If you know anything about rickrolling, then you’ve heard enough of Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” in the past week, which is I guess the point of rickrolling. A number of people have been proposing alternative tunes for rickrolling, so I thought I would offer my nominations for the:

Rickrolling Top 20 Hall of Shame

• Come On Eileen - Dexy’s Midnight Runners

If there were no Rick Astley we would have Dexyrolling.

• Macarena - Los Del Rio

• Who Let The Dogs Out - Baha Men

Please put the dogs back in before someone gets hurt.

• Walking on Sunshine - Katrina and the Waves

I walked on something and it doesn’t smell like sunshine.

• Milkshake - Kellis

It tastes more like that non-dairy stuff they have at Foster’s Freeze.

• Yamo Be There – Michael McDonald

What in God’s name is he saying? “Heavenly father watching us all. We take from each other and give nothing at all. Well it’s a dog-gone shame..” Oh.

• Horse With No Name – America

These lyrics were not so much written as culled from a night of first-grade Mad Libs.

• Girl You Know It’s True - Milli Vanilli

• Wake Me Up Before You Go Go – Wham

Sneaking quietly out the door.

• Do You Really Want to Hurt Me - Culture Club

• Love Plus One - Haircut 100

• Muskrat Love - The Captain and Tenille

• Hey There, Delilah - Plain White T’s

• The Sign – Ace of Base

• Small World Theme (It’s a Small World After All) - Walt Disney Productions

• We Built This City on Rock and Roll – Jefferson Starship

Yes, but apparently without the proper permits.

• How Am I Supposed to Live Without You? – Michael Bolton

“No-talent ass clown” of Office Space fame

• Billy Ray Cyrus Achy Breaky Heart

• Conga - Miami Sound Machine

• You’re Beautiful - James Blunt

In a special category are the narrative rickrolling tunes, with lengthy, often nauseating stories, sometimes interpreted endlessly by musicologists. Seriously, don’t bother.

• Cat’s in the Cradle - Harry Chapin

• American Pie – Don McClean

• Hotel California - The Eagles

• Stairway to Heaven – Led Zeppelin

Please add your nominations below, and dispute these freely.

Back when I had my crappy Motorola Razr, its only redeeming characteristic was its awesome ringtone, the one on Chev Chelios’ (Jason Statham) phone in the movie Crank.

I got an iPhone in December, and I’ve been missing that ringtone, but thanks to a hint from a friend on Facebook I found out that you can make ringtones in GarageBand. All you have to do is drag an mp3 into a GarageBand project, save it, and then under the “Share” menu, select “Send ringtone to iTunes.”

Hear Crank ringtone: here

And if you want it, here’s the ringtone in iPhone format.

Thanks to my BFF The Everywhere Girl for the pointer to these great hints for new parents:

My immediate family owns an iPod Mini, an iPod Nano, a video iPod, an iPod Touch and an iPhone. And two PowerBooks. And a Mac Mini. And a Lisa. And an Apple I. And an Apple II. I became an Apple developer in the early 80s on the Apple II, and was a Mac developer for 12 years. Loyal? I was also a Newton developer.

Enough about me. I am so fed up with Apple. They are tragically uncool. My iPhone experience has been a nightmare. First, no one can activate it for you. You activate it from iTunes. But you have to have the right version of iTunes. To get the right version of iTunes you need the right version of Mac OS X, 10.5. If you don’t have it, it will cost you about $139.

So I updated my OS to 10.5. Guess what that did to most of my Macromedia graphics apps and PowerPoint? Yep. They don’t work anymore. Adobe Fireworks is available from Amazon for $297.99, $1.01 off of list! Mac Office 8 upgrade? $240.

Estimating conservatively, I have spent close to a million dollars over the years on Macs, Apple laser printers, CD ROM drives, software, etc. I ran my own business and we both developed Mac peripherals and software and bravely ran the company on Macs. I’m not talking about managing some corporate budget worth close to $1M and spending it on Macs. I was an entrepreneur. This was money out of my own pocket. But I digress.

In addition to a couple of thousand dollars in recent investments in iPods and the iPhone, I HAVE PURCHASED LEGITIMATELY THROUGH ITUNES several hundred songs. Great stuff. Buzzcocks. Clash. Snow Patrol. Bummer I can’t put them on my iPhone. That’s because Apple forces people to update iTunes so they can introduce hardened and more insidious digital rights management (DRM). DRM is designed to keep people from playing music they have legitimately obtained. You thought it was designed to thwart music theft? No way.

