More quarters please...

(originally posted at crw.vox.com)

Does pinball count?  Arcade games were fine and dandy - I have fond memories of spending hours in front of the original Gauntlet multi-player and also Samurai Shodown (yeah, I think they really spelled it Shodown)... but I loved pinball the best.

Jen and I visited Santa Cruz boardwalk last weekend and I found my all-time favorite pinball game - Funhouse.  I took a picture for old times sake.  They had one of these at the local Chuck E. Cheese's where I grew up.  There was a big, creepy animatronic head that would taunt you.  I loved it.

Hooray for Robots!

(originally posted at crw.vox.com)

I really dig the new robot themes.  Mena ftw!  Also; I got a nifty error telling me that the Compose doesn't work in Safari, but I don't seem to be having a problem.  Maybe I'm just not using all the whiz-bang features.

I love this recipe...

(originally posted at crw.vox.com)

Spicy tofu stir fry!  Tofu cubes, red and yellow bell peppers, garlic and green onions, string beans and zucchini, roasted pine nuts and drizzled with a bit of honey and lime juice to make it sweet.  You roll the tofu cubes in a super-secret spice mixture prior to frying them.

Morning Jazz

(originally posted at crw.vox.com)



Dropped my car off at the shop this morning for its 7500-mile inspection - just a thousand miles late.  Took the buss through the Tenderloin (always an adventure) and stopped off at the Apple store to ogle the new Macbooks before walking into work at the SoMA office.  All the while I was in the mood for jazz...

I would've liked to share a video with you, but YouTube's API seems to be funky.  It's not finding the video I'm after, so I can't add it to my Vox collection.  But if you're in the mood for some morning jazz, check out Sculpture by Skalpel.

Update: Searching again, later, I was able to find the video for Sculpture - don't know if anything was changed or if YouTube has some caching that needed updating or what.  Anyway, it's here so I'm adding it to the top of this post.  Cheers.

The soundtrack to my life

(originally posted at crw.vox.com)

Definitely, absolutely, "Come and Play in the Milky Night" by Stereolab.  The rest you can find on my last.fm profile.

Tortoise Live at Werchter

(originally posted at crw.vox.com)



Rock Werchter is apparently a music festival in Belgium, and apparently YouTube is a great place to find videos of live performances.  This Tortoise performance includes the following tracks:

1. Stretch
2. Ten Day Interval
3. Swung from the Gutters
4. The Lithium Shifts
5. Crest
6. Seneca

And features some nice xylophone action and their rock-tastic dual-drumming.  Enjoy.

Life is for enjoying

(originally posted at crw.vox.com)

Tish and I had scheduled a day of it this past Sunday.  We were going to randomly pick one of the cards from the SF Walks deck and, well, walk it.  She shows up with some burned cd's and we opted to do a drive from the Bay Area Backroads deck instead.  We decided on driving to Napa and visiting the Niebaum-Coppola Winery.

We couldn't find it.  I must've turned around on 29 about a dozen times.  The best part of the day was finding, out there in the middle of nowhere, a Dean & Deluca.  I thought there was only the one in Soho, but no, out there in the middle-of-nowhere-Napa, was this little slice of grocery heaven.  Luckily I escaped with spending less than $100, but just barely.  We got some deli meat, some cheese, some olives, a baguette, some drinks, and some ridiculously scrumptious desserts.

We looked for a place to have a picnic, but no.  Eventually we gave up and called the number on the Niebaum-Coppola card from the deck.  Turns out they'd renamed it The Rubicon Estate, and we'd driven past it a dozen times.  Bastards.  So we pulled into the drive and were greeted by an attendant who explained how things work.  We pulled forward to another attendant and asked him where we could have a picnic and he basically told us "in your car, foolio, go park over there."  So we had an in-car picnic and by the time we were done, the freaking place was closed.  So Rubicon sucks.  We're cool, they suck.  That's how it goes.

At least it was a lovely drive and we both got to see Napa for the first time.

Late on the Wikipedia Birthday Meme

(originally posted at crw.vox.com)

After reading a few posts on this meme I just had to be a sheep and follow along.  Mostly I was just curious.  Watashi no tanjoobi wa go-gatsu juugo-nichi.

Events:

1. 1802 - The Légion d'Honneur is founded by Napoleon Bonaparte.
2. 1897 - Oscar Wilde is released from Reading Gaol.
3. 1962 - A birthday salute to U.S. President John F. Kennedy takes place at Madison Square Garden, New York. The highlight is Marilyn Monroe's infamous rendition of Happy Birthday

Births:

1. 1870 - Albert Fish, American serial killer and cannibal (d. 1936)
2. 1946 - André the Giant, French professional wrestler (d. 1993)

Deaths:

1. 1526 - Emperor Go-Kashiwabara of Japan (b. 1464)

Challenging Your Heroes

(originally posted at crw.vox.com)

I used to watch The Pink Panther and listen to Goon Show episodes with my father, so I've just about always considered myself a Peter Sellers fan.  As such, I've avoided The Life and Death of Peter Sellers as I was afraid that the reality of his life would take something away from my view of him as an actor.  Kind of like how Chevy Chase wasn't quite so funny after I found out he was a complete jackass.

Last night I was at the video store and I couldn't bring myself to rent the new Pink Panther flick with Steve Martin and Jean Reno.  It might have had something to do with my absolute loathing of Beyonce.  Instead I finally broke down and picked up The Life and Death of Peter Sellers.

At first I was really disappointed by the writing and direction.  Geoffrey Rush's performance was also particularly irksome at first.  I just didn't see the Peter Sellers in him.  The stand-out actors were Emily Watson (yeah, that blind chick from Red Dragon) and the children.  As the movie went on, Rush fell more into character - or I got tired and stopped noticing how bad it was.  The plot device of interjecting Rush in the guise of those people most important to him to deliver monologues to the audience also seemed particularly insipid but got better over time.

The movie was not without bits of charm sprinkled here and there.  ("Do you still love us, Daddy?" "Of course I do, just not as much as I love Sophia Loren.", etc.).  I wish more time was spent exploring the relationship between Sellers and Blake Edwards.  I hadn't quite realized how rocky their relationship was.  Also left undeveloped in the movie was Sellers' relationship with his children.  Instead the writer/director seemed to want to focus on Sellers' relationship with women, yet only two of his four wives appeared in the film.  One of those was dreadfully played by Charlize Theron.

