Posted on by mwhybark

Gimme the number three, Louie

Simply Red, by Mark Rotella: a long, tasty feature on the joys and fate of what I think of as red checkered tablecloth joints, hands down my favorite endangered restaurant species.

From the article:


And for someone like me, an Italian-American in his 30’s who grew up with Italian food as the ultimate comfort food, the old-style Italian restaurants offer service and food that, while not innovative, always satisfies. In the old-fashioned Italian restaurants, what many call red sauce restaurants, I know I’ll get Old World treatment – if not old Italy, then definitely old New York.

At these family-run establishments, the waiters – almost always male – are typically dressed in black bow ties and crisp white shirts. Stepping into them is like stepping into the early 20th century, the height of Italian immigration to the United States.

Mmm, I miss ’em. There was one here in Seattle – over in Queen Anne, God I loved that place. I think it was called “Louie’s.”

I learned about the death of Princess Di there, one September. Got drunk with the layoff victims of my first tech bubble burst. Oh, it was a little bit of heaven, murky lighting, brick interior and cheap wine.

I miss ’em. East Coasters – you don’t know what you got ovah deyah. Mangia!*

(*my apologies for any language mangling involved in this post)

Posted on by mwhybark

Doyon updates

KUOW’s devoting the Swing Years and Beyond to the late Cynthia Doyon this evening; they also added a page with a selection of what are apparently considerable numbers of notes of condolence and shock.

bluejack has a little note expressing surprise; and the Little City Journal noted her passing, pointing to the P-I obit. Anita linked to me about this as well.

I’m actually surprised that there aren’t more blogland expressions of loss out there – I suppose blogger demographics don’t overlap with Saturday night public radio listeners very much.

Over the past few days, I haven’t really been able to shake brooding about this – I feel like I’ve lost a friend, as illusory as that is. In the comments on my original entry, at least one person expressed similar sentiments.

UPDATE: In January, 2004, the Seattle Weekly published a piece on suicide and led with Ms. Doyon’s last moments. There’s a lovely phptp of her accompanying the article, and that photo is also the magazine’s cover for the issue.

Posted on by mwhybark

oh yeah: Desolation Row

In the heat of battle today, I was listening to my old pal Bob Dylan – who really is more of a Johnny Come Lately than an old pal in my musical tastes, having dropped his battered guitar case in my living room after I had made the acquaintance of Harry Smith and Shane MacGowan for several years. Before that, I had sort of abstractly admired the man’s work but bever really got it, for all the usual reasons: whiny voice, obscure lyrics, too boring, you know the drill.

Anyway, Bob’s been couch-surfing in my mind for a while now, earning his keep mostly though his later stuff – Time Out of Mind is how he usually pays his rent, and I urge you to take him in for a night.

But this is old, old news, Mike. What brings you to wave the well-lofted banner of an artist who needs your praise like Norma Desmond needs Joe Gillis?

Cinderella, she seems so easy
“It takes one to know one,” she smiles
And puts her hands in her back pockets
Bette Davis style
And in comes Romeo, he’s moaning
“You Belong to Me I Believe”
And someone says, “You’re in the wrong place, my friend
You better leave”
And the only sound that’s left
After the ambulances go
Is Cinderella sweeping up
On Desolation Row

Well, I happened to focus my ear on the last song of Highway 61 Revisited, Desolation Row. So, I’m sure this is old news, but, like, the song is great.

On repeated closer listening, I found fault – it’s too long, and abandons the interplay of the fluent lead picking and fluent lyrics for one of Dylan’s squawling harp solos – but these are complaints of style, of manner.

Dr. Filth, he keeps his world
Inside of a leather cup
But all his sexless patients
They’re trying to blow it up
Now his nurse, some local loser
She’s in charge of the cyanide hole
And she also keeps the cards that read
“Have Mercy on His Soul”
They all play on penny whistles
You can hear them blow
If you lean your head out far enough
From Desolation Row

Across the street they’ve nailed the curtains
They’re getting ready for the feast
The Phantom of the Opera
A perfect image of a priest
They’re spoonfeeding Casanova
To get him to feel more assured
Then they’ll kill him with self-confidence
After poisoning him with words

And the Phantom’s shouting to skinny girls
“Get Outa Here If You Don’t Know
Casanova is just being punished for going
To Desolation Row”

Listening to this as a break from the war news – so sad, so surreal – I was totally distracted from my project as a never-made film by Alex Cox, set in Missoula, Montana, one-hundred-and-fifty-years ago, unreeled on my inner eye.

