New York Times: An Alternative to Increasingly Elusive Bottles of Chartreuse. The decision to concentrate on meditation and prayer at the expense of increasing Chartreuse production to meet demand is one of those classic points that puts one’s faith to the test. Looks like Brucato Amaro’s Chaparral might be worth checking out, and might give me an excuse to finally try ordering from WoodenCork.
Category: linkblog
Linkblog for 8 Jan 2018
Quirkspace: 78 RPM Records. One user’s tips for recording 78RPM records when your turntable only supports 33/45 RPM, including settings in Amadeus Pro.
Stereophile: My Top 10 Jazz Albums of 2017. Fred Kaplan runs down a list of great jazz releases from last year, including both new and historical releases. Totally agree about the Cecile McLorin Salvant release.
Gaffa: Lou Reed og Laurie Anderson: DR Koncerthuset, København. A review of late-period Lou Reed, from 2009, four years before his death, in concert with Laurie Anderson. From the review, this was a true collaborative show. There may be a bootleg of the performance floating around out there…
Catching up
A List Apart: Web Typography: Designing Tables to be Read, Not Looked At. One of my pet peeves is tables that can’t be scanned easily. There are some great tips here, including some CSS features I didn’t know about (like td { text-align: “.” center; } to align a column of numbers at a decimal point!).
Talking Points Memo: Compromise and the Civil War. Short essay by Josh Marshall outlining the insanity behind John Kelly’s remarks on how the failure to “compromise” led to the Civil War. In fact, it was the South’s refusal to accept any compromise on slavery that led directly to the conflict.
Amadeus Pro: Elimination of a continuous background noise. I’m digitizing a lot more vinyl these days and need to check into this feature to “denoise” a track based on a sample of, for instance, needle hiss.
Archive.org: 78rpm Records Digitized by George Blood, L.P. Definitely going to dig into this. There’s a Twitter feed too.
Numero Group records. The makers of the “Eccentric Soul” series, which blew the top of my head off the first time I heard it (“You Can’t Blame Me,” anyone?).
Deferring maintenance
New York Times: Oroville is a warning for California Dams, as Climate Change Adds Stress. We have, as a society, been neglecting maintenance – of our infrastructure, our code, our bodies. (Well, I have, anyway.)
Link roundup
Brian Krebs: Who is Anna Senpai, the Mirai Worm Author? Fascinating and detailed explanation of how the economics of Minecraft combined with DDOS led to the rise of the seriously nasty IOT DDOS bot.
Aquarium Drunkard: Bash & Pop: Anything Could Happen. Review of the forthcoming album from ex-Replacements bassist Tommy Stinson.
Wired: Finally, Miles Morales Will Get to Be a Big Screen Spider-Man. Awesome. Looking forward to hearing more about this. Not looking forward to hearing racists lose their minds that this Spider-Man is biracial (African-American and Hispanic).
Boing Boing: John Edgar Park’s Mystery Box DIYs. Cool video and tutorial about JP’s AdaFruit work.
End of the week link roundup
I’m writing this in the back seat of our minivan on my iPhone, surrounded by a pair of Bichons who don’t travel well. So links are what you’re going to get.
IBM: Migrating security to the cloud: a model for Total Cost of Ownership. I thought I had seen all the models for savings from adopting SaaS products, but this one adds a few factors I hadn’t considered.
Aeon: Why bullshit is no laughing matter. In passing, this article uses tweets by Deepak Chopra to illustrate the qualities of BS and calls out some reliable signs of it: “The words … are unnecessarily complex, and the intended meanings are not obviously clear. Perhaps the tweets have been constructed to impress rather than inform. Chopra might have used vagueness as a tool to elicit profundity.”
Doom and Gloom from the Tomb: Invisible Hits 2016. Roundup of interesting Pitchfork articles from the bootleg folks.
Smithsonian: Listen to JRR Tolkien read songs and poems from the Lord of the Rings. Um, yes please.
Oh, my head
Five Thirty Eight: Election Update: The Craziest End To The 2016 Campaign Runs Through New Mexico. There’s a scenario in which there’s a tight electoral college such that the electoral votes in New Mexico might decide the election, but in which Gary Johnson holds those votes. I don’t even wanna think about how that scenario plays out afterwards.
Catch-up post vacation music link post
We were out of town for a week doing family things, during which time I managed to refrain from posting (much) on social media, but still collected a handful of interesting links. Here we go:
Aquarium Drunkard: James Booker, Montreux Jazz Festival, July 1978. Looking forward to checking this out; I’ve heard of Booker but never heard his music.
Doom and Gloom from the Tomb: Funkadelic – Rocky Mountain Shakedown. A farewell to the giant Bernie Worrell (DY16).
