A Pith Productions' Oscar Pool 2004, virtually representing the opinion of the blogosphere.
Except, alas, it seems to be gone from my DNS at least, for pity's sake. No pings, 'unknown host.' Hopefully you'll have better luck than I. Anybody got an IP address for it?
(Here's a web-based toolset, if you care.)
Andy Inahtko runs his picks and promises to blog the ceremony from the comfort of his couch.
Don't forget the MPAA's official site.
I'm off to make dinner.
So, by now we all know that the end of the world was barely averted recently when an asteroid just missed the planet.
Shortly thereafter, I found it peculiar to read a story whose central metaphor for the loss of a child is asteroidal impact and variations thereof.
The story was posted online February 23. The actual events took place in mid-Jaunary, and resulted in a conference on developing a procedure for alerting the authorities.
Therefore it's possible, maybe even probable, that the story was selected in awareness of the conference and possibly the catalyst for the story's publication date.
I just got a note from Ross William Rader of Tucows noting that Tucows has bought Blogrolling from Jason DiFillippo, as many of you did as well.
BlogRolling - News has a note from Jason about the sale. Congrats!
Everybody is either stunned or entertained by Quiznos' adoption of the spongmonkeys, it seems. The truly amazing thing to me is just what a well-kept secret Joel Veitch's work apparently has remained these past couple years. Those of us fortunate enough to be exposed to the beloved earworm in its' primary incarnation are unsurprised by the hubbub, though.
I'll remind the reader that lyrics and chords are to be found, as well.
In the comments over at Dear God Damn Diary, where B2 is hosting a windows-media capture of the Quiznos ad, reasonable speculation has erupted over what dada-flash masterwork is destined to next burst forth upon the world.
The current frontrunner would appear to be, naturally enough, the works of j. picking in the form of either Weebl and Bob or (my pony in this race) Badgers.
It's interesting, and I think probably not coincidental, that both weebl and spongmonkey are (in my mind anyway) associated with the hugely entertaining b3ta.
Any others out there? I'm sure by now if I had resurrected the Ken Goldstein Project I'd have a shot. I do have a brief clip of Ken singing the Hampsterdance song over the phone. It does leads one's mind in a certain direction...
Irregular Orbit: Narthex - A Small Story From the Days of Punk [via Boing Boing - Mark's been active lately and it's a good thing].
"Here is our amazingly obscure story, because all of these little stories added up to a remarkable era -- everyone who participated should be telling their own first-hand stories."
Amen to that.
Here are a couple of mine: the Tussin Up archive and Modock, both posted quite a while ago. Must reactivate guestbooks!
The Modock website includes Mp3s and video. The Tussin Up site presents browsable scans of every page of every issue of the late Steve Millen's amazing 'zine.
Other archival audio including a live set by the Walking Ruins may be found here. Eric White's Walking Ruins video archive is here.
A pointer post to yesterday's USB printing plea, now resolved.
If your USB-shared HP printer is misbehaving under Mac OS X by not providing all options to all clients on the network, make sure the drivers on all the machines are the same version.
1. Download the updated printer drivers from HP.
2. Install the drivers on all the machines in the network, servers and clients, to ensure the same version is deployed. HP notes that differing versions of drivers can cause problems in printing in networked environments.
3. On each machine, delete and re-add the printer in Print Center to be certain that the installation process zapped old prefs and settings.
Kudos to Manuel for prompting me to think this through systematically, leading to my decision to read the readme. D'oh.
The Stranger is running a thing on the PNW comics scene by me.
I'll run my notes here later, probably next week. I spent part of a day on the phone talking to more or less everyone quoted in the article and transcribed a lot of what they had to say, which will be the body of what I run here, about 5,000 words.
The spot illo is by Dave Lasky, the sacred chief of Seattle comics today, if there was a secret society or something.
Hope you like the piece - it was a good old-fashioned rush job, and I tried to make it thoughtful. Let me know what you think!
OK, you non-Mac users, move along. Nothing to see here. You remaining ten folks, limber up your noggins, 'cuz I'm asking for some help.
Without going into brain-stunning detail, I have a small home network. On my primary server unit, an inkjet printer, the HP 970Cxi, is configured to be available to the network via OS X's USB printer sharing. It works well for all machines.
However, the HP offers a cool feature that I use when printing locally by default, two-sided printing. On only one of the networked machines does this option appear when printing to the remote queue.
On my main desktop machine, the option is not available in the remote dialogs, but if I plug the printer directly into that machine, the option becomes available.
My main machine is using 10.3.x, the server is under 10.2.x (8, I think), and the other machines that use the service are also under 10.2.x.
I'm digging around at Apple, and my instinct tells me that for some reason, the desktop machine is using two different printer drivers when it should be using the same one for both instances.
Any experience, insight, or opinions out there?
UPDATE: Goodness! MacSurfer linked to this in their headlines. So... Let me add some info resources.
I did find a thread on the Apple Discussions website, not about the disappearing two-sided printer option under USB printer sharing specifically, but about the disappearing option under HP printer drivers. I was unable to use the thread to develop a resolution, however.
Regrettably, Apple deletes old discussion threads after an unreasonably short period - three months - so the utility of the link and the data there is quite llimited.
The gist of the thread is to install the updated HP drivers, and to always work through the 'Page Format..." dialog when printing. However, not everyone finds that the update respects the two-sided option.
I did install the updated driver, and it did not provide the two-sided option when revising the settings for the remote printer.
UPDATE II: A comment from Manuel led to some thinking, and a patient readthrough of the HP driver readme led to the resolution. HP mentions that version differences between drivers could cause unexpected printer results. So I gingerly installed the updated drivers on the server, and voila, I have access to the 2-sided printing and ink-throttling features again. Thanks, Manny, and thanks Internet!
In this excellent Metafilter post, Quartermass reports that Smile!, the legendary lost Beach Boys album intended to challenge the Beatles for the world-studio-wizard championship, will finally be released, and that in support of this event, Brian Wilson performed the entire album live last Friday.
This is very, very cool.
How Catapults Married Sciences With Politics [NYT] reminds me of the card model trebuchet (instructions here).
"Hurl a grape 30 feet."
It's one of Fryer's Kits which includes a lovely, complex clock.
Seattle Cinerama: MARCH 4-11, 2004. THE SECOND ANNUAL "REEL" CINERAMA FILM FESTIVAL.
