June 29, 2005
Podcasting
I haven't really hopped aboard the podcasting bandwagon, mostly because I have no empty spaces in my media-saturated day. (In a mass communications class I'm taking, we analyzed our hours of media consumption per day and it was quite shocking.) In other words, I'd rather listen to music or surf the 'net. Though I barely participate, I do think podcasting is a cool use of technology. Since it's in the news because of the mainstream validation lent by iTunes 4.9, here are some links:
29 Jun 22:51 | Link | Category: Technology & Computing
The Lost Liberty Hotel
I was alarmed by the Supreme Court's recent ruling on personal property seizures. I agreed with almost everything in Sandra Day O'Connor's dissent. (Should I also mention my surprise at being in agreement with Justices Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas?) I personally know of several powerful local politicians who have made momentous planning decisions and are intimately connected with developers & development companies. Why should property seizure be left solely to their "good judgement" regarding public benefit? Hmmm.
Anyway. I chuckled at a news item I read today about a critic who wants to replace Justice Souter's home with a hotel. He wrote a fax to leaders in Souter's New Hampshire town stating that "the justification for such an eminent domain action is that our hotel will better serve the public interest as it will bring in economic development and higher tax revenue to Weare." Beautiful.
29 Jun 22:32 | Link | Category: Current Events, Opinion & Thoughts
Flag Burning
Regarding those nutty folks in the House of Representatives and their recent approval of a flag burning amendment, I think I have to agree with Jaf's assessment. See also: What does happen when you burn an American flag?
29 Jun 22:27 | Link | Category: Current Events, Opinion & Thoughts
R.E.M.'s Best
After looking over Flagpole's 25 Best Ever R.E.M. Songs (and the reactions of various webloggers), Kevin Murphy came up with his own Top 50 list. At the moment I'm feeling too lazy to come up with my own Top 25 / 50, but it would probably be fairly similar to Kevin's. (I was glad to see some selections from "Around The Sun".)
29 Jun 22:21 | Link | Category: Music
The Drapes have been removed!
Say what you will about Alberto Gonzalez, but hey - at least he removed Ashcroft's silly drapes from the Spirit of Justice statue in the Great Hall. Now if we could just get him to reconsider his belief that the war against terrorism "renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners," we'd be making some real progress!
29 Jun 22:03 | Link | Category: Current Events, Opinion & Thoughts
Photography Links
- Hupix - a collection of photos taken by Hugh Symonds with his mobile phone camera
- USDA Historical Photos
- Sara Padgett
29 Jun 22:00 | Link | Category: Photography
Is It Normal?
This link has been flying around the web lately: Is It Normal, a site where you can submit your peculiar situation and see if others think it qualifies as being "normal".
29 Jun 21:57 | Link | Category: Humor
Malls of America
This site, full of vintage photos of old shopping malls from the '60s and '70s, is oddly compelling: Malls of America. (It reminds me of that scene from True Stories where David Byrne walks through the NorthPark Mall.)
29 Jun 21:45 | Link | Category: Misc. Tidbits
A Woeful eXPerience
The hard drive in my dad's computer died. Guess who got called to fix it?
Luckily, I made a Ghost backup a few weeks ago, so he lost relatively little data. (I've now set up an automatic daily differential backup, since his computer hardware seems to be jinxed.) Unfortunately, the restoration process was an enormous headache.
First, the new hard drive proved to be defective within a few days. That annoyance, however, was nothing compared to the next one. My dad's coworker (a very computer literate man who actually introduced me to PCs back in the stone age) wisely - or so he thought - decided to install SP2 for Windows XP. Little did he know that... well, this is a long story, but the simplified version is that years ago, I used PC Relocator to move everything from my dad's old Windows 98 computer to his Windows XP system. It worked fine for my dad's daily use, but there were always little oddities in the system because PC Relocator borked a few things (registry corruption and some other stuff) and despite the best efforts of yours truly and a number of experienced geeks and tech support personnel, there was simply no way to apply service packs without rendering the system unbootable, requiring a complete wipe of the drive and reinstallation of Windows. (No, repairing / reinstalling Windows didn't work, nor did all sorts of schemes with the Recovery Console, etc. etc. etc. Even System Restore didn't work!) I used the same version of PC Relocator on my brother's computer, with the same pleasing results. (Yay me!) Luckily, I discovered this nasty PC Relocator bug immediately after doing backups with Ghost, so it wasn't a problem - I just restored and accepted the fact that service packs were out of the question. In retrospect, I should have taped a big message on the computer - "DO NOT INSTALL SERVICE PACKS!" My dad's coworker didn't know of the bug, applied the service pack without backing up, and BOOM.
