March 2008 Archives

* You can file your taxes for free if you meet a few requirements with the Beehive and H&R Block.

• Have valid social security number or ITIN number.
  
• Have an email address.
  
• Your adjusted gross income is $54,000 or less.

One of the most interesting plugins and one of the most popular is the All in One SEO Pack.

This WordPress plugin optimizes not only the title (of which you can override if you don't like it) but it also generates meta tags for you. Useful? Dfdffffffffffefinitely. In fact, since you can fine tune everything, but it's still backwards compatible with most tagging plugins (now more obsolete with WP2.5.... ) then it makes it a lot easier I would imagine to rank higher.

What you really need though? A lot of trackbacks.

So far? I'm thoroughly impressed.

WordPress 2.5 just released and I've upgraded one of my blogs with it and the interface is MUCH cleaner. In fact, it's one of the reasons that I had stayed with Six Apart's MT due to the easier to use interface. This changes everything.

In fact, there were a bunch of look and feel changes which in the end I believe is a customers' dream come true. It's all about how easily accessible things are and how easy it is to understand. The Automattic team has come to that same realization and have gone forth and conquered.

While I might use the gallery feature, the one big thing that I love next is the fact that visual editor now doesn't screw with the code. You wouldn't believe how annoying it was to go from one to the other editor, then find that visual editor went in and changed what you had just painstakingly edited in html. In fact, it's one of the reasons I have visual editor turned off in my profiles.

Much of the development features are all backside things. Database opto, shortcode API, salted passwords, secure cookies, and easy taxonomy. A lot of it you probably won't use unless you happen to write plugins, but it's there which is a nice feature. The actual code was compressed as 1 lousy megabyte which made things absolutely great.

As usual, WP is the super easy install/upgrade. Dump and Pump. Basically, you just upload the thing and upgrade the database, and it's done barring some things like making sure that your themes weren't overridden if you used a default theme and such.

Would I change anything? Sure. It'd be nice if you could backup your install and directly upgrade from WordPress servers instead of having to mess with downloading, uploading, and all this other stuff. Makes it a lot simpler if you could click a button and perform upgrades (and seeing how their upgrade architecture is designed, I don't see how this would be impossible to perform).

I don't believe I'll switch to WP here only because it's been customized to the point where I know where everything is at, but Automattic sure has me seeing future ease of blog deployment without the ugly interface. And all I can say is "Bravo!" to that.

Ick. I just read two posts by Engadget author, Darren Murph, and I'm thoroughly disappointed.

A couple commenters also mentioned this fact, but in both this post on Japan's move to run GPS in their phones and then this later one on South Korea, it just reeks of misinformation.

Here's the problem with the post:

"Taking a note from Japan, it's being reported that South Korean police are backing a highly controversial plan ..."

Hate to say it, but just because South Korea is close to Japan, doesn't mean they South Korea used Japan as an example. Nothing in the XinHua (China View) news report states this nor does it from from textually.

On top of this, back in 2001, I had worked on getting the customer (one of the US vendors) into compliance with both CALEA and E911. By the early 2000s, all mobile handsets in the United States were required to be equipped with a GPS chip for 911 emergency. As far as I know for most of the mobiles I've ever tested, this is on by default unless you specifically tell it to only be on for E911.

Furthermore, there are numerous reports of how E911 works, such as this one back in 2004 when a Tennessee boy prank called 911 services from his school bus. Based on some background, I would have expected a little more seeing that the author had worked for a corporation that is one of the domestic three cellular infrastructure providers.

Bad choice of words, Engadget. Perhaps poor research. Either way, it doesn't look good when the written word makes the assumption that the US doesn't have similar technologies in place already for emergency services. Especially when those that are not in the know-how have the expectation that you know what you're talking about.

Photo Credit: (Milica Sekulic)

How many times have you worked on a document on your laptop and then suddenly.... BAM.. your mouse cursor jumps and you're like... "what the...."

No more. NoStrayClicks keeps that mousepad in check, by locking it. Just double click the tray icon to turn it on when you need the mousepad off, and double click the tray icon again when you're done. Doesn't get any easier than that. Freeware for Windows.

Maybe it's just me.

But a couple blogs I follow happen to have installed the Twitter Tools plugin for WordPress.

Now first on the tool. I see the point, and Alex King writes some incredible stuff. In fact, if you're using a Twitter purely from a marketing standpoint, I could definitely see the merging between Twitter and a blog. This is something that is a great use of Twitter Tools.

