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Watts Up?

Just plugged my server, monitor, modem and router into a Watts Up watt meter borrowed from Berkeley’s Sun Light And Power. The goal is to see how much power this machine chews in a month, then purchase solar cells, inverter, and battery backup to match or exceed. Going by initial conversations, should be able do this relatively affordably, even without feeding power back to the grid (if you want to see your electric meter turn backwards, the investment swells considerably — we’ll start small).

Music: Velvet Underground :: Some Kinda Love
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Margaret Cho

“What’s this weird connection between fans of Star Trek, S&M, and the Renaissance Faire?”

This is Margaret Cho, apparently describing my next-door neighbors. Had never seen her before; rented both of her shows and watched with Amy this weekend. “I’m the One That I Want” by far the funnier, more cohesive, more involving. “Notorious C.H.O.” more like straight stand-up, less funny. But she is so honest, so gregarious, just so … willing to mock her family, it’s mesmerizing.

Music: Neil Young :: Loose Change
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Photshopped Fox News Moments

History as though seen through the eyes of Fox News. Bril.

Speaking of Fox, there was hardly any mention of the fact that Bill O’Reilly was pre-empted throughout the entirety of the Iraq war. Lord, sweet respite. Did Fox feel he was just too inflammatory to be set loose on such a sensitive subject? He’s the network’s biggest draw, and it was as if they just decided to put a lid on the garbage can for a few weeks.

Music: Musci – Venosta :: Dialogue Between A Dreamer And Others
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Emerging Tech Conf.

Jon Lebkowsky has been blogging highly detailed notes from O’Reilly’s Emerging Tech conference all week. Not so much futurist stuff but very smart people pulling the big picture of the new social computing into focus – RSS, Wikis, FOAF, hive mind, open spectrum, mesh…

Clay Shirky on social structure in social software:

Why do we have weblogs now? Why did we have geocities instead? We didn’t know what we were doing – it took a while to realize that conversation was better than pictures of cats. We’ve internalized, now people are building, and what they’re building is web native. A weblog and a wiki is web all the way in… lightweight, loosely coupled, easy to break down and extend.

Andrew Orlowski slams the conference, then Tim O’Reilly rebuts the slam. Boys, boys.

Music: Ali Farka Toure and Ry Cooder :: Banga
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Yard Sale Score

In SF last night on the way to see Hedwig again with friends (show closes May 11 and is tremendously entertaining — GO!) and passed a guy with random wares spread out on the sidewalk in one of those makeshift yard sales. Amongst the usual raft of items: twine, coverless book, rabbit’s foot, pen stolen from the bank with chain still attached, was a shiny new… AOL 7.0 CD. Yup, for sale. The entrepreneurial spirit runs high. I wondered how much he got for it.

Music: Clem Snide :: Lets Explode (Master Cylinder)
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iPhoto Acid Test

Put iPhoto’s slideshow feature to the public test last night. Mimi Chakarova came back from India with hundreds of incredible images (not yet online). Arranged them in iPhoto 3 and added another hundred slides of text blocks – captions, poems, etc. Set the interval and timed the segments, then ripped chunks of audio tracks in iTunes and stitched them together in QuickTime Pro. Told iPhoto to use the resulting audio track as the sound track for her album. The result was an absolutely breathtaking 25 minute presentation, which we output through a high-quality projector and very good speakers to a room of around 100 people. Went off without a hitch. Nobody was more amazed than her – she had never done anything remotely multimedia before, but pulled this off in two days with about 30 minutes training.

Music: The White Stripes :: Little Acorns
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They Call Her “Peaches”

Listening tonight to the alternatingly sweet / heavy, intense / broadway, pastoral / political voice of Nina Simone, who passed on yesterday at age 70. Saddened not just at her death as I am always to see the great masters peeling away, one by one. Great music still rises up to take its place, it’s true, and I don’t want to come off like I romance only the past, blind to the present, but I always want to ask, who will be this generation’s Nina Simone / Sun Ra / Django Reinhardt? History is one-way and I don’t hear world-changing music anywhere around me.

Yahoo! has more.

Music: Nina Simone :: Mood Indigo
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Chickenfoot

A year ago, posted about baald and his chicken head motorcycle helmet. Then recently, doing research, stumbled entirely by accident on a blog entry by a guy I knew back in Boston — Tim Anderson lived in a cramped hollow in an MIT building and built robots and 3D scanners and held amazing show and tell nights… and now apparently has turned his genius toward kiteboarding — here he is with chickenfoot foot pads and a hand-crafted chickenhead hood. That’s two chickenheads in my life, neither edible.

Music: Count Basie and His Orchestra :: Easy Money
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War Media

One of the take-home lessons of this war (for me) has been that it hammered home the gulf of coverage between television and the internet. With two 24-hour news channels and all the hundreds of embedded journalists at work, one might hope to have heard hundreds of meaningful perspectives. And the funny thing is, if TV was your only source of news through the course of the war, you probably felt that you were hearing lots of meaningful perspectives, that you were, on the whole, getting fair and balanced coverage.
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