So, what is the point?  Well, to raise money.  The money raised goes to The Prostate Cancer Foundation and the Lance Armstrong Foundation.  I’m doing my part by growing an awesome ’stache, won’t you help out by donating now? You can also go to my donation page or my Daily Booth page every day to see my mustache progress. The first picture of baby-faced shep is up now, complete with nicks and cuts.

Finding the motivation to do it really isn’t that difficult, it’s finding the time.  Right now, I’m using the simple workout room in my apartment complex and that closes at 9:00pm.  I’m not quite ready to sign up for a gym membership, especially since I hate other people watching me.  If I ever fell using the equipment I’d never return.  I’m not the most coordinated person.

Another issue I face when exercising is how quickly I get bored. I used to listen to podcasts of NPR’s Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, but that has gotten bored. I really wish I could use my Slingbox app on my iPhone to stream TV, but stupid AT&T won’t allow streaming over 3G. I decided to load my iPhone up with a few TV shows to pass the time.  Last night I was working out and watched an hour-long show and the time flew by.  Of course since it was my first workout in a while I took it easy, but I’m glad I’m finally getting back into the swing of things.

1. Game status updates/requests

I really really don’t want to help you out in your Mafia war.  Nor do I want to help you find your sheep or feed your chickens.  This type of crap clutters my feed and makes FB look and feel like *shudder* MySpace.

2. Profile pictures showing your pregnant belly

Do you really think people want to see that as your profile picture?  They don’t. Don’t show us. You’re having a baby, fantastic! Congrats! You’re not all that special though.  Hundreds of thousands of people have babies every singe day.  If it’s something a 14 year old girl can do after making a bad decision, it’s not a miracle and we don’t really want to see it.

3. Quizzes

Let me tell you a secret,  mo one cares what comic book villain, member of The Facts of Life, character in literature, etc you would be.  Yeah, it’s cool, you want to take a quiz to find that stuff out.  I’m guilty of the same thing, here’s the difference: I do not publish that if I were a Saved by the Bell character I’d be Zack Morris to my profile.

4. Posting your Daily Horoscope

By posting your horoscope on a daily basis you are telling me that you are a complete moron. Who believes in this crap anymore? This is 2009, not 1309. We do not use Astrology to predict anything about how your life will turn out. Your schooling has failed you. Now, go call Ms. Cleo and leave that shit off my feed.

5. Updating your status every 5 minutes. If I really wanted to know your status every 5 minutes I’d subscribe to your feed on the site that was designed for such mundane information, Twitter.

6. Flair, badges, superpokes, and gifts

Why are you sending me this crap? Do I look like I want a button that says “You’re a Peach!”?  Do you think that I’m going to think that you SuperPoking me is cute? Do you like getting poked in real life? Of course not, so what makes you think everyone wants to get poked on Facebook?

I know what you might be thinking, if I hate seeing all this stuff so much, why not use Facebook Lite? That really isn’t the point. Facebook should have never gone this far with applications and the amount of crap people can post and I think they will eventually pay for it, just like how MySpace is now paying for its clutter and crap with lack of users. Facebook has tried so hard to stay relevant (and don’t get me wrong, they still are) with applications, site redesigns, idea stealing, that it just keeps makingthe site more and more cluttered.  People will get tired and move on to the next big thing eventually and Facebook will have no one to blame but themselves.

The New Rules of Blogging
This post is quite old and not many people will understand it. It was basically an inside joke with some members of the WordPress and Habari communities. The post was inspired by someone that we all found completely annoying and we hated her blogging style. This post was created as a joke.

The Game
I really love this post, but not as much as I love baseball. I was excited about baseball season starting and was bored when I was working in the computer labs in college, so I wrote this. It was even featured on StLToday when the season began a couple seasons later.

The Best Hip Hop Albums
Everyone knows that I love music, especially hip hop. In 2006 I put together some of my favorite albums of all time. 3 years later and I’d still say this list is the same. Maybe that’s because I’m still waiting for the sure-to-be-a-classic Chico and the Man album.

Three Generations of Cardinals Fans
This isn’t so much a post as an image. One of my favorites. My nephew, my dad, and me.

The World Can be Saved by the Bell
Last, but certainly not least, is my favorite post of all time. Anyone who really knows me knows I am a freak when it comes to Saved by the Bell. I think it’s the best show in the world (only slightly kidding here) and have seen every episode too many times to count. Heck, if I could get away with having the theme song as my ringtone without looking like a total geek I would.

So there you have it, my favorite 5 posts from the past 5 years. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading them as much as I have writing them.

Because this month is my Blogiversary, I will (hopefully) be posting a bit more, including one that features some of my favorite posts of the past 5 years. I find it hard to categorize my blog other than personal. I write about technology, music, TV, and rant about pretty much everything. This of course makes my blog limited in exposure. When you visit and read a post you really are getting a piece of me. Most of my readers are people I know in real life or from the internet. I’d like to thank all my readers for continuing to read and look forward to what the future brings.