Unfortunately, the things that I've been reading have been tweets that basically bolster posts. It's almost as if people don't have enough time to write a post, so they throw together every single tweet they did this week as a overview post. Pretty uneventful, pretty useless, and it's a plain waste of my time to read.

This differs slightly from overview posts that some blogs manage over a week since they crank out over hundreds of posts and show the most popular. In that sense, I could see why people would want to rehash. Not really my cup of tea, but I can see the perspective. But tweets wise, I really don't care to read what's on your mind on Monday, when it's Friday. In fact, there's really not too many reasons to even bother with these automated postings.

Point of all this? Twitter is a archived pseudo real-time tool. It's background noise that you can bring to the forefront like irc when you want it to do so. Let's just keep it that way.

Somehow a bit morbid, a producer of an Internet production has created a reality show where ten condemned criminals that were on death row are to fight it out on a tiny island outfitted with cameras and microphones. The last man or woman standing will get to live after thirty hours, or else they all die.

So pitting insane criminals against crazy lunatics, Jack Conrad (Austin) is placed on this island to take on some brow-beating hardened killers. Little do the folks watching for the Internet and the others know.... Conrad has a little something up his sleeve.

And what's funny about it is that I didn't expect much of anything for this movie at all. Mainly because outside of Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, there hasn't been many WWE stars that have made it onto the big screen in a great way. But I was pleasantly surprised in this film.

Don't get me wrong. The Condemned (Widescreen Edition) is probably only a B-rated film in my book. It was good, but the acting wasn't spectacular. But it was action packed at every turn and with that, it kept your eyeballs glued to the screen. In that sense, it did what it was to do, which was entertain me with a lot of guns, fights, and explosions.

Personally, I would probably rank this a little above say.... Mortal Kombat on a Sunday afternoon. Not a bad film, but I was right to rent instead of go to the theater for it.

ProcessGuard is a great little program that basically allows you to watch the processes. When they go above a certain threshold then you can either kill the process, or start an application, or shutdown, hibernate, ... all sorts of crazy things.

This configuration is done via an ini file so you can edit it and relaunch the application whenever and wherever. Freeware for Windows.

This is one movie that I can't wait to see out. One of the best storytellers and producers is Hideo Kojima, the mastermind behind the Metal Gear series.

So it seems that Sony Pictures is going to be releasing a movie, and Mike De Luca is the producer. Personally, I think that Kojima could handle producing it as long as the script was written well (bring in the Metal Gear script team). All in all? The entire movie can totally be realized even without game play.

Hopefully they land someone that can totally be like Snake too. My pick? Hugh Jackman. His Wolverine is classic for the rough looker, and he's definitely got the tough look in the X-Men series that could totally pull off Solid Snake.

Have no fear. If Kojima has his hand in it, I would hope that it would not disappoint just as every single game in the series has not to the delight of loyal fans.

Photo Credit: (Akiraman)

Not sure if you've ever slept around computers, but when you don't remember to mute them... man, it's annoying when in the middle of the night you hear an update sound or something that scares the living bajeebus out of you.

We're talking, "WHOA! What the heck was that!" type of startling. Well, no more of that. You can sleep soundly knowing that your Mac won't be waking you up with SoundAsleep. Just set the "night time mode" with hours and all, and sleep soundly.

If there's any other reason to use Netflix, it's the fact that their service is impeccable. I got this in my inbox today, and so did many others. Due to the fact that there was a delayed shipping, they credited 5% back to every user affected by this issue. What's interesting is that they not only identified an issue, and solved it, but they also gave back to the customers that keep them in business without any prompting. This is how to treat your customers and retain customer loyalty. And this is how to respond to a problem.

In a service oriented business environment, sometimes many corporate people forget that the make or break people are the customers and that if you make a mistake, you should turn that negative into a positive. Good job, Netflix.

Disclaimer: Author is a Netflix shareholder

Tthese remixes are from Hellogoodbye's older albums. While that's the case, it still doesn't change the upbeat, dance music along with what is known as the "Cher effect" or autotuning. This is done in a lot of electronica, and very evident in the songs produced.

Nothing like indie music, with simple lyrics but a catchy tune that can have you just humming along as you go about doing your usual business. Grabbed it off of . You just have to love this stuff if you love electronic.

