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The other day I was turned on to the magic of ZINGWater, what I like to think of as the perfect caffeine delivery system. It's water plus caffeine, and that's it. Nothing more. No cups and cups of sugar, no horrible taste or aftertaste, and no pretense at being EXTREME fuel for the EXTREME lifestyle. In fact, if the bottle didn't say it had caffeine in it, you'd never know it.

I call it the perfect delivery system because it gives all the caffeine pick-me-up potency of a Red Bull but with the hydrating and super-clean taste of purified water. How many of us slam down multiple cups of coffee or diet Cokes in a single day for the caffeine rush? Hate having your teeth squeak from pop syrup or dislike that coffee tongue and post-java halitosis? Me too! I don't know about you, but when I'm working, I find that I drink far less water than I should and that can wreak havoc on the body. Thus, finding a way to hydrate AND also get the energy boost that I need to keep me alert at work is a pretty important thing - and it's all found in ZINGWater.

Who would drink it? The computer programmer in me would drink it for the reasons I've already mentioned above. The musician in me would drink it for the hydration factor plus the energy to rock out extra hard during a show. And the health-conscious side of me (yes, there is one in there...somewhere) would drink it because I know that it's healthier than any other drink out there that delivers that kind of caffeine punch with zero side effects (other than the caffeine, of course).

Oh, and did I mention that ZINGWater is local? Yep. Made right here in the Texas Hill Country. Hit up the link to check out the site, read the story, and then find out where you can buy your own. You can even order direct from the company, and I hear tell that they're also trying to get hooked up with some humanitarian organizations to help provide clean and available drinking water in places of the world where they can't get it.

SO...

Not only are you helping YOU stay lubricated and energized, you'd be supporting a LOCAL company to keep money here in the Austin economy, and you'd be helping OTHERS get water in places where the idea of bottled water seems like some ludicrous extravagance of heaven. Everybody wins! So give ZINGWater a try the next time you need that little something extra to put some pep in your step.

If I'm lyin', I'm dyin'.

I headed down to the Parish Room on Friday night with Ballenger to see one of my new favorite bands, Telegraph Canyon, play with Quiet Company and The Morakestra. While Quiet Company was the headliner, I was really there to see Telegraph Canyon:

The other bands were good, don't get me wrong. If you like Rooney, I'd suggest you check out Quiet Company - they were really tight, had a ton of style, and stage presence to last for days. The Morakestra was also good, with a lot of tight instrumentation and jamming (although their stage presence needs a little work).

Telegraph Canyon is just really interesting to watch because they have so many musicians on stage and such different instrumentation. Their music is quite varied in dynamic volume, and they have a lot of good fun and are not your run of the mill band. I guess that's why they got a writeup in Rolling Stone's online edition last month. It's not the kind of music that I would normally listen to (and thus I don't have any comparisons to make of the "if you like {x} you'll like Telegraph Canyon" kind) so I think that speaks to how good their music is because it has earned me as a convert. Plus, they've released their latest album on vinyl, and that's got to count for something.

So if you're looking for some new music, check out any one of these three bands and I think you'll be glad that you did.

My next installment of the "why I do (or don't do) the things that I do (or don't do)" series stems from the last one that I wrote about why I'm not on Facebook. I mentioned in there that I would rather go the route of having several disparate services that I can aggregate rather than the one-stop-shop (and time suck) that is the Facebook universe. Amongst those services which I use, Twitter garnered a lot of comments and thus, my decision to post my reasons for using it in order to answer some questions and comments that I received in relation to it.

The most prolific objection that I hear to Twitter is that it is just a self-indulgent and narcissistic status update to show everyone how important you are, and that nobody wants to know what a person is doing every minute of the day (which is true). There are some people - usually celebrities - that post a lot about stupid stuff. Generally, nobody wants to know if you're in the bathroom, watching TV, or just walking around at the mall. In that respect, those who use Twitter as mainly just a "I'm doing this right now" update in an attempt to feel important kind of make a bad name for the rest of us. The worst offense in my book are those famous people who constantly pimp the shows of their other famous friends on Twitter, or users who constantly pimp themselves in a "vote for me for best..." kind of way.