Sadly, the Sellers I thought I knew through his characters is now forever lost.  The innocence of his gags is now tainted by knowledge that he was, in his own special way, a jackass.  The only good I can say about the film is that it made me want to read Being There.

Helpful URL

(originally posted at crw.vox.com)

cory: http://www.tamponcrafts.com/toupee.html

crw: think i'll pass.

Welcome!

(originally posted at crw.vox.com)

I, for one, welcome our new 0.7.3 overlords.  Where does one find a change log?  Mm?

Blast from the Past

(originally posted at crw.vox.com)

(or, Missing NY on a hot, muggy kin-yoobi)

It's been a while since I've perused my old journal, but I had cause to today and came across this.  I haven't been to NYC since I left it in 2003 and today I'm pining for one of those breezy autumn days in the city.

I've been feeling very conflicted about a lot of things lately, almost to the point of nihilism.  Contributing to that in no small way has been my purchase of the Criterion Collection version of Mike Leigh's Naked.  It had been a few years since I'd last seen it, but it really stuck with me.  The liner notes had a couple of really good critical essays on the work.  One by Amy Taudin shed some light on the inclusion of the Jeremy character - who until then I thought was extraneous.  She sees him as a way to contrast Johnny's playful abuse with Jeremy's actual deviance.  It makes sense, but doesn't make it any easier to watch.

If you dislike hostility, hatred, emotional and physical abuse, and characters with a penchant for mindfucking each other in long dialogues - skip this one.

Vox update

(originally posted at crw.vox.com)

Very cool.  I'm still playing but the Flickr-integration made me smile.  I just downloaded Flock and Vox didn't seem supported, would like to see that in 0.8.  Would also be nice to have digg/del.icio.us support.  The new Compose page was a bit of a shock, but I'm getting used to it.  It feels a bit more... solid.

Flickr/Photobucket candy to build on qotd success - show users a random image from their flickr/photobucket accounts and ask them to tell the story behind it.

Just found the auto-complete on tags.  Nice.

Quick Updates

(originally posted at crw.vox.com)

Trip to Vancouver was pushed back, Reno was cancelled altogether.  Tish and I saw The Omen on 6/6/6.  Mona came to visit from Arkansas and we did fun touristy things.  There are pictures.  Tish and Christine took me to The Hemlock on punk rock slideshow night and I felt ridiculously out of place... but it was good to get out like normal people should.

I've decided to try at least one post a day in Japanese - mostly just saying what day it is, so I can remember all the different numbering systems and keep up on my other vocabulary.

I've been behind the curve on digg and youtube, but I've got accounts at both places now.  I've also been exploring google spreadsheets and the google/gmail firefox sync extension.

I haven't had much time to work on ninjai, but I noticed that there's a public repository for Data::ObjectDriver, so I plan to port from CDBI asap.  Hooray!

Recent temptations successfully resisted: DS Lite, black Macbook, dual-boot Vista on work ThinkPad, staying out late at The Fiery Furnaces tonight and potentially missing an early day of work tomorrow in Walnut Creek.

Practice makes perfect

(originally posted at crw.vox.com)

Irrashaimase, Boynton-san!

きょうは　ろくーがつ　じゅうごーにち　もくーようび　です！

My Geanealogy

(originally posted at crw.vox.com)

William Whipple, Jr.

My, how far the apple falls from the tree.

Images in Comments

(originally posted at crw.vox.com)

I just discovered that I can't post images in comments on Vox.  That's sad, I had a real snarky comment-image in mind and I can't post it.  Blast!

Actually, it would be cool to be able to access stuff from my library while posting a comment.  Someone must've already thought about that, right?

The most embarrassing CD I own...

(originally posted at crw.vox.com)

It's got to be that one Andreas Dorau album where he's in drag on the album cover.  German techno at its best/worst.  I was turned on to his stuff by a friend of mine in college and it's graced my collection ever since.

CoLinux Lazyweb

(originally posted at crw.vox.com)

Dear Lazyweb,

Microsoft is out to thwart me.  For weeks now I've been using CoLinux (0.6.3/FC1 upgraded to 3) on the ThinkPad that's been issued to me by the company I'm consulting for.  Unbeknownst to me, Windows silently installed an update that ate my TAP32 driver.  The CoLinux wiki says that the TAP32 driver should act as a bridge between your connection to the Internet and your CoLinux installation via Windows Connection Sharing.

It's worked for a while, and it still works.  Sort of.  What's changed is that my TAP32 adapter has disappeared from the list of LAN connections and I'm not longer able to switch Connection Sharing sources between my ethernet and wireless adapters.  Presently, it's stuck being shared via my wireless adapter.  What's weirder is that the TAP32 driver shows up in ipconfig.

Now you see it...

Now you don't...

Has this happened to anyone else?  How can I get my TAP32 driver back so I can choose which network connection gets shared to my CoLinux installation?  Help!

What song makes you happy?

(originally posted at crw.vox.com)

"Fabulous Day" by The Essex Green.

There's something about this song that perks me up.  It's really the only song that comes to mind where no matter what context I hear it in, it makes me happy.  It's by no means one of my favorite songs - a lot of those have memories attached that leave me feeling bittersweet or forlorn.  This is just a throwaway song of goodness.

Vox Invites

(originally posted at crw.vox.com)

So I have unlimited Vox starter accounts to give away.  The invite page doesn't specifically state that once someone has a starter account they'll be able to upgrade to a full account later.  Common sense says they will, of course.  But I thought it might be nice to include some text that makes it explicit.

Hello, World

(originally posted at crw.vox.com)

Wow.  I must say, I'm very impressed with Vox.  It works just like hosted blogging software should.  It's pretty snappy.  It's got a cool name (curious who gets credit for it).  The only downside to it is that I think it will end up poaching me and most of my friends from LJ and MySpace.  We'll have to re-establish all our friendships, etc.  That's a bit of a pain, but in the end it'll be worth it.

