I am honored and privileged to be able to present the exclusive world premier of the new music video “Dance All Night” (WMV 8MB) from the Damwell Betters. Formed in 2005, the Damwell Betters feature original songs and talented musicians that put on a great live show.
This video is presented courtesy of the wonderful people at Epix 1 Productions. Thanks Rhaine! And thanks to my friend Jenn for forwarding this link on to me.
My gamer buddies and I have been looking for a new online game to play for a few weeks now. EVE Online is one of the games that we’ve considered. EVE Online is a massively multiplayer space simulation that combines aspects of role playing, space combat, economics and empire building into a huge, highly complex game. EVE’s universe features 5,000 distinct star systems, each of which contains a number of planets, moons, asteroid fields, space stations, and/or featured locations populated by numerous player and NPC (non-player character) ships, both good and bad. All of this fits into a single environment where everyone is playing in the same universe.
Although this game was initially released in 2003 (which makes it relatively ancient in terms of online games), it continues to innovate. EVETV features live online coverage of in-game events mixed in with commentary and analysis from PVP experts. Live coverage will be, uh, televised July 14th-16th and July 21st-23rd between 10:00 AM and 4:00 PM local time (central daylight).
I’ve been watching for more than an hour now (yes, I’m a complete geek and I’m OK with that 
), and the level of professionalism (for lack of a better word) in the commentary and studio segments is impressive. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that it’s a gorgeous game, graphically speaking. It seems like a great way for the developers to drum up interest in an existing game.
UPDATE…
We took the plunge and signed up for the 14-day free trial… FIVE HOURS AGO!!! It’s now approximately 1:15 AM and there’s still quite a bit left to do in the game tutorial! However, I’m happy to report that so far IT’S FREAKIN’ AWESOME! 
The portrait above is of “Boogey Mann”, one of the newest pilots in the Caldari fleet. Don’t wanna go to bed. Wish we would’ve done this a couple nights ago… 
MySpace was recently declared the #1 single most visiting Website, according to top Internet tracker Hitwise. It has recently gotten a reputation (deservedly so) of being primarily a virtual hang-out for the teeny-boppers and their friends. But another thing that MySpace does well is allow musicians and bands to build pages that feature their latest music.
Anyway, I was browsing the Barenaked Ladies MySpace page earlier and a link or two later happened upon a band (actually I think it’s one guy) called Secondhand Serenade. If you like acoustic rock with slightly whiney, but good, harmonizing, then you’ll like this music. Reminds me a little of Dashboard Confessional.
Highly recommended. Let me know what you think…
I know that I’ve been remiss in my postings lately, but I had to put this one out there for my buddy Jeff, who’s a long-suffering fan of the Chicago Cubs…
According to this story in the Boston Globe, an independent league baseball team in Illinois is putting the lineup card in the hands of its fans.
Unfortunately for my buddy, that team is not the Cubs. The Schaumberg Flyers announced Tuesday that the public now will be determining the team’s batting order and pitching rotation. Decisions are set via Internet voting. The fans’ first move: to override manager Andy McCauley in his choice of one position player. Eventually, fans will be able to decide who should be traded, too, the story said.
Anything’s possible when you have an interesting idea and the cohones to follow through with it…
Kyle MacDonald is a 26-year-old Montreal man who started out with a single red paperclip and the stated intention to kick off a series of trades which would result in a new house. It’s taken a year, but it looks like he’s done it!
Read all about it in his blog entitled, appropriately enough, One Red Paperclip.
Was watching Bravo tonight and saw a small ad for an interesting site called BrilliantButCancelled.com. Followed the inevitable Blog link, and found an entry entitled “91 NEW Reality Shows You Need To Know About”.
91 new reality shows?!? Wow! How much is too much? (My guess at this point, especially after reading some of the descriptions, is somewhere around 89. )
I caught the sneak preview of Superman Returns last night. Very good movie, but you have to have a Bladder of SteelTM to make it through the whole 2 1/2+ hours.
My first impression is that Batman Begins was a better movie, but this one really conveys the sense of having both godlike power and human sensibilities. I need to see it a few more times and let it soak in. I thought that the flying special effects were AMAZING! I remember one of the taglines of the original movie was “You’ll believe a man can fly” and that’s never been more true.