The last backup had been about a week earlier, so I had to find a way to get my dad's recent files off the computer, which was screwy because of a strange NTFS permissions glitch similiar to this, caused by trying to repair Windows. After many attempts with boot disks, putting the drive in external enclosures, and such, I did finally figure out how to access the files painlessly (using my G5, of all things). Then because I had already wasted many hours and because I'm a perfectionist, I decided the computer would run SP2 or else. So I wiped the drive and reinstalled everything - exactly what I should have done years ago instead of using PC Relocator. My dad never hangs on to install discs, which multiplied the fun by another factor.
The computer's programs, data, and settings are now fully restored (and running SP2!), but getting there was like pulling fingernails. I've been through many instances of DLL Hell, hours of sifting through & hacking the beloved Windows Registry, and deciphering / solving lots of annoying errors like, oh... the AGP440.SYS freeze and GETIUMS and MSDART.DLL and... I could go on an on. Fun fun fun! I'd start cursing Microsoft Windows now, but I think I've even had enough of that. Imagine!
29 Jun 12:00 | Link | Category: Technology & Computing
June 21, 2005
Should iPods carry health warnings?
These are old links, but still worth mentioning. According to The Register, an Australian head teacher has banned pupils from bringing their iPods to school, "because they encourage social isolation." Included in the article are several amusing iPod health warning labels.
While there's some truth to the argument that personal digital music players encourage isolation and contribute to the desocialization of music, they are only the latest part of a continuing trend that started with the advent of recorded music (read Alex Ross's thoughtful article in The New Yorker), so it's unreasonable to single them out or claim them to be unique in some way. (How truly different is an iPod from a Walkman?)
For more, read Andrew Sullivan's iPod World: The End of Society?, Christine Rosen's The Age of Egocasting, and Douglas Kern's response to both, iPod Therefore iAm.
21 Jun 22:59 | Link | Category: Music, Technology & Computing
Hitler Hitler Everywhere
I never took any debate classes, but I have always assumed that an important lesson to be gleaned from introductory high school debate would be that it's horribly unimaginative and hackneyed to constantly fall back on comparisons to Hitler and Nazis. I think we all do it from time to time, but I always assumed that politicians and pundits would be aware of something that high school debate students should know.
These assumptions were clearly wrong. Not long ago in the Quick Links section, I posted a link to this: In the future, everyone will be Hitler for 15 minutes, about how people far and wide just can't seem to get enough of the Hitler comparisons. Then today, I discovered a brilliant little Daily Show clip about the same thing. You can download it (torrent) from CommonBits. Enjoy.
21 Jun 21:39 | Link | Category: Humor
June 19, 2005
One Free Minute
"What would you say, given one free minute of anonymous, uncensored speech?"
One Free Minute is a mobile sculpture designed to allow for instances of anonymous public speech. When you call the cellphone inside One Free Minute, you get connected for exactly a minute to a 200 watt amplifier and speaker. The speech produced by the speaker can be heard clearly more than 150 feet away from the sculpture.
Read a Wired News article about it.
19 Jun 23:12 | Link | Category: Cool Links
Did humans take a coastal route out of Africa?
An interesting tidbit (for at least some of you, I hope): Researchers in the UK are surmising that humans (and we're talking modern humans, not earlier groups) left Africa only once, via a southern coastal route. (This conclusion was reached primarily through analysis of mitochondrial DNA from the Orang Asli, a 'relict population' from Malaysia.) This is an interesting and controversial claim. At the very least, it doesn't disagree with dates of remains (and the fact that modern human remains are found earlier in Australia than, say, Europe). It should be interesting to see how well this hypothesis stands up to scrutiny.