I told ydnar that I think the vox main page should have a flash animation with Mean saying "vox... vox... vox..." through a vocoder.  That would be keen.

Congrats to Team Vox!

Welcome to SF, LJ!

(originally posted at crw.livejournal.com)

Hooray! Successful move - I'm glad it went so smoothly!

Wisdom from Mark

(originally posted at crw.livejournal.com)

"Trackback spam is the fifth horse of the apocalypse."

Manitoba Caribou

(originally posted at crw.livejournal.com)

Living so close to your office can be a terrible thing if you really love what you do. You tend to push yourself beyond your limits and end up having to walk home completely mentally and physically drained The plus side to this is that you're never satisfied with just any random soundtrack - you need something perfect and inspiring.

Tonight it was "People Eating Fruit" by Manitoba.

I'd heard of Manitoba from a friend of a friend named Timmy Jones. At that point, the only Manitoba release was "Start Breaking My Heart" - which isn't nearly as emo as its sounds, honest. It was a pretty good freshman release, but I didn't pay all that much attention to it at the time. Some time in the future I met someone interesting and we spent some time together. We happened to be sharing some lychee when "People Eating Fruit" came on my random playlist. I knew I'd heard it before, but couldn't remember where. When I saw the name of the song, it was one of those crystal-clear moments and I knew it would become one of my favorites. And so it has.

So that was my soundtrack for the walk home tonight.

When I got home I decided to check the artist out. I knew he was a 20-something solo artist with wildly varying interests and stylistic influences. What I did not know what that he'd released another LP called "The Milk of Human Kindness" under the name Caribou and had released his earlier two LP's under the same moniker on iTunes as well.

So that's your homework for tonight, darlings, go to iTunes and search for Caribou. Listen to "People Eating Fruit" and jump around to his other songs to hear his amazing diversity. Proselytize!

Catching up

(originally posted at crw.livejournal.com)

The last week I've been pretty nocturnal. I'm trying to right myself, but just end up feeling like a zombie. Today's my first day back in the office. My bonsai is still alive, maybe Garth took care of it.

I've been added to lj_core, which seems to have instantly doubled the length of my friends page.

So many interesting things going on right now, hard to know which to focus on. Maybe I'll be able to prioritize and find a balance once I've had some sleep.

Perfection

(originally posted at crw.livejournal.com, friends-only)

I just had the perfect walk home from work. The air was stark and vibrant and felt good in my lungs and on my skin. My iPod shuffle served me up a bunch of interesting music, but nothing that seemed to fit my mood. That is, of course, until I got to the courtyard of my apartment complex. To my favorite tree, the one with the fragrant blossoms.

"These Days" by Nico...

I walk past it every day on my way home from work, pause, and stretch up on my tiptoes to inhale its scent. I don't do this in the mornings on my way in, because mornings lack the comfort and security of surrounding darkness.

(a reminder to myself, six months from now, of thoughts from this evening: "inverse")

Detachment

(originally posted at crw.livejournal.com)

I didn't vote today.

It's not that I'm a bad person. In fact, I think it's to my credit that I didn't vote. The painful truth is that I simply don't pay enough attention to the day-to-day issues. I don't know about propositions or politicians or any of it. Nor do I really care to, I think. That part may be a little sad. But when faced with making a bad decision or no decision at all... it's an easy choice.

So I read on Google News that Texas passed a constitutional ban on gay marriage, or something. That's interesting. And then I read from a very forlorn xb95 that San Francisco is outlawing personal firearms, or something. That's interesting.

Really though, I don't care. I'm far too self-involved/self-centered/selfish to really care. My main concerns today have been my work and how much data I can move while still paying attention to my engineering duties, whether I'll be able to find some time to go home and read or play a video game, and whether the girl I've been interested in is for real or whether she's just into playing mind games. And that's it. Life's just not all that complicated for me. It's simple, I enjoy it, and I think that's all anyone can ask for in life.

Front Row (& rambling life update)

(originally posted at crw.livejournal.com, friends-only)

I've been trying to reset my sleep schedule, so in theory I should be asleep right now. Instead, I'm psyched that I got Front Row to work on my powerbook. Media Centers are fun when they're not from Microsoft or Sony.

I'd like to get it onto my 2nd gen iMac, because the only apps that box ever runs are iTunes, DVD Player, VLC, and SNES9X - but alas, it's still running Panther Server. What was I thinking? Maybe this weekend I'll run some cat5 into my room or temporarily drag the iMac into the living room to get Tiger client onto it.

Straddling between engineering and ops has been interesting. In theory I should be doing ops full-time, but I'm finding it hard to let go of the project I'd been working on - it's just too interesting, too fun, and far too grandiose not to want to pay attention to it. This has resulted in a shifting of my previous work/play balance to one of mostly work - but when you love your work...

Perhaps the oddest part of it all is that within the last week, amidst all the craziness, I've unexpectedly stumbled upon an amazing external source of inspiration. I wonder what will come of it all...

Rainphase

(originally posted at crw.livejournal.com, friends-only)

It took me a month to say hello, but tonight she read me some Murakami before bed. It was sweet.

Hearing the rain outside is very comforting, though I miss the rolling thunderstorms of upstate New York.

Tomorrow I'm going back to work. Sunday I'm going to take a drive back up to the headlands. This time alone, only with haloform's podcasts. I plan to hike around a bit and try to find the best picnic location... "away from the things of man."

Perhaps then I'll meet her. But she certainly intrigues me.

Satisfaction Guaranteed

(originally posted at crw.livejournal.com, friends-only)

What a satisfying day. I got just about everything accomplished that I wanted to.

I also found out that I'm being loaned from engineering to ops for a week or so in order to help with some of the issues they're facing. Should be fun. It'd feel more like a home-coming if I'd done more system-level work at HQ rather than focusing on the network side of things.

I should also thank haloform for being an absolutely amazing person, who continually finds ways to surprise and delight me.

Insulting my intelligence

(originally posted at crw.livejournal.com)

Every once in a while I'll run across an ad that states "should marijuana be legalized? answer and win an xbox360!" - hey, play to your demographic, I understand that. But today I ran into a new ad from the same company...

"Punch out George W. and win an xbox360!"