Contrary to what some might expect, this is not a retelling or remake of the classic Christpher Reeve movies (the first couple anyway). This should be looked at as a sequel to those movies, and as an homage to Christopher Reeve himself. I highly recommend it if you are any kind of fan of truth, justice, and the American way.
Seeing this movie brought back to mind an extremely interesting forum posting entitled “Superman V: The Whole Sordid Saga” that made the rounds via e-mail a year or two ago. I’ll let it speak for itself…
I found this online: the stange and evil tale of the production of Superman V. It spans decades, $50,000,000 is spent before they even have even settled on a writer or director. It’s so horrible. It’s out of date as it stops in the middle of 2004, but it’s so horrible, you have to read it.
Disclaimer: I have no idea how much of the information in the forum posting is true. As the saying goes, “Disinformation wants to be free.” And as far as I’m concerned, the Internet has become its natural habitat.
Since the original posting is so long, I’ve decided to be kind and summarize the highlights (and lowlights) in the extended body of this entry…
Continue reading “Superman Returns!”
According to the Associated Press, author J.K. Rowling said two characters will die in the last installment of her Harry Potter series, and she hinted Harry himself might not survive either.
“I have never been tempted to kill him off before the final because I’ve always planned seven books, and I want to finish on seven books,” Rowling said Monday on TV here.
“I can completely understand, however, the mentality of an author who thinks, ‘Well, I’m gonna kill them off because that means there can be no non-author-written sequels. So it will end with me, and after I’m dead and gone they won’t be able to bring back the character’.”
Rowling declined to commit herself about Harry, saying she doesn’t want to receive hate mail.
“The last book is not finished. But I’m well into it now. I wrote the final chapter in something like 1990, so I’ve known exactly how the series is going to end,” she said.
Some characters might die, but the blockbuster movie franchise lives on. Warner Bros. Pictures has announced that the fifth installment will be released in U.S. theaters, including Imax screens, on July 13, 2007.
In “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,” directed by David Yates, the teenage Harry continues to battle the evil Lord Voldemort (again played by Ralph Fiennes) and his followers. Daniel Radcliffe is returning as the title character, and Emma Watson and Rupert Grint reprise their roles as Hermione and Ron. Oscar-nominated actress Imelda Staunton plays the malicious, frumpy Professor Dolores Umbridge, who tortures Harry.
In her Monday interview on the “Richard and Judy” show, Rowling said people are sometimes shocked to hear that she wrote the end of book seven before she had a publisher for the first book in the series.
“The final chapter is hidden away, although it’s now changed very slightly. One character got a reprieve. But I have to say two die that I didn’t intend to die,” she said. “A price has to be paid. We are dealing with pure evil here. They don’t target extras do they? They go for the main characters. Well, I do.”
Rowling is the richest woman in Britain – wealthier than even the queen – with a fortune estimated by Forbes magazine last year at more than $1 billion.
Whatever she writes next, Rowling is sure of one thing: It won’t be as successful as Harry Potter.
“I don’t think I’m ever going to have anything like Harry again. You just get one like Harry.”
The new site design (“version 1.50”) has been up for about a day now. There’s still a few minor tweaks that I’d like to make, specifically some shadowing for the main “page” of blog entries and something different with the entry dates. But overall, I’m very happy with the way that it turned out. Hope you like it too.
A little history about the name “Deck Monster” and the change in logo at the top of the page… I was an undergrad at the University of Illinois just a few years before the World Wide Web exploded onto the computer screens and consciousness of well, the world. (In fact, Mosiac, the first popular Web browser was developed at NCSA on the U of I campus.) Back in those days, we were using 9600 bps modems to connect to bulletin board systems (BBS’s) to download files and exchange bulletin board messages (hence the name). Just like many Web sites today, the BBS systems often required a login to do anything interesting. Don’t remember exactly why, but I started using “Deck Monster” for my user name.
This was also prior to graphical user interfaces, so some of us did our best making use of the various line characters included with the extended DOS character set. As best I can recreate, the banner above closely approximates the “sig” (signature line) I used to use in the BBS days…
OK, history lesson over. Hope you enjoy the new look of the site…
p.s. For the sake of posterity, a screenshot of the previous site design has been saved in the extended body of this message…
Continue reading “New Design”
OK, I realize that this is probably most humorous to Web development geeks like myself, but this is my damn blog so y’all just suffer through it…
p.s. If all goes as planned, I should have the new site design up by tonight…
