I hear tell my honorary mentor, The Best Bus Driver in the World, is coming around to my point of view regarding music produced with minimal amplification and internal electronics. I'm glad to hear it - the qualities I hear in obscure field recordings and teenage punk rock singles draw me to the genres as if here was no distinction.
For about a year I have been frustrated by the inadequate file-sync support available for the Nokia series 6 phones, in particular the 6600 and the 6620. There appeared to be only limited ways to get the images off the phone.
The best way has proven to be removing the battery and downloading from the storage card by mounting the card on a USB reader; but the following pieces of software may also be of assistance:
Nokia Collector enables desktop file transfer to the phone only. Uploads appear as new SMS messages, enabling application installation.
Photo Server and Photo Retreiver are a pair of apps that enable image transfers from Nokia series 60 phones. A note, however: as of this writing, the download link will produce a non-binary download. I used an ftp client and set the file-type to binary manually, which worked. The developer has a bunch of interesting apps, most especially including a range of Nokia-specific Mac-remote-control via Bluetooth goodies.
I was saddened this week to hear of the passing, at 76, of my former professor and friend and all-around character J. P. Darriau, at home in Bloomington, Indiana. J. P. grew up in NYC during the war in a Jewish neighborhood, and one of my favorite memories of him is this grey-headed child of French Catholic emigrants to the States singing Yiddish songs about baseball at a piano during an evening of performance art circa 1989.
J. P. came to Bloomington in the early sixties and remained a prof at IU until his retirement in 1996. He was my professor in three classes and became my friend during the first. He opened his home, over the years, to innumerable members of my cohort, usually something I would discover much later.
During the first class i took with him, which he insisted on holding in his backyard sculpture studio instead of on campus, all the members of the class were charged with researching something about transformative performance traditions and presenting our findings in the context of a performance. While the details of my research are somewhat hazy, as I recall I determined to compare and contrast the European use and abuse of alcohol to the indigenous and pre-Colombian use of tobacco. I spent about $100 on various interesting beers and about the same amount on a selection of high-end tobacco, including what must have been among the last tins of Balkan Sobranies imported into the US before the Yugoslav civil war destroyed the factory.
I loaded all this on the back of my mountain bike and sprung this on the class, insisting that we had to consume all the beer and smoke all the 'baccy in the three hours set aside for the class. J. P. was not happy with me and gave me an additional assignment to make up for the drunken debacle class that day was transformed into, and he explicitly enforced a no-booze policy on these classes after that day. But he certainly had his share of the goods I brought that day and there is no question in my mind that our relationship was deepened and cemented that day.
J. P., you were a good man; a hardworking, insightful artist; and a thoughtful, challenging, at times baffling but always deeply engaged teacher. My world is richer for having you in it, and I owe you more than can be told for your role as my mentor and as a contributor to the alternative culture of my hometown. R.I.P.
Bocces was fun, but of course Jarts came up, as we had two toddlers running around. eBay came up empty, but it seems they can be had!
Eric notes Counterpunch: “Will they bomb Bedford?” I will contact my conspiratorial Bedford FVW friends to see what they think.
SLC news sources credit the ever-muckracking CJ with the story.
After an intensive round of googlizing and calling local retailers, I was able to locate a bocce set for sale today, and thus will spend this evening cooking and eating hot dogs, apple pie, and root beer floats to the soothing accompaniment of the klonk of lawn bowls. I was briefly introduced to this sport one blazing September afternoon over ten years ago in Bloomington, Indiana, at the pre-New orleans home of Bart and XY.
And may I say how am excited to see my old pal Kenneth Goldstein this week for an evening? Very well then: very. Sometimes the right friend just finds you.
I have been keeping an eye on Zillow's valuation of our house this summer, largely for morale-reasons. Currently the site lists the home as valued at well over 100K more what we paid for it in October. Anecdotally, I have heard that Zillow tends to err on the side of inflating reported values. It's certainly what I expect the site to do, as a way of creating stickiness - it's certainly working very well in drawing my repeated site visits.
Curious to see if anyone has done a systematic analysis of what Zillow's reported values for a given property are in comparison to what people are actually paying for these listings, I was disappointed to find that no one's done so in a careful, large-scale way. Are you listening, Consumer Reports? For that matter, are you listing, HouseValues and Redfin? Careful competitive analyses of competitor's datasets over time could be a great marketing tool!
However, I did not come up wholly dry. This Phoenix-area blogging realtor did a quick set of reality checks on some recent sales in the Arizona community, and while I'm guessing he must have cherry-picked, he found little correlation between Zillow's estimates and what he takes to be real-world market values. In two cases, he found gross overvaluations based on inaccurate data at Zillow, and in cases of homes currently listing, he found that Zillow was undervaluing the homes, based on his opinion of the market.
His basic critique is reasonable enough - you can't trust an automated valuation service to provide accurate estimates because the actual condition of the property is likely to vary from that represented by the available data. I'm also not surprised that he feels the site is undervaluing homes that he is involved in developing listings for - the more capital there is in his market, the more there is available for him.
I am surprised that Zillow's valuations do appear to be on the conservative side. I suppose that after this summer winds down and Seattle's market cools down to match the rest of the country's slowing sales, I'll have a better sense of things. I was amazed to see that so far this summer nearly every house that has sold in our immediate area has well topped $400k. Wonder if it will hold. I hope so, now that we're in it.
I'm hacking away at our database at work, attempting to automate the daily data imports we use to bring orders into our order management system. We have three distinct data sources for each merchant identity, and of course these three sources employ diferring schema. I have chosen not to worry about normalizing the data at import in any significant way, rather storing the data in one flat-file table with fieldnames that segment the unique datasource elements. This makes it very easy to pull out the original source data in the format it was passed to us.
