Genealogy‘s a big hobby. Today’s site lies on the lighter end of that hobby, for those who just want to keep track of their close and extended family.

If you sign up at Famento, you can create pages for members of your family, upload photos, and write biographies for each of them. There’s also a guestbook where friends and family members can leave comments. The site is entirely free.

Famento was created by two Asian friends, one who wanted to build a permanent memorial of her grandmother, and the other who wanted to record her family’s histories.

I’ve been hearing about Last.fm for months now, but I haven’t tried it. It’s a website—like Pandora—where you list a few of your favorite artists, and the site plays music that sounds similar. It catalogues music by what it sounds like, basically, then streams music that matches the music you like.

But now I hear that Pandora’s in trouble, and Last.fm was described as the competitor that everyone else uses. So, I tried it out.

Color me impressed: I entered Yoko Kanno (arguably the greatest living Japanese composer), and not only did Last.fm recognize her, it immediately played a piece she wrote that I’d never heard of. It then played a piece I’d never heard by another Japanese composer I love, Toshihiko Sahashi.

So I’ve been using Last.fm since. It works perfectly thus far. The John Williams stream plays John Williams-type music (John Barry, Hans Zimmer), without playing any John Williams music.

Highly recommended.

Just stumbled across a very odd video called Ela: Legend of Light. It’s a combination live-action/CGI short film, made in Argentina, that very much evokes 1980′s American cartoons. One of its directors describes it as “a weird mix between She-Ra, Tron, and Flash Gordon,” a fairly accurate description.

Besides the He-Man/She-Ra feel, I noticed what I think are references to Rescuers Down Under and The Neverending Story. Odd and inventive. Neat to see weird, fun creations like this.

So I did something that might appear crazy today. I turned down a nice job offer.

I got a phone call two weeks ago from a recruiter, who put me in touch with a local company who does ASP development. I had a phone interview with one of the founders, then went in for a face-to-face interview with the other founder and a few people there at the office.

I’m trying to keep these people as anonymous as possible. I don’t want them to stumble across this and be offended, but I got a stern, stereotypically authoritarian vibe from several of the interviewers. I felt like….

…okay, an example from Christianity. Christ is described as being “full of grace and truth.” That’s an important duality: truth represents the classic, serious Old Testament God of firm adherence to an established structure, while grace represents flexible moderation. Both are important (though not always equally important).

I felt little grace there. Plenty of truth, but very little grace.

Now, they offered me a decent salary, and I could use the money right now. I don’t know where I’ll get enough money in a couple of months. And I’m willing to work in a less-than-stellar environment, if the people are good and the work’s important.

But I couldn’t shake this vibe. I was unsure about the people. This just didn’t feel right.

Silly, right, to base one’s job decision on a feeling? I don’t think so. Feelings are facts; they’re just as real as a thought.

So, this morning, I called them back and politely declined. I’ll continue to pursue freelancing for a while. It’s what feels right.

My first encounter with IM was through ICQ. Over 10 years ago, the folks I chatted with on IRC encouraged me to try ICQ, and since then I’ve almost always had an IM client of some kind open.

I’ve since expanded to AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, Google Talk. But I kept an ICQ account open and active. Until now.

For the past year, I’ve gotten more and more bogus friend requests and spam on ICQ. Every single friend request has been in a foreign language, and encouraged me to check out a “100% free!!” site of some kind (the most recent purported to be for a child porn site). Every non-spam contact attempt (a small percentage, mind you) has been from people messaging random ICQ numbers (the last one, after greeting me, asked “Who are you?”). I have not received a single legitimate ICQ message or contact request in the past year.

So, I’m leaving ICQ. I don’t like to close off a method of communication, but since there’s been no legitimate communication through it, I feel justified in doing so.

A shame to see a useful service become so overrun with the equivalent of empty line noise.

Imagine a bunch of twenty-somethings getting their hands on a dubbing rig and a bunch of old, cheesy kung fu films. Now imagine that they threw out the old audio tracks and completely redubbed scenes from the films.

That’s Uncle Morty’s Dub Shack, currently airing on ImaginAsian TV. Here are a few YouTube clips to give you an idea of their humor (despite the titles, they’re all clean):

• Exploding Apples
• Red Ninja Sex Slave
• The Oldest Mugger in the World
• Insomniac

Hilarious in strange, postmodern ways.

I enjoy making homemade soda. It’s usually delicious, and I have no problems.

Except with ginger ale. For some reason, ginger ale gets incredibly carbonated. Explosively carbonated.

So, when I found an old bottle of it in the back of the fridge, I figured I’d do a Diet-Coke-and-Mentos sort of video. I took it outside and filmed myself opening it.

Didn’t quite work out as planned.

Soda Fountain – Ginger Ale Version from Brent Newhall on Vimeo.

If that weren’t enough, I found a bottle of strawberry soda, and decided to open that. Which worked out even less like I’d planned.

Soda Fountain – Strawberry Soda Version from Brent Newhall on Vimeo.

Ah well.

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have recently been cracking down on various kinds of internet traffic. Some is understandable; others interfere with legitimate uses of the ‘net. Worse, ISPs often do this without telling anyone.

Well, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is striking back: they recently released Switzerland, a tool that will test your internet connection to see what your ISP blocks. It’s still very basic—you have to run it from a terminal or command line prompt—but it can provide very useful information. Download it here to check your own ISP.

Read a fascinating book lately: Boogiepop and Others.

It’s the first novel in a whole franchise, which itself takes some explaining. The franchise focuses on an entity called Boogiepop, which exists in the collective unconscious, and surfaces in certain people whenever a paranormal danger to humanity manifests. So, yes, it’s something of an urban fantasy.

This first book describes the initial conflict that brings Boogiepop to the surface today: a creature called the Manticore who feeds on human souls. The franchise went on to spawn numerous novels, a live-action movie, an anime TV series, and a manga. This is where it all started, as a single (award-winning) young adult novel.

The book’s split into several parts, each one told from a different character’s perspective. Because of this, you often get to see the same scene from different characters’ eyes, which changes your interpretation of that scene, and what was actually going on. A great hook

The whole story takes place in a high school, which is key to the franchise. Boogiepop is really about the high school years, when young people begin to solidify their philosophies on life. Each character in the novel sees life very differently, but I can sympathize with all of them to varying degrees.

As a whole, I really enjoyed it.

For the past two weeks, I’ve been trying to figure out how to describe the online comic North World. And I can’t.

That’s one of the reasons I like it. North World has elements of a fantasy story—the protagonist wields a sword and confidently fights creatures in the wilderness. But that’s crossed with a very normal, modern world of cars and coffee shops. It’s a modern world with wildernesses that contain spirit bears.

Not long into the story, the protagonist returns to his hometown, a place he never wanted to come back to. He left it a mess, and now he has to face it. Which means he has to face himself, and the choices he’s made. And he doesn’t like them.

He loves fighting in the wilderness, but he’s alone. And here with his family and old friends…he realizes everyone is together and happy. And he’s not. In running off to pursue his dream, he burned his bridges, and he’s beginning to realize the folly of that.

An unusual sort of story, and now that I think about it, I realize it’s quite similar to Zot!, which I just finished (and heartily recommend to any human). It pulls together the supernormal and the everyday, without debasing either.

An achievement, if nothing else.