Thursday, 3/4
11:00 p.m. - 2001
Friday, 3/5
7:00 p.m. - Lawrence of Arabia
Monday, 3/8
3:00 p.m. - Lawrence of Arabia
Wednesday, 3/10
3:00 p.m. - Lawrence of Arabia
There are other films playing, of course, including some 3-strip Cinerama flicks but mostly I must say:
LAWRENCE
OF
EXCLAMATORY
INTENSIFIER
ARABIA!
(Here's a review.)
Aw, Ralph. Not this year, OK?
That said, today's tizzy of handwringing and fingerpointing is profoundly irritating. Nader did not cost the Democratic Party the election four years ago - the Supreme Court did, Al Gore's listless campaign did, and most importantly, the helpless floundering of the Democratic Party as it cut and ran from the actual long term interests of the party's former base, the American working class.
Was I a Dean man? Well, no. His critiques were trenchant and I hope that President Kerry taps him for HHS at the very least, but his political record in Vermont reveals that he'd been very much the conservative New Democrat he was running against in the primaries. Do I expect to see Kerry pick up the Dean ball and advance to D.C., scattering the forces that have created our current woesome economy and limp shell of a democracy before him like ninepins?
Hell no. But the election is his to lose. GWB and team won't - CAN'T - repair the economy in time; we'll still be losing jobs in November. The big question, as I've noted here before, is, "Can any Democratic nominee win an election in the face of an October Surprise?"
I don't know the answer. I am certain that the administration is capable of that exact sort of thing, it worked to get Ronnie elected, after all. I certainly hope the Kerry team are not under any illusions about the lengths to which they'll go. They should certainly even be anticipating assassination attempts - not needfully directed by anyone in particular, but the Kennedy comparisons will draw wackos, it seems safe to say.
So is Ralph a threat to a Kerry? Well, no. I think it's clear that a Bush victory ensures the creation of a virtual one-party state that will guarantee that our country effectively loses its' middle class over the course of a generation. It seems likely this insight is not unique to me. So Democratically-inclined voters will vote for Kerry (or Edwards), not Ralph, in order to stave off that eventuality.
The hysterical armwaving about Nader today has only served to remind me just how misdirected and inimical to my interests the interests of the professional Democratic Party actually are. Both Nader and Dean based their appeal on pointing out the mechanisms that have created ungovernable centers of power via accelerated capital concentration. Until those mechanisms have been disassembled the future of this country as a democracy remains in deadly peril. The more anti-Ralph rants I hear the more clearly reminded I am of this. I think it would behoove the Democcratic Party to shut up about Ralph, right now.
Right now, do you hear me?
The underlying problems that the Democratic Party has created for itself are highly unlikely to be addressed under a Kerry administration, which will see its' interests as aligned with that of the capital. They appear marginally likely to be more effectively addressed under an Edwards administration. Either way, four years later, the same problems will hobble a Democratic effort to retain power.
Would a Dean administration have addressed these issues? We'll never know. We can hope that the Doctor remains active and exerts a salutary pressure on the Party - a Dean-Edwards fundraising alliance might be very effective - but once in power, I'm frankly skeptical that he would have run the country any differently than our ususal crop of white guys.
I lean so far to the left I have special shoes that make me appear to be upstanding. In the long term, I genuinely believe that the diminution of American power in the world and the requisite economic shrinkage are what's best for my country. That's not to say I'm an isolationist. It is to say, as someone who grew up as much outside of the United States as in it, that the world is a great big place and it's a good thing when middle-class economies proliferate, as they just might be about to do in many places internationally. They provide economic stability and a wider degree of both social mobility and resource sharing than most other economic forms, and I think we can all agree that the very inventive pop and high culture markets that accompany the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie are life-enriching.
So why not adopt a neo-Marxian position and embrace the GOP? After all, the sooner they lead the country into maximal capitalism, the sooner the country destabilizes, right?
I've lived in countries which have experienced this progression of events, each time enabled by direct or tacit United States support for the disempowerment of that middle class (See today's news concerning Haiti, for example). It leads, to be succinct, to a shitload of needless human suffering, and makes a hell of a lot of people - often poorly educated people - very, very angry. Controlling the passions of such a populace often requires a great many military-grade weapons, which eventually become distributed throughout the society. The kind of internal destablization that is likely to eventually result from the election of a Maximal GOP administration is something I don't care to live through, and believe me, neither do you.
So Ralph is no threat to a Democratic nominee. The internal contradictions upon which the Democratic Party is currently founded, however, pose a grave threat to that same nominee. Today, the President was pointing this out as he noted the contradictory positions that Senator Kerry has taken. Governor Dean talked like he intended to address these contradictions. So far, Senator Kerry has only continued to claim that they are not, in fact, contradictions. It's something he should resolve.
[I promise, no more politics for a while. As I've noted here and there, I can be intensely political in personal discussion. However, I made an editorial determination not to incorporate politics here. It came in respect of the intense personal pain I experienced as I read many, many others' political opinions out yonder when I first began blogging. The memory of that pain led me to conclude that I had no desire to inflict it on others in this form. So mum's the word, generally.]
Per a reader request, the RSS feeds are no longer excerpts but rather now provide full entry content. I haven't debugged them, so who knows what javascript hijinks or images or so forth will do. Not that I've been including any of that of late.
And a request: will the knowledgeable among you please direct me to RSS metrics and tracking resources? The downside to full RSS is that it's no longer a carrot, directing readers to the site, and instead offers the traffic benefits (if I may characterize them as such) to the aggregator rather than the author or publisher. For content providers that use ads to offset hosting, that's a reasonable argument against providing a full feed.
I don't use ads, of course, but part of my theoretical justification for this site is to keep current on thinking about internet publishing. As such, I'd like to be prepared with the answer to the question, 'how can we provide RSS in such a way that it provides a measurable benefit to our business goals'?
Won't you help?
I wandered into the tinfoil hat Wikipedia entry from an old entry over at Tom's place, and that led me to the entry on the microwave auditory effect, whereby directed microwaves can cause modulatable clicks in the inner ear. It triggered a memory of one of the most amazing things I have ever seen and heard.
My dad exclaimed, "There it is again! Oh man, it's LOUD!"
We turned and looked at him in puzzlement. He exclaimed in surprise, "You can't hear that?"
