Matt notes today's passing of one of his favorite "rock and roll brothers," Billy (Hideaki Sekiguchi), the bassist for the very kick ass Japanese band Guitar Wolf. Guitar Wolf was in the midst of a US tour, now cancelled, and had recently played both Seattle and New Orleans, where Matt is located.
Matt has posted a great picture, taken this week, of Billy rocking out, and not long ago wrote about his excitement at seeing the band cover one of his songs.
I am not a believer in any form of post-death consciousness, but I do feel free to use the idiom: what will Ms. Schiavo and His Holiness say when they run into this guy on the elevator?
Last October, engadget ran How-To: Podcasting, which I hope catches the eye of certain readers, especially those with radio shows.
I finally just began poking at this whole topic, since the phone offers music playback.
Eric notes that Tom Donohue's painted portrait now gazes down upon the Bloomington arts community in benevolent wisdom. I think this should be the start of a series. Hoagy, for one (duh). Marvis Foley's old pal and maracas player Herman B. Wells, for another. But most importantly to me, the founder of Concerned Citizens Against Art, Steve Millen.
As our friends and (ex-)neighbors shuffle off, we can join them every now and then for a cuppa and some gossip.
Exra special bonus points for the Bloomingtonian who first makes with the clicky-clicky and posts a picture of the undoubtedly handsome portrait.
Godspeed, Tom. You meant so much to all of us.
The Greatest Bus Driver in the World dropped a line wondering, "Can I use my iMac as a monitor for a Mac Mini?"
I scoffed, and indicated only the nuttiest of alpha geeks would even consider this. Well, them, and perhaps a sole, brave Italian, pushing back the frontier of creative hardware reuse!
If TGBDW's iMac is quite old, he might well be able to use his Bondi iMac as a monitor for that shiny new Mini.
But for newer iMacs, as I understand it at least, reusing them as monitors is unlikely.
I should note that this is perhaps the fourth Mac Mini related inquiry I have fielded since Apple announced the model in January. That is totally unprecedented. Apple's sales figures for the first quarter should be the best for any new Mac introduction, I suspect. The level of interest it seems to have generated must be quite comparable to that of the iPod.
For you NNW users: I think I need to proofread my blogstuff more closely.
The Vulgar Boatmen Trade List includes at least one recent-ish show from Schuba's which I have not heard.
Found while attempting to determine if the VB's "You Don't Love Me Yet" is, in fact, one of Dale's crafty covers (in this case possibly of a Roky Erickson song) or his own original material.
Cars, sitting in the back of the car, Laura's friends, they are going back to New York, radio's on...
That's gotta be Dale.
I left work early today because of a dental appointment. It was a cold, sunny day and a chilly wind was blowing. I was not dressed for it and the walk to the bus stop took on the aspect of a struggle.
I paused and called Viv, and then one Eric, and then another. As I spoke to the final Eric, a tank-tread construction shovel started up, lunch hour evidently over, and squeaked and clanked an end to our conversation. Moments later, my bus arrived, and I wended my way down the crowded aisle.
A lanky young man in loose-fitting black slouched into the aisle atop one of the two benches in the very center of the bus. He sported a lovingly braided mohawk, dangling and flipping about his face. His face was vividly painted in red, black, and white greasepaint, the angular shapes apparently applied carelessly and without direct cultural reference to Native American facepaint, or, I thought, to circus entertainers.
I seated myself next to a man in filthy clothing who was absorbed in a battered Marion Zimmer Bradley paperback. He refused to share the seat with me by not moving from the expansive sprawl he had adopted prior to my unwelcome appearance on the scene. A few stops later, the lanky young man shifted seats, and I could see his sweatshirt was emblazoned with the art and name of the Insane Clown Posse. He was down with the clown. I should have known.
As I emerged from the bus tunnel, a melodic voice singing in a language unknown to me filled the echo chamber in front of the Nordstrom tunnel entrance. I listened for a moment and heard some pretty good guitar picking behind it. I paused and hit the record button on my phone. As the song ended, I had become certain that the singer was my acquaintance Karen Olsen, a fervent Jason Webley admirer who has lately taken up her own creativity and begun to exhibit at the independent gallery Art Not Terminal as well as to busk and perform in public. This was the first time I had heard her, and I was pleasantly surprised.
I stopped and chatted with Karen and offered to host her demo at mp3.whybark.com, promising to email her the URL and to explain what all is involved. She might not want to post the material. I believe she may have concerns about people taking the music for free or stealing the songs. The option is there and her concerns are legitimate ones that should be addressed as a matter of education. I'm pleased that Karen has been pursuing her muse and am happy to lend a hand when I can.
Emerging from the side of Nordstrom into a driving, stinging rain, I was amused to note a mannequin posed in one of the windows, holding a cheap guitar with open case at her feet, filled with shoes. The windowdresser had seen fit to provide the doll with a sign reading “Will play for shoes,” and the windowdressing gnomes had done so.
Among other amusements this evening, I roughed out another first draft on the Treo, this time not on the bus but prone on the couch.
Since the laptop drive is providing failure warnings, I had considered my options and determined that an outboard backup drive was the place to start. It is, and what have you.
So I'm studiously leaving the laptop alone whilst CCC clones out a baby. Time and tide wait for no man, I hear King Wenceslaus once larned him, and I'll be god-damned if I let selflessness like that go unremarked upon.
Speaking of the self, Greg and Stacey very accurately laid the Bob Dylan autobio, part one, upon me last week. I started reading it last night, and so far Bobby's het-up reimagining of Greenwich Village circa 1960 as the last outpost of Victoriana (note the repeated motif of gas and kerosene lamps) is both compelling and suffused with the hilarity of the improbable.
It's a slo-mo Desolation Row, and it's sticking with me. I can't wait to get back to it.
