DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I’ve been seeing what appears to be spider traffic from Axmo.com in my server logs… dozens of hits per day to various URLs on my site, with http://axmo.com in the HTTP_REFERER field. These aren’t clickthroughs; the IP is the same in every case (82.164.174.188; it doesn’t resolve). I thought it might be “referer spam,” but there’s just too much traffic. I’ve never seen a referer-spammer this aggressive.

I visited the advertised site and found what appears to be a search engine. Google has raised the bar so high it would take something pretty fantastic to make me bother trying a competing product. At a glance, Axmo didn’t have it.

Then I noticed the “pear-2-pear” typo on the URL submission page, and then this surprising description of the company’s technology:

Axmo is the first SE that makes full use of Microsoft’s new file system WinFS that will be implemented in the new OS, LongHorn.

And I thought, that seems like a really expensive way to build a search engine that can’t scale.

But I was momentarily intrigued, so I tried the search: I typed in a word, clicked the submit button… and got a .NET server error! Classic!

Ironically, the full error message suggested I check my spelling. Hmmm.

I dreamt last night that John Kerry selected me as his running mate.

Of course, I woke up screaming.

I’ve been playing drums since high school. I’ve studied rock, latin, jazz, rock, parade, rock, blues, progressive rock, and rock styles. Oh, and rock, and also let’s not forget rock.

Anyway the one thing I never learned was how to smile when I play. It’s like my face just doesn’t go that way any more.

Maybe I can blame my days in the marching band, when we were encouraged to don a rigid “game face,” even though my game face was indistinguishable from my “gas pain face.” Maybe that’s a story for another time.

I watch Carter Beauford with amazement. His joy in playing is evident on his face. Watch his instructional video or a DMB concert; he wears a grin half the size of his enormous drumkit.

I think this must be something he studied. It requires five-way independence: the left foot is playing eighths or quarters or something fancy on the hi-hat, and the right is going ballistic (but tastefully so) on the kick drum; the right hand is zinging out some amazing ride pattern across two cymbals and the left chatters ghost notes like the entire Blue Devils snare line at triple pianissamo. And the rest of the brain is thinking “smile nice for the camera!” But I’ve never seen such an exercise in the tutorial columns of the drumming magazines.

(Don’t even tell me that Beauford chews gum at the same time. I know this. The man has two brains.)

The closest I can come to smiling is a sort of baleful grimace. I try not to aim that at anyone else on stage, lest they stop playing in alarm. What happened, is the building on fire?! I tried a few times at rehearsal tonight, with extremely limited success. Maybe this is why my bandmates rarely look at me when I play; they’re afraid what they might see.

Inkjet ink: $8000/gallon

Here’s a neat technique for creating custom photo edges in Photoshop. (In a nutshell: select the image area, invert, enter quick mask mode, and apply Distortion filters to the mask.) Read more on the topic here and especially here (pdf with illustrations).