The associated merchant IDs are not written into the export files; this, determining the associated merchant ID is implicit and cannot be established by testing the data structure.
What I want to do is automate the import process such that my operator svaes the daily downloads in a given appropriate folder. Currently we have been saving them in files tagged with the data provider's name and the date. I beleive I will change this to incorporate the data provider, merchant ID, and date shortly.
However, MS Access does not natively support automating data import with a dynamic file name - the Text Transfer function requires a hardcoded path and file. I think I could set up macros that useTextTransfers that import from a fixed-location file and that then create a new exported file incorporating additional data such as date of import and merchant ID, but again I find myself bumping up agains the fixed-file-name issue in Text Transfer.
I'm sure there must be a way to use VB to construct the filepath from user input selected via drop-downs, but I'm not there yet. Argh!
I meant to post this a ways back, but just realized I hain't as yet.
MeFi pointed out Popspike.com, a searchable archive of ebay auction resluts for rare vinyl. My own rarities, "Songs Pictures and Stories of the Fabulous Beatles," and a VJ promo EP are apparently fetching healthy amounts. I sould temper any excitement, however, as my copies are very, very beat-up.
About 2 hours ago, we struck for the night. We have two pickups to bang out in the morning - I'm guessing around 11 am - and the shoot will be over and we pack it up and head home to Seattle. I am very happy with the results - the shots look great, we got good sound, and our actors' performances were all we could have hoped for.
I was initially skeptical about the project and agreed to participate because I am interested in learning about fast-and-light filmmaking. the practice of which I believe poses a significant threat to the revenue dominance of major film producers, much in the way that the proliferation of cable channels has challenged the predominance of the US Big Three networks.
I haven't looked at the shots and schedule we were working from since sometime on Thursday, but as I recall, this ten-minute film used about twenty shots and a bit less than ten setups. Last I heard, we shot two full mini DV tapes, which I think gives us 180 minutes of footage; generally we were trying to get three takes of each shot.
Greg and Joey and I worked together very fluidly, and in some ways the best was the way we developed the lighting for the setups. I hope that the dailies look as good as I think they do at 6 am after being up all night.
I'm spending the weekend out of town helping with a friend's film shoot. The crew has taken over a good-sized house in the south Puget Sound area and tonight I am running sound on the shots, which mostly entails holding my arms above my head for a long long time. We've completed the first of three setups and one of seven shots. We started at 8 or so.
We project continuing to shoot straight through the weekend - the schedule tonight calls for us to work until about 4 am.
Viv and I finally took the walk to the sound through Carkeek Park from the shopping center that sits by one of the park entrances this morning, and we'll be back. The highlight of the walk was a restored apple orchard by the trailside that had been planted by the Pipers, who originally homesteaded the area a bit over 100 years ago. It was a mix of incredibly old and beautiful fruit trees, gnarled and bent, and younger trees planted at the time of the orchard's restoration in the late 1980s.
It's quite rare to find a large orchard with such old trees - my grandfather, a fruit rancher, told me that trees are often pulled out at about twenty to forty years - and it was wonderful to wander around the slope, smelling the various heirloom varieties that were fruiting in great abundance in the summer sun. I came home with six; it would have been seven, but the incredibly ripe par I clambered up one senior citizen to pluck fell away as I jostled the branch that bore them.
Perusing the ever-expanding wonders of Musical Family Tree, I came across this amazing recording of the Zero Boys live at Ricky's Canteena in 1983. Rat Rondell intros the band. I was there and boy was it a show. The band must have been right on the verge of recording Vicious Circle, I think. The sound on stage is nearly exactly the same as that on the influential record, also available for listening at MFT, it seems, in a live performance recorded in 2005.
I have a quickly populated playlist at MFT that includes a lot of records or recordings by people I am friends with. I have happy memories of listening to most of this material years ago and this site always amazes me with the depth of it's archive. I mean, how incredible is it to idly jump on the internet and in three clicks of a mouse discover a recording of an all-ages hardcore punk-rock show recorded in 1983 and attended by about thirty people, one of which was me?
Say, that reminds me: Jon, where are you in your Vulgar Boatmen exploration?
It's clear to me: plants do, clearly, suck less than people. Therefore, I endorse meatatarianism. MMMM. bacon!
Slog:
More About the Chop Suey and Comet Sales : " 'We're going to remember, support, and cherish the parts of the Comet [that everyone loves]. We are going to clean it, add some fresh paint, and make it less cluttered. We will still have graffiti, live bands, and the same clientel [sic: "e"]. We also plan on spending [several] hours cleaning up those bathrooms.'
'Additionally, Dasef plans on applying for a license to serve hard alcohol, a change that old timers may grumble about, but seems to be a necessary upgrade for most bars these days.' "
To which I say FUCK YEAH! Chez Comet is the best bar ever, period. Adding booze to brew is a fine thing in this instance.
Eric at Flog flogs Victor Moscoso's sixties gfx retrospective, Sex, Rock & Optical Illusions. Woah, baby. I'm there.
As Jon points out below, i appear to have no idea what I am talking about, as my bellyaching is premised on the improbable (and, to me, apparently unwelcome) fact of my prosperity.
I have been sucking on this idea like a lemon for a few days and really don't have even an analysis, let alone an answer. I value routine and reward as strongly as any bourgeois ever, and of late have been savoring the new rituals of daily lawn and flowerbed watering and the like. Why, just today I have been afflicted with a leaky soaker hose, fountaining profligately all over the place. Naturally, I have elected to pursue the appropriate, environmentally conservative resolution and have discarded the hose in favor of a new one, purchased at the same locale we bought the first, Home Depot. Thank heaven for Chinese labor!
