Author: shacker

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Grammys

I didn’t watch ’em, but was gratified to read the piece in Newsweek about the general growing consensus that A) the quality of available music (especially pop music) is at an all-time low, and B) the music industry is getting kicked on its ass. I’ve been moaning about #A for a very long time and it’s nice to see a pub like Newsweek come out and say it rather than pretending. I’d like to think that if lots of money is siphoned out of the music industry, it can only have a positive effect (music may become a meritocracy again, or at least something resembling it … people voting with their downloads rather than gagging on the spoon-fed banana brulee’).

And to have all these judges give awards to the O Brother soundtrack … was just too sweet for words. I had long since given up hope that the Grammys would ever reward talent again.

Poetic justice on me that Engelbert Humperdinck should be rolling through the itunes queue as I write this ;)

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Scanner

Had dinner at Juan’s, which is probably the most authentic and most comfortable Mexican restaurant in the East Bay. Belly full of rellenos.

Amy got a new scanner, needed one that would work with her Mac. Epson 1250 Perfection. Hell of an improvement over the antique SCSI scanner we’ve been using, and she’ll get a lot of use out of the slide scanner add-on.

To test it, I yanked some of my old razor blade-n-gluestick collages off the wall and ran ’em through.

Quinine Leaf Pipe

Venus Fly Chick

Close in

At 300 dpi, you can see every tiny dot in the source paper, and can make out that the glass is ringed with “V8” symbols, which I had not even seen when making the collage to begin with.

God, it’s starting to become embarassing to look back at old birdhouse pages. Not so much the images, but a lot of the text, and the now-dated web designs. Would love to gut the site and start over from scratch, but there’s just so much content there to wade through.

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Day Off

Power’s still out on much of the UCB campus this morning, which is pretty much unprecedented. Classes cancelled, buildings closed. A big yellow sign on my office door said I should turn around and go home. A substation flooded, causing a cascade failure. Question: How does such a critical substation get built and run without major water-detection and warning systems? Anyway, had a nice bike ride to work and back, now I’ve got the day off to work on the SKSM database and leave for dad’s place early.

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tcpflow

Wanna see something scary? Run Aquisition for a while, so you’re established on the network (I suppose LimeWire would work too). You don’t have to do or host anything, just run it. Now install tcpflow, which is like tcpdump, but shows you *everything* passing through your network and run

sudo tcpflow -i en0 -c

Congrats — You’re a porn portal! Or at least the rest of the world is trying to treat you like one. Discovered this by accident when my router lights were going crazy and tcpdump showed so much traffic I thought I was being DOS’d or something. Forgot I had left Aquisition running. tcpflow output tipped me off that something wasn’t right, since there are no brittney or “naked teen” refs on betips.

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Pink Oz

About a year ago we invited a dozen people over to watch the wizard of oz with the sound turned down, playing dark side of the moon as the soundtrack instead. It had been alleged to be a jaw-dropping synchronicity feast, and we weren’t disappointed. If you’re not familiar with this phenomenon, search google on “pink oz” – there are plenty of sites about it.

Today a friend pointed out this letter to the editor, which had me rolling.

Set up QuickTime Streaming Server today for the first time, for a test run. Need to be ready to stream live video feeds from the jschool in the next month or so. QTSS is pretty cool software, but I sure hope they get the MPEG-4 licensing crap sorted out in time.

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Macs vs. PCs in Education

Here is a tremendous set of resources put together to defend keeping Macs in schools rather than standardizing on Wintel. It’s been interesting seeing how things go at the J-School, which is about 50/50. Faculty and staff have a mix of Macs and PCs. Students have “The Greenhouse,” which is a room of 12 fully-decked-out G4s where we teach web design, video production, audio production, Quark, and pretty much anything creative, and two “Newsrooms” full of PCs where students basically do word processing.

It’s clear from interacting with students and faculty over the past four months that MacOS is less confusing overall (I know that’s vague and fuzzy, but it seems to be true) and that we do far less support work on the Macs (which is empirically true).

Just observations, not trying to start a flame war… ;)

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webdb class

Taught my first class to adults tonight. It went really well for the most part. We actually covered more ground in the first session than I thought we would. Aside from the fact that several students kept working on other students files accidentally, we got through forms, variables, and control structures. Some of them actually started to get excited, which is all I can hope for. And I enjoyed it. If the rest of the class goes this well, I wouldn’t mind doing this freelance (though I’d probably rather just have normal freelance php gigs).

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Danny Pearl

Just attended a memorial service for murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. A panel hosted by two WSJ reporters and Michael Lerner, rabbi and editor of Tikkun. Fascinating perspectives, especially since it was the first time I had gotten to see a rabbi and an atheist sitting side by side at a round table.

Got a lot of behind the scenes information, far outside of what you hear in the press. Stuff about how news organizations deal with overseas reporters, about the preponderance of Jewish editors and reporters, and how they’re received overseas. Heard the Kaddish recited for the first time (not counting Ginsberg’s version ;). It was beautiful.

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Multiuser

Figured out today how to make phpmyadmin run multi-user (like it might through an ISP) so I can have students in my webdb class use phpmyadmin for their class projects without being able to see the databases that drive the main site.

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Primal Drum

Amy just called to say she had gotten back from the doctor and heard our baby’s heartbeat for the first time. She described it as the sound of “tiny little horse hoof-beats.” And that she could hear her own deeper, slower heartbeat in the background. So the baby is tuned in to the elemental rhythm, and making one of its own. The primal funk. What a moment, wish I had been there.