Something big or good is gonna happen. You know how i know why? Because I saw the Kings of Leon on SNL this week, and I have fallen in love with the song "use somebody" from their new album. My basis for this is this: About 6 years ago i saw the strokes on SNL and they were making their debut playing a song from "Is This It"? It was a pivotal point in my musical enlightenment. I am not sure why but it was. Not long after this, we went to new york, and I heard the same song being played at this guys party on his Manahattan Deck. I got into this crazy conversation about Julian Casablancas with this guy who was a shoe designer, and how they made their name big in the NYC bars/clubs before they hit the Bigtime.
It was not long after this good stuff started to happen.
Anyway, I saw Kings Of Leon this week on SNL, and I have not been a fan of them before, I have a friend who has been a fan for along time and trying to make me a convert, but i have resisted. Until now. There is something about the vocals in this song that has captured my love. It's not just the lead vocal, its this oooohh, woooh, ooohh, that the drummer, guitar player, and bass player are doing around the lead vocal. This morning i Heard it again on KEXP and it cemented the fact that I love this song. Its been in my head all day.
As i was walking up the the street tonight to go get some draino for the tub, it came to me. Its time. Time for some good stuff. Something exciting, something exhilarating, something wickedly awesome. I know becuase its not every week that i hear a band on SNL and fall in love with a song. It happened once 6 -ish years ago, and now this week.
This is good, really good. ¶ 9:51 PM 2 Comments
Last year I decided to take a tongue-in-cheek, sarcastic approach, and it made light of the entire process. It worked. People laughed, and it was fun to do. About 3 months ago i started to obsess over what we were going to do this year. We had to take it in a completely different direction, we could not go back to the same old presentation so we made a Rap Video ( Of Course ). We took our inspiration from a youtube video called "promo pimp" and wrote our own hip hop song. We enlisted the Help of local quizzo master Johnny Goodtimes ( we co-wrote the rhyme ) and he laid down the vocals at milkboy studios in Ardmore.
I have not had this much fun in tv in a long time. We have been working on this for about the last 6 weeks. Today was the day of the presentation. The folks in the room, i am not quite sure knew what they were looking at. They did not know whether to laugh, or clap, or just sit their...
which was awesome.
So you can have some context, i will post last years video in the near future...it is a huge file, i need to convert it.
Enjoy. ¶ 3:41 PM 1 Comments
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How much spam you get may depend on the first letter in your e-mail address, a study reveals.
The analysis, of more than 500 million junk messages, revealed those letters that get more junk than average.
It found that e-mail addresses starting with an "A", "M" or "S" got more than 40% spam. By contrast those beginning with a "Q" or "Z" got about 20%.
The difference could be down to the way spammers generate e-mail addresses they want to target, said the study.
Letter attack
The analysis was carried out by University of Cambridge computer scientist Dr Richard Clayton, in a bid to understand the widely noted discrepancies in the amounts of junk mail or spam that different people receive.
Dr Clayton took as his dataset the 550 million e-mail messages sent to customers of net service Demon between 1 February and 27 March 2008.
Looking at the mix of messages landing in inboxes, Dr Clayton found a wide discrepancy in the amounts of junk that different addresses received which seemed to hinge on their initial letters.
The most popular letters for spammers were "A", "M", "S", "R" and "P". about 40% of all the messages arriving in the e-mail inboxes of accounts with addresses that had one of those characters as their first letter were junk. Much less popular were "Q", "Z" and "Y". For these cases, spam was running at about 20% or less.
The reason for the difference could be partly explained, said Dr Clayton, by the way that spammers generate e-mail addresses to which they then send junk messages.
Often, he said, they carry out so-called "dictionary" attacks. In these, spammers take the part of a live e-mail address in front of the "@" symbol that they know is live, and add that to other net domain names to generate a new one.
For instance, spammers who know that there is a real person attached to john@example.com may try john@another.com to see if that reaches a live account too.
As a result the relative abundance of names beginning with "M" compared to "Q" could explain some of the disparities, as spammers would be more likely to re-use popular names and send them more junk.
Dr Clayton said the research had thrown up some anomalies that needed further research. For instance, he said, addresses starting with the letter "U" appear to get more than 50% spam despite there being relatively few of them. ¶ 11:39 PM 1 Comments
