Month: January 2006

New (old) mix: the unapologetic liberal psychosis blues

A new mix minifeature kicks off today, inspired by the recent loss of my iTunes library. I was able to rebuild some mixes from Art of the Mix, but had to go back to j-cards from the original tapes for many of my playlists. At that point I decided that it was time to stop being embarrassed about my old mixes and just go ahead and post them, if for no other reason than so that I would have a back-up record of them later—but also so that I could transcribe some of my memories about what was going on at the time.

I started with my first self-consciously titled mix: the unapologetic liberal psychosis blues. The mix dates from my second year in college—in fact, if my rare handwritten date on the j-card is to be trusted, from right after Thanksgiving break, November 25, 1991. I was, if the playlist is any indication, knee deep in my contemporaneous love affair with the Pixies, just discovering Bauhaus and Joy Division, and working out from under the influence of U2’s Achtung Baby. I was still buying discs from the music services, including the Bob Dylan Bootleg set and the Jesus and Mary Chain. I was also digesting a stack of CDs that I had bought during the summer from the independent music shop in Patrick Henry Mall in Newport News, including a two-disc Hendrix compilation and a House of Love rarities disc.

In fact, for all its aggression and noise, this disc has my hometown written all over it. In addition to the stuff from the mall, I had been turned onto Nine Inch Nails and the Jesus and Mary Chain by a kid a year younger than me who used to go to my high school. I was trading tapes with friends, and my sister’s friends, and getting feedback about the Pixies from people who had seen U2’s show at the Hampton Coliseum where the Pixies opened for them.

But the tone of this mix was so much darker than anything I had made before. What brought that darkness? Maybe it was the second year of college. In fact, almost certainly it was—I was taking a more than full course load, 20 hours compared to the original 15, and I was freaking out. I was also, I feared, in danger of failing my first math course—I was in a math for physics majors course with third years and in way over my head. I was also being distracted by things that were much more interesting—literature, music, philosophy—and didn’t know what was going on. Didn’t I want to be a physicist?

I’m just now, 14 years later, realizing how confused I was and how much anger I had stirring in me as a result of what I was fearing was a waste of time, years spent as a science student, years not spent learning how to be a kid. I feel like I’ve been playing catch-up, in a way, ever since.

But none of that changes the fact that this is damned good music. It’s funny how the distance from those events actually makes the music that much better.

The use of SuperSoakers in audiology

This is what the Internet is for: turning up articles in Canadian medical journals about using SuperSoakers (in lieu of conventional irrigation devices) to remove impacted earwax. With picture (of the procedure, not the actual cerumen, alas).

The article is almost as much fun as the concept, with several keeper quotations, including my favorite: “The patient later reported a resumption in his nighttime ability to hear his infant son crying, which led to his being able to promptly jump out of bed and attend to his son’s needs, excluding breast-feeding” (um, emphasis added).

Follow up: Mac OS X archive and install

I described, several months ago now, my ongoing problems with the spinning beachball of doom under Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger). This weekend I finally popped the Tiger DVD into my drive and performed an Archive and Install, which shuffles the System folder (and odds and ends of other system-owned folders, including surprisingly the development tools folder) into a Previous System Folders directory and creates a clean new system installation. I decided this time around to migrate all the user profiles into the new installation, so that I would still have a usable machine and would understand better what was causing the slowdown.

At this writing, I have to say that the archive and install wasn’t helpful. I was still getting SBODs after the first reboot with the new install. This, to me, suggests that the problem is either caused by something in my user profile (maybe Spotlight indexes, or startup items, or something) or else something that is endemic to the machine (like too little RAM).

As this machine continues to live up to its dubious fame as one of the least reliable PowerBooks—in addition to the slowdowns, I’ve got a bad stuck hinge that is damaging the frame of the display on the lower left side—I will be listening for news of new ’books at this week’s MacWorld keynote with more than the usual interest.

Friday crazy rumors day: Clinton replacing Ballmer?

Boy, is it fun to speculate and what-if today. Namely, what if this rumor is true? The one that has Steve Ballmer stepping aside as Microsoft CEO … in favor of Bill Clinton???

For one thing, you’d probably see a lot of red states joining Massachusetts’ ex-CIO in putting policies in place to get Microsoft out of their government. It would probably be the first time that open source advocates and most mouthbreathing conservatives would agree on anything.

Nonetheless, I will say that the only thing that could convince me this rumor is true would be if I looked out my window and saw pork on the wing.

(Via Scripting News.)

Always somebody watching at the Bellagio

Conference season is starting early for 2006. I’ll be at the grandly named Pink Elephant 10th Annual IT Service Management Conference and Exhibition in mid-February at the Bellagio, the hotel famous for inclusion in Ocean’s Eleven and for its masses of art glass by Dale Chihuly.

Looks like I won’t be the only Sloan person in attendance, either: Professor Ralph Katz, a research associate at Sloan (and a professor at Northeastern) will be speaking in the IT Business School track about managing innovation during uncertain times. If you feel like talking a little business at the show, or just quoting lines from O11 at me, I’ll be on the exhibit floor.

Missing more meetups

The Boston Geek Dinner that Dave organized last night at the CambridgeSide Galleria is probably the only blog meetup in recent memory to get covered by ZDNet. I wasn’t there—and haven’t been able to make any blog related gatherings, such as the Berkman Thursdays—because they all insist on Thursday night as the meeting datetime of choice. Which, when we’re not kicking off a BSO concert series, is the night I have choir rehearsal. There just aren’t enough days.

“Last time I answer an MIT survey,” and an offer of help

Last summer’s blogging survey by Cameron Marlow, who created the Blogdex tool at the MIT Media Labs in 2001, has become this week’s backlash story. Marlow promised to publish the results of the research at the end of the summer, then didn’t, and has indicated through an interview with the Bostonist that he’s just too swamped with work at his new job at Yahoo! to publish it. The reaction from the blogging community, who put out a bunch of buttons and banners to encourage people to fill out the survey, has been annoyed at best, angry at worst (as in the headline from Universal Hub above).

I’ve requested a copy of the thesis from the MIT archives. Copyright will prevent me from republishing the whole thing, but I hope to at least get the abstract on line. But I’d like to do better. Cameron, if you’re out there, I’d like to offer my services as a stats savvy MIT (Sloan) grad and blogger to help get the summary of the survey results on line. After all, it’s our collective alma mater’s reputation on the line. Plus I want to see the data too. How ’bout it?

Egolinking

Egolinking
The process of linking to things you find when you egosurf.

Today’s egolinks are to two unlikely sources. The first is to an interview in a Sloan School of Management publication about Sloan bloggers. Which reminds me: I need to add the other folks in that article to the Sloanblogs list.

The second is to my first mention in the New York Times—or more properly on the New York Times website. Not because of the Boycott Sony initiative, as one might think; this is as an addendum to an article about authors reading what bloggers say about them. My blog is linked from a page that summarizes bloggers’ discussions of Julie and Julia by Julie Powell. Ah well. Cool to see one’s name associated with the Grey Lady, no matter how it got there.

FWIW, I don’t think I invented the term egolink, but there aren’t many people using it. Spread the word!

New iTunes script: Increment Playcount

I’ve uploaded a bare bones AppleScript that I’ve found useful over the past few weeks. The script, Increment Playcount, does what it says: it bumps the playcount of a track in iTunes by 1 and sets the Last Played date to the current date and time. It’s been helpful to me because many of my smart playlists rely on knowing if I’ve heard a track or not, but unfortunately sometimes my iPod doesn’t sync playcounts—and sometimes my iTunes library gets blown away, losing all playcount information.

To use the script, unzip it, drop the script in your Library/iTunes/Scripts folder, go to iTunes, select one or more tracks, then select Increment Playcount from the scripts menu.

More detail about this and my other AppleScripts on my Software page.

Tomorrow’s Children

It’s been one of those serendipitious days. A link on Boing Boing about a secret “cornfield” where misbehaving players inside the MMPORG Second Life get banished sent me on a search for the original story. The game makers credit the Twilight Zone, but I remembered reading a short story with the same premise as a kid in elementary school. “It’s a Good Life,” by Jerome Bixby, always scared the hell out of me, but it’s the sort of story that sticks with me to the present day.

Remembering the title of another story in the anthology, “Gonna Roll Them Bones,” I found a pointer to the anthology. Tomorrow’s Children, edited by Isaac Asimov, was full of extraordinarily creepy stories and hit me, as I was busy reading my way through the entire elementary school library, like a ton of bricks. From that point on I was hooked on science fiction, and remember being disappointed that Asimov’s own works didn’t have anywhere near the eerie resonance that these stories did. Based on the reviews in Amazon, it would appear that I’m not the only one who was warped for life by the book—and based on the prices for it on Alibris, it will be a good long time before I can get my hands on it again.

New music: The Black Angels

Listening to the KEXP podcast today (thanks to Cheryl Waters for bringing me the feeling that I was listening to my favorite radio station in my car from 3000 miles away), I found a new band. Of course KEXP found them first… They’re called The Black Angels (after the Velvet Underground song, not the George Crumb string quartet), and like their antecedent they bring heavy guitars over psychedelic droning rhythms. It’s the sort of sound that keeps getting rediscovered—think the Paisley Underground bands, Mazzy Star, or even Mogwai with vocals—but these young Texans do it really, really well, blending twists of sixties garage rock with their drones and heavy drum beats.

