David Chan’s Blog

Are you a lazy blogger?  Here’s a tool to generate a freebie blog post for you, which doubles as an excuse to explain your inactivity!

Here’s what I generated by randomly selecting the dropdowns:

Holy crap! I just woke up to the fact I have not updated this since 1999… You would not believe how much it’s costing me. My bad.

I am tied up with discovering time doesn’t stand still, choosing my retirement village, just generally being a parent to the secret service, my day pisses me off from 8am to till I fall into bed at midnight. I am smitten. But who cares.

I absolutely, positively promise that when the weather turns bad, I will blog more often. If you have kids. No Joke!

The Lazy Blogger’s Post Generator [aussiebloggers.com.au]

Regardless of what others think of Panic at the Disco, I enjoy their music, and I thought I’d go see them live as they promote their Pretty. Odd. album.

I’ve seen pictures and videos of some of their performances which encorporate the circus theme, but that was more A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out era.  The current PATD is more 60’s flower power hippy, which I assume is why they have teamed up with Honda to promote the Civic hybrid.

They played some hits from their first cd, which are more danceable than some of their current songs, and which were obvious crowd pleasers.  They also performed numerous numbers from their latest album, though the crowd wasn’t as involved during those songs, from what I saw.

Here are three videos from the concert, before my Flip’s battery died.

Opened with We’re so Starving and Nine in the Afternoon

But it’s Better if You Do (probably my favorite PATD song)

The Only Difference Between Martyrdom and Suicide is Press Coverage

You may have heard of Google I/O, but you may not have known it to be a secret weapon in Google’s grand scheme.  So powerful, Google advertises it proudly on tshirts as “Google KO”.  KO as in Knock Out.

[Image via TechCrunch]

Excerpt: “Attendees of the Google I/O conference today were given t-shirts that, presumably, were supposed to spell GOOGLEIO on the front in binary. Just one problem, the actual message printed spells GOOGLEKO”

Google Gets Fancy With Google I/O TShirts.  Too Fancy. [TechCrunch]

I went to the M.I.A. concert last night at the PNE, and it was an interesting experience. I’ve been to numerous rock shows, and I’m more used to that kind of crowd and atmosphere, so I had no idea of what to expect from my first hip-hop concert.

When the (unknown to me) opening acts finished, M.I.A.’s show started, and we were shown this interesting video message:

It’s impossible to make out the subtitles from that video, and if you listen carefully there’s a guy in the back reciting the words.

Lots of beats, dancing, glow-in-the-dark glasses, disputes, and mosh-pit attempts later, the show was over. M.I.A. ends the concert with an encore, featuring Paper Planes:

Over all I can’t complain. My decision to see this show was a last minute thing, and I got my ticket for cheap off Craigslist. Anyone reading this also went to the concert? Did you see the fight over the flag?

I watched the Foo Fighters live when they were in Vancouver promoting their 2005 album In Your Honor, and I thought that was an amazing show. Three years and many live shows attended later, I wasn’t sure if they were still going to wow me like they did before.

I was totally wrong.

Eighty dollars (exorbitant Ticketmaster taxes included) for my floor ticket to Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace was a steal. Not only did attendees get the four person Foo Fighters lineup, but as Grohl proudly exclaimed, we were getting “100% more Foo Fighters”. For a few songs they had four extra members, an extra guitarist, a pianist, a guy who played exotic percussion instruments (various chimes and of course, the triangle), and a girl on strings (chello/violin). “We’re into that experimental s—,” Grohl explains.

Two stages, two hours, three song encore, one triangle solo. A hell of a hard rockin’ concert. There’s going to be a huge influx of people getting Foo Fighters tattoos this week.

There’s a first for everything, and today I launched my first Facebook application. It’s an interesting idea, and the premise is simple: Strendr takes the keywords from your status message and displays them in a cloud format (think tag clouds for blogs). The execution was on a “good-enough” level; the entire thing took about 60 hrs of work, including all the research. I wasn’t surprised by the wealth of documentation and information available for the developers - it explains why there are so many applications out there.

Next steps for my application include refactoring and cleanup. Working on the eve of Jesus’ birthday doesn’t promote good coding standards. I will also look into user experience and documentation. My UI has been made to be as friendly and uncluttered as possible, but I believe that the content could be worded better and with more consistency. Of course, there’s also a social-viral component of the app that must be nurtured. There is a “Trends” page that tracks the usage of keywords amongst all users of Strendr, and it will need to be presented in a way so that users will want to send app invites.

If you have time, check out my Facebook app, Strendr!

(comic from xkcd)

Reminds me of how I learned (the hard way) about SQL injection attacks. Did you ever have a security blunder (of course you did)? How bad was it?

The 37signals’ recent Sunspots post had an excerpt from the Wikipedia article on the metabolism of hummingbirds.

“[Hummingbirds] also typically consume more than their own weight in food each day, and to do so they must visit hundreds of flowers daily. At any given moment, they are only hours away from starving.”

This reminded me of something I once heard which also dealt with urgency in everyday life.

Gazelles and lions live together in the savannas. Everyday, the lion must feed and the gazelle must escape from predators. A lion must run faster than the slowest gazelle if it wishes to feed. A gazelle must run faster than the fastest lion to guarantee survival.

Are you a lion or a gazelle?

I used part of my weekend to play around with WordPress themes, and honestly they were easier to edit, change and implement than I thought. While I was changing things around I decided to give this blog a new name and feel. I felt that the old “Brain Barn” wasn’t at all accurate with describing the kind of content I tend to write, and from the knowledge of the kind of keyword searches and incoming links to this blog, I have decided to rename it to “Everyday Extra”.

Brain Barn gets the boot; enter Everyday Extra. It was better than just “David Chan Blog”, and besides, I like alliterations.

Edit: the layout still has a minor alignment issue in IE6, working on fixing it as I find time. In the meantime use Firefox