No, we told him. What on earth could he be talking about? He held his hand to his jaw and continued to exclaim.
Finally he got over his surprise and annoyance enough to tell us, "I'm receiving a radio transmission in my fillings, and it is so loud that it's vibrating my whole jaw."
We reacted with derision and disbelief, of course.
He was insistent. "No, I'm not kidding! It's happened before, but this is the most powerful I've ever felt it. In fact..."
He paused.
"I bet if I open my mouth wide, you'll be able to hear it."
We laughed. I went over to my dad, and put my ear to his open mouth.
The NPR top-of-the-hour news was clearly audible, if with a buzzing and tinny timbre.
In surprise I turned to look deep into my father's mouth, suspecting some sort of practical joke. A wide variety of silvery fillings gleamed out at me as the news continued.
Here's a different person's first-hand account. Aparently, Lucille Ball claimed to have aided in the capture of a Japanese spy due to her experience of the same phenomenon.
OT describes it as 'for all your countercultural e-text needs' but the site proppah includes a black-beret-and-turtleneck worthy manifesto and the cache includes not only many works of the red-and-black variety but also works by Umberto Eco and Stephen King, to cite two random authors.
PF takes note of a mysterious mass failure of auto locks in Vegas on Friday.
He fails to note the story's links to the Puget Sound area, the last two paragraphs in the story:
News reports of a similar phenomenon several years ago in Washington state suggested the outages were linked to the arrival of military aircraft carriers to Bremerton.In March 2001, the keyless entry failures began at the same time the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson returned to Bremerton. Then in April of that year, the outages began one day after the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln arrived at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard.
I'm doing some backfill homework tonight, watching the 1997 documentary Trekkies, which for whatever reason I missed the first time out. I'm laying ground work for my long-mused-about look at fanfic flicks.
At fifteen minutes in there's a five-second or less clip of two costumed fans I can name, Jimm and Josh Johnson, who will, I expect, appear in the forthcoming Trekkies II for their Starship Exeter fanflick.
It startled me. It's not every day you recognize a Starfleet captain and his Andorian first officer when you pop a documentary into the box.
The original Ed Anger, dead at 56 (spotted on MeFi, natch).
The Economist runs the only story I'm ever likely to cite approvingly. Somehow, it seems appropriate that the magazine should salute the Weekly World News - I certainly have had trouble believing more or less anything I ever read in both publications. Of course, it's usually a heck of a lot more fun chez the WWN.
I spent the night before last and last night hanging out with my old pal Herb Reith, in town to seek gainful employment upon the conclusion of his MFA from the University of Cincinnati. I've known Herb since he was about ten.
Indirectly Herb helped introduce me to the mandolin. He and another younger friend, Joe Zagorski, had started playing bluegrass and old-timey music after I'd moved out to Seattle. They were known as the Squash Blossom String Pullers, and the concept was pretty good: take punk rockers, add whiskey, now play bluegrass, but seriously and without mockery.
I visited my hometown around the time I was getting divorced, like 1992, I think, and I beleive that Joey had written me about what they were doing. He was living in the house I had last lived in in town and Herb and I went by with some beer.
Joe's younger brother had just bought a Neapolitan-style 'watermelon' mandolin that day and no-one in the house knew how to tune or play it. I picked it up and it was working for me, somehow. It was the second time I'd ever touched one.
Later that night we went to a bonfire party with pumpkins and bales of hay under the full October moon. We sat on the hay bales and ignorantly assaulted the fastnesses of American traditional music, not really knowing that we were already inside the keep.
Last night Herb and I played music together for the first time since then. He was playing guitar and I was playing mando and guitar. He's a hilarious singer. I don't mean that his singing is poor, although others have gently disagreed (do a page search on 'Pony Stars' if you follow the link). He has always had a surplus of nervous energy and that frenetic quality comes through in his performance. It was a pleasure and I hope we have the opportunity to play again while he's in town, although he should certainly concentrate in schmoozing at the conference.
Like a doofus I ran out of time to get the camera ready, so alas, no pix.
The Danelope bravely takes us into the unknown world of the Potted Meat Food Product, clearly earning the mantle of an heroic explorer.
Videophones Revisited, by Way of the Modem [NYT]: David Pogue takes a look at a desktop DSL-based videophone that uses the H.263 protocol. Limited install base, as with the iSight, means limited utility. Again, like iSight, the phone uses a standard and can theoretically link up with inputs from alternative video-chat sources.
(Note that the link is to a co-sponsored archive for the article, preventing traditional NYT linkrot. See here. Spotted on MeTa the other day, which looks to be downt agin.)
Jeff Carlson at TidBITS also looks at iSight and iChat AV in a bit more depth this week with a passel of tips and tricks from his book on the topic.
Anatomy of a Jetliner, a NOVA interactive. Via Kindall, who really picked up the slack today. Great work keeping the Puget Sound link quota up!
(There is a real, real kooky idea for a useless collaboweb metric thingy embedded in this post, huh?)
The Illuminated Donkey has been laid off.
When a hard-working man the likes of Ken Goldstein gets the axe it's a powerful argument for a universe free of oversight.
Maybe he'll blow his unemployment on a visit. Time for a drink.
Actually, come to think of it, he's like the third person I heard of getting the axe this month. Hm.
Bells and Whistles: Naked in America.
Sounds like AZ needs a little Flexcar - er, I mean, I-Go. Oh look, a referral-based membership discount.
Viv and I are founding members of the initial branch here in Seattle. Haven't made much use of it lately, having a decent (if dented) car.
I have had issues with them over some marketing and customer service decisions. We joined under an expensive upfront payment 'lifetime' membership plan which lasted exactly as long as the federal and city subsidies, two years. I did, I am happy to report, get the CEO on the phone and raked him over the coals without mercy but politely for a good forty-five minutes, which did not lead to a policy change but which felt good. I'm also certain that the man in question was both taken aback by my anger and one hopes that the company's other locales avoided the same errors in marketing.
That said, Flexcar has proved a highly attractive and useful option. The cars are immaculate, so far, and have been rotated and replaced about once every two years. There are a variety of vehicles available. Interested persons who believe that the idea of a commons is an important and useful feature of civilized life are highly encouraged to explore the service. Insert gratuitous crack about SUV-driving suburban anti-tax activists here.
Metafilter | Community Weblog is back up. Man, it's truly amazing how central that website is to my daily linkfishing.
