This post is a tad off-topic, but I know some of us share this sphere of interest. I recently got a great write-up for a show my band played in Brooklyn:

There are no airy disco beats, no acoustic jams, and certainly no taking of prisoners as Ben Franklin is a live act that goes for the jugular with every song. Even the borderline kitschy, “Timmeh,” dedicated to our Treasury Secretary Tim Gieger [sic], is a sludge rock tune that sounds like Dinosaur Jr.’s J. Macis if he ever got the rocks removed from his mouth and asked, better yet demanded, “Where are my taxes?!”

Not bad. I didn’t know that we could be described as “neopunk,” and I never would have thought “sludge rock,” but this is not a review to complain about.

Apparently Michael Bay shows us how. Very funny review of the new Transformers movie, via @warrenellis.

As the Future Ruby conference in Toronto draws near, I’m getting more and more excited about the event. Within the last day or two the full list of speakers
has been posted on their site along with summaries of the talks, and it’s eye-popping. They range from the philosophical to the far-out to the highly technical. Programming with DNA modules? What?

def MajorKusanagi
  mixin homo_sapien, cyborg

  add :xray_vision, :therm_optic_camouflage
  suppress :cancer
end

I’m particularly looking forward to experiencing another Giles Bowkett presentation, learning about the Rhodes, Cucumber and Tokyo Cabinet projects from the people behind the tech, and attending another FAILCamp.

We did a lot of chatting with people at Ruby Fringe last year, it’s a good place to put your finger in the air and see which way the winds are blowing. I’ll be curious to see how many of the folks are moving into iPhone and other mobile platform development.

I think there are still a few tickets left — you should come! You don’t need to be a Ruby programmer to dig on a lot of this.

One of my favorite artists, Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls, has managed to make more money over Twitter in 10 hours ($19,000) than she has from her recent major-label released album ($0). She’s got a great write-up describing how she did it, but the main points are brilliant and obvious — she’s dealing direct, she’s giving the people what they want. This isn’t so much surprising as it is one of those bell-weather moments for the music industry. It’s also the first time I’ve actually heard of anybody really making money off Twitter, and it’s nice to see it’s not one of those “Internet marketing experts.”

There were some very discouraging signs from Apple out of the WWDC with regard to iPhone developers and the App Store review process, but it sounds like the pile of online criticism is having some effect on them:

I also learned, through various statements and implications, that the App Review team tries to actively avoid major blog publicity about bad rejections, and it’s something they take very seriously. This means, fortunately for us as iPhone-dev bloggers, that we matter and we should continue to bitch incessantly whenever anything is rejected for an invalid or ridiculous reason..