ITEM.
Trying NetNewsWire for the first time. Not sold, very definitely not sold. Glad that I was able to export/import the blogroll from blogrolling.com. No beef with the app, it's the way the content is sketchily available. I also miss the site formatting, although I clearly understand the advantages of leaving it out of the feeds.
ITEM.
Disk Tool reports the internal hardware testing status (“S.M.A.R.T status”: may the marketeer that came up with this abuse of the acronym be long between gigs) of the Powerbook internal HD to be “failing,” which made me realize that although I purchased backup software at Christmas, I have not yet implemented it. Nor have I defragged the drive. Nor have I, in fact, performed any sort of maintenace at all upon the drive.
ITEM.
My trusty DiskWarrior 3.x CD will not reboot many late-model Macs. An update is available but you must order a new CD from the manufacturer if your disk won't boot the box. For $12.95, which, well, OK. And expect to wait up to three weeks. Grrr.
ITEM.
Very little makes me more angry than confronting a pissant electronics repair shopman noting that the television set I have lugged in is beyond the 90-day parts-and-labor warranty. In fact, it makes me so very angry that I did not realize while in the shop that the warranty was out by THREE DAYS on the day we brought it in, and furthermore, that the failure happened within the warranty period, and that we had we contacted the manufacturer at that time.
I haven't decided if I am going to call them up and yell at them before announcing a William S. Burroughs inspired campaign of shame surveillance or if I'm going to call them up and try to learn more about what sort of shitful souls they possess before announcing my global campaign of utter revilement. It being Easter, perhaps egging would be a fruitful option to consider.
Eric recently noted a compendium of John Peel on-air offensive centent advisories. Manuel has pointed out that my hoped-for "Warriors" dialog is embedded within the DVD subtitles.
I downloaded and dropped gmail-lite on the server - and it was a seamless experience. All I had to do was point the browser at it.
Unfortunately, the page render on the PDA is a bit wide - it looks like it wants about 400px, and the screen is 320. But it's a better experience than the Google-approved variant, which basically only disables javascript but retains top and side pagejunk that is problematic on a small screen.
Wait, I'm misremembering.
The apparently-new 'plain HTML' variant of official Gmail renders acceptably in the default Palm browser, Blazer. At first. Then, something untoward happens, and the page width exceeds the screen and the list of mail entries are vertically separated in a visually problematic manner.
The developer of gmail-lite notes that the application is also a probable violation of the Gmail TOS, which makes me nervous, as clearly Gmail is a monopoly application in my life now. Spammers, you have made Google into a king.
The upshot of this is I'm a bit wary of looking to use gmail-lite as a primary mobile interface into gmail.
I added a simple method of letting DJ Vicki speak a bit more randomly tonight.
The important bits are:
set A1 to some item of {"You're listening to", "What you hear playing is", "Behind me you hear"}
set A2 to some item of {"by", "lovingly performed by", "laid to wax by"}
set B1 to some item of {"Before that, we heard", "That was preceded by", "Leading into that we heard"}
set B2 to some item of {"from", "played by", "recorded by"}
set C1 to some item of {"And starting off the set was", "Three tracks ago, we heard", "led off by"}
set C2 to some item of {"shouted into a wire recorder by", "atrociously covered by", "downsampled to mp3 from the original analog sixteen track by"}
Which should be more or less self-explanatory to any interested party.
Manuel provides me with proof that the lazyweb works. Inspired by my bedtime musing about having speech synthesis provide occasional track info in the context of iTunes, he busta move and the results (should that be 'TheResult'?) can be found here.
Looking at the code, the script provides the information for the last three songs, and Manuel hasn't blocked out globals that could store lists of variables to swap in randomly. It also doesn't yet perform a count-and-interrupt (where when the script is fired it assigns n to the number of tunes to wait before performing a set break and then pauses the playback before reading the announcements).
Lessee now, I know I wrote something that uses globals...
Ah, here it is. My Applescript for using cron to schedule radio streams in iTunes uses a block to set the way that the script sees the radio streams:
set myPlaylist to "a radio selection"
set theCallSign to "KUOW"
This lacks a randomization method, though.
UPDATE: I take it back about the pause-to-announce; Manny has the volume fade to half while Vicki lays the lowdown on ya and brings it back up when she's done. It made me laugh so hard spittle went flyin.'
What would be great: a handy list of the dialog which the never-seen-on-screen deejay from 1979's "The Warriors" employs. I think it would be a lovely base for DJ Vicki to rock the talkbox with. Amazingly, no script for the film appears to be online.
Of course, eventually we will need to see what DJ Vicki looks like. Little help, party people?
A Spring, when flowers scent the air, the twitter of little birds lifts our hearts after a long winter's dark night, and the elephants return to Manhattan.
The Greatest Bus Driver in the World, Jon Nelson, recently got a kick out of something I posted.
Here's where life gets strange. I had not thought about the song "California Uber Alles" by the Dead Kennedys in years, but just last night, with the Governor's butt still in recent memory, I posted a link to Mike Whybark's Tussin Up archives. If you look over Mike's blog, you'll find, down at the bottom, a Quicktime film of his friend's Seattle Punk Accordion Class performance of Calfornia Uber Alles. It sounds great and is totally way more punk rock than anything ever recorded by Rancid. The accordions achieve a sort of Klezmer sound that reminds of the Governor's dad, and his many victims.
Hooray! I was very excited about posting that clip. Happy Jon enjoyed it.
However, although Jason is from Seattle, the singer in the clip is Aaron Seeman, who I don't know personally. Jon may be excited to learn that Aaron is actually from the Bay Area, and that when Aaron's tour is over he will be back in the same area that Jon lives.
