July 2003 Archives

Someone online pointed to this article on Gilgi over on Yahoo! News. It sounds like it is pretty much sucks.

Critics Call Affleck, J Lo. Movie 'Gigli' a Turkey

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Call it one of the biggest turkeys of all time.

The romance between Ben Affleck ( news ) and Jennifer Lopez ( news ) has captivated the American public, but their first movie together is already being called a low point of cinema history.

If early reviews are anything to go by, the pairing of the real-life love birds in the movie "Gigli" looks set to bomb when it opens at the U.S. box office Friday.

Among its biggest problems is a love scene in which Lopez spreads her legs and tells a smoldering Affleck, "It's turkey time. Gobble, gobble." [Yahoo! News]

I remember playing Glider when I was a CCon (computer room consultant) back at Carnegie Mellon. It was usually on one of the macs if the lab had them. The game concept was very simple and kind of silly. You control a paper airplane as it glides through a house. You can move it back and forth some with the controls, but a lot of the game is using things in the environment to help keep you aloft while avoiding hazards. The company that published the game went bankrupt and the rights to the game reverted to the author, John Calhoun. He's now gone and made Glider available for free on his web site. It runs on OS X and Mac OS 9. It's always nice to see people keeping older games alive.

Saki: "A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation." [Quotes of the Day]

A bukkake artist needs YOUR help. The Reverse Cowgirl writes about this bukkake-based art project:

Skye Ashbrook is a graffiti artist interested in bringing the word "bukkake" to the streets of his fair city--Austin, Texas--one stencil at a time. To do so, though, Skye needs your help. He wants to know the Japanese character spelling of bukkake, so he can, well, bukkake Austin with it. 

Here's how Skye explains his bukkake-based art project:

"In Austin, there is a decent amount of stencil work going on--lots of regular girls & porn-star girl-type imagery, some political figures, some random crap. I have a stencil I want to add on top of other stencils, adding to them, transforming an average porn-star, politician, or movie star stencil into a well-labeled bukkake scene. There is a Marilyn Monroe stencil that just needs a little bit extra--I guess that's what started it all. It's been there for months, un-touched, no additions, nothing. People seem to think it's sacred? Not sure, but I think it's unfinished. I was also thinking that with the upcoming political season and impending elections, the bukkake stencil could nicely modify the huge mugshots of the candidates that will be popping up everywhere." [the reverse cowgirl's blog]

Btw, for everyone's information, the internal spellchecker that comes with OS X doesn't know Bukkake by default.

Harry Potter fun, thanks to the folks at bash.org. Here's a sample:

<JonJonB> Purely in the interests of science, I have replaced the word "wand" with "wang" in the first Harry Potter Book
<JonJonB> Let's see the results...

<JonJonB> "Why aren't you supposed to do magic?" asked Harry.
<JonJonB> "Oh, well -- I was at Hogwarts meself but I -- er -- got expelled, ter tell yeh the truth. In me third year. They snapped me wang in half an' everything

<JonJonB> A magic wang... this was what Harry had been really looking forward to.

<JonJonB> "Yes, yes. I thought I'd be seeing you soon. Harry Potter." It wasn't a question. "You have your mother's eyes. It seems only yesterday she was in here herself, buying her first wang. Ten and a quarter inches long, swishy, made of willow. Nice wang for charm work."
<JonJonB> "Your father, on the other hand, favored a mahogany wang. Eleven inches. " [bash.org]

From Gizmodo. Pics of the new Playstation Portable

I want. Thankfully it isn't out yet.

Okay, I just spent the better part of the last half hour coughing my lungs out. When I went to call my friend Pete at the club I could barely squeak out the words "I. won't. be. there." And now I'm even more cranky. But the Tussionex is finally taking affect and I'm feeling a bit high now, so things will be okay. I hope my voice comes back soon.

Buh.

Woman gives birth on subway train

BOSTON A woman gave birth to a boy Wednesday morning on a subway train in Boston, transit police said.

Passengers said the mother quietly declined their assistance while she was in labor on the full rush-hour train, said Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority Lt. Gary Fredericks. He met the train at the JFK stop on the Red Line after train commuters used cell phones to call for help.

"She didn't tell anybody, didn't say a word," about the birth, Fredericks said. "Next thing they knew the baby was on the floor." [Boston.com]

I've had a headache all day and even taking two aleve didn't put a dent in it. Blah. I'll try grabbing some on my way out to Vertigo tonight and see if that helps. Btw. Everyone should go tonight. Even if I'm not spinning this week. Have some nice cool drinks to offset the warm weather.

Fred Thompson<: "After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood." [Quotes of the Day]

It seems that the Studio behind the latest Tomb Raider movie is blaming the recent lackluster Tomb Raider games for the movie not doing well.

Studio Cites Game for Weak 'Tomb Raider' Sequel

Mon July 28, 2003 06:07 PM ET
By Ben Berkowitz

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The romance between Hollywood and the video game industry is suddenly a lot chillier after the studio behind "Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life" on Monday cited problems with a related game for the sequel's weaker-than-expected debut.

The movie and video game industries have grown closer in recent years as films increasingly are tied in to games and games, in turn, are licensed as movies.

But the comments by Paramount Pictures underscore the tensions between the two sides when sales disappoint.

"The Cradle of Life," the second film based on games heroine Lara Croft, opened in fourth place at the U.S. box office last weekend with sales of $21.7 million, well below the opening weekend of 2001's "Tomb Raider."

.The film, released by Viacom Inc.'s Paramount Pictures unit, faced heavy competition, but was still weaker than most in the industry had expected. [Reuters]

So it wasn't that most of the reviews said it was pretty lame. Nope, the movie couldn't possibly suck.

I was having a hard enough time sleeping as it is and you had to go and post this:

fun...
Sore Eyes (via Off On A Tangent):  "Plastic Balls is a thoroughly addictive Flash game. I don't have the hand-eye coordination or reflexes to be really good at it, but I can easily see myself wasting the remainder of the evening trying." [jenett.radio]

It's like circular breakout, with a bit of arkanoid added in. It's frustratingly fun.

Alan Kay: "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." [Quotes of the Day]

(Crossposted to the anime blog).

I'm not sure when this happened, but it must have been somewhat recently (correction: it looks like it happened back in February, I really am behind the times). Anime News Network now has an RSS feed. Now we just need Anime on DVD to put one up (I'll help if they want).

After hearing someone rave about Knights of the Old Republic, I just had to give it a try. A few days later I'm still hooked. This is one of the best Star Wars based games I've ever played. The game takes place long long before the movies and you play a character who gets caught up in a pretty epic adventure. So far I've been to three planets, have become a jedi, wield two lightsabers at once, and can kick ass quite well. Lucasarts got the whole feel of Star Wars down perfectly.

Actually, the game was developed by Bioware, the folks who have written lots of great RPGs for the PC. So it is no big surprise they did a kickass job with this. You really can play the game any way you like, either as a good guy or being more of an evil jedi. Right now I'm being a good guy,b ut I want to start a second game where I'm a mean and nasty jedi.

Halley writes about her experiences with spending a whole day (mostly) silent.

Someone pointed me at this page for a great new programming language called Whitespace.

What is Whitespace?

Most modern programming languages do not consider white space characters (spaces, tabs and newlines) syntax, ignoring them, as if they weren't there. We consider this to be a gross injustice to these perfectly friendly members of the character set. Should they be ignored, just because they are invisible? Whitespace is a language that seeks to redress the balance. Any non whitespace characters are ignored; only spaces, tabs and newlines are considered syntax.

I love it! Someone obviously had way too much time on their hands or was taking some really interesting drugs when they thought up this.

The New York Times has a nice article about one of my favorite places to shop: Trader Joe's.

