Mailoutage

It just came to my attention that the forwarding address that I use for this site is down, and, thanks to a bureaucratic snafu, I can’t get it fixed right now. If you’ve been trying to contact me, you can reach me for a limited time at toj8j at mac.com. Apologies to anyone who’s gotten a bounced mail notice from me. Some heads are going to roll…

Bad, bad AOL. No takedowns for you.

You’re a blogger. You find the AOL listings for Live8. All of Live8. And you post links to them. You don’t rehost the clips, you don’t try to sell them, you just point to them. No problem, right? Um, apparently, wrong. Sonician, as indicated in this Google cache snapshot, is taken down completely. I’m looking forward to working down the links anyway, but damn it: why on earth would you do something so boneheaded, AOL?

Oh right, I forgot, you’re AOL.

If I had a Paypal address for the author of the site, I’d be flowing them some coin, but as it turns out, all I can do is to call AOL and the site’s ISP and bitch. Maybe you should too. Because as the author of the site says, “Since when is linking to another website a crime? Isn’t that what the Internet is all about?”

Squicky Wagnerian drama at Tanglewood

Lisa and I went with Charlie and Carie to see the Wagner doubleheader yesterday at Tanglewood. It was a hell of a concert—certainly symphonic but just as certainly operatic.

We brought our customary picnic: homemade calzones with a cold tomato, basil and garlic salsa cruda, along with a few bottles of wine, some taralli, and cheese. We had the low table (to keep from blocking everyone’s view behind us) and Lisa’s Provençal tablecloth. Alas, no candles.

The music was spectacular—at least the first half, comprising Act I of Die Walküre. Deb Voight, who also performed with us in the Mahler 8th, sang a convincing Sieglinde and Clifton Forbis did a spectacular Siegmund. Stephen Milling as the jealous Hunding was even more impressive, both musically and dramatically. But the love aria between Sieglinde and Siegmund was the topper—at least, as long as you weren’t reading the supertitles, which made the incestuous nature of the lovers’ relationship entirely too clear. As Lisa said, repeatedly, “Ew.” Which brings a question: how, exactly, is one supposed to react to a work of high art that rates high on the squick scale? Judging from Voight’s facial expression just as she sang her final line, she struggled just a little bit with the issue as well.

Still, Wagner’s weird take on Germanic myth aside, it was a phenomenal performance, and we had a heck of a time. I kind of wish I were singing another concert this summer, preferably not in the rain.

Some hope for iChat 3

In the “following up old threads” department, I went back to Apple’s site to check if there was any news regarding the “insufficient bandwidth” issues that have kept us from using video chat features since I upgraded to Tiger. And sure enough, Support Article 301641 has been updated. Where it used to discuss QoS related issues with ISPs, it now suggests upgrading to 10.4.2 (which contains iChat AV 3.0.1) to fix the problem.

I’m looking forward to trying this out tonight. It will be nice to be able to chat with my inlaws again. The update apparently doesn’t fix all the issues, though this thread on the Apple forums is a pretty good rundown of troubleshooting methods to address remaining problems.

Intruders in the dust

New York Times: Reviving His Works, on Paper and Plaster. With William Faulkner’s house, Rowan Oak, newly restored to the somewhat eccentric condition in which its owner left it (houseblogger beware! “haphazardly laid pine floors” and “brick patios like wings” that “fostered rot” and “diluted the whole Greek Revival vibe” lurk within), it seems an appropriate time for a confession.

A fleuron is a typographical symbol that looks like a flower.

Thirteen years and change ago, I was with the Glee Club on what seemed like a never-ending Tour of the South. We had left Charlottesville, opened in Chapel Hill, proceeded to Athens and Atlanta, and made a stop in Jackson, MI before pulling into Oxford for the night. At that point we were all a little disconcerted to find that Oxford buttoned up its sidewalks at 8:30 at night—and since we had been on a bus for a Very Long Time, we wanted to get out and find something to do. So, while some of the group went off in search of house parties at Ole Miss, a few more literary-minded individuals (I’m not naming names, but I’ve talked about one of them before, and another is now a minister) piled into a car in search of Faulkner’s home.

It was after 10 when we walked up the front drive and found the house. We had joked and laughed in the car, which we left parked at the top of the drive; now we were soberer. I remember it was a moonlit night and we seemed awfully exposed. But it was quiet and still except for the crunch of gravel underfoot; and luminous around us except for the small cloud of dust raised by our feet. We stood at the base of the steps leading up to the back porch—that porch that the writer, between novels, added along with his office, that office on the walls of which was scrawled in graphite and grease pencil the skeleton of a novel; that office in which rests the typewriter that crackled and popped with the writer’s thoughts, now silent.

– It’s a sad house, said the future minister. – It feels as though it’s incomplete and is waiting for someone.

And then there was a pop from inside, a crack as though someone had trod on the floors—those same rough pine floors haphazardly laid by the writer during one renovation or other. We held our breath.

But no ghosts arrived, no night watchman shining suspicious flashlights. And no bleary eyed writer clutching a glass invited us up on the porch.

A fleuron is a typographical symbol that looks like a flower.

Now, if Faulkner could read Oprah’s tips on how to get through The Sound and the Fury, I think the house would be doing more than crackling. Probably it would be making sounds more like the advice at the end of Tod Goldberg’s post on the same subject.