I want iTunes to bust in every n tracks and use the “Victoria” speech synthesis voice to say things like “...and that wass Meeles Dahviss with Eena Silent Mood. Right before that we heard...” and so on.
Someone must have written this plugin, surely. If not, here's a set of scripts that nearly offer the answer; the obvious deployment is to tie it to a key-command and randomize the wrapper script, so that the voice says different things as it announces the trackname and artist. The current implementation also only draws the variables from the current track, and speaks as the track is playing (paused counts as not playing, in this instance).
This has the unfortunate effect of placing the speech right over (or, as in my case) under the audio, making it even harder to understand. I'd hack it up, but I really should be looking at fixing those comments.
A couple of beers at The Comet with the man that married my wife.
To me, I mean.
Then we had sushi and bento at the wonderfully quiet Oasis Cafe up the block. On the way home walked by the nearly-complete reservoir park, where that van driver plowed into the wall twentyodd days ago. The park looks lovely and I hope that my battered neighborhood's current problems with the homeless don't turn it into a wasteland right out of the gate.
We also walked by Value Village's window display of Eastertide bunny rabbits.
And of course, a learned lesson. mo:blog does not handle multiple photos in a single post. I'm also beginning to make my peace with the craptacular CCD in the Treo; sometimes it produces a certain generalization in the lighting which to me appears painterly.
I went to the Elysian for lunch on my way home from work, hoping to get some work done, and was puzzled by the repeated failure of my computer to connect to the wireless signal, which is clearly visible under the name “Elysian Free Wi-Fi.” The formerly open access point now required a password to join.
Inquiring with my server, I was informed that the network was “down indefinitely,” which seems odd given the visibility of the signal. Seems like this might be worth investigating further.
Last night, Greg was kind enough to lay In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning on me; he and Stacey were also kind enough to include Chronicles. This eventuality leads me to the ineluctable declaration that this evening shall be Reading Night.
As I sat down, I had the realization that I'd been through this once already.
I'm not the sharpest blade in the knife block, evidently.
Concerned onlookers please note: no actual powerbook was harmed in the creation of this entry.
Joe's list of Gmail accessories includes a pointer to gmail-lite, a PHP-based project of interest to persons, such as myself, seeking better mobile access to Gmail.
Dinner Wednesday night at The Oceanaire with Greg and Stacey. I hear Greg can't make it to practice Thursday which is just as well, as I have some seriously overdue copy I need to work on.
and one more try should do it.
I still need to code the image div, though, and the resize is fakied.
If not babies, then cats, of course.
Resize is yet unaccounted for.
It would also appear that preview may be an issue.
Huh. I actually posted a new entry from the road, but this one duplicated.
The Cartoonist passed on a plea the other day for someone to translate a few lines of dialog from Dutch to English in an old cartoon found tucked inside a book.
The original statement of curiosity originated here, with what was clearly a Dutch translation of a Little Nemo strip printed in black and white.
I recognized McCay's hand and thought I had a copy of the original in one book or another and asked Ralf to put me in touch with Rob. We corresponded a bit, whereupon I learned that he was unfamiliar with Winsor McCay.
I dug out the book and copied the dialog, sending it to him with some links to McCay resources on the intarweb.
I assumed that the piece was a translation of the Little Nemo original; the images I saw looked familiar as part of a long sequence in which Flip, Nemo, and the Imp are wandering through Morpheus' castle. I have several of the Fanagraphics reprints and thought I might be able to locate the piece.
I seem to recall something about early seventies bootleg Dutch reprints of Nemo preceding US reprints by a couple of years. I may have read that these reprints influenced Joost Swarte, who so clearly has looked at McCay (among other early cartoonists) pretty closely.
McCay also is widely credited as the inventor of animation, for his Gertie the Dinosaur films, and is remembered in the ongoing Kim Deitch Waldo epic as a frustrated old man, aggravated at the way the his inheritors had commercialized the form
Here's a wikipedia article on Nemo.
The period in the strip which the images are drawn from is known as the “Befuddle Hall” sequence.
I have it in several republications. This transcription is taken from page 110 of “the Best of Little Nemo in Slumberland,” edited by Richard Marschall.
FRAME ONE
Nemo (on the left, in policeman's cap):
I wish we had never come into this Befuddle Hall in the first place.
Flip (to right, in cap, appears bearded and with cigar):
That isn't the question now, it's how are we going to get out.
FRAME TWO
N: The whole affair seems to be sideways. It makes me dizzy.
F: There's a hall running up and down and crossways! Don't fall in, now, hear?
FRAME THREE
N: Let's give ourselves up when we get out of here, eh, Flip?
F: Let's get out first! Whoever named this Befuddle Hall knew his business!
FRAME FOUR
N (to the Imp): Come on! You slowpoke! Hurry up! Don't be so slow!
F: I see daylight! Come on! Hurry up!
FRAME FIVE
N: We'll hunt up the princess now, eh? And go back to the palace!
F: Yes! There's the door to this befuddle place yonder!
FRAME SIX
I: Pug ug umble guck!
N (losing cap): I'm so glad we are going to get out of here!
F: I told you I'd find the way out, did I not, eh?
FRAME SEVEN
N: Yes! You did not! We are as bad off as ever!
F: Huh! This beats me! I'm certainly, um, twisted! the only thing we can do is go back again!
FRAME EIGHT
N: (having fallen out of bed and awakened): Huh! I was wondering why everything looked so sidewise like!
---
Every single installment of Little Nemo in Slumberland ends with Nemo awakening on the floor in a smaller frame. There is a wonderful sequence which starts with him in bed, and the bed grows legs and gallops over the city wildly until he awakens, having fallen out of bed.
The strip Rob found has an original publication date of 1908, and is drawn from a several-weeks sequence known as “Befuddle Hall.”