Trader Joe's, now 45 years old, has an unusual approach: it sells upscale specialty food and wine at lower-than-average prices, and roughly 80 percent of what it stocks is sold under private labels, like Trader Joe's, Trader Jacques' and Trader Ming's. By contrast, at a typical supermarket, private labels account for about 16 percent of the stock. And Trader Joe's products have sassy names, like Rosencrunch & Guildenpop caramel popcorn. [NYTimes]

I always feel like I just don't get there often enough. I do love their selection though. I always find cool things to munch on, and many of their frozen foods are great. I guess I'll make a trip there tomorrow.

I just stumbled upon a copy of a remastered version of Tears for Fears - The Hurting. Rock. I've been looking to replace this forever. It is definitely one of my all time favorites. Listening to it now, it still rocks. Mmmm.

The other night I decided I wanted to start tracking the books I read, along with some thoughts on them. So, there's now the books section of this site. It won't be updated too often, but I plan on having my current reading queue in there, which will hopefully help me keep on top of reading more. And of course, all the book links go to Amazon. The first one up there is just some short comments on Harry Potter since I finished that the other day. Enjoy!

Jennifer of scriptygoddess.com writes about her (hellish) experiences with BuyMusic.com. Here's the first two (of many) problems she experienced:

First problem. After you buy an album, you need to download it. Sure, I knew that. What I didn't know is that you have to download EACH SONG INDIVIDUALLY. One click per song. With Two large sized albums with many songs on it - it can be just a LITTLE annoying.

Ok. We're compromising, right? I'll suck it up and deal.

After all the songs downloaded, I tried to play them. Second problem. Before each song plays - it has to download and verify your license. You can't mulitple select a bunch and do this. You need to do this before EACH SONG will play. [Edited to add: "Verifing your license" means another window pops up that asks for your buymusic login and password... you enter it... it thinks awhile... it thinks some more... Then it comes back and says click "play" to actually play the song...]

Ok. Getting a little annoyed here, but still willing to suck it up and deal. [scriptygoddess]

The whole experience sounds positively dreadful. Especially when I compare it to my iTunes experience, where the biggest issue was the first day or so when the system was so overloaded by everyone going there. Fortunately, I can't even look over BuyMusic.com's site because if you aren't running IE on Windows it throws you at a nice ol 'Fuck You' screen. You can't even browse the site at all. Nice and user friendly.

And to end things off, here's some other BuyMusic.com tidbits from stereoboy.org.

When I grow up, I wanna be a Jedi.

Janet Long: "Part of being sane, is being a little bit crazy." [Quotes of the Day]

Oh I am a happy anime geek. Miyazaki's Nausicaa is coming out on DVD. Okay, so it is Region 2. That's not a big deal, my DVD player can handle it. The big decision is which version to get. I have to admit that the ultra mega special release is very tempting.

So I got my parent's DSL set up today. I think my mom is going to be forever hooked on the Quicktime Movie Trailers site. They each now have their own email address, which will be handy those times when I want to mail my mom and find out what to get my dad for his birthday. The only thing that sucked was my experience at the Apple Store today. I stopped by the one in Hartford on my way to my parent's place to see if they had any Airport cards in stock. Unfortunately they didn't, but the sales person said to give a call later because they were due to get some today or tomorrow. 4pm rolls around and I give a call to the store and ask if they got any in and if they could hold one for me. They say "no problem". I duck out and drive over there to find that no, they still don't have any in stock, they don't have any idea who i talked to, and are sorry they can't help me. I was pretty annoyed because I had wanted to get that set up too. Oh well, next time. I'm just glad to get them all set up.

I'm off to Hartford, CT for the day. My parents are getting DSL and they want me to set it up for them. I'm actually kind of psyched since I've been pestering them to go high speed for ages. It's one of the things that drives me nuts when I'm down there visiting. It's. just. so. damn. slow. to be on dialup.

And I'm planning on picking up an Airport card for their Powermac G4 and making it into a base station so that I can be wireless when I'm down there too. This means I can sit out on the porch and be a geek. Woohoo.

(Now if the weather would just get a bit nicer).

Walt Disney: "It's kind of fun to do the impossible." [Quotes of the Day]

Halley talks about taking a day away from online:

I had this conversation with Joi Ito about S-L-O-W-I-N-G D-O-W-N. I threw out a challenge -- spend 24 hours not talking, not emailing, not IM'ing, not IRC'ing, not communicating in anyway. Just a silent sunday -- this coming sunday actually -- for 24 hours.

You do get to use one hand-held device. A rock. Just keep it in the palm of your hand. Get the urge to IM someone -- just tell the rock. Get the need to email someone else -- just think the message through your rock. Get the temptation to talk -- no talking -- just look at your rock.

So far the toughest thing is explaining to people that you will will be incommunicato -- really not available, really out of reach, really out of pocket -- at least in the traditional ways of communicating.

[Keep your eyes peeled for a picture of my rock -- I'll post it soon.] [Halley's Comment]

I really like the sound of this and have been thinking about doing something like that sometime soon. Disconnecting myself for a day. I think it would be a nice break. Mad William Flint also commented on this post with some interesting stuff. I'll have to think of this. I wonder if I have to talk to a rock. I want to talk to my stuffed cat.

Colubra over on LiveJournal posted this priceless quote. Every time I read it I just go buh. So I decided to relay it here for all you non-LJ folks (people on LJ can ignore this if they've read it).

It's a proven fact that a single anal sex experience causes one to be homosexual. The hormones released by a sexual situation involving the anus being broached, are the same hormones found in large quantities in effeminate homosexual males. For example, when I was much younger I knew a young man who was for all intents and purposes, heterosexual. He was mugged, and involved in a rape situation involving a tent peg. This one event was enough to have him start on a road that eventually led to him becoming effeminate and gay. --Anne McCaffrey, author

So I haven't been sleeping well the last few nights and around noon today it all caught up with me. Nothing like sleeping for four hours in the afternoon. But now I'm all rested up for that whole Wednesday night thing. Sorry it's a bit late, but here's the info.

Changmian and Dubcoast present

*~The Analog Lounge~*

The relaxed side of things. Join us every Wednesday for a mix of music styles in the lounge at Vertigo, with lots of mellow mixed in.
This week we proudly present our special guest: Ali Ajami. Ali is resident DJ at both Squareone Thursdays at Axis and Friday nights at Avalon, on Friday nights playing a fresh blend of progressive house, self-described as "Dirty House". Ali's introduction to the Boston Scene came when he started at Chrome in December of 1999. Now he's quickly becoming one of Boston's favorite locals playing alongside such respected national acts as John Digweed, Sasha, Danny Howells, Chris Fortier, and Steve Porter. Come on down, it should be a great time.

Special Guest:
July 25th - Ali Ajami [Chug Records, Avalon, SquareOne/Axis], Boston

The Analog Lounge with resident dj's
Gregory Blake (Changmian) Boston
Special Pete (dubcoast music) CA
Peter Ellis (ttb) Boston
Pete Yagmin (Changmian) Boston

Wednesdays
@ Vertigo (upstairs)
126 State St. Boston, MA
617-723-7277
10pm - 2am
21+ with ID
$5 cover (gets you into both the Lounge and Anitya)
Free before 11
No dress code
www.changmian.com
www.dubcoast.com
www.vertigoboston.com
www.mapquest.com (directions)

Upcoming Guests:
July 30th - Dave Wagz, Boston

To view our calendar online (with support for you iCal and Mozilla calendar folk):
http://ical.mac.com/gblake99/The32Analog32Lounge

This week at Anitya: TALAMASCA (3D Vision/Spiral Trax) France

Are you a DJ in the Boston area? Are you interested in playing out some Wednesday night? If so, drop me a line at lounge@ezoons.com.

