I discovered a treasure not too long ago, from someone who has created non-stop mixes of popular ambient songs, called Ambient Nights. They are seperated into CD’s, and right now it is up to CD 8, with CD 9 being in the works.

What is amazing is the level of quality of the mixes, the songs, and the community of people sharing the beautiful music. We can all argue the legal ramifications of sharing our music, but we cannot deny that it opens up a world of music to a whole new generation. That generation is mine, and those who came before me. For example, I never was into reggae, until a friend uploaded me a mp3 of Bob Marley’s song, Three Little Birds. Because of that, I have become a big fan of reggae and Bob Marley. I probably would’ve never gotten into reggae if it weren’t for the people in the world sharing what they enjoy.

I’m all for supporting the artists, and I do go out and buy the CD’s, or even purchase the tracks I want through iTunes. I believe the digital music revolution is creating a whole new appreciation towards music - genres of music I never heard of, are now being explored and experienced. Ambient is a new genre for me that I absolutely love listening to; it is perfect while working, or for any other occasion. It is relaxing, beautiful, and wholesome. If you love ambient, or want to experience it, check out Ambient Nights. It is a great way to start, and a great way to discover new music.

To download it, download the Torrents (each torrent is over 100MB), and if you don’t have a Bittorrent client yet, you can grab it here.

I’m listening to the news channels and reading articles online about this whole Iowa caucaus stuff. I have seen a lot of journalists and analysts express surprise on the findings that the vast majority of the Iowa voters stated that they were undecided and/or may change their minds on who to vote for tonight.

Why is that surprising? Nearly all of the Democrats up for elections have done nothing but attack President Bush and his policy of the war and the deficit here in the States. All of them except John Edwards. I haven’t seen him in any debates or campaigns attack Bush ruthlessly over and over again, beating a dead horse, if you will. He stated why he should be elected, and gave his own personal view points, without lowering himself by personally attacking the President. I find that horribly pathetic, and a justification as to why I consider myself a Republican.

Right now Iowans are telling themselves, “Choose the lesser evils”, when voting for these Democrats. If I had to choose between them (and thank God I don’t), I’d choose John Edwards. At least the man has stated his points, has a personality, and doesn’t lower his morales to get voted. I agree with most everything he brings up, and he seems like he knows what he wants to do, and how to help America. Here’s hoping the 15 people that live in Iowa votes for him.

Here’s some good advice from a personal bad experience regarding putting jalapeno peppers into a blender: Don’t sniff the blender afterwards!

My brain is still trying to figure out what in the world happened. I really need to get a food processor.

I used to play Quake 2. No, correction — I used to breathe Quake 2. In case you’re not familiar with Quake 2, it used to be a popular first-person PC game, and playing it online was addictive. It wasn’t uncommon for me to play it around 8 p.m. and suddenly take a break to find out it’s 6 a.m. in the morning. I played it daily for about a year, and I got so good at it, that even my best friends wouldn’t play against me online anymore. They couldn’t even kill me, and they got sick of dying over and over and over again.

This one map I was particularly good on. It was the perfect 1-on-1 map, Q2DM3. I knew all the trick jumps, all the best ways to get from Point A to Point B, and knew exactly where my foe was based on the sounds that I’d hear. In any case, I decided to fire it up tonight and try it out, even though I haven’t played the game in years. I was horrible. I couldn’t perform the trick jumps anymore, I couldn’t use the environment to my advantage, but I did remember what certain sounds meant and could still find out where my foe was at, or what he was about to do. That’s something I won’t forget. It’s just interesting to see how rusty you can get, and how hard it is to regain the skills you once had, even though you remember how to perform those skills.

Ahh, the glory days of gaming. I long to have broadband so I can play online again.

Mozilla 1.6 is now final and is available for download. Mozilla is a complete solution, which includes a feature-rich browser, mail client, and HTML editor. For more information, see this page. I’ll personally stick with Mozilla Firefox, and Thunderbird, but if you want an easy all-in-one solution, definitely check out Mozilla, as it is a fine browser with great support for web standards.

Firefox Ext. - RSS Reader Panel lets you install an extension to read RSS feeds right in the sidebar if you are using Mozilla Firefox. I’ve been using an online RSS reader, and before that, FeedDemon, but I ran out of trial time, and personally don’t think I should pay for a RSS reader, even though FeedDemon is a very top-notch program. As in my site designs though, I’m big on simplicity and minimalism.

In related news, Whitespace has an excellent discussion regarding RSS feeds; whether we should offer the readers a choice between a summary, or the full post. There are advantages and disadvantages to both, and it can really go both ways. I’m of the personal belief that if you can offer both choices, that empowers the users, which is what you want to do. If you’re unsure on which is best, read all the opinions of others in the discussion, mix in your own, and you’ll come up with the conclusion. A lot like baking a cake, eh?

There’s an update on movabletype.org: News with a new Movabletype version now available — version 2.66. This update fixes the comment flooding issue that has been cropping up lately on numerous sites. Kudos to the Movabletype team for their quick action on this issue!

“In recent weeks, open comment systems, and Movable Type weblogs in particular, have become a target for comment spam and comment flooding (automated scripts that send many comments at a time to a weblog entry).”

“As a stopgap before we release comment registration in Movable Type 3.0, we’ve released version 2.66 of Movable Type, which includes some protection against comment flooding. We’ve included a throttling measure so that comments from the same IP address can only be posted every N seconds, where N is configurable.”

Update: Noticed via Dionidium that this newest release has invalid XHTML in it, so if you want to keep your site valid, you’ll want to read up on the solution to this problem.

Update 2: Just saw Movabletype released a new version, 2.661, to fix the XHTML bug that breaks validation in the comment redirect script, along with using comment IDs instead of URLs to fix an open redirect problem.