There was a very terrible animated film adaptation of the strip made in the 1990s. In the US in the seventies, a wonderful animated campaign for Levis' pants made heavy and direct use of imagery and sequences originating in the strips, but wildly psychedelicized in the nineteen-seventies idiom.
Performing a google image search on the quoted term “little nemo” seems to yield a number of scans of the strip in color, as it was originally published. The strip was an anchor of the American sunday comics supplement and original rotgoravured pages are sought-after collectibles (I have never seen one in real life).
Anyway, there's a ton of stuff out there of Nemo and on McCay. If you can find it, “Little Nemo 1905-1914” may contain every strip from the greatest period. This edition was published by the Evergreen Press (a subthing of Taschen), has an introductioun by Bill Blackbeard, and the ISBN is 3-8228-6300-9.
Rob also blogged our correspondence, upon which this post is based.
My ol' buddy and housemate Bill Weaver emailed me a link to his 2004 pictures, in which i learned, variously:
1. My hometown still produces seasonal events of heartbreaking beauty and quaint silliness, such as the leaf change and the municipal bluegrass festival band names.
2. Bill visited an incredible residence belonging to some wealthy person.
3. WFHB still exists (but I knew that already).
5. One of the churches I attended as a child now has a new cupola over the nave crossing, probably an interim to a steeple originally planned when the church was built in the early nineteen-hundreds (There's supposed to gbe a ghost, but never saw one).
Whether Bill knows that his annual photo updates are a kindness to me personally or not, I do not know. But they most assuredly are.
On the bus ride home, my AvantGo feed of Wired News presented me with this astonishing information.
Apparently,
TOKYO -- Your eyes probably hurt just thinking about it: Tens of thousands of Japanese cell-phone owners are poring over full-length novels on their tiny screens.
In this technology-enamored nation, the mobile phone has become so widespread as an entertainment and communication device that reading e-mail, news headlines and weather forecasts -- rather advanced mobile features by global standards -- is routine.
Now, Japan's cell-phone users are turning pages.
Several mobile websites offer hundreds of novels -- classics, best sellers and some works written especially for the medium.
Once again, I find myself living in the future of the future. Really, it's not at all what I had planned. I had a hovel in the country all picked out, replete with peeling lath walls and choked with charcoal dust, tracked with crushed pastels and aromatic with turpentine and linseed oil. Oh well; this only adds to my conviction that personal desire is a thing of absolute irrelevance.
Returning to the topic at hand from such - ah - pastoral reflections, I am becoming aware of the odd limitations that the Palm OS and associated apps enforce upon users. In this case, my immediate reaction to seeing the story, of course, was to blog it.
But how? AvantGo provides no direct URLs in the story feeds. I could copy it to the clipboard, paste it into mo:blog, thumb out a few words, and save it to sync when I got home - or even upload remotely as I did yesterday.
But how in the world could I get a screenshot of the eye-popper that prompted the entry? Anyway, I'm sure I'll have some longer-form thoughts on the general topic of this rather absurd mountain-climbing I'm engaged in. As I have remarked, I had literally no idea what I was getting in to. I thought this whole thing was a done deal and I was walking down some well-trod path, one that preferably passed though a bucolic countryside and ended in a garden cottage.
Bryan explains why he's easing over to Firefox from Safari. I have been more or less doing this myself, although I haven't loaded FF up with plugins.
What I would really like is bookmark sync between the browsers.
Also, come to think of it, Safari's bookmark manager implementation is waaaay slicker than Firefox's; also the default text-entry form display in Firefox is 12-pt Courier, which really sucks if you are entering lots of HTML in fixed-width form boxes. I also miss Safari's excellent in-text-area interactive spellchecker.
Ben, one of my dinner partners this evening, displays a well advised interest.
(Special geek interest note: This post originated as a 100% remote post, sent from the dining table moments after the shot - sadly, I was not conversant with all of the steps required to create the post with the image embedded. Suffice to note that the image was successfully uploaded, if not resized.)
After dinner, Rose and Eric and Viv and I trekked to a house in far Ballard where we enjoyed the self-deprecating Jason Webley. Among other things, Jason read the forty or so that assembled a story (that's a link to the performance, in a 3-odd mb mp3) by Carl Sandburg.
Jason opened for Aaron Seeman, whose specialty is a blend of Dead Kennedys covers, mainstream pop, and traditional tunes, all pumped out of a “Linex” accordion - I assume Torvalds is holding out on the licensing agreement.
At the end of the night, Aaron and Jason led the six-or-so folks who took Aaron's accordion clinic in a rousing chorus of “California Uber Alles” - most of which I actually got on undoubtedly-awful-quality video. However, it will take some work to get it off the phone - when I try to send it, I get an out of memory message - I assume this is because the bluetooth transfer has to stuff the whole thing into RAM before it will go over the, er, wireless.
But when I get it over, I'll at least link. It's in this newfangled “3GP” format, which Quicktime is supposed to fully support, but, like, YMMV.
I also tried getting as much of the show as audio as I could, experimentally. It looks like I got about an hour and a half of the show, close to the theoretical capacity of the card I'm using.
Also, I think I have learned some things. First, it's gonna make you paranoid even in a relaxed and intimate space if you have to leave your expensive cellphone on a shelf to use it as a music recording device. Second, if you do, you can't take pictures with it. Third, while low light and no flash means relatively poor image quality, it's also much less obtrusive than the flash, and therefore probably better from a documentist's perspective - you stick out less, and have less to worry about and can be more 'in' the event than if you're fiddling with your gear to keep it from blinding people all night.
So, off to try to excavate that video before Morpheus sweeps me away.
