Kurt Cobain would have been 45 today.

George Stroumboulopoulous (crazy long last name that I’ve probably spelled wrong…) put together a fantastic playlist of Cobain’s influences. Head over to the site and listen to the well put together Grooveshark playlist.

“The playlist includes some of the more well-known influences on Cobain’s style – Sonic Youth, Iggy Pop, Melvins, Butthole Surfers, Buzzcocks, Earth – as well as nods toward various artists that Kurt admitted to borrowing some ideas from (for instance, he said “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was an attempt at writing a Pixies song, and that the main guitar figure was “so close to a Boston riff”).”

via Strombo | Happy Birthday Kurt Cobain: 27 Songs That Influenced Nirvana’s Lead Singer | CBC Television.

Related articles

• Happy birthday, Kurt Cobain! (kexp.org)
• February 20, Kurt Cobain’s Birthday / President’s Day (jack.radio.com)
• Happy 45th birthday, Kurt Cobain: 10 things he never got to see (seattlepi.com)
• Kurt Cobain Would Have Turned 45 Today (spin.com)
• In honor of Kurt Cobain’s 45th birthday, let’s listen to his other band (music-mix.ew.com)

The person said their name was Jamie(same as me) and to forward on the number if they had the wrong number.

The phone number was from Calgary. So back into my memory banks I went, thinking about anyone from my past named Jamie that lived in Calgary…I tried to think of those drunk nights from my 20′s when I may have wound up waking up next to someone, but I’m pretty sure I had all that in order, and never slept with a Jamie. I’m positive I would have remembered that!! lol. You ever sleep with a person who had the same name as you? You’d remember that, wouldn’t you?

I couldn’t think of anyone I knew named Jamie that would want to get in touch. I’ve been caught up on all my bills as well, so it couldn’t be a collection agent! haha. Curiosity killed the cat, and today I decided to make the phone call and see what Pandora’s Box I was about to open…

The person that answered the phone brought back someone from the dead for me!

Let me explain.

Around 3 years ago I wrote an article on this very site about Alcoholic’s Anonymous and that it may be a cult. I talked about my naive beginnings in Vancouver and the lessons I learned being exposed to a cocaine addict named Jim.

I must have part of the story wrong, because for the last 22 years I’ve thought Jim was dead. Apparently the Jamie wanting to get in touch with me was the one and only cocaine addicted, wired electrician guy Jim! And he is very much alive. I’m certain of it. I don’t talk to ghosts.

Jim’s alive!

I asked him why he was trying to get in touch with me? He started out thinking that he was looking for a woman named Jamie. Once we sorted out his foggy memories of his past, he remembered me. Mostly for my past love for the band Van Halen. Sad when people remember you for some band you were obsessed with, rather than saving the human race, or finding the cure for AIDS or something.

We chatted for a while, and Jim sounds like he has some vague memories of the people that were in his life during these difficult years. He told me that he had been sorting through around 60 boxes of stuff at his mom’s house and came across my name. He asked me about working for him. I told him that the final tally working for him, and him ‘borrowing’ money from me was that he owed me around $2000 back then.

He sounded a bit embarrassed about owing me the money and I told him it was water under the bridge. That the $2000 was good money spent on learning to say no, not to be too trusting with people you don’t know, and never to lend out money to addicts! Granted, I didn’t know he was one at the time he was borrowing the funds, but none the less I think I learned a lot from my short experience with him.

He told me that he would pay me back by taking me out for dinner the next time he’s on the island. Knowing what I know of him, and his ability to gravitate to people in his past, I politely declined, and told him that he owed me nothing and that I had to get back to my family.

Right after hanging up though, I came up with a brilliant idea!

You see, I actually know very little about Jim and his journey to 2012. It has been over 20 years. I’m curious about the life of Jim, especially since I thought for sure he was dead! I called him back, and said I knew how he could pay me back the money he owed me. I wanted to hear his story. The story that got him from the rehab centre in 1989/1990 to today. He said he would, I have cynical hopes he will come through.

I gave Jim my email address, and I can’t wait to read what he has to share!

