Steven Brust is one of my all-time favorite writers. I heard of him from another of my favorite writers, Roger Zelazny. Anyway, he’s having a tough time right now (Steven, not Roger. Roger passed away in 1995. Wow it seems incredibly sad that he’s been gone that long, it seems only very recently that I heard of his passing).

Anyway, some friends of Brust talked him into putting a donation page up, and I’m just kind of spreading the word, in more ways than one…(I can almost hear my friends thinking, “huh? what does THAT mean?).

Well if you like Firefly (and I actually don’t have any friends who don’t like Firefly, now that I think about it), you’ll be pleased to find that Mr. Brust wrote a wonderful story of our friends Mal, Zoe, Wash, River, Simon, Kaylee and Jayne having a typically hair-raising adventure, and best of all IT’S FREE. Click Here to read it.

AND THEN GO DONATE SOME MONEY, BITCH. ‘Cause when the fickle finger of fate decides to strike YOU, it’d be nice to have some good karma built up, wouldn’t it?

So here’s a picture of this awesomely talented dude, wow he looks like a biker, doesn’t he? Well you know what they say about judging a book by it’s cover, heh….anyway Good Luck, Steven and get well soon!

Mouseover text for our RSS readers: “Buy his books, too – they’re bad to the bone, I mean I actually put this guy in the same class as Jack Vance, Gene Wolfe and Frank Herbert. And Zelazny, of course.”

Obviously if you’re reading this you can see the new flash header – it was tough getting something cool that wasn’t ridiculously huge (file size wise) – the first lame attempt was 1.4 megabytes! (I said NFW). Now it rolls in at a svelte 105 kb’s (sweet).

I used the Kimili Flash Embed plugin (a verry nice job Michael), but since I had some difficulty actually figuring out precisely where to put the syntax into the header.php file, I thought I would show anybody else who may be interested.

Open your theme’s* header.php file and around line 35 remove these two lines:

<a href="<?php echo get_settings('home'); ?>" title="<?php bloginfo('name'); ?>">

<h1><?php bloginfo('name'); ?></h1>

But leave the line between them:

<div id="headerimg">

Just below that is where you insert the syntax for the Kimili plugin, my final code looks like this:

<div id="page">
<div id="header">
<div id="headerimg">
kml_flashembed movie="http://www.daveryder.com/header.swf" height="200" width="758" /
<div class="description"><?php bloginfo('description'); ?></div>
</div>
</div>

There are supposed to be square brackets [ ] around the Kimili syntax shown above, i.e. before kml_flashembed and after width=”758″ / – I had to remove them because if I didn’t, the header would just load, heh as I found out.

So, anyway I love it especially my flashing negative skull which is eerie as all fuck, but just in time for Halloween:

*note – remember, even though it doesn’t look like it I use the default Kubrick theme – it’s just modified and hacked to hell and back. in a handbasket.

AND UPDATE 11-12-08 – not using the flash header anymore (frankly it was a bit annoying), but the plugin works fine. If u want to see it click here.

I’m going to start doing some podcasting soon, so I thought it would be nice to create a graphic for the show – here it is in all it’s raging glory:

For those of you familiar with Electric Man, this makes sense

BTW, there are some indications that Leopold Von Beck may not be dead after all….WTF!?!

I wasn’t happy with a few things about my old contact form, so I switched to Contact Form 7. It’s pretty awesome – it allows me to use the askimet spam filter and CAPTCHA, which I’m totally digging.

Check it out: Contact Me.

So yeah, u kixors the ass Takayuki Miyoshi.

If you look to the right you will see that I have implemented Feedburner here on the old el website – it should help me keep track of the number of readers better, so if you have a minute sign up for the RSS feed – it’s very quick and easy (if you already subscribe to the old RSS feed you don’t need to do anything feedburner is hip to that – at least I think it is, I will know more in a day or two).