In other news, I just noticed that tireless linkfisher Dirk Deppey over at Journalista has been kicked upstairs upon the departure of the capable Milo George from TCJ's hotseat.
Hey guys! Where's my check? But seriously, condolences to Milo and congrats to Dirk.
I'm kind of excited that my turntable is working again and I can listen to a bunch of stuff I don't have on CD and am too lazy to rip. Right now it's one of the middlin' size bunch of classical music records I started grabbing as the vinyl slough commenced. They were your best bargain bet in the early nineties because in the fifties the only records produced in greater quantity were by schlock merchants like 101 Strings. This had the effect of creating a vast glut of great and largely unknown music that did not appeal to the clientele in thrift shops all across America. I looked ahead and bought in (slight) bulk.
Then I started to concentrate on 78s but those quickly became expensive collectibles, so, no go.
What the hell am I listening to?
Mozart concertos 3 and 4. Arthur Grumiaux on fiddle backed by the Viennese Philharmonic, on Epic, apparently released 1956. Apparently escaped from a radio station, as it features a grand total of 4 on-turntrable events marked on the cover of the LP.
The cover is pretty cool - abstract modernist triangles in grey and black with a lower-case modern type (an all l/c Eurostile?) "mozart" large in the upper left corner. The release is clearly too early to be stereo.
Also, I'm pretty sure we saw Al Roker (warning, silly plane SFX, turn audio down) at Blue Canal on Broadway, with a full entourage of about twenty folks. A photo was snapped in front of the (Thai?) bas-relief in the waiting area, but not of or by me. Maybe Al will update his journal.
If I had to guess, I'd say the Cheery One was hereabouts due to the annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Next week, it's the College Art Association a-comin' ter town. I'll be hooking up with long-lost childhood drinking buddy Herb "Herbie" Reith.
He's not been known as "Herbie," actually, since he crossed the far side of the six-foot-plus construction-worker-physique line. But I knew him when he was but a wee sprat!
Today we went to the Frye Art Museum, which devotes itself to figurative art, by and large. It has an interesting collection of non-modernist works up roughly through the turn of the nineteenth century. Viv and I go fairly frequently; I'd say about once every six months. The rotating exhibitions there often feature cartoonists, as with the one up currently featuring the Pulitzer-winning long-time Seattle P-I cartoonist David Horsey.
The other rotating exhibit at the moment features the work of Bo Bartlett.
The museum was also featuring a show revisiting a selection of works drawn from a number of exhibitions over the past few years.
Horsey may be the most accomplished draftsman working in editorial cartooning today, and it's a pleasure to see his brushwork on paper. His politcal cartoons don't generally wow me with their incisive analysis, but sometimes they do make me laugh. I don't really hold him responsible for what I see as the often-facile nature of his satire; appealing to the sensibility of the majority of his paper's subscribers is a part of his job, after all. Also, Some mention must be made of the fact that he does work for a Hearst paper.
It appears that they have begun to offer him some leeway in the wake of his multiple Pulitzers, however. Similarly, Hearst has allowed, or possibly encouraged, the P-I to take on the role of a persistent critic here in Puget Sound toward both the foibles of local government (Sound Transit) and national (the Iraq war). I don't doubt my grandpa, a lifetime P-I subscriber from the dry side, would be troubled by this evolution of his paper, but I'm all for it.
Looking at Horsey's cartoons, which cover roughly the last quarter century, one can trace an evolution in both his line and the politics expressed. I don't view it as accidental that his 1980 cartoon 'Liberalism' has been signed not only with the artists' name but also with the icthus, the symbolic fish used of late by evangelical Christians to signify shared values. The cartoon depicts a troupe of black-suited Republican elephants carrying a coffin with the word of the title emblazoned on it. It's classic Hearstian cartoon, worthy of the indignities cranked out by Winsor McCay as illustrations for Old Man Heart's fulminations against such controversial subjects as Hunger and Poverty back in the day.
Turning to the funniest material on display, all concerning the departed President from Arkansas and the foibles and follies of his era, the fish has - if you'll pardon my putting it this way - gone for a walk. Nearby, a drawing of the Pope in his popemobile is captioned 'Pope embraces evolution,' a reference to a Vatican pronouncement on the subject. On the popemobile's rear panel is the Puget Sound area's response to the use of the icthus on autos, the Darwin fish.
Now, I doubt that Horsey's renounced his faith. But it seems clear that the later cartooning is much less polemic and more observational in nature, and this is what lends the Clinton-era material its' punch. In one, we see a two-panel, stacked layout. The caption is something like (sorry, didn't take notes, as I had no idea I was going to go on and on about this) "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce." The caption is presented as a quote (probably from Karl Marx). The top panel depicts Richard Nixon and a prosecutorial figure in togas, as Nixon hands over his laurel wreath. The panel beneath? Two clowns in full regalia are engaged in a pursuit. The greasepainted faces belong to (if I recall correctly) Ken Starr and Bill Clinton.
Recently Horsey has been quite merciless in his depictions of President Bush as would-be Caesar, images which are so strikingly out of place in the traditional canon of Hearst editorial cartooning that one fully expects him to be fired every day. However, the peculiar niche that the P-I has carved out for itself appears to provide sufficient shelter. Will David Horsey one day go on to provide the nation itself with images that reach beyond political commentary, analysis and humor as Bill Mauldin's work and Herblock's work have done? It's hard to say. But he does appear to be an artist who is continuing to grow, and one supposes that as he does so his increasing depth of reference and observation will lend him the opportunity to craft an image so succinct and poetic that it sums up the zeitgeist of the moment.
In other news, there was a guy at the museum who looked and sounded just like a twenty-seven year old Ken Goldstein, with darker hair and more of it. He wore squared-off, narrow, dark-framed hipster glasses and at one point I noticed him speaking familiarly with some quite arty looking folks in the cafe, so I surmise he's involved in the art scene here. He was wearing black and carrying a single-shoulder-strap military satchel. I had initially dismissed Viv's observation that he looked like Ken, when he walked by speaking to a friend, and my friends, he sounded like him too.
I went up to him in one of the galleries and asked him if he knew Ken, and he did not. I thought about giving him a "Ken Goldstein has a posse" sticker, on the assumption that he probably knew the work of Shepard Fairey, but did not. I did not ask his name.