Bertrand Russell: "The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible." [Quotes of the Day]

Wow, sometime around 4;30am I was woken up by some of the loudest thunder I've ever heard. The initial clap woke me up and then it just kept rumbling for a good 10 to 15 seconds. And then nothing else except for a few distant sounding rumblings. I really hope this rain kills off some of the humidity.

A site that offers disposable email addresses that point to your primary email address. You can choose how long it is good for, after which it disappears. Pretty funky. [via jenett.radio [via thebooge.ca]]

TOKYO - An American in Tokyo recently entered a restroom in an office building and pressed a button, expecting to hear a recording of rushing water, designed to mask the sounds of nature's call.

Instead, a loud siren blared and women rushed to her aid.

The visitor had confused two of the many high-tech features of the Japanese lavatory. [Mercury News]

And to make things even better. One Japanese company is looking to bring the Japanese restroom experience to america. Again from the Mercury news:

The company, which logged more than $117 million in 2002 sales in the United States, says now may be prime time to introduce Americans to a cleaner, more intense toilet experience. It's banking on raised sanitation awareness in the aftermath of health scares like SARS -- and the popularity of anything ``anti-bacterial'' to win over consumers to the combination bidet/toilets that are common in Japan.

More intense? Do I need my toilet experience to be more intense? I'm not sure I want to know.

Okay, I gave it a chance. I've tried to run Safari as my primary browser for a while and while it actually works well, I've been having a few show stopper type issues with it. The biggest is hanging. It happens all the time. It starts to load a page and I get the spinning rainbow disk and I have to force quit it. or it just stops making network connections and I need to quit and restart. The frustrating thing is that others don't seem to have any of these problems. I haven't done anything strange that I am aware of. What a pain in the ass.

Rene Descartes: "If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things." [Quotes of the Day]

I don't care what your reason is. I still haven't heard a good one for changing your name to something like GoVeg.com.

As PETA’s youth projects specialist, GoVeg.com —“GoVeg” to friends, family, and coworkers—spends her days talking to high school and college audiences around the country. Her former moniker would occasionally stir others to blandly comment, “You spell ‘Karin’ with an ‘i’ instead of an ‘e’? Interesting.” Now when GoVeg.com introduces herself to others, their eyes grow wide, their heads cock to the side, and they soon find themselves deep in conversation about why they should, well, go veg. [GoVeg.com]

Joe Jennet is having a lot of the same types of issues with two posts today concerning it and I have to say I agree with his thoughts completely. I think the biggest issue for me was really the lack of responsiveness by Userland. Both lack of response to issues with Radio and lack of response to what was going on with the blogging world.

I think for some people, Radio is just fine. I think if you are someone who just wants to put up a blog and post things to it regularly and you don't care too much about how the whole thing looks, it is fine. It's also fine if you have a lot of time to figure out how it does everything, because the documentation just plain sucks (maybe it has gotten better now, but it wasn't that great when I was using it). I found the whole system of how templates work in Radio to be very cumbersome and hard to work with. Especially compared to Blogger and Movable Type.

My other big issue with Radio is that the program itself is really only half of the system. It's a blogging client with lots of very cool functionality that most users will never use half of. I always wished that Userland would have released some kind of plugin type package for Apache. They released the community stuff for Radio, but that would have required me buying another license for it and installing it on my G3 and making that my web server, which is not what I wanted to do. In the end, I don't know that I'd say Radio sucks, but I know that I don't think it is living up to its potential.

On the other hand, Movable Type was quite easy to set up and the technical support I've received from them is wonderful (I did donate $50 to get support and two update codes). There are definite things I think they can do to improve their initial setup (I do still need to send that feedback to them after all I've written here about it), but overall my experience has been much better than with Radio.

Oliver Wendell Holmes: "Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions." [Quotes of the Day]

Just a week ago or so I got email from my old boss Spud (yes, we all called him Spud). He'd wondered what was up with me and searched for 'snooze' and found me. You have to love how good the internet is for finding old contacts. So when I got home from running some errands today I looked up someone I used to work with back at Connecticut Bank & Trust and surprisingly enough found out he's still in the area. So I fired him off an email, hopefully I'll hear something back.

There's still a few people I'd love to be able to find again. Anyone know my old coffee buddy Linda Quintiliani?

So last night there was a birthday gathering over at my friend Ethan's place. He hadn't thrown a party there in ages and so I had been looking forward to it all week. Unfortunately, yesterday and last night it was insanely humid and Ethan's place was hot, even with two air conditioners running. After just a short while there I felt my heart racing, which isn't good. I lasted about an hour and had to leave. It was pretty annoying and I was quite grumpy. Even once I was home it took a good hour or two for me to get back to normal. Blah.

On the plus side I got up early this morning, had a nice breakfast over at Rosebud and it's beautiful out. Humidity is down to 44%, which is great. Life feels much nicer this morning.

John Andrew Holmes: "Speech is conveniently located midway between thought and action, where it often substitutes for both." [Quotes of the Day]

Me and 100% humidity don't do well together.

How about Hipster Bingo? And there's also a site that randomly generates Hipster Bingo cards. Bonus points if you can can get a square from yourself. I should bring these out some Wednesday night, but we aren't really a hipster kinda night. We're more an old alcohol ex-raver kinda night. [via BoingBoing]

Tenessee Williams: "A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with." [Quotes of the Day]

I really don't have much to say about this video for Satisfaction by Benny Benassi. Except that women who use power tools are hot. The song isn't bad either, it's got that kind of minimal Warm Leatherette feel to it.

I set up a feed for my anime blog over on LiveJournal. If you're using LJ you can subscribe to 'nonameanimeblog' and it should set you all up. Please remember that comments left over there do not get mirrored back over here, so click through to the article and give it a read (which you will want to do anyways since only excerpts of posts are sent over there). Enjoy! (oh yeah, when you first sub you'll probably get a bunch of messages, don't worry, the blog isn't THAT busy).

CNN is always coming up with silly headlines, but this one is one of their best (the article is pretty humorous too):

Little robots in your pants

Making sense of revolutionary nanotechnology claim

(POPULAR SCIENCE ) -- Dockers recently came out with a new brand of pants, the Go Khakis, which promise to keep your legs stain-free using revolutionary nanotechnology.

We couldn't help thinking that Dockers might be using the word "nanotechnology" more for marketing muscle than for true scientific purposes, so we called its customer service line to ask a few pointed questions. Here's a slice of the conversation. [CNN - Technology]

I can't help it. I love seeing people toy with customer support people. There's a point where scripts just don't help much and I think they really need to be able to handle those times.

Wendy's talking about her own personal privacy policy for her blog. I don't really know how I'd explain. In general I'll write about most things that go on in my life, but I do have definite limits. I treat my blog like how I'd talk in general conversation, and as such there are a number of things I wouldn't talk about due to them being too personal or private. But even then a lot of it depends on mood. And, as far as mentioning people, that too depends on the context. Since I'm usually not posting anything that might be incriminating it isn't an issue. And if I ever have any doubts I won't mention them or ask them if it is okay.

Kasia asks "So what was your beginning in computers?" I can actually remember it well. Back in fourth grade I went to this place called Talcott Mountain Science Center (Holy heck, it still exists!) It was at the top of this mountain and they had a few different programs. I think the first I did was a week long one in astronomy. We learned all about astronomy stuff, and as a bonus the week I was there was when the first space shuttle landing test happened. Remember the one where it was strapped to the back of a 747 and they let it go and land? I remember the big concern being that it might hit the tail of the plane as it was released. But all went well. It was a cool time. The second program I went there for was on Saturdays and you could choose the area you wanted to learn about. Computers were a big draw, but I ended up doing a few things beforehand. I did an electronics class where I made an intercom set, and then I did a class in chronobiology which was very cool. And then I found the computer department and I was hooked. They had a PDP 11 there hooked up to paper terminals (what were those things called? Decwriters or something like that?), two Apple IIs, a TRS-80, and the Sinclair ZX81 (I think that was the model, I remember every time you pressed a button it would blank the screen and redraw it :)).