For those of you that have gawked at the fact that there are devices out there ... yes, bluetooth devices, that allow you to step away from your computer and have it lock up but only for Windows? Look no further, BlueProximity brings that functionality to linux.

Usually set to a device such as your mobile phone, when your mobile phone leaves the vicinity, the computer will automatically lock itself. When the phone comes back? Bam! Computer is back in action. Amazing eh? It's got to be one of the most interesting ways of locking a device and now it's for linux and open source. Totally neato skippy.

A long long time ago, there was a time where I had a stockpile of viruses and their source code sitting on a floppy somewhere. It was amazing to see how they functioned, and how they attacked the systems.

The most fascinating of them was those that could run in stealth mode, and polymorphers. Polymorphers were viruses that could change themselves and rewrite their code. This took a significant amount of thinking since this virus would mutate and hide itself very well. The other one, stealth, knew how to sneak into the crevices of your computer, never to be found until it dropped its payload.

Obviously things have changed from those times, but it seems that now there's a new variant called StealthMBRs. A combination of virus and rootkit, it actually rewrites your MBR with a version of its own and then sets up its own defense network. What was fascinating is the way it bypasses virus detection and cleaning since it's in the MBR and having "feelers" put out when it knows something that isn't right to restore itself.

All in all, it's always good to know what you're up against which is the reason I watch security threads and read things such as the Avert Labs posts. Call it an old fascination of mine.

Photo Credit: (.hj barraza)

Ever had a need to categorize your CDs that you burn? Mainly because you don't remember what exactly you burned on them and it would be mind numbingly painful to go through each of them to find that one single file that you're looking for?

That's where Visual CD comes in handy. It basically creates an searchable index of your CD, and thus eliminating the step of looking through your stuff one by one. Like you wanted to do that anyways. Freeware for Windows.

I was fortunate enough to have a conversation with Kina Grannis, one of Interscope's latest additions, on behalf of 8Asians. This girl is going places in the entertainment industry, partaking in a totally different style of marketing with Youtube and original songs played out for the fans even before they make it to an album.

The above video is her latest blog post and the original Stars Falling Down (starts at 1:12 mark). Definitely catchy and totally can see this hitting the pop charts. In any case, if after listening to that, you still want to listen to my interview with her, then catch it at 8A.

Back when I took the SAT, it was during the time that they had just introduced the SAT II and were in the process of re-scoring. It was then, when they turned up the math scoring so that you could actually miss a couple problems and still make a 800. I remember clearly that it was also the time that many Ivy league schools moved their average entrance score from 1350 to 1450. It was said that the shift was made due to the standardized scores being low internationally for American students in internationally based statistics. Who knows if that was true or not.

Well, just recently I heard from a cousin that the total score has changed yet again. Apparently now it's out of 2400 as of 2006. They took away the analogies section, changed mathematics to encompass three years of high school mathematics, and added in the SAT II Writing exam into the main one.

And all I have to say is: "Ick."

The analogies section was stripped due to some criticism by the University of California system:

"A famous example of alleged bias in the SAT I is the oarsman-regatta analogy question.[23] The object of the question was to find the pair of terms that have the relationship most similar to the relationship between "runner" and "marathon". The correct answer was "oarsman" and "regatta"."

The replacement section (writing) is also very subjective. While they are to be scored on quality of writing the amusing thing is that quality of writing is very subjective. In fact, I had papers in college that would not have passed muster with certain English professors, and would have had amazing grades with others.

The critique from a MIT writing professor came down that the longer the essay, the higher the score according to some trend results from data he was given. That is completely ridiculous.

Unfortunately, it seems that students these days have to deal more so with the human aspect of test taking beyond the scope of right, wrong, or no answer. Now it must be taken into account that someone might like or dislike your writing style to judge quality. I truly feel for today's high school students since it seems that the college entrance exams have finally met up with politics. And that's just a sad thought.

Photo Credit: (TheBrassPotato)

If you've ever had multiple archived files and you were extracting them one by one, then you know the painfulness of your index finger on the mouse.

Look no further than ExtractNow. This isn't the end-all-be-all archive utility. In fact, the only thing it was made to do is to extract multiple files at once without the danger of sequential clicking.

So if you have lots of archives, and you need to take those and extract them all at once... then you've hit the jackpot. Freeware for Windows.