I am happy to see that American Museum of Radio is alive and kicking up the Washington coast in beautiful downtown Bellingham. I wsas inspired to google for this place in the wake of reading the teasers for the intriguing-sounding The Phantom Museum, a book featured on the Things Magazine web site.
I visited the radio museum several years ago, and it was a sterling example of the vernacular museum. It's based on a quite excessively large collection of antique radio and electricity gear; on the day I visited there were two people puttering amidst the cabinets and so forth, In the back was an individual who was clearly in charge. We talked about the internet and he showed me an amazing device, a radio modem. At the time the museum was reflecting some old-time radio program streams (possibly from Shoutcast but it's quite possible the visit was before they came into existence).
Most wonderfully, that internet feed was also being rebroadcast from a low-wattage transceiver just outside of town, so at the time it was possible to drive around Bellingham listening to Fibber McGee and Molly and the strains of Benny Goodman at the Savoy, an audio timewarp that was on the airwaves via the internet, a conundrum I've savored happily ever since.
inthe90s, The Nineties nostalgia site.
A helpful resource I came across while researching this pressing set of queries.
The ever-excellent Cartoonist notes three old star atlases available online. Most cool. It's almost embarrassing to just link like this, as the bande dessinateur (if you'll pardon the expression) is such an exemplary practitioner of le bloguage court.
If you'll pardon the expression, messieurs-dames.
Linking to some server-side bookmarking tools made me curious, so I set one up on my local server, the PHP/MySQL based MySQLinks.
It's described as beta, which appears a bit modest, but I understand the description. There's no 'make nice text' function in the form submit, for example, which means it chokes on SQL operator characters such as quotes.
Although it works with blog pinger update files, it currently will only examine one changes.xml file at a time (so you can't build a list of the updates with multiple sources, a necessity), and if that file is unavailable, it coughs up raw errors instead of your llist of links. So it's got a ways to go yet.
On the plus side, setting it up was cake. I joined the mailing list and contributed rewritten bookmarklet code so that Safari would work with the tool, but have heard nothing from them and not recieved any list-mail, which makes me think they project might be dark for now.
It's got me thinking about data management in general again. On my desktop, I tend to drag and drop crud all month long and then stick it in a folder every month. I have actually gone so far as to find scripts to do the cleanup for me on the first of the month but have yet to implement them because I want it to integrate with a by-filetype filer script I use. I also want all of the above to be available as folder actions in the OS.
Better is the enemy of good, after all. So instead I just do the cleanup by hand, or, better yet, write about it here instead of figring out how to hook it all up.
Hm.
I really should get it all working, and I really do have all the pieces in place. Once I get that settled I could presumably build a front end for the configuration components. I guess the last thing would be a concept that would allow users to grok it as an app instead of a collection of scripts.
Maybe if I call it the Red Swingline? Your Intern? Humina.
Remote Central appears to be a community web site for universal remote control enthusiasts. Frankly, I'm glad there are such people, because I'm the opposite. I've been attempting to cajole various multifunction remotes to see our satellite receiver with no luck. I'm
blogging this so that when I finally concede that the current universal remote I'm a-wrasslin' cain't get thar fum heah, I'll know where to turn the next time the man extracts my ten dollars.
Yeesh, it's a lotta effort to go through just to watch TV, I'll tell ya that.
Combine PDFs 1.0, from Monkeybread Software. Does what you'd think. Helpful for me when I've edited a PDF in Ilustrator and svaed the resulting one-page files back out as PDF.
Made with RealBasic for Mac OS X.
Waxy.org: Daily Log: Danger Mouse's The Grey Album MP3s.
You read about it, now go get it.
eMusicTheory.com practice: java-based online drills. Greg is perpetually after me to relearn to read music so I can pick up the melodies from his lead sheets, and he's so, so right.
So far I'm finding Garageband is not as well suited to my needs as the old free version of ProTools. I'm (at the moment, anyway) just disinterested in the midi stuff, although the audio fidelity of many of the instruments is quite astounding.
I should link to these two methods to get around the irritating lack of midi importability. I have actually long used the quirky but powerful Harmony Assistant and Melody Assistant to learn parts by ear. The great strengths of these programs are unfortunately hidden behind a complex and confusing interface.
The programs import an unbelievable number of music notation formats and - and for me, as a non-reader, this is key - can convert a lead sheet into tab for any given stringed intrument. You can even customize the tuning of the intrument and get tab based on that. Since there are so many midi files floating around the internet, this software would make a good companion to Garageband, without a doubt.
MonkeyFilter | Curious George: Meta...what?: MoFi investigates MeFi outage.
As you figured... sumpin's broked.
Impression, a backup utility for Mac OS X, by Stephen Elliott.
I'll be giving this a whirl. Looks promising.
Here's a roundup at MacFixit.
buffoonery.org puts on the gold velour flares, the perforated-aluminium aviator shades, and the black leather gloves in preparation for, for, for... Well, frankly, I'm not in the market. You might be, though, so drop by!
UPDATE: rereading this, it sounds as though I'm disinterested in the site content. That's inaccurate. It's the velour-slacks activities I'm steering clear of. Even though they are a metaphor that I actually just made up.
Am I making any sense at all? Sometimes it's hard to tell.
So all day today, this feline, Simon, has been insistently parking himself on my lap. He's a robust fellow and a bit hard to type around. It does keep the top of my thighs nice and toasty, though.
I guess someone let him read the universal blog license terms or something, so I'm obligated. Don't tell Chloe, OK?
The Seattle Public Library finally reopened the branch in my neighborhood not so very long ago. I was reminded of this when at the end of last week I heard that restrooms in the facility had been closed due to drug problems, a genuine irritation in Capitol Hill generally at the moment.
The day after Mayor Nickels' most recent appearance on KUOW, the restrooms reopened.
The tempest in a toilet bowl tickled my memory and I realized that ever since getting my library card reactivated, I had intended to look into the library's online reservations and catalog system. Eons ago, before the Age of the Web, the Seattle Public Library system offered an online catalog with reservations and so forth that was solely accessible via dial-up or telnet, and I used it heavily. This was about ten years ago.
I'm happy to report that the home page offers direct access to the catalog. What's a canonical technoweenie search? Hm, how about anything published by O'Reilly?
Of course, tech books age poorly in libraries, but as an example search, that's pretty cool. Happily, I've noticed that the URLs in the search app are hackable as well, so you can (for example) adjust the number of items in a page view easily. Look for the string 'npp=10' and hack away!