19 Jun 22:51 | Link | Category: Human/Primate Evolution & Behavior, Science
How to Become an Early Riser
Those of you who know me in real life (and many of you who chatted online with me in the old days) are surely aware that I'm a bit of a night owl. When given the choice, I prefer to stay up late and wake up late. I've been this way for about ten years (since my mid-teens). For the last five years, I've been trying on and off to break my night-owl habits and become a consistently early riser. (I simply think it would be better to be an early riser... for the sake of brevity I won't detail all the reasons why.) My attempts to change myself have consistently ended in failure. I can take some solace in the fact that there may be a genetic determination for being a night owl or early bird. But still... I'm not willing to give up that easily. Recently, I noticed a link Jody Cairns posted to Steel White Table about how to sleep less. Basically, the idea is that you wake up at the same time every day. At night, you go to sleep when you feel tired. Well, that's a slight oversimplification. Read Steve Pavlina's original post and the followup he wrote when it became so popular.
I'm going to try this method out for a while. I'll let you all know how well it does or doesn't work.
19 Jun 21:53 | Link | Category: Misc. Tidbits
Photography Links
19 Jun 21:14 | Link | Category: Photography
Current Playlist
This month's playlist actually manages to be more disjointed than normal. I made some unusual selections... and even aside from that, none of it fits together. I really have no business actually trying to pass it off as a playlist, but I suppose some of you might buy that line about life being random. Anyway, without further ado:
| Artie Shaw - Begin The Beguine
>> Artie Shaw's instrumental version of the jazz standard by Cole Porter is one of my favorites. Sometime I should post some playlists of good stuff from the '20s, '30s, and '40s. Remind me. |
| Bo Diddley - You Can't Judge A Book By Its Cover >> An old Diddley favorite, written by Willie Dixon. Great guitar. |
| The Beatles - I'm So Tired
>> A perfect little ditty from the White album. |
| Gordon Lightfoot - Rich Man's Spiritual
>> This folkie song is on the list because I stumbled across a huge Gordon Lightfoot collection that had been lost for maybe eight or nine years, so his tunes have been in rotation lately. |
| Weezer - Island In The Sun >> Hip Hip. |
| Nelly - Ride Wit Me >> Don't ask. |
| Q-Tip - Vivrant Thing >> Not among Q-Tip's best work by a long stretch (I miss Tribe), but still... it's catchier'n hell. |
| Morcheeba - Lighten Up
>> Daisy Martey isn't Skye Edwards, but that's not necessarily all bad. I included a couple of tracks from Morcheeba's latest CD on last month's playlist. Here's another good one. |
| Spoon - I Summon You >> One of several five-star songs from Spoon's latest. |
| Dealership - Nerdy Girl
>> Perfectly executed little song about an adolescent crush. Soft, Velvet Underground-ish guitars (and Jane's spoken Japanese) alternate with a weird distorted chorus. |
| Doves - Snowden >> This band's albums always take a while to grow on me. After I buy one, I'll listen a few times, decide it's not too bad, and forget it for a while. Then one day months later, I'll listen out of the blue and be floored. |
| Daniel Lanois - San Juan >> The man is a master of soft, subtle textures. This is a very simple song with less-than-perfect vocals, but it's quite stunning. |
| David Byrne - Astronaut >> A floaty, hazy song with excellent Byrne-ian lyrics. Could one ask for more? Yes, actually. You see, part of the reason this song is so utterly cool is that is uses a theremin. Need I say more? |
| Josh Rouse - 1972 >> An enjoyable, mellow retro tune from the album it shares a title with. |
| Bebel Gilberto - Cada Beijo >> A smooth, jazzy, sexy tune that is one of the bright spots on Bebel Gilberto's second album. I always get sucked in by songs in Portuguese. (Insert here: paragraph about how I would someday like to learn Portuguese and live in Brazil for a while.) |
| Lemon Jelly - '75 AKA Stay With You >> Many of Lemon Jelly's songs are repetitive and uninspiring. But on every album, there are a few little masterpieces. This is one. |
| Junior Senior - Move Your Feet >> I'll finish up this playlist with a ridiculously catchy, goofy song that will get stuck in your head (as any decent piece of bubblegum should). This song will probably end up getting my vote for the most obnoxiously wonderful ear candy I hear this summer. If it doesn't make you want to have a huge party and dance around like a five year old, there's something wrong with you. (Check out their video.) |
19 Jun 1:22 | Link | Category: Music
June 15, 2005
Amazon loggers clash with lost tribe
This link has been lingering in my bookmarks list for weeks. I've been trying to think of a suitable comment for it, but I always find myself at a loss. Instead of deleting it (as I do with an increasing number of my bookmarks), I'll just throw it at you and wish we could exchange facial expressions.
