Wayne Larsen - Personal

Zunior.com: DRM free independent digital music in Canada

2007-03-31T03:43:00Z

While checking out ohbijou, I noticed a link to: download the album at zunior.com. What a fortuitous link, as I wasn’t aware that such a website existed. Zunior offers DRM free, downloadable 192kbit mp3 albums for $8.88, with a great selection of canadian (but not exclusively canadian) independent artists.

I picked up Apostle of Hustle, Ohbijou and Malajube all for under $30 canadian… If apple had their act together, and actually offered proper support for the lossless FLAC format in iTunes, I could have picked up the files in that format for an extra 2 bucks per album. But then again, if apple had their act together, I’d be buying my high bitrate DRM free music through iTunes. For now, I’m happy that I’ve found an alternative.

Desktop Tower Defense

2007-03-27T22:28:00Z

Evil, time sucking game! Must beat hard mode…

update: Bryan solved it, so now I can sleep without dreaming of tower defenses!

Presenting Roar to Ogre March 28

2007-03-27T19:27:00Z

I have been developing a plugin for ruby on rails that can function as an admin framework for entering and managing data, but also as a higher level abstraction that is useful for many web applications. Yet, I have not put much effort into both getting the word out, as well as explaining to people how it works. In an attempt to improve on both of those, I am excited to be presenting to the Ottawa ruby group (ogre) tomorrow, March 28.

Wanna clone shopify.com? Find out how you too can speed up your web development so fast that you only have to work one week per year! Spend the rest of the year floating in the sea of money generated by your uber app! This session will walk through creating a sample web application using Roar, the all singing, all dancing rails plugin that promises to not only make you rich and famous, but cure world peace too!

With that introduction (either excited exuberance or overreaching hyperbole, I haven’t decided), how can anything possibly go wrong?

When: Wednesday March 28th at 7pm
Where: Army Officers Mess – 149 Somerset Street West – near the corner of Elgin and Somerset Street.

And in other Ottawa related tech happenings, BarCampOttawa3 is set to go down this Saturday.

Update: Well, that was an interesting presentation—the feedback was largely positive. However, it seems that I lost a good portion of the audience by going too fast and trying to cover too much. Hopefully I can use the feedback to communicate more effectively.

5 reality show proposals

2007-03-09T01:25:00Z

In which Wayne pretends to work for McSweeny’s:

America’s Next Bottom Model—Find america’s best ass.
American Idolation—Get america’s biggest fans together on a ship, and then, well, sink it.
24 Lost Heroes—Bring america’s favourite serials to the reality screen. A bunch of heroes stranded on a tropical island, with only 24 hours to get off the island, and only those pesky others and that island standing in their way. Vote for your favourite hero every hour, with the loser getting thrown to the polar bears.
Beauty is the Geek—Who needs the guys? Find the beauties that can explain the Poincaré conjecture while building an autonomous robot, and you’ve got a show.
Project Punway—If reality tv is the lowest form of television, why not pair it with “Pun (n.): the lowest form of humour” – Samuel Johnson, lexicographer. Project Punway, the last refuge of the witless.