Dock n’ Roll

I’ve a number of things over the last year or so for tonymacx86.com and its related sites (mostly animations), however some of it was never used for various reasons.  One of the items I made was an HTML imitation of the Mac OS X dock – nothing fancy, just a combination of basic Javascript, HTML, and CSS.  You can play with it here: http://www.unibeast.com

I tried to get the bouncing animation to be as close as possible to the bounce on the real dock.  I also limited it to two bounces so the user doesn’t have to sit and watch it bounce forever while waiting for a page to load. :D

Posted in Uncategorized

How High the Awesomeness

I make no bones about it: Les Paul is one of my guitar heros.  The guy was about 50 years ahead of his time with everything he touched.  He inspires me not only as a musician, but as someone who never felt constrained to do just one thing.  It’s like he took the phrase, “you can do anything you put your mind to” and put it into practice.  I’m not surprised he was inducted into the Inventor’s Hall of Fame.

Stylistically, it’s pretty easy to tell the era in which the songs were written, but listen to the guitar playing.  No one was playing like that then.  I admire his ability to play extremely quickly without it sounding as though he just wants to play 900 notes a minute.  Everything feels natural, fluid and harmonious; it’s not a wank-fest.  The guitars don’t even sound like guitars half of the time.

 

 

Posted in music

Today, I woke up feeling like you do

Apparently, I’ve gotten the flu.  I started to feel like garbage yesterday, and after not being able to sleep at all last night I got up and felt like my body was full of lead.  According to the thermometer my temperature is 100.4° F.  Acetaminophen and I are going to be best friends for a while, it seems.

I think the thing that I hate the most is that it makes it hard to get anything done.  I don’t like feeling like I’m wasting time and I like to be busy.  When I realize that I’ve been staring off into space for 30 seconds in a fever-induced stupor, I get agitated.  When you’re a grump like me it’s always bad to be sick.  Fortunately I have a very loving, patient wife who likes to take care of me, so I’m in good hands.

I’ll be back to my usual ornery self before long, no doubt.

Posted in illness

Audio Archive Resurrection

Like most musicians, I have a bountiful booty of songs laying around collecting dust and possibly growing mold. On occasion I will go through these songs and listen to them with fresh ears, to both good and bad effect. Sometimes I shut it off after a few seconds and shudder, and other times I think, “this isn’t too bad”.

This is one of the latter times and not the former, thankfully. There’s nothing about this song I don’t like, and it even has some background vocals in addition to a finger-picked guitar solo. The production values aren’t too bad considering I didn’t have access to much at the time it was written, and don’t detract from the song.

Enjoy!

 


hardees, I loathe your employees

I don’t eat at Hardees that much.  It’s not that the food is bad, but I try to avoid eating out whenever I can for various reasons.   Anyway, Elis happened to see that they had turkey burgers now in conjunction with Men’s Health magazine (I guess only men are interested in turkey burgers), in an apparent stab at being healthier.  After looking at the menu I decided to go with a BBQ Chicken sandwich. While one of the new burgers looked promising, I didn’t want to have to tell them to leave off the ranch dressing for fear that they would leave it on despite my request.

I don’t know what it is with this trend of putting ranch dressing on everything.  It’s for salads, people, and maybe chicken strips.   That said, I didn’t trust them to leave it off so I ordered something else this time that could be made standard.  My thinking was they were less likely to screw up.  Lo’ and behold, however, rather than make my sandwich wrong, they just made another sandwich entirely.

My inner child wanted badly to throw it at the wall and listen to it hit with a satisfying splat sound, but I restrained myself.  This is a crisis, I tell you.  This is what our governing bodies should be focused on.  Who cares about balanced budgets when Hardees can’t even make your damn sandwich right.  I wonder if our lawmakers used to work at Hardees?