Return of the Knee Plays

The Blogcritics new release roundup for yesterday reports that David Byrne’s Knee Plays recording has finally been released on CD (though not, surprisingly, on MP3 or iTunes). I found an LP copy of the album a few years back and fell in love with the music. With eight extra tracks, and with the Dixieland brass meets spacey spoken word vibe of the original now in pristine digital sound, this is going to be a pretty good release to check out.

My favorite track on the release is probably “In the Future,” the original album closer:

In the future everyone will have the same haircut and the same clothes.
In the future everyone will be very fat from the starchy diet.
In the future everyone will be very thin from not having enough to eat.
In the future it will be next to impossible to tell girls from boys, even in bed.
In the future men will be ‘super masculine’ and women will be ‘ultra-feminine’.
In the future half of us will be ‘mentally ill’.
In the future there will be no religion or spirtualism of any sort.
In the future the ‘psychic arts’ will be put to practical use.
In the future we will not think that ‘nature’ is beautiful.
In the future the weather will always be the same.
In the future no one will fight with anyone else.
In the future there will be an atomic war.
In the future water will be expensive.
In the future all material items will be free.
In the future everyone’s house will be like a little fortress.
In the future everyone’s house will be a total entertainment center.

And that’s just the beginning. It’s fun to listen to the track and check off the items that have come true, 22 years later: starchy diet, starvation, mental illness, water crisis, home security, entertainment center… of course, Byrne cleverly hedges his bets by including diametrically opposed predictions throughout, so it’s easy to point to all the things he got right, and ignore the ones that were misses.

Synchronicity II: HDI ITIM and Blogworld collide in Vegas

As always, I’m out in Las Vegas representing iET Solutions at the IT Infrastructure Management (HDI ITIM) conference. But this year, the timing is fortuitous, since not only ITIM but the Blog World Expo are in Vegas at exactly the same time. Looks like the last day of ITIM is the first day of the Blogworld conference, featuring back to back panels moderated by Blogcritics founder and publisher Eric Olsen.

Not only that, but Tony Pierce will be on the afternoon panel. Now that’s a cool conference.

I’ll be working the show floor at ITIM during the day, but maybe I can catch up with any Blogcritics or other bloggers who are in town for Blogworld. If you’re interested, drop me a line.

Like a well-oiled machine

I have been flying regularly—at least once or twice a month—since I took this job in early 2005. I have my security regimen down to reflex: on the way out of my car, my keys are already clipped inside my briefcase, my wallet is in my hand and I am tucking my parking pass inside and my license in my shirt pocket; by the time I am in reach of a bin in the security line, my laptop and one-quart bag are out and my jacket and shoes are off. I scoff at those occasional travelers who slow the line.

Well, I got my comeuppance. I waited about 20 minutes to show my boarding pass and photo ID to the bored worker at the head of the line so I could get in the stationary line to go through screening. He took a look at my boarding pass and said, “This is a JetBlue pass. This is the United line. Go back up the ramp and to the other side of the terminal.”

Thankfully, I left plenty of time this morning. But what a blow. My perfect system: busted.

Mothman is married

I had a great weekend, hanging out in DC at my good friend Jim Heaney’s wedding. Jim, known to many as the Mothman, was a fellow Suspicious Cheeselord/housemate/Glee Club alum and remains a good friend. I had a fabulous time meeting Rebecca’s family and reconnecting with friends—Doyle, Vick, Cheeselords, it was good to see all of you again.

In particular, I received the welcome news that the next Cheeselords recording, of unrecorded works of Jean Mouton, will be coming out soon. Having heard the group on Saturday, I can only say that (perhaps fortunately) it’s a completely different sound than when I was there, and I can’t wait to hear how it goes.

And, yes, all survived the hike on Saturday morning. Definitely the only wedding I’ve ever been to where the groom requested a bachelor hike in lieu of a party. Despite my fears of dropping from cardiac arrest, I had a lot of fun. Jim and Rebecca, I can’t wait to hang out with you guys again soon; you throw a heckuva party.

Trying to use Disqus

I read with some interest that Dave Winer is experimenting with the comment service from Disqus on Scripting News. I turned comments completely off on my site one year ago today and really miss the interactivity. So I signed up for Disqus to see what I could get.

Unfortunately, I can’t figure out how to make Disqus work with Manila. I use a hosted Manila site, so I can’t resort to back-end code to make the integration work, and there are two critical pieces that are missing for me to be able to implement Disqus:

  1. A unique page for each post. This is obviously not Disqus’s fault, but the version of Manila that I use has one page per day, not per post. So it’s not clear where the comment form should go.
  2. A way to modify the permalink URL. The generic Disqus instructions say to publish a version of the permalink URL followed by #disqus_thread. Unfortunately, I don’t appear to have access to a Manila macro that will do this—I get the permalink as a fully formed link.

So it looks like, unless the Disqus people come up with something, I have yet another reason to accelerate my move to another blog platform.

Except…hmmm, now I have an idea about how I might pull it off. Let’s see if I can make it work.

Installing Leopard on an 800 MHz G4 iMac

On the way down to Jim Heaney’s wedding, we stopped overnight at my inlaws’ place in Lakewood, NJ. They own one of the four Macs in the family, an 800 MHz G4 iMac (one of the Luxo Jr models). I had bought Leopard as a family pack with the intention of upgrading everyone, but I hit a surprising snag: Apple’s Leopard Installer actually enforces the 867 MHz minimum clock speed cited on the box specs! So for lack of 67 MHz, the disk won’t install.