I've requested a number of items and look forward to getting notification they're in. One very interesting aspect of poking aroound in the catalog is the ease with which non-book resources can be tracked down. DVDs, CDs, and videos are much easier to locate and identify than via the old green-screen system.
One interesting aspect is the apparent relative paucity of search-and-sort parameters for non-book items. Despite no clear place to search on, for example, a director's name, I found that you can enter that in the KEYWORDS section and that will often work fine, as long as you also limit by media.
Anyway, I'm happy to see this.
Interestingly, I called the central library to see if they'd implemented WiFi yet. It's on the table but has not been finalized, apparently. That seems a bit crazy, to me - I mean, they already have the network and the internet access, so why not allocate $200 to each branch for access points? I mena, that's enough for each branch PLUS relacements for a couple of years!
As a donation-based project, this particualr thing could be funded, imagine, quite rapidly. Not that I'm setting it up or anything, but I count thirty branches. Let's assume that the project would have to supply a hub to plug the AP in as well. $200 is still more than enough; over Xmas I helped my cousin in LA pick up a Netgear AP that included four ethernet jacks for under $30 new at Fry's.
There are 29 branches. Even if a hardware manufacturer was not persuaded to simply donate the hardware (cough Michael or Steve cough) at that $200 figure I made up it's a total of $5800 in hardware costs to at least provide minimal wireless access at each branch. That's the cost of three mid-range PCs.
There is no reasonable excuse for the libraries to not offer this service.
All right-thinking Mac users have long depended upon the inimitable As the Apple Turns as our primary news resource, so it's not that big a surprise to note that in the wake of a Boing Boing link to the original story, first C|Net and then the New York Times follow up on the story. What is is it, pray tell?
Well, um, it seems you can buy silent tracks at the Apple Music Store via iTunes. Big deal, huh? Yeah, I thought it was funny too, but for christ's sake: is it really news that you can waste your money buying worthless crap online, and that computer-processed catalogs often contain bogus listings?
I didn't think so.
I'm linking because I think it's a symptom of the increasing transparency of blog-media to Big Media. Let's see... recently we had the amazing blog blitz around Mingering Mike (which also entered the collective consciousness via Boing Boing, if I recall correctly), and I'm sure others as well. Unfortunately for me, I'm pressed for time and can't document them at the moment. I recall a light NYT story quoting MeFi users within the past couple days, and I suspect there have been more recently.
Is this a good thing or a bad thing?
Well, it may be a good thing, although at the same time it feels kinda sad. After all, one of the things that creates a positive feedback loop for bloggers is the pleasure of learning about something, however fragmentarily and anecdotally, before the information has been vetted and professionally developed or reviewed.
The vituperative concerns of sites such as The Reg (Google and blogs) and Boing Boing (Orkut) may reflect this developing transformation. By presenting dismissive or negative analyses of elements of the intarweb, the sites seek to undermine the validity of those sites they dismiss or criticize.
Hmmph, I have totally lost my train of thought. How you people blog with a TV on in the same room is a mystery I'll never plumb the depths of.
Huh? Oh yeah!
So, one possible consequence? By the end of the week, I predict careful, serious analysis of the possibility that Steve Jobs will be airlifted into the CEO's throne at Disney.
This recipe is called ‘humpback’ because I didn’t know it would be especially memorable before I started cooking it. We watched the quite irresistible fillum Whale Rider on pay-per-view as we ate it, and I’ll always associate the two. Also, the stew is so good you’ll eat enough that you’ll feel an affinity with our cetacean neighbors.
Hungry and/or bibulous readers may be interested in my vernacular Guinness Beef Stew, also. Personally, I'd never prepare both at once, though. You gotta pick your fights.
Equipment
2 highball glasses
Cocktail shaker
Sharp kitchen knife
Measuring spoons
Measuring cup
Heavy-duty, deep lidded pot (8-12 cup capacity)
Soup bowls
Ladle
Wooden spoon
Soup spoons
Optional
Microwave
Grooved microwave platter
Paper towels
Second medium pot
Ingredients
4 Gin Rickeys
5 oz Bombay Gin
7 oz Rose’s lime juice
1 fresh lime, sectioned
Ice
Humpback Chicken Stew
8 cloves garlic, peeled, and sliced or diced
1 medium onion, chopped
3 tbsp (or more) Italian herb mix (thyme, parsley, oregano, etc. Ascertain it’s herbs only, no added salt!)
1/2 – 3/4 cup small carrots, cut up into rounds
olive oil
salt
pepper
bay leaf
4 medium potatoes
1 cube boullion (veggie, chicken, or beef)
3 – 4 cups water
6 strips bacon
1 – 1 1/2 lbs boneless chicken, cubed
1 can S & W ‘San Antonio’ beans (pinto beans, small red beans, Jalapeno peppers)
1 can S & W ‘Santa Fe’ beans (pinto beans, small red beans, yellow kernel corn, diced onion)
1 cup grape tomatoes
Optional ingredients
6 to 8 oz (half a bag) stew vegetables (frozen pearl onions, celery, carrots, etc.)
1 bag frozen kernel corn
1 bag frozen peas
Other fresh or frozen veggies as appropriate and to taste
Preparation
Slice and chop vegetables and chicken as stated in ingredients. Set aside. This is to minimize knife handling while drinking.
Pour gin and Rose’s lime juice together into shaker full of ice. Shake vigorously. Set aside.
Prepare 2 highball glasses with ice and lime wedge. Set aside.
I chose to cut the bacon strips in half and microwave them on high for five minutes to begin the cooking process while allowing some of the bacon fat to be picked up by the paper towels I nuked them on. Non-nukers may proceed to the next step.
Heat heavy duty pot over medium high. As pot heats, cut half-cooked bacon into inch-square pieces and add to pot, watching carefully to keep from overheating (if the grease smokes, it’s too hot).
Serve Gin Rickeys. It’s assumed you’ll consume two as you cook and so will your partner, busy at the X-Box or web browser as the case may be.
When the bacon has crisped up and shed most of the grease, remove to layered paper towels. Dump most of the bacon grease, but coat the interior of the pot with it before discarding. Do not dump directly into drain unless you are a plumber, in which case you know better already. A can or old milk carton will do. Bachelors are encouraged to use empty beer cans scavenged from living room area.
Replace pot on medium heat burner. Add chopped garlic, and stir with wooden spoon. Observe cooking process and add olive oil as needed. When enough oil is engaged, add chopped onions as well. Salt and pepper generously. Drink from gin rickey.
When oil has coated garlic and onion and you can smell the pepper from the sauté, add Italian seasoning mix and stir. There should be enough that it looks like too much. The oil will cause it to cling to the garlic and onions, more or less coating them, but not clumping in the oil.
Add chopped carrots, stirring. Allow to sauté for five minutes.
Fend hungry partner off with second Gin Rickey or, if necessary, saltines. Water down the drink if they show obvious signs of drunkenness or hunger-induced irritability. Once they leave kitchen, rummage in fridge for a pickle or some olives.
Optionally, boil the cubed potatoes separately for about ten minutes before draining and adding to main pot.
Add three cups water and boullion cube. Turn heat to high. If chicken is not cubed yet, do so now. Add cubes to liquid. As liquid approaches boiling, add the beans and the other vegetables; if you’re adding frozen vegetables it will slow the time to boil.
Bring to rolling boil and add bay leaf. If you do not boil the potatoes separately, keep on low rolling boil for about ten minutes; otherwise, add potatoes, but not liquid, from other pot.
After boiling, turn heat down to simmer. If there’s not enough stock to your taste add water to suit. Cover, but leave lid ajar to prevent boil-over.
Adjourn to common room and consume the rest of the Rickeys. Allow the simmer to continue for at least half-an-hour, checking on pot continuously to prevent boill-off or boil-over. At a half-hour or more of simmer time, turn burner off and remove pot from heat. Cover tightly, and wait another half-hour to allow soup to cool.
Serve. I recommend beer as a beverage accompaniment.
The Last Words on Earth, by Nicole Krauss. Feb 9, 2004 issue of the New Yorker.
A funny little old man tells us about some of the buffeting the century dealt him. He's hilarious; the story is heartbreaking. I loved it. I laughed, I cried, right?
Well, yeah.
(I should clarify that the story is a short work of fiction.)
Matthew at defective yeti reviewed The Triplets of Belleville recently, and mentioned that a review he'd read likened the film to Delicatessen and City of Lost Children, a resemblance that he did not see.
I did, and in a review, so I assumed that he was among the five people who read my film stuff in Tablet.
Tonight Viv and I went out for dinner and film, and Triplets was the most interesting film in the neighborhood, so we went. Viv rarely gets to see films with me when I attend a review screening (they're usually during the day), so it was her first time seeing the film and my second.
At dinner, I picked up a Stranger to check film schedules, and what did I see?
Writer-director-animator Sylvain Chomet invokes the same absurdly entertaining and overwhelmingly brown nostalgia that Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro tapped into for Delicatessen and City of Lost Children (all three filmmakers are indebted to Terry Gilliam's Brazil).
That's from Andy Spletzer's film short. Ah. So Matthew probably read Andy's review, not mine. Oops. For all that, Matthew's feeling that Jeunet and Caro's flicks are unlike Triplets is ungrounded; all three feel very much like a certain breed of Francophone comics, which is where all three creators began their careers.
The film is playing Seattle with the recreated/restored Salvador Dali / Walt Disney production, Destino, a project initiated and shelved in the late forties by the two moustachioed creators. The recreation is, uh, underwhelming - limited, frame-fade animation is used for no apparent reason. The film looks very computer-assisted. Why not let the app do the tweening? Additionally, the postwar era is not the high point for either man's creative powers, and the film reflects the constricted boundaries that both artists were turning to.
Entertainingly, I did see something new in Triplets - a supporting character, a mouselike midget engineer inventor, looks suspiciously like a well-known studio head, famed for his association with an animated mouse. The engineer character designs and builds a film-projector that is driven by pedaling athletes held captive by the French wine mob. Chomet, Triplets' director, goes so far as to show us a photo of the engineer wearing mouse ears. I'm pretty sure it's a poke at Disney's dominance of animated entertainment; the engineer is the flunky of murdering kidnappers and his audience is held in bondage.
eclecticism > Caucus Time: Michael reports on the Washington state caucus experience. Michael lives literally across the street from Town Hall, where Governor Dean most recently spoke in the city; he reports a 2/3 split from his precinct: Kerry over Dean.
While I think it's clear that the concerns of anti-war persons are being upheld with this weeks' news, I have to say that I can't imagine a Kerry victory over Bush in the fall. The Democratic contender is certain to face a late-October disclosure of Osama's capture, and only an uncompromising critic of everything - everything - the Bush administration has done and stands for will be able to save the country from a Republican steamroll.
Now, while I'm not as skeptical of Kerry's qualifications as either presidential candidate or officeholder as some, (who also weigh in with a first-hand report), I do concur with the general idea that this election will set the political tenor of this country for the next few generations.
Time to get my passport renewed. How's the economy up in B.C. these days?
Postfix Enabler. Looks like it's time to start thinking about migrating the server to Panther.
I Love Death is a schematically visualized, deeply cynical, perfectly realized flash movie. While it's by no means explicit, sex and death feature prominently enough that it's NSFW. via the good people of everlasting blort.
I believe it's a video for the band Lodger.
Tiny corkscrew in brain could help stop strokes.
I actually don't care about the article so much as the headline. Man, that is a headline.
Speaking of heads, this may help to minimize your pre-lunch cravings.
Daymented uses sour cream containers for storage. Sometimes it makes tracking the leftovers down a bit tricky. She's assembled a thoughtful interactive simulation for your edification.
All ya gots ta do is find the pea, see? Look, how easy it is! C'mon, c'mon, who's up for it. You sir! You! You look like sportin' type!
(Disclaimer: there is no actual gambling behind this link. Rollover-state images deployed for strictly educational purposes. Void where prohibited by law. You must be over 5' 2" to board this ride.)
Blather, by Bill Barol, beloved by billions, bounces back. You betcha.
AOL links with Apple on video IM | CNET News.com.
Oh, what a relief! I was expecting to have to handhold my folks through some gnarly NetMeeting pain!
They'll hate the ads, though. Hm...
A few help wanted ads that caught my eye this afternoon:
Organ Donor! Who wouldn't want that gig! I wonder, if experience is required, exactly how much? I did have my tonsils removed as a child.
