This is a flash-based audio-rating application exploring synesthaesia – the mixing of the senses. You can upload MP3s, listen to mp3s that others have uploaded, and – most importantly – assign colors to that audio. Then, see what others have chosen.

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As you will come to realize, when it comes to weight loss, I am a firm believer in the cutting of caloric intake: it doesn’t matter whether you eat 1,600 calories of sugar cookies, bacon strips, frozen pizzas or energy bars; if you can do this while working out like a lunatic, you will lose weight. You have to be honest with yourself, though: if you eat a handful of nuts, you need to tally it, otherwise the whole exercise is pointless.

There is one area, however, in which I am lax, and regarding which I felt little need to modify my behavior: drinking. I enjoy drinking. I enjoy a nice glass of beer – after all, I live in Portland, so it would be a travesty if I didn’t. I like a good martini – gin, only, of course; please don’t insult me by offering me anything else. (I’ll leave the brand to your discretion.) I find drinking quite beneficial in social situations: it aids in the mingling process; it can convert two left feet into an adequate pair; it helps dampen the noise of a particularly loud concert or party; and it can even turn the most timid of us into a Streisand or Stewart at the local karaoke bar (whether this is a good thing is a subject for another discussion). I will even go so far as to say that I occasionally enjoy getting – hmm, how do I put this – shitfaced, when it strikes my fancy, I have nothing to do the next day, and I’m out with a group of friends.

Now, there are some amongst you who are probably shaking your heads, whispering, “I think he has a problem.” I do have a problem: the fact that I’m writing this without a cup of coffee next to me is a problem. That I have a splitting headache, brought about by this very activity, is a problem. But moreover, my biggest problem – aside from the minor but irreparable damage such an activity causes my liver – is this: how can my enjoyment of alcohol coexist with both my generally obsessive approach to weight loss, and my specific stance against calories? Alcohol, and most alcoholic beverages, are not exactly light in the calorie department.

Simple. I have created a wholly unscientific, somewhat arbitrary system that has obviously served me well.

1. If you enjoy going out and getting loaded on weekends, then you must refrain from any mid-week, lackadaisical drinking, or otherwise its calories must be stringently counted, like anything else. I used to enjoy a beer every couple of days, just as a way to unwind. Now, I try to steer clear of that activity. If you’re going to do it – make it count.

2. Stick with beer, basic cocktails, and shots. I used to be a big fan of the White Russian, a delicious drink comprised of vodka, Kahlua, and whole cream. You know what those White Russians did? They built their capital city on my ass and named it Fatingrad. Those things give out merciless headaches, anyway; instead, hang out with Tanqueray and grapefruit all night, and you won’t feel like death the next day. Plus, its a great way to cute a cold!

3. Avoid a late night restaurant run. I used to be a fairly staunch supporter of the late night restaurant run, whether it was fast food, or one of those 24-hour pseudo-diners like Denny’s or Shari’s. Note: I’m not explicitly banning the consumption of food while on the bender itself, but when you leave wherever you are to go someplace explicitly for food, then you may have a problem. A few 3 AM Grand Slam breakfasts and pretty soon you’ll find they’ve turned your gut into a baseball stadium named Jiggly Field.

4. On the day after, you must exercise. Sorry, this is non-negotiable. When you drink to excess, what you’re doing is mortgaging the present: the next day, you have to pay. Additionally, it helps combat that hangover: there have been occasions where I’m fairly positive my sweat carries a proof of no less than fifty.

5. Have fun with it. That’s why you’re adhering to the rest of these rules, so that you can relax when you’re out, and you don’t have to meticulously count your calories. That’s right, I said it: if you follow these rules, you can enjoy your excessive drinking without obsessing over the exact number of beers you’ve had. Although, keep in mind that your slim, finely chiseled body really won’t look as impressive if its curled up on the bathroom floor, or passed out on the toilet, so a bit of moderation might not be completely out of the question.

I’m not saying its a perfect system, and you know what? You’ll probably have even better results more quickly if you cut out drinking entirely. But that’s not the point of this post. My point is that it’s not required. If you make some adjustments, you can have your booze, and drink it to.

As many tech-savvy folks know (most of you, I’m sure), Apple recently released an iPod with video capabilities. The practicality of video on the go notwithstanding, I think the most interesting part of that announcement was that they’d be offering television shows up for download, ala cart, along with full seasons, if you wanted to download them. This is very cool, and I hope it continues to mature. However, this has angered some network affiliates, who are worried that will people will download the shows they want to see, and no longer turn on local television.

One affiliate, however, has taken some forward-thinking steps to combat this:

ABC Affiliates Start ‘Vidcasting’ News Broadcasts

So, am I angry at the affiliate, for some reason? No.

