Saturday, May 23, 2009

Great Article, hillarious paragraph

..."Other programmers are banking on a broader change in mind-set for the Obama era. MTV, which spent most of the Bush Administration blinging out with Cribs and My Super Sweet 16, is slotting more-idealistic shows, on the theory that young millennials want uplift now. But it's keeping The Hills, just in case."...

Go read the story over on Time's website.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1900253,00.html

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

The best websites of my childhood (that are still online)

So here it is, a collection of links to some of the best sites of my young years or until the web was forever changed by Blogger, WordPress, MySpace, YouTube, and Google (1998-2004)

My 5ish favorite sites ever created pre-internet video land:

1. http://www.Geocities.com Yahoo is closing down this once personal website giant later this year, much to my chagrin as I now must find a new place for my Junior-High website to grow old. (http://www.geocities.com/cooldude166861)

2. http://www.Xanga.com This site brought the world of Blogging and the world of social networking to my doorstep, it was my first step into the deep personality the web was about to take on as people abandoned their freewebs, Angelfire, GeoCities, and Lycos pages, and ventured into a world of socially-aware internet friendships. (http://www.xanga.com/bandguy817)

3. http://www.FreeArcade.com The explosion of excitement at my school introduced to me for the first time the intrigue and uniqueness of the experience of the Macromedia(look it up kids) flash based games the internet was now making possible. In fact, I still love going on on occasion to play Fill-It (http://ww12.freearcade.com/Fillit.jav/Fillit.html) (Oh there's another thing I miss about the older internet, the whole ww1, ww2, ww3, etc. thing that sites use to do to break up traffic.)

4. http://www.freevideocodes.com/ I got my first taste of the whole "Video on the internet" thing (What now? that's crazy talk.) in those pre-internet-video-explosion days from a little site you may recall called FreeVideoCodes. The first time that I saw this site it blew my mind, "You mean I can see videos on the internet?" These videos mostly if not exclusively used non flash-video techniques such as imbedded Quicktime, WindowsMedia, or a funny thing called "Real Media". (I actually link to an Eminem(I know) video on the first page of my aforementioned GeoCities page.)

5. http://video.yahoo.com/ "What now? A WHOLE site dedicated to [mostly music] videos, that's awesome" My first memory of using the infamous and under-appreciated Yahoo! videos came when my friend Anthony wanted to show me an awesome new video from Something Corporate entitled "If you C Jordan" (also possible my first experience with non-standard internet spelling) (The Classic: http://video.yahoo.com/watch/2990589/v2154737)



Sites that have passed on to the great internet beyond to never be seen again (except in old screen shots and on Archive.org) Click on the following to see the site as I did in my youth:

http://www.hampsterdance.com (in it's original form) (also included are BabyDance[I can't find a good example of this one], CowDance, and any others)

http://hometown.aol.com What can I say about Hometown, it was my first internet home, and I was sad to see it go.

http://www.postopia.com (I can't find a good example of this site in all of its glory, but it was an awesome site where you could jump honeycomb cerial off a ramp and into a glass of milk, and many other cerial-based games that may eventually come back to me.)

Anyway, I enjoyed this trip down memory lane, I hope you did as well, stay cool, and buy Binford Tools.

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Preview of The Jay Leno Show

I never thought I would see a "The 'name of person' Show" on TV in my lifetime.