Mike Cohen

I just got back from my trip. I had a great time, except for losing my watch at Blizzard Beach. One of the guys brought his pet sugar glider, which is the strangest creature I’ve ever seen. It looks like you shouldn’t get it wet or feed it after midnight.

I’m getting ready to leave for Orlando tomorrow morning. I’ll spend the weekend there, and while I’m up there I plan to see Attack of the Clones on a digital screen.

Despite rampant piracy which forced the record company to release it several weeks early and disrupted their advertising campaign, Eminem’s new CD sold nearly 300,000 copies during the first long weekend to debut at number 1.

“We’ve never had a record debut at No. 1 on the SoundScan chart that hasn’t had the benefit of a full six days of sales behind it,” said Mike Shalett, chief executive of SoundScan. Yet Interscope Geffen A&M, the label behind Eminem, insists that illegal copies, made from one of three closely guarded master copies sent to manufacturers, hurt the release.

I believe most people will buy a CD after sampling several tracks by downloading MP3s, if it’s something they want to listen to.

Cody just killed a huge palmetto bug. For anyone who doesn’t live in Florida, that’s what we have instead of cockroaches. They’re basically the same thing except bigger & more disgusting. This one was the size of a small mouse.

Cody played with it for about 10 minutes before he finally killed it and he kept watching it for another 15 minutes to make sure it was really dead.

Homogenized Music [Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters]

Someone finally said it: radio is crap. I almost never listen to the radio for music, since they never play anything I want to hear. I’m not into top-40 stuff – I don’t listen to Britney & N’sync.

Lately I’ve started listening to Miami’s new all dance music station, 93.1, but even they play the same songs over and over again. At least it isn’t top-40 pop songs.

Most of the time I just listen to CDs. I usually burn 80-minute music mix CDs to listen to in my car, so I don’t have to change CDs as often & I can listen to the songs I like rather than what the record companies think I should listen to.

Devin Powell’s car wouldn’t start this afternoon, because he left his headlights on all day while he was at school. So we pushed the little mercury all around the parking lot (and pretty damn fast too) before realizing you can’t start an automatic that way (apparently). So he got jumped. But now Layne can’t find out where those jumper cables jumped off to… [Jeremiah Rogers Weblog]

That was never a problem with my 1995 Toyota Corolla. I left my headlights on all the time, and as soon as I removed my key from the ignition & opened my door, it would automatically turn off the headlights. That was a great feature, and I got used to just leaving them on and not thinking about it.

Unfortunately, that changed with my 2003 Corolla. They added daylight running lights & it now has an alarm if I forget to shut the headlights, but they removed that auto shutoff feature. I’ll have to get used to thinking about turning the headlights on & off again.

Other than that, I love my new car. It’s bigger than the 95 model & a lot more comfortable.

Apparently it’s illegal to sell dildos in the state of Texas. Worse yet, having more than six dildos constitutes the intent to distribute them, so zealous dong ownership alone is against the law. No wonder Bush is such a tight-ass! [Adam Curry: Adam Curry’s Weblog]

I knew Texas had the nation’s dumbest laws, but this proves it.

I just spent a few hours getting WorldBeatPlanet back up. BounceWeb had a serious hardware crash, resulting in loss of many accounts & all data. Thankfully I always keep backups of all of my code on my own machine. Unfortunately all of the content is in a MySQL database and my SQL backup was almost a month old.

This time I plan to set up a cron job to automatically back it up & send a copy to my machine. I’ve been able to do that easily with MacMegasite, since I can connect to their server remotely from mysqldump running on my own machine. However, bounceweb doesn’t allow remote connections to mysql, so I’ll have to set up a job on their server with their help.

I just bought a 2003 Toyota Corolla today, trading in my 1995 Corolla. If I kept the old car, it would have cost me $800 to fix the air conditioner. I had spent $400 on a minor repair just before I moved, so it was getting to the point where it cost too much to keep.

Awwww…. how cute!

[Yahoo News]