I’ll be in attendance at An Event Apart Chicago with the AG UI team. Not sure if I’ll have any time to post about the conference while there, but I’m not planning on it. I have some friends in town I’d like to visit, and I want to hit up some Chicago staples like Reckless, […]

Wild Oats / Whole Foods merger finally approved. Perhaps the government had a look at At&t recently and rethought their ideas on natural food stores and monopolies. I hope all the Wild Oats don’t become Whole Foods. In addition to liking Wild Oats better all around, I don’t know where I’d get Uncle Eddie’s […]

Marketers now have statistical data to prove what I could’ve told you all along.
Some 88% of gay men and 91% of lesbians claim that a brand’s sponsorship or support of LGBT events favorably influences their buying decisions, according to a study released today from Community Marketing, Inc., San Francisco. The study also found that […]

An article on giving children internet identities at birth. Doesn’t this put us one step closer to Minority Report? It got me to thinking that not very long from now, there will be young adults whose entire lives have been recorded into the history of permanent internet cache. (Like the baby whose Dad Twittered his […]

I like the idea that, because of downloading, people are going to buy songs only if they are good. I think that’s a positive thing. It means lazy bands aren’t going to get away with giving you one hit single and an album full of filler.
This is almost exactly what I’ve been saying all along. […]

Friday night I hung out with some friends. Alana tattooed one of them while I had drinks next door. Much guitar hero was played. Saturday I had lunch with my sister and stepdad at Great Lakes. I ate German food. It was gorgeous out so we got to sit on the patio. I received an […]

In case you were wondering what Le Tigre’s been up to. I wasn’t. Personally, I haven’t given a rat’s ass about this band since This Island came out and I heard Visibility pumping out of the Gap. That’s right, a song about queer visibility in a store with questionable attitudes about the gay community, and […]

I’m late to the game, but Little Brother’s (one of the longest running independent music venues in Ohio) closed. It’s a large slap in the face that absurdly high rent should drive out the very business that revitalized this part of High Street into the booming shopping area it is now. I have many fond […]

Hotel ejects Nobel laureate, mistaking her for a bag lady. “Commentators noted the irony of upmarket resorts discriminating against real Maya while trying to attract tourists with fake Mayan architecture and spectacles.”

Salon piece on two books chronicling meth. All politics and the “war on drugs” aside, I firmly believe this is the most dangerous drug in America and ruins the lives of anyone it touches.

In the past few years I’ve become interested in good food. I wouldn’t go as far as to call myself a foodie, because I acknowledge that as a picky eater I miss out on a lot of things that are delicious to most other people. But I’ve taken to eating in nicer restaurants, and attempting […]

Always a little late to the game, the NY Times has an article about how hip librarians are right now. Off the top of my head I think I know something like 5 librarians? I certainly know more librarians than any other profession which is not my own.

Some college officials are trying to create a design district in Cleveland. While I think this is a fantastic idea, I don’t know how well such a thing would pan out. A lot of great designers have come from Cleveland, (Michael Beirut anyone?) agencies are springing up everywhere, and a lot of interesting design is […]

In the past few months the web community in Cleveland has really begun to flourish. Tonight the Cleveland Web Standards Meetup Group gets together. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to make it yet, and I’m ill today so I still won’t be in attendance. On the agenda tonight is non-profit work as well as the […]

Now That’s What I Call Indie! It was only a matter of time. Incidentally quite a few bands on this comp are on major and not independent labels. Indie is the new alternative, a word thrown around with no real meaning other than a marketing label. It is not a genre of music.
See also […]

From Wikipedia:
The Modern Rogue Taxidermy movement differs from traditional taxidermy in that Rogue Taxidermists share the mandate to “advocate the showmanship of oddities, espouse the belief in natural adaptation and mutation, and encourage the desire to create displays of curiosity”.

Tonight is the series premiere for TLC’s latest trainwreck, LA Ink, a spin off of Miami Ink. The show is certain to make me roll my eyes and groan with irritation, but I’ll probably watch anyway out of morbid curiousity. Other things the show is certain to contain:

Mediocre black and grey work.
Kat Von D spreading […]

Last night I installed Simplify Media on my home computer, and this morning I installed it at work. If you’re not already familiar, it’s a free application for sharing your iTunes library over the internet. So far I really like it.
But it has a couple quirks, it doesn’t actually share your library, it shares […]

You tend to take for granted how active you are until someone pays you to sit on your butt for eight hours a day. In the time since I finished college, my life has become increasingly unhealthy. Lucky for me, my health is something I can change. I’ve tried taking big strides, but it’s always […]

It’s that time of year again, and people keep asking me what should they bring to college when they first move into a dorm. Mostly you want to maximize your personal space in a small room you’ll be sharing with another person. I’ve compiled the basics into one handy list:

Dear Rocky River,
Only a person with no joy in their heart, a true miser, would try to close a dog park.

