Weekend in purgatory

No, not the trip: our wommitin’ dog didn’t up any chuck on the way back home. I’m talking about sports.

First I should mention that we were in Hazleton, PA, up in the coal mountains, until about 7:30 and were on more or less rural parts of I-80 until about 8:30, so I wasn’t able to check the score of the Virginia–Florida State game until about 5 minutes from the end of the first half. At which point, ESPN’s mobile channel informed me on my phone, the score was 19 to 0. I refreshed the game page until my battery ran out on my phone (I hadn’t charged the phone the previous night), so I saw Marques Hagans’ last minute goal-line stand turn into a field goal when he couldn’t complete a pass from the five-yard line. That field goal would be the Cavaliers’ only score of the game. 36–3 smarts. But at least we weren’t the only top-10 ranked college football team to get pantsed this weekend.

And the Yankees vs. the Sox? Less said about Saturday the better. We caught the game on the radio in the bottom of the second, a few minutes before the Sox got on the scoreboard to tie it up with a homer and go into the lead with another run. Another hour later and at the bottom of the fourth the Yanks had retaken the lead, 11–6, after some of the worst pitching I’ve ever had the privilege to hear. As the one announcer put it, “Okay, folks, bottom of the fourth, we’re entering the third hour of play, and there’s no end to this inning in sight. Like the Snickers folks say, ‘when you know you’re not going anywhere for a long time’…” At least we’re still in contention, by our fingernails, after last night’s win.

More fun than a barrel of monkeys

We’re really starting off the week with a bang. The electricians we needed to come and do about six jobs for us arrived at 7:45 on the dot and got to work. Right now one of them is fishing a snake up from my shop, where he punched a small hole in the finished corner (plaster, naturally; why is nothing in old houses easy?), came up through the firebreak, and is working on getting wire run up to where we’ll be installing some wall sconces for light.

One other project is already finished: a utility outlet under the sink for the garbage disposal we want to install. The previous owner had run wire under there, but we didn’t know from where. As it turns out, mercifully it was run from the breaker box!

The electrician has poked a hole in the living room wall for the first sconce and run back downstairs to snake the wire for the second one. This of course gives me the opportunity to poke around. Surprise: the back wall of the living room is actually plaster over backing board, not plaster over lathe (though the back side is still lathe and plaster). Second surprise: the stud spacing, at least near the outside wall, is about 14 inches. Third: the wall near the arch (which connects the living room to the small hall that accesses the first-floor bedroom, back bathroom, and kitchen) is plaster over board on both sides; no lathe in sight when the electrician opens the wall to install a new switch.

And that’s just the first two projects. Can’t wait to see what happens with the bathroom and garage outlets and the phone wire.

Off

We have a family wedding this weekend in Pennsylvania. Lisa and I just arrived in New Jersey, our base of operations. After a very long drive from Boston through what felt like 40 days and 40 nights of rain, one wommitin’ dog (“aye, she’s wommitin’ bad, sorr”) and various other tribulations, we’re here and I’m going to bed. Blogging might resume on Sunday.

Links that wouldn’t go away

So how do I deal with those links that won‘t die? In a word: bullet lists.

Blogging style

My workflow for blogging has changed with NetNewsWire. With 264 subscriptions, I can’t read everything in detail. I scan headlines, pick out the ones I want to pay attention to, and open them in browser tab windows in NetNewsWire. Then I’ll read the tabs that are open, and close the ones that I’m done thinking about. There will always be one or two that I want to blog immediately; I’ll switch to MarsEdit and write about those (though since my style is to combine two or three different links in a post, I don’t generally take as much advantage of the MarsEdit integration with NNW as I might).

But there are always tabs left over after that. I like that NNW saves my open browser tabs. If I find one or two that persist across sessions, I’ll come back and blog those later.

So what makes me blog something? Generally, these days, I don’t point to things unless I have something to say about them. They could make me mad; make me laugh (not as often as I’d like); make me say “This is really cool”; or tickle a connection with something else I’ve read, said, or thought. The last is my favorite category of blogging material—it’s where I can actually add value as a blogger.

The return of William Gibson

William Gibson’s blog, silent since the end of the author’s tour for Pattern Recognition, crackled back to life yesterday. The natural question, “Why?”, is the first word of the posting. I excerpt the rest of the post in its entirety here, because it’s short, sweet, and right on point:

Because the United States currently has, as Jack Womack so succintly puts it, a president who makes Richard Nixon look like Abraham Lincoln.

And because, as the Spanish philospher Unamuno said, “At times, to be silent is to lie.”

Nice.

Special off-topic bonus: Pattern Recognition is one of Gibson’s works or concepts to inspire a Sonic Youth song. The other, of course, was the Neuromancer trilogy, which is linkable directly to “The Sprawl” on Daydream Nation. So which Yoot is a Gibson fan?

Blocking comment spam, and other fun stuff

Very long time readers of this site (and you two know who you are) will remember it used to live at another domain, on Userland’s free servers. When I switched over, even though all the content migrated, the Google index didn’t pick things up right away so I left everything in place, put a note at the top of each page with the new site address, and forgot about it.

Until this morning, when I woke up and found two pieces of comment spam on the site. I promptly deleted them and blocked the member who left the comments, but now I’m wondering if it’s time to take more drastic action on that site.

