Blog of Josh Hall

Political opinions are like butt holes; Everyone has one and they all stink.  To extend the analogy, they should not be revealed in public places.  To extend it even further, possibly into metaphor, If you are so emotional about your political opinion and it’s all you really think about, perhaps your head is a little too close to previously mentioned nether-region.

I like how pandora and last.fm recommend music based on the genre and bands you’re listening too, but I’m envisioning a site based on literal connections that bands have.  I think the interface could very pretty and fun.  It could be like TheyRule.net.  Think a colored red circle with "Foo Fighters" written in the middle.  clicking on it would pop out all these little circles.  Maybe one would be a blue circle with "Nirvana" written on it.  You could click on the line that connected the two and it would tell you that Dave Grohl played drums in Nirvana and is the front man for Foo Fighters.  Maybe another Circle could be Gary Numan, and the connection is that Foo Fighters covered his "Down in the Park."  Getting content would be as easy as partnering with last.fm, http://www.coversproject.com/, and maybe freedb.org.  I’d like to see connections such as band members that have the same birthdays or went to the same highschool and bands that have the same lyrics or song titles.

So, I’m going to leave the phpnuke system and convert from ravennuke to wordpress.   I’ve had this blog running on phpnuke for a long time, and I loved having the flexibility of editing the code and writing my own modules and having a very full featured site, but I think it’s time to shave it down to what is useful and also maintainable.  I’ve written a php script to convert all the stories from ravennuke to a fresh install of wordpress and I’ll be messing with templates and features in the next month or so.  The demo site is http://joshuadhall.com/wordpress and I’ll eventually switch it over to the main URL once I’m done playing and find something I’m satisfied with.  RavenNuke is still a great product, don’t misunderstand me, but it’s not the best system for blogging.  I’ve made my concerns known to the community for a long time, and have even contributed code that it lacked, but there were projects that kept getting delayed that are already available in wordpress, so that’s tipped me over to the switch.

Here’s the link to the script – http://sixf00t4.com/downloads/?did=65

Drop-D is bifurcated by amateur and awesomeness.  It’s a hard but necessary division.

Congratulations to Kristy on winning to 2 tickets to the Carnegie Museum!

Thanks to used cars in pittsburgh as well!

Are there more people alive right now then people that have ever died?  What’s your first thought?  I want to say that there are more dead people, but I’m not sure how to figure this out, or the best possible way to make an educated guess.

According to census.gov, there are 6,812,935,148 people alive today.  So if we assume an average of 2 people (parents) for every person alive today, then we’d only have to go through 1 generation of dead people to tip the scale to the dead people.  If the most common family dynamic is 2 kids per 2 family, then we’re almost at a stand still.  Thoughts?

Here’s a visual aid: