Month: September 2006

Spoke too soon…

When will I learn to stop saying things like “it looks like clear sailing”? My flight has been delayed two hours to Chicago, which makes me nervous about my connection to Salt Lake City. The good news is that everything in and out of Chicago is delayed, so I might actually make it. The bad news is that I probably won’t get there until well past midnight, and I have an early morning phone call the next day. And let’s not even think about luggage…

This just in…

Traveling on the day before my wife’s birthday sucks.

Fortunately that’s the suckiest thing about this flight so far. I got here in plenty of time, have a seat (albeit a middle) to Chicago, and it looks like it’ll be clear sailing to the ITSMf meeting in Salt Lake City.

The last time I was in Salt Lake City, aside from connecting through the airport, was some eight years ago when I stayed there while doing some consulting in Ogden. I recall that they had some pretty good local microbrews, in spite of the Byzantine local liquor laws. But I can’t find any of them using BeerAdvocate, so I’ll have to hang loose and hope for the best.

Friday Random 10: So happy that I can’t stop crying

I’m happy it’s Friday; so happy that I’m about to fall asleep sitting up. This week’s Random 10, drawn using iTunes 7 from my full library, has a lot of good time tunes, for whatever reason, but I’m not complaining:

  1. Daniel Lanois, “The Deadly Nightshade” (Belladona)
  2. G Love and Special Sauce, “Milk & Cereal” (Rappin’ Blues EP)
  3. Original Five Blind Boys of Alabama, “Broken Heart Of Mine” (Oh Lord, Stand By Me)
  4. Nina Simone, “Chauffeur” (Pastel Blues/Let It All Out)
  5. John Coltrane, “Witches Pit” (Dakar)
  6. Le Tigre, “All That Glitters (Remix By Rachael Kozak)” (From The Desk Of Mr. Lady)
  7. Sting, “I’m So Happy I Can’t Stop Crying” (Mercury Falling)
  8. Bascom Lamar Lunsford, “Drinking Of The Wine” (Ballads, Banjo Tunes, And Sacred Songs Of Western North Carolina)
  9. Duke Ellington, “The Deep South Suite: Happy – Go – Lucky Local” (The Great Chicago Concerts)
  10. Frank Sinatra, “It Happened In Monterey” (Songs For Swingin’ Lovers)

A rare thing indeed

Boston Globe (yesterday): Panel OK’s 2 rival wiretapping bills. Ok, I’m very unhappy of this trend of the senate to roll over for the Administration’s power-mad citizen surveillance schemes. “What, the covert warrantless wiretaps were illegal? Well, let’s just make ’em legal!!”

But here’s the rare thing, at least where Virginia senator John Warner is concerned: I have a small amount of new respect for a few of those senators, namely the senators from the Senate Armed Services Committee (McCain, John Warner, Lindsey Graham) who announced their continued opposition to proposals from the White House that limit an defendant’s access to evidence if it is classified. I can think of no system more ripe for abuse than one in which the Executive Branch collects evidence without notifying the judicial branch through a warrant application; classifies the evidence; then uses it to convict someone with no opportunities for challenge.

Overall the picture out of judiciary as painted by this article looks like total disarray and a complete lack of inclination for the senate to fall in line behind Bush’s police state measures. Thank goodness, democracy is messy.

Catching my breath

I haven’t really been any less busy in the last week—I was in Pittsburgh on Tuesday, Chicago on Wednesday (hence the no blogging), and have been trying to balance my BSO and church choir commitments. Fortunately our kitchen is in a state where I can’t do anything on it until the plasterers are done, or I’d be a wreck.

But for once I’m breathing easily. I managed to arrange a break in my schedule this morning so that I can help manage the contractors for the plaster work, and I have some time off this afternoon. It’s a short respite—in the interim, I have a trio of meetings and then on Sunday I hop a plane for Salt Lake City. But I somehow have the feeling that I’ll survive now.

I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass

I have nothing to say about the new Yo La Tengo album, except that it makes me happier than any record that I’ve heard for a while. And of course I Am Not Afraid of You And I Will Beat Your Ass is an title that instantly joins such fine names as Free Your Mind … And Your Ass Will Follow. One wonders if that’s what the band had in mind. In fact, is any album with ass in the title destined for greatness?

EMusic has a serious take, and a completely not-serious take, on the album as well.

