Great segment on Democracy Now! yesterday:

Lawsuits, Machine Malfunctions and Missing Absentee Ballots Among Voting Rights Issues Facing Jittery Election. Great interview with Harvey Wasserman, and Brad Friedman ( The Brad Blog).

...or don't. I don't care.

Here's the point. I am a VERY SERIOUS business man. I think about things like ROI and productivity. There is NO TIME for thinking about things like sex or what band is hip.

No, wait, I DO thing about sex. A lot. But that is not the point. The point IS, is that I am a VERY SERIOUS BUSINESS MAN, and the we need to forge ahead and focus on the task at hand which is... wait, what was I thinking about? Oh yeah... sex... NO! Not that. Anyhoo...

With everything that is happening with the economy, one naturally wonders about their own situation and how (if) they will be personally affected. We seem to be ok for the moment (famous last words?). Company I work for just got a big round of funding last quarter and sells a low-cost phone system that can be easily marketed as a "recession-buster".

Buy on Amazon: 

Betula Licensed by Birkenstock 2 Strap Sandal

Random thoughts of the day:

Buy on Amazon: 

Rocking the Cradle: Egypt 1978 (2CD/1 DVD Set)

From Dead.net:

Looks like I found what I'm gettin' everyone for Christmas!

Buy on Amazon: 

GPTBLPWR Pedal Tote Effect Pedal Case (with Power Supply)

Been trying to get over my fear of too many pedals and have been thinking about getting a pedal board. They go from super cheap to way expensive. Or, I could make my own. Dunno, haven't made up my mind yet.

Buy on Amazon: 

Prism of Eternal Now

When I was Web manager at Warner Bros. Records, I got to the point where the only music I could tolerate was New Age. Seriously. I was inundated with so much bad overproduced crap and stress from angry managers and bosses, that the only thing I could do when I got home was to put on the new age cable music channel, turn off the lights and try to clear my head of the reality and day-to-day stress of a declining and failing industry.

Buy on Amazon: 

Emmett Kelly Jr. Figurine "Hurdy Gurdy Man"

My iPhone pre 2.x software was great. Barely any crashes, very snappy, really a dream device. But what happened with Apple with the new releases?

iPhone 2.0.x was horrible. Lot's of crashes, slow, extreme lags in typing sometimes with text-messaging, etc.

iPhone 2.1.x is a slight improvement, lags in typing have been fixed, but everything else seems slower, start of built in apps especially. And Safari crashes a lot. Apple really dropped the ball on this version. I hope they can fix the lagginess and crashiness in upcoming versions. The Apple shine is starting to lose it's luster

Yours truly playing kid-friendly rawk music this weekend:

“Join us this Saturday, October 4th at 6:15 PM as we rock out at the Eagle Rock Music Festival. We'll be there with our full band as the featured performers on the Children's Stage!”

http://www.ellenandmatt.net

http://www.myspace.com/eaglerockmusicfestival

The festival is really quite a blast. Bands every block of all different styles. Very family friendly and hip.

UPDATE: Doh! text -> Encode Entities will also work, though the below script will give you a bit more control over what you want to encode to.

Lately, Coda has been my main text editor of choice. I switched from TextMate, which I still love, but Coda just seems to be more natural for me.

Today has turned into bizarro day. This is weird, but very cool: Ben Kingsley lip-syncing to Minor Threat.

Buy on Amazon: 

Workbook

Some interesting things going on in the music world:

• Metallica's new album, "Death Magnetic" is the latest casualty of the "Loudness Wars". Interestingly, the tracks from the album released for Guitar Hero III sound better than the CD versions.

Thoughts and prayers out to those who lost loved ones on this day in 2001.

Another year, and more reflection.

The events of this day back in 2001 shook us to our core even as we sat watching everything on TV way out west in Portland, OR.

Even though we didn't know anyone lost, it felt personal if not surreal and one of those days were you realize that what just happened is going to shape so many things to follow: travel, politics, war, etc.

Wow. Sometimes one graphic says it all.

Grabbed this from the post "Graphic of the Day: Shill, Baby, Shill" on treehugger.com: