My morning
When I saw what they had to do to clear the bathroom sink, I felt less bad about my inability. I had taken the drain apart and, using a bent coat hanger, had fished out what was clearly years of backed up hair and filth the likes of which I hope to never see again. But this was merely the tip of the revolting iceberg, as the two handymen had to cut the drain pipe in half with a hacksaw and extract even more disgustingness. The hair was clearly not ours. It was very, very long. Like haunt my nightmares long. So that threw off my whole morning.
Rapunzel must have grown old in my apartment.
posted on: July 15, 2008
The Bugle
The last week I have been catching up on The Bugle, a rather enjoyable weekly “audio newspaper for a visual world”. You might recognize the voice of John Oliver from The Daily Show but who really cares about that. It’s hilarious. I’ve excerpted a short bit from Episode 34 that I was compelled to replay a few times my first listen. Also gives me a chance to try out the embedded Flash player I just wired up. Have no fear, those of you on the iPhone without Flash can still hear the clip.
Also, another geeky technical point, I stumbled upon a useful way of making clips from iTunes files. Right click and Get Info on the track, select Options, and set the Start Time and Stop Time. Then right click on the track and select Convert Selection to MP3. Done.
Listen to the file.
Update: Had to add one more excerpt as some people didn’t quite think the first one was funny enough. What’s not funny about a nuclear submarine and some bleeped swearing? Did they bleep shipmates, or did the XO say shitmates? Funny either way really.
Listen to the file.
posted on: July 15, 2008
Beats and Pieces Volume 1
Beats and Pieces Volume 1- Intercooler – All Coming Back to Me
- Steve Earle- Satellite Radio
- Jose Gonzalez – Down the Line
- Robert Plant and Alison Krauss – Gone Gone Gone
- The Cave Singers – Seeds Of Night
I tried last.fm a few weeks ago and quickly concluded that sharing my music listening habits with the public was a bad idea, despite openly sharing things like photographs. I have an irrational and vociferous response to people when they say to me: “You listen to that??”.
I’d still like to experiment with sharing music that I like, but God help the first person who questions my taste. I’ll hold off on the electronic music to start with in the hope of achieving wider interest. This batch of tracks were all things I liked from the KCRW Top Tune podcast.
These links all point at the Amazon MP3 page for the track, in an attempt to help encourage the uptake of DRM-free music. Amazon only samples 30 seconds, but I’m sure you can find the full tracks if you want to. Otherwise, you can give me $0.99 worth of trust. When people link to things via affiliate programs that always makes me a bit queasy, so none of these links make me money. Comments such as, “I heard that 6 months ago” or “That’s too mainstream/obscure” are really not useful and will be filed in my shoe after I extract it from your face.
Is 5 tracks too many or too few, or just right?
n.b. Yes, I stole the title from Ninja Tune.
posted on: July 13, 2008
Powerhouse
Remember that song they always played during construction in Warner Brothers cartoons? This be it:
Also, a nice animation featuring the track on YouTube.
I’ve only explored a bit of his discography but it he clearly seems to be a predecessor to the jazz influenced electronic music of today.
posted on: July 07, 2008
Little white dot
I think this might be the most amazing space photo I have ever seen. Not only did we put a probe onto another planet, we had a satellite in orbit to take a photograph as it parachuted in for a landing.
posted on: May 26, 2008
Democracies accept certain risks that tyrannies do not
from radaronline
“We are at the edge of a cliff and we’re about to fall off,” says constitutional lawyer and former Reagan administration official Bruce Fein. “To a national emergency planner, everybody looks like a danger to stability. There’s no doubt that Congress would have the authority to denounce all this-for example, to refuse to appropriate money for the preparation of a list of U.S. citizens to be detained in the event of martial law. But Congress is the invertebrate branch. They say, ‘We have to be cautious.’ The same old crap you associate with cowards. None of this will change under a Democratic administration, unless you have exceptional statesmanship and the courage to stand up and say, ‘You know, democracies accept certain risks that tyrannies do not.’”
posted on: May 21, 2008
Death, taxes and
Some highlights from searching for “Death, taxes and” :
Sport:- Major League Waivers
- Fifth Place
- Leaky Waders
- Comparing Golf Courses
- Mrs. Clinton
- McCain
- the fact George Bush is an asshole
- Sarbanes-Oxley
- Failing Chips
- Convergence of Peer-to-Peer and Grid Computing
- Relational Databases
- MMORPGs
- Death Taxes
- tax avoidance
- the IRS
- Wesley Snipes
- Chuck E. Cheese
- Leaf Blowing
- the evil which lies in back of them both
- left side throat burps
- Dandelions
posted on: May 14, 2008
I am not a puppet
Saw this photo on the cover of the NYTimes walking down the street today. Immediately the Imperial March started playing in my head.
