Rowan Henderson

Here’s a list of albums from 2009 (in order of release date) that I’ve listened to, and a quick word on what I thought of them.

Just note, I’m not a music critic, and I’m never too hard on music, and enjoy just about everything… If I mark an album “Good”, that could mean I’ve only listened to it once and enjoyed it, or it could mean I gave it a lot of listens and think it’s pretty good…

This is mainly just for fun and information….

Fame, Fortune and Fornication - Reel Big Fish - Fail
Tonight: Franz Ferdinand - Franz Ferdinand - Good
Lonely Road - The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus - Good
Scrambles - Bomb the Music Industry! - OK
What It Takes - The Sleeping - Good
Wrath - Lamb of God - Good
It’s Blitz! - Yeah Yeah Yeahs - OK
No Regrets - Dope - Good
Not Without a Fight - New Found Glory - Good (So much better than their last album)
Scream - Chris Cornell - Good
Cult of Static - Static-X - OK
Approaching Normal - Blue October - Good
The Hazards of Love - The Decemberists - Good
Metamorphosis - Papa Roach - Good
A Shipwreck in the Sand - Silverstein - Amazing!
Sounds of the Universe - Depeche Mode - OK (Fell asleep listening to it, didn’t sound much like them)
Shallow Life - Lacuna Coil - Amazing!
Coaster - NOFX - Good
Self-Titled Album - The Audition - Amazing!
Entertainment - Fischerspooner - Fail (Although I’m still making up my mind, was kind of cheesy and boring compared to last album)
Knives - Aiden - Good/Amazing! (still deciding, it’s 500% better than their last album though)
21st Century Breakdown - Green Day - OK/Good (still deciding, took a few listens for me to even enjoy it)

What do you think?

Music, Reviews 2009, Music, Reviews

So I was reading up on The Used on Wikipedia, and there was a section about their new album and it said

“Bert stated “In the past, we’ve always kind of brought pop sensibility into heavy rock, but this is going to be all that much more tantalizing and brutal. Our songs are 10 times messier and noisier than they’ve ever been”

Now, I’ve had a bad history of bands doing new things like that. Let’s take the recent albums of let’s say… Anti-Flag, Panic At The Disco, Weezer, Blink-182, and don’t get me started on Iggy Pop’s upcoming jazz album…

So I decided to just send out a little tweet, thinking it woudln’t phase anyone..

Well, little did I know, I quickly got a reply from The Used themselves (well, one of the band members)

Well, I immediately felt horrible. The Used have been one of my favorite bands for quite a few years. Their sound is quite incredible, and there’s so much more I can say, but I won’t… So yeah, I immediately tried to defend myself with what I truly meant…

Then to my horrid sighting, he posts this, which although half of it was joking, I’m not really sure how the other half went… This kind of blew out of proportion pretty fast

Then The Used started to get some comments from fans about it, most notably, this one..

Attacking my thick long eyebrows? Low blow Ms. Makeup and Cleavage.

Luckily enough, things started coming together…

I didn’t really think I should reply from there. Overall, I’m an idiot. I’ve been waiting for The Used to reply to me for ages, and finally when they do it’s on something negative. I hope I didn’t really make them feel bad. The Used have a history of having really strange and odd humor, and maybe this was one big joke to make me feel bad, which it did…

UPDATE: I was right, he was just fucking with me

Then the hugs start rolling in….

… and then they tell me to try to book them a place in Alaska. Holy shit this day can’t get any weirder…

I feel so special! ahahah

Twitter is getting pretty cool, the ability to talk to bands and people you’ve always liked, it’s pretty incredible if you ask me.. Connecting bands with fans :D… I once got a reply from Hunter Burgan (@TranquilMammoth) from AFI (another one of my favorite bands, used to own a fansite, theartofdrowning.net).

But yeah, just though this was kind of scary/funny so figured I’d use my blog for something. You can follow me up on twitter at

http://twitter.com/Rowan187

and please don’t forget to follow The Used

http://twitter.com/wearetheused

And let’s see that The Used’s upcoming album, Artwork, shows that change can truly be a good thing!

Uncategorized the used, twitter

Random emo, face, Random, rice, roni

Here’s my first post about a dream I had. Honestly I don’t expect people to read these, they’re mainly here for my keeping track of, but maybe someone will find interest, and have links to some dreams they’ve had to.

Naturally, for me a dream is hard to remember, and within 5 minutes of waking up, I’ve already forgot it. Just like the website said, I’ll be keeping a notepad next to my bed to write down all I can remember. So the data in these dreams can be a little sketchy, but I’ll write down as much as I can remember in the proper order.

