Shuman takes the red pill

No, not that red pill. Shuman’s started a blog. He’s handcoding it and he only has four entries and no permalinks, but hey.

Oh, and for the record, I disagree with him about The Two Towers. If it made more money, it was less about marketing inertia (though they certainly didn’t have to work as hard this time around to establish credibility with all the opinion leaders (i.e. Tolkien fanatics)) and more about the fact that, objectively, it was a better movie. More going on, less slack in the story, the amazing Helm’s Deep sequence, Gollum. Anyway, welcome to the blogging world, Shuman.

Artists the Apple Store doesn’t carry, but should

Going from my own list of tracks I’m trying to replace from CDs that were sold during college at the end of each semester for gas money (true!), I found some gaps in the Apple Music Store’s 2000 songs. I haven’t gone back to figure out who owns the rights, but I have pinged the Music Store Management using their handy suggestion form.

Here’s the list:

  • Peter Murphy: no tracks
  • Jesus & Mary Chain: no tracks
  • Jesus Jones: only their last album available
  • Radiohead: only OK Computer

There were also some tracks I didn’t expect to find, namely:

  • U2’s One single, including the fabulous “Lady With The Spinning Head”
  • Bugs Bunny on Broadway, including the full soundtrack to “Long Haired Hare” (“L-L-L-Leopold!”)

And finally, some notes on pricing: No apparent discounts for albums; you can only buy some songs, notably those over 6 minutes, on albums (no downloading just the 38-minute version of “Sister Ray” from the Quine Tapes box set for you!).

There is justice in the world

Although Peter Murphy is not available on Apple’s iTunes Music Store, William Burroughs is. Dead City Radio and Spare Ass Annie. Track by track.

If you’ve never heard Michael Franti and the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprasy backing up Burroughs’ insane rants on the latter album, you at least owe it to yourself to spend the $0.99 to check out the title track.

Hey, anyone notice you can’t link to anything in the iTunes music store from the Web? Dumb, Apple.

Negroponte on spectrum, international media labs

Last week I went to an MIT alum event at which Nicholas Negroponte, founding director of the MIT Media Lab, spoke. It was less… revelatory than I would have expected. In fact, Negroponte, who said he doesn’t do that sort of stand up talking very often, largely eschewed the techno-prognostication that made him famous except for a discussion on the merits of open spectrum.

Instead, he talked about:

  • The Wired article (“You’d think that they could have chosen a more flattering photo… however, the article was substantially true.”)
  • Efforts associated with or partly sponsored by the Media Lab to wire third world classrooms (the Digital Nations project)
  • The international expansion of the Media Lab
  • The growth of the Media Lab from an organization funded, in no small part, from UROP fees to the heights of the late 90s, and the difficulty of raising the last bit of cash for the new building now that sober fiscal reality has settled in
  • On working with corporate research sponsors (“The only complaint I ever heard from the corporations was that we weren’t crazy enough… Have you seen what really creative people look like and how they act? Would they survive in a corporate environment? They were outsourcing that uncontrollable creative energy to us.”)

A great talk. I need to come back and blog more of the things he said about Digital Nations and about WiFi and mesh networks, but that can wait until later.

Apple’s new music download service

Details at MacInTouch (which is slammed): All five major labels, over 200,000 songs and growing, $0.99/song, AAC, burning allowed (but you have to change the playlist every 10 burns), browsable via iTunes (4), new iPods, new iPod dock with line out.

I’m getting ready for a presentation. More thoughts later.

Later: Details are now up on Apple’s site. Added to the above: only browsable via iTunes—so the service is Mac only. The service uses AAC, not MP3, which means higher fidelity music. You can “play your music on up to three computers, enjoy unlimited synching with your iPods, burn unlimited CDs of individual songs, and burn unchanged playlists up to 10 times each.” So of course the questions are:

  • If I buy a new machine and move purchased files to that machine, and erase them from the old machine, does that count as using them on two computers?
  • Do I have a separate license file to move with the media?
  • I may not be able to browse the files on my PC, but can I play them there once I download them?