I’m angry at the word “vidcast,” which I find profoundly stupid, and indicative of a larger trend with which I’m sure you’ll all be familiar. There is currently this need, which I see primarily in the web industry, but is probably manifested elsewhere, to reinvent that which doesn’t need reinvention, and to use new language to do it. I know that one of the best parts of English is its malleability (woohoo!), and the fact that it can be refined and honed to properly express new ideas as they materialize. This is fine in certain cases. Hypertext becomes the web, a web page becomes a web site, etc… And you know what? I’m even okay with the word “blog” representing any kind of a website with either an article/link focus, typically published in reverse chronological order, with comments enabled (although it could certainly be argued that that definition is starting to lose its utility).

However, there are some things that I’m just not ok with, and this story was the one that broke the camel’s back.

AJAX – Asynchronous JavaScript and XML.: Cute, but misses the point that it’s really not about XML at all, beyond the fact that XML (along with plain text, if desired) can be returned, and that the name of the object used in JavaScript to facilitate this transfer is the XMLHttpRequest (which should, really, be simply called HTMLRequest). This should really be termed “remoting with JavaScript”, or JavaScript remoting. I guess “JeMo” isn’t as sexy as AJAX (although it’d probably make a kickass musical genre). Of course, flash has had this for awhile now, but I guess Flax isn’t as cool as AJAX, either.

Podcasting – Points for coining this word at the exact right time. It still seems to me mostly like a solution in need of a problem. Oh, and I liked it better when it was just referred to as timeshifting.

Screencasting – Yeah, this is a movie of your computer screen. It isn’t cool.

Vidcasting – Huh? VIDCASTING?! You mean, like displaying VIDEO to USERS on the WEB? Maybe if I download these videos with broadband, I can refer to the whole movement as BROADCASTING, and we can step away from the brink.

Mashup – Ok, this isn’t about the web, but I still hate the term.

Web 2.0 – Look. I’ve been making websites for about nine years. I’ve been making interactive web apps for five. I’ve been using techniques like hidden iframes, and advanced JavaScript for four. So don’t tell me that we’re just now being ushered into some sort of glorious panacea with draggable DIVs, opacity and remoting. Some of us have already been here. (However, mad props to Scriptaculous, which is indeed a very cool JavaScript library, the prototype library, and to Ruby on Rails, for grouping web zealots into one easily ignorable set, in a way that hasn’t been done since GNU/Linux started picking up steam.)

So is this just sour grapes? Am I just another web developer who, having used all these technologies for years in quiet obscurity finds it irritating to have my skillset renamed by a bunch of posers?

Yes. That’s pretty much what it is. It is a rant, after all.

Oh, and incidentally, I’ve submitted this as a news story to digg.com – I have subdigged it, you might say – and will later record myself reading this blog entry, in preparation for a first-ever blogcast/podcast, a term to which I will refer as a podblogcast. If this takes off, all websites dealing with blogs recorded exactly as written will no longer be referred to as websites, or even blogs or audioblogs – they will be podblogs, or pooblogs for short (in spite of the fact that this does not shorten the word at all.)

Ok, now that that’s over – does anyone has any terminology to add?

My results? 129 WPM, 7 Word Errors, Net Speed 122 WPM, Accuracy 94%.

And on that crappy Mac keyboard, too

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I was 13, and a partner and I had made it, deep into the LEST Spelling tournament. LEST stands for Lutheran Elementary Schools Tournament – I’m attempting to come up with some sort of sordid or distasteful acronym that would also be suitable, but am drawing a blank. Anyway, there were only two other two-person teams left, and us: Team Trinity Lutheran, comprised of me, a gregarious fat kid with a talent for spelling, and a friend, who was one of those simultaneously cool, simultaneously nerdy kids who wouldn’t really recognize that as an asset until later.

While this obviously isn’t the national spelling bee, in which bedraggled children completely devoid of social skills commit to memory thousands of words foreign even to those who study for the GRE, we’d weathered some difficult words. Imagine our surprise and delight when the next word was called: “Please spell ‘misspell’”

We looked at each other, relief probably palpable, but then shadows of doubt began to creep across our prepubescant visages: misspell? Who spells misspell? Miss-pell? Mi-spell ? Mis-spell? Well, the answer is the last word in the list, and it seems terribly obvious to me now, but it was either nerves or a combination of spelling words for hours on end, but we blurted out “mispell.”

We lost.

My father hit the bottle that night. My friend killed himself. Ok, he didn’t really, and my father didn’t drink due to our mistake, either. But it still stunk to have to tell people you knew that, yes, we had been tossed out of a spelling competition because we misspelled mispell. Er, wait. We mispelled misspell. Aw, fuck it.

Screw you, misspell.