Highland’s Island

By Josh Highland in funny, Josh's Rambling

I love halloween. Halloween is my favorite. This year was extra special because my costume was part of a group. I have done halloween costumes with my former band, and with xFLORIDAx in the past, but this year my wife, Amy got involved.

Together we went as the cast of  “Giligan’s Island”. I was gilligan, florida was the skipper and amy was mary ann.

We all wet to a party and had a great time there. I was actually suprised by the general lack of knowledge about Gilligan’s Island, but then again I am a geek with tons of usless knowledge in my head.

If you want to see more party pictures, please check out the Halloween 2008 Photo Set on flickr

LoudSon.gs : i <3 lyrics & code

By Josh Highland in Josh's Rambling, music

LoudSon.gs is a website that I recently threw together in my attempt to tighten my strangle hold on teh interwebz (by the way, I’m losing)

LoudSon.gs is a lyrics website that focuses on hard to find album artwork and lyrics, mostly for punk, hardcore and emo bands, but the door is open for all types of music.

On the technical site, the site is built using PHP, MySQL, and is the first site that I have built using the codeIgniter framework. There is also some code integration with amazon for the album art, along with some other code wizardry.

But isn’t the internet full of lyric sites already?

Yeah, it is, but none of them specialize in the kind of music that speaks to me, so I built one.

The project started out as something personal for myself in 2004, then became part of notpopular.com in 2005. The original version lived for years at notPopular.com/lyrics, and was build out of some really bad php code and used a really sketch database. Instead of taking it down, I allow it to live on, but all new additions get added to LoudSon.gs.

I also decided to do some different things with this site. In an attempt to make the domain name a bit more memorable, I bought a non .com domain, sort of like del.icio.us. For easy, and for n00bz, you can also get to the site from LoudSongs.com. I also used some SES (search engine safe) URLS. The CodeIgniter framwork made that really easy to do.

Overall, this was probably one if the funnest projects I have worked on in a while. It’s a real labor of love on my part. The site takes time every day to maintain, the only way I will ever mak money from the site is throught the google ads.

Music is a huge part of my life. You can see the “about section” of LoudSon.gs to read more about that. LoudSon.gs sums up a lot about me, code, the internet and music.


Great Depression 2.0?

By Josh Highland in comic

I saw this comic, and I really think it hits the nail on the head. My friend Henrik Joreteg is smart with financial type stuff and has been giving me some insight to the economic mess the world has gotten itself into… crazy stuff. Henrik has decided to start blogging about the state of the economy, and once he gives me the green light I will post some links to hims new site.

For now, enjoy the comic and LOL. (click for a larger version)