UPDATE: California Uber Alles, performed by Aaron Seeman and the Seattle Punk Accordion class of March 2005. 320x160, 3.6mb, 3:37min, and I clipped the first fifteen seconds of the song because it took me that long to realize I had enough storage to shoot it. Warning: the clarity of the audio and video achieved in this clip gives new meaning to the word “crappy.”
There's a tiny test clip of Jason from much earlier in the evening in that same directory, in which Jason leads the crowd in a rousing rendition of the Columbus Day song.
Feedpalooza Journal documents Carlo Zottman's bootleg RSS scraper, Feedapalooza. Ooh! He's got the NME!
RSSscraper: "RSSscraper generates RSS feeds from websites who do not provide it themselves."
..ah, sweet relief! I can post from iPhoto again! ecto seems all happied up now too.
This is a shot of the late afternoon sun along the busway south of downtown taken with the cell. It has been manipulated.
Chris set me up the bomb, and now the remote posting widget is functional again!
Supposedly, mo:blog will allow me to post phone pix, too. But my pix dir is empty at the moment.
Jay Allen mentions some new anti-spam plugins, and while I'm not going to run out and set them up (given that I busted the comments on a bunch of blogs real good last time I did that), all three sound pretty interesting. I would love to reimplement trackback, but until moderation is avaialable, it's gotta wait.
The combination of preview->post->moderation on this blog has, as best I can recall, zeroed out my spam; unfortunately, it's also killed conversation in the comments. When a post picks up a bunch of commentary, I may not get to approve the comments until the end of the day, and so the remarks overlap and do not take into account my replies.
Which is a shame. I may experimentally disable MT-B's moderation to see if the dual-layer asbestos underwear is enough.
The thought strikes that MT-4 should really have something like a dedicated spam-fighting plugin layer or protocol so that developers like Jay and Chad (who wrote the multi-step comment submission filter and the MT-Moderate filter which does enable trackback moderation) can make their products work together with maximal handshakery.
Barry Skidmore had the same problem I am having: XML::Parser refuses to install even though I have successfully installed expat in the vanilla locations. Wonder if he ever got anywhere with the problem.
Not by October 2004, looks like.
I actually had found this before the first link but don't think this is the same issue.
curiously, "locate expat" does not reveal the /usr/local/* files that were actually installed, although it sees an install (of php) in /usr/local/ just fine.
This is true even after globally setting PATH to explicitly include /usr/local/ etc.
Perhaps a restart is in order.
It does appear that we are not alone.
For completeness' sake, here is the error that is thrown when ecto tries to access the xmlrpc:
And here's the piece of SOAP:Lite that is throwing the error:
The all-night quorum of the Tipple Congress produced many pleasant results, such as this impressive architectural wonder and short-lived public work.
Tonight, I will attend a meeting of the Tipple Congress at Die Bierstube, courtesy of the insistence and instigation of a gentleman of Polish extraction.
During the Mexican-American War of the 1840s, a battalion of Irish emigrants to North America fought on the Mexican side of the war. They are known, and remembered in Mexico, as Los San Patricios (30-second RA sample of The Fenians' "The San Patricios").
Despite an obscure movie, a documentary, and another song or two (Why are all these songs by Irish-American bands? Why no mariachi bands or full-on traditional numbers?), the Patricios are little known in the U.S. This might well be due to the fact that many of the Irish fighting with the Mexicans were deserters from the U.S. military. I find it interesting that the San Patricios are credited wih having played a key role in the defense of Monterrey, one of the two Mexican citites where I spent significant time as a child.
I stumbled across this site years ago while in the Bare Knuckle Boxers. We played a tune called "The Gallowglass," which years later I learned was an Hibernian Anglicization of a Scots Gaelic word, "Gall Oglaighs," which was applied as a class to Scots fighters, of Viking heritage, who came to Ireland to fight as mercenaries but became a recognized element of Irish society.
May I suggest you listen to our version of the tune and think, for a moment, about the role of war and violence in Irish history. Then, shake it off and hoist a few.
My Treo has a silver stylus built into the body, which i rarely use, although I am happy that it's there.
Many of the flip-style phones feature a short, retractable antenna.
Honestly, I'm no special genius, and am sure that I can't be the only person who has wondered why cell phones don't come with a retractable earbud and throat mike by default. I mean really!
It wouldn't add appreciable bulk or cost to nearly any phone.
The hordes of one-handed drivers we share the roads with would vanish overnight. You, of course, would never, ever speak into your handset while driving, gentle reader.
And me? I wouldn't have a new rat's nest of cable in my pocket to thumbwrestle with daily.
Cell phones: evil or loathsome? Tune in tonight!
OK, the second dentist in two years is telling me I have Oscar-quality gingivitis, which results in the scurvy-like loss of teeth due to bone loss.
The first place suggested using a flouride rinse, but the new place stressed the importance of punishing, De-Sade-esque flossing and the patience of Job, in order to actually wait out the interminable 30-seconds-per-quad that the horrible instrument of entrapment known as a Sonicare requires.
The upshot of all this is incredible gum pain shortly after dinner, and consequent crankiness and pain-related personality deformations. Too much gum, indeed.
Quake, Doom, and Hexen.
For Palm OS 5. Ported by Yohann Magnien. Found via PDArcade.
This amuses me by making me wonder if Marathon might ever be Palm ported.
A forum poster at Agoraquest notes that the STR-DE597 only supports active subwoofers. As the receiver/amplifier is built for multi-channel setups, this also explains the profoundly tinny sound we have through our 1970's homemade PA speakers. To think I once put a cherry-cabinet all-tube Fisher into the trash.
This forum posting, "TreoCentral.com - Gmail DOES work with Versamail...here's how," details the settings necessary to utilize Versamail to access one's Gmail account via POP.
