iTunes Music Store now Tougher Than Leather

Well, it took two years, but Run-DMC is finally available in the iTunes Music Store as of Tuesday.

(One) day when I was chillin’ in Kentucky Fried Chicken
Just mindin’ my business, eatin’ food and finger lickin’
This dude walked in lookin’ strange and kind of funny
Went up to the front with a menu and his money
He didn’t walk straight, kind of side to side
He asked this old lady, “Yo, yo, um…is this Kentucky Fried?”
The lady said “Yeah”, smiled and he smiled back
He gave a quarter and his order, small fries, Big Mac!
You be illin’

RIP, R. L. Burnside

Just got word from RL Burnside’s label, Fat Possum, that the late blooming blues musician passed away today in Memphis at the age of 81. Going from a hardscrabble life as a sharecropper and fisherman, he recorded for the first time in 1968 but didn’t make it into the public eye until his 1996 collaboration with the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. A great bluesman and a great voice.

Catching up; golf introduction

There’s something about business travel, even to a location with high-speed Internet, that makes it challenging to keep to a normal posting schedule. In our case here, the specific issues were:

  1. A game of golf, my first ever, played on a partly rainy day on Tuesday
  2. A bad cold that started arriving yesterday

I do not think that (b) is connected, at least not directly, to (a). I rode in a four passenger vehicle on Monday with a woman who was in the throes of a bad cold, and so far my symptoms (coughing, aching head, congestion) seem consistent with hers. Still, I’m pretty sure that the golf game didn’t help my resistance.

My first round of golf, a full 18 holes, did two things. It opened a door into a world of male competition (our foursome and our competitors were all men) that I had not previously witnessed directly, and it made me aware how out of shape I am, at least from an upper-body perspective. I think my shoulders have stopped aching. Regarding the former, I will not disclose my score. It wouldn’t be a useful number, because we played best ball off the tee (we all played to the hole from the ball that went furthest on the drive), and because we all agreed to hold our scoring to eight strokes a hole max, so as not to inhibit the progress of a game. There were a few par threes, owing to the best ball rule, where I broke that eight-stroke ceiling and actually landed the ball in the hole on five or six strokes, but the rest of my scorecard is a wall of eights.

The good news is that I have nowhere to go but up. Heh.

Funny postlude: we were discussing career paths over an after dinner drink last night, and I prefaced a statement with the clause “Having spent most of my childhood and teenage years in a library…” The presales engineer who gave me the most pointers snorted, then asked, “Really? You didn’t spend them on the golf course?” Zing.

Katrina prayers, Katrina charities

Two personal thoughts this morning for residents of the Gulf Coast: one family friend who’s visiting my parents right now who has no idea what has happened to his Mississippi house and whose wife is stranded (but safe) at a hotel with no power; one for Hooblogger Todd at Frolic, who has now updated after a scary silence (turns out he was just out of the country).

For those who unlike my friends were in the city, prayers, of course, but also support. Governor Howard Dean has joined other voices in my inbox asking for donations to the Red Cross (see details for making a donation at the DNC). It’s going to take a lot of help. As Dave pointed out, the city is under sea level, so the flood waters aren’t going to go down on their own without a lot of pumping.

Last word on the flat

Just to clarify: a friend asked over IM after my tale of woe with my flat tire: “Can’t you change a tire yourself?” Answer: Yes, and I have always found the Volkswagen jack and tire iron to be exceptionally intuitive to use (having had to change at least one tire in the line of fire on my old Golf).

However, the timing on Monday was the key part that I didn’t spell out. I got the flat at 7:40 am, about 3/4 of a mile from my office building, and I was supposed to be climbing aboard a shared ride to our sales and marketing meeting here in Stowe at 8 am. I can change a tire, but not in 20 minutes. In this case, the tow truck was definitely the better part of valor.

Do I sound defensive? I suppose I feel a little bad that I wasn’t able to resolve more of the problem myself. But I guess there comes a point where doing it yourself is less important than resolving it so you can move on to truly important things.

