Still going after all these years.
Esta tells some outstanding ghost stories from her days in Colonial Williamsburg and philosophizes about why Halloween is so cool:
On Halloween we realize that everything we trouble ourselves about is as fragile and fleeting as water in a cupped palm, and rather than howling about it, in our inimitable human logic we put on face paint and howl with it. Tell me that ain’t cool.
I came into work this morning and turned on my music software. The first song it decided to play?
Sonic Youth’s “Expressway to Yr Skull.”
Happy Halloween.
(Now I just need to dig up the UK Surf mix of the Pixies’ “Wave of Mutilation” and I’ll be in that proper indie rock Halloween mood.)
One more link: Forbes’ CEO Halloween Masks! Print ’em out and go as your favorite scary CEO! (Thanks to Cory @ BoingBoing).
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Greg has started calling our group of connected blogs a keiretsu, after the Japanese cross-industrial conglomerate. I guess that’s the only way to describe that circle: a programming MBA deep in the software world (me), two Southern Democratic political bloggers, and a financial analyst and poet. It’s too bad the era of corporate megamergers gave “synergy” a bad name, because you’d hope there would be some in that random combination of assets.
Anyway, looking out over my keiretsu to catch up:
Me? I still have a cold and I need sleep. I was at work until 9:30 tonight and I have a long day tomorrow. Talk amongst yourselves. 🙂
Moxie’s blog turns 2 today. Go spank it.
Updated: I should clarify: I meant, spank her blog, in keeping with the custom for birthdays. Get your minds out of the gutter.
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After the last post, I decided it was high time to create a new department in which I could ramble about food and beverages. The Cucina department, aka “Food Porn,” has accordingly been added. Old posts will be recategorized as I get to it.
The Julie/Julia Project may have its Spicy Thursdays; I have, at least while Lisa is on the road, Leftover Tuesdays. In this case, though, the leftovers were steaks from a beef tenderloin that had been roasted in an herbed salt crust (for the curious, you dispose of the caked salt—it just ensures consistent temperature distribution, retention of juices by the meat, and some small amount of seasoning).
Being a fundamentally masochistic person, I decided that I couldn’t just do leftovers. So (after using our new random-orbital palm sander to buzz off the trim in the Gold Room prior to tomorrow night’s painting) I tried cooking mashed potatoes with parsley and chive oil (it’s in this month’s Gourmet, but probably won’t be on Epicurious for another few months). I halved the recipe but had proportion problems. For instance, I decided to substitute sautéed shallots for chives, since we only have one very small pot of the latter. And I probably didn’t have enough parsley (though our parsley plant is overproducing, I didn’t want to cut off every leaf). So as a result, the potatoes that were supposed to be bright green and presumably bursting with herbaceous flavor…weren’t quite. Still good, but next time I’ll stick to roasted garlic.
I emailed Michael Goldberg today. He founded Addicted to Noise, which in the mid nineties was the coolest music site around. They had Corinne Tucker of Sleater Kinney writing a column for them for a while… Alas, they sold to SonicNet, who sold to the VH1 corporate megalith, and a lot of great content that they had has disappeared (though some of it is still in the Google cache).
That was actually why I emailed Michael. I was looking for good SY and Thurston Moore reviews for musicmoz, but the content was no longer accessible. To my chagrin, Michael confirmed that VH1 owns the rights to all those great stories. There’s a greater point to be made here about the evils of contracts that give all rights to the purchaser of content. You think copyright is bad when Disney owns it? What about a corporation that is bought and essentially ceases to exist, and a new copyright owner who lets all the content rot?
Fortunately this story has a happy ending. Michael’s now at Neumu, a killer little site about music and art that deserves to be a lot better known. Go check it out.
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Enough said, really. I picked up Blacklisted the other day and I’ve forgotten all the other music I was listening to, which almost never happens. If you’ve never heard Ms. Case’s music, do yourself a favor and check out the new album’s second track, ‘Deep Red Bells.’
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I must be losing my touch. I got our LaserJet 2100M working with our new SMC Barricade router after entirely too much time spent working on the problem. Why wasn’t it working? I had configured the SMC for MAC authentication, on top of the other built-in protections, and hadn’t input the MAC address for the LaserJet’s print server. I figured that since I was connecting the LaserJet via a wired connection it wouldn’t matter, but apparently the SMC’s MAC authentication is good for both wired and wireless clients.
No matter. It’s working, and now we have both our printers accessible via wireless. I’m going to bed to nurse this cold.
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…just fighting a nasty cold that came on suddenly this afternoon, and buried under a pile of work. I’m also trying to minimize the amount of stuff I post to my blog in preparation for the move, but I will try to ping it daily to reassure you that I’m still alive. If you don’t see the blog updated, send out the search dogs. I’ll be the one buried alive in cold germ by-products.
Before I start this, I should note that I’ve been permalinked by Moxie. Which is pretty exciting for a married man pushing 30. (Look on the right hand side, halfway down, just under “Pop Culture Kingdom.”) And now she’s taking my advice about things to do with your blog when it turns 2! “Who knew my blog was a tad on the whorish side?”
I just now saw the post linked above, as it’s been a domestic weekend. After picking up Lisa on Friday from SeaTac (after receiving roses at the Cascadian concert, I pulled up in my tux and handed her the flowers), we spent yesterday priming and today painting the formerly wallpaper covered room. It’s now—ready?—a canaryish yellow (officially marketed as “Empire Gold”). Alas, paint is one of those things that reproduces itself when you’re not looking. Now I have to repaint all the trim, and eventually the wall above the top rail, and the door, and the ceiling…
Apartment dwellers everywhere, rejoice. You don’t know how much work you’re missing by not owning a house…
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Lisa comes home tonight. It’s been a really crazy week and I can’t wait to see her. I’ve been practicing all week for the first real concert that I’ll sing with the Cascadian Chorale: selected choral dances from Purcell’s The Fairy Queen, with the Ballet Bellevue. It’s really different singing for the ballet. As our director points out, he’s got to remember 29 different tempi—if he’s off on the tempo, the dancer will be thrown.
I have to go straight from my performance to pick her up at SeaTac, so I guess I’ll be the only tuxedoed guy by baggage claim. Now if I can just find some roses it’ll be perfect.
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Following the sniper story to the Washington Post, I stumbled across this “Organizing Guide” that is scaring me a little bit. (Probably because our house is still a partly unpacked mess.) But the closet thing is, I think, the most out of control. If you follow some of the links in the closet article, you could wind up at EasyClosets’s online Java-based closet designer, complete with custom floor plan drawing tool.
The scary part is, I want to use it.
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Well, after 17 months of active use (and much longer ownership–I have content on this site dating back to 2000), I’ve finally bitten the bullet and spent some money on a professional Manila hosting service. I have really appreciated the free space on Userland’s server, but they’re not a hosting company and can’t be held to the same expectations for server uptime and so forth–certainly not for free. (It was the server falling over for two hours during the day earlier this week that sparked the decision.)
What does this mean for you, my loyal reader? I will post a link to the new site when it’s up and running, and will do everything I can to redirect traffic. The one thing I don’t know about is whether Userland will put RSS redirection into place on Manila, so if you’re subscribing to this feed, look for an item giving the new subscription address.
The timeline isn’t firm yet, but I expect the changes to happen in the next week. As a result there may be a quiet period on the blog so that I don’t lose anything during the migration process.
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