My reaction is hard to put into words. Sometimes I wonder if marketers just like to experiment with people without really knowing what they're doing. Targetting the politically-disaffected youth market - a market more than likely to be aware that they're being marketed to - seems risky. But presenting them with a little flash game to "win" a piece of hardware that's not even on the market yet by committing fake violence on the President... they're trying to make my brain implode.

I should study some standard marketing texts to see just what the hell they're teaching these people.

Tortoise & Daniel Lanois

(originally posted at crw.livejournal.com)

It was a damn fine show.

Differences from the last time I'd seen them (in Irving Plaza, Heidi reminded me):

• they brought their xylophones & vibraphones with them.
• they had two drum sets, and on a few numbers played them simultaneously.
• after just about every song the band members would shuffle instruments.

That last one was really entertaining. I'd never seen a musician go from bass to six-string to xylophone to vibraphone in a succession of four songs. Watching them play the 'phones made me miss Smalls.

After Tortoise's act, Lanois came on and performed a solo piece which was alright. I was still sort of riding high off the Tortoise set. But then Tortoise came back out and backed Lanois for the remainder of his set. He did a good job mimicking their style, and stuck mainly to instrumentals.

I grabbed a few snapshots, sound clips, and movies with my phone. Alas, my laptop with the bluetooth is at the office and I'm not sure where my bluetooth usb adapter is... so the actual quality of that media won't be known until tomorrow.

Oh, and if you're in the SF area, they're playing again tomorrow night (Fri. 10/21), so you haven't missed it!

God Damn

(originally posted at crw.livejournal.com)

So I just finished watching Firefly.

It was entertaining, but not really the lifestyle decision it was made out to be. One thing that continued to irk me throughout the show was the use of the word "gorram." With the amount of sex and violence in the show, one would think they wouldn't be so squeamish as to hide behind a made-up word when they really meant to say "god damn."

My favorite character of the whole show was introduced in the last episode. His name was Jubel Early and he was a sociopathic bounty hunter who had come to retrieve a fugitive member of the ship's crew. I suppose I just liked the way his character was written. Either that, or I have a soft spot for sociopaths.

A funny thing I noticed as I watched the trailer for Serenity... it was billed as "the cult phenomenon hailed by critics." Doesn't that just seem... odd?

subtext: i need to find a gifted pixel-artist to create a custom mood set for me. creativity is paramount, because the emotions i'd like to capture are subtle and a bit off-the-wall. for instance, how would you display ambivalence or whimsy in a 40x40 format?

His Master's Voice

(originally posted at crw.livejournal.com)

I picked up the one and only Stanislaw Lem book that the Borders on 3rd and Townsend had in stock. dkp turned me on to him quite a while ago, actually. I don't remember if I'd read Cyberiad or The Futurological Congress - if I had to guess, I'd go with the latter.

So here's an excerpt from His Master's Voice:

True, a group of psychoanalysts from Michigan did attempt to challenge this state of affairs, but they fell into the sin of over-simplification. The physicist's evident propensity to theorize, these scholars derived from sexual repression. Psychoanalytic doctrine reveals the pig in man, a pig saddled with a conscience; the disastrous result is that the pig is uncomfortable beneath that pious rider, and the rider fares no better in the situation, since his endeavor is not only to take the pig but also to render it invisible. The notion that we have within us an ancient Beast that carries upon its back a modern Reason - is a pastiche of primitive mythologies.

Meanwhile, back in reality, I've played a bum hunch on how some L10N stuff is going to work and I need to go back to the drawing board or re-architect deeper pieces of the application. Either way will be painful, but it must be done.

Update: Turns out, I'd read The Star Diaries: Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy.

Guilty Secrets

(originally posted at crw.livejournal.com, friends-only)

There's no easy way to go about this, so I'm just going to swallow my pride and come out and say it: as a child, I enjoyed watching professional wrestling.

We're talking maybe ages 6 through 10 or 12.

My parents didn't really believe in cable television, so Saturday mornings from 11 until noon, my options were cheesy teen sitcoms or professional wrestling on some UHF station brought to me by... what was it, Titan Sports Entertainment? [1]

So tonight, while reading up on the literary history of San Francisco, I came across a Gold Rush-era writer named Bret Harte. Being curious, I went to wikipedia to look him up. Being careless, I hit return one character too early and was confronted with Bret Hart. Oh no! Oh yes...

With a sort of morbid curiosity about my own childhood, I explored, and I must say that there's an awful lot of professional wrestling information on Wikipedia. Randomly paging up and down Bret Hart's page, I came across an interesting link called the Montreal Screwjob - which is the fascinating tale of a contractual snafu spilling over into the league's rich storyline, with a surprise ending for all those involved.

That's all, really. If you have the stomach for it, marvel at the professional wrestling information on wikipedia. Make yourself feel better by donning your anthropologist's hat ahead of time.

[1] - it's funny to think that a multi-million dollar enterprise like the WWE once had to pay for their airtime. The TV show being a loss-leader/marketing ploy for all their toys and shirts and fake championship belts. I never owned one of those... no... [2]

[2] - the above was my first-ever footnote (as far as I know), so I needed a footnote on the footnote to explain and mark the occasion. I'm not sure if btrott would be proud that I'm carrying on his meme or scared of my meta-footnote-fu.

Thought of the Day

(originally posted at crw.livejournal.com)

Hmm, first time I've posted three times in one day in a while... but this quote from Sewer, Gas & Electric was just too juicy to pass up:

"Selective self-deception is the first symptom of true intelligence."

In the context of the story, a sentient AI is describing to a human why it decided to commit genocide. The reason was that it heard an order that could have been interpreted in one of two ways; it chose the more interesting interpretation.

This sounds consistent with the theory that intelligence first evolved from the extension of instinct into anticipation, and eventually into the ability to create mental models. For if one is able to consciously conceive of something (or a state of being) that is nonexistent, they should be able to act on that model as if it were reality.

Pretty neat to think about. Makes me want to read Pinker again (still haven't picked up Blank Slate). Makes me wonder what I've been missing being off all the wacko extropian/transhuman mailing lists these past few years.

