Robert Gomez's blog

This is my new favorite song of the moment! Download it here. Get the whole album here at Twilightzone's Blog, where, at the moment, there is a great series of rare 45's being posted under the moniker Trashcan Records. Fantastic stuff!

This afternoon I came up with a handy little bookmarklet (or favlet) that uses the site dummyimage.com to create a place holder graphic. Simply drag the following link to the button bar of your browser:

Dummy Image

When you click the bookmark it will prompt you to input image dimensions. Use the format, WIDTHxHEIGHT (for example 640x480) and a new window should open up with a downloadable GIF with those exact dimensions.

I just noticed today that a video I had posted in YouTube was just blocked in the U.S. because of some music I used in the background. Specifically, they blocked my PC Transporter video that I used to demo some hardware I was selling on eBay. The video is pretty mundane, but I used a Señor Coconut track in the background along with various beeps and noises from the Apple ][gs. Come on, who is going to download the song with all sorts of disk drive noises on top of it?

Ya know, I love me them video games. I would go so far as to argue that video games are, well... can be, art. However, I have to admit that even the best video games are a bit lacking in the originality department. Take, for example, this screen shot from Yahoo showing three upcoming games:

Stubble-faced muscle men abound in the video game world.

I just got back from a short little weekend excursion to visit my cousins up in Windsor, Canada. Windsor can be described as Detroit's Gary, Indiana... if Gary had weird money and lots of Tim Horton's donut shops (or do they say shoppes in Canada? Or doughnuts for that matter?). One area where Windsor has Gary (and Chicago) whipped, is great Lebanese food (El Mayor). On the other hand, the whole "Beer Store" thing is really, dare I say, stupid and backwards.

I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with Adobe. Some of their products are great—Photoshop is a verb these days for good reason—but, they have also released some of the most disappointing software I have ever used. Encore, their DVD authoring program, will crash anytime you try to do anything with even a moderate degree of complexity. Dreamweaver will give you cryptic JavaScript errors out of the blue, when you are not actively editing anything. Heck, everyone knows Acrobat is a bloated resource hog.

It's the end of another year and I think it would be a good time for me to recap my personal best of lists for 2009. In case you haven't noticed, much of this site is devoted to keeping track of all the media I digest. I review and rate just about every movie, game or book I finish.

Here's  a brief movie I made for my Daughter using xtra normal's text-to-movie web app. (click here if you are having trouble seeing the video)

This weekend, I actually left the house to see live music that wasn't Nonagon. Thanks to John H., I got offered to see The Jesus Lizard at Metro. The Jesus Lizard is one of those bands that, during the nineties, I saw at least half-a-dozen times. Their music basically became the blueprint for much of the stuff we wrote in Der Lugomen.