That was my first real experience with computers. I learned a bit of Basic to start. We'd make silly little multiple choice quiz programs. It was a blast. I loved going there. After that I didn't have much exposure till I went away to high school at NMH. There they had a PDP 11 running rsts/e and I learned a bunch more about computers, even being a computer room monitor for my workjob. And my roommate had one of the first Macs. It was pretty damn cool. I kinda miss things from back then. It was a cool time to be a geeky kid.

Last night I went out to dinner with a handful of bloggers, primarily people who have been going to the Thursday night blog thing that Dave Winer does. Since he's out of town we decided to just head out to dinner at John Harvard's. It was a good time and I got to meet a number of new people, but it was quite loud so doing much talking was difficult. Though on the way there I walked past Pho Pasteur and realized that would probably be a pretty good place to go too (and less loud I think). Much thanks to Wendy for organizing this. Afterwards I wandered upstairs to buy two used CDs, then slipped off home to catch the first episode of Onegai Twins before sleep (but more about that over on the anime blog in a bit).

Yay! Some kind soul helped Halley get her RSS feed back. I'd emailed a week ago whining about how I couldn't read her blog via RSS anymore. And now that I've gotten back into the habit of checking it regularly, she's available via RSS. Yay!

Mickey Mouse: "Arithmetic is being able to count up to twenty without taking off your shoes." [Quotes of the Day]

Is it a hoax? Snopes seems to think it probably is.. I hope so. Also from that page is a link to information about notorious prankster Joey Skaggs that is pretty amazing.

On this day last year, I found out what my Cowboy Bebop theme song is.

Abraham Lincoln: "Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves." [Quotes of the Day]

I'm posting this here, hoping someone else might have run into some of these issues. Lately I've found that Safari has been flaking out on me bigtime. After running for a few hours it starts to do one of a few things. Either it stops opening up new pages (it just hangs at 'connecting to site'), or it puts up a spinning wheel and just sits there, forever as far as I can tell. This just started in the last week or so, so I'm not sure what's up. I'm wondering if maybe clearing out the cache might help, but I was wondering if anyone else has had problems like this.

Being unemployed sucks, but here's someone making the best of it

"The first month, I was totally lost," Higby said. "I was either moping around the house or chasing leads for jobs that were ridiculously out of my reach. But now I have experience under my belt."

Through a months-long process of trial and error, Higby has learned the tricks of the unemployment trade.

"Leaving the house every single day is very important, even if it's just to spend a few hours at the coffee shop organizing the MP3 files on your laptop," Higby said. "I try to be out the door by 2 or 3 in the afternoon—no exceptions. You have to get out and do something during the day in order to not feel guilty about going out drinking that night."

Higby warned strongly against going to bed too early. [The Onion]

I love The Onion. It's almost sad how much this article sounds like some parts of my life (not everything since I don't go out drinking really). But it's a fun read anyways. Anyone wanna hire an out of work computer geek with 10 years of sysadmin experience?

As usual, come on down!

Changmian and Dubcoast present

*~The Analog Lounge~*

The relaxed side of things. Join us every Wednesday for a mix of music styles in the lounge at Vertigo, with lots of mellow mixed in.
This week we proudly present our special guest: Matt Diamond. Come on out and have a drink tonight.

Special Guest:
Matt Dimond - Boston

The Analog Lounge with resident dj's
Gregory Blake (Changmian) Boston
Special Pete (dubcoast music) CA
Peter Ellis (ttb) Boston
Pete Yagmin (Changmian) Boston

Wednesdays
@ Vertigo (upstairs)
126 State St. Boston, MA
617-723-7277
10pm - 2am
21+ with ID
$5 cover (gets you into both the Lounge and Anitya)
No dress code
www.changmian.com
www.dubcoast.com
www.vertigoboston.com
www.mapquest.com (directions)

Upcoming Guests:
July 25th - Ali Ajami [Chug Records, Avalon, SquareOne/Axis], Boston
July 30th - Dave Wagz, Boston

To view our calendar online (with support for you iCal and Mozilla calendar folk):
http://ical.mac.com/gblake99/The32Analog32Lounge

This week at Anitya: Alpha Channel *LIVE SET* (D-Space Studios/Soular Records) CT

Are you a DJ in the Boston area? Are you interested in playing out some Wednesday night? If so, drop me a line at lounge@ezoons.com.

I love my TiVo. It's a great device and it just plain works. But in a lot of ways it feels like the tip of the iceberg to me. And I've been waiting to see what is next. Today, my friend Ellen pointed me at a product that I think shows one of the next steps. It's the Telly: The Entertainment Computer. It does all the stuff of a TiVo, plus you can play DVDs and CDs on it. You can play music off the network (so if you store your music on a central server like I do you can play that music through it). It's got a web server built in. Oh yes, and it runs linux. But unlike the TiVo they seem to have no problem with you going in and playing around with the unix side of things. According to the FAQ you can even configure the on-screen menus to run programs.

A month or so ago someone released this portable radio that would record programs for you so you could listen to them at a later point in time. I thought it was neat, but until I could pause a live radio program I was listening to I wasn't ready to call it TiVo for radio. Now, the cool people over at Griffin Technology have announced the RadioSHARK. Due out end of summer, it is a USB controlled radio with time shift recording.

The radio airwaves will never be safe again. The RadioSHARK adds a software controlled AM-FM radio to any Mac computer - but thats just the beginning.

The RadioSHARK can also record any AM, FM or even Internet radio broadcast. You can program the RadioSHARK to record a scheduled show or as a way of ‘pausing’ live radio, giving you the ability to return to right where you left off moments or even hours later. It can also record audio Internet streams, either scheduled or real-time, from any streaming audio application available. [Griffin Technology]

Oh wow. I want this. I could see having it hooked up to my G3 and controlling it remotely to play over my stereo. Also, being able to easily record all the NPR shows I like that are on over the weekend would rock. This item goes on my wish list right now.

Holy Heck. I'm now the second match for Gregory on Google. I wonder what happened. I was on like page three just a month or so ago. Of course it is still pointing at my old address, but whatever. I can't help it. I'm just a big geek. I want to be able to tell people: "to find my site, just go to Google and search for Gregory". I'll have to work on taking the top spot now.

Edit: My friend Lukas, is also the second match for his first name. Cool.

PerversionTracker has a review of some apparently useless software called Cretin Tracker 1.0.

Keep those unspeakable cretins accounted for with Scotland Software's Cretin Tracker, which offers handy features for maintaining a detailed list of the transgressions of your family, friends and coworkers. A laudable purpose, but can it cut the dijonnaise?

Offering an profusely cretinous interface with incredibly non-obvious cretin-adding, this software will never liquify a mouse in 30 seconds. Despite its surplus of flaws, it remains the #1 cretin tracking application on Mac OS X. [PerversionTracker]

Damn, I don't know that I have any cretins in my life to track. Though maybe I could make a modified version of this called Crouton Tracker and rate the croutons in my salad.

Wolfgang Pauli: "This isn't right. This isn't even wrong." [Quotes of the Day]

I keep finding great stuff over at Defective Yeti. Here's one someone pointed me at over there. The Spam Subjectline Haiku Generator. My favorite so far:

Become a member
8 girls, one guy, see what's next!
Photo gifts for dad.