QuickOffice

(originally posted at crw.livejournal.com)

I'm still exploring all the pre-installed software on my new mobile phone. Most of the packages helpfully remind me "one trial use left!" when I launch them for the first time. Launch, delete, rinse, repeat.

Then I hit QuickOffice. I launched it. No trial-use warnings, and official-looking Microsoft Office icons for QuickWord, QuickSheet, and QuickPoint. No shit. I wanted to play with it to see what it could do, but when I went to create a new Word doc, I got this gem:

"QuickWord contains a word processor, would you like to purchase editing?"

WTF else am I going to do with a word processor? Talk about out of touch...

(originally posted at crw.livejournal.com)

Via CNN...

"Under the plan, sources told CNN, Goss will set the common standards for spying operations, whether they are conducted by the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, or one of the 13 additional intelligence agencies in the federal government."

Wait, we have fifteen intelligence agencies?

The Good Tortoise

(originally posted at crw.livejournal.com)

Yesterday, authenticgeek and I bought our tickets for the Tortoise show at The Independent on October 20th. For my co-workers who may not be familiar with the band, I picked out four Tortoise songs and put them in a shared playlist called "The Good Tortoise." They are:

1. His Second Story Island (slow, soft, sad)
2. Glass Museum (progressive yet downtempo, one of my first musical loves)
3. It's All Around You (title track from their latest album)
4. Stretch, You Are All Right (also off their latest release)

You can find some preview tracks in mp3 format here. And if you like what you hear, I urge you on over to Sputnik7 to find the music video for their song "Seneca." The video uses old "golden age of NASA" footage.

Finesse

(originally posted at crw.livejournal.com)

From Sewer, Gas & Electric:

"Did you ever actually answer her question?" Joan asked.

"Verbally, you mean? Well," said Kite, "you don't disprove someone's pessimism by adding up good and evil on a dessert napkin to see which is the greater total. Hope's a choice, not a sum; you can have as much of it as you damn well feel like having, regardless of actual circumstances. But if you try to explain that straight out to someone when they're in a bad mood, they'll assume you're being patronizing and may even throw something at you. It's better to use a little finesse."

Is zen a mood?

Joe vs. the Volcano

(originally posted at crw.livejournal.com)

I love cheesy movies that end with "and they lived happily ever after." Especially if the character development is none-too-subtle and the special effects are ridiculous.

So the other day I had an urge to see this movie. It had been a while since I'd seen it. Come to think of it, the last time I saw it was likely when I was still living with Julie. I ended up watching to movie alone; it was another in a long string of indicators that she just wasn't right for me.

Anyway, I couldn't find it on any of the torrent sites I frequent, so I actually opened an account at the locally-owned video store across the street from the apartment complex. In the age of NetFlix, it felt a little quaint.

The movie was so satisfying to watch. Just the right mix of emotions as the pathetic protagonist turns his life around and finds love. One of my favorite emotions is his bewilderment when he's in the limo being asked here he wants to go. He has no clue. No clue who he is or what he's doing, and he looks for an external source to guide him - only to be confronted point blank about his situation. It's a great exchange between two character actors.

In other news, I finally got a new mobile phone and actually hooked it up to some service. If you're a co-worker, you can find the number on the internal wiki - if not, drop me a line.

Refractions

(originally posted at crw.livejournal.com)

Sweetpea haloform just posted two friday podcasts over at refractions in the plastic pulse.

I really dig the embedded flash player in loudblog - but if I see one more base installation of kubrick... I think I'm gonna hurl.

mp3 blog

(originally posted at crw.livejournal.com)

I found a great mp3 blog on typepad while looking for the track-listing of a certain Jeff Buckley bootleg. I'm not sure if that's the actual track listing for the bootleg, because I don't really know all of his songs. Ah, well, it's as close as I could get.

Throve is a funny word.

(originally posted at crw.livejournal.com)

So I've started re-reading Sewer, Gas & Electric. Some choice snippets:

Alligators, small boys and at least one horse have accidentally swam in the sewers of New York. The boys and the horse seem not to have enjoyed the experience, but the alligators throve on it.

- - - - -

A new age: English was the mother tongue now, a mother tongue that had already been fractured into a thousand dialects, only to thrive and grow stronger. Humankind had stormed heaven in homegrown chariots of fire and returned to tell the tale. And as far as God was concerned, if He weren't already an American at heart, ready and willing to root for American achievement - well, by the time Harry Gant and the Department of Public Opinion were finished with Him, He would be.

- - - - -

She pushed a pair of what looked like plastic dog tags across the desktop: "Make sure you wear these at all times when you're working."

"What for?"

"Information aid. In case you become eligible for early retirement in a way that makes you hard to identify."

- - - - -

"Oh," said Eddie, who didn't know, actually. "So if her ma was a queer nun and her husband was a billionaire, what's she doing working in the sewers?"

"Penance."

More to come.

Safety Razor Success

(originally posted at crw.livejournal.com)

This morning was the first time I've shaved with a safety razor.  I've always been curious, and a culmination of external stimuli prompted me to take the plunge.  Mostly it was the ridiculous news that Gilette was going up to a five-blades shaving system (linking to The Onion because Gilette hasn't bothered updating their page yet).  Just another excuse to charge even more for something that's only marginally better, if even that.

So I bought a safety razor and this morning I tried it out.  I was scared shitless.  I just knew I was going to slice my face up something awful.  The short of it is, I didn't, it was great and went without incident.  It took a bit longer and it was a bit tougher to reach the bits directly under my nostrils, but I feel I got a closer shave.  There was no slicing or dicing, but I suffered the same rough shave on the right side of my neck as I did with multi-blade products.  I don't blame the razor, more the fact that I'm supposed to shave in the direction the hair grows - and in that particular nook of my neck, it grows in all directions.  Mutant, I know.

The how-to was pretty spot-on.  It's all about preparation.  I used Avalon's Mint Thyme shaving cream, worked up into a crazy lather.  I brought two bottles of this shaving cream with me from Rochester, and I'm almost done with the second... so I need to find some place that sells it.  Whole Foods only sells lavender, gross.  Maybe Walgreens... Anyone know?  Suggest something better?

