The BBQ Song: A review of BBQ in the Southern US.
This fun little video is apparently part of a series sponsored by Alka-Seltzer. I’m not sure what indigestion medicine has to do with travelling across the United States, but if it results in awesome videos like the one above, I’m don’t think I’ll question it.
Today’s song is Baba Yetu, written by composer Christopher Tin and performed by Talisman A Capella, a chorus from Stanford University. It’s the menu music in the game Civilization 4, and it’s available for free from Christopher Tin’s website.
If you have any thoughts about the show, I’d love to get your feedback at jeremy.harper@gmail.com, or even right here on the blog using the new comments system. Thanks for listening!
Habari is a new set of blogging software designed to be simple and easy to use. What you see above is the interface for adding a new post. It’s just a title, a box for the text, and a box for tags.
You can add more buttons with plugins. For example, the Flickr plugin will link directly to your Flickr account. Push the Flickr button, and a panel will open up to allow you to pick photos to add to the post.
It’s developed by a lot of people who became disillusioned with Wordpress. They started with a clean slate, knowing some of the problems bloggers commonly face, like comment spam or spikes in traffic if you get a link from one of the big sites, and designed a new system that’s both robust and beautiful.
I like this system so much that I’ve moved my personal blog from Wordpress to Habari. They’ve just released version 0.5, which adds a lot of neat features. If you’re thinking of starting a new blog, be sure to give Habari a try.
Indexed is fun little blog with lots of amusing graphs written on index cards. They range from simple to the complex, and from the funny to the political to the reflective.
The author, Jessica Hagy, has even had so much success with the blog that she’s made it into a book. It’s just a fun site that occupies a warm and happy place in my RSS reader.
Battletech is classic wargame about fighting 30-foot-tall robots. Back when I was still in high school, I played a game or two, but never had enough players who were interested in playing again.
This was really too bad; this game excites the imagination like you wouldn’t believe. Tonight, for example, I was down to three damaged mechs, two of them *very* badly damaged. My brother was down to one, less damaged mech. My mechs had him cornered. Each of them pumped their various lasers and missiles into it. Finally, one of my mechs managed an incredibly difficult head shot that blew the head clean off. But at the same time, he shot lasers into both of my badly damaged mechs, destroying one outright and eliminating the other by exploding what was left of his missile ammo.
Every time I’ve played this game, I’ve had some awesome event like that happen. Once, I was playing with a bunch of other people, and as the least experienced player I was saddled with a couple squads of infantry as opposed to a full-sized mech or even another vehicle. But, one of my infantry squads managed to disable their last remaining long range missile truck near the end of the game, guaranteeing a win for my team.
So, now that my own little brother is old enough to enjoy this game fully, I’ve bought the Battletech Introductory Boxed Set. It contains the rules for the basic game, some twenty-odd plastic figurines, a couple of maps, and a lot of neat background information into the Battletech universe.
Although the games tend to be ridiculously long (especially when you have to look up every other rule) it’s still a ton of fun. Can’t recommend it highly enough.
Today we hear from the band Red Hunter with their song The Fall, which I first found on the science fiction podcast Escape Pod. I would link to their own web page if they had one, but they appear to have joined with another band, Peter and the Wolf, to form a group called Whiskey and Apples.
Anyways, the song is clear and simple even if the band history isn’t. It’s Good.
If you have any thoughts about the show, I’d love to get your feedback at jeremy.harper@gmail.com, or even right here on the blog using the new comments system. Thanks for listening!
The Upstate Board Gamers group is a collection of people in the Greenville/Spartanburg SC area who come together to play board games.
It’s not just little kids either; in fact, most of the people involved are adults. At the game days, on the last Saturday of every month, members of the group get together at a local game shop or at a local library.
Games range from light games based on luck to deep strategic games that can last for hours. Everyone brings some of their favorite games; I’ve never been to a game day where I haven’t tried something new and interesting.
If you’re ever in the Upstate of South Carolina on the last Saturday of the month, we’d love to have you come and play with us.
Disqus is a beautifully simple way of adding comments to blogs running Wordpress, Movable Type, Blogger, TypePad, and Tumblr. This last one is most important to me, since Tumblr does not have a built-in comment system.
Installation is easy enough: Set up an account on Disqus.com and copy some javascript into your blog’s template. I’ve done it here on the Parade of Awesomeness, and now you can leave comments directly here on the blog.
Additionally, Disqus provides a neat Community Page where you can keep track of all the comment threads, see recent and popular threads, and subscribe to comment feeds via RSS.
It’s easy and it works. What more could you ask for?