VERY cool project out of MIT Media Lab. It's called the Audiopad. I'm not even totally sure how to describe it. It's a surface with some kind of display built in that lets you play sounds, but it's a bit more complex than that. From the web page:

It is a composition and performance instrument for electronic music which tracks the positions of objects on a tabletop surface and converts their motion into music. One can pull sounds from a giant set of samples, juxtapose archived recordings against warm synthetic melodies, cut between drum loops to create new beats, and apply digital processing all at the same time on the same table. Audiopad not only allows for spontaneous reinterpretation of musical compositions, but also creates a visual and tactile dialogue between itself, the performer, and the audience. [Audiopad]

The page has a six minute video (available in Quicktime or Windows Media) that shows it in action. It is seriously cool. I'd love to get a chance to play with it sometime. I wonder if these guys could come out and open up some Wednesday night.

Phew. I'm not sure if I'm behind on sleep or what, but today I was just sleepy all day. So around 2ish I just let myself take a long nap. I feel pretty good now too. I've been finding that my body seems to finally want to get back onto a solid sleeping schedule too. So I've been going to sleep at more and more of a normal hour lately. This all feels like a good thing.

Buy a New Beetle, get an iPod. I'm actually curious about the connectivity kit and how it plays the music. If it uses something like the cassette that plugs into the tape player, or if they did something different.

Ronnie Shakes: "I like life. It's something to do." [Quotes of the Day]

Jonathan Winters: "Nothing is impossible. Some things are just less likely than others." [Quotes of the Day]

Well, we finally have had some really nice weather. Not too hot for a day or two. And the nights have been beautiful sleeping weather. Yesterday had a nice early brunch over at the Neighborhood Restaurant. After being stuffed with food there I made my way over to Harvard Square to meet up with my friend Lyn and her friend. We went to Pho Pasteur for lunch, which was quite good, I hadn't been there before. Then we made it over to Tokyo Kid, which was fun. I like how they've remodeled recently. Then onto Newbury Comics and Million Year Picnic (where I got to pick up the second issue of Alien 9).

Last night was a pretty quiet night in, and today I've been lounging around reading, watching anime, and playing Castlevania on my GBA. Tonight I'm hoping to get to sleep kinda early so I can exercise in the morning and not have to worry about going in the afternoon.

Hmm. Sara Lee seems to be suing Spike Lee.

I wasn't really planning on seeing The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Mostly because I wasn't sure they could do the comic justice. The New York Times has an excellent article by Douglas Wold titled The Comic Book 'League' Was Better that talks about some of what was wrong in the film adaptation of it.

You would think it would be easy to turn a comic book into a movie, which is what the director Stephen Norrington and the screenwriter James Dale Robinson have tried to do with "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen." All you have to do, after all, is to translate it from one visual medium into another; the comic book already looks like a storyboard. Of course, it's nowhere near that simple, and the filmmakers behind "League" have failed to recognize what makes a good comic book tick in the first place.

Alan Moore, author of the mock Victorian adventure tale on which the movie is based, is the most acclaimed writer currently working in mainstream comics, and much of his work seems, on the face of it, as if it could be made into spectacular cinema. He writes ingenious, psychologically resonant stories, full of breathtaking images and set pieces, and his famously detailed scripts "direct" his artist-collaborators in everything from the "camera angle" of each panel to the minutiae of the characters' facial expressions.

But that's actually a problem when it comes to filming his work. "Watchmen," written by Mr. Moore and drawn by Dave Gibbons, continues to be one of the best-selling graphic novels more than 15 years after its publication, but it has been notoriously resistant to attempts to adapt it into a workable screenplay: its narrative about aging superheroes and nuclear panic is so deeply rooted in the comics form that it could no more be filmed than, say, "Citizen Kane" could be adapted into a novel. "From Hell," Mr. Moore and Eddie Campbell's terrifying dissection of Jack the Ripper's world and world view, was turned into a successful movie by the Hughes brothers a few years ago, but only by discarding most of its plot and structural framework, and recasting it as a straightforward thriller. [New York Times]

This just reinforces my belief that there are some texts that just don't cross well between mediums. Some books just can't really be made into a movie that preserves all its elements. And some movies can't really be adapted in a way that really does the visual impact of the movie justice. So often I wish that someone would adapt a book as a series on HBO or Showtime. So that they could take the time to tell the story more fully.

This also made me think of an article I read ages back by Terry Rossio on adapting The Puppet Masters into a movie. It's a great look into how Hollywood thinks.

Jimmy Stewart: "I've wrestled with reality for 35 years, Doctor, and I'm happy to state I finally won out over it." [Quotes of the Day]

Last night I finished unlocking everything in Wario Ware, inc. At least I think I unlocked everything. The game is truly insane. If you have a Game Boy Advance you should drop everything and go buy it right now. It will eat your brain.

I updated MTThreadMail this morning. The old version didn't really have any support for anonymous comments. So someone could check the box to be notified of comments and not give an email. It now checks that an email address is provided and returns an error if it isn't. Enjoy.

Nick Mamatas announced that his new book, 3000MPH In Every Direction At Once is now available on Amazon (It's sales rank as of this moment is 783). So you should get a copy. You know you want to.

So, in my last post I was writing about using mod_rewrite to send people to another image. My initial thought was to just send any image request that wasn't from my site to an alternate image. The first problem I had was the image I redirected to was caught by my rule also (which created a nice loop). Then I realized something else. If I did it this way, people reading my site via RSS wouldn't be able to see images. And also, people reading this via LiveJournal would have the same issue. So in the end I'm going to just add sites that leech images from me as they do it.

Today was web geeking day for me. I had a few things on my todo list that I've wanted to take care of forever. The first was to start rebuilding rules for blocking bad web spiders (as I posted about earlier). Mark Pilgrim posted a great article on blocking spambots and spotbots a few months ago that is a great starting point. So first I started building up my rules. I'm mostly watching my logs to look for things that don't look like they are behaving well and adding rules based on that along with using the article as a guide for things to look for. So far so good.

The next thing I wanted to do was block people from hotlinking to images on my machine. More and more people have been grabbing images this way and it's getting on my nerves. I could care less if they copied them down to their own server and used them. I just don't want them using me as a hosting service. After looking around for a bit I found this article on using mod_rewrite to block hot linked images. For now people who do this will get a very nice image. After I get bored with that it'll just give them a 404 or something like that. Maybe I'll redirect them to where they came from just to confuse things even more.

And finally, I set up a redirect rule to point from some of my old archives to the current ones. It isn't perfect and doesn't catch everything, but does catch some things. It also tells search engines that the page has moved, so my old pages should vanish eventually. One thing I'm curious about now though is the 301 status for pages. 301 means that the page has moved to a new location and provides that location. Search engines should respect it when crawling (and many do I believe). One thing I think would be cool is if browsers would notice that a bookmark has changed that way. So you follow a bookmark to a page and it gives a 301, it should prompt you to change the bookmark or something. I also think RSS aggregators should do something like this too. It would be nice not to have to worry about keeping old redirect rules around forever.

I found this over on MachineGirl's LiveJournal. It's the Lemon Jelly Ducks Video. I did some more looking around and found the web page for the video also. Very cool. Requires Quicktime, but worth it.

This morning I was glancing at my log files and noticed something quite odd:

193.29.77.* - - [11/Jul/2003:10:16:40 -0400] "GET /cgi-bin/MT/mt-tb.cgi?__mode=view&entry_id=3218 HTTP/1.0" 200 939 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)"
193.29.77.* - - [11/Jul/2003:10:16:51 -0400] "GET /2003/07/09/because_everything_is_better_with_bukkake.html HTTP/1.0" 200 6390 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; SunOS sun4u; en-US; rv:1.0rc3) Gecko/20020524"
193.29.77.* - - [11/Jul/2003:10:16:56 -0400] "GET /cgi-bin/MT/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=3217 HTTP/1.0" 200 6006 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (SunOS 5.8)"
193.29.77.* - - [11/Jul/2003:10:16:59 -0400] "GET /cgi-bin/MT/mt-tb.cgi?__mode=view&entry_id=3217 HTTP/1.0" 200 961 "-" "Mozilla/4.61 [en] (OS/2; U)"
193.29.77.* - - [11/Jul/2003:10:17:06 -0400] "GET /2003/07/09/qotd_07092003.html HTTP/1.0" 200 5166 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (OS/2; U; Warp 4.5; en-US; rv:0.9.8) Gecko/20020204"
193.29.77.* - - [11/Jul/2003:10:17:09 -0400] "GET /cgi-bin/MT/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=3216 HTTP/1.0" 200 4912 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (Windows XP 5.1)"
193.29.77.* - - [11/Jul/2003:10:17:12 -0400] "GET /cgi-bin/MT/mt-tb.cgi?__mode=view&entry_id=3216 HTTP/1.0" 200 877 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows XP; U) Opera 6.01 [en]\""

Notice anything interesting? Take a look at the referrer string User-agent. The ip is the same, but the referrer changes with every query. What an ass. Thanks to the power of mod_rewrite that person will no longer be crawling my site (Though it's looking like I may just have to block his whole network).

Edit: I had to change the IP# because for some reason mod_rewrite of remote addr was catching the IP# in the log snipped above and screwing with the whole page. Hmm. Sounds like a bug?

Another Edit: Oh yeah, and the other thing they were doing was ignoring my robots.txt

Lewis Carroll: "It's a poor sort of memory that only works backward." [Quotes of the Day]

Nights where I can have the windows open and not be sweating all night. Last night was amazing sleeping weather. Let's hope we can go a few days without having to run the a/c, it's just too expensive.

Ernie the Attorney has just purchased a new Powerbook and been writing about his experiences with it. It mirrors my own a lot. While I'll be the first to admit that OS X isn't perfect there are just so many things it does right. I do feel like I need to at least try out WIndows XP though, just to have an accurate comparison.

Andy Warhol: "In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes." [Quotes of the Day]

There's this strange bird somewhere in my neighborhood that won't shut up at night. And it seems to imitate other birdcalls. So I'll hard loud chirp chirp, then something that sounds like a seagull, etc. And it is on this endless loop. I not normally one to go about killing or hurting animals, but if I could find this bird I'd tape its mouth shut.

From my dinner:

Negotiations move along smoothly, the outcome is favorable.

Huh? What negotiations. I feel like I've intercepted some sekrit message.

I want to go see Pirates of the Carribean, maybe tomorrow or Friday afternoon. And for those modern day pirates, I bring you the Ergonomic Keyboard for Pirates [via defective yeti].

News story of the day:

Hulk doll's monster willy

SHOCKED six-year-old Leah Lowland checked out a mystery bulge on her Incredible Hulk doll — and uncovered a giant green WILLY .

Curious Leah noticed a lump after winning the monster, catchphrase “You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry,” at a seaside fair.

And when she peeled off the green comic-book character’s ripped purple shorts, she found the two-inch manhood beneath them. [The Sun Online] [via Dispatches from Revland]

The Reverse Cowgirl talks about how Bukkake Makes Everything Better in the Blogosphere. Well, actually she talks about how she keeps from getting too bored with blogging and her thoughts on rules of blogging.

Because blogging is not a fucking conversation. It's a fucking  primal scream . May others unwrite the rules of blogging as quickly as the rigid bloggers post them. I'm going to be blogging for a while more about the creative process as it happens. Gee, if Jarvis doesn't link to it, does that mean  Idon't exist? Here, at least, it and I will now. [The Reverse Cowgirl]

Personally, I think blogging is whatever the author feels like it is. My blog is for myself. I do think it's cool that people come by every day to read my babbling, but it's really just a way for me to share some of what is running around in my head. My blog is that strange guy wandering down the street muttering to himself just loud enough for you to hear bits of.

Bertolt Brecht: "Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are." [Quotes of the Day]

Phew, is it Wednesday already? Tonight's gonna be pretty kickass, so I hope to see some of you out there. I'll be opening up things at 10, then we've got Scott McLeod, and of course the one and only Mr. Peter Ellis closing things out. It should be pretty cool. Oh yeah, and now it is free before 11. How's that for a bargin?

Changmian and Dubcoast present

*~The Analog Lounge~*

The relaxed side of things. Join us every Wednesday for a mix of music styles in the lounge at Vertigo, with lots of mellow mixed in.
This week we bring you one of the Deklab guys, Scott McLeod. He'll be playing some really funked-up house/tec-house. So come on out and help us welcome Scott to his first night at the Lounge.

Special Guest:
Scott McLeod [Deklab] Boston

The Analog Lounge with resident dj's
Gregory Blake (Changmian) Boston
Special Pete (dubcoast music) CA
Peter Ellis (ttb) Boston
Pete Yagmin (Changmian) Boston

Wednesdays
@ Vertigo (upstairs)
126 State St. Boston, MA
617-723-7277
10pm - 2am
21+ with ID
$5 cover (gets you into both the Lounge and Anitya)
No dress code
www.changmian.com
www.dubcoast.com
www.vertigoboston.com
www.mapquest.com (directions)

Upcoming Guests:
July 16th - Matt Dimond, Boston July 25th - Ali Ajami [Chug Records, Avalon, SquareOne/Axis], Boston July 30th - Dave Wagz, Boston To view our calendar online (with support for you iCal and Mozilla calendar folk):
http://ical.mac.com/gblake99/The32Analog32Lounge

This week at Anitya: Alpha Channel *LIVE SET* (D-Space Studios/Soular Records) CT

Are you a DJ in the Boston area? Are you interested in playing out some Wednesday night? If so, drop me a line at lounge@ezoons.com.

My parents were up today to help out around home and afterwards we went out to eat at Blue Ginger. It was extremely good. For an appetizer I had Grilled Quail Satay with Green Papaya Salad and Peanut Lime Sauce, and for my entree I had Grilled Beef Tenderloin with Citrus-Meat Jus, Beef Cheek-Potato Hash and Dijon-Mango Puree. It was all amazing. Definitely one of the better places I've been to in the area. If you live in the Boston area I highly recommend it. I want to go back and try more stuff there.

Britney spears has announced that she's not a virgin.

Britney acknowledges she's not a virgin
Singer thought Justin 'was the one'

NEW YORK (AP) -- After years of saying she'd wait until she was married to lose her virginity, Britney Spears is acknowledging that she had sex with her ex-boyfriend, Justin Timberlake.

"I've only slept with one person my whole life," the pop star tells W magazine for its August issue.

"It was two years into my relationship with Justin, and I thought he was the one," she pauses, then adds, "But I was wrong! I didn't think he was gonna go on Barbara Walters and sell me out." [CNN]

Yes folks, this is major entertainment news. I'm surprised CNN didn't put it as the lead story in the entertainment section.

Do the current crop of aggregators recognize http redirects? I guess you'd use a 303 status code to say where the new location for the RSS file is. Anyone know? Anyone have any good suggestions on pointing people to the new location of my RSS feed, there are still some stragglers.