New Apple announcements: Apple is everywhere

As per usual, I’ve been in meetings and on travel all day (in fact, I was in the Pittsburgh airport at 2:30 pm when I started writing this) and am just catching up on Apple’s announcements from earlier this afternoon. Briefly: new higher capacity iPods with click-wheel driven search, new thinner iPod Nanos, a Shuffle that doesn’t look like a USB stick, new radically overhauled iTunes, iTunes store with downloadable movies and games, and a preview of a set-top box.

So read between the lines. What you see is a company trying to answer to Wall Street how it will follow up the iPod, arguably the most successful new product of the first half of this decade. The answer is content and a wider footprint, and a clear statement that the iPod has become not just Apple’s music brand, but Apple’s consumer electronics brand (to use an awful phrase). The iPod/iTunes/iTV family is now solidly positioned in Apple’s product suite for people who watch and listen, but don’t necessarily create.

That’s not a bad thing, and the devices don’t lock out user created content; on the contrary, the embrace of podcasting within iTunes is as significant a factor of the meteoric rise of that phenomenon as anything else. But what this announcement illustrates is that it’s not just the MP3 player makers and the makers of competing DRM; it’s the living room electronics manufacturers who are squarely in Apple’s sights. And having screwed around with dizzyingly complex products for about 40 years now, these guys have a lot to lose. Should be fun to watch…

One last thought: The momentum with which other studios add movies to the newly renamed iTunes Store will probably be considerably slower than the rate at which music studios signed up, and that might really hurt Apple’s odds in this market. Bet Jobs didn’t figure on that when Disney bought Pixar…

Oh, and confidential to ZDNet’s David Berlind. Given the amount of energy the record companies have put into fighting iTunes, the number of alternative companies that are out there, and the still rapidly changing market, I’d say it’s a little precipitous to call for government intervention in the iTunes/iPod ecosystem. Particularly since there is nothing, device manufacturers’s claims to the contrary, that prevents any content manufacturer from getting their content onto the iPod. The format is called MP3, and it trades off restrictive DRM for support everywhere. Look into it. It seems to be working well for eMusic.

Five years (and change)

I didn’t post anything yesterday about September 11. It’s not that I didn’t think about it. How could I not? I was in Cambridge, just a few miles from where I live now, when I first saw the news on Yahoo. I am constantly surrounded by reminders of that day, whether the profound (the silent presence of a 9/11 widow in our soprano section, the memory of Doug, the skies over the Charles that were so eerily silent that week) or the mundane (long lines and byzantine security procedures at the airport, five years of online saber rattling by both sides).

But I cannot participate in the sanctification of September 11. And I cannot give the administration a free pass for continuing to drag us into unrelated conflicts in memory of that day. Too much wrong has already been done in the name of this day.

Ironically, I’m flying (on business) for much of this week, so I don’t really have the time or energy to say more. But this column by H. D. S. Greenway in the Globe, calling the administration on their policies, is a good start.

Infinite emulation

When all content is digitized and free, it might feel a little like this: being able to play PC and Mac games that gripped your attention 10 and 20 years ago on the same platform.

Item 1: DosBox, a limited x86/DOS emulation environment that is focused on the gaming experience. Or more precisely, DosBox plus Thexder, the Sierra Online-published transforming mech warrior shoot-em-up side-scroller. Man, I used to play the Apple II version of this for hours when I was in high school.

Item 2: Abuse, a shooting side scroller published by Bungie in the mid-90s and now available on Unix and Mac platforms. Abuse and Marathon (Bungie’s other early hit, before they got bought by Microsoft and did Halo) together were responsible for many, many lost evenings when Lisa was in grad school.

Both now run on Mac OS X (as well as other platforms), and both are a pretty good nostalgia blast.

I can’t relax, ’cause I’m a Boinger

Thanks to a link on Fark for this: Billy and the Boingers MP3s. I owned the book that contained the flexidisc with these songs, but we could only play it on my childhood portable record player. Hope these sound better than they did on that record player; I had to weight the flexidisc with a penny to keep it from slipping, and it still didn’t rotate at a consistent rate which lent a warbly quality to the music. If these sound halfway decent, they’re a shoo-in for my next 80 mix.

Friday Random 10: iPod blues redux

My iPod is getting increasingly flaky. In addition to spontaneous reboots it also occasionally refuses to sync, indicating that the disc couldn’t be read to or written from. The middle of a kitchen renovation is a bad time for any small electronics purchase that doesn’t also crush ice, so I’ll have to live with it for a while longer, I guess.

Besides, it still works for the Random 10. Lots of Elvis Costello still on the iPod from his appearance last week at Tanglewood with Marian McPartland.

