Bradezone

How about another round of frivolous updates? Okay then.

• I recently joined Merge in Greenville as the new lead developer. The team is great, and if you check the bios, you see that oddly enough none of us are native to the area. They somehow found me despite my interviewing for jobs in such random places as New York City and Portland, Oregon. I’m eager to see what comes of the new gig.
• In related job news, my resume was also found by Amazon, and they set up a phone chat with me this coming Tuesday. It looks like they develop with Java, which is not my favorite language in the world, but it sounds like they have a job opening for development work on their main site, so we’ll see what the deal is there.
• This is the first Bradezone post from my new MacBook Pro.
• I put a new thing on my Apps page—a script that improves Firefox’s password-saving feature.
• Hopefully I’ll be moving out of my crappy house in the forest with a broken roof, blown fuses, no DirecTV, and no heat, and into a better location sooner than later.
• Recent fantasy drafts were held for hockey and basketball, and I brought my A-game to each. Starring for Belvedeeks Junior High are such NHL dynamos as Alex Ovechkin, Nick Lidstrom, and Roberto Luongo, while NBA stalwarts Elton Brand, Shawn Marion, and Chris Bosh lead the way for the Last Minute Wings.
• I am still in a fair state of mental disarray about a certain situation.
• I might be late to the party, but Black Cherry by Goldfrapp is one of the best albums I’ve heard in a while.
• The Titans are still undefeated. Is this the year?

That’s the name of this new thing I concocted. It’s a website that allows you to build your collection of movies, TV shows, and video games. Specify which ones you actually own or simply the ones you’ve watched or played. Post comments and reviews about them and their respective artists and creators. The interface is fairly clean and simple, so hopefully the experience is intuitive. I whipped the site up within a couple of weeks because I could not find anything else out there that lets you keep track of stuff this way. Hopefully it’s useful for others as well.

Klection gets its data from Freebase, which is a tool similar to Wikipedia but much easier for other websites to access, and which also allows you to correct erroneous or incomplete data yourself if you happen to notice any. I’m running the site on Google App Engine, a hot-off-the-press framework that enables Python developers to build very scalable sites that employ Google’s infrastructure. So without further ado, go give Klection a try, and let me know your thoughts.

In high school my three best friends and I formed a conglomerate called “The Bench,” so named after our morning meet-up location. Our specialties were absurdist humor and social commentary, and our enemy was “fakeness.” I have had a longstanding hatred of many cultural norms that are steeped in fakeness, particularly one that I designated “the party scene.” Among the hallmarks of this way of life are those strange institutions we know as nightclubs. Now, years after my seething disdain for them had become dormant, one man has absolutely flayed the entire lifestyle better than I ever could. Read, learn, and strive to better yourselves.