Most of the time I find needing to use supplimental oxygen a pain in the ass. I have to lug around this tank, which isn't really that heavy, but it's just always there. It just gets in the way. Every once in a while though, I get to use the oxygen to my advantage. Normally I'm pretty stubborn and hate to admit to needing any help. But I admit it, sometimes I also use it to help get what I want. This morning was one of those times. I'd been up way too late last night working on blog crap and ended up sleeping late. Unfortunately, with the air conditioner on I missed those wonderful words shouting out "Street Cleaning. There is no parking on the odd side of the street..." at 7am this morning. I instead woke to hearing a "BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP" sound from outside from a tow truck. It was street cleaning day and I was pretty sure I was parked on the wrong side of the street. I glanced out the window and sure enough the front end of my car was being lifted up by the tow truck. 20 seconds (and much cursing) later I was dressed and out the door with my tank on, gasping for breath (though I was really out of breath), and asking if he could let my car down so I could move it. The guy looked up at me and I could see him glance at the tank, he paused a moment, said "yeah, go ahead", and let my car down. I'd like to think he'd have let me have my car anyways, but I'm sure seeing me panting for breath with plastic tubing shoved up my nose didn't hurt. Phew. Then I drove around for 30 minutes looking for a spot to park my car (and calling my parents to tell them not to show up till after 2 so they'd have someplace to park).

Have I mentioned lately how much I hate street cleaning day?

Earlier today (yesterday?) I posted about how comments work in Movable Type and how I wanted to let comment authors receive notification of replies to their comments. Feeling somewhat inspired by a suggestion from someone I started looking around at my options. In the end I decided to take a look at the MTThreadedComments plugin and see if I could figure things out from that. In the end it was pretty easy. I was able to cobble together version 0.1 in just a few hours. So, for people who are interested, you can now check out MTThreadMail. You can see the use of it in my comments currently. I'm willing to take comments and suggestions too, as this is my first time trying this. Also, this only works if you are running MTThreadedComments as the patch is based on that.

So I got my webcam set up. It's still pretty primitive at the moment, but you can see it here. Big thanks to Evological for their help with getting EvoCam working right with AppleScript. If anyone out there runs OS X and needs a webcam I definitely recommend it. I'll try and keep it running when I think of it. If I'm not there you'll see Cthulhu instead.

John W. Gardner: "We are continually faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems." [Quotes of the Day]

I think it is time for me to start learning more about the internals of Movable Type. Now that I have Threaded Comments, there's something else I want. The ability for a comment author to be notified when someone responds to their comment (if they gave their correct email address). This is one thing that I think would help create more of a community feeling on a blog. It's something that LiveJournal has that I've always thought was really cool.

Of course, now the big question is, how difficult is it. I do have some example code to look at, since the Threaded Comments plugin adds new stuff into the database. Anyone have any suggestions? (Or better yet, pointers to someone who has already done this? I looked around, but couldn't really find anything). Also, it seems that someone else is looking for something like this too (though I don't know that I need the first part they want).

Thanks to Colubra for posting a link to the Instant Slash Generator (it'll start asking you questions when you click on the link). I've now completely disturbed myself since I had Shaman King on the brain thanks to someone else's LJ.

Yesterday, Emilily and I went to go see Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle. As far as sequels go I enjoyed it a lot. It was much more over the top than the first movie, with many of the action sequences being just silly (some of the shots in the motocross scene come to mind). But the movie didn't try and take itself too seriously at all, and for me that's what made it work. I'll be picking it up on DVD when it comes out.

Emo Phillips: "At my lemonade stand I used to give the first glass away free and charge five dollars for the second glass. The refill contained the antidote." [Quotes of the Day]

There's a great post over on Radio Free Blogistan about his experiences moving blogs between different blogging systems. I wanted to make note of it since he mentions similar issues with Movable Type to what I posted yesterday.

The big problem is converting the backed up entries to the MT format without breaking permalinks. Also, Radio stores each day as YYYY/MM/DD.html whereas MT by default puts each entry on its own archive page, with my preferred URL being YYYY/MM/DD/entry_title.html. In order not to break old links to the site, I'll probably end up keeping a duplicate set of all past entries. That may be confusing to some, but it should minimize breakage. [Radio Free Blogistan]

Once you start moving things between different blogging systems you run into a whole bunch of other issues. Since many of the systems seem to use numbers by default to indicate blog post. One thing that might be useful is for them to start having a seperate field in their internal database for permalink. This way when you import posts you can do so and not worry about any other issues.

Singer Barry White dies at 58

LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- Velvet-voiced R&B crooner Barry White, whose lush baritone and throbbing musical compositions oozed sex appeal on songs like "Can't Get Enough of Your Love, Babe," died Friday. He was 58.

White, who had kidney failure from years of high blood pressure, had been undergoing dialysis and had been hospitalized since a September stroke. He died about 9:30 a.m. at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, said his manager, Ned Shankman.

His canyon-deep, butter-smooth vocals emphasized his songs' sexually charged verbal foreplay, like on 1975's "Love Serenade," which began with White purring: "I want you the way you came into the world, I don't want to feel no clothes ..." [CNN]

For the 'OOPS' file:

Flickering bulb that was piece of art is mistakenly repaired

A repair man has fixed a flickering light bulb on a Glasgow street sign not knowing it was a valuable piece of art.

The 'faulty' lightbulb was in a neon 'Empire' sign on Brunswick Lane and was the central part of a £200,000 work by Turner-prize winning artist, Douglas Gordon. [Ananova]

So I'm mostly recovered from moving my site to my friend's hosting company. Overall it was fairly painless. My biggest gripe is with Movable Type's default handling of permalinks. With a default Movable Type installation your permalinks are only permalinks if you never ever delete a post or only have one blog on it. I really think they should have something in the documentation or even a standard setting that makes links more permanent. While it wasn't necessarily moving my blog that caused my problem, I was planning on moving it anyways and it would have come up then anyways. I actually think they need to change their default archive structure too. When you have around 3000 posts in the same directory it gets to be a pain to work with if anything goes wrong. The issue is that a lot of people who set up Movable Type are still fairly new to blogging and aren't even aware of issues like this until it is too late. It would be great if there was a kind of checklist of things for new MT users to think about when setting up their blog. Just so that they are aware of possible issues.

On the plus side, since all my links were going to break anyways I was able to move my whole site into just http://www.ezoons.com/. Every cloud has a silver lining I guess.

Yesterday was the First International Love Hotel Moblogging Conference. And of course, there's a blog too. Eeks! [via Boing Boing]

Marty Indik: "Confusion is always the most honest response." [Quotes of the Day]

Over at Surfin' Safari, Dave asks for some feedback on Safari's web page display. He actually asks for a top 10. I actually am not sure I can even come up with that many. I do have one gripe to do with how javascript is handled though. There are numerous blogs I go to that have comments and use javascript to indicate how many comments there are. If I make a comment and then revisit the page it seems to keep the whole thing cached and won't update the count until I force a reload. This is the only browser I've run into that treats Javascript this way (at least that I've noticed).

Oh, and I thought of a second one. I use Movable Type for my blog and there are some administrative tasks that run for a longer period of time and send text to the browser showing what it is doing (importing posts for instance). In something like Camino you'll see each line as it is sent to the browser. In Safari two things happen. First, you don't see any of that text, you just get the little spinning dial in the tab. Second, it times out with an error after around 60 seconds (though the script does seem to keep running on the server). This was driving me crazy when I was migrating my blog recently.

So today I took the webcam plunge again and picked up an iSight. I used to have an old QuickCam VC, the old one where you had to plug it into your keyboard and parallel port. It was a pain in the ass and never really worked that well. I got some video conferencing stuff to work at one point, but it was flakey as all heck. I think I might even still have it stashed in some box in my closet. I have to admit, the iSight is quite sexy, Apple did a really nice job designing it. I have it clipped to the screen of my laptop right now. Setup was easy. Had it wired up within minutes of opening the box. I'm actually waiting for someone to be available so I can try doing video chat.