When you're looking to copy files directly from the Internet cache, to a place of your choosing, CacheSort is the way to go. It's basically a copier of cache, which is useful when you're looking to dump the things you're surfing or what not into categories. Works with Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Opera. And it's freeware for Windows.

So the next time you're looking to just get some stuff copied over, but you don't want to go through the trouble of saving each and every website, just do a dump of your cache with CacheSort. It's easy, fast, and super customizable.

While you might not be doing this just yet... (since Service Pack 1 just came out and there might be fun things that just break due to it)... at some point you're not going to want to restore before pre-SP1.

When that day comes, then you'll want to know to run vsp1cln.exe from the command prompt.

When you do this, it'll get rid of the restore versions of the files that SP1 replaced and you'll save some valuable disk space. Just remember that the wipe means you won't be able to go back anymore so make sure that's exactly what you want to do before you go do it.

Excuse me while I laugh quietly.

In reading about "Hazards of Wifi" I almost cried. Don't get me wrong. EHS (electromagnetic hypersensitivity) probably exists. At least I know that if I stand in front of a 19db dish pumping out over 1 watt of WiFi, even I would get a headache. Obviously Part 15 doesn't allow such power behind it so, that's probably not the issue.

My silent laughter has to do with the ill education of RF in general and how Part 15 works. The Sebastopol petition has those that claim to be effected by WiFi and that the constant barrage of waves make them ill to the point that they can't visit anywhere with wifi. I hate to break it to you, but on a power scale, your cell phone pumps out way more power than any WiFi ever could. What's more is that if you're effected by Part 15 wave patterns, then you probably also have issues with not only pretty much all general electronics which irradiate under Part 15, but you also couldn't possibly be using a microwave.

Forget consumer band 2-way radios. Part-15. Maybe you have the silver or gold flecks that block certain wavelengths from entering a house like a Faraday cage. But I've found that most people that actually claim to get sick from certain Part 15 are picking and choosing what RF they are associating with even though it's all around us.

Hate to break the news, but cellular phone calls are going on all the time and you're immersed in a large cellular wave 24x7 if you have coverage. Similarly, there's UHF, VHF, radio bands, and pretty much everything mentioned above and a few that I didn't even go into since there's no need.

Having worked in celullar infrastructure for the past nine years, I can tell you that most people run petitions against wireless technologies without doing much homework. Again, it has nothing to do with EHS. In fact, I believe that EHS is probably real and have done some research into EMF readings. But when you just think about how relative power in relation to the body is, you'd realize that a mobile next to your head is actually irradiating you way more at a single point than having the same amount of power irradiating your whole body.

Still don't get it? Think of wave power as a weight and the point of contact as a needle. If the weight sits on a single needle, the likelihood that the needle would puncture someone is great because there is little surface area. But if you distribute that weight acros multiple points of contact, then the over all surface area has increased and thus lessening the weight at the points of contact. Same with RF.

Regardless, the smell of fear is in the air. Don't tell those people yet, but computers actually generate some pretty nasty EMF fields due to the power supply and spinning disks and what not.

Photo Credit: (Travelin' Librarian)

Dealing with not only the war on terror, but the whole issue of Islamic terrorists and extreme religious factions, The Kingdom is not only action packed but very disturbing. The movie itself follows an attack on a softball field within an American expatriate compound in Saudi Arabia.

FBI Agents (Foxx, Garner, Cooper, Batesman) are sent in to investigate the blast in an area where the culture clashes incredibly with the way Americans operate day-to-day. In fact, this movie drives home many differences between the Islamic world and how working together can actually help solve many of the issues that result from crazy people.

I have to say that I love the part played by Ashraf Barhom, as Colonel Faris Al-Ghazi of the Saudi State Police. He reported directly to the Prince, but he was also the one that took hold when SA. Fleury (Foxx) extended out to try to make things work to find the bombers behind the attacks on American civilians.

This movie was extremely dramatic and action packed. As always, Foxx outdoes himself with his performance and I actually loved it from beginning to end even though film critics gave it a mixed review. I would definite recommend at least renting The Kingdom (Widescreen Edition), if not picking up a copy if you're into dramatic cultural and violence in more of a military format.

I have to say that this is one of the most fascinating websites in a long time. Mainly because it reminds me of college.

Remember when you just sad there with a highlighter, going over passages that were the "meat" of the book?