But Twitter can be a lot more useful, and so here's why I choose to use Twitter as my "status updater" as opposed to anything else. And away we go...

• Microblogging. WIRED had an article that mentioned this, and it sums up my feelings immaculately. When blogging first started, people posted about everything - including short little blips of cool websites, stupid thoughts, and one-liners that they heard or wanted to pass along. I found, however, logging into my blogging software to post pithy little statements or short blips to be overly onerous and generally didn't do it due to the overhead involved in actually posting a full-on blog entry. Plus, I didn't want to waste space and cause other, more interesting entries to scroll off the main page because I was blasting out a link to the latest Penny Arcade comic or something. With the 140-character limit, Twitter has removed that element from most blogs entirely such that now most of the content is meatier and more worth spending time to read at the site. It takes away a lot of the clutter and leaves the important stuff hanging around.
• Mobility. I use my phone a LOT, and there are so many Twitter apps for phones now that it could safely be called ubiquitous. It's so much easier to tweet from my phone than to blog about something, and many times I don't want to go into great detail about a subject I could tweet about; oftentimes I just want to post a picture and a pithy comment, or describe (in 140 characters or less) some amazingly silly thing I just witnessed. With Twitter, and my go-to Pre app Tweed, I can do that anywhere.
• Thoughts, not diatribes. Twitter is perfect for capturing those "things that make ya go hmmm" moments that don't need a lot of exposition, and it can be a great holding zone for things that I may want to comment on later but don't have time or equipment to comment on at length at the present moment. Sometimes a stream of consciousness can tell you a lot about a person, even if it is random, disjointed, and non-sequitorial. I don't have to spend an hour composing, checking, rewording, and rethinking a tweet like I may do for a blog post. Tweets don't even have to be complete thoughts, just something out there to get the point across. Quick points, not discussions.
• An RSS feed analog that doesn't need a browser. Most blogging software has widgets that will update Twitter every time the poster makes a new entry, which is great for following people who don't post on a regular schedule and when I'm away from a browser with an RSS feed client. I have friends that post on a random schedule that also use Twitter, and so it's nice to be alerted that something new has gone up without me having to check it every day. On the other hand, it's great to have a site like Engadget, which seems to post every 5 minutes on some days, post to Twitter where I can see the article headers and only follow the links I want to read as opposed to constantly monitoring my browser and refreshing the page. When I'm mobile, as I am much more these days, Twitter makes a great RSS feed replacement to keep me informed on things that are important to me.
• Redundancy. Long-time readers will know that my blog machine crashed a few months ago, and Twitter allowed me to keep people informed on what was going on. Twitter is offsite, so it will (theoretically) always be available as an alternate means of communication. With the Twitter widget that now appears on the BrainDrain sidebar, as long as there's a static page to display (meaning that as long as apache is running), I can still post updates via Twitter, even when I can't update the blog itself.
• A different audience. There are people that I follow and interact with on Twitter that I don't interact with any other way and having my blog posts show up on Twitter may drive new traffic to the blog from time to time. Additionally, there is a "public timeline" on Twitter that is a constant update of every tweet as it comes in. Theoretically, then, someone whom I don't know could catch an update post on Twitter, follow that to the blog, and find that they like what they see and I could wind up with a new reader or a new follower on Twitter. Who knows, perhaps that might even end up being a new communications point and I gain a friend out of it. Stranger things have happened, but it's a possibility that I would like to exploit when possible.
• Membership is not required. One of my main beefs with Facebook is that membership is required even to view pages, and that is not the case with Twitter. Even if you're not a member, you can read tweets unless the person has explicitly marked them as private. While this openness may be daunting to some - it's basically like having an IM conversation with the entire internet - I find it to be yet another avenue to get my thoughts and personality out there for whoever wants to read it. Do I think that there are a bunch of people hanging on my every word? No. But I do know that there are a few people that like to check in on what's going on with me from time to time, and I post and tweet for them.
• Advertising. I will tweet about things in an effort to advertise them because I know that I will go places my friends have gone and liked. If I tweet something like, "At Mooyah Burgers....mmmm, tasty, tasty!", that's an endorsement from me saying that the place is great and that you should try it. It is less "this is what I'm doing right this instant" and more "you should try this because I like it and think you would too." In some cases, I'll use it as a direct shill for something (e.g. "Life On Loan's got a show tonight - you should come!") but for the most part it is more of a passing endorsement of whatever product I choose to tweet about...the electronic equivalent of "word of mouth".

