daveryder.com [the official dave ryder website]

Tax day is also Kent Hall’s birthday, so would just like to give the professor on the drumkit happy birthday wishes - here’s to you old chap, may you live to be 110 and record 1000 songs!

Here is a small sampling of Kent’s solo work, which he’s been posting on the forum:

Welcome The Spaceman

Satan Is Real

Make Yourself Comfortable Now

I think soon you will be able to access Kent’s solo work directly from his website www.kenthall.info but it is still under construction.

You can see a list of albums the DRB has released HERE.

Or you can download Mp3s directly from our downloads page HERE.

It’s all free, no strings attached.

This music is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. .

The news about Demi Moore stopping a suicide is ALL over Twitter, but I thought it would be interesting to see the actual Tweets (complete with links) as the event unfolded, so I made a source grab of the page - here it is, it’s just plain HTML, but still kind of interesting:

http://daveryder.com/demi.html

Very crazy, it’s gotta suck to be so popular all the nutbags crawl out of the woodwork and target you for no apparent reason. But at least she showed common sense and got the loony some help Way to go, Demi!
Update: Fixed the @usernames, now they point properly.

Turns out the plugin has to make use of the Social Actions API to be eligible for the Change the Web Challenge, so I included another button that, when clicked, returns the results of “change+the+world” search for actionable opportunities on Social Actions via the Social Action API .

Here is the final version:

DOWNLOAD PLUGIN>>>>http://daveryder.com/change-the-world.zip

Installation is easy: just get it, unzip it, upload it to your plugins directory and activate it from your WordPress plugins admin panel.

Description: Based on the (in)famous Hello, Dolly. When activated a Change The World button will return a list of Social Actions you can take to change the world when clicked, and a small Twitter icon will show the search results for the query “change the world” as an Atom feed of current “tweets” on Twitter when clicked. It also randomly shows a lyric from I’d Love To Change The World by the band Ten Years After, all located in the upper right of your admin screen on every page.

It also includes a GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation.

Here is a screenshot of it in action:

And here is the php executed right here in this post (notice the new “Change the World” button”).

  Population keeps on breeding

Kent commented that Alvin looks exactly like Todd, could this be a case of the two being

SEPARATED AT BIRTH?!

You be the judge:

Well, if they were separated at birth, at least we know which one got the majority of the male chromosomes:

Actually though the biggest clue for all of you rock and roll super-sleuths is the Big Red guitar - Todd was rarely seen playing a Gibson ES-335 (semi-hollowbody with F-holes), and Alvin never played anything else. Man I wish I had an ES-335 - ever since I heard Larry Carlton’s solo stuff I have coveted that tone. and here’s a big fat WAAA!

A little while ago I read about the Change the Web Challenge and was inspired to modify the Hello, Dolly plugin to display the lyrics to I’d Love To Change The World by Ten Years After (and there was much rejoicing).

So more as a joke than anything, I entered it into the challenge and posted about it here, and was really surprised when Joe Solomon actually commented about it saying,

” Hey Dave! Neat plugin! Glad the Change the Web Challenge inspired you!

If you remix some ways to take action into it via Social Actions - then you’ll have a bonafied and super fun submission! For example, you could add a feed of actions with the phrase “change the world” - http://search.socialactions.com/actions?q=%22Change+The+World%22&created=all&commit=Search

It would also be our first musical submission - which would rock! (no pun intended)

Best,
Joe

Joe Solomon
Director, Social Actions’ Change the Web Challenge”

Ok that kind of stuff eats at me, and it kept gnawing at the back of my mind until today I decided to see if I could tie it into the Twitter API, returning an ATOM feed for the search query “change the world”.

So I did and here it is: Change The World WordPress Plugin

Installation is super easy - get it, unzip it, upload it to your plugins folder and activate it. Thanks for inspiring me Joe!

Here’s a gratuitous picture of Alvin - dig that spiky wrist band:

Mashable on Tumblr posted about the stupid Tweetaholic song, and it kind of freaked me out because that’s Pete Cashmore, one of the heavyweights of social media.

And I’m basically, uh, nobody.

Also he dropped a hint in that post that I couldn’t stop think about, “Where is the Tumblr Song, eh?“.

So this is what I came up with:

DOWNLOAD SONG HERE>>>>Tumblr [Social Creatures]

UPDATE: As of 8:16PM (central) 3-27-09 the REMIX is up (*see below for details).

We are all social creatures we are all social creatures

Maybe it was coined by why the lucky stiff
Infamous for Ruby and the Hackety Hack
It’s a link- mob- audio and video mutation
Anarchaia for my generation

Oh Mr. Cashmore I think I’m dreaming
Never thought that I could tumble like this

Let’s get the band going out of their heads
Let’s see the crowd going out of control
Let’s show the after-party like it really was
Let’s take some pictures and cellphone video
And when we stumble home at 3:00 AM
We’ll have so much to write about the next day yeah
Tumblr you dirty stream of consciousness it’s ok ahh yeah

I got most of the info about tumblelogs from wikipedia, which is where I found out about _why’s role in coining the term, and also his cool Poignant Guide to Ruby and Hackety-Hack, a Ruby- and Mozilla- based environment used to teach programming to children, which I think is actually pretty awesome.

So even though I got way off-topic so far as being a song about Tumblr (sorry about that), I still have to say thanks for the inspiration Mr. Cashmore.

Recording notes: I mentioned before I edited this post that it was around a 70 track session, but that’s a bit misleading - most of those tracks were ideas that got changed, or deleted, or were scratch vocal ideas and flubs - once the final tracks were done it could all be easily condensed down to a bass track, 2 drum loop tracks, an organ track, a couple of guitars (plus the heil talkbox solo at the end) and several vocal tracks (I did the old Beatles vocal trick of double and triple tracking most of the vocal lines, and panning them L and R). I even pulled the old stunt of running the entire mix through a flanger at one point which gave it a sort of psychedelic feel that I love.

*BTW, I am doing a re-mix that I will post soon, there are a few things about the arrangement and vocal volumes levels that are bugging me, and they’ve got to be fixed, so the few people who downloaded the first version will have a one-of-a-kind -3 mix of lameness they can add to the illustrious Dave Ryder archive of fucked-up mixes that shouldn’t have been released (unfortunately, there are a LOT of them floating around).

Mouseover text for our RSS readers:“We find you guilty of closing your torrents as soon as they finish. Your sentence is unremovable Hungarian subtitles on everything.”

This guy is sick:

FUNNIEST 404 PAGE EVER Click Here - it has a text version of Marvin the Paranoid Android as web server.

Marvin’s Lullaby (or “How I Hate The Night)
Now the world has gone to bed
Darkness won’t engulf my head
I can see by infra-red
How I hate the night

Now I lay me down to sleep
Try to count electric sheep
Sweet dream wishes you can keep
How I hate the night