Year: 2002

Weird Al New Album Progress

Ashley Bischoff28 Comments

Weird Al is apparently working on his 11th album, and he linked to some studio-session photos from his site. As with most pictures from a band’s studio-time, they were probably taken by one of the band members (my hunch is that it was Bermuda, in this case).

Band-pictures are cool and all, but I’m struck by their low quality. I mean, the lighting is all wrong on the left-side picture on this page. And, the picture on the left side here is too dark. And, that doesn’t even go into the framing issues.

As the Weird Al Band is successful, I would think they could at least afford a better camera for themselves :-/.

More on Red Hat and KDE

Ashley BischoffLeave a comment

There seems to be some confusion surrounding Red Hat and whether they (intentionally or unintentionally) mangled their KDE.

“Mike’s Little Website” has A Users’ Perspective of Red Hat 8.0’s KDE. Now, I’m not pro Red Hat, per se, but I think they have had some rough treatment regarding what may have been due to recompiling some apps with GCC 3. Sure, that may break a few things, but it’s not sabotage.

It’s been alleged that Red Hat deliberately broke Konqueror plugins. […] Konqueror plugins work. On my current 8 BETA system, my favorite Flash site (www.xdude.com) works, my favorite Quicktime site (www.quicktime.com/trailers) works, and so do most other sites (macromedia.com still has issues though). The issue was that older versions of these closed source plugins were compiled with ‘ancient’ (according to Bero) compilers, and this couldn’t be dynamically loaded from the GCC 3 compiled nspluginviewer. Macromedia seem to have fixed the problem with their current Flash 6 open beta […]

Trading Spaces: Behind the Scenes

Ashley BischoffLeave a comment

Linked from this Ask Slashdot article with questions for Cathy Rogers (from Junkyard Wars) was this Behind the Scenes for Trading Space. On Trading Spaces, if you haven’t heard of it, two homeowners trade houses for two days to redecorate each others’s rooms:

Once inside, I met the sewing coordinator. The very existence of the sewing coordinator was for a long time a closely-guarded secret. His name was in the credits, but they never referred to him on camera. The need for a sewing coordinator is obvious; any given episode features a huge amount of sewing, some of it very complex, and the homeowners and designers simply wouldn't have time to do it all themselves. The sewing coordinator, therefore, stays behind the scenes and makes sure things get done on schedule. Later in the day, after he had finished all his tasks and packed up his equipment, I caught up with him and asked why he was never shown on camera. He explained that it was a logistical decision. Each episode, he pointed out, already features eight “characters,” and adding a ninth would be tricky. Makes sense. […]

Alex.numJobs++

Ashley Bischoff6 Comments

I am once again employed! I interviewed with Hybrid this morning, and I start on Thursday.

Hybrid is an e-consulting company, much like AIVIA or Xpedior. There, I’ll be doing HTML coding, working alongside web designers and back-end developers (just as I like it). They’re on the first floor of Bryan Tower in downtown Dallas, which is certainly an improvement over the commute that I had to Steamatic ;).

I wouldn’t mind going for a little celebratory trip to Braum’s sometime this week, if anyone would like to join me. I’m quite busy this weekend with some freelance work, but perhaps Wednesday or Thursday evening would work (I’ll write more about this closer to the time).

Rye Pizza?

Ashley Bischoff5 Comments

I was talking with Bryan earlier today, and he mentioned that he was planning on making homemade pizza this evening. He hadn't made one before, but was plan was to use pre-made bread dough for the crust (as recommended to him by some pizza-making friends).

That caused my mind to wander for a moment — oh, the possibilties of being able to customize the dough. Wheat-pizza was an obvious one, but what about something like using rye-bread dough to create a rye pizza? Hmm, a rye pizza topped with Italian sausage and Canadian bacon… ?

The others in the group seemed to conclude that rye-pizza was a gross idea (including even Bryan “chocolate chips with hot dogs” himself), but I wouldn’t mind trying one of those. Of course, I’m not even certain whether bread-dough is suitable for homemade pizza-making in the first place ;).