Aux armes, citoyens

How are you planning to celebrate Bastille Day (er, 14 juillet)? Me, I think a glass of something French is in order, along with a big raspberry for Margaret Thatcher for once remarking of the French: “who can trust a people who celebrate, as their national event, a jailbreak?”

Wonder if we can get a chorus of La Marseillaise going tonight at Berkman. That would be something worth podcasting… At the least, take a second to download the first verse from this comprehensive La Marseillaise site.

What’s wrong with DRM? Let me count the ways

Boing Boing: White Wolf’s last copyright debacle: DRM disaster. Great list of something like 13 different problems with a product using the simple DRM in Acrobat files, plus a jillion bad PR moves by the firm producing the DRM’d content trying to defend their DRM.

Second most stupid use of DRM ever, after the inexplicable decision to DRM a CD by a new act like Tsar that stands to lose the least and benefit the most from file-sharing.

OPML roadshow

Looks like Dave is taking his new OPML outliner application on the road. Yesterday New York (with visit from John Sculley), tomorrow Berkman. I hope to be there tomorrow night.

Mostly I’m excited at the prospect of a decent Internet aware Windows outliner.

And yeah, much more excited about the demo than I am about the Boston Macworld going on this week. And will remain in that balance of excitement until Apple starts announcing product at Boston Macworld. (Though it would have been nice to meet Adam Engst, Andy Ihnatko, and the great Rob Griffiths.

Too many progress bars, too little time

Site maintenance: I added a dedicated houseblog page to my site, which allowed me to put up a list of shame projects in progress, and also hopefully made the houesblog more visible than it was previously.

I wanted to use the progress bars that Houseblogs.net provides (as seen on HouseInProgress), but didn’t want to allow use of <object> tags on my site. So I looked around and found a pure CSS solution, which seems a little lighter weight.

Man, it’s scary looking at that list just how much we have to do. And I’m probably forgetting some things, like bathroom remodels…

A date with IKEA

Pavement-influenced post title aside, this might be more aptly described as IKEA as Mail Order Bride. Lisa and I are practically on tenterhooks for the 2006 catalog, and frantic to get an updated Kitchen Planning Tool. I feel like I did back in 1982 when I was waiting for my exclusive mail order Admiral Ackbar action figure (sadly now gone along with all my other Star Wars toys).

We’ve all but decided to go with IKEA cabinets for the kitchen remodel, primarily because of the budget flexibility we’ll get, but also because anything is going to be nicer than the built ins we have now. We’re planning to remove part of the wall between kitchen and dining room, relocate the stove, and fix some craziness with the sink plumbing, as well as extend the cabinets along the wall where our busted radiator is living (until a few weeks from now, when it along with all our other radiators will be removed).

Speaking of deserving people making good

Back in 1996, when Eva Cassidy died, who would have predicted that she would be #5 on the list of Amazon’s top selling musicians in their first ten years in business? She beat out Frank Sinatra, Bob Dylan, and the Rolling Stones; she also beat the Dave Matthews Band, Josh Groban, Celine Dion, Johnny Cash, Ray Charles, and Sting (whose “Fields of Gold” she memorably covered on her best album, Live from Blues Alley).

Number five. Wow. Go, Eva. Not bad for a little white girl from the DC suburbs with the biggest voice you ever heard.

Incidentally, I think I first heard Eva’s music on a tribute show on the late great WDCU. Too bad that her fame came too late to lift that station.

Newspaper comics getting bigger

In other news, hell freezes over.

Seriously, the launch of the Globe’s tabloid sized pullout, Sidekick, mostly makes me unhappy. In design and content it feels like a Mini Pages for adults. But having the comics strips at a readable size almost makes up for it (though the Globe’s comics selection is nothing to write home about, as it features the likes of Mallard Fillmore). Interestingly, the Globe didn’t take advantage of this change to revamp its online comics page, which omits some of the better features from its paper offering (including For Better or For Worse).

I’ve pretty much moved my morning comics reading entirely online, thanks to MyComicsPage and various syndicate sites. In fact, I think that reading the comics online might be the reason that Mozilla invented opening a folder of bookmarks into a tabbed browser window. Of course, my online comics reading energy is pretty much entirely channeled toward webcomics like Questionable Content, Little Dee, and Scary Go Round, which are larger, better drawn, funnier, more imaginative, and more legible than their syndicated counterparts.

Another reaction at Anderkoo (who appears to have some interesting comics commentary in general).

Soaking in history at the Hancock Shaker Village

I forgot to mention my other activity from Friday. After putting in a morning’s work, I drove from Pittsfield due west on Rt 20 to the Hancock Shaker Village. The village, which was active from the 19th century during Mother Ann’s Work through 1959, still has almost all its original buildings, plus furniture and fixtures.

It was pouring on Friday, so I wasn’t able to spend as much time as I wanted, but I got some good photos (posted, for the sake of trying something new, at Flickr).

An unfailingly practical people, the Shakers: similar in some ways to the Amish, the other outsider community with whom I have strong family ties, but vastly dissimilar in others. The adoption of electricity, for instance: the Shakers diverted a creek to power a turbine and were the first folks with electricity in Berkshire County.