(I would put it in "Quick Links" but judging by the RSS feeds visitors subscribe to, I have a nagging suspicion that a lot of you skip those... your loss, since they're often the best links I post.)
15 Jun 0:18 | Link | Category: Current Events, Human/Primate Evolution & Behavior
June 14, 2005
Choosing a Girlfriend
There's a pretty funny submission by Shek Baker at supermasterpiece (home of Oops I Did It Again: The Original) called Choosing a Girlfriend. It categorizes and describes various types of girlfriends. Sadly, I can relate to several of them:
- 'The Fixer-Upper' - "Super cute, and also super neurotic."
- 'The Wild Child' - "No doubt about it, she's a ton of fun , especially at the outset ... Once that week is up, though, she's going to get kind of weird."
- 'The Intellectual' - "Hope you like post-modern theoretical literary discussion. Get used to hearing things like 'Frankly, I don't see how that blowhard Gottlieb gets away with all his facile anti-deconstructionalist theoretical tomfoolery.' ... Good thing she's super hot in glasses and a pony tail."
As for the 'Perfect Girlfriend'? - "No, you don't want this one, trust me ... because she'll break your heart when she finally finds the man she deserves, dumbass."
14 Jun 22:45 | Link | Category: Humor
June 13, 2005
A dynamic figure (part II)
Way back in 2002, I linked to this SETI@Home profile because I thought it was so clever. Turns out it was adapted from the college admission essay that got Hugh Gallagher accepted to NYU. (As you might expect, Gallagher went on to become a writer. His first novel was Teeth.)
13 Jun 16:59 | Link | Category: Humor
Could toxin damage become hereditary?
A slightly disturbing entry from Time's Daily Rx blog:
The study, published in Thursday's issue of Science, involved exposing rats to two common agricultural chemicals - the fungicide vinclozolin and the pesticide methoxychlorthat. Both are chemically related to natural hormones, and have been tentatively implicated in reproductive disorders in both animals and humans. When the rats gave birth, their male offspring tended to have low sperm counts and low fertility. None of that was a surprise. But what did surprise researchers was the fact that when these males did manage to reproduce, their offspring also had low sperm counts. And so did the generation after that - more than 90% of the males in each generation were affected.
If the same effect occurs in humans - a reasonable hypothesis - it could imply that keeping poisons out of the environment becomes even more important than previously realized. Michael K. Skinner, director of the University's Center for Reproductive Biology, suggests that that the new findings on toxin damage being transmitted across generations could even help explain the dramatic rise in breast and prostate cancer in recent decades as partly due to the cumulative effect of various toxins over several generations.
13 Jun 16:55 | Link | Category: Science
Climate Change
Occasionally - very occasionally, I admit - I still run across people who refuse to acknowledge that global warming climate change is really happening. (Apparently they are unconvinced by mounds of data or even scary-as-hell pictures of shrinking glaciers). Lately, I've been sending them to New Scientist's Climate Change page, which contains excellent articles like Climate change: Menace or myth? I like this bit:
We know for sure that human activity is influencing the global environment, even if we don't know by how much. We might still get away with it: the sceptics could be right, and the majority of the world's climate scientists wrong. It would be a lucky break. But how lucky do you feel?
13 Jun 1:16 | Link | Category: Science
Apple Switches to Intel
Last week, Apple announced they will begin using Intel processors next year. I can't say I was particularly shocked by the news. Nor was I upset about it because I think it will end up being a 'good thing'... though for reasons both geeky and emotional, a part of me will miss the PowerPC architecture. (See: John Siracusa mourns the Power PC.) Developers, more than customers, have taken a lot of crap from Apple over the years, and as Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has rightfully (and, um, enthusiastically) stated, developers are key. (In fact, I attribute much of Microsoft's continued dominance to their developer tools and relations.) Hopefully Apple can make the transition easy for everyone... although they probably realize many of us will jump through a few hoops because we're addicted to OS X.