February 19, 11:30 pm - February 20, 1:30 am

My friends Forrest and Taira, that have been on a long trip through South America, finally return home, and they need to stay at my house for a little while.

It’s early morning and we’re all in pajamas, and my mom is at her computer, she tells us to eat cereal. We look in the Kitchen and there are like 30 different bags of cereal… One sign that this is already a dream.

Forrest and Taira eat their cereal in the living room while watching something on the TV. I decide I’m tired and want to go to my room and watch a movie. When I’m looking through my list of recently downloaded movies, I start noticing a whole bunch of things I’ve never even heard of before.

The first thing I click is just an image of a forest with a bunch of angels or fairies or whatever you want to call them. After clicking on each fairy, the image starts to move around, and turns into this clip of a fairy running away from something in the dark. I notice that the URL is something like http://site.com/forest/NIN. Once again, my brain blames strange things on Nine Inch Nails.

Then I start checking out the other downloaded movies. Some are dated February 30, 2009, another obvious sign that this is either a dream or I’m just really stupid. All of the movies consist of very artsy images, sometimes of flowers turning transparent and such, and the main characters not talking in any other way except symbolism or confusing. You know, like when in movies there’s always that character that never just straight up says what’s going on, he just hints at what is next to come (foreshadowing) by giving it some symbolic identity.

The movies freak me out, so I close my eyes, and I’m on my couch still, but two people I know from IRC that I’ve never met in real life are sitting on the couch next to me. They were Beska and Louise. Beska was yelling at me for not being able to connect to IRC via an XBOX 360 or something.

Here’s where the  dream makes a strange shift. I’m in my car driving around up by the college in my town. There are three other people in the car, but the only one I can identify/remember is Karley Lesko. We’re driving down the hill, and it’s pretty icy, and we’re blasting some song. We get to this one point and my car starts acting strange and sliding out of control and isn’t really moving anymore, just swaying back and forth.

This black car pulls in front of me and asks who I am. I tell him, and he tells me that he’s out to kill me (wtf?). I notice that none of my friends are in the car anymore, so I make a run for it. I pull a sled out of my car (I think this is a snowy replacement for the skateboard that is actually always in my car), and I sled down the hill. He chases me and gets close to me when this giant truck drives up the hill, and this insanely large man gets out, and starts to help me. I tell him that the guy in the black car is trying to kill me, and he says “oh, that’s what I’m supposed to do to”, and then starts coming after me.

I continue to slide down the hill, away from both of the people that are after me, when this larger woman greets me. She starts persuading me with money and such if I let her kill me or something, and saying that I’m the chosen one. I run away from her around the corner (next to the music store in town), and there’s this kid shoveling snow. He doesn’t know anything about me being “chosen”, and he starts talking to the woman.

Dream Journal car, dream, friends, journal, running, sled, strange

The stumbledupon this website that talked about how to have a lucid dream. It really got me interested in the whole concept. It talked about getting to know your dreams as dreams, even realistic ones. One concept of recognizing it is keeping records of all your dreams right when you wake up inside a little “dream journal”. Now, a dream journal sounds a little cheesy to me, but I think it would be kind of interesting to give it a try.

One reason I bring this up is because lately I’ve been having a lot of nightmares, and normally I don’t really dream much. In each of these nightmares, there’s certain things that are in a lot of my other dreams, and I’m starting to think they symbolize something. I want to keep track of how much they show up. One of the “symbols” is this long stairway full of vibrant green trees and stuff. It’s located where a similar path is located in my town, although this one is completely different, just same basic location. If you continue up this stairway (in the dream), it leads to a new area that is just a big wooden dock type thing. If you continue it to the end, it’s just this really thin unfilled in square that you have to walk around in circles, and there’s nothing else there. The strange thing about the dock at this point is it moves a lot, like it’s made of rubber or something, and you’re constantly falling in. I think this could potentially symbolize my fear of drowning/deep water.

Back to the topic. I’ve decided to keep a dream journal for a while to see if anything interesting comes up. I’ve already got one entry that I just did a few minutes ago (woke up from another nightmare). That will be in my next post.

Dream Journal dream, experiment, idea, journal, lucid, thoughts

Google Chrome is one of those things that people have been rumoring Google to be involved with for years. This is one that I think everyone saw coming, and Google saw it coming too, they just wanted to make sure they did something completely different.

