We passed this today – a giant inflatable Homer in a Santa suit.

JWZ has a fun method of rating all the songs he has on iTunes:

“This was fun, because it turned out that there was a lot of music in there that I didn’t even recognize! It was a good way to discover that one really good track on an otherwise-crappy ten-year-old album. Sometimes it takes hearing a song out of context with the rest of its album to give it another chance.”

It’s something I could do with trying out myself. There are albums in my iTunes list that I’ve never heard before, some stuff from Michael’s collection that I maybe didn’t like before (there was a time, for example, when I didn’t like Metallica), that I might really enjoy now. I’ll probably get bored of listening to Contraband eventually, and this sounds a fun way of digging out the good stuff in our very diverse collection.

• JWZ – song ratings

UPDATE — The story so far… the Epi was originally ordered from GAK, who couldn’t despatch before the end of January, and seemingly couldn’t keep their telephone lines free to enable us to ring and talk to them about it, so the order was cancelled. After a fruitless search around local stores, I had pretty much given up on getting one. Until I decided to go through every store I remember seeing advertised in various guitar magazines, and hey presto! Found one at Soho Soundhouse. Taking a bit of a compromise on the colour, having an ebony finish instead of alpine white, but I should have one of these to review after all. Christmas is now resumed, hurrah!

Now to return you to the original article…

When we were just starting to get into guitars at the beginning of the year, I thought I’d never have the chance to play, let alone own, a Les Paul. I knew there were copies out there from the likes of Vintage or Shine, but assumed that even Epiphone’s range would remain out of reach because decent Les Paul guitars do not come cheap.

[Image:1214 size=original]

This one, however, does. The Les Paul Special II (curiously just known as the Special II on Epiphone’s website) has all you’d expect from these beautiful guitars, and for about the same price you’d expect to pay for a Squier Strat, or a cheap Telecaster copy.

More information, including current price, here

I’ll be posting a full review of one of these beauties in the New Year, ‘cos I’m getting one for Christmas. Thank you Michael. I love you.

Simon-le-bon at GuitarGAS offers some interesting advice on keeping the learning going:

“We’re lucky now too. There are lots of magazines for guitarists. One issue of Guitar Techniques has enough material to keep anyone going for over a month.”

I found this inspiring because my ESP and my Danelectro have been sat gathering dust for several months now. Not that I’m in any way proficient in my playing, but it’s easy to get bored. I’ll put a page of tips together soon, but for now keep an eye on GuitarGAS for tips and product reviews.

• GuitarGAS

Nature magazine has conducted a study of scientific articles in both Wikipedia and Britannica, to see how accurate they are. They selected articles from both, and submitted them to experts for peer review, without telling the experts where each article came from. The result was that Britannica was slightly more accurate.

• Wikipedia averaged 4 errors per article.
• Britannica averaged 3 errors per article. There were eight ‘serious’ errors found in total, four in each encyclopedia.

On the whole, considering the cost of them each, Wikipedia still looks like a pretty reasonable bet for researching, but it’s worth doing some double-checking for anything important in either case.

• Full report from Nature magazine

(Thanks to Boing Boing.)

Latest Update: – Added Tampon Crafts.

Making Decorations

• Tampon Crafts – an assortment of different Christmas decorations, all made from tampons. Hmm.

Tree Decorations

• Tampon Angel – yes, really – an angel made from a tampon. Looks surprisingly good, actually. I’ll not be trying it myself though. They’d only become cat toys.
• Keri Smith’s Portable Christmas Tree – Print, cut, glue, colour, decorate. Now wasn’t that easier than wrestling with a six-foot spruce?

The Glass is Too Big has a good post, suggesting you start abusing books more – only your books, not library books.

I dogear for 2 different purposes. I use the top right corner of the right page as my bookmark. I also use the bottom corner of a page that contains something interesting as a marker as well. That lower dogear is often accompanied by notes written in the margin. By folding over the bottom corner of interesting pages, I can quickly look at a book of mine and see how useful I find it. It also lets me flip through a book I haven’t used in a while and easily find the bits I’m likely to want to find again.

Nice simple idea – he says it also makes it easy to see how much useful stuff is in a book at a glance, just by seeing how many pages are turned up at the bottom.

• Read the full article on The Glass is Too Big

(Thanks to Boing Boing.)

velvet revolver have revealed their plans to record a concept album.

Following in the footsteps of Green Day, who received worldwide acclaim for their rock opera ‘American Idiot’, the band have been working on the LP for months, but are remaining tight-lipped about its content.

See the full NME article here

Meanwhile…

The band will also be ringing in 2006 with a special New Year’s Eve show at the Starland Ballroom in Sayreville, New Jersey.

McKagan explained: “It’s a tiny little club where people can hang from the rafters. It’s gonna be hot and sweaty and ferocious, but that’s rock and roll.”

Hot. Sweaty. Ferocious. Band with Slash in…

…I think I need a cold shower.

I’ve just discovered that I’ve been quoted on a story on C|Net

Update2: I couldn’t fix the problems with the main feed, but I’ve managed to add a full feed as an extra. Rather than redirect the main feed to this, though, I’m leaving the partial feed in place too, and adding the option of a full feed. It’s going to be labelled as ‘Ad Supported’. It actually isn’t at the moment, but will be eventually, and I don’t want to be seen as offering something then taking it away.

We’ve actually found a couple of ways of potentially gaining some income from the full feed anyway, by splicing in searches and Amazon links, but these won’t be big extra ads, just links in the text, and we’ll keep it fairly low-key. Anyway, if you prefer full-fat feeds, just switch to http://pigpog.com/rss-full. Sorry for the mess recently, but this will all be worth it for those who hate leaving their RSS Readers

Update: I’ve had to switch this back over to partial feeds, I’m afraid. The trick given by Performancing outputs the full content of the article, but doesn’t pass it through the input filters, so readers are ending up getting the Markdown code, so none of the links or images worked, and the formatting is all screwed up. Sorry.

I’ve just made the change that should make our RSS feeds output the full content of the posts, not just the summaries. If you don’t subscribe to our RSS feeds, nothing changes. If you do, you’ll start getting the whole articles rather than just the first bits of them.

Why?

We’d only changed to partial feeds when we implemented the Drupal system because that’s all Drupal does – there isn’t the option of ourputting full feeds. Recently, though, an article on Performancing explained how to change that. I took a bit of time to think about it, but I’ve come to the conclusion that full feeds are better for us than partial feeds.

There’s two reasons I’d hesitated…

• Bandwidth usage. The bandwidth used by RSS clients fetching the feed was fairly high anyway – outputting the full posts rather than just snippets of them would push that up even higher. We recently switched back to FeedBurner for our feeds, so that’s not really an issue any more – they cache the feeds and they deal with the bandwidth issue.
• Content ‘theft’. Some people set up sites that just grab the contents of other people’s feeds, and republish them on their site – all automated, and often without even stating where the content has been taken from. But letting fear of somone else gaining from our work stop us from giving our most regular users the best experience we can seems stupid.

Anyway, it will probably mean a whole lot of reposting – RSS readers will probably think all the articles are updated again – sorry about that.

In the end, though, it’s about giving people the content they want, where and how they want it. I like reading full feeds, so our readers probably do too.