I suspect Apple realized a switch would be necessary because IBM couldn't (or wouldn't) deliver a decent low-heat, power-conscious G5. The current Power Macs are fairly zippy, but it seems the G5 will never make its way into notebooks - and Apple's portable line is already quite poky and sluggish compared to many Centrino systems. Hopefully, Apple's notebooks will be among the first systems to utilize Intel chips. John Stokes' hypothetical Apple-Intel roadmap addresses this (along with the 64-bit question), so hopefully it's on the mark.
Those of you familiar with Macs might chuckle at this: New startup chime for Macintel computers revealed!
The speculators among you might enjoy Robert X. Cringley's latest silly conspiracy theory column.
13 Jun 0:33 | Link | Category: Technology & Computing
Photography Links
13 Jun 0:14 | Link | Category: Photography
June 12, 2005
Better Read Than Dead
Conservative magazine Human Events has compiled a list of the "most harmful books of the 19th and 20th centuries" Along with predictable picks like The Communist Manifesto are "harmful" books like Kinsey's Reports and Dewey's Democracy and Education. Dangerous books like Silent Spring, Unsafe at Any Speed, and The Origin of Species only garnered honorable mentions, as did John Stuart Mill's On Liberty (I'd love to see the reasoning for that one).
I must say, Democracy and Education and On Liberty had me laughing pretty loudly. That's why I'm placing this in the 'humor' category rather than another.
12 Jun 23:27 | Link | Category: Humor
May The Force Please Go Away
I saw the final Star Wars movie last week. It was definitely the best of the prequels... not that that says much. (Sorry, I'm not going to bother with a review.) Sadly, I think most people have been as entertained with the Vader YTMNDs as with the movies, especially the coaster and Vader vs. Luke.
Read Mark Morford's column May The Force Please Go Away. Here's the #5 reason you should be glad Star Wars is finally over (if you really believe that, suckers):
Darth Vader choking a giant red M&M candy. Darth Vader staring down that creepy Burger King mascot thing. Darth Vader hawking cell phones and Energizer batteries and floor cleaner and breakfast cereal and who the hell knows what else. Good riddance, odious sea of SW product tie-ins. Like the goddamn franchise needs more cash? Like seeing Darth Vader hawking tampons and aspirin and Darth Vader-branded bunion pads is in any way necessary? Please.
12 Jun 23:01 | Link | Category: Art & Entertainment
June 1, 2005
The end of 'my'
Ending a long tradition, Microsoft plans to stop using the word "my" as the default prefix for such folders as "My Documents," "My Music," and "My Pictures". Thank God. I've been confused and annoyed by the prefix since I loaded Windows 95 onto my PC nearly ten years ago.
If the other annoying software products and web sites that use the 'my' prefix would ditch it, we might start to make some real progress. Then maybe we could tackle annoying suffixes (think 'Windows XP' or 'Photoshop CS') and maybe even that ubiquitous 'e-' prefix. And oh what I'd give for Apple to stop using that damned 'i-', but I think Hell will freeze over first.
01 Jun 16:44 | Link | Category: Technology & Computing
Indie Rock Cribs
Joe Pernice decided there should be an MTV Cribs program for indie musicians / actors.
Would that the pimped-out Hummers and drive-in sized plasma screens could lock me to my own TV the way they once could, long ago, in say, March of this year ... Where do you go when glimpses inside Usher's great room no longer titillate? ... I'll tell you where you go. You go straight into the musty crawl space of that dude from Spoon. You put in some hang time in Cat Power's mud room, is what you do. You give a Bill Curtis-worthy examination to the carport where the Tyde parks their rental van.
He even filmed a short pilot featuring his own crib.
01 Jun 16:26 | Link | Category: Humor, Music
Even Better Than The Real Thing
Classic: The Improv Everywhere crew stages a U2 rooftop concert in Manhattan. One of the best hoaxes I've seen in a long time. (Download a highlights video here, 21 MB MPEG-4.)