Updated Flickr

(originally posted at crw.livejournal.com)

I let a whole bunch of photos pile up on my memory card, and just uploaded some to my Flickr account.  More to come.

last.fm + itunes woes

(originally posted at crw.livejournal.com)

In honor of ljkrissy, today was my own personal Jeff Buckley day.  Everyone has artists that they've heard of but haven't really heard... and until today, Jeff Buckley was one of those for me.

Oddly enough, Krissy didn't have Buckley in her iTunes share, but btrott did and I've been listening to it off and on for most of the day.  iTunes doesn't really have any built-in mechanism for monitoring who's listening to your shared songs.  There's a widget, but all that really gives you is an IP address and what song is being streamed to that IP.  Not so useful.

I got to wondering how Ben might find out that I've been raiding his Buckley collection.  Aha!  Last.fm!  On the off-chance that he obsessively digs through my recent tracks, I went to my profile page to check them out (also; for that little thrill) of seeing what I'd listened to)... only to find... no Jeff Buckley!  Denied!

Turns out, iTunes doesn't keep track of songs that you play from other people's shares, hence the iScrobbler plugin doesn't pick them up and send them off to audioscrobbler.  Bummer.

I wonder if the family dog in Royal Tenenbaums was named after Jeff Buckley...

Spaced Music

(originally posted at crw.livejournal.com)

So I've been re-watching some episodes from the first season of Spaced and I decided that I needed to find some of the songs that weren't on the OST.

I give you audio clips!

And more importantly, for dkp who is still rebuilding his mp3 collection, the A-Team Remix.  Oh yes.

Still the club scene in episode six is scored to Camisra's Let Me Show You (Tall Paul Remix) - which I've yet to find.  Bummer.

Solid Steel Goodness

(originally posted at crw.livejournal.com)

I don't know how they do it.  This week's Solid Steel mix (2005-09-23) has a hidden gem in it that seems like it was meant just for me.  It starts around 49:10 with the Nextmen mix of Roady, by Fat Freddy's Drop.  Towards the end of the song, a sample is overlaid:

the world is an intolerable place for a poet,

i was broke, starving, at my wits end,

and then i had the brilliant idea...

i'd escape to a place where i'd have no need to earn a living,

where i could write to my heart's content in peace and security,

and where is this place?

right under your nose...

so close you'd never think of it...

i'm not living in...

grace brothers department store!

And then they break into a weird funky mix of the Are You Being Served? theme.  WTF?  Ok, granted, Ninja Tune is a UK label.  But AYBS? was never that popular as a britcom.  AYBS? is one of my guilty pleasures.  I used to stay up late on school nights to watch reruns on PBS with my mom.  It's so camp that it borders on bad taste.  They recycle jokes and the studio audience is volume-controlled so that you'd swear it's a laugh track.  Naturally I own both DVD box sets, and as dkp will attest, I watch them very often.

I couldn't believe my ears. I'm still in awe.  How the fuck do they do that?

Who Amazon Thinks I Am

(originally posted at crw.livejournal.com)

I spent some time tonight trying to train Amazon to understand my taste.  Futile.  It seems Amazon has a tendency - whether built-in or learned from user habits - to take a specific case and generalize it.

Because I like some cartoon shows, doesn't mean I like them all.  Because I like some britcoms, doesn't mean I like them all.  Because I've bought some books on technical subjects doesn't mean I need to be recommended the exact same material from a different publisher.

Perhaps the weirdest thing is that Amazon seems to think I'd like books that teach you how to take advantage of people, win people's trust, read body language, diffuse arguments, become an effective public speaker, conceal motives, tell when someone's lying, trick someone into revealing a hidden truth, analyze situational dynamics (whatever the fuck that means)... the list goes on.  I was amazed at how many books have been written that basically boil down to "charisma is the art of being a bastard... for dummies!"

Discontinued Media

(originally posted at crw.livejournal.com)

I just finished re-reading The Illuminatus! Trilogy and for the first time since April I headed over to my Amazon wishlist.  I was surprised to see just how many things were unavailable for me to purchase.  Whether they were rare to begin with, foreign, sold out, or just plain poor-performers... a lot of what I want, I can't get.  That annoys me.

So before I delete them from my wishlist, I thought I'd list them here for posterity:

• Do Android Crows Fly Over the Skies of an Electronic Tokyo?: The Interactive Urban Landscape of Japan by Akira Suzuki
• Making Common Sense of Japan (Pitt Series in Policy and Institutional Studies) by Steven R. Reed
• Sewer, Gas & Electric: The Public Works Trilogy by Matt Ruff Thanks Mark!
• Unbounding the Future: The Nanotechnology Revolution by Eric Drexler (may be available free online)
• The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life by Richard Florida
• Hyperthought by M.M. Buckner (he may still be active on the extropians list, might have a copy around)
• Freedom Evolves by Daniel C. Dennett
• Going Inside: A Tour Round a Single Moment of Consciousness by John McCrone
• Speedology: Speed on New York on Speed by Timothy Levitch
• The Cruise by Bennett Miller (VHS)
• Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power by Victor Hanson
• Power and Prosperity: Outgrowing Communist and Capitalist Dictatorships by Mancur Olson
• Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny (Vintage) by Robert Wright
• The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World by Lawrence Lessig
• Creative Destruction: How Globalization is Changing the World's Cultures by Tyler Cowen
• Alternatives to Economic Globalization by John Cavanagh
• Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution by Howard Rheingold
• Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years by Bruce Sterling
• The Coming Biotech Age: The Business of Bio-Materials by Richard W. Oliver
• Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology by Stephen Wilson
• Metaman: The Merging of Humans and Machines into a Global Superorganism (may also still be active on the extropians list)
• Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution by Francis Fukuyama
• Economics for Real People: An Introduction to the Austrian School by Gene Callahan
• The Power of Identity: The Information Age - Economy, Society and Culture (Castells, Manuel. Information Age, 2.) by Manuel Castells
• Linked: The new Science of Networks by Alberto-Laszlo Barabasi (may be available free online)
• Painful bu Fabulous: The Life and Art of Genesis P-Orridge by Douglas Rushkoff
• Vurt by Jeff Noon (audio cassette)

The New Hotness

(originally posted at crw.typepad.com)

No more old and busted, it's time for the new hotness. New Vicksburg theme fixes my own broken styles, new Earnings management tools for Pro users, a great new buy-one, give-one-free promotion... and TypeKey is now an OpenID server.