My dad and I have very similar email addresses because we have the same name. My family on his side continuously sends me emails (emails that are sent to the entire family) thinking I’m him. Then I get all the replies when they reply to all. It’s been explained that my email address is not my dad’s, but once your email address is in their address books there’s no turning back. You’re on the chain for good and because of family happenings regarding my grandparents over the past few weeks I’ve been seeing an influx of emails. Sometimes I’ll get 20 a day not meant for me.

I’ve decided I’ve had enough and set up a gmail filter. Any message that comes from the addresses of my aunts and uncles go directly to a new label and are marked as read. It’s not that risky because they think I’m my dad anyway so they wouldn’t be using that address to contact me. They also know that my dad never checks his email so they including my mom’s address on all emails. Then once a day I will delete all the mails from the label. I had a bit of trouble trying to figure out how to enter in multiple email addresses in the from field in a gmail filter but I think I found a solution. If you place a | between the email addresses, gmail will see them as separate addresses and apply the rule accordingly. Let’s hope it works. I’m waiting for the next email to arrive.

The funniest moment was last night. One of my favorite so-bad-it’s-good movies, Congo, was on. I turned it on right at a scene where Amy the gorilla had a close up. She instantly became curious and watched the TV. She then started getting excited, like she wanted to play with the gorilla. She moved closer and closer to the TV and then even stood on her hind legs and put her face inches from the screen. The scene changed and she sat back down, but not before watching another 5 minutes of the movie. My dog is weird.

[See post to listen to audio]

I really need to start the Costanza Experiment again and start doing the opposite of what I normally do. If I would have stuck with this, I would not be stressing over the missed opportunity today. The real kick in the shin is that I have, in one way or another, been waiting for this opportunity all week. Finally it presented itself in the most perfect way possible and I didn’t do anything. Will the opportunity be lost forever or will it present itself again? Maybe I shouldn’t wait for another opportunity to present itself and instead abide by the old cliche and “make my own opportunity.” That would be the opposite of what I usually do. Enough stressing.

I know we haven’t been on the best of terms lately. I’ve hated you since you make us wait so long for new episodes of Lost. I get mad at you for not heavily promoting the really funny Better Off Ted. You canceled really original shows like Eli Stone and Pushing Daisies. I want to give you another chance though. Here is how you can get back on my good side: do not cancel Defying Gravity.

I know that there has not been any word that the show will be canceled, but I don’t know anyone who has actually heard of the show, I don’t see any promotion for it, and it has to be expensive to make. That being said, I really think you need to give this show a chance. You almost set it up to fail by starting it in August when not many people are watching TV and you never really promote it, which is a shame. This is a really good show. Sure, the writers play it fast and loose with the science aspect of it, but the stories are good. I really want to follow the “adventures that await the crew as they quickly discover their lives and destinies to be intertwined and carefully directed, not only by Mission Control officials on Earth, but also by an unseen force which is much closer and far more powerful.” Why aren’t you promoting this show more? It is something that hasn’t been done before. It has the sort of mystery that Lost has that can draw people in if they would just know about it. If you cancel it, what are you going to replace it with? Another cop show? Or how about a doctor show? We don’t have enough of those.

Here is what I propose: finish showing this season this fall. Commit to a second season, but in the spring/summer re-air season 1 with a lot of promotion. You need to hook people in from the beginning or they won’t start watching. There’s people like my dad, who I know would love the show but would not be able to watch the episodes available on Hulu, who need some way to catch up.

So in conclusion, we can finally make up if you do me this one favor. Keep Defying Gravity around. Promote it a little bit. If you give viewers a chance, they will not let you down. We can become BFFs again with just a little effort. Don’t turn into my ex-BFF NBC. They never give quality programming (shows like Kings) a chance, and have made me not want to give any new shows on their network a shot for fear that I will like it only to see it canceled after a few episodes.

Sincerely,
Shep

You lost, get over it. Move on. If you don’t like the policies, draft new ones instead of just saying them bad, us good. They want to kill old people and he was born in Kenya and Heil Hitler. The new motto of the Republican Party should be, “If at first you don’t succeed, lie, lie again.”

A note to Democrats, take note of Barney Frank. This is how you should respond to these loonies.

Fast forward to this morning. I wanted to listen to my newly purchased album on the way to work. Normally I listen to hip hop or 90’s alt-rock on my way to work in the morning, and usually at a fairly high volume. Since I decided to go with Bat for Lashes, a relatively chill band, the volume was not up too high. This is what saved my life. I was driving down highway 94, like I do every morning, and I come to the intersection at Harvester and 94. Shortly before I reach the intersection I notice the car in the left lane was not moving. Normally I would have thought the driver was having car troubles and kept on through the intersection. Normally I would have been listening to the music loud enough that I would not have heard the St. Charles County Sheriff’s sirens going off as he comes speeding through the intersection. But I was listening to Bat for Lashes. So I did hear the sirens, I did stop in time, and I did avoid running directly into a Sheriff’s car at 55 mph. My life was saved because of what was playing in my car this morning.

