His Name is Earl

Go away, Earl, just go away.

This Week's Apps - Worthy of Purchase

I almost let my new weekly app post slip by the wayside already. I took some time to try to figure out what I was using on my phone last week, but really all I was really using were the same music apps that I mentioned the week before. Another successful week at the gym and I am loving my phone and loving the album art with said music on said phone!

But I don't have nothing for you this week. Besides a poor choice of double negatives, I wanted to just give a quick listing of a couple of apps that I use absolutely every day. There's no theme, just a couple of commonly used apps. If there is a theme, it's that these are paid themes. It's important, Android users, to support developers because they need reasons to put apps on this platform and not cop out and just develop on the iPhone. So what's worth the money for me?

Beautiful Widgets for Android on AppBrain

Beautiful Widgets has been mentioned before, but it has to be by far the most commonly used application on my phone. It's the first app I see when I turn my phone on, it's where I get the time, it's where I get the weather, it's where I get the forecast for the weather, it's just really valuable. Besides the typical home widget, there are other handy widgets such as a toggle for airplane mode, wifi, bluetooth, etc. This has always been my recommended must have app, especially for those who do not have Sense UI and the flavors of clocks that it offers.

twidroyd PRO for twitter for Android on AppBrain

Twidroyd Pro offers me a complete Twitter experience with the help of very handy widgets. I like having advanced features such as list control, ability to view an entire conversation, reply to all, a lot of things that make this a seamless experience. I continue coming back to this application. Others in the market are great and have a better interface, but this keeps winning me over with it's simplistic functionality. It's like breathing.

I do promise to have more next week, this week has not been so much about the applications, but about the ROMs. With the newest stable version of Cyanogenmod released, I've been enjoying all the benefits of FroYo. My phone and the platform only continue to get better!

This Week's Apps - Music

I figured it was time to attempt another weekly segment. I'm going to start highlighting the apps that I've used on my phone over the past week with the help of AppBrain. I mentioned them a few posts back, and the service has only gotten better since my remarks. Now I can easily share the apps that I used with some handy embedding from their website.

This week as Janine and I started back into our gym routine, I started using the Pandora and Last FM apps again. They work fine, as long as there's a good, consistent data connection. Our gym is not in a part of Richmond that has a great connection, so it's been spotty. Some days have been great, and some have been unusable and completely frustrating. There's nothing like trying to restart a stream while power walking or rowing.

I've never been much of the stock Music app user within Android. It's fine, I just find it lacking, and honestly as with most iPod refugees, the stock application just lacks style. I have been using the doubleTwist app as I've mentioned before to play music from my SD card. This works for me some of the times, especially when I have my iTunes playlists up to date, music just moves over seamlessly.

The biggest bummer about using the doubleTwist app was the lack of album artwork to accompany the songs. It's quite dull to see their standard music note for each song, but lucky for me I stumbled upon Album Art Grabber. I'm linking the free version below, but this app is well worth spending the dollar for their donation version. I now have album art for all my songs and this will greatly enhance my gym time. It's the simple things, remember that.

Below are the AppBrain links and embeds to the apps I've mentioned this week. I will do this every weekend, to help my fellow users make their super phone experiences a better one. Of course I'm going to link the AppBrain app first. It is now a MUST have!

AppBrain App Market for Android on AppBrain

Last.fm for Android on AppBrain

Pandora Radio for Android on AppBrain

doubleTwist Player for Android on AppBrain

Album Art Grabber Free for Android on AppBrain

Metal Month Continues

You know I'm not going to pass up an opportunity to catch Swedish Metal whenever it hits Richmond. Soilwork came into town to play some new material and we could not pass this show up. In an ideal world, all great shows like this will be on a Saturday, but one of the great perks about living in Richmond is being able to catch great stuff like this at any time.

The new album is called The Panic Broadcast, I like it, everything they put out is great and worth checking out.

What I wasn't expecting was some good, old fashioned music discovery. Apparently, I've been under a rock these past few months or years and haven't heard about any of the bands playing before Soilwork, but I was both surprised and even blown away.



Death Angel, thrash, I'll let this clip of them playing in Wacken in 2004 speak loudly for itself.

Tour Flyer

Now that I've shown more videos in one month than MTV will all year, I figured I'd throw in one more from the headliners. I had a blast at the Canal Club last night, hopefully we'll be getting out more.

Mayhem Recapping

I figured for posterity events of last week deserved a better post than just a few crappy pictures from my cell phone. Mayhem Fest came to Virginia Beach last Wednesday. Janine and I were very fortunate to land some tickets for these sweaty festivities thanks to our good friends! So I figured with five of us going, (Sam, Jessi, Ben, Janine, and I), I should do what any heavy metal ringleader should do, rent a mini van. This actually worked very well back in 2002 when I had to carry a large crowd to see a show in northern Virginia.

We got to Virginia Beach about an hour into the show, sweated, stood, sat, rinsed and repeated all the way to the last performance of the night. I quickly realized the top bands of my day are all pretty much the same as they were in 2006 when I last saw most of these bands. I'm very happy for these bands, but I was reminded I need to really try to keep discovering new acts.

It felt like even more of a throwback to see the top two headliners Rob Zombie and Korn. I was taken back to those magical days in the 90's when in entertainment Beavis and Butthead were on MTV, the top movie was about alternate realities, and 90210 was on the air.

Wait....

Sweat and Mayhem Festing

Hatebreed preforming, way over there...

Shadows Fall aka I'm really far away aka walking ads for sunblock.

Rob Zombie brought the pyro!

Korn brought the nostalgia. They've been doing this a lifetime!

30 Seconds on the Clock

I really did purposefully forget to post yesterday being the last day of the month. I figured I had my 31 posts, I'd just post today and recap my month of blogging.

It's very hard to do this on a daily basis. My brain is fried in such a great way. I also realized some things that should help me out considerably. I've been trying to produce content. I am no content producer. My creative capabilities are slim. I've always been that person in the room that can carry a conversation, but very rarely am I able to start a conversation. I guess that makes me a pundit or a commentator.

I need to own my skill sets.

I figure I'll give my take on things I see, things I read, and appreciate the people that to like to read my insane ramblings. And I am thankful for my readers. I can see the people who visit the site and even those who read my feed and I am eternally grateful. I hope to live up to my own hype some day.

And now, since I didn't do it all month, it's time to get random about my 31 days of attempted blogging. Go:

• Thank the heavens for spell correction!
• I don't think I'm going to leave Blogger. I tried making a WordPress blog, I have all the micro blogging services, but this will always be home.
• Coffee. It's unbeatable.
• Posting blog posts from my phone was a great change of pace and something I will do more of in the future. 
• I really need to keep working on this page. The background is terrible (hopefully was terrible soon).
• Dinner for Schmucks was hilarious. I can only hope I'll never be paraded around for being the idiot that I am.
• I'd still love guest writers, I'd still love to guest write. Give me a topic and I'll go thermonuclear.
• Without spell check I would have spelled thermonuclear completely wrong, phew.
• Without Janine I would have not made it with ideas from the past month. Thanks, Neener!
• My yard is demanding more time, so it will get 30 minutes almost daily. Almost of course used in the vaguest of senses. 
• I'm not sure what my yard has to do with blogging other than it's my co-nemesis. 
• How cool is it that anyone can share their thoughts now? We've come a long way. I'll try not to take this great freedom for granted.

Again, I'm grateful. This past month was a lot of fun, but it went so fast! My last lesson was to manage and cherish the time that I have, because it's only going away quicker by the day. I don't want to focus on the end of the ride, just concentrate on the ride while I'm on it.