It’s pretty rare that I hear a song closely like this anymore unless I plan on it – when it just washes in, grabs me, and reminds me why music interests me, I have to say: “thanks.” So, like: thanks, Bob.

And a footnote: as one might expect, Herr Doktor-Professor Marcus has a thing or two to say about the song that’s worth reading.

Posted on by mwhybark

Cynthia Doyon dead

Cynthia Doyon dead at 48: She hosted KUOW’s ‘Swing Years’, notes the P-I.

I’m really bummed out. Ms. Doyon is an apparent suicide.

She was the Saturday evening host of a retro radio show, “The Swing Years and Beyond,” and I have spent many Saturday nights happily learning about that era of American popular music in this gracious and knowledgeable woman’s virtual company.

Each Saturday, she opened the show with a slightly cheesy, deliberately old-fashioned audio montage of the sound of waves lapping shore over the show’s theme.

“The Swing Years and Beyond” was the only radio show devoted to music in the region that I responded strongly to. Ms. Doyon’s encyclopedic knowledge of her subjects and the self-effacing sense of humor that she brought to her broadcasts filled my home with joy on many Saturday nights.

I also noticed over the years that when I was up overnight, so was she: her voice was by far the most likely to host overnight shifts at KUOW, and without realizing it, I guess I had begun to consider her a part of my life – just a voice on the radio, but a friend, someone else who knew how to greet the dawn after a night of work, reading, or the black black.

I should note that I more-or-less never watch any television but nearly always have a radio on. Radio fills the same place in my life that the tube does for the great majority of my fellow inhabitants of the United States.

I am posting this before I go to sleep. In my certain sleeplessness I will envy her current peace. There’s a hole in my life. I’m sure it will close quickly for me. May it heal with speed for those closer to Ms. Doyon.

UPDATE: a few days later, I posted this entry, and both draw comments, so I’ve decided to link them.

UPDATE II: In January, 2004, the Seattle Weekly published a piece on suicide and led with Ms. Doyon’s last moments. There’s a lovely phptp of her accompanying the article, and that photo is also the magazine’s cover for the issue.

Posted on by mwhybark

Blackout!

Soo…

I was closing in on a server-side software debug (updating Marc Liyanage’s PHP 4.3.0 to 4.3.2r7, if you care) when

BANG

All the lights in the house went out – this was around 9pm on Monday night, the fourth of August. Viv and I stumbled around in the dark for a few mintues, trying to remember where the flashlights were, lighting candles, and eventually made it outside.

DCP_6478.JPG

The whole neighborhood was dark, and the very last reflections of post-sunset dusk still illuminated the sky. A half-moon shone on broken clouds. After a few more minutes of puttering around the house, I noticed that the streetlights and traffic lights went out as well. Our apartment building sits at the intersection of two very busy streets, and drivers immediately began speeding through in both directions without stopping, those traveling along Twelfth often passing the darkened intersection at speeds that appeared to surpass forty miles an hour.

People started emerging from their darkened apartments, and everyone was talking with each other. Eventually I heard from someone who had walked down from above fifteenth that a bus has somehow snapped a power cable.

The lights came back on at five am.

in the interim, lying in my dark, dark, dark bedroom, the night silence outside was as deep as I can recall it ever being in this bustling neighborhood full of young people. No hum of a neighbor’s fridge or throb of a dryer; no high-pitched electrical whine. Somewhere in the distance, someone tentatively explored a melody on a steel drum.

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A bad day in the subway

Bells and Whistles: In Between Stations

When we got to the doorway, people were jumping across a short distance to a narrow ledge running along the side of the tunnel. Some people fell between the wall and the train and had to be pulled back up. Although I didn’t worry about getting across the gap, I did wonder which way I should go from there. I hadn’t seen any flames, but there was a lot of smoke. It occurred to me–still quiet, still calm, not screaming–that I might not get out of the subway. I hadn’t told E. I was going downtown, and how long would it take him to figure out what had happened? And then I was out of the car and onto the ledge.