The concept of Google Chrome is quite amazing if you think about it. It’s derived from one of Google’s many new open source projects, Chromium. They wanted to create a browser that was different than the others since they felt the current methods of browsing are obsolete and such. They used a new style of javascript engine called V8, along with a concept of using each tab as a different process, which actually does make sense since you can close an unresponsive process and just lose that tab, instead of the entire browser crashing. One strange decision by Google is the use of the Webkit engine. Google and Mozilla have always had this sort of partnership, so I think everyone was expecting them to use Gecko.

But enough about what Google Chrome is, let’s talk about what it isn’t. I knew from the start that the browser would be lacking features, but there’s a few things in it that completely bug me. Some are not exactly features, but more like interface and usability problems. Let’s get started.

 

Google Product Support (Mode?)

 This isn’t really something Google Chrome needs, but it would add a lot of specialty for people like me that  converted all their services into Google’s services. My main idea beyond this Google  Product Mode is a  feature you can turn on (or a separate browser download) that incorporates all of Google’s services into your browser. Such as a Gmail and Google Reader notifier, calendar,  docs, etc. My Firefox status-bar has notifiers for Google products, why doesn’t Google incorporate their own awesome products into their own awesome browser?

Some ideas for this? Well apart from the notifiers, maybe take some of the concept from Firefox’s Ubiquity project, such as highlighting any text, right clicking, and being able to add that information to your Google Calendar, save the text in your Google Docs, search Google with that text, or even e-mail it directly to a friend. Perhaps be able to have Chrome automatically detect street addresses and allow you to click them for a direct link or or a pop-up to Google Maps or even have it launch Google Earth. There are tons of different possibilities.

The reason I say this should be a “mode” or a different browser download is because obviously not everyone that uses Chrome also uses Google products. Having these features enabled by default for the non-users is just a useless bulk on the interface and usability of the browser.

 

Stop Button

I know Chrome is trying to have a sleek and simple interface, but seriously, removing the stop button? Sometimes websites have a problem where they constantly load for whatever reason, and you want to be able to stop the process from continuing to try. But in all honesty, my main reason for this comes for my web development. I do a lot of stuff with PHP/MySQL, and sometimes I miscalculate the logic on one of my loops and it turns into an infinite loop, constantly outputting data and never stopping. Honestly, the first time I realized it didn’t have a stop button is when I produced an infinite loop and urgently went to click stop, and came to the horrifying realization that this was impossible (unless I’m missing out on a keyboard shortcut). I know you can just click “back” or close the tab, but what if I really wanted to stop the page and analyze what the loop did?

Okay, I’ll admit I’m a complete idiot and didn’t notice the stop button is in the address bar. (I panicked when I saw it was infinite looping.) I’d much rather have a stop button next to the refresh button anyways. It’s much more natural to go over there since I don’t use Internet Explorer which for some illogical reason has the stop and refresh buttons on the right side of the address bar. (I guess they need at least one thing to be different from the other browsers. Well, besides interpreting simple HTML and CSS completely wrong so web designers have to create a completely separate style sheet for IE.)

 

Don’t Select Everything!

 Selecting text is a very common use of a browser. Whether it’s to copy and paste something somewhere else or… Well, that’s pretty much it.

 Can anyone please explain me Google’s logic on not only highlighting text when you’re hovering over things, but highlighting every element on the page?  This makes it really hard to copy/paste a few paragraphs because sometimes it just starts highlighting images, videos, random invisible divs, etc. CSS  Floats and Chrome highlighting do not get along (see the image to the left).

 Highlighting images has lost all purpose for me ever since Photoshop stopped allowing me to drag photos from my browser into my canvas. What’s wrong  with right clicking the image to copy the data, get the URL, or save the file.

 Not to mention the annoyance of trying to get certain text and always ending up with an image, then you decide “well, since Windows Live Messenger can’t post images, I’ll just paste the text to my friend.” Only to realize that it pasted them the ALT tags of the image, leaving complete confusion in the conversation. Or once in a while (At least with WLM 9) trying to start a file transfer with your contact by sending them the images.

On a side note, in all other browsers you’re able to select a certain part of the text, and then hold down Shift + an arrow key and start selecting more text. Usually you can click anywhere on the page and do the little shift click to start selecting text. Chrome completely lacks this functionality. Oh well, I guess if it had it that wouldn’t prevent it from happily grabbing onto random images and divs.

 

Improved Blank Tab Page

 Okay let’s face it, anyone that has used Opera Web Browser knows that this feature was almost completely stolen from it. Well, if you’re going to steal something amazingly intuitive, at least do it right.