While I didn’t collide head-on with another car, I did almost get hit from behind. The person behind me was not as observant as I was and almost plowed right into the back of me at 55 mph. Luckily he was able to slow and swerve and avoid hitting me. It was scary seeing him miss me by inches and wind up along side of me. Two catastrophes were avoided this morning and Bat for Lashes saved my life. Nothing like a near-death experience to wake you up in the morning.

First off, the msnbot practices in referral spam. If you look at your stats and see random one word searches coming from Bing, you’ll know what I’m talking about. This isn’t anything new, it has been happening for a while. If you are a company that uses search terms to help determine your ad campaigns, this could really pollute your field, making it harder to determine the best keywords. Website owners see a lot of false visitor data, thinking they rank for generic keywords when they don’t.

Another reason you shouldn’t use Bing is because of the fact that Microsoft changed (or tried to change) a user’s default search engines to Bing in order to help them gain more market share.Cnet’s Dennis O’Reilly caught ‘Windows Search Helper’ trying to change his default Firefox search from Google to Bing. Not cool Microsoft. You should never change a user’s settings without approval from the user. What you’re doing is essentially what malware does.

Lastly, yet probably most importantly, is that they game their search results. How do you know you are finding the best information if Microsoft chooses what should be shown first according to their own interests? You can’t, and you can see a very real example of Microsoft gaming the results right now. Go to Bing and search Why is Windows so expensive? When you search that phrase the top results are all Why are Macs so Expesnive. Who knows what other results they are gaming to benefit themselves. This is just one example, there could be many more. There have also been other reports of Microsoft censoring Bing results. I do not trust Microsoft and I do not trust Bing search results.

Viral marketing has made it’s way to independent hip hop label QN5. They are employing the technique for their release Chico and the Man, a duo composed of emcee Tonedeff and producer Kno (of CunninLynguists fame). What’s interesting is that an independent label would go the viral route first, and not a major label with unlimited supply of resources. This goes to show you the power of the internet and social media sites.

So what do we know about this album? There’s not much. Everything that has been found has been by the dedicated fan base working hard at finding any sort of possible information, making guesses, and taking leaps. Only a few clues have been released, but let’s take a look at the clues that were given, how they were given, and the resulting news. All the clues have appeared on the Chico and the Man Twitter account.

Before we look at the clues given, I should point out that the Twitter account background is a clue in itself. If you look at the background file name you see that it’s called fulgenciobatista01011959. Fulgencio Batista was a Cuban dictator, and 0101959 = January 1st, 1959. On that date, Batista was forced out of the country by Castro’s revolution. Could the History of Cuba be one of the topics. There is also the line catm: work for it. twitter is the key. commented out in the code.

Clue number 1: waiting to breathe
No one is sure what this means quite yet. It may be the title of the album or a title of the track off the album.

Clue number 2: love keeps the stars in the firmament and imposes rhythm on the ocean tides – maya angelou
The rest of the poem is as follows:

“Love builds up the broken wall
and straightens the crooked path.
Love keeps the stars in the firmament
and imposes rhythm on the ocean tides,
each of us is created of it
and I suspect
each of us was created for it!”

It seems that the ocean is a major theme for this album, but what does it all mean?

Clue number 3:_fanned by a _pale mist the heart _flutters
There is a lot of speculation on what this one means, what the underscore means, etc. Far too much for me to reprint here, but read what fans have to say.

Clue number 4:18/5/1/3/8/ 23/8/9/20/5 13/1/18/9/16/15/19/1
This turns out to be code for Reach White Mariposa. What does this mean? Well, fans have found White Mariposa. Again, there’s a lot of clues here. Could the tagline “Su Amigo Para más de 45 Años.” mean anything for the album? What about the image titles. The logo is punto4. Point 4. Also, if you call the number, it is for this fake business described on the page, but the message is in Spanish. So if you want to translate an audio message that would help the fans out a great deal.

Your’s truly found the next bit of information. Commented out in the code is cada punto confirma el último. Translated that means “each point confirms the last.” That takes us to…

Clue number 5: cada punto confirma el último
It seems we are on the right track.

There is a lot of information that I have not posted, from meaning of butterflies to speculation on the initials HCK. It is all very fascinating. If you want to play along and love riddles, someone has made a thread to catch everyone up with what we know so far.

I’m excited about this use of marketing. This is definitely innovative. QN5, like one of their slogans says, is always 5 steps ahead of the game.

My favorite member of the group has always been Chali 2na. I love his deep voice and his spectacular flow. I’ve always wished he would put out a solo album and have been waiting for one to drop ever since J5 broke up. In the meantime, I purchased his less-than-stellar mixtape, listened to all the Ozomotli songs that 2na was part of. Finally, and without my knowing, Chali 2na came out with a solo album. The album is called Fish Outta Water and, while not the best album in the world, it is still a solid album on par with all the Jurassic 5 albums. It is definitely a breath of fresh air in a summer of stale music.

Check out a couple of my favorite tracks from his album and make sure you purchase Fish Outta Water today. (It is $5 at the Amazon MP3 store right now)

Chali 2na ft Anthony Hamilton – Don’t Stop
[See post to listen to audio]

Chali 2na – Comin’ Thru
[See post to listen to audio]