Similarly, Awesome Highlighter allows you to highlight websites. How cool is that? It doesn't quite work with every single site and there is a Firefox toolbar if you want to lose screen real estate instead of using the site, but it's still dang cool. Now you can basically highlight anything you want and send it to a friend. Neato.

Google has launched Google for Non-Profits.

Basically, this site shows you how a non-profit can harness the power of Google applications without much of anything. In fact, my own non-profit is running off of Google Apps. There's so many amazing things that you can get for basically free which makes having a non-profit all the easier since you can manage everything via Google.

Hmm. I have to quit saying the G word. I just mentioned it about five times.

Visa opened today publicly and started trading at $59.50. The IPO price was $44 that raised over $17 billion and that was done late yesterday.

This is one of the most anticipated IPOs and definitely the largest one since AT&T.

Why do I think this is a good buy? Mastercard, the smaller of the credit card financiers has quadrupled since it IPO'd in 2006. With the ARMs taking their toll on the largest banks, the fifteen underwriters all have stake in Visa. This will not only boost the banking industry, but Visa also doesn't take a hit from ARMs since they do strictly transactions and doesn't work into financial services. This is also why Discover and American Express have been suffering since they also are not strictly credit card networks.

Disclaimer: I am a shareholder of Visa.

From a dance music point of view, I have to say that owning most of Hellogoodbye's stuff has really been ... well, for a lack of a better term.... "sweet." Grabbing this off of , it definitely has given me some upbeat music to just groove to while I'm working, or even lifting.

Funny, but I now realize why people listen to really fast paced music when they're at the gym. It just gets the blood pumping, and you just want to get that stuff done.

Hellogoodbye's remixes of All of Your Love shows that even simple lyrics and a geeky look can get people to scream in envy and run to their nearest music store to buy their albums. Or maybe it's just me. In any case, check out what you're missing below:

Vista is definitely just one of those big ugly beasts of an operating system that provide a lot of eye candy. It's actually semi-more useful too.

I'm not particularly fond of it, but I would recommend that once you get it to optimize it for performance rather than looks. One of the best ways is to tell it to remove all the pretty graphics funky things. It's called visual effects and it can really bog it down.

On a clean OEM HP computer recently, I checked and saw that Windows Vista Ultimate ate 1.92G of RAM. phew. That's a big chunk. Anything that you can save definitely would help it out some.

If you're big into tweaking hardware... OCCT is for you then. This piece of freeware for Windows allows you to check on some very important things like watching the heat from your cpu and ram, and also doing some more extensive testing of them.

You can also generate some easy to read graphs and it uses a common plugin interface to watch Speedfan, and some other tools. It might not look like much, but believe me when I say that when you overclock, you'll almost definitely need to use a tool like OCCT. Definitely. So stop the presses and give it a go. You won't be disappointed.

Sometimes, it's just good to know that you can fiddle with the look of something. TClock Light allows you to fiddle with the look of the clock in the Windows system tray.

In fact, this is one of the few ways to only change the clock so that it displays the date, and the clock in numeric form, or word form. You can also change the fonts, sizes, background colors and a whole bunch of other types of features including the layout, if you're not happy with it.

Overall, this is a worthwhile download if it just bugs you that you can't get the exact thing to show up for your clock if that's what you need it to do. Freeware for Windows.

WinBin2Iso converts Windows bin images to ISO images. Pretty nifty considering this doesn't need to be installed and can fit on a USB drive.

One of those quick conversion tools that you probably would never need another one. Assuming that's all you needed to do (convert bin to iso images that is). Freeware for Windows.

What's neat about ColorConsole is that it gives Windows back what command line should be. Sorta. Kinda.

Basically, it allows you to change the fonts, colors, sizes, and such of the console which is... well... pretty. But it also does allow you to export the console screen to rtf or html and it gives you multiple tabs for console windows along with command history. This actually is a good thing considering that both command history and multiple tabbed windows is actually very useful in a commandline type environment.

If you're looking for a console replacement, this piece of freeware could be the one you were waiting for. Maybe? If not, at least you can rejoice in changing the text and background colors.

I've recently been playing with Google Calendar after noticing that any time someone sent me an email with a possible date and time with a location, the right side of the screen would have a "Add to Calendar" link. When I noticed that, I was like.... hey wait a second.

Being that my nonprofit organization runs off Google Apps, I started to schedule everything in the nonprofit's calendar and realized I could do the same with my regular personal account. Then I figured that I'd manage all my items on one single calendar so I shared my nonprofit's calendar with my personal account and ... lo and behold, I had a synchronized schedule book.