And so there you have it. Not necessarily an exhaustive list, but the most important points that came to mind. Again, this is also not meant as a conversion missive, to come join the ever-growing masses of the cult of Twitter. It is merely an answer to many questions that I have received and an effort to expose yet more of my thought processes to you, my loyal readers. If there are some new Twitterers that result from this, great. If not, I'm going to keep on tweeting because I love the idea and it has now become a permanent part of my online experience.

So, good luck, godspeed, and I'll be tweeting atcha.

For a long time, I found most original programming that was produced by cable networks to be cheesy at best and unwatchable at worst, on par with some of the most painful public television shows around. Then Battlestar Galactica showed up and raised the bar on the "original programming" genre. Over the last two years or so, both USA and TNT have raised the bar such that there are some great shows being produced that you should probably be watching. They are, in no particular order:

• Burn Notice (USA) - Burned ex-spy does freelance jobs for people in need while trying to figure out who burned him and get his old spy job back. If you're needing a Bruce Campbell fix, this show is for you.
• Warehouse 13 (SyFy) - Two Secret Service agents track down mysterious and powerful artifacts of famous people in history for safe-keeping in a government warehouse a la Raiders of the Lost Ark. Part X-Files, part Indiana Jones.
• Leverage (TNT) - A team of five lovable former thieves run scams on the scammers who bilk innocent people out of their money. Fans of Ocean's 11 will like this weekly heist caper show.
• Dark Blue (TNT) - Enter the shady world of an LAPD deep cover unit to ask yourself where the line between cop and criminal lies and whether the ends really do justify the means.

Most of these shows have only run for one or two seasons (Burn Notice might be at three now) and a few of them are going into summer hiatus soon, so now might be a good time to surf the network sites, Hulu, or Netflix to catch up on the previous seasons so you can get right into the current runs. That is, if you're the tv-watchin' sort...or, say, if you don't have a job and are lookin' for some entertainment.

I received my Pre accessories today - a Golla pouch to carry the Pre around in and a set of BodyGuardz protective skins.

The Golla pouch is great, let me say. I don't like having bulging pockets and I've been having some trouble extricating the Pre from my pocket when sitting down (I know, I know, perhaps I should wear looser pants). The Golla will remedy this due to the nice caribiner that allows me to attach it to a belt loop in a holster-like manner without having the hip-dig of a hard, belt-mounted holster, and also gives me the freedom to attach it to a bag or whatever I'm carrying in case I want it close at hand but not buried in a deep pocket somewhere. What's more, it's a little more fashionable than a holster and protects the Pre with more cushion. The zipper pocket on the back is great for storing the earbuds and the extra pocket in front that may hold my iPod as well from time to time sets it off in spades. I foresee a lot of use out of this item for me.