Boing Boing: Legendary Betty Davis and Miles Davis funk/fusion/psych session released. The vinyl bundles are all sold out, but the single vinyl LP and CD offerings are still available.
Doom and Gloom from the Tomb: Miles Davis – Paul’s Mall, Boston Massachusetts September 14, 1972. Live On The Corner era Miles.
Miscellaneous links roundup
Lots of stuff has accumulated in my iPhone Safari browser (the modern day equivalent of “too many tabs open in Firefox”). Here’s a few items of potential interest:
Boston area
Boston Light Tours: The oldest lighthouse site in America, with the current tower built in 1785 on foundations dating to 1713, is open for day tours. Selling it to my kids: “It’s only 76 steps—that’s a lot less than the Bunker Hill monument!”
Software and Business
1944 OSS Sabotage Manual (via): brilliant tips on physical and organizational sabotage. I especially like the tips on sabotaging organizational efficiency: “Always insist on doing everything through ‘channels.’ Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.”
So you wanna go on-prem do ya: The best explanation yet for why it’s so hard to take native SAAS/cloud software back on premise—and why it’s getting harder over time.
Food
Milk Sherbet (a Mid-Century Menu recipe). On our list to try out this summer.
Barbecued Chicken (a New York Times recipe). Always worth revisiting the basics.
Virginia
A Historical Sketch and Selected Documents Relating to the Jefferson Literary & Debating Society. 2011 paper by Thomas Howard and Owen Gallogly providing a thumbnail history of the University’s oldest extant organization.
Patron’s Choice: Exploring the Gannaway/Ganaway Family Roots. Excellent post about tracing family history and the difficulties of doing so across the boundaries of slavery. I haven’t done the research yet but suspect that the slave-owning family may be the ancestors of Glee Club president Malcolm W. Gannaway. More to come…
Music
“Alrac” – Paul Bley (Doom and Gloom from the Tomb). A belated pointer to this bootleg in memory of the late great jazz pianist and composer Paul Bley.
The Meters: 5/30/80 / New Orleans, LA Saenger Theatre (Aquarium Drunkard). Live footage from a Meters concert. Funk is, indeed, its own reward.
Tom Verlaine: The Big Train Crash (Doom and Gloom). Great 1987 Verlaine bootleg.
Links roundup
It’s been a busy week at the RSA Conference in San Francisco, so I’m just going to summarize a few things that interested me enough to put them on Delicious or otherwise check ’em out.
Doom and Gloom from the Tomb: Grand Banks – QB4: 1877–1896. This week’s Bandcamp Monday on this great music and bootlegs blog featured my friend and fellow Glee Club fossil Tyler Magill’s band Grand Banks and their first label release. I’ve been enjoying their self-released stuff a lot and am looking forward to this one.
Bill Peschel: Sherlock Holmes Outwitted: The Adventure of the ‘Hot Feet.’ Reprinting, with annotations, a Sherlock Holmes pastiche from the 1904 Corks and Curls. Usually student parodies are too full of in-jokes to be readable but this one comes off. It’s also notable due to its authorship by Armistead Dobie, future UVA law school professor and federal judge. Peschel gets most of the annotations right, only missing in calling College Topics a literary magazine (it was the school newspaper, the early incarnation of the Cavalier Daily).
Krebs on Security: Credit Unions Feeling Pinch in Wendy’s Breach. Two things: first, what is it going to take to get merchants to move away from swiping (extremely vulnerable to theft of credit card info) to dipping the chip? Second, if you use a debit card at merchants, please stop. You’re putting your bank account at risk with every swipe.
Virginia Memory: Forsaken: The Digital Bibliography. Fantastic project linking the plot and characters of the novel by Ross Howell, Jr. to their real-life counterparts using information from the Library of Virginia’s archives. Makes me want to go out and buy the book.
My Twitter reactions to the Steve Jobs news
Steve Jobs is the main reason I wanted to go into software, to be a product manager, and to build something great. No more “one more thing.”
Grab bag: Hallelujah and taxation
-
Laziness is the best interpretation of this song’s overuse.
-
Get rich and pay your taxes.
-
They’d damn well better not forbid students from using the Lawn fireplaces indefinitely.
Go ahead, make teens wait to drive
-
Delaying when a driver starts to learn how to drive has no effect on the accident rate. Imagine!!
XSS around the edges
-
If you think you understand XSS, think again. Lots of gnarly interesting little edge cases in this writeup.
Grab bag: UX data vs. aesthetic experience
-
It’s no surprise that former MS Office guy Steven Sinofsky would bring a data driven approach to improving the next version of Windows. I think that level of rigorous UX design will be refreshing. It’s also no surprising, unfortunately, that the end result as implemented in Explorer is an aesthetic disaster.
-
Wow. You thought iPhone fanboys were bad? Try Droid fanboys.