But going where? There was enough room to stand and a small handrail to hold on to, but there wasn’t enough room to walk forward; you had to face the wall and shuffle sideways. Some people were shuffling to my left, but since the smoke was coming from that direction, I opted to shuffle to the right.

Anne shows us why she makes the big bucks with this harrowing recollection of what it’s like to be caught in a burning subway tunnel.

Whoo.

Posted on by mwhybark

Reference collection

Apparently I am sufficently serious and annoyed by both spam and the hasslement of accomplishing my objective that I’m sticking to it, in abeyance of my previous sour declaration.

My objective is to get a server-side spam filter, or “milter” as the kids would have it, installed on my mail server so that all incoming mail gets vetted. Cursory research revealed that Spam Assassin is the Bayesian weapon of choice. Forthwith, the links I’ve been haunting in search of the wise words of early voyageurs into OS X serveration.

One person, as noted earlier, has actually accomplished my goal.

Unfortunately for me, the world has turned, and the versions of sendmail and SpamAssassin there employed are both superannuated. Currently, I’ve been able to get everything to work as desired up through the compile of the milter proper, which barfs on something I haven’t noted yet but which appears to be different than Numbski’s compile problem.

Or maybe it is, as he had problems with a function called “new_poll()” while mine also have to do with polling:

spamass-milter.cpp:86:24: subst_poll.h: No such file or directory
spamass-milter.cpp: In member function

`void SpamAssassin::output(const void*, long int)':

spamass-milter.cpp:1157: storage size of `fds' isn't known
spamass-milter.cpp:1160: `POLLOUT' undeclared (first use this function)
spamass-milter.cpp:1160: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once for each function it appears in.)
spamass-milter.cpp:1162: `POLLIN' undeclared (first use this function)
spamass-milter.cpp:1165: `poll' undeclared (first use this function)
make[1]: *** [spamass-milter.o] Error 1
make: *** [all] Error 2

Savannah: Project Info – SpamAssassin Milter Plugin and mailing list archives are my next stop.

Previously was having trouble getting sendmail to unzip – it was because I stubbornly persisted in attempting to use a non-commandline product, Stuffit Extractor, to do the job. Once I broke down and typed “tar xvf filename” all was well. Silly me – expecting a GUI tool to do a man’s work!

Monkeying around wth my sendmail has led me to seek to disentangle the gordian wiki that is the documentation – or lack thereof – of the beloved SquirrelMail, a PHP-based webmail system that relies on IMAP to manage email on the server. Unfortunately for me, in previous incarnations, SM had no clearly documented capacity to handle secure communications with sendmail or the uw-imap family of mail demons. Sufficiently curious about what’s failing, I’ve joined the support list, which did not apparently show a record of my specific problem. The PHP part of the program looks like it’s working just fine, but it does not successfully establish communications with the IMAP demon, desite currently supporting the needed protocols.

Secure connections are no longer an option, but rather the default in most of these projects. This has had the salutory effect of requiring the casual user, such as yours truly, to seek the wisdom of such masters of clarity and open, clear communication as the PGP corporation, which, in their defense, did explain to me how to resolve a bug in their free version, once I was aware that they did not, in fact, provide support for the free version.

(I should explain I actually was a good boy ages ago and setup a bunch of security stuff server side, albeit grumpily. Mmmm, brussels sprouts and lima beans!)

So.

I think that hits most of the links I’ve been pawing through lately – it feels rather like digging around trunks of other people’s old clothes. One of the special qualities of the open source support mailing lists is the testiness of many of the knowledgeable users in response to support questions from, well, those less knowledgeable.

It’s understandable, sure.

But I’d venture to guess each nastygram on the support list of a given opensource project translates directly into increased shareholder value at a certain large, friendly software provider across the lake from where I live. Hm, I wonder – could there be any legislative pressure aimed at UW-developed projects such as pine and uw-imap?