The jury's still out on the BodyGuardz skin. It's incredibly difficult to apply. I expected it to be more like previous screen protectors I've used (which just covered the touchable area of the screen), but this required an application solution, turning off of the phone for 12 hours, and a lot of patience to apply. It was incredibly difficult for me to get the skin in place and have all the bits and pieces laying down and covering as they were supposed to and I'm afraid that there will be some little edges that didn't stick quite completely that will end up getting caught and frayed and eventually peel off. The skin is supposedly the same protective plastic as the clear bra on my G35, but I definitely have my reservations. I can only assume that the 12-hour off time is to allow the phone to dry in case any of the application solution gets down into the phone while you're trying to apply the skin. All I have to say is that this skin better protect my Pre from bullets or it's comin' off. And of course, they don't yet have a HOWTO video on applying the skin to the Pre. Excellent.

So there you have it - right now, I'm sitting at about 50% satisfaction with my newly purchased protective options and I'm just waiting for the jury to come back in on that second one to see if it gets the thumbs up or down. For you Pre owners out there, I'd recommend the Golla case right now - it's worth it, in my opinion. Way better than that lame little slip cover that comes with the phone.

You may have seen the commercials that have started running this week, the ones that look like public service announcements from a company called MNU and which ends with the tagline "Keeping humans safe by keeping non-humans separate" superimposed over a smiling nuclear family. These commercials remind me of the interstitial commercials that showed up in the RoboCop movies.

They are for an upcoming movie called District 9 which is slated for release on August 14. This film is bring brought to the US by Peter Jackson (the guy responsible for bringing us the Lord of the Rings movies), and is directed by Neill Blomkamp (who is, I believe, from South Africa). District 9 is based on a short film created by Blomkamp, called Alive in Joburg, which is available on YouTube. It looks to be a very thought-provoking flick, which I am assuming (based on what info I can find on the website and in the videos) is about race relations using a sci-fi spin on the races. Whereas Alien Nation was a similar story with the aliens integrated into society, this one seems to be perhaps a treatise on refugees and slavery as the aliens are apparently used as slave labor and not allowed to leave.

All I know is that this film looks really good and I'm looking forward to seeing it, and I also wanted to bring it to your attention. Check out the website as well; it's pretty well done and you can get a better sense of what the point of the film might be after spending some time there. The real gems are the videos, as they tend to explore some of the socioeconomic ramifications of the content within the context of the movie.

Seriously, Vibram should hire me as a walking sales representative for their Five Fingers shoes. I wore my 5Fs to Schlitterbahn today, and got stopped by nearly every park worker in the place as well as quite a few patrons. I think that they should provide me with an Under Armor swim shirt that says "My shoes are called Five Fingers by Vibram. You can get them at http://vibramfivefingers.com" on the front and then have the URL for the site on the back. Oh, and probably give me a stack of laminated business cards to hand out because I get the most comments about them when I'm around the water. The 5Fs are perfect for a waterpark because they allow me to be "barefoot" while still providing protection as I walk from ride to ride and take the tram between the sections of the park. Also, with the tightening strap, they stay securely on my feet so that I don't need to worry about taking them off for the rides and holding them in my hands. They're good for a lot of other things too, like drumming, but I've found that the waterpark scenario is the shining jewel in my experience.

Alas, my 5Fs have developed holes in the bottom and so it's time to investigate getting some new ones. I've had this pair for just under two years now (I bought them back in August of '07) and for the amount I've worn them, it was a $70 well spent. I love them, and wear them pretty much all the time unless legit shoes are called for. I've worn a hole in the ball of one foot and a toe of the other. I think that I'm going to get one size up on the next pair, as my current pair was pretty tight on my feet even with the tension strap as slack as it could be. I haven't quite decided if I'm going to get the same model (the open top "original" model or get the closed-foot model that goes up to the ankle, but I'm pretty sure that I've decided that I do need to get another pair. I think I'm going to be a 5F customer for the rest of my life.