I read a post today that pretty succinctly sums up my feelings about MySpace. It got me to thinking, why do I even still use this awful, bloated tool? Mostly it’s because they got my friends before a better site did. If Virb had come out within 6 months of MySpace, everyone would be using it instead. Now MySpace has become this substitute for email and IM and everyone’s too invested to leave.

When I first moved into this downstairs duplex we thought it was perfect. Our upstairs neighbors were nice, the house next door to us was empty. Most of the other houses in the neighborhood were occupied by nice families and were well kept. In the past year this has all gone to hell.

I realized it was the beginning of the end when one rainy day I saw the house next door had a uhaul backed up on the lawn to the front door, mud tire tracks be damned. Dudes in wifebeaters were unloading plastic lawn furniture from the truck into the house. I’d later learn since the bank foreclosed upon the previous owners, these people were able to scoop up the property for 1/3 of the cost of the surrounding property. Unfortunately we just resigned a lease since it wasn’t at the time apparent what our future plans exactly were. Now I have all this to deal with:

I want an iPhone. I do not want Cingular / AT&T. I also don’t want to activate my phone online. While this is appealing to me as someone who prefers not dealing with people, it does not appeal to me as a person who has no idea what kind of ridiculous deposit AT&T will want from me.

One of my favorite restaurants in this city unfortunately goes unrecognized by many Clevelanders.

Der Braumeister, at the intersection of West 130th and Lorain, serves traditional German food in a warm, cozy, Bavarian atmosphere. The bar looks like a traditional hunting lodge complete with stag heads, while the dining areas are decorated with huge mountain landscapes. Did I mention they have one of the best imported beer selections around, and have their own deli?

If you didn’t know already, my girlfriend tattoos. Because of this, people have a lot of questions for me, and I’d thought I’d take this opportunity to address them, so this is not directed at any one particular person. Additionally I find a lot of people aren’t really aware of what the tattoo experience entails, how they should be prepared, how they should expect to pay, and how they should interact with the artist. Hopefully this will help you and your artist or future artist have a good relationship.

I am the bane of the RIAA’s existence, yet I’m one of their best customers. Why? I download music. I also buy several times more music than the average consumer. It’s clear that I’m not at fault for tanking album sales, because I buy so much, yet the approach the RIAA takes is to try and scare me out of downloading, not convince me to buy more.

I do not believe music is public domain and that I have a right to it. I do believe musicians should be compensated for their work, and the majority of them aren’t compensated enough. This is why I also believe it’s extremely wrong to profit by exploiting their work, which is why I would never buy or sell a bootlegged copy of an album. Artists have families to feed too.

It’s painfully obvious, however, that the RIAA threatening to sue their best customers, and in actuality suing children and old people and sending them into horrendous debt, is not going to solve this problem, because the problem isn’t downloading. The music industry can do some simple things right now to fix their profits.

I’ve been absent for a few days, as I took some time to visit old friends in Columbus and go see Peter Bjorn and John. I had a great time, and it’s weird to see how much the city has changed since I lived there, mostly for the better but definitely gentrified.

We ate at a few new (to me) places, Surly Girl for late night tex-mex and Northstar (Clintonville) for organic foodie fare. Surly Girl has a great selection of beers on tap, and they highlight which were women brewed and which are organic. Something like 99% of of the food served at Northstar is organic and anything you order looks like it could’ve popped off the pages of Gastronomica. Did I mention they also sell Gastronomica? In addition to uber-modern digs they have an awesome magazine selection available for sale.

At her majesty’s pleasure, an article on Salon today, reveals a lot about the human condition.

Last year author Peter Kurth was imprisoned for essentially being obnoxious on an airplane. It’s strange to think we’re living in a time where simply being a rude customer is enough to get you thrown into jail. The laws in place allowing such a thing are meant to address terrorism, and even though Kurth is clearly not a terrorist, we’re willing to mold and adjust these laws for the sake of teaching him a lesson. Well really who knows why it was decided he should go to jail, because obviously this seems like the most difficult possible way to handle such a solution.