Unfortunately, since you must leave "leave on server" set in order to preserve the state of the gmail account for browser access, it's nearly impossible to use effectively; when you delete old messages, the application re-downloads them.
tinfoil.com - Early Recorded Sounds and Wax Cylinders, via MonkeyFilter. Did I link to this already? Very well, then, I repeat myself.
Repeat myself.
Dan once pointed out the City of Seattle real time emergency dispatch list. I've found myself rooting around his site for it more than once of late as sirens spiraled off into the night. Early this evening there was a long-repeating distant lowing noise, the sort I associate with air-horns for air-raids and tornado alerts. It was to the north and west of here. It repeated an insistent pattern for several minutes, nearly inspiring me to leave the couch.
A few minutes later, as bellowing firetrucks barrelled through the intersection, the shaking of my house inspired me to the action of linking to that list. In future when idly curious about events of human disaster, I can consult my own site archives rather than Dan's.
Moments later, another siren. "Motor Vehicle Accident," I read, as the police car roughly shouldered through the crowd of gawking SUVs and Smarte Cars, rubber whip antenna flailing authoritatively. "10th Av E / E Roanoke St."
I fell back against the cushions. My work for the night was done.
iPodder, the cross-platform Podcast receiver.
This may prove useful to learn non-iTunes podcast reception management.
Of course, my ideal would be just to use iTunes and hack something that will place the 'casts onto the Treo at sync (just like this, but for a Missing-Sync-using Mac user). Perhaps Palmcasting has a lead. Hm, that article cites Pocket Tunes again, is windows-oriented, and relies on being able to drag-and-drop playlists into the sync window, something that Palm's 'add to handheld' tool explicitly disallows.
I also came across AeroPlayer, which looks interesting as well.
Oh, I seem to have overlooked a feature of the Missing Sync toolkit. When the Treo is mounted as a drive to the Mac desktop using the Palm-based "Missing Sync" drive mounter, you can copy tunes (and playlists?) to the media card of the Palm from within iTunes via in-window drag-and-drops. That plus smart playlists for podcasts equals a possibility of accomplishing my goal.
How scriptable this is remains to be seen. Seems like someone must have scripted an 'if volume mounted'applecsript for iTunes. Clearly. this is also the sort of monkeyshines that watched folders were designed for.
I may delete Busker after poking at it briefly. It is clearly designed to emulate much of iTunes' functionality, but since the program is so solidly aimed at a Wintel audience I found the design and featureset implementation unappealing. I actually prefer parts of the portable RealPlayer UI, but that app clearly has trouble dealing with a volatile, multivalent mediabase and has already failed to play media from playlists I built with the application from local media on the card.
But enough palm futzing for the day. There's writing to be done!
In my defense for a day of blogslacking, I would like to point out that we went out to eat Korean food with Greg and Stacey last night. I abused my cellphone's camera privileges all night.
The Old Village restaurant featured many tables with hooded charcoal burners in the center of the table, which made the dining experience an amusing combination of Brazil and Clan of the Cave Bear. It was the first time that I'd ever eaten Korean food with a burner in the table. I liked it a lot. Greg and Stacey set us up right, ordering a plethora of Korean dishes. We were all stuffed to the gills when we left.
Wow! I haven't missed a day for a couple of years!
Today's Treo update:
I installed Ringo, a ringtone manager which looks to be based on the Apple-store model of app. The default tone-selection methodology is to direct you to a store to purchase tone. Since I hate that business model with a burning passion, I deleted the app immeditaely.
I'm experimenting with another electric pocket utility, Busker, which is an MP3 player that includes podcast support. I imagine I'll be looking at other players but it's clear to me that podcast support is the single feature I really want.
I have also put Butler on the phone, which looks very promising indeed. It offers up to 60 day-configurable repeating or non-repeating alarms, 2 more than my beloved (and sadly mourned) BigClock, as well as a host of other little reminder-oriented features.
Finally, I'll be experimenting with both ToySoft's mp3Ringer and MotionApps' mRing. Both apps advertise the ability to set ringtones based on mp3s and other media-stoage file formats.
UPDATE: both apps disqualifed themselves on initial launch. One required non-standard phone-answering behavior, so it's gone. The other required Pocket Tunes; the ring manager I want has to be standalone. Onward!
After all, even if all the Palm Pilots stop, the cellphones will still all play Jason Webley tunes.
Google News: now offering customization.
Add your own saved searches, delete sections (bye-bye, Sports!) rearrange the pagelayout. And no login. Pretty cool.
Leisure Town is back. That is all.
You may wish to take a day off work. Having some cheap scotch handy is advised.
The indispensible Cartoonist digs up Hoboken's The Feelies, and also audio.
Man, I have tons of non-blog writing to do, and I am dawdling up a storm.
BBC NEWS | Health | Transplant cures man of diabetes
I read this on the way in to work this morning. The cure depends on islet transplants, and what the story fails to mention is that as in any transplant, the recipient is dependent on anti-immune-reaction drugs for the rest of their life. The only way around this (barring twins) is to employ cloned islet cells, which to date are solely obtainable via the use of the ever-controversial stem cells, cells taken from foetii, I think.
Viv and I have discussed this, and she rejects, rightly, I think, the idea of replacing one lifetime treatment which she has mastered, it seems, with another which she would need to learn in her forties.
memigo : cut through the infoglut, says the tagline. Or intensify it, really.
Possible alternate MeFi feed-parser for handheld.
MT-Keystrokes offers YA approach to comment spam, one predicated on testing for human input.
It requires a per-template, per-blog modification, as have several recent solutions I have, er, 'implemented.'
When I get around to fixing the orbital blogs' comments I will evaluate this.
[credit: Danelope.]
Need Some New Luster? Try Rosie O'Donnell's Method: Create It by the Blogful [NYT blogerated link]. I find this delightfully weird, but alsoi sooo depressing that the Times, which must know better, is looking for celebrity-blogger stories. What I would give to hear the meeting that has led to all this attention from the Grey Lady to blogland!
