Yes We Can (Hold Babies)

I just heard about the adorable Yes We Can (Hold Babies) web site. You should check it out, and remember to vote, vote, vote! Find out where and what ID to bring.

25 Wedding songs

Avett Brothers - Matrimony Blitzen Trapper - Crazy On You [Buy mp3!!!] Jonathan Coulton - Skullcrusher Mountain [ Buy mp3!!!] The Boy Least Likely To - Rock Upon A Porch With You Nada Surf - Always Love [Buy mp3!!!] Elvis Perkins - While You Were Sleeping [YouTube][Buy mp3!!!] The Brunettes - If You Were Alien [Buy mp3!!!] Death Cab For Cutie - All Is Full Of Love The Brunettes - Mars Loves Venus Sufjan Stevens - To Be Alone With You Feist - I Feel It All Feist - It's Cool To Love Your Family [last.fm] The Bees - I Love You [last.fm] Wendy O. Williams and Lemmy Kilmister - Stand By Your Man Matt Costa - Sunshine Matt Costa - Sweet Rose [Lyrics] Foo Fighters - Everlong Of Montreal - Spoonful Of Sugar The Pipettes - I Love You [Live][Live][Buy] Cowboy Junkies - Sweet Jane [Live][Buy Album] Crosby, Stills & Nash - Teach Your Children The Velvet Underground - I'm Sticking With You Gothic Archies - Shipwrecked Holly Golightly - Your Love Is Mine The Cure - Love Song

Google Chrome: I'll pass

My Firefox browser crept up to using 200 megs of system resources today, so I decided to try out the new Google Chrome browser, which treats every window and tab as a different process. Close one tab, use fewer system resources. Awesome!

While Chrome installed (it took a long time!), I started looking for del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, and download manager tools for Chrome. I found del.icio.us and StumbleUpon bookmarklets, hooray! But while I was deciding if no wonderful DownThemAll download manager would be a dealbreaker (I use DownThemAll in conjunction with my blog reader to feed my podcast addiction), I noticed the blog post "Why I Uninstalled Google Chrome." It's about Google's weird privacy situation. It's bad enough that every time any one of the kajillion random people we let use our wifi does a search, that gets logged in Google's database under our IP address. Google anonymizes that, but not really.

With Chrome, Google would keep a database of not just my searches, but absolutely everything I do online. Though I am not a terrorist or a pornographer or a promising young politician susceptible to Roveian use of spying agencies, having everything I do online in someone else's database is still creepy to me, and I don't think Firefox does that (it seems like phoning home to Google every time you load a web page would slow you down a bit).

Additionally, it occurs to me that Chrome would probably not allow anything like the NoScript and AdBlockPlus Firefox extensions that currently make my web browsing experience so downright pleasant. Nearly every page you visit wants you to be running some google-analytics script, presumably to harvest information about you and show you ads. NoScript means I don't have to have my information collected and used against me in annoying video ad form, so only under the severest page malfunction circumstances do I even temporarily allow google-analytics. And AdBlockPlus means I'm puzzled when I end up on a web page where people are complaining about the annoying video ad. What annoying video ad?

I think I'll just hope that Firefox's next version incorporates the cool individual-process feature* instead of switching to Chrome and hoping that Google will suddenly care more about my privacy than its ad revenue.

*Firefox has shown a weird combination of hard work and denial on the memory problem. It's clear they're trying to fix it. But they also suggest you're a weirdo for having the problem and you really ought to use fewer windows and restart Firefox more often.

Update: Google plans to open Chrome up for extensions.

Republicans: Waaa-tastic

Top Republicans in the House of Representatives say Republicans decided not to try to shore up the U.S. economy because Nancy Pelosi hurt their feelings.

"We could have gotten there today had it not been for the partisan speech that the speaker gave on the floor of the House."

House minority leader John Boehner (R) said Pelosi's speech, which criticized the last eight years of deregulation that got us into this mess, "poisoned our conference (and) caused a number of members that we thought we could get to go south."

Pathetic.

Speaking of going south, the Dow is down almost 7% on the news that Republican feelings are so delicate.

VIVA OBAMA 2008 video

My mom sent me this video of a demographic I hadn't previously been aware of: Mariachis for Obama. Smiled the whole way through.

I shoulda learned Java

Alas, my bank account has little more than tumbleweeds in it, so my year or so of un-/self-employment is coming to an end. I must job search in earnest and stop turning up my liberal elite nose at corporations looking for automated pollutant emitters and chicken torturers.

The question now is what programming skills such corporations want me to use to design their new improved Humvee fan sites, and since I've sent out my quota of three resumes today, I get to blog those skills.

As I've opened various job postings, hoping the single handful of programming languages I'm truly comfortable with are just what they're looking for (FORTRAN anyone? Anyone?), I've been keeping track of what they are, in fact, looking for. This is completely non-scientific, of course. One glaring flaw, for example: every third company wants a straight-up Java programmer. I want to know Java (that's how the awesome, awesome, awesome Legend of Zelda for your phone! was written), but I don't honestly know Java, so I don't open those ones.

Here are the programming languages/skills companies are looking for in order of popularity in my unscientific survey:

Javascript - 8 companies
Green Ventures, Inc.
Mystery Company
Auction company
Smarsh
Mystery Company
Dealerpeak
Inspiration
ConceroTechnology

HTML - 6 companies
Sharepoint
Smarsh
Intersoft
Mystery Company
Auction company
ConceroTechnology

Java - 6 companies
Amazon
Sharepoint
Axiom
Mystery Company
Dealerpeak
DB Professionals

Linux - 4 companies
Amazon
Mystery Company
Intersoft
VxWorks

PHP - 3 companies
Green Ventures, Inc.
Mystery Company
Intersoft

MySQL - 3 companies
Green Ventures, Inc.
Mystery Company
Auction company

Visual Basic - 3 companies
Smarsh
Axiom
Selectron

Visual Basic.NET - 3 companies
Lifeport
Sharepoint
ConceroTechnology

XML - 2 companies
Intersoft
Dealerpeak

Perl - 2 companies
Amazon
Intersoft

C++ - 2 companies
Amazon
Axiom

C# - 2 companies
Selectron
ConceroTechnology

C - 2 companies
VxWorks
Mystery Company

Coldfusion - 2 companies
Mystery Company
Dealerpeak

.NET - 2 companies
Sharepoint
Intersoft

CGI - 1 company
Intersoft

CSS - 2 companies
Smarsh
Mystery Company

ASP - 2 companies
Sharepoint
Smarsh

Flash - 2 companies
Auction company
Inspiration

SQL - 1 company
Dealerpeak

AJAX - 1 company
Green Ventures, Inc.

Joomla - 1 company
Green Ventures, Inc.

Drupal - 1 company
Inspiration

SQL Server - 1 company
Smarsh

ActiveX - 1 company
Smarsh

Barack Obama - "Yes We Can" audio mp3

I was adding new podcasts to my Podcast Finder, and I saw that Barack Obama's most-listened-to track is his "Yes We Can" speech from New Hampshire. There's video of that all over the place, but I couldn't find an mp3 of the speech. So I made one using the Free Video to MP3 Converter.

Here you go:
Barack Obama - Yes We Can

And here's the original video, which only took a couple months to post to my blog from YouTube.

You'd think I'd know by now that the Internet doesn't work better if you keep clicking until it does what you want. Sorry if I Obama-spammed your feed reader.