Yes, I will post it on the site for you! I’ll keep it as anonymous as possible to protect his privacy, but knowing the stories he used to tell me, I can’t wait to see what he has to say and should make for an interesting blog post!

I went for a long ride at my old stomping ground today, Mt. Tzouhalem! I realized that I haven’t been there for a few months…

Someone took the time to hand make wooden signs of all the popular trails up there! It is so nice!

Above is one of my favourite named trails up there, ‘Field of Dreams’.

Today I came across the most exciting thing since the Internet came into my life! It is IFTTT! What is IFTTT?

It is a service that automates many of the tasks we are just too lazy to complete, or never thought we could even do! It stands for If This Then That.

Up until today I thought it was a fancy term for automator actions that many Mac users are familiar with, but was only available for computer driven tasks. Little did I know that I am late to the game, and IFTTT is now a website (ifttt.com).

This post is a perfect example of the power of IFTTT. I took this picture in Instagram. Because I added the hashtag #wp, IFTTT has recognized my automated task that I set up, and has posted a blog post to my WordPress.com blog! I’ll probably change the tag, but you get the idea!

Granted, I have come in after the fact and edited this blog post to add in my fleshed out content. But that is not the point here. If I want to take a picture in Instagram now, I have it automatically backup to Evernote and Dropbox too! And if I like it enough, I add a tag and wham, I’ve done a blog post!

The amount of ‘recipes’ available to use are mindblowing!  There are over 750 pages of actions to choose from that people have shared. You can set up your own customized IFTTT tasks, but more than likely one is already pre-saved for you to start using!

I’ve set up automated backups of all my incoming Gmail attachments(pictures, PDFs, Word Docs, etc…), to Dropbox. I’ve set up automated backups of all my blog posts from WordPress to Evernote. Well, actually I’ve played with IFTTT so much today that I think I am going to fall down on the ground laughing at how god damn cool it is!

Not only cool, but the big thing is that the site is extremely easy to use! Once you grant access to IFTTT with a couple of clicks on services like Twitter, Facebook, Dropbox, Evernote, Gmail, you simply follow the prompts to tell the task what you want to achieve.

Ever kicked yourself for forgetting someone’s birthday? Set up a task to email them on their birthday automatically! You’ll look like a champion! You can even set up automated phone calls in those awkward moments when you wished you could get out of that conversation with your annoying neighbour! Text yourself a quick message with a tag, and IFTTT will phone you. Same goes for setting wake up calls. Set up a time for the call to happen and it does.

I could spend hours talking about all the cool stuff I found today, but do yourself a favour and go create an account at ifttt.com and start making the internet what it was meant to be used for. To make our life easy!

Boom! Did you hear that? That is my mind blowing up from the giddiness!

Related articles

• Review of If-This-Then-That (ifttt.com) (roundpeg.biz)
• Prediction: .ifttt to be ‘the next big thing’ (bloxhammarketing.wordpress.com)
• IFTTT and Evernote (dougpete.wordpress.com)
• How to: Get started with ifttt in 5 easy steps (bloxhammarketing.wordpress.com)
• IFTTT Triggers Loyal, Nerdy Following (techcrunch.com)

Reblogged from Lindsay Glauser:

I was asked to contribute to the Love is a Four Letter Word serial that my fiancee and I were featured in a couple months ago on Vancouver Is Awesome. I had a hard time finding a couple willing to divulge their intimacies: How they met, what was the attraction and so on and who fit the criteria.  I thought and made lists of suitable couples that I knew or that we knew people in common, and I finally found the perfect couple. Tonight we met for their interview in the eclectic setting of the Prophouse …

I’m currently using Remember the Milk(still love it the mostest), but Producteev has really been hard at work refreshing their app. They’ve even made it easy to import your RTM tasks directly into your account. I’m doing that right now, and will see how the import went. If it goes well, I’ll do a small review of the new interface on the site…

For now, here is a link to the Lifehacker article which also hosts a video of the changes…

“Comprehensive to-do suite Producteev has not only updated its web app and iPhone app, its now also showing some love for Windows 7 and Android users. The cross-platform task management app works great for group or individual tasks and has a revamped interface.”

via Producteev Is Now a Universal Task Manager with New Android and Windows Apps.