Now for the part where I babble about how cool OS X is. One reason I wanted the iSight was to play with having a webcam. I looked into webcam software for OS X, but it was all lacking one feature I wanted. The ability to publish to a remote machine via scp (secure copy). Looking at the different software I noticed a few of the packages had AppleScript support. For those of you who aren't familiar with AppleScript, it is an English-like language used to write script files which can automate the actions of the computer and the applications which run on it. With OS X, Apple expanded the capabilities of AppleScript to allow it to run shell commands. That's the feature I was hoping to use.

In the end I chose EvoCam because it looked fairly easy to use and it would let me run an applescript script after it did an image capture. After a few false starts, I came up with a one line script:

do shell script "/usr/bin/scp /Users/gblake/webcam/webcam.jpg gblake@remotehost.com:~/public_html/webcam/"

That's all it took. I'm psyched that it was that easy to do. Add this to the list of reasons I really dig OS X. I'm going to have to play around with it some more.

It seems that some bands don't want to sell individual songs at Apple's Music Store.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Rock bands The Red Hot Chili Peppers and Metallica are refusing to make their music available as individual downloads on Apple Computer Inc's (AAPL.O) iTunes online music store, a representative for the bands, said on Wednesday.

That move comes in response to Apple's decision to allow users to buy single tracks and is intended to protect the future of the long-playing album, the format that has dominated the music industry for decades, an agent for the bands said. [Reuters] [via MacNN]

What's most surprising is that Apple won't sell on albums with no tracks being available on it. I think some for some bands it makes sense for them to do this. Though I think it might make sense for them to just release one song of the album, just to give people a taste. It's pretty interesting seeing how all this is playing out. I know how much Apple wants to sell things by the song, but if they don't bend on this they're doing their customers a disservice. I'm sure there are lots of folks who would be glad to buy a whole album by some of these bands. Though it might be an interesting compromise to sell some individual tracks on older albums, and maybe only sell new albums by the album.

A bunch of my friends had already gotten the PodiumPad, and all of them raved about it. So yesterday while at the Apple Store I decided to pick one up. I love it already. So often I kick back on the couch and want to have my TiBook in my lap. The only problem is this sucker can get hot. So in the winter it's fine, but once it gets warm out at all it sucks. It's also nice having the machine at a slight angle. I definitely give this product a thumbs up.

The Blobs attack!

Chilean scientists work to ID mysterious sea creature

(CNN) -- Is it a fabled giant octopus, a monster squid, or perhaps a piece of a rotting whale?

A huge, gelatinous sea creature found in the Southern Pacific Coast of Chile continued to baffle scientists Wednesday while they waited for a DNA analysis. Elsa Cabrera, director of the Center for Cetacean Conservation in Santiago, whose team found, photographed and preserved the find, received inquiries from around the world.

The more they looked at the creature, the more they became convinced it was a giant octopus known as Octopus Giganteus. A specimen of that octopus was believed to have washed up on the Florida Coast in 1896, but samples of the animal's skin were lost and its species was never confirmed, said Dr. James Mead, a zoologist at the Smithsonian Institution where pictures of the specimen are stored. [CNN] [via Adam]

John J. Plomp: "You know that children are growing up when they start asking questions that have answers." [Quotes of the Day]

Okay, who paged me with just 'PEACE BOO' earlier? I didn't recognize the number.

I knew I was spacing on something today. I didn't post anything about the Analog Lounge tonight. Oh well, you all know the deal. Come by tonight, drink, be merry. I'll be there early on but won't be there late. Tonight we've got Eli Wilkie [Agent 001, SquareOne/Axis]. Mr. Ellis says you should all come out to hear him play. I'll be less lame next week.

Before you do any web browsing, be sure to check this list of links NOT to click on. There's some scary ones there. [via The Universal Church Of Cosmic Uncertainty]

I've decided that I can no longer predict which anime shows will be licensed anymore. The show that I least expected to ever get brought over here has been licensed. Toriyamaworld.com reports that the latest E-Journal from the American Go Association has broken the news. Viz has licensed both manga and anime of Hikaru no Go. I'm pretty psyched about this because I think the show is actually pretty damn good (as much I used to make fun of it before I watched/read it). Of course this means I'm going to have to wait FOREVER to find out what happens next.

Since I'd been ramping up to move my blog for a few days I hadn't really been keeping up on all the news going on in the Blog world. One of the big things currently (well, for a while actually) is RSS. One of the latest things being Mark Pilgrim's altering his RSS 2.0 feed to remove namespace elements and saying "Leave RSS Alone!" The thread of comments over there is pretty interesting. One thing I found particularly interesting was how various RSS aggregators handle various parts of RSS, specificly the GUID. It appears that most don't use it for a permalink for the post, instead using the LINK value. So what's the right solution? My opinion as someone not really that involved with the whole discussion is the software should change. While it is a pain in the neck on some level, I think the authors of the various aggregators should work to support RSS as the format is written.

The other big question is excerpts vs full posts in Mark's feed. While I liked having the full post, I can cope with just part of it. It's better than things like MacSlash.org, which just has titles. And in the case of Mark's blog, going to read the full article also means you've got all the comments right there (and many times there's a good bit to read in the comments).

Here's my other issue with all the stuff going on like this. For the most part I'm just someone who wants to be able to publish a feed of his blog. While I find things like RSS interesting I don't really have the background to know what is good or bad about it from a technical standpoint. I know it works well enough for me and is simple enough for me to gasp the basics of. I find a lot of this stuff kind of confusing (and I wonder if others in the same position as I do too). Does RSS work well enough? Should it do everything? What is gained by creating something completely new? Who invented liquid soap and why? I have no idea, but I figure I'll just wait and see at this point.

The other day I posted a quote from Robert McCloskey. So, when emilily paged me a few min ago to say that he had passed away I thought it was kinda funky that I'd just posted something by him. When reading the article on his death I was struck by the number of things he'd written that I didn't really remember were by him. Of course I blame much of that on being a young kid at the time I read much of his stuff. I think Make Way for Ducklings was probably the first thing I read by him. My parents had this old copy that I think belonged to one of them growing up. It certainly wasn't new when I got a hold of it. The book of his that I remember the most though was Homer Price. I read tons as a kid, but there were a few books that I'll always remeber and that was one of them. I also remember reading the second book Centerburg Tales, though that one didn't seem to leave as much of an impact. I can't wait till my nephew starts reading and is old enough for me to get him some of these books. Hopefully he'll enjoy them as much as I did.

Here's another link giving a bit more history of him and the books he wrote.

Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About has been around for a while, though I hadn't checked it out in ages. There's a lot more there than when I first looked, and parts of it are still insanely funny. There's much to learn here.

It's time for the 26 Things International Photographic Scavenger Hunt. There's a list of 26 things to take pictures of this month. On August 1st you post your project. Pretty keen. I just printed out the list of things to find and think I'm going to be doing this. It sounds pretty neat. [via The Scobleizer Weblog]

The weather report for today says

Today:  Abundant sunshine. High 84F. Winds WNW at 5 to 10 mph. [weather.com]

Sounds like a perfect day to find a nice patch of shade under a tree to sit in and read. I think I'll try and do that this afternoon. I haven't really gotten that far in HP yet.

As usual...

Rabbit Rabbit!

I meant to post about this yesterday, but with moving my blog didn't get around to it. Katharine Hepburn is one of my favorite actresses, and it saddened me out to read of her death. I think I may have to do a bit of a mini movie marathon. I've got Bringing up Baby on VHS, The Philadelphia Story on DVD, and Holiday on the TiVo. There are so many others I'd love to watch again too.