Manila gurus: is it possible to do page-level redirects on a Manila site such that someone coming to http://jarretthousenorth.editthispage.com/faq ends up at http://www.www.jarretthousenorth.com/faq instead?

Or should I just blow the content away? I hate that it’s attracting comment spam.

Last debate

I’ve passed on liveblogging this debate, partly because I don’t think there’s a lot to be gained, but partly because Lisa was coming back after a business trip tonight. Sorry, folks; priorities. Interesting, though, this last question, to find the humanity in the candidates? Also interesting that Kerry punts the “strong women” question to his mom, rather than Teresa. I don’t think Kerry is coming away a winner in this debate—unless, of course, you count all the lies that the administration is telling through Bush; and unless you weigh the administration on its record rather than Bush’s words.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Item 1: A private voter-registration firm in Las Vegas is under attack from its own employees, who allege that the firm has been throwing away Democratic registration forms by the hundreds while keeping all the Republican registrations. The firm is under contract in another case for door-to-door canvassers by the GOP, and has also done work in Arizona for Ralph Nader. There are some dots waiting to be connected here…

Item 2: From the dirty-tricks file, Josh Marshall connects the dots and fingers Jim Tobin, New England regional chairman for the Bush-Cheney campaign and former Northeast political director for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, as being deeply involved in the felonious “phone jamming incident” that knocked a Democratic get-out-the-vote operation out of commission on Election Day in 2002.

Item 3: Sinclair Broadcasting, owner of 62 stations across the country has committed to airing an anti-Kerry broadcast two weeks before the election, funded by “Swift Boat Veterans and POWs for Truth,” attacking Kerry’s Vietnam record. (Note Tony Pierce’s reaction: “if the dems can be derailed by a dumbass swiftboat talkie despite [twelve points including ‘bush’s failure to find obl,’ ‘bush’s military record cover up,’ and ‘five gop senators coming out against him,’] then the dems don’t deserve to win ever.”) Interesting side note: Sinclair has a subsidiary, Jadoo Power Systems, Inc., that just won a big contract to supply the US Special Operations Command in the war on terror.

Item 4: Veterans of the Iraq conflict are self-funding a TV ad that focuses on the failures of the Bush administration’s preparation, conduct, and post-war support in Iraq and the consequences for veterans. They call BS on claims that the lack of body armor is an “urban legend,” and discuss how the war has cost them dearly while at the same time the administration is cutting VA benefits.

It seems to me that if the Bush/Cheney campaign wasn’t so busy trying to disenfranchise voters and mislead the public instead of taking care of the boys (and girls) they sent to Iraq who are now coming home maimed and angry—or in boxes—they might actually be making some headway in public opinion.

Bing!: Sub Pop goes RSS

Seattle label Sub Pop, home to the Postal Service, Low, Wolf Eyes, Sebadoh, the Shins, Damien Jurado, Iron and Wine, and other great bands with impeccable indie cred, has gone RSS, offering RSS 1.0 feeds for the following content:

This is a brilliant and as far as I know unprecedented move—I don’t know of any other label that is doing this in a consistent way like this. Bravo, Sub Pop.

Except… because the downloads/media feed is RSS 1.0 and not 2.0, it doesn’t appear to work with iPodder. This is unfortunate; I’d love to subscribe to that feed in iPodder and have all the latest Sub Pop releases automatically hit my iPod. Ah well, hopefully this will be cleaned up soon. Until then, this is a pretty good way to keep on top of what’s happening across the label or with your favorite band.

Journalist-casting: is it just noise?

Some people think David Coursey’s latest column on Podcasting, in which he swoons over having Bob Edwards on his iPod but turns up his nose at the notion that someone might want to listen to a podcast from the technology’s originators, is really silly, and if you limit your imagination to audio versions of people’s egomaniacal columns for eWeek, that seems perfectly reasonable. But if you look at it as another failing gasp for air by the demigods of the mass media world, who don’t understand the social impact of the technologies that surround them and the emerging world of independent content creators, it becomes really interesting.

—Please pardon the above riff on Coursey’s column, in which I’ve kept most of the last paragraph intact and substituted the targets of his spleen with my own italicized interjections, but he was too pompous not to deflate. What is it about print journalists—not all of them, thank God, but enough of them—that they all want bloggers to dry up and blow away? They seem so, I don’t know, threatened. I guess they can’t help it; they bought the hype that attention is scarce, and any attention paid to the likes of me (and Adam and Dave, or even Larry) somehow invalidates their existence.

Interesting proposition, that last one. Do print journalists and other media magnates still have authority if people stop believing they do?

Inspired by a link on Scripting News.

The week in music

Polar opposites this week. First, the long-awaited final (and I must enclose a question mark after that word, given the long tradition of mining the back catalog of dead celebrities until not even their teeth are left in the grave) album from Elliott Smith, From a Basement on the Hill. With two songs from the album having been released as a 45 prior to Elliott’s passing and subsequently included on multiple compilations, I’ve been eager to hear the rest of the work for a long time and am listening right now, so further reactions will have to wait…

Second, the first-ever mash-up to receive a major-label release hit iTunes (and, one supposes, physical record stores) today: the DJ Reset mash “Frontin’ on Debra,” which combines elements of Beck’s “Debra” with the Pharrell Williams/Jay-Z tune “Frontin’,” plus original elements added by DJ Reset. Beatmixed had the story back in September, so check it out for more detail. All I can say is, like the best tracks from the Gray Album, this mash is a goofy pleasure.