Joel Johnson Has Him a Blog

More details and pictures soon, but I just wanted to note that we raised $1656 for the Children's Hospital of Montefiore and Child's Play Charity last night. Not too shabby!

No more messing around. We've got some serious charity rocking to do. And you've got an Xbox 360 to win.

FÜNDE RAZOR: GUITAR ROCKIN' FOR THE CHILDREN

What: Drinking, Gaming, Prizes, including a chance to win Microsoft's hot new Xbox 360 console.

• Play Guitar Hero on a giant screen!

• Drink some of New England's finest beers! In cups!

• Play classic stand-up arcade games by the bushel!

• Win one of our dozens of ROFL RAFL prizes, including an Xbox 360 or a signed Game Boy by internationally-acclaimed DJ Nullsleep!

When: Starts 8PM Tuesday, December 13th, 2005. Guitar Hero Rock Off Starts at 8:30.

Where: Barcade, Brooklyn's finest over-21 classic gaming and beer drinking establishment.
388 Union Avenue, Brooklyn, New York; Between Powers and Ainslie
L train to Lorimer (Union Ave Exit) or G Train to Metropolitan

How: There ain't no cover change to rock! Show up ready to play games, drink top-quality brews, and buy tickets to win an Xbox 360 and other great prizes!

Why: We're doing it for the kids. All proceeds from the raffle and competitions go directly, 100%, no overhead to the kids of The Children's Hospital of Montefiore in the Bronx, via the Child's Play Charity.

Who: Everyone is welcome, as long as you're over 21. It is Barcade, after all.

On the web at JoelJohnson.com, ChildsPlayCharity.com, BarcadeBrooklyn.com, and Montekids.org.

Sponsors include: Microsoft, Nintendo, Kotaku.com, Brian Crecente, Noah Robischon, and Harmonix.

FÜNDE RAZOR is wholly the responsibility of Joel Johnson and not Barcade, Montefiore, or Child's Play. If something goes sideways, blame him.

RSVP is not necessary, but if you have the time, a quick email to Joel (using the information at the top of this site) would be appreciated.

We're getting together at Barcade, Brooklyn's finest beer and classic arcade game emporium, to raise money for Child's Play Charity, at 8PM on Tuesday, December 13th. It's all a bit last minute, so some details are still jelling, but we'll be raffling off lots of schwag, including a special grand prize that I hope to announce by tomorrow.

Perhaps even better than free stuff, we'll be turning up the volume stupid loud and playing round after round of drunken Guitar Hero on a twenty foot screen.

If you'll be in New York, come on by. We're not charging at the door, so you'll have extra money to buy tickets for the ROFL RAFL. (No, we won't actually call it that, although I want to badly). Update: I think I'm going to call it that.

If you have anything you'd like to donate, feel free to contact me directly. If you plan on attending, you don't have to RSVP, although a quick email wouldn't be bad just so I can have an idea of who's going to make it.

More details very, very soon.

And check out Barcade. They're hosting us for free.

Update 1: Seriously cool prize added to the RAFL today. A signed, original Game Boy from world-famous bloop DJ Nullsleep! One of a kind, because he doesn't have hands!

In fact, Frances became a bit of a local celebrity that day. After the game while she was waiting for Murray to get the car, she was immediately recognized by a group of guys. “They said, ‘you’re the woman who did the three-story beer bong!’ ” Frances recalled.

Party all the time [Michigan Daily]

I live under a curse, like the serpent. For years, my hard drives have died. Some die slowly and some die quickly, but they all die at the worst possible moments. I have learned to live with this curse by keeping multiple copies of important data on both local and remote machines, as well as duplicating important things, like my music collection onto multiple drives.

Recently, while I was going through my ~100GB music collection, I noticed that I was missing files. A song here, a song there. Occasionally a whole folder. Somehow my drive had been slowing eating the data. That made me sad, like a panda. I pulled that Maxtor drive out and replaced it with a Seagate, but I'm sure the curse will strike it soon enough.

So when I read this evening on Boing Boing that MP3Tunes was offering a music 'locker' for $40 a year, I hopped on quick, like a bunny. As far as I can tell, the Locker would allow me to upload all my files—gigs and gigs—, then both stream them down at a listenable bitrate (128kbps) as well as allow me to sync them to multiple devices, including PCs.

After the positive experience I've had with Flickr, I'm totally not averse to paying someone else to manage my data. In fact, it's the great irony of the cheap storage age: now that I can afford a terabyte or more of RAIDed storage in a file server, I'd rather just pay someone a yearly fee to handle it for me. Someone wise, like the owl.

Problem is, the Oboe software that comes from MP3Tunes doesn't seem to work at all. Not only does the remote Bonjour-based streaming endlessly spool in iTunes, the Oboe Sync program pukes and tells me that I need to install iTunes 6 for it to work. I have iTunes 6. It is strong, like bull.

I sent MP3Tunes an email and despite their assurances that I would get a response in the "next three to five business days," I quickly (~10 minutes) got back a message that said they knew it was a problem and were working on a fix. They didn't answer my second question about using the service to upload all my MP3s into the Locker, then downloading them to another PC in original, full-quality form. I hope that they get their act together soon, but for now I would suggest giving them a few days to get it together, so you don't get screwed, like me.