Tilting at windmills for a better tomorrow.
Not sure whether to be afraid or ecstatic — Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band are reuniting after 20 years (without the good cap’n, of course). One show in LA, two in the UK. I just pray it doesn’t become an embarrassment for them, although I have confidence they wouldn’t be doing it if they’d lost their thang in the meantime.
—
Music: Fess Williams And His Orchestra :: Eleven-Thirty Saturday Night
Trying to figure out why I have less than 2GBs of space left on my hdd at work — was trying to burn a DVD and didn’t have enough swap space for it. Found OmniDiskSweeper and started burrowing through hidden subdirs. Found the culprit : 650 core files of 22MBs each hanging out in /cores, totaling 21.5 GB. Deleted them all to get my drive back, but the question is, which app is dumping core so often and consistently without me even knowing, and why isn’t the system cleaning these up during daily/weekly maintenance?
Happened across gnod’s statistics – an amazing applet that connects artists and musicians in a stringy gooey web of interrelatedness. Click on an artist and similar artists will gather ’round the strange attractor, showing you that people who like artist X will also like artist Y. Keep digging to swim through your own constellation of tastes.
At work until 2 a.m. last night managing the web-publishing component of the J-School’s 2002 election coverage. A huge effort – 60 students, 6 editor/professors, and 4 web techs. It all came down in the end to a real-life test of Movable Type in action, which passed with flying colors, despite a few limitations.
Amazingly, references to the O’Reilly blog entry found it’s way into a bunch of blogs today, resulting in birdhouse.org hitting #16 on blogdex, a first.
From there, discovered that scripting.com’s Dave Winer had totally misunderstood the point of our Movable Type project. My article was called “Fooling Movable Type.” His rejoinder was called “Who’s the Fool?,” which I found personally insulting. His choice of words is probably an indirect result of the fact that I didn’t choose his product Radio back when I was selecting blogging software for the J-School’s intellectual property class. Ironically, he’s the one who now looks the fool, since he apparently didn’t read my ORA piece very carefully – not sure how else he could have conflated our election coverage with the IP/weblog class discussed at ORA a few months ago.
This is significant because his criticism of our project assumes that ours is a blogging project, when it is not. We are producing collective news coverage of elections, and he is suggesting that each student author be given his/her own blog. Dave has absolutely no idea how intense the evening was, how many people are running around yelling, making corrections, updating stories over and over again. It was all we could do to keep it together as well as we did under one roof, and he’s suggesting we distribute the project among 60 separate blogs, aggregating them together at run-time. All I can say is, “Whatever.” Dave’s misunderstanding of the nature of our project is profound, but he nevertheless has the cojones to ask “Who’s the Fool?”
The mind reels.
I’m very proud of the 2002 election site – we published a good looking, well-oiled site in record time with experimental tools.
—
Music: Man or Astro-Man? :: Fractionalized Reception Of A Scrambled Transmission
In some combination of protest and support, I cast my gubernatorial vote for Green Party candidate Peter Camejo. Turns out he received more of the vote (15.79%) than Republican Bill Simon (15.12%) in San Francisco. Makes me realize how completely distorted my vision of the political landscape is – this area is so off-skew with the rest of the country. I sometimes wonder exactly where all these so-called Republicans actually live, then I realize, “Oh yeah, everywhere but here.”
—
Music: Toots and the Maytals :: Sailin’ On
Walking up Euclid for an afternoon coffee, the homeless guy who sweeps the sidewalk daily outside of the Bongo Burger said suddenly to me “Nice haircut!” It’s true that I got a haircut over the weekend. Strange to become aware that I’m some kind of regular in this man’s universe, so much so that he knows when my hairstyle has changed. I don’t even know his name.
—
Music: Robert Wyatt :: Was A Friend
Wonderfully evocative Lynda Barry cartoon on modern marvels like hair curlers and El Marko and Jello 1-2-3 that aren’t so new, but kinda sorta seem marvelous anyway. Barry is our (Amy’s and my) hero. We have a hand-drawn and signed image of hers (“Tip-Toe Marlys”) hanging in the baby’s room. Now Miles is getting into her too.
—
Music: T. Rex :: Seal of Seasons
Rented a disc of Groucho Marx’ old TV show “You Bet Your Life” b/w The Red Skelton Show. So strange the way the pacing of media and the national sense of humor have changed. You can see it looking back through every decade – get back to Hee Haw reruns and they’re barely funny, though I remember the family gathering around the tube in the 70s to watch Hee Haw and laugh… hard to imagine now what we thought was so rip-roaring.
We think of Groucho as some kind of genius, but his humor is actually banal by today’s standards, and the pace of the show is so slow. At the beginning the camera sits on a placard bearing his name for a full 15 seconds as Mr. Music Man plays a charming ditty — it’s excruciating to eyeballs fried by 21st century shotgun media. If someone appeared today working with Groucho-style humor and pacing, no one would notice.
—
Music: Cardiacs :: Cry Wet Smile Dry
For the J-School’s Election 2002 coverage, trying to see just how far I can bend Movable Type to make it behave like a full-blown Content Management System. Short answer: about 90% of the way. Details in my ORA blog.
—
Music: John Holt :: Ghetto Girl
Finally, a QuickTime plug-in to support Ogg-Vorbis. Drop it in place, restart iTunes, and your OGG files just work. A command-line encoder is also available at the site. Rumors floating that Apple may be working on an official Ogg decoder, but for now, this one is working great. No iPod support though, so we’re not all the way there.
—
Music: Plus-Tech Squeezebox :: Test Room
