Nasty letters from lawyers have been sent. Fans have been irked. I don’t see the problem.

I’ve heard Kevin Rose explain in 2 instances (Diggnation 102 and Cranky Geeks 72) the root of the problem with Diggnation fans getting the show from Diggdown is that Rev3 can’t accurately count their viewers because Diggdown does not report numbers to Rev3. Due to these circumstances, they can’t portray the correct number of viewers to advertisers and thus can’t sell as many ads.

First of all that’s borderline corporate asshole talk. Second of all, Striker (the guy who runs Diggdown) claims he DOES report numbers to Rev3. And most importantly, the simple solution would be to download each episode twice. This is what I’ve been doing for over a year now. I get the show on Saturday night, the day it’s released AND Rev3 can count my download on Tuesday or whenever I happen to open iTunes. In fact, I have the feed in iTunes on BOTH of my computers so they’re actually getting 2 downloads per episode from me. This whole situation is stupid.

Thanks to Amber and Leo from net@nite for the heads up on Jonathan Coulton’s “Code Monkey.” This song is hilarious and pretty catchy as well.

Just check out the first verse:

Code Monkey get up get coffee
Code Monkey go to job
Code Monkey have boring meeting
With boring manager Rob
Rob say Code Monkey very dilligent
But his output stink
His code not “functional” or “elegant”
What do Code Monkey think?
Code Monkey think maybe manager want to write god damned login page himself
Code Monkey not say it out loud
Code Monkey not crazy, just proud

And then there are the remixes. My favorite is the Speedmonkey remix. So funny!

Minnesota is starting to warm up these days. That means it’s getting in the 50s. It was a perfect time to go check out an early Friday show.
The night got off to a great start with Protest The Hero opening things up. They have a great stage presence and you would swear you were listening to a recording. Bassist, Arif, is out of control. The man can pull off utterly massive bass lines and be flailing around stage at the same time. Unfortunately, most of the young crowd at the Triple Rock tonight was unfamiliar with this band. The bands latest, Kezia, was just released on Vagrant Records this past Tuesday. This may be why they received little fanfare that night. It just so happened they were selling copies of that very album for only $5. I picked myself up a copy. These guys stole the show as far as I was concerned. All indications point to Protest The Hero having a very good 2006.

Grade: A

As Cities Burn’s set can be summed up with one word: disappointing. Son, I Loved You At Your Darkest was a decent enough album. It turns out it doesn’t translate well to a live show. For the most part the band was just plain boring. At one point the lead singer was standing with his hand in his pocket for a good minute and a half of a song. Maybe this type of music just doesn’t work well live. The spacey parts of their songs served as snoozefests for a majority of the crowd, though, there were quite a number of As Cities Burn t-shirts floating around.

Grade: D

Things got rocking again with Since By Man. I am admittedly not a fan of their style, but they have a lot of energy live. The smaller portion of the crowd who knew the band were getting into it and there was much hardcore pitting and dancing.

Grade: C

After Since By Man, The Bled were up. Having seen the band once before at the same venue opening for Avenged Sevenfold (seems weird now), I knew I was in for a treat. Lead vocalist, James, is a mixture of brash and sincere. At this point in the show, I was joined by Decoy photographer Matt Birhanzel and his camera. The Bled’s set bounced between old favorites and offerings from Found in the Flood. They are at their best on previous album’s tracks though. About two-thirds of the way through the set, James paused to tell a story. Some kid had given him a pair of shop glasses and he told him he would wear them on stage and with that they ripped into “Spitshine Sonata.” The night closed in full force with “Red Wedding.” As Birhanzel had said, “A perfect closer.”

Grade: B+

Overall Grade: B-

Back somtime around October or November I had blogged about getting a digital camera. For my continued work on DecoyMusic, Aaron agreed to hook me up with a digital camera. Well shortly afterward Aaron hoped on a tour for about 6-7 weeks and right before he left he ordered it. But for whatever reason, it never showed up. His credit card was never charged.

Time for Round 2. Aaron made another attempt to order said camera and again something goofed. So finally on his third try he got things down and finally got the order placed. Well on Thursday the package showed up on my doorstep.

As for camera itself? It’s better than I expected. Back in October when I first started looking for potential cameras, I settled on the Canon SD500. I really like Canon’s digital cameras in general and my buddy Rick had a similar model, but I digress. When I was doing my research, I was looking for a 4-5 Megapixel camera and like I said settled on the SD500. I swear I remember seeing it as a 5.0MP camera, but looking at review on Steve’s Digicams dated 3/30/05, they say it’s a 7.1. Either way, I win. It’s a great little point and shoot camera. It’s small and fits in my pocket. I was quite surprised with the video it shoots as well. My few tests looked nice even at full screen on my 19″ LCD.

Along with the camera, I also got a 1GB memory card for it. At the max quality settings, that’s over 300 pictures. If I change it from SuperFine to Fine, I get something like 580+ pictures. Makes the 32MB card they include with the camera look pretty small in comparison.

Now that I have a digital camera, I expect I will be uploading a lot more photos to my gallery. Maybe I’ll have to get a Flickr account too.

RPS means Rock Paper Scissors.
Ok now that you know that, the first thing you need to do is go to http://worldrps.com/ and marvel in the amount of content there. Next, you need to play the online trainer. Then go read the advanced strategy. Last, post comments here.

This post is dedicated to Bev!

Bev, you got your wish. So, here’s to a good friend.