I’m very sad this evening. As I sit here, I’m working on several projects on the laptop. The television was running silently in the background, and I decided I needed some musical uplifting. I’ve been very out of touch to my usual listening haunts lately, specifically KCRW and my Friday night fav Kevin Ponthier’s show Let’s Get Lost. It happens sometimes, work and family become central, things get out of whack. Tonight I needed to get back into whack, and the archives for Friday’s Let’s Get Lost are where I headed.

But it appears Kevin has left! No mention of the show exists anymore, and the show has also been removed from the archives? I’m really bummed. Just a few days ago, Kevin himself left a comment here. At the time, I was just to happy to see the comment. I didn’t actually put 2 and 2 together until tonight.

A short history on why the show made an impact on me:

I grew up in L.A. listening to KROQ. Back then it was all 80’s, Depeche Mode and all. After High School, I moved to Nebraska for college. Nebraska is like a huge black hole for music. Honest. I held onto my roots for about a year, until the local party scene took over, where I became a hard rock/top 40/classic rock listener. Try and avoid it back then and it was nigh impossible.

I longed for what I remembered of my radio youth. Crazy DJ’s on KROQ who spun tunes I’d never heard of and made me rock.

When I finally made my way back home to L.A., I was greeted with what KROQ has become. KRAP. Total KRAP. And so, in my depression, I began searching the dial. I found KCRW. Odd tunes, odd sounds. DJ’s who actually chose ALL the music they played. No commercials? What was this thing?

Fantastic, and nothing less. My eyes opened to a whole new musical world with Morning Becomes Eclectic at first. In the evenings, I was getting my groove on with Metropolis and Nocturna. Nic Harcourt, Jason Bentley, Raúl Campos, these DJ’s redefined what I had come to expect from a radio disc jockey.

Then I found Let’s Get Lost on Friday nights, and my metamorphosis was complete. Kevin Ponthier played things that made me question all my past listening habits. I began to realize just how closed-minded I had been throughout my youth. How could I have been so blind? I had a new dialect, and I felt exhilarated.

And so, it’s with a sad heart I bid Mr. Kevin Ponthier farewell. I hope to find him in his next gig. I hope our government doesn’t stifle my ability to hear him and the brilliant choices in music he offers up. And it looks as though I need to get back to listening to my still favorite station just a bit more, so things like this won’t pass me by again.

Do yourself a favor. Go hit up KCRW.com and take a good listen. Forget what you know, for you know nothing. Yet.

I received an email today, from a Yahoo! email address, asking if I’d like to purchase the kellysims.com domain. Here is the email below:

Hi,

I own the .COM version of your domain name kellysims.info and I am wanting to sell it.

I was wondering if you would be interested in buying this domain for $95 from me seen as though you own the same domain but in another extension ?

If you are interested please get back to me.

Shawn

I remembered looking into that domain back when I bought up all the kellysims.whatevers that were open and that I wanted. The .com address was taken then. So when I got this email, I was happy. $95 was a bit high though. So first, I decided to do a Whois on the domain, and see if “Shawn” really owned it or not.

For those not in the know on these things, there is a web service called Whois that allows you to pull up ownership details of a domain. Many domains are open for viewing, but many are closed to prying eyes. Using the Whois at Network Solutions revealed it was not actually owned by anyone at all, let alone anyone named “Shawn.”

So I logged into my account at 1and1.com, and bought the domain for a whopping $5.99/year. Within a few hours I had it pointing to my main address, http://anotherbrightidea.org, as I do with all my other kellysims domains.

The moral of the story: Do your homework, and don’t ever, ever, ever trust an email.

Oh, and “Shawn”, thanks buddy. You saved me $89.01 today.

Brent Simmons has released a sneak-peak of the upcoming NetNewsWire 3, a news reader for the Mac. I’m a die-hard NNW user and fan, so this is big news. Problem is, it’s not even Alpha software. It’s “danger”, as in 3.0d46, the “d” being for danger. I’m not quite ready to take the plunge on that yet. This machine is for work first, play second.