This was really cool, but wasn't the end-all-be-all. The last of it was to see if it could handle my day job calendar that was in a corporate Outlook setting. It seems that Google provides a small external application called Google Calendar Sync. I could almost cry that I almost had everything in order. But would it work?

It seemed like a fairytale, that everything was too good to be true. And then the mirror shattered. Sorta. Outlook didn't sync up. Not exactly anyways. In fact, it would only sync only if you created the calendar items in Outlook (not the ones that you're invited on) especially if your corporate has multiple email aliases. What's worse is that if you change your primary calendar name, then it refuses to sync together even though the Google Calendar Sync shows up as working. There's no way to get this to work, and apparently many of the Help group for Google Calendar also ran across the similar issues with enterprise level Outlook accounts. If you export the calendar and import it into Google Calendar, it seems to sync up then which is a strange bug.

It definitely is worthwhile to me if I can consolidate all of my notes and schedules under one house. I believe many others feel the same, considering the request for this to be fixed ASAP in the Help Group. But outside of that, Google Calendar seems to be going down a great path if they can address the issues at hand.

As of now, Google has in effect let me put my entire schedule for multiple businesses and everything else on one single calendar. There's nothing like feeling organized again.

Wesley Snipes? Wow. It just came out on DVD, but I never thought it actually went to the theater. At least I don't remember it ever going to the theater.

Do you? In any case, the movie itself was actually a pretty good action flick. Not quite up to par though for what it was... since the script got a little long and slow during the middle but not quite enough to turn your attention completely off of it. It was actually decently fascinating with plot twists and a lot of action and gun battles.

If you're into bad cop good cop and maybe a dirty cop here or there type movies, then you'll definitely like Chaos. Myself? I actually rented it because I think Jason Statham and Wesley Snipes are dang good action film stars. Together? It couldn't have been that terrible of a movie. And it wasn't.

Really simply, ProcessKO kills hung processes or programs. Of course, you can do it the difficult way of going to the Windows Task Manager and go through each of the processes that have hung one at a time. No one is stopping you.

But with this free application, you can simplify the steps by killing all hung processes from one single place without having to go through them one at a time. It just makes the entire process that much less painful. And that's a good thing! Freeware for Windows.

Google has launched their Ad Manager in a closed beta.

I have to admit that this definitely has me intrigued due to the fact that I'm in the business or niche market advertising and am organizing a clearinghouse for a particular market for my business, Five18. Should be interesting to see if they can handle more than one publisher's site at a time and how intuitive it is to actually manage since the stuff out there currently isn't all that great from what I've seen. I'd love to have something where I can manage both advertisers and publishers at the same time but give publishers as much control as they want over the ads they wish to sell.

Advertisers wise, should be able to run their own campaigns based on straight fee structures. So far, the interface seems to be pretty intuitive but it's more geared towards single sites than anything else. In fact, reminds me a lot of OpenX, which is what I use currently to publish all advertising for the sites on the network.

Definitely worth a look when they open it up.

Worst thing that can happen when you're messing around with Word or any other documents is the fact that you forgot what the actual font looks like. You might sort of have an inkling but you really just don't remember.

FontViewOK gives you the bigger picture. Basically allows you to check out what each of the fonts are in full glory, and even allows you to change the color, style, or font itself. This gives you the flexibility to test and view your fonts without having to go through them one by one.

Freeware for Windows that is just a standalone and no need for install. Neato.

My latest music love has been the band, Hellogoodbye.

Brings back some serious memories considering that Forrest Klein, the vocals and the man behind the music itself... started out composing midi tracks late at night because he didn't want to wake his parents. Never seeking out fame, the music went unnoticed until a mutual friend brought it to their current label, and the label was floored.

Truthfully? You think it's all an image thing, but he really seems to like to look like he came from Buddy Holly's era a bit. And every single music video seems to run the whole nerd/geek thing loving cheerleader type. But you have to admit that a lot of people really connect to that image. And then there's this amazing electronic music and the use of autotune. Very upbeat music and totally worth looking into if you like indie electronic/powerpop.

Their latest album, Zombies! Aliens! Vampires! Dinosaurs!, is everywhere to be found including .

And in case you're just not knowing what the big deal is about? Check out their mv of Baby, It's Fact.