Well, I was skeptical, but may be converted. I really didn't think I wanted a thumboard on the phone. but on the busride home today I just wrote 500 words of a 1500 word rough draft. That's many, many more than I was ever able to get done using Grafitti on the old Palm.
I am also finding I use the menuing keys to do normal computery things that were always a giant PITA under earlier Palm OSes - like cutting and pasting data from one app to another.
The latest update in the continuing recording-phone-calls quest is twofold. On Monday, the only shipping dual-mode headset for the Trreo arrived, the Seidio 2-in-1 headset. This headset is not really the model I wanted, I just need it now, and the other listed models are currently out of stock.
Unfortunately, right out of the box, it was apparent that the headset sufferes from overly delicate cabling, as it was not so much a stereo headset as a mono headset, with signal intensity randomly adjustable by fiddling with the base of the cable near the elbow join. Feh.
I have an RMA, but it does not appear that MobilePlanet will eat the return freight or that they will overnight a replacement to me.
Further exploring the Treo front, I have been in copious correspondance with Toysoft's Danny Wong, the developer of PAR. He has been very prompt, if SMS brief, in replying to my messages.
Unfortunately, this morning, he informed me that "you CAN NOT record conversation with the headset." Coming from the developer, I'm inclined to take that as accurate, although it differs from what various posters in Treo-oriented fora have indicated. I'm continuing to work with him to try to figure out why I haven't been able to get the headphone button to work as a record-activation button.
I'm not done working this yet, though. My last hope is a device that would provide 'loopback' to the audio-in part of the headphone jack, adding the remote speaker's voice to the feed after it's hit the mic and earphone. It's possible a piece of gear I currently have will do the trick, although I'm loth to bring gear to the picture.
My question about AvantGo led to someone pointing me at moblierss. I believe it's a different app than a previous feed reader I tried out.
Now I gotta hit the books again to see how you point things at AvantGo.
The light his morning reminds me of dawn in early summer. Looking out the front window, I see that the floral buds on the tulip tree in our courtyard have erupted overnight, and as the morning light hits them, they are toning the courtyard - and my livingroom - a pale, deep pink. The flowers are acting like a cumulus cloud in the sky at dawn or sunset.
Awesome pix and pitch-perfect sketchy backstory. I saved a web archive of this: perhaps you should too, before your grandpa is distemporated. Could this be an ARG gateway?
Mount St Helens erupts, notes The Australian. The USGS notes that the event took place at about 5:30, sending ash up to about 36,000 feet. Based on images I saw on TV, the eruption was clearly visible from downtown Portland as the sun began setting on an amazingly warm spring day.
I poked through the Volcanocam recent images archive and it appears that they did not get the pix, although I was hurried (I'm in the middle of cooking dinner).
UPDATE: Well, maybe it did get some pix. But the blurring - is that from the quake?
Huh. Actually, that's pretty cool. The eruption coincided with sunset, so the camera gets blurry and fades out as the light goes over images 20, 19, 18, and so on. Compiled as a movie, the camera would appear to have been affected by the eruption into a loss of signal.
Air kisses, people - the sole won't wait! Tell me if I missed something!
UPDATE: Paul Freankenstein points out this Flickr photoset.
Pictures of the Seattle Mefi meet held at the Big Time on March 5. A fine time was had by all, I believe.
At least one update should be forthcoming, I think.
...and here it is.
TheDoctorDementoShow.com: Every. Doctor. Demento. Show.
Widely linked and all, but, geez! You gotta linky for something like this! I hope the host's bandwidth does not falter or bankrupt anyone.
Jon Nelson, an elder statesman of the bohemian and odd and Bay Area bus shepard par excellence dropped a line noting his recent foray into the world of blogging.
I first heard of Jon from my late pal Steve Millen, who saw fit to run some of Jon's material in his celebrated (by me) zine Tussin Up back in the eighties. Since that material is the sort of thing that routinely gets folks fired these days, you'll have to figure out what Jon contributed on your own.
Jon first got in touch with me about a year ago, as a consequence of reflecting on Steve's death and having come across my archive of the zine (See link above; no, really, you should check it out - the zine's hilarious).
Since then I have looked forward to receiving his occasional ruminations, and the very idea that Jon is now in the building makes me all quivery.
Ladies and gentlemen - Jon Nelson!
May be void where prohibited by law. Closed track with provessional driver. Persons with easily disturbed digestive processes, a tendency to believe that Democrats and Republicans offer a materially different electoral choice, a fondness for Ayn Rand, and outmoded views of sexual morality may wish to avoid the links cited above. Your mileage may vary.
As I walked out of Cafe Argento, where I was working for a while this afternoon, a screech of tires and rattle of metal attracted exclamations from a few people on the sidewalk in front of the cafe.
I walked by them, on my way to Caffe Vita to keep working, and looked down the street to see what they were exclaiming about. My eye caught a white van accellerating down the empty street toward the reservoir park and playfield at the end of the block.
As I watched, it careened through the intersection and plowed through a chain-link fence surrounding a stone wall in the process of being constructed. As the van hit the wall, it slewed sideways and came to rest in a cloud of dust.
Absurdly, with my new cell phone in my hand, I called out to the knot of onlookers at the cafe to call an ambulance, and proceeded toward the wreck. Someone who passed me noticed my phone and told me to call 911, which gave me pause. Later, I asked my friend Sabrina how that works, and she assured me that any call to 911 placed from a handset is now legally obligated to connect to geographically-local emergency services operators.
The park had been crowded with people, and many of them were drifting cautiously nearer to the van, evidently fearful of the sight awaiting them. I heard someone say, "Was there anyone in the van?"