Last week I heard 27 Jennifers by Mike Doughty and I loved it. I came right home to buy it from iTunes and put it on my iPhone. I paid my .99 and downloaded it. I connected my iPhone and tried to sync it. (I have yet to get the calendar to sync). I was alerted to the fact that I needed to update the iPhone software. I downloaded it. I then updated the iPhone which took a LONG time. It also failed to install the update. I tried several times with repeated failure.

I also could not get 27 Jennifers or any of my purchased tunes onto the iPhone.

So tonight, I fixed it, or at least, I got 27 Jennifers onto it. I booted LimeWire, searched on the title of the song, found it in 10 seconds, downloaded it in under a minute, dragged it to my iPod and iPhone and guess what? I can finally listen to the god damn song I bought a week ago.

Apple … what is THAT all about? With the cost of the phone, the tunes I can’t play because of your hideous DRM, the OS upgrade, and all the apps that broke with the upgrade, I had to spend $1000 JUST TO GET MY IPHONE, MAKE MY FIRST CALL, AND RESTORE THE APPS THAT BROKE IN THE PROCESS!

Steve Jobs came out in February of last year and said he opposed DRM. What does that mean? The DRM that plagues iTunes and the iPhone must be the most onerous ever. Jobs explains Apple’s DRM policy in an elucidating 1800-word plus Thoughts on Music on Apple’s site. Despite the title, it is not about music. It’s really Thoughts on Greed. There’s not a word about musical genres, the joy of good music, the artistic experience. It’s an explanation of why iTunes music has to carry DRM even though Steve doesn’t want it. (He would also prefer to give away all of the company’s products, but that decision is ultimately up to the Board.) Jobs writes “all iPods play music that is free of any DRM.” A friend of mine told me, never buy your music from iTunes and you won’t have a problem. I guess that’s the answer.

I know this is a story that has been told thousands of times, but it’s infuriating, and it’s my blog, so there.

Spotted this in the mall in Capitola, California today:

Note that only Clinton is referred to by her first name, and that all candidates are counting down to victory, an historical impossibility but a great way to sell calendars.

I screwed up! I confused the Everywhere Girl’s blog, http://www.theeverywheregirl.com/ with a skeevy porn site at http://www.everywheregirl.com/ .

SORRY!  

The good news is, the Everywhere Girl (or “eg” as I call her) posted a comment correcting me, and she did a blog post graciously pointing out my stupidity, so I now I can realistically claim we are best friends!

.

I started this post after reading an Inquirer report on the Everywhere Girl’s on again/off again entry on Wikipedia. But the more research I did the stranger this story became.

The Everywhere Girl is a model whose stock photos struck a chord with marketers and graphic designers and consequently showed up in hundreds of places all over the web. I blogged on this phenomenon on my old blog, Hyde Park.

Given the attention the Everywhere Girl has received from bloggers, it is only appropriate that she now has her own blog. But is it really “her blog” and what are its sinister underpinnings?

I am sure I am not the first to notice this, but a whois search reveals that the blog’s domain, everywheregirl.com, is owned by Studio for Publications, Inc. aka TheWetlands.com Inc. of Ocean City, Maryland. It’s unclear to me what line of business these two entities are in.

Here the plot thickens. The Educate Yourself site, attempts to implicate Jon David, listed as the administrative and technical contact for everywheregirl.com, Studio for Publications, and WetLandsInc.com, in the July 2005 London bombings! Educate Yourself appears, to me at least, to be a crackpot conspiracy theorist free-for-all. The site describes itself as:

“A free educational forum dedicated to the dissemination of accurate information in the use of natural, non-pharmaceutical medicines and alternative healing therapies in the treatment of disease conditions. Free Energy, Earth Changes, and the growing reality of Big Brother are also explored since survival itself in the very near future may well depend on self acquired skills to face the growing threats of bioterrorism, emerging diseases, and the continuing abridgement of constitutional liberties.”

A primary tool employed by Educate Yourself is what they refer to as “dowsing.” The site’s dowsing on Jon David alleges that he has ties to CIA operatives, is fluent in Arabic, had advance knowledge of the bombings, and posted on the Internet on behalf of [sic] “El-Queada,” (perhaps a Latin American Al Qaeda splinter group?).

That’s where the trail ended for me. Or at least my interest in spending any more of my time ended here. If nothing else, this post demonstrates the uncanny ability of the web to suck up three hours of research that is quite entertaining but ultimately yields nothing conclusive or credible.