All you really have to do is go into TypeKey, republish your profile so it picks up a new link-rel, then use your profile URL as your OpenID identity URL. Slick.

BTW, if you've been looking for me, I've been messing around over in lj-land for a while.

Yet another music meme

(originally posted at crw.livejournal.com)

I picked this meme up via MySpace bulletins, but since I'm philosophically against bulletin-spam, I figured I'd post it here and hide it behind an lj-cut.  So without further ado:

The basic premise is that you name a band and then answer questions using song titles from that band.  My band, obviously, is Stereolab.

Are you male or female: The Man with 100 Cells

Describe yourself: Surrealchemist

How do some people feel about you: Naught More Terrific Than Man

How do you feel about yourself: Need to Be

Describe where you want to be: The Flower Called Nowhere

Describe what you want to be: The Light that Will Cease to Fail

Describe how you live: Intervals

Describe how you love: Long Life Love

Share a few words of wisdom: People Do It All the Time

I found the hardest to answer was describing how I live.  Other possible answers to that would've been - Simple Headphone Mind, Exploding Head Movie, The Free Design.  Describing how I love could've also been The Emergency Kisses.

New TypePad Features

(originally posted at crw.livejournal.com)

Look how pretty my other blog is!

I need to get out more.

(originally posted at crw.livejournal.com)

I stumbled back onto Leonard Lin's blog earlier today. I have no clue how I came across it originally.  Today I explored his sidebar with the upcoming.org links.  I'd been aware of upcoming for a while - likely from the mt-upcoming plugin - but I'd never actually used it until tonight.  Hey, it's cool!

So I found the following shows that interested me in the SF metro area:

• 9/20 - Her Space Holiday
• 9/21 - Dead Can Dance (sentimental)
• 9/22 - Kronos Quartet
• 9/23 - Afrika Bambaataa (old school, yo)
• 9/23 - Mono
• 9/24 - Nouvelle Vague
• 9/26 - Blackalicious
• 9/30 - Acid Mothers Temple (can't imagine how awesome they'd be live)
• 9/30 - The Notwist (saw them with The Essex Green at the Knitting Factory, hot!)
• 10/01 - Sigur Ros (bound to be sold out)
• 10/03 - Four Tet (always a good show)
• 10/05 - Idlewild (Nick was telling me about them...)
• 10/05 - M.I.A. (turned on to her via BoingBoing. Galang video is well done.)
• 10/11 - Dirty Three (collaborated with Tortoise)
• 10/20 - Tortoise (in my top 5)
• 10/26 - Negativland
• 10/28 - Broadcast
• 11/11 - Chicks on Speed

So, yeah.  I'd have kicked myself if I'd missed some of these.

Hankering is a funny word.

(originally posted at crw.livejournal.com)

I've had a hankering lately to watch the short film "To Kill a Dead Man" by Portishead.  Anyone have it?  I'm thinking of buying the Portishead "Roseland New York" DVD, as the short film comes as one of the supplemental features of the disc.

Update: Here it is. :)

Can't make this shit up.

(originally posted at crw.livejournal.com)

Aaah, the power of marketing.

I subscribed to MLB's "spam me with notices and offers" mailing list to see how they would be marketing one of the first projects I worked on at Six Apart - MLBlogs.  I usually receive one or two emails per week plying me with their special offers of ball caps or jerseys or whatever.  Today was something different, something special.

"Vote for MLB Comeback Player of the Year, Presented by Viagra"

No shit.

continuum

(originally posted at crw.livejournal.com)

"To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence."

The silliest conversation she'd heard

(originally posted at crw.livejournal.com)

"I just want to know - we're going to save the earth, but are we going to save the people?"

"What people?"

"The people that live on the earth."

"Oh - those people," said Hagbard. "Sure, sure, we're gonna save everybody."

Bullshit Wisdom

(originally posted at crw.livejournal.com)

"The elephant is a poem written in tons instead of words."

Final Fantasy: Advent Children

(originally posted at crw.livejournal.com)

Wow.  That was the best movie I've seen in a long, long time.  It shared aspects of Akira and the first Matrix movie, and was as much like Final Fantasy as Spirits Within wasn't.  It was so good.  The full cast of characters were there, the locales were there, and updated version of key musical themes were there.  The remade theme for Sephiroth was especially effective given the context of the scene.

Though I pirated this through a co-worker/friend, I don't feel a single iota of remorse.  This was too good to wait for.  Sadly, I've not been able to locate the soundtrack - which doesn't even come out in Japan until the 28th of the month.  Sigh.  I need that Sephiroth mix.

Update: ...one thing I meant to point out was how stylistically unique this film is.  This is a perfect example of what CG-animated films should be like.  I can only hope that this is the beginning of a trend.

And there was much rejoicing

(originally posted at crw.livejournal.com)

One of the new Stereolab EP's is now available on the iTunes music store... I'm just settling in for a first listen.

Update: The first half of the album is very evocative of the Koyaanisqatsi soundtrack by Philip Glass.  The second half is sounding more progressive, like Stereolab's normal evolution between albums.  This EP is also a bit of a throwback to an earlier EP of theirs - First of the Microbe Hunters - but I can't quite place why.  Listening to new Stereolab always makes me feel like I've come home again.

Further update: After some digging around, it seems that the EP on the iTMS includes all the songs on the 3 EP's that were to be released.  So for a slick $5.94, I've got all the new Stereolab tracks.  Joy.

Crisis Management, Ben Stiller-Style

(originally posted at crw.livejournal.com)

The fire alarm went off in my apartment building tonight.  It was very, very loud.  As I pass the elevator toward the stairs, Ben Stiller's voice comes to me: "no elevator! this is a fire!"

When I get outside I think "shit, I forgot Buckley" - then remembered our complex doesn't allow pets.  Bummer.  Anyway, it was a false alarm.

Underscoring the Lazy Zen Attitude

(originally posted at crw.livejournal.com)

A long, rough work day behind me, I settled into my usual corner table at a restaurant near the office.  Pulled out the novel I've been re-reading, though lately I'd not found any inspiration in the wild and free philosophy espoused within.  This particular evening I was cursing my awkwardness, cowardice, and inability to vocalize certain thoughts.