"Someone was driving it," I said as I walked closer to the van, stepping over the shattered remnants of the low stone wall. As I did so I thought for the first time about what I might be just about to see and the fact that my phone was also a camera.
As I paused, a somewhat unkempt man wearing a blue plaid shirt and a Caffe Vita cap emerged shakily from the other side of the van. "Are you the driver?" I asked. He was not able to speak, but did not appear physically hurt, just very badly shaken. His left hand remained at his side while his right was lifted to his chest in the universal gesture of relief.
"You are a very lucky man," I told him. Other onlookers began to draw closer, including one woman who gestured to her car, stopped in the middle of the road. She expressed relief as well; had she been a few feet further into the intersection the speeding van would have T-boned her on the driver's side.
I was torn between staying and moving on, because I got a late start today and have a ton of work to do. In the end I settled for snapping a few photos and moving on.
Once I was a block down the street, I became aware that I was shaking with adrenaline. I sat down and called Sabrina and Viv.
After last night's MeFi meet, Jim and Dan and I repaired to the confines of the snug in the very back of The College Inn, a fusty relic of the 1920s featuring a battered and moldy piano upon which Jim and I executed half-competent tinkle-tones at various points through the evening.
This, by the way, is what Jim looks like to my Treo when drinking under low-light conditions. It is a companion to another image which willl be posted in due course.
Florent Pillet's iTreo offers photo-sync for the Mac-based Treo user, and his Sync Buddy looks like it will serve that portionof the market that is resistant to the Missing Sync's price point, while also oferring a few fewer features.
Regarding audio recording, I downloaded both the Palm-oriented Audacity (not to be confused with the opensource project of the same name) and SoundRec. Audacity costs $99 and requires a PC-based installation and setup, which I could probably hack through, but: meh. SoundRec looked promising, but the project hasn't been updated since Summer '04 and required some sort of tweak to enable the Treo 600, so I was unsurprised when it refused to record to the Treo's SD card and then errored out after a minute thirty when recording to the internal memory of the Treo.
I've dropped a line to the PAR developer, and hope to hear more soon.
Regarding the Nokia Series 6 apps, I removed Natural Recorder from Viv's phone for now. I had a nice exchange of emails with the CTO of the company selling the app, and he confirmed that there is no way to turn off the recording in the current release - it's a feature, he said, more or less. If you look at the marketing for the product, you can see that he is quite serious.
He did confirm that they intend to add an on-off feature in a future release, but that no release date is set. I understand this; the product was only released in January, if I recall correctly, so the company doesn't even know if they are going to be in the ballpark on sales.
Finally, the Mac forum at MyTreo.net has been quite helpful.
PalmVNC 2.0. That is all.
Cingular Treo 650 FAQ: r34d 7415 n00bs! In fact, read everything at TreoCentral, but start with the forums. This is the place that explained how and why I need a hybrid headset in order to accomplish my internal call-recording goal.
As an aside, the music-management on the Treo is kind of not-so-hot, but it works! You must drag the audio assets (presumably MP3s) to the icon for 'Send to Handheld,' a PalmOne widget that installed with the 4.2.1 Palm Desktop suite, and the files are prepped for the next time you sync, where they appear to be converted into RA files which you access via a RealPlayer on the Palm.
Investigating photo syncing with iPhoto yielded cryptic references to a "PalmOne Photos" folder in your user directory's "Pictures" folder, which apparently instantiates only if you choose to use Palm Desktop rather than iCal, AddressBook, and iSync. Here's a resource page at Palm that doesn't explicitly cover the 650 but which appears to apply to the documentation provided with the Treo.
BigClock doesn't work on the Treo 650 or 600, but someone patched it for the 600; at first impression, it appears to work well enough.
Returning to the bug-up-my-nether-parts-du-jour, I have downloaded and played with PAR, and while the audio quality appears to be excellent, if subject to the rustling noises produced by handling the case, it also very definitely has a tendency to crash if you attempt to record for longer than a minute. That, coupled with the inability to make a direct internal recording, means I must keep searching. Time's a-wasting!
Eric mentioned in passing that the Gizmodo entry that flagged Natural Recorder also mentioned Spy Call, an app which offers nearly the same functionality as NR, but (thankfully) includes a toggling option for automatically recording or not - with the autorecord feature on, it just records every call. With the feature off, a dialog is presented at the start of every call asking "Record this call?"
There's a 14-day demo and a manual. I'll be checking it out.
This software's primary drawback appears to be the interesting feature it offers - you can install the app and then hide it from the phone's user. That, in combination with the transparent recording feature furrows the brow.
The app's developer, Killer Mobile, appears to host a Nokia Series 60 blog, and to be based in Portland.
So where's the Treo blog?
Blogjam presents: Neil Armstrong - The Truth. Rare, unedited footage of the first lunar landing which dramatically challenges my childhood memories if parsed for fact. Yet, as it alwasy has, this particular reinterpretation captures something of the truth.
Say, how would you like it if you knew that your pal's cell phone recorded every call placed to it, by default?
I don't really like it one bit, and sure hope that I'm just misunderstanding the basic functionality of the software. It's a shame really, because the software's transparency is absolutely cool.
This MacOSXHints entry proved helpful this evening: macosxhints - Copy Address Book contacts to a Nokia 6620.
Boy, my brain hurts. Remind me not to dive into two new OSes on new hardware in a deadline again, mmkay?
The good news is that everything seems to be going as well as could possibly be expected.
UPDATE: The Treo mostly synced but then a) quit part way through the first sync and b) refused to sync again. Markspace says to try the beta.
This may also prove helpful.
Mother of god, am I an inadvertent early adopter?
MeFi links to "Complacency Kills," a 36mb pdf containing Joe Sacco's reporting from Iraq for (natch) The Guardian.