Dun dun dun, dun dun…
posted on: May 08, 2008
So we know that you’re paying attention.
Two weeks ago was my last week at Three Rings, my home away from home for the last two years. I wrote some software, played a few games, received careful mentorship, and made some close friends. Basically everything you could want working for a company. I’ve decided however it is time for me to try my hand at the wheel. We’ll see how that goes.
For a hint as to what I am doing, here is Landon’s post on our first open source library, PLDatabase.
posted on: May 07, 2008
Jpkg and Antidote
I’ve finally gotten my act together and released Jpkg, the project I have been working on for the last few months at work. It is a Java library and Ant task for creating operating system packages, currently only Debian packages. The Ant task and library are heavily unit tested and provide as strict an implementation of the Debian specification as possible. Not all features of the .deb format are supported, but enough are implemented for the packages to be useful outside of the context of the Debian distribution itself. In the future, I’d like to add a command line interface to the library as an alternative to the Ant task.
Jpkg is actively being used to package production Java software and ship it via APT to FreeBSD servers. A build server compiles the code, copies the code into a destroot, invokes Jpkg to package the code, and then rsync mirrors the generated APT repositories throughout the infrastructure. By leveraging an existing packaging system we were able to easily support isolated distributions, dependencies, versioning, and rollbacks, none of which the previous Ruby/rsync deplyment mechanism provided. Nick Barkas did all the heavy lifting of porting dpkg/APT to FreeBSD.
In the process of writing Jpkg, I ended up writing a library called Antidote, which is included with Jpkg. This library contains useful features inspired by implementing a number of Ant tasks over the last two years, mainly to deal with mutable state and Ant reference handling. I also wanted a way to collect data validation violations and then present all of those issues to the user at once, much like a compiler, along with clear suggestions and/or reasons why the user supplied data was invalid. I’d be curious to hear from anyone who uses this library if they feel it has improved the process of writing Ant tasks at all.
I’d like to thank Landon Fuller and Robin Barooah for all the advice during development, and Three Rings Design for supporting me in open sourcing the results. Drop me a line if you find Jpkg useful.
posted on: April 20, 2008
Is this a Men’s Warehouse advertisement?
“We’re getting every barricade known to man and hauling it in from everywhere,” Mayor Gavin Newsom said. “And that is very significant because of what happened in London and Paris.”
Originally quoted in the nytimes, but the quotation has been removed from the article.
Seriously, is he a mayor, or a clothing model?
posted on: April 09, 2008
Lego arms dealer
I was looking at this pretty impressive Lego recreations of famous photographs, when I noticed one of the Lego characters holding a gun. There were “muskets” for the pirate set, but I don’t remember ever seeing modern weapons. That’s because there is a company called BrickArms that sells an entire arsenal of Lego compatible weaponry. That’s right, a Lego arms dealer. This is equal parts unbridled awesome and childhood destroying what the fuckness.
FREE Weapon in EVERY order!
posted on: March 31, 2008
The only subject of drama
MametFor, in the abstract, we may envision an Olympian perfection of perfect beings in Washington doing the business of their employers, the people, but any of us who has ever been at a zoning meeting with our property at stake is aware of the urge to cut through all the pernicious bullshit and go straight to firearms.
posted on: March 12, 2008
Still Alive
What is the #5 most popular track currently selling at Amazon MP3? Why Still Alive of course. Do not listen to this song if you have not finished Portal. All of you have played and finished Portal, so it won’t be a problem.
posted on: December 29, 2007
SoundWaves
- Jean-Pierre Gauthier – “Chants de travail”. Annoyingly they don’t have video of this. All of the horns etc. were powered by these crazy electronic “bellows” and the whole apparatus was motion activated. As the first person in the room I had the joy of triggering the beast.
- Celeste Boursier-Mougenot [damn French names] – “Untitled, 2001”. This was really amazing. Watch the video. Three kiddie pools full of china and glasses. The effect was really impressive. Her other piece was great too.
Also, I have to agree with the various folks who ripped on Apple for the first iPhone commercial. It is uncannily similar to Christian Marclay’s “Telephones”, which predates it by at least 10 years.
One day these damn artists are going to realize that random people taking photographs and writing about their work is a good thing so I don’t have to rely on crappy Flash interfaces to discuss their work.
posted on: December 22, 2007