able to pull dynamic online data and put into Excel (I think Python can do this but I didn't have the time to invest in learning the Office API for it).
The regular expression syntax isn't that difficult to learn. Most of the time I spent the other morning was finding something to do the find and replace in Windows. I eventually found EditPad Pro and it's been working wonders (SubEthaEdit is my text editor of choice on the Mac). For anyone doing any kind of text manipulation or data entry, I highly recommend learning how to use this very powerful tool.
Technorati tags: regular expressions, regex, subethaedit, excel, Work.
The lyrics have been fixed. Now to get to work on that interpretation…
I'm working on a post about one of the Stand Up songs and went to check the lyrics here, and it the formatting is all messed up on those pages. I never realized this before, but it seems the Stand Up lyrics pages I set up a few months ago didn't respect the line breaks I put in, so I'm gonna have to manually add HTML line breaks to each page. Shouldn't take very long and it gives me something to do for 15 minutes tomorrow.
This post brought to you by insomnia and the great ideas I get while laying in bed.