Reading the Black Dog

Fortunately, I’m not in a mood where the Dog is too close, but I did finally start reading Churchill’s Black Dog. At first I was taken aback. It’s a collection, and only the first story is about Churchill. Also, the author (a psychoanalyst) spends the first 15 pages discussing various theories of Churchill’s temperament. Apparently Sir Winston was an “extraverted intuitive,” “predominantly endomorphic, with a strong secondary mesomorphic component,” and of “cyclothermic temperament.”

At this point the book almost went out the window. But I persevered, and on the next page, following an anecdote about Churchill’s depression before World War II, there comes the line:

Many depressives deny themselves rest or relaxation because they cannot afford to stop. If they are forced by circumstances to do so, the black cloud comes down upon them. … He invented various methods of coping with the depression which descended when he was no longer fully occupied by affairs of state, including painting, writing, and bricklaying, but none of these were wholly successful.…

Hooked. Guess I’ll have to keep reading now…

Ballpark. Back pain. Becalmed.

I scored some great tickets for the Mariners from a co-worker last week (thanks, Kathy!), for today’s game. It turned out to be a gorgeous afternoon in Seattle: mid-sixties, no humidity, sunny with patchy clouds in an enormous blue sky. The Mariners were up four-three at the top of the eighth, we had just had finished hot dogs and beer and were working on garlic fries and peanuts.

Then someone’s back went into spasm. (I knew that trying to dig in soaker hoses right before the game was a bad idea.) We got everyone home, appropriate backs were medicated, and feet were propped up. Now chips, salsa, tea, and relaxation.

I think someone was trying to send us a message about the proper use of Sunday afternoons. Relaxation is key right now.

Last words from William Gibson?

One last post from Gibson at the end of his book tour in Dublin, pondering hyper-branding, the oddity of soba noodles near the Liffey, and…

… winding up where I always eventually do if I’m jetlagged in Dublin: peering throughy the fence at the tiny, deeply strange Huguenot Cemetary on Merrion Row, c. 1693. Grave-markers like Shaker tables carved from stone. Bluebells growing up through boxwood. Litter-spillage from the Merrion Row bus-stop: tall tinnies of Guiness and Linden Village Strong Cider. Deja-vu of soul-delay.

Deja.

Vu.

Man, I’m going to miss hearing new words from that voice every day. But the next novel will be worth it.

Our drinking water filtration system…

…has two cut-off valves. One cuts off water pressure from the main line to the filters. The other cuts off water to the whole sink and faucet assembly—apparently, and to the filters as well, since the two valves are joined for some insane reason. Meaning that if the filter line is cut off, but the faucet is running, pressure will force water through the line to the filter.

And if you’re running the faucet to clean the cups under the filter, which you have removed for this purpose and to replace the filters, the additional back pressure will push water out the top of the filter unit and flood the area under our sink.

Needless to say, this was one of the quickest (and dampest) educations in plumbing I could have gotten. The mess is cleaned up, except for whatever leaked through the bottom of the cabinet and into the unreachable floor space to feed molds and mildews, and I’m onto step three, which is cleaning out the whole system with a mild bleach solution for fifteen to twenty minutes.

Which, by my clock, is enough time to drink a beer and ignore the whole mess.

Blog (or Outline) the Presidential Campaigns

Philip Greenspun discusses things that could be done on the Internet to improve our ability during the next Presidential campaign to understand what the candidates are saying and doing, including distributed outlining and blogging. He suggests that blogging will not help us get a “comprehensive view of any one candidate.” But what if there were a centralized site with a channel for each candidate, like PolState, with a bunch of people having the ability to post information to that channel about the candidate, like BlogCritics?

I invoke LazyWeb. Let’s get a group blog going on this.

Say it ain’t so

Craig spills the beans by pointing to a Washington Post article: Pep Band’s Last Stand. Apparently a rich alum has decided to finally settle the argument over whether the University should have a Pep Band or a bunch of blown-up loonies in uniforms—oops, I mean a marching band.

Chalk up another blow against self determination and for those who lack senses of humor. The irony that the gift comes with money for the performing arts center is not lost on me.

Was a Sunny Day

Drove into work this morning in my wife’s car. She’s taking my in-laws down to Mt. St. Helens, which is about a two and a half hour drive, so we figured she should have the newer, bigger car. This makes the second time she’s driven my car, the first being yesterday, so I hope everything goes well for her.