What are the odds of two medical establishments in the Pacific Northwest cleverly naming themselves after mythic figures of the regional Native American culture? Next, you'll be telling me there are sports teams called, uh, the Seahawks or the Thunderbirds hereabouts!
Inmates' Elaborate Plans to Escape From Sing Sing Are Thwarted [NYT]
Mr. Zimmerman, a rapper from Queens who recorded songs under the name Puzz Pacino, hatched the plan to escape last year with a guard he met in Sing Sing named Quangtrice Wilson, according to investigators.
Sing Sing! Puzz! Quangtrice Wilson!
Of course, my gnomic glee is tempered by the tragic loss of Cornelius Bumpus.
Looks like Dear God Damn Diary has collected a cease-and-desist letter from one Angela Gordon, representing United Features Syndicate, for posting the execrable earworm 'Hey Ya.'
While we at mike.whybark.com applaud the effect of this letter, which is to minimize the possibility that we'll experience the inescapable urge to perforate our eardrums with the tiny little pencils once distributed by national magazines with appeals to subscribe (back in the seventies, when every day was like a rotting tooth in the mouth of a week-old corpse), we are sadly constrained to note that Ms. Gordon's thuggish eviction notice was intended to protect not the innocent listener (oh, how we mourn for the pursuit of the public good in our vaunted corps of legal professionals) but rather to protect the valuable intellectual property created by the happy collaboration of Charles M. Schulz and Bill Melendez in the form of an animated television special celebrating the birth of an important religious figure as reflected in the lives of a group of children originally seen in the comics section of nationally distributed newspapers but which I do not refer to by name out of my deep concern, (undoubtedly only expressed with greater assiduity by Ms. Angela Gordon on behalf of United Features Syndicate) for the protection and maintenance of the property rights of United Features Syndicate, as the name is clearly marked in the cease-and-desist letter with the registered symbol.
It's my sincere hope that while this deserved slap in the faces of all callous underminers of our nation's and the world's regime of intellectual property rights will in no wise distract B2's mission of providing us with informative, sober, thougtful insights into the current high-powered primary battle.
Happened across Sam Raimi's '93 classic Army of Darkness last night and chuckled my way through it.
In the sequence where the Deadites attack Arthur's castle, I was struck by the similarities between it and Jackson's Helms Deep sequence from The Two Towers. Not in scale of course; but both are night sequences, certain shots from the Raimi film appear to anticipate much larger and more polished shots in Helms Deep, and there were enough rough paralells that I began to muse on the topic.
Consider Jackson's 1992 Dead Alive. Though much more over the top than AOD, it also takes the slapstick approach to horror as a genre. An aside: what is up with the goatse reference on that poster?
Fast forward to three years ago. Note that Raimi's Spider-Man actually beats each one of Jackson's LOTR films at the box office. It also entered release as Jackson was probably fine-tuning TTT.
Finally, I think it should be noted that many of the folks that worked on LOTR worked for Raimi even longer than they worked for Jackson: Xena: Warrior Princess and Hercules were shot in NZ for the series' entire run.
So I think a reasonable case can be made for the two filmmakers being aware of each others' work. I suspect they like each others' stuff, actually. But did Jackson insert certain sequences into Helms Deep as a tip of the helmet to Raimi?
Cursory Googling did not yield others wondering about this. A similar lack of attributed quotes by Jackson on this specific proposition or on Raimi's work in general leads me to guess that no-one's spent time with Jackson talking about Raimi's work of late.
I shall add it to my list of questions for the bearded one!
Adam Kalsey figured out the Remember Me, Movable Type comments problem sometime this summer, and provides a crystal-clear fix. I haven't implemented this today (or even checked to see if MT integrated the fix into later releases) but for those of you who have wondered why MT sometimes knows ya and sometimes don't, you may now sleep even more soundly than when you learned that the G5 to PC thing was a hoax.
How I PC'd an Apple G5 turns out to be a practical joke spun out of control, says the 1/27/04 update to the original cringe-inducing post.
Rest easy, America. It will be at least a few years before someone does something like this for real.
I still think duct taping a laptop drive to a transistor battery inside a cheese grater with a circuit board and illuminated flashlight bulb would make a swell mod. You could even cut off the bottom of the grater and made a down-market G5 Cube.
But distracted by this project.
On my way to scrounge the MT fora, I saw a call for testers on MT3.0 dated January 30. I guess they might be full up, but I imagine I'll drop a line.
This forum post appears to have detailed instructions on setting up a PDA-friendly submission form.
My socks are calling.
Well, this is being entered offline via AvantGo.
Aggravatingly, the form's text-entry box is six characters wide by six lines high, rendering it rahtha poor from a usability perspective.
More research needed. But first, a vsnture into the exciting world of laundry.
UPDATE: hmmmm. Posting via that form appears to skip some of the formatting steps that happen when posting via the web-based forms. The original entry appeared sans line breaks. The form also included the extended field and did not offer the 'preserve lline breaks option' that I noticed.
More research indeed.
meryl.net articles: PDA Posting to MT (From Feb. 2002)
Once I got AvantGo set up to sync under OS X, the next step was finding the tools to post to the blog from the PDA.
I ended up using MAL Conduit which is both a true Palm conduit and has a decent readme in the distro, so no futzing around to set up the install, thankfully. I'm still poking around with the content settings.
I'm beginning this entry prior to completing the setup of the AvantGo bookmarklet, and I expect I'll have to tweak things a bit.
The AG sync process takes a reallly long time.
Linkblog?, wonders Eric S. at Wiredfool. He wants a centralized online bookmark storage facility that he administers and hosts so that the data is non-dependent on the vagaries of free web services.
I knew I'd just seen an extensive discussion of varieties of solutions to this problem; naturally I hadn't linked to it in a way that was accessible to me.
The discussions were on Ask Metafilter, but site-googling was unproductive because the key words - 'bookmark,' 'link,' etc., - are too meta, even (or perhaps especially) on MeFi, to produce a parsable result set.
To summarize the discussion, there are a variety of open-source tools and projects underway to provide this functionality, using everything from Perl to PHP/MySQL.
Another Eric pointed out that a paid .Mac subscription provides seamless virtual desktop integration, which leads to the same bookmarks appearing in-browser for Safari users when roaming.
We are only just beginning...: Jason Webley announces new CD with release party, May 11 and April 30, respectively.
Does it have to do with the open-heart surgery?
