The "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog" Blog Post

You know, because I can.

And Dr. Horrible is AWESOME!

A broadcasting sensation?

When I first told my wife that I was going to do a podcast, her first reaction was, "You mean like iCarly?"  The new tween sensation on Nick has been playing off and on around my house lately.  No I said, not like iCarly, like Leo (Laporte) on TWiT.  She gave me a look that basically said, "Be careful honey, your Geek is showing,"

So now we have 19 episodes under our belt.  So what do we do now?  We decided to do Episode 20 LIVE on Stickam.  If you don't know, Stickam is basically a social network, like MySpace, but with a webcam.  You can log on and not only can you follow you friends, you can do with you webcam on for all the world to see.

Mostly it's pretty boring.  The more interesting folks actually perform to a degree.  Most just sit there and type, as I said pretty boring.

Leo has taken it a step further.  He broadcasts all of his TWiT network shows live on Stickam as they are being recorded.  He's basically brought TechTV back on his own.  Well with the help of some friends who join him on his various programs.

Will Too Old to Grow Up! ever be as popular as TWiT?  Probably not, but for the listeners we do have, it will be a fun way to interact.  They can watch us record, interact with us in the chat room.  Maybe we'll even open up Skype and do a call in show.

Let's get through this first recording, okay.  Watch Live at 12:30pm EST Sunday July 27th at http://live.totgu.com.

Some fun with Beaker...

It's no secret that I'm a Beaker fan.  You know, Beaker from the Muppets.  In fact, one year my friend Matt and I spontaneously broke out into a scene from The Muppet Movie with him as Dr. Bunson Honeydew and me as Beaker.

So when I found this on YouTube, I had to share.  Well timed, and a lot of fun to watch.  Consider it your Beaker fix for the day.

“Weird Al” Yankovic

I have not been to a concert in a LONG time. That changed Wednesday night when my friend Art and I went to see one of my favorites growing up, and favorite again more recently, Weird Al Yankovic.

I remember first hearing Al on copied tapes from my friends. Yoda was probably the first song I had ever heard. I'd but the odd album or two here or there. I smiled from ear to ear when I heard Al doing the theme song for one of my favorite movies growing up; Johnny Dangerously with This is the Life. You may also remember he had a song in the Transformers animated movie, Dare to be Stuipid.

After that I was a fan. I eventually "grew out" of his music, thinking it was just for kids. I barely listened to him during the 90s, but then in 1999 I saw a video for his latest parody, based on a movie coming out in May and one of the greatest, most recognizable songs of all time. The Saga Begins told the entire story of Star Wars Episode I to the song American Pie.

That album, Running with Scissors, would be the first Weird Al album I purchased in over 10 years. I now have all the songs he's recorded, and if you ever look at my Zune Card at the bottom of my blog you might sometimes see him in my "Recently Played" list.

The show itself was a great time. Over 2 sold hours of entertainment, described by Al sometimes as, "a rock and comedy multimedia extravaganza" with an audience that "ranges from toddlers to geriatrics" (from Wikipedia). The show was definitely that. He and the band has several costume changes, which I knew about going in and had wondered how the show would maintain it's momentum during these changes. Not to worry, a performer like Al would take care of that by showing clips from "Al TV" on screens above the stage that were used during the performances as well. Projected images included clips from his videos of the song being performed, including Donny Osmond dancing during White and Nerdy.

I'll be talking a lot more about Al with my co-host Art on our podcast, Too Old to Grow Up! this week. Listen in for the latest show on the MP3 player at the top of the blog.

Here's a picture of me and Weird Al Yankovic.

 

CSS is my new friend

It's been a long, long time since I've done any Web development. That's a generous term, Web Development. I wrote a few personal web pages with some PHP and MySQL programming. Sounds impressive, right? I'm an amateur all the way, I just convinced people who knew less than I did that I knew what I was doing.

Now I'm co-host of a podcast, Too Old to Grow Up! We've been doing it for about 5 months now. It's been a good time, people are listening, and they seem to like us. Our basic web presence is pretty bland, though. It's a simple Google Apps hosted site, Libsyn does most of the heavy lifting as far as hosting the show goes. Add to that new artwork from our friend Harold Jennett, the time is right for a change.

As cold as my PHP and HTML skills are, I never, ever touched CSS, Cascading Style Sheets. A few years ago CSS became the standard way to format your web pages. Much more flexible than HTML by itself. If I could learn CSS then our new home page could be the destination site I've dreamed it could be. Plus, I want to start cataloging our shows while we only have a few, so if we ever do outgrow Libsyn I'll already have the indexed database ready to go and portable.

So I got my hands on some tutorials (thanks Spano) and I'm on my way. I installed a text editor that color codes syntax, making it easier to read the code.

…Chapter One…Introduction to CSS…

It’s been too long…

Well so much for my great experiment.

Too long ago I created this blog, intending to write something, anything, each day. Maybe it wouldn't be profound, or even interesting. It would at least keep me writing, and act as a journal of sorts.

Then real life got involved. Don't you hate that. You get a new job, kids are getting busier, life gets away from you. I just didn't have the time to sit, log in, write something, even just to say hi.

Hopefully I'll be doing a little more with this. I just installed Office 2007 at work, and Word 07 now has a very nice "Publish Blog" feature. I'm trying it out right now. If you see this post it means my test was successful. Now, whenever I have a spare moment I can quickly type something up and put it out there.

See you around,

Ken