Good thing he’s also put up a screenshot of the new release. First thing I noticed is a new icon set across the top, as well as what looks like a preview window in the bottom left, like iTunes has for album art. I’ll reserve final thoughts on the UI when I can actually run the app.

A couple of things I’d like to see in the new release:

A contextual menu item for emailing links to articles Growl notifications (apparently included in this release) NetNewsWire is a rock solid application, and I hope future releases keep that. I spend a lot of my time in NNW, too much some might say, but I also reap a lot of information from it.

So Brent, the big question, when are you going to stop teasing us and release 3.0?

Those of you reading the site in Internet Explorer, 20% according to Mint, can now see the site as it was intended to be seen. I had run across a few hacks to make transparent PNG files (that’s an image format for the web) work in INternet Explorer 5.5+, but none worked as well as I liked. Using this new method, all the sites icons are now visible to IE users.

This came across the feeds the other day, and I gave it a shot. There’s a slight hit in performance on some pages, with page load times getting a bit longer, so I’m not sure how long I’ll leave this set this way.

I’d like to give a shout out to the icon creator, Mark James, whose Silk Icons are in liberal use throughout the site. These are amazing little icons, full of color and detail. Really great work Mark!

I’m no pro-blogger. I never set out to be, and I still have no aspirations toward that goal. I do, however, enjoy seeing the minimal traffic I do get. So as the year winds down, and my traffic seems to be on an upswing, I’d like to thank you.

Thanks for stopping by, and if you like the site, drop a comment in somewhere and let me know you’re here. I have more plans for the site as the year progresses, but work always pulls me away from that. Work, play, it all blends in together. How do you tell the difference when you enjoy what you do so much?

The latest installment of iTunes, version 7, is a fairly big upgrade considering all the new features, and for the most part I’m quite happy with it (crashing has stopped for now). There is a new feature I wanted to mention here today though, that also touches on something that a lot of us tech/geek types can probably understand. iTunes now shows in it’s newly designed side pane, the number of un-listened podcasts.

At first I thought this was a great feature. I often find that new podcasts have been added to my list without my knowing about them. I’d actually been thinking about making/finding some kind of plugin or something that would Growl me when a new podcast came in, so that I could schedule a listen. Now I have a nice un-listened count to show me that there are some ready in the waiting.

The problem is that I am busy. I work two jobs for a living, and I have a family. As it stands right now, I have a hard time keeping up with all of my RSS feeds. This un-listened count started at my upgrade point with 5 un-listened podcasts. Now, as I type this, I am at 15. It’s starting to feel like a nag! Holy cow! 15 podcasts! I’d better stop working and get to listening! Yes, I know some of you out there are able to listen and work at the same time. I’m not. While I work, it’s Groove Salad or nothing.

This gets to my main point. Time. As I’ve become more social on the web, I find that it’s taking more and more time out of my day just to be social. My RSS reader stands currently at 93 feeds. I’ve added two in the last two days. And don’t even get me started on Flickr.

The rate at which others post information is a mirror of my steady decline in work completed. I can’t keep up. So I end up deleting feeds, not being as commenty(hey, it’s my blog) on Flickr, and I hardly ever post anything here. My plate is fairly full right now and that should make me satisfied. But it does not.

As a typical geek, I crave more input. Daily, hourly. Feed me, great Internet. Feed my thirst for knowledge, no matter how esoteric!

I’ll finish that advertisement later. I’ll do the web comps after midnight, on my third pot of Moka Java. I’ll reply to friends emails right after I clear out all my unread feeds. Yes honey, I’ll get off the computer in just a minute. Just one more minute. I just have to reply to a comment here…

Lifehacker ran a post today, based on a post from Slate magazine, about what the best computer upgrade would be. Both agree that a larger screen is it, and I have to concur.

About six months ago I upgraded from a 19” Dell monitor to a beautiful 20” widescreen Dell 2005FPW Flat Panel Monitor (it’s the same hardware as the Apple, but with Dell’s more affordable pricing). Since then, my work has been wonderful. I also now don’t suffer from headaches like I did when working in front of a standard monitor. The LCD is really much better on my eyes, considering how many hours a day they are in front of it.

So, what’s your favorite or most anticipated upgrade?