The band has made the KEXP Top 90.3 for 2005 on the strength of its eponymous debut EP. You can check out a full-length MP3 download and some samples on their site, and some live in studio recordings from KVRX (Austin, Texas).

Can you get to that?

Funkadelic is in the iTunes Music Store. Holy hell. I can’t believe I’ve gone so long in my life without hearing “Maggot Brain.” In fact, I distinctly remember being a snotnosed 21 or 22 year old at the (apparently late lamented) Olsson’s Records in Georgetown, checking out the Funkadelic section on the strength of the George Clinton connection (I was a mighty Parliament fan), seeing the cover of Maggot Brain, shuddering and passing by. More fool, I. The title track really is one of the greatest guitar tracks of all time. And it doesn’t stop there.

Aside: I don’t know if there is a band that had a better gift for album titles. On the strength of Free Your Mind…And Your Ass Will Follow and Standing on the Verge of Getting It On, Funkadelic should have won some sort of lifetime achievement award.

Mac laptops to buy (or avoid)

Currently being Slashdotted: the Macintouch iBook and PowerBook reliability survey. Usual statistical cautions apply: while the overall sample size of 4,614 repairs out of 10,627 respondents should yield reliable answers at the top level (when did your ‘book need to be repaired? did you buy AppleCare? have you ever dropped your machine?), it’s unlikely to do so at the machine level.

And yet. For the two machines I’ve owned (the Powerbook G3 Firewire and the 1GHz G4 TiBook), the stats are dead on. To wit: the three things that gave me problems on the G3 were the power adapter, the RAM, and the optical drive, and I’ve experienced serious case problems on the G4 TiBook.

Fortunately for Apple, it looks like recent AlBook models have been much more reliable. Which probably means that Apple really is due to introduce some new designs to shake things up at next week’s MacWorld Expo.

WordPress 2.0 hits the streets

Missed this over the weekend: WordPress 2.0 (née 1.6) has been released. I will be looking at the process to upgrade from 1.5 on the Boycott Sony blog, which is currently on WordPress 1.5. (This blog is on the Manila platform.)

Changelist, and what’s new from a developer’s perspective. I’m most excited about the default inclusion of Akismet for distributed spam blocking, as comment moderation for spam comments takes some time today.

Media wiring, penultimate chapter

On New Years Eve, I got a chance to work on a long stalled project—hooking up the cable wiring in our distributed media outlets. As you may recall, back in June and July I ran coax to outlets in the first and second floor bedrooms and connected them to a distribution block—really an oversized panel-mounted tee connector—in our structured wiring panel. That left the last step: connecting the distribution block to a live cable feed.

On Saturday, Lisa and I (with help from Esta) mostly finished this part of the job. What was required:

First: Reroute the existing cable hookup in the basement back behind the fake wall. This takes some explaining: Our basement is built with one finished room, which has drywall walls at a standoff (about six inches) from the actual foundation wall. This leaves a convenient space to run electrical cables back and forth to the service panel, since the panel is mounted in the false wall, as well as for other kinds of cabling projects. There is even a door in the false wall, which is for accessing the house water shutoff but which works well for fishing wire.

Back in 2004 when cable was installed in the basement, the installer drilled a hole through the left top of the window frame and dropped the cable directly into the room. I drilled a hole through the false wall on the upper right side of the window and pulled the cable across behind the blind hardware at the top of the window and through the hole into the access space.

Second: Fish coax cable from the media panel into the laundry room. This was straightforward, since there are lots of cables and ducts passing through openings in the wall between these two rooms that will be boxed in at some point in the future. With everything still open, I could just pass the cable by hand through the wall into the laundry room.

Third: Fish coax from the laundry room, inside the finished ceiling of the library, and down into the access space and connect it to the live feed. This was the nightmare. The last time I looked at the access space, it wasn’t too bad: just a few cables strung across. One of our electricians had even been thoughtful enough to leave a nylon string in place for pulling future cables through. Unfortunately, that was before the first floor ductwork and the bathroom renovations were completed. End result: it took about two hours to work my hand up and fish the coax across, without getting snagged on any live electrical wires or puncturing the insulated ducts, and then to retrieve the fish tape.

Oy. Finally, though, almost all the connections have been made. Still remaining: actually test the cable outlets in the two bedrooms; insert one more tee in the false wall; install an outlet on the wall in the library bedroom; and tack up the cables in the library and the utility room. I’m most nervous about the first item. Anything could have gone wrong with the coax going up to the bedrooms, including bad connector attachment (by me), drywall nails driven into the coax (also me), insulation damaged by the HVAC guys… etc. Well, we’ll see how it goes.