Google’s little twist on this is that it will show thumbnails of your top 9 most visited websites. This is a good idea, but it needs a little more to it. Perhaps if they were to keep this feature, and then add a URL next to the “most visited” text on the top that shows you “user choice”. The user choice section will be more based on Opera’s approach to the thumbnails. Allowing you to select which websites go in the thumbnails, and the ability to arrange them.

One minor annoyance is they thumbnail certain pages on a domain. I’d kind of like the option for it to only do it on the domain’s home page, since that is most likely the central place you would want to go when opening up your browser. 

Overall, I like this feature, and I like all the side panels such as searching your history, recent bookmarks, and recent closed tabs. But this feature could definitely be more user friendly, I can’t even explain my problems with it because it’s just a bunch of minor ones. Or perhaps I’m just far too used to Opera’s feature.

 

Improved Downloads Page

 Honestly, the page isn’t too bad, but needs a little work. A few minor annoyances would be the fact that once you cancel a download, you can’t resume it, but you can copy the URL and paste it into the browser to redownload it. Where’s the logic in that?

Another small thing but would be nice and easy would be the ability to clear your downloads (all or just certain days) right from that page instead of going to your Clear Browsing Data section and removing your downloads.

I love having the ability to search through your downloads though. Google is doing a great thing by keeping its core reason of existance in the browser. You can quickly and easily search your history, downloads, bookmarks, etc.

 

 

Improved Bookmarks Manager

Something very strange I noticed is that when editing your bookmarks, all you can change is the title and URL. However, if you import your bookmarks from Firefox, you also import the ability to have the bookmark shortcuts (for example I type “m” in the address to go directly to my e-mail, or “fb” to go right to facebook). 

If you’re allowed to use Firefox’s shortcut feature, why can’t Chrome implement their own. Obviously the data is already stored, so why not add another input box to allow the data to be stored!

Another obvious improvement would be tags. I’m not a fan of tags, but ever since Firefox implemented the tags and the awesome bar, finding my stuff has been a whole lot easier. Something along the lines of this feature would be a huge improvement, especially with Chrome’s bookmark searching speed.

 

RSS Reader/Management

 This this both along the lines of a needed feature, and another idea for Google Product Support. I’ve recently switched to Google Reader to manage my ever expanding list of RSS feeds, so why not implement some Google Reader features to Google Chrome? Makes sense, doesn’t it?

All current most used browsers, including the dreaded Internet Explorer, have some sort of interface when viewing a direct RSS feed. Safari’s is personally my favorite, just thought I’d throw that in.

Even something as simple as “This is an RSS feed, click here to implement it into Google Reader, or copy this URL into your current Feed Aggregator” would be good enough for now. 

My main thought on this is that Google is working on it. They wanted the browser to start out very lightweight and simple so didn’t quite implement this yet, but it’s most likely coming.

Linux!

Although sadly enough, most of my computer using latest has been in Vista, I’m still use Linux an awful lot. Honestly enough, Firefox’s linux support is dreadful. It’s a lot slower than on Windows and crashes an unexplainable amount, mostly with Flash involved.

I’d love to be able to start up OpenSuse and begin browsing away with the power and speed of Google Chrome. I know it’s coming, but not soon enough :(

 

Add-Ons

Let’s face it, everyone reading this saw this coming. Personally, I’m not too big of a user of Add-ons with Firefox, but the little amount of ones I use are very important to me, and are very helpful with my everyday browsing and especially web development. I don’t think Google should implement their silly widgets or gadgets or whatever they’re called into the browser. Opera did that and it’s a miserable failure. But I also don’t think they should create an add-on system of their own. The smartest thing to do would be to get Firefox add-ons completely functioning in Chrome, or at least use the same language (XUL I believe). That way the people that enjoy making add-ons don’t have to learn a new method of add-on making, and Chrome will already have a bunch to start with.

 

Summary

Overall, I like Chrome. It’s as simple to say as that. It offers a lot of new things in browsing that should be in every browser. I’ve been using it a lot this month so I can see the pros and cons of it. It’s safe to say it’s my favorite right now, but I don’t think it will ever replace my use of Mozilla’s wonderful Firefox browser. Perhaps if they fixed everything on this list it would have a bigger chance for not only me, but the millions of other Firefox users. But it definitely has a long way to go.

Chrome is still brand new, and we don’t know which direction it will go. It will either get amazingly better over time like Firefox, Safari, and Opera are doing. Or it will plummet into failure like Internet Explorer and Konqueror (and honestly, all other linux-only browser) have been doing for years.

Google Chrome, Technology Chrome, Features, Google, Ideas