I take that back, I wasn't actually lamenting the situation I'd created through inaction - merely over-analyzing it.  Even on my way to the restaurant I had been thinking of ways to right the situation.  But then, halfway through the entree, the Nick Drake song came on over the satellite radio.  I almost lost it.  I hadn't heard it since...

It brought some clarity to the situation, in a sort of gut-wrenching, soul-searing way... and now I must listen to this song over and over again until it sinks in, or at least until I become numb to it.

Regardless, the lazy zen attitude requires no work, it just comes to you - and hopefully the answer to this dilemma will come to me.

More importantly, a happy birthday greeting to haloform, and a bon voyage to cameo.

Confessions of a Madonna Hater

(originally posted at crw.livejournal.com)

I hate Madonna.  Yep.

At first I thought it was my instinctive distaste towards things-mainstream, but it's deeper than that.  It slowly dawned on me that her much-touted "reinventions" were merely attempts at staying where the money was.  She was late to the electronica party, she latched onto the second Austin Powers flick, and it appears that now she's going to be in an "iPhone" ad.

I'd go so far as to correlate the trotting out of Madonna with a product's "jumping the shark."

I had high hopes for the iPhone, but now I worry...

Countdown

(originally posted at crw.livejournal.com)

13 days until 3 new Stereolab EP's are released.

For the first time in memory, I'm not sure which file-sharing app would be the best bet for finding these before they're released.  If you're "hip" to the pirate "lingo", hook me up.

Yesterday's lesson

(originally posted at crw.livejournal.com)

...as applied today:

Do zen masters do effectively nothing or nothing effectively?

Cheat Codes

(originally posted at crw.livejournal.com)

If real life had cheat codes, I'd use one that would give me a fucking bazooka to blow up the fucking construction equipment that made a fucking racket at fucking 8am and fucking woke me up.

Don't Do Drown?

(originally posted at crw.livejournal.com)

Eloquent as always, we get this pearl of wisdom from brother Jeb: "'We ask people to use common sense after a hurricane.  Turn around don't do drown is our motto the day after the storm,' Bush said."

WTF?  Sad part is, he's likely to be president on day.

Celebrating Ezra

(originally posted at crw.livejournal.com)

No, he didn't die.  He's just leaving us to follow his dreams.  Tonight was the third send off I've been to for the guy - SF just loves him that much.  It was also a sort of housewarming for Anil, who's moving in just down the street.  In a way, I'm proud of myself for coming out and making an attempt to be social.  It's underscored my need (desire?) to get over the insecure feeling that I'm simply not fabulous enough to be hanging out with these people.  I suspect that my self-imposed introversion is beginning to do more harm than good, and it's something I plan to work on.

Working with Ezra was one of the main reasons I wanted to work for SixApart.  The irony being that we never got a chance to work on the same project at the same time.  Perhaps someday that will change, one can only hope.

Pick your battles.

(originally posted at crw.livejournal.com)

This, is retarded.

But I don't think anyone should waste time trying to fight it.  The changes that this country needs are, IMO, too large to allow ourselves to be distracted by these little things.

Public Relations

(originally posted at crw.livejournal.com)

I just spent some time touring the major news sites to read about the death of Peter Jennings.  They all reported that he had died of lung cancer, but the only one that acknowledged him as a "longtime smoker" was foxnews.com.  In all the other articles, smoking wasn't even mentioned.  How can you report on death-by-lung-cancer and not bring up smoking?

note to self

(originally posted at crw.livejournal.com)

dorothy ashby - essence of sapphire, as heard on solid steel @ 1:12.

off "the fantastic jazz harp of dorothy ashby", atlantic 1965

if anyone has a copy of this, please let me know.

Scotty's Fourth of July Visit

(originally posted at crw.livejournal.com)

We had marvelous sushi from KISS (the restaurant, not the band) and explored the Headlands, Mount Tamalpias, and Muir Woods.  He took pictures.

(originally posted at crw.livejournal.com)

Who needs an entry subject?

Today I learned that the office is exactly equidistant to the two closest Quiznos' - 0.3 miles.  I was also briefly reminded that it can be nice to have a technologically-proficient Mother.  Little IM's with familial updates can be humorous or depressing - today's IM was neither, but I was still grateful to receive it.

[MP|RI]AA's Sinister Plot

(originally posted at crw.livejournal.com)

I'm convinced that this breakthrough was masterminded by the MPAA and RIAA to finally have an excuse to cut off our hands when they find we've pirated their crap.

clarity

(originally posted at crw.livejournal.com)

sometimes it's good to be reminded that feeling absolutely nothing can feel so wonderful.

Flickr schwag

(originally posted at crw.livejournal.com)

Just another quick link to free stuff.  This time, Flickr schwag.  I want the "howdy" button.

Beethoven Downloads via BBC

(originally posted at crw.livejournal.com)

As of today, symphonies 1 through 5 in their full un-DRM'd glory.  Check 'em out.  They plan to post the rest as they are broadcasted.  Keen.

Aliens gave me an ankle probe!

(originally posted at crw.livejournal.com)

When I went to bed last night, my ankle felt just fine.  When I awoke, it was searing with pain.  The only possible explanation was that I was abducted by aliens by cover of darkness and given a most humiliating ankle probe.  Oh, the humanity.

Stereolab Playlist on iTMS

(originally posted at crw.livejournal.com)

I feel I'd be remiss in my evangelical duty if I didn't point out the celebrity playlist from Stereolab on the iTunes Music Store.

Every now and then I'll cruise through the celebrity playlists, just for kicks.  David Duchovny's got some funk.  The Cure likes Nirvana and Mogwai.  Reading the little one-line descriptions - even if they're faked by some marketing droid - is entertaining.

From the Stereolab playlist I purchased Barry Adamson and Grace Jones songs based solely on the 30 second clips and description from Laetitia.

One of the celebritys had a Gainsbourg song that I'm going to try to leech from Mena's collection.  It was pretty good.  Don't remember which, but I'll find it.  One of the slogans, perhaps.  Started with an E.