In the meantime, instead of my 2003 Passat, I have Lisa’s 1993 Geo Prizm. (Insert your own Will Smith Men in Black II reference here. (Number of hits Google returns for the query “old and busted” “new hotness”: 228.))

But I think it’s a pretty good day. The sun is shining, I just lined up plane tickets to see my family in a little under two weeks, it’s Friday, and despite the funk on my MP3 player there’s another silly song running through my head:

Was a sunny day
Not a cloud was in the sky
Not a negative word was heard
From the people passing by
’Twas a sunny day
All the birdies in the trees
And the radio’s singing song
All the favorite melodies

He was a Navy man
stationed in Newport News
She was a highschool queen
with nothing left to lose
She was a highschool queen
with nothing left to lose

Her name was Lorelei
She was his only girl
She called him “Speedoo”
But his Christian name was Mister Earl
She called him “Speedoo”
But his Christian name was Mister Earl

Streaming Wilco EP, and some Flaming Lips

Eric Olsen at Blogcritics reports on Wilco’s celebration of the one-year anniversary of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’s release with the streaming audio release of an Australian EP featuring alternate versions of YHF material and new songs. Cool, if you can get through.

And if that isn’t enough, another BlogCritic reports that you can get all of Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots and some of Fight Test via stream here.

On knowing the limitations of your stats

I have three sources of statistics about the readership of my weblog. One is the built in statistics in Manila, which tells me about referrers and page views in the last 24 hours, and the most read messages since I started the weblog. But it doesn’t tell me anything about the readers doing the page views—browser, IP, source country, anything. Also, it doesn’t report on pages served by my static site, which is where I try to point most of my readers these days.

Another is Site Meter, the seemingly ubiquitous tracking device that shows up on everyone’s blogs. My Site Meter reports give me a few more things, such as showing what the most popular entry and exit pages are, who the most popular browsers are, and so forth. But no ranking of messages by popularity, no reports of 404s, etc. Plus, um, it is a potential privacy violation. (What do they do with that data?)

The third, which I finally was able to access last week, is the actual Apache logs for the static site. And I discovered something about Site Meter: it filters out quite a few things from its Browser report. Like robots. Site Meter claims that most of my visitors run Internet Explorer. Actually, twice as many—over 10,000 visits, or almost 25% of my static site’s traffic—are done by GoogleBot. Which is fine, but another 9% are apparently done by Slurp. And there are lots of other visitors who are running evil bots, like the cunningly named EvilBot.

Which makes me grateful for the new Spam-Free Email feature in Manila. Used to be that if you left a comment, visitors saw your email address. Now they see the name you used to register, and clicking on that takes you to a form that allows you to submit email, but not see their address. Which means that the spambots crawling my site looking for email addresses won’t find any.

A great start. But there are more limitations:

  • My RSS file is served by Manila, not Apache, so I can’t see which RSS readers are subscribing to me—or how many distinct people there are, or how often they’re hitting my server.
  • I can put a robots.txt file on my static server to control how the robots crawl my site (and I will), but I can’t do the same on Manila.

Ah, for a unified stats solution. In the meantime, two new projects start today on the weblog:

  • A robots.txt file for the static site.
  • A P3P-compliant (and human-readable!) privacy policy.

William Gibson, blogger no more

Sez here (interview by Karlin Lillington, to be on Wired this afternoon sometime) that William Gibson is giving up blogging, as he fears it will damage his creative process for his next novel. While I grieve his loss as a blogger, I commend his motives. Great quotes:

Somehow the ecology of writing novels wouldn’t be able to exist if I’m in daily contact. The watched pot never boils… Writing novels is pretty solitary, and blogging is very social.…If I were really a novelist of ideas in the way some novelists are, it might well work [to keep blogging] – if I needed to work through political and philosophical ideas. But that’s not how I think I work.…If I expose things that interest or obsess me as I go along, there’d be no need to write the book. The sinews of narrative would never grow. So, I think I’m going to say goodbye to whoever’s been following it. Though it’s very tempting not to stop. Stop me now!

I think we’ve all been there. I hope that blogging—and meeting his fans and reading their comments about his work—has given him some good grist for the next one.