I’ll start off this post by saying the letter “E” on my keyboard is malfunctioning, which is annoying as hll hll hll all fuck. Talk about pissing m off. About every third E I type doesn’t show and I have to go back and strike the key HARD. Hey that’s better, I’ll just type harder.

Anyway, the story circulating the intertubes about the mystery chinese iPhone worker girl got me thinking about internet fashions that flash around overnight and die off as quickly, it reminds me of flocks of birds or schools of fish that fly (or dart, as the case may be) in new directions seemingly as one organism. These displays of group behavior have always fascinated me (probably because when the group veers right I tend to drift left). Well, so long as the model doesn’t begin to mimic the behavior of lemmings it’s all harmless fun I suppose (although now that I think about it if a few groups were to jump off cliffs it wouldn’t be so bad).

But the iPhone story is great, and I hope for her sake the evil overlords in management don’t fire her (actually, if anyone should be shit-canned, it should be the nutsack who took the pictures and forgot to delete them IMNSHO). This picture came from Wired.com – where there are more and bigger pics, and more on the story:

My old friend Mike Winchester sent me an email today, and proved his intelligence once again by cracking the secret code. Good job Mike, you’re the first! I am forced to assume the rest of the readers here are either apathetic or stupid (probably about a 60/40 split heh). Remember fools, x=4.

Anyway, it was great to here from Mike again he was one of my best friends when we were classmates at that superb institute of education Pacific High School. Which reminds me, the class of 83 25 year reunion is coming up and I haven’t yet decided whether I’ll go or not (I did not attend any of previous ones). So is anybody who reads this blog going? Drop me a line and let me know – if enough of my friends go I guess I’ll go too – we can sit in back, get drunk and laugh at everybody who got fat – wait, that’s what we did in high school.

Matt Brotherson wrote a nice plugin that uses weather.com’s XML web service to display local weather called WP-Weather Manager – it’s very cool and easy, and I have it in the News/Weather section of my links page if you want to chex it out. Nice job, Matt!

BTW if your wondering about the long period of silence from me, I’ll be sending out a newsletter and posting info soon – it really boils down to being extremely busy, but more on that later

Dan the man and I celebrated his birthday the 22nd (by drinking many beers and jamming at his home studio), so I thought I’d extend our best wishes to Dan here on teh internets – who BTW plays bass, guitar, keyboards and harmonica (and sings, too – oh yeah he’s a regular one man band).

No, really he is seriously super talented, he has always fronted his own band and is an awesome songwriter (and has done for years – ever since I met him during the Rhythm Gypsy days, way back when), and we are very lucky he is willing to play the bass for us and take time from his own projects to help us out.

Thanks budski, and Happy Birthday!

Don Xavier Cole’s birthday is today, and tomorrow it is Miles Davis’ birthday, which seems appropriate as they are both badass trumpet players. In fact, I can’t speak highly enough of Don in regards to his piano and trumpet playing, and his creativity because although the band shares song writing credit on most of our songs, it’s Don who frequently comes up with the chord progression or melody that sparks it off, or suggests a bridge or rhythmic device that is used more often than not.

In short, he’s AWESOME and we’re very lucky to have him as a major force in our band. A lot of our songs wouldn’t even exist without him. Here’s a photo of the preposterous monstrosity himself (BTW to be called a monster amongst the hep jazz cats is considered a compliment):

Curiously enough, the great guitar player Sonny Sharrock also died on Miles’s birthday (which is really weird considering he played with Miles on A Tribute to Jack Johnson, obviously NOT the Jack Johnson you’re probably thinking of). I only bring that up because our drummer Kent had frequently compared my playing to Sharrock’s before I had even heard of him, which I think is just a series of strange coincidences. But cool. And flattering.

Anyway Happy Bithday Don! (I can always remember Don’s birthday from a line in Rush’s Lakeside Park: “Everyone would gather on the 24th of May, sitting in the sand to watch the fireworks display”.