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Chickenfat

When I was in elementary school the teacher would often put a record on the Close-n-Play called “Go You Chicken Fat, Go” and we would get up and dancercise to the lyrics, which instructed us to “Push up / every morning / 10 times / not just / now and then / give that chickenfat back to the chickens / and don’t be chicken again.” After a while this song was completely burned into the faraway nether regions of the brain. Like knowing how to ride a bike, I know this song.

At the time I thought that only our class exercised to this song. But it turns out that the record was actually released by the President’s Council on Fitness and distributed to every classroom in the country! As a result, I’m finding that lots of people roughly my age also have the Chickenfat song indelibly burned in. I played it for Amy the other morning and she knew most of the words too though she grew up in the Midwest.

Wonder why youth obesity is an epidemic today? No Chickenfat song. Thanks Defective Yeti.

Speaking of music permanently etched into the crannies of the brain, I love this animation of The Hustle. The hideous font too. Our time was a good time.

Update 2007: Video version from the archives:

Music: Suba :: Abraso
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Un-Zen Box

For Valentine’s Day I gave Amy a tiny Zen garden with tiny bag of sand, tiny wooden rake, and tiny rocks.

zenbox_tb.jpg (Click)

The trouble with the mini Zen Garden is that it’s so small that you get frustrated trying to create patterns like the ones David Carradine made in Kung Fu. So you end up either barking at it or losing interest, whichever comes first.

Music: The Smiths :: Sheila Take a Bow
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Pinstripe Exhaustion

I’ve s-o-o-o-o had it with Aqua’s pinstripes. The more brushed aluminum apps I see, the happier I am. In theory, Apple employees should be as tired of seeing pinstripes as we are right about now. So you can mark this as my prediction for X 10.3 : A new default appearance plus additional UI customization options. Yes, I know there are 3rd party hacks for this kind of thing…

n.b.: The difference between a simple wishlist item and a public prediction is quantified as:

pi / (foolhardiness x huevos)

Music: Lilys :: Strange Feelin’
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Twig-n-Berries

Amy made new wallpaper for her Mac featuring Miles on a green rug with large interlocking circles. Buk nekkid. She used one of her desktop Stickies to cover up his wee twig-n-berries, just for the sake of decorum. The particular Stickie note she used happened to contain the account # for our Tiny Tots diaper service. It was all done unselfconsciously, but somehow the combination struck me as perfect visual poetry and we had a long belly laugh about it.

Music: Burning Spear :: Old Marcus Garvey
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Mitnick Hacked

Amused by the fact that Kevin Mitnick’s web site has been hacked into twice already since his release a few weeks ago. Of course, the fact that his host was running unpatched IIS (for chrissake!) is not revealed until the second-to-last paragraph of the story.

Mitnick is pedestalized like he’s the great hacking guru of time, space, and dimension, but the fact is he’s been stuck in a time capsule for years and has much catching up to do to grok the current state of the art. Mitnick running a security company today is like bringing Michelangelo back from the grave and asking him to set up a CPU fab. The world has changed. Hacking has changed. The tools, environment, and culture of hacking have changed tremendously. He’ll catch up, but what a lot of egg on face. Yipes.

Unpatched IIS, for chrissake.

Music: Man or Astro-Man? :: Interstellar Hardrive
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MusicBrainz

The MusicBrainz service aims to become a community-driven replacement to CDDB, which your favorite MP3 encoder / CD player uses to pull down metadata for the CDs you stick in your computer. CDDB, as you’ve probably discovered, is full of errors, the metadata categories are limited, and results can be ambiguous. The CDDB API is also notoriously difficult to build apps around.

MusicBrainz aims to fix all that in two ways: 1) By using positive, unambiguous techniques to fingerprint specific tracks (imagine sending a friend a playlist file and it working on their computer even though the filenames, paths, and metadata are different), and 2) Letting communities collaboratively build metadata and enhance it over time via constant collaborative peer review, Wiki-style. Sounds a lot more capable than freedb.

This could become a beautiful thing. Or at least interesting to watch. Boing-Boing has more.

Music: Mekons :: Tribbles Down South
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Receipts

Joke floating around today:

The UN asked President Bush what evidence he had that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction. He said, “We kept the receipts”.

Music: Toots And The Maytals :: Pressure Drop
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Netsol

I am taking every opportunity to move domain registrations off of Netsol and onto Dotster. Currently trying to transfer betips.net to its new owner, but to do that, I need to retrieve a password. And to do that, Netsol’s password-retrieval system needs to be up and running. For the past 72 hours, I’ve gotten nothing but a “this service temporarily unavailable” message from them.

Music: Godley & Creme :: Sleeping Earth * Honolulu Lulu * The Flood