  1. Boston Camerata, “Thomas-Town” (New Britain)
  2. Elvis Costello, “Brilliant Mistake” (King of America)
  3. Elvis Costello, “Just About Glad” (Costello and Nieve)
  4. Radiohead mashed with Ghostface, “Daytona 500” (Me and This Army)
  5. Elvis Costello, “They Didn’t Believe Me” (Marian McPartland’s Piano Jazz with Elvis Costello)
  6. Elvis Costello, “Temptation” (Costello and Nieve)
  7. Clifton Chenier, “Jole Blonde” (Bon Ton Roulet)
  8. Elvis Costello, “Baby Plays Around” (Spike)
  9. Don Cherry and John Coltrane, “The Invisible” (The Avant-Garde)
  10. Nouvelle Vague, “Dancing with Myself” (Bande A Part)

Open encyclopedias, with open arguments

I love the lamest edit wars page on Wikipedia. It’s academic humor writ large, and is a microcosm of politics, geekdom, transliteration, and other hair-splitting pursuits. Was Copernicus Polish, German, or Prussian? If Nikolai Tesla was born in a part of Austria-Hungary that is now part of Croatia, was he Austrian, Hungarian, or Croat? More seriously, should Hong Kong literature be categorized under Chinese literature or just linked to it? The Death Star: “Is it 120km or 160km in diameter? Who cares?” (Thanks, Boing Boing.)

10,000

This should be the 10,000th post on my Manila blog. Will time end? Will the calendar still work? Let’s roll over the odometer.

… Oh well, the spammers win again. This was actually message 10,013. Messages 9995 through 10012 are all spam comments.

Demolition redux: the kitchen remodel

It seems like a long time since we’ve written anything substantial in the houseblog—and that’s because, after two bathroom remodels and a full HVAC system replacement, we were on Houseblog Hiatus. But no longer. We’ve been removing bits and pieces of the kitchen over the last month and this weekend everything else came out. Yes, we’re in the throes of a kitchen remodel—but this is going to be a remodel on a budget. Alas, no granite for us.

You could really say that this project started shortly after we moved in, when we realized that we couldn’t get our new fridge into the kitchen. As part of that effort, I ripped out the cabinet above the fridge and realized that the plaster ceiling above it was in pieces. Since then we’ve dealt with freezing pipes, leaks from ice dams through the kitchen ceiling, kitchen cabinets that don’t close and drawers that shower sawdust on the cabinet areas below each time they are opened and closed…

So we decided that it was time to bite the bullet and remodel. I wrote about the general scope a while ago, but didn’t get into any details. So here is the plan:

  1. Set up temporary kitchen in the dining room, complete with fridge, microwave, toaster, coffee pot, and hot plate. Done, and let me tell ya, it’s compact. As they say, we are camping with a mortgage…
  2. Rip out all the old cabinets. Done, finally (see the photoset).
  3. Have plumber reroute the sink plumbing and the gas line. In progress.
  4. Remove the wall between the kitchen and the dining room.
  5. Install new cabinets.
  6. Hook up old stove and sink and new dishwasher (finally) and fan in their new locations (a picture is forthcoming).
  7. New countertops.

And now we’re on the way. The photoset gives some interesting glimpses of the things that we’ve found in the demolition, and I will annotate each photo over the next day or two.

Wired on Splogs

The title Spam + Blogs = Trouble is a rare understatement from Wired, but the article is a good examination of the dangers of splogs—sites that look like blogs but are constructed entirely of links to get-rich-quick sites, link forests that artificially inflate the PageRank of pages within them, and “male enhancement” or phentermine ads.

The most insidious part of the spam blogger’s arsenal comes when they try to get people to link to the sites. Since no one will do that voluntarily, spam bloggers abuse the comments features on sites like mine, using automated tools or low-paid labor. How bad is it? I’m routinely deleting upwards of fifty comments a night and my site doesn’t even get that much traffic any more. I will most likely crack my 10,000th message in my site’s Manila discussion group this week (all comments, along with my posts and any images I upload, are stored in the discussion group), and I’d guess that something like 40% of the total message count has been spam messages.

In fact, spam is the number one reason that I will likely move off this blogging platform as soon as I find a way to migrate my content. Spam is an arms race, and with my site host not upgrading to the latest version of Manila—which doesn’t see frequent updates anyway—I’m badly underarmed. The Boycott Sony blog probably gets as many spam comments if not more in spite of its not having been updated in seven months, but they go into a holding tank for approval, and if I upgraded to the latest WordPress version, the vast archive of spam already flagged would serve to educate my spam filter to keep more comments from coming in.