Godcasting: podcasting for churches

New York Times: Missed church? Download it to your iPod. A logical, and perhaps lower-cost, extension of the radio services long used to connect churches with their stay-at-home members, this description of various podcasting churches is ringing a few bells for me.

I have long bemoaned the lack of a strong principled moral opposition to conservative politics in the US, and have thought that the liberal church might provide some of the material to arm that opposition, if only it would speak up. Originally I thought the answer was religious bloggers, such as the Real Live Preacher, coming from a church dedicated to principles of equality before God. I am now imagining the church that I attend, syndicated to the blogosphere, serving a similar function for a similarly scattered flock that KEXP serves for the indie-rock faithful. I also had a discussion with my sister, who is entering her third year at Union PSCE, about technology education for theology students. Maybe this article will provide some inspiration…

(Technology note: Godcast.org, which is serving as an aggregator for a series of religion-themed podcasts, runs on Radio Userland.)

Rescue me

As it turns out, the resolution of my morning flat was relatively painless. I called a towing service, they took it to the dealership, the dealership managed the rest (doubly appropriate since I needed a scheduled service visit anyway). The kicker, unfortunately, was that the injury to the new tire wasn’t a manufacturing defect but a very long nail, and so the replacement wasn’t covered under warranty. Ah well.

In the meantime we’re eating well here at Stoweflake.

Perfect morning

I was on my way to the office to join a group of people heading to an offsite conference in Stowe, Vermont, and happily driving along when I took a left turn into a shopping center for some coffee and heard a pop. Oh no, I thought. I managed to get the car into a parking space. It was the tire that had been replaced two weeks ago, flat as a pancake.

Hopefully tonight I’ll be able to write the update of how the issue was resolved, but for now I have to catch a shuttle up to Stowe. More to come…

Dead Mac blues

It hasn’t been all hi-fi fun here, unfortunately. Esta’s PowerBook, which used to be my old faithful G3, has bitten the dust. It won’t boot any more. I made an appointment for her at the Cambridge Apple Store, and they indicated that (a) it needed some internal power circuitry replaced, which would set her back a few Franklins, and (b) they could have the fix done in seven business days. Oy.

They were pretty nice about suggesting some alternatives, though, including a recommendation for an alternative local repair shop and (most surprisingly) an Apple Store near Richmond that she didn’t know existed. (Who knew that Short Pump was Apple Store material?) She’ll end up going with the latter, based on the time factor.

In the meantime, we have discovered what Fast User Switching is made for—allowing guests to surf the web, check email, iChat, and upload digital photos without changing all their host’s settings.

Denon, de non psallibus

denon dp-45F, or rather the dp-47f which is essentially the same thing

Esta, who arrived on Wednesday evening for a few days of R and R, is helping me with a very important task: auditioning a new turntable. A coworker was looking to unload a circa 1983 Denon DP-45F that hadn’t been played in eleven years.

So far the results have been mixed. On the plus side, the full automatic action is smooth, and the sound can be quite good, even without the grounding strap connected. On the minus side, the unit is an inch or so too deep for our AV shelf, meaning I would need to do another cutout (if I could and still be able to lift the glass on the turntable). More damningly, the thing skips on brand new records. I’m not sure if that’s because it needs a new stylus, because it doesn’t like 180 gram vinyl, or what. I’ll play with it a little more this weekend and see if I can isolate the problem without shelling out the money for a new stylus or cartridge (which could be substantial, according to this thread).

It is a sweet looking turntable though.

Cool: Google Talk. Also cool: it’s Jabber

The Unofficial Apple Weblog is one of a bunch of sites talking about the leak of Google Talk, also known as Google’s implementation of Jabber. Nice to see Mac support (albeit apparently unofficial) in a new Google product before it ships.

Also nice to see Jabber getting some traction. With an open API and an open source client, it always surprised me that more people haven’t adopted Jabber as a messaging platform of choice, the way UserLand did. Including me. At the moment I can’t even remember my Jabber address.