The Awesomeness Blog

Please Hold

2009-01-12T10:11:00.002-06:00

As you can probably tell, I’ve let this blog fall by the wayside. I haven’t had the time to post here and have recently been considering some other directions for The Awesomeness Blog. Thanks for reading.

- Commander K

You Look Nice Today

2008-06-24T13:01:00.008-05:00

I know, it's seems like an eternity since I've posted anything up here, but I'm back with some serious awesomeness to drop on y'all. It's a podcast called You Look Nice Today. You Look Nice Today is a journal of emotional hygiene featuring lonelysandwich, scottsimpson, and hotdogsladies.

Orange Team

2008-04-06T20:18:00.004-05:00

Orange = Awesome. 'Nuff said.

A little back story for those who are confused.

Muxtape

2008-03-26T17:06:00.007-05:00

Muxtape is an awesome new services created by Justin Ouellette. It's a services where you can create your own online mixtape. You can upload a maximum of 12 mp3s with a maximum size of 10 megabytes each. Here's mine!

The Decemberists - The Crane Wife

2008-01-04T15:48:00.000-06:00

Happy New Year, all! I come this week with praise of The Decemberists' "The Crane Wife" album. I got it bundled with Sufjan Steven's "Songs For Christmas" (also very awesome) off Amazon.com. "The Crane Wife" is thoroughly awesome. Each track just gets better and better. My favorite track, by far, is "The Island: Come & See/The Landlord's Daughter/You'll Not Feel The Drowning". Unfortunately, the file is to large to post here, but "Yankee Bayonet" is also a rad tune.

The Dark Knight Trailer

2007-12-17T14:39:00.000-06:00

Via Hot Air

Aaaaaawesome. Heath Ledger is going to be a great Joker. I cannot wait for this movie to come out.

For a higher quality trailer, click here.

Fried Rice Thoughts

2007-12-11T14:23:00.000-06:00

Fried Rice Thoughts; a weblog by Ian Casselberry, formerly of the That's What She Said podcast. Want to know how awesome it is? Well, see for your self.

The Day of the Ninja

2007-12-05T17:04:00.000-06:00

Pandora Radio

2007-12-02T13:36:00.000-06:00

From Wikipedia:

Pandora is an automated music recommendation and Internet radio service created by The Music Genome Project. Users enter a song or artist that they enjoy, and the service responds by playing selections that are musically similar. Users provide feedback on the individual song choices — approval or disapproval — which Pandora takes into account for future selections.

Pandora Radio is awesome. I currently have three stations, a James Figurine station, and Iron & Wine station, and a The Hives station. All three have suggested great stuff.

The Hives - The Black and White Album

2007-11-18T08:00:00.000-06:00

I had never heard of The Hives before this album, but I really love it. The high energy garage rock is really addicting and makes you what to bang your head and jump around like a punk rocker.

Check out The Black and White Album on iTunes

La Collina Pizzeria and Ristorante

2007-11-11T14:49:00.000-06:00

La Collina Pizzeria and Ristorante is a radical italian resturant in Harker Heights, Texas. I went there for the first time last night with some family and we all loved it. We ordered a 16-inch pizza (half veggie and half all-beef pepperoni) and the Pasta Primavera. It was all delicious; I think that pizza was the best I've ever had. If you'll be passing through or live in the area, check it out!

Joost™

2007-11-04T14:08:00.000-06:00

Joost™ is an online video streaming app which is totally awesome, in fact I'm watching "The Tick" as I type. It's available for free for both Macs and PCs. There are some commercials, but they're very few and far between.

PSDTuts.com

2007-10-21T15:54:00.000-05:00

PSDTuts.com is an awesome Photoshop tutorial site. Most of their current tutorials are Web 2.0 style, but they're adding more and all of their tutorials are great. I highly recommend this tutorial site.

MST3K

2007-10-14T09:00:00.000-05:00

From Wikipedia:

Mystery Science Theater 3000, often abbreviated MST3K, is an American cult television comedy series created by Joel Hodgson and produced by Best Brains, Inc. that ran from 1988 to 1999.

It features a man and his robot sidekicks who are trapped on a satellite in space and forced to watch a selection of terrible movies, especially (but not limited to) those of the science fiction genre. The premise of the show is that the man and his robots make a running commentary on the film, making fun of its flaws and wisecracking their way through the film in the style of a movie theater peanut gallery. - Read More

I didn't watch this show very much when it was actually on air, but recently I've been really enjoying it. I found a bunch of episodes on Google Video and can't get enough.

Click here for MST3K on Google Video.

Iron and Wine

2007-10-07T12:18:00.000-05:00

From Pitchfork Media:

Sam Beam's first two full-lengths under the name Iron & Wine were bare-bones, hushed affairs full of rich imagery, whispery falsettos, rhythmic finger-picking, and not much else. In the time since, Beam has gradually moved in other directions, expanding his palette on both the excellent Woman King EP-- which featured more percussion and fleshed-out arrangements-- and 2005's full-band collaboration with Calexico, In the Reins.

Beam has also toured with a group of musicians for some time now, so it makes sense that his new album would complete his gradual journey away from lo-fi home recordings. The album even teases you at its start-- it begins with a snatch of scratchy black-and-white guitar and percussion before jumping to Technicolor when the bass and drums dive in. The rest of opener "Pagan Angel and a Borrowed Car" is surprising as well, at once sleek and full of clattering Americana signifiers like steel guitar, acoustic slide guitar, and tack piano. - Read more

Iron & Wine is really a great band and I completely agree with Pitchfork's assessment of their...er, his latest album. I really recommend checking them out.

Update: Interview and in-studio performance on World Cafe

Vienna

2007-10-01T12:15:00.001-05:00

Vienna is a great open source RSS/Atom newsreader for the Mac OS X. It's the best reader I've used so far; a simple, user-friendly interface and very well organized.

The Talk Show

2007-09-25T13:08:00.001-05:00

The Talk Show is a rad podcast featuring John Gruber and Dan Benjamin. It is a casual, conversational style podcast on anything from wisdom teeth to the iPhone.

Up in Smoke BBQ

2007-09-24T09:49:00.000-05:00

"Up in Smoke BBQ" is a great little barbecue place located at I-35 at Exit 364A in Hillsboro, Texas. They've got some of the best barbecue I've every tasted. I had the "Regular Sandwich", which I enjoyed very much.

VoodooPad

2007-09-20T12:11:00.000-05:00

This weeks awesomeness pick is VoodooPad, a Macintosh app by Flying Meat. It's a great catch-all notepad app with lots of great features. It is available in three versions; lite, regular, and pro. I only have the lite version, which is free, but if you've got the cash, it's worth it.

EDIT: I just broke down and bought the full version of VoodooPad and it is totally worth it.

Hello World!

2007-09-19T18:21:00.000-05:00

Welcome to "THE AWESOMENESS BLOG", the blog on all things awesome. The Awesomeness Blog is a weekly blog of whatever I, Commander K, find awesome each week, which can range from apps, bands, websites, etc. If you like, you can also send me nominees for the weekly awesomeness award to theawesomenessblog(at)gmail(dot)com. Well, thanks for visiting, I hope you enjoy the blog.

Commander K