After watching the Jonas Brothers perform during halftime at the Thanksgiving Day Cowboys game yesterday, I wanted to look around and see if I could find any commentary about their performance. Besides the usual plain vanilla news blurbs, I found a guy who had a similar opinion to my own:
I have to agree with the poster when he says that they didn't sound good during the halftime performance. I don't really want to make general statements about their fans besides the one fact that mostly everyone would agree on, and that is that the majority of their fans are young girls. I will also predict that most of them will look back at when they were fans of the Jonas Brothers and laugh at themselves, much as women of my age look back at the boy bands they liked in their teens and laugh.
I am sure it is my age that makes me laugh at the antics of these boy bands and wonder at the lack of talent. Only time will tell. Remember, William Penn once said, "Wrong is wrong, even if everyone is for it and right is right, even if everyone is against it." 5 million screaming female teenagers doesn't make the Jonas brothers talented, it just makes them popular. Nobody is disputing whether they are "good guys" there are plenty of good guys out there that can't sing a lick. The good news is, the Jonas brothers will most likely get better, so there is a slim chance that one of them will become the next Sting, or the next Billy Joel of this teenybopper generation. As far as being good guys, I am kind of glad that it is not too out of style for a musical performer to have a "decent" image, since I have a daughter of my own...
All that being said, I did find myself cringing while I listened to Demi Lovato (who?!!!) sing my National Anthem before the game, and once again during the Jonas brothers' HT performance. It is probably a good thing that they don't usually show the halftime stuff on TV, there's only so much dog catching a frisbee though a hoop that you want to see anyway...
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Tags: dallas cowboys, football, jonas brothers
Adjust The Time On Your Camera
Posted on November 11, 2008 11:43 AM
I was loading up the pictures from the Halloween Party from a couple weeks ago, and I realized that with the time change for Daylight Savings Time, I need to change the time on my cameras.
I don't know if they have cameras yet that will change their time for DST but if your camera doesn't then you should go grab it and make sure it has the right time.
When your camera takes a picture, it records the date and time that the picture was taken in the image file. Most of the time, having the time be off by one hour is not a big deal. However, the pictures on my site are usually sorted by the timestamp embedded (EXIF) in the image file. In the past I have put pictures together from different cameras in one set and if the cameras are not synchronized, I'll have pictures that were taken an hour apart mixing together.
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Tags: Photography, technology
Perl Tricks
Posted on November 8, 2008 10:26 AM
I use Perl a lot when I am programming something. I have a bad habit of figuring out how to do something and then forgetting how I did it later, which sends me to Google trying to figure out the "trick" again.
When I think of it, I'll put my Perl tricks here, and hopefully I won't have to spend so much time trying to figure it out the next time!
Remove Windows Returns From Text Files
Windows uses two characters for the end of line in text files, but Unix only uses one of those characters. When you open a Windows saved file in Unix or some editors even on Windows you may see a funny character at the end of each line that looks like ^M You can use perl to remove these extra characters using a couple command switches for the perl interpreter:
Code:
perl -p -i -e 's/\r//g' filename.txt
-e tells perl that the entire program will be on the command line ('s/\r//g' in this case, a regular expression that replaces all '\r' with '')
-i tells perl to edit the files in place, this means that the command will CHANGE the file (use with caution!) If you do not include this one, perl will send the output to STDOUT so you can send it to a new file. i.e. >newfile.txt
-p tells perl that it should run the program for each filename argument
So to get rid of the ^M characters in all .asp files in a directory you would run:
(Updated 11/17/2008)
Here's another one that I like to use:
If I have database Data Definition Language (DDL) that creates tables and I want to grab the table names that are created, I use this one:
Code:
perl -n -e 'print "$1\n" if (m/create table\s+(\w+\.\w+)/i);' tables.ddl
I am sure that the code can be cleaned up quite a bit, but I am too lazy to tackle combining the multiple search and replaces to make one regular expression. I will leave that as an exercise for the reader. :) Add/View Comments
Tags: perl
Dealing With a Troublesome Cat, Photoshop Style
Posted on November 3, 2008 12:26 PM
We have 3 cats, and one of them likes to mark his territory throughout our house. In this hilarious Photoshop tutorial, this guy shows one way to deal with it.