LIFE ON LOAN
RED EYED FLY (715 Red River, 1 block south of Stubb's)
FRIDAY, JUNE 26
9PM

Tonight's show will be the best lineup we've played with yet - a LOT of fan favorites on the bill. Just take a look at this lineup:

The Soles - 8pm
LIFE ON LOAN - 9pm
Matchsticks for Memories - 10pm
Sixes & Eights - 11pm (EP Release party - free EPs for everybody!!)
Mike Truth & the Replacement Killers - 12:45am

If you've never come out to hear us, now is definitely the time. If you have been out to hear us, we would love to see you back again. We're adding some of the old favorites back into the set due to popular demand and we're looking forward to having a good time. This will definitely be one to remember and we hope to see you there! Bring some friends!!!

I was able to finally acquire the latest object of my irrational obsession, a Palm Pre, on Tuesday. I have only desired two other things in recent years as much as I desired this Palm Pre: my G35 and the original Treo 600 when it was brand new. Well, now that I have one and have done pretty much nothing but play with it for the last four days, I thought it was time to give my initial impressions.

So, the quickie review. Overall, I love this phone and it is quickly becoming the best personal electronic device I've ever owned. It's almost that Hitchhiker's Guide device that I was wanting. Here are the salient points:

Pros

• It's an iPhone for the Sprint set, which is awesome


• Highly intuitive WebOS interface - the "activity cards" totally rule


• Twitter client at launch!


• 3 megapixel camera with auto-flash


• Slide out, physical keyboard


• GPS and WiFi enabled, as well as EVDO network support


• Integrated contacts are huge - phone, email, IM all in one contact location with context-appropriate launching of desired communication method


• Content constantly syncs with Google, Microsoft Exchange, or Palm for integrated, available-everywhere PIM activities

Cons

• Dismal battery life when using GPS and WiFi


• Cell reception is pretty bad (at least in the cellular black hole which is my apartment)


• Memory doesn't seem to purge sometimes- "closed" cards may still actually be taking up memory


• No zoom on the camera, and no video


• No MicroSD slot for memory expansion

Note for owners of a current phone that Sprint considers "smart" (Palm Centro, Blackberry, Treo, etc.): If you purchased your smartphone less than 22 months ago, Sprint will not consider the Pre as an upgrade and will therefore NOT give you the $250 off the $550 cost of the phone as advertised. You will only get $75 off AND you will not be eligible for the $100 mail-in rebate (as you will still be under the original 2-year contract which got you the discount on your previous smartphone, whether you realized it or not). So, if you have "recently" purchased a smartphone, you will pay $475 for the Pre, not $299.

Hit the jump for my in-depth review of the Pre as I see it.

I headed down to the Austin Convention Center on Sunday night with 9AM and Shawn to catch some more hot Texas Rollergirls roller derby action with the Holy Rollers takin' on the Rhinestone Cowgirls. You know, the Cowgirls are becoming my favorite team, with Rollergasm and Truckstop Trixie being my fave derby girls on the track. The Cowgirls came out on top (which they've done every time I've seen them roll) and there was some pretty good action going on in the later stages of the derby. Lots of penalties too - arm wrestling, 2-lap relays, pillow fights (which basically came down to fist fights), and single-lap speed races. I was hoping that someone would earn the long jump penalty, which is my favorite - the girls work up some speed and then have to jump when they hit the jam line to see who can jump the farthest. Alas, there was no long jump penalty. *sigh* Chili Cold Blood was the pre-game and half-time musical entertainment. I failed to take pictures like a good little flickrbug, so you're just going to have to take my word for it that it was fun and I promise that I'll take snapshots next time.

You know, I think that the Texas Rollergirls is something that every Austinite should experience. There are just some things that make Austin unique - those blessed bats, live music, Austin City Limits, and the Rollergirls. If you like to people watch, there is no better place in the entire city to do so than a TXRD match - you get freaks, geeks, cowboys, bikers, old, young, boys, girls, and everything in between. Roller derby is like a combination of hockey, soccer, and professional wrestling on wheels. Just come with an open mind and a desire to have fun and I think you'll see that it is a uniquely Austin experience and is definitely keeping Austin weird.