Fortunately, there are a few workarounds. One is, if you happen to have another Mac handy, to boot the iMac in target disk mode and install the OS that way. The problem is that I don’t have my MacBook Pro with me, and I’m not sure if the iMac even supports booting into target disk mode.

The second, which I’m doing now, is to make a patched copy of the install DVD that disables the speed check. The linked article helpfully explains how to do the patch (and provides an example file) and even provides screenshots to show the process. I am currently making a read-write disk image from the install DVD and once I get a double-layer DVD to burn it to we’ll be able to move forward.

What are the risks? Well, I think the biggest risk is that some of the new Core Animation features will tax the processor and slow things down. So we’ll have to watch that. But being able to remote into my inlaws’ computer and help them will be worth it, as will the putatively improved iChat experience. And a quick check of comments of people who have done this hack suggests that any degradation of performance on an 800 MHz machine will be minimal, so in this case I think the risks are outweighed by the rewards.

Delicious Delicious Library 2.0

Wired: First Look: Delicious Library 2.0 Burns With Animated Cool. Looks like the 2.0 version (currently under development) of Delicious Library should address a lot of my criticisms of the program, as well as a lot of Core Animation goodness. Favorite features: publishing to templates, iTunes integration, export formats, library sharing, and smart bookshelves.

For comparison, here’s my Delicious Library feature request list from 2004. So far, it looks like they’re addressing #s 1, 2, and 5. I’d still like to see #6.

Halloween is Everyday

Alas, tis true—if you aren’t trick or treating or taking someone out trick or treating, the holiday is over way too soon. It was a pretty quiet day at the office followed by a relatively small parade of trick or treaters. (Favorites: the neighborhood “math kid” (he was Pi a few years ago) as the Pythagorean Triples, and the middle school kid wearing the halo, black leotard, and black wings, who announced herself as the “goth angel.”)

It’s a good thing I don’t live on this block. I have to believe that the trick or treat traffic at Youk’s place would be a lot heavier.

Getting to Inbox Zero with Outlook and Taglocity

A follow up to my earlier note about tags and Microsoft Outlook: I am happy to say that Taglocity has changed my life. I used to have folders in folders in folders and dealing with any received mail was torture. Now I’ve implemented tags and my workflow has totally changed.

I used to deal only with my unread mail, which was nice but it meant crud built up in my inbox. I used to flag mail messages as To Dos, but half the time I never got to reviewing the To Do list. Now I tag each mail message as it comes in (unless Taglocity can tag it for me), take whatever action is necessary on it, and move it to one archive folder. If I need to see a collection of messages about a particular subject, I use Taglocity’s filters or have it create a search folder for me.

My morning routine is a lot simpler too. I come in in the morning and the only things in my inbox are the ones that have come in since the night before. I delete most of the bacn, tag anything that I responded to the prior evening through Outlook Web Access (which doesn’t support tags), archive all tagged messages, and start processing all the new stuff.

The best part: that empty inbox. Now I work from my action list like I should have been doing all along. Inbox Zero is a good thing.

Some specific notes on Taglocity: using the Tag Cloud and other parts of the UI to assign tags and filters is a little challenging, since I tend to have a lot of tags. As in my tag collection in iPhoto, I find typing the tag name to be much, much easier. But having a Tag Cloud for my email is kind of cool anyway.

You know the Sox have won the Series…

…when greater Boston traffic goes completely and utterly to Hell the next morning. I swear, I spent 70 minutes just on the 10 miles of Rt. 2 between my home and 128, thanks to the four separate fender-benders I ran into.

I didn’t stay up for the end, and thus missed Colorado’s runs… and A-Rod’s hogging the spotlight. Dude, I think you could have picked some other night to announce that you are taking your punk ass to the market. You’d think that you would at least have waited until a few days after Red Sox pitcher (pitcher!) Daisuke Matsuzaka blew away your post-season RBI record…

Leopard of the Yard

I have been running Leopard for about two hours now, having picked up the Family Pack this afternoon and backed up the MacBook Pro (first full backup since I bought the thing, frighteningly enough). Notes so far: seems snappier. I thought I’d hate the changed handling of folders in the dock (stacks?) but I actually really dig it. If you only have one mouse button and don’t want to do the two-handed right click, it’s a much easier way to work with the contents of folders in the dock, and a much better application of Fitts’ Law.

I ran into a minor Keychain issue that seems to be responsible for this update after the installation, but that’s the only glitch so far.

I did notice one interesting thing. Software updates, even those that required restarts, used to download and install before signalling for a restart. Now the restart signal occurs and the installs happen after the user desktop disappears. Cuts into the user’s productive time, but perhaps safer and easier for the update installer to handle…

(Title reference here… only much less violent.)

iTunes craps out with err: -34 on large downloads

And that’s all I know, really. I can download small files from the iTunes Store, but larger files (e.g. a 98 MB movie) fail with the message that the disk I am downloading to is full (err: -34). The problem of course is that it isn’t full at all: 18 GB free on the primary drive, 60 GB free on the external drive where I keep all my music.

A little Googling led me to this support thread which suggests restarting the Airport Extreme Base Station, or copying a dummy large file then deleting it, as potential workarounds. We’ll see.