I discovered this via snoochface’s site!  I was a big fan of this comic growing up, so it was an exciting surprise to see this this morning.  It’s quite an honor for Xanga!

In what has to be the most amazing product promotion ever, 12 7-Eleven stores across the US have been transformed into Kwik-E-Marts from the Simpsons!  So far I’ve enjoyed Buzz Cola, Krusty-O’s, a Squishee, and Radioactive Man edition #711; its a Simpson’s fan dream come true!  Here are some photos from the store in New York City; you can view the full album here:

Just got tickets to the Beastie Boy’s Summerstage show!  Tickets were $50, which is a little steep, but the Ticketmaster fees are outrageous!  Consider:

You can watch a movie in NYC for that much!  For 2 tickets, over 20% of the total cost is in fees!

However, its not the fee itself that bothers me.  Items like the “facility charge” aren’t even from Ticketmaster.  The frustration comes from thinking you are going to pay one price, and then watching the cost steadily rise with each additional checkout step.  The Summerstage website makes it clear that you are paying $50 plus and extra dollar.  I wish Ticketmaster was more upfront with how much you will actually pay.

EDIT: Hypebot has a post today that also addresses Ticketmaster’s fees, with some interesting information

Sonic Youth’s classic album Daydream Nation is remastered and rereleased this week.  I was never into Sonic Youth, which probably sounds blasphemous to some.  They are one of the seminal indie bands, but I think I was just too young to get them.  Now seems like a good time to discover this album.  Does anyone have any thoughts on it?

A while back Sean wrote a great post about Google Reader, which I was supposed to then followup in defense of Bloglines.  I never did get around to that post, but it doesn’t matter: I am loving Google Reader!  Sean, I should have listened to you from the beginning. 

I always picked RSS readers for the little things.  I started out on Bloglines, then moved to Newsgator because they only showed only updated feeds.  I moved back to Bloglines when they added that feature as well as Playlists.  In between I flirted with Rojo and Google Reader but the performance issues bogged me down. 

And now I’m giving Google Reader another try, for the simple reason that they let you mass delete feeds.  When Google Reader first came out, I loaded all my feeds into it and found Reader to be too sloooooow.  The second revision of Google Reader promised performance improvements, but I couldn’t mass delete my old feeds and start fresh.  So I ignored it. 

Yesterday, after Google announced Google Gears, I decided to give Reader another chance, and guess what: you can delete multiple feeds at once!  I deleted my old feeds, reimported my Bloglines feeds into Reader, and discovered a bunch of great features, such as “List View” and keyboard navigation.  But most importantly (and I know I’m late to the party on this one) Google Reader is FAST!  Much faster than any other online reader I’ve used.  Its a HUGE productivity improvement.  The proof?  I worked through more posts yesterday than I ever have with any other rss reader.

I’m not unhappy with Bloglines; Bloglines is great, but Google Reader is a better experience.  Is Google reader the only RSS Reader I’ll ever need?  I doubt it.  I believe there’s still a lot of room for productivity improvements when reading feeds.  But I’m always appreciative of how the little details can make a big difference.

I was messing around with Javascript and created a simple Javascript cache, similar to the cache in ASP.NET (with stuff like expirations, priorities and callbacks).  Javascript has features such as “objects as associative arrays” and “functions as data” that made this a fun exercise.  And check it out: Ajaxian posted about it this morning! 

C# vs. Java.  Perl vs. PHP.  Ruby vs. the World.  If you’re a programmer, you’ve no doubt endured a few of these arguments.  Scott Hanselman has written what I think is the be-all-end-all post on programming languages and religious wars.  I love the way he ends it; very inspirational!

Like Scott, I made a New Years Resolution to learn Ruby and Ruby on Rails.  While I may never have a practical use for it, when you consider that its a web framework built around the current “Web 2.0″ phenomenon, it has many lessons to offer all web developers.  As Mikey says: “It never hurts to know something“

The latest album from The National, Boxer, comes out today.  Fake Empire is already one of my favorite singles of the year.

Alligator, The National’s previous album, was a small but critically acclaimed release that snowballed into something big.  The National’s September 2005 show wasn’t even sold out until Clap Your Hands and Say Yeah were added as the openers.  CYHSY were just coming off a 9.0 rating from Pitchfork; the concert sold out the day after they were announced as openers.  This lead to an indie rock soccer showdown between the two bands (all in good fun).

Earlier this month, The National opened for the Arcade Fire, another band who’s rise can partially be credited to the Pitchfork Effect.  But the National have the last laugh.  Boxer received an 8.6 and Best New Music recommendation on Pitchfork, and they sold out 5 nights at Bowery Ballroom at the end of the month!  But you can still see them at a free South Street Seaport show on August 17th.

Today is a big day for new releases.  In addition to The National, I’m excited about new albums from Parts & Labor, Voxtrot and White Rabbits. 

Adult Swim released a FREE MP3 mix of songs from artists like TV On The Radio and Les Savy Fav.  They even built a flash player for your site; its running up there at the top of my site (Thanks to Xanga Themes!)

Insound recently released their own MP3 mix (it used to be free, now it comes with orders over $25), while Soul Sides releases volume 2 of their successful mix series on Tuesday.  Blogger Catbirdseat is methodical about releasing a monthly mix/podcast highlighting the best new stuff.

There are a ton of sites out there trying to build the best music recommendation systems, but mixes like these are still my favorite.  Music recommendation sites can be overwhelming, and they are only as good as your current tastes.  These mixes hit that right balance between stuff I like and new stuff I never would have discovered; the key is putting your faith in a blog/site you like.  I’m glad to see more and more sites trying stuff like this; its like taking the best of the music blogs and condensing it into manageable pieces.

(hmmm, the general theme of my life seems to be making manageable pieces out of the sea of information we are drowning in).

EDIT: Ok, I’ve never been a big fan of auto-play music on a site, and its been annoying me all day.  I just got rid of the flash player.  The songs are still worth the download though!

I don’t know about you, but I feel inundated with information these days: RSS, news sites, email, even Xanga sites!  I needed a way to queue up articles I didn’t have the time to read but wanted to revisit later.  So I wrote Readeroo, a Firefox plugin that does just that (the name comes from “Reader” and “Queue”).  Think of it as a Netflix queue for the web!  You can learn more and install it here:

• http://www.monsur.com/projects/readeroo/

If you try it out, I’d love to hear what you think!