My last job was t-shirt production and, as with many production jobs, we would listen to the radio while we worked.  My coworkers liked rock music mostly, so all of our ears were subjected to hour after hour of bands like Royal Bliss, Nickelback, Buck Cherry, etc.  Unsurprisingly, most radio stations feature a handful of bands that they play over and over.  One of the most overplayed is Nickelback.

I must have heard songs like Nickelback’s “Hero” hundreds of times a piece.  These songs were all way overplayed, and I never really listened to the lyrics.  I have been at my new job for a while now and for some reason, maybe because the job I am at now requires me to use my brain, or maybe because I sit alone in a cubicle for several hours a day, I really started to contemplate the words to some of the songs that I heard oh so many times at my last job.

The one offending phrase that I can’t get out of my mind comes from Nickelback

“I hold on to the wings of the eagles, watch as they all fly away”

Did they fly away without their wings?  Are my arms stretching to amazing lengths as they go?  Or perchance, I am still with the eagles but I left my eyes on the ground.  What the devil are they talking about?  Maybe I need to be disillusioned, but I like to think that the majority of the world’s English-speaking population aren’t total idiots.  That’s why I don’t understand how a band like Nickelback can popularize such nonsensical sentiments.

This is my plea to you as a citizen of the world, STOP THE MADNESS.  Demand that bands actually think before they perform.

-Andy Morrise

Last night as I was taking a well-deserved break from work, I turned on the T.V. to find myself watching someone dressed up as Shakira dancing around a stage. No, this wasn’t Scrubs latest attempt at humor, it was a new episode of the hit reality T.V. show “America’s Got Talent.” As the judges put this person through to the next round I realized, “Hey, I’ve got much more talent than that. Come on!” Unfortunately, my talent involves building websites. I suppose I could take a laptop onto the stage, hook it up the a projector, and show them, but I just don’t think that would have a whole lot of appeal to the crowd. This is when I came up with the idea of:

America’s Got Talent: The Web Developer Edition

More after the jump… (more…)

A couple of months ago my family and I moved into a new house. Too poor to afford real internet at the time, I fell into the evil trap of “Trial Internet.” It seemed like a quick and easy solution to my internet withdrawals. It was slow and didn’t allow for much, but I could check my email. Well, a month came and went and there it was, a $9.95 charge on my monthly statement. Not wanting to pay that fee, I called up the well-natured people at Netscape support. I told them I no longer wanted the service and that I wanted to cancel.

“I’m sorry sir, but if you had read the agreement that you checked when you installed the software, you would have known that to cancel you’ll be charged a cancellation fee.” I couldn’t believe this! A cancellation fee? Who really reads the terms? Sure, I didn’t read them, but come on!

What was the cancellation fee? Exactly $9.95 per month for the remainder of the year of subscription. That’s not a cancellation fee! That’s me paying for the rest of the year! Why would I want to cancel and pay or not cancel and pay? It makes no sense, right?

This brings me to the topic at hand. Thinking a few days later, I decided that if I found a genie and he gave me one wish, it would be that I was the blog king of the world. Everyone would come to my blog, read it, and do exactly what it said. I would write about Netscape and how stupid they are. I won’t use them again. I shouldn’t have used them in the first place. I knew it was a dumb idea. But, we all do stupid things.

Recently Engadget had a story talking about the possibility of the iPhone being able to play Nintendo games. If they created the Wii then why not? The iPhone has the multi-touch surface that would allow those ingenious guys over at Nintendo to build some sweet stuff. I’m not thinking we’d see traditional games however. Can you imagine play Super Mario 3 with a virtual controller?
Although as a young teenager it was always my secret desire to have Super Mario 3 running on my trusty TI-89 calculator, I’m sure whatever Nintendo will come up with for the iPhone, if they do make games for it, will be mighty sweet!

Unknown to even the most hardcore “Apple Geeks” out there, Apple CEO Steve Jobs has a pet peeve that is beyond anything you can possibly imagine; He HATES long finger nails. Many geeks have been seen around the WWDC sporting long, dirty, and uneven finger nails. Steve himself has often cringed at the site of these Apple worshipers. What’s the solution? The iPhone. As everyone knows, the iPhone is entirely touched-based. You know why? Because to use it, you have to use your fingers thereby forcing you to clip those hideous nails. Oh sure, you can use your iPhone without clipping your nails, but you’ll end up with a mini recreation of the grand canyon right down the middle as your scrolling to find your Aunt Bessie’s phone number. Is Aunt Bessie really worth it? I think not.

Yesterday I experienced quite the experience. One of the pages on my site hit the front page of digg.com. Can I tell you how awesome this was. Within minutes the web server I hosted sent me this message:

Hello,

We had to suspend the account with morrise.com due to high CPU and RAM
usage.
Currently the web site is using about 21.41% of RAM and 16% of CPU
Our limits are 10% of each resource.
Unfortunately we can’t afford to host so large account on a shared
server it
affects other accounts.
I strongly recommend you to consider upgrade to a dedicated or VPS
server or
limit your downloads.

More information for a VPS or dedicated servers you can find on the
following pages:
http://midphase.com/html_files/hosting_plan_vps.php
http://midphase.com/html_files/hosting_plan_dedicated.php

Thank you
–
Alex Shevchuk
System administrator
midPhase Services, Inc. — #1 Recommended Web Host!

Phone: 312-386-1640
E-mail: support@midphase.com

I will freely admit that the hosting that I have for my website is less than “Enterprise” level. It’s about 7 bucks a month. The website came down after being on digg.com’s homepage for only about an hour. It’s amazing the kind of views that thing gets. After several hours of having my page pounded without people being able to get on, I emailed my hosting provider asking them to enable my account again. Here was the response:

Hello Benjamin,

I’ve unsuspended your account to allow you to get it fixed. Please
note, we’ll be forced to terminate it if the problem remains in the future
Thank you.
Eugene

I was actually quite curious as to the amount of visits that I received to this site because it sounded like a ton. This morning when I logged on to my Google Analytics account I got a great surprise: almost 9000 unique visitors for yesterday. That’s pretty awesome considering the site was only “up” for a few hours. Here’s what the page looked like:

A friend of mine who is in the video production business has informed me that we can use one of his cameras to shoot our sitcom. His business is Copperrain Productions based out of Utah. Look forward to seeing our first episode in the coming weeks.