two good reggae bands

so i've been turned on to the following two reggae bands: slightly stoopid and bedouin soundclash.
slightly stoopid is a band from ocean beach, ca, just down the road from me. i usually end up there probably once a week to head out to the bars down there. these guys blend mixes of rap, hip hop, ska and a most of all, reggae. they have some really good songs that are well-composed.
bedouin soundclash is this awesome reggae/acoustic guitar band from canada. they cite "The Police, The Clash and Bob Marley" as some of their influences, which you can hear traces of throughout their songs. i best like their "bob marley"-like acoustic songs which remind me of "redemption song" (by bob marley). i definately recommend these guys to anyone that is in love with reggae.

embed data in URLs

i read about this a little while ago and didn't realize how useful it was. you can actually embed binary data into a URL by encoding it in base-64, which makes total sense when you think about it. here's an example: . The image that you see is the base-64 encoded version of the last.fm social bookmarking/music site that i visit frequently. Mozilla Firefox and IE7, i believe, both use this icon in their search engine definition lists which are created from XML configuration files. the OpenSearch standard defines the schema for the XML, which encapsulates the image file for a search engine in a base-64 encoded field. if you get properties on the last.fm logo shown above, you'll see that it's just a character string. if you want to mess around with this some more, you should check out this tool to build base-64 encoded URIs.

happy new year!

happy new year! I went to Longboards in Pacific Beach (San Diego) last night to see a really good reggae band called The Devastators that plays there every sunday night. it was a pretty good evening filled with a lot of champagne and dancing to some pretty chill reggae. speaking of reggae, i was recently turned on to a really awesome reggae band: John Brown's Body. if you like some of the more popular reggae (bob marley, steel pulse...), then you'll love this guy.

well, that's all for now - HAPPY NEW YEAR!