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Junior Brown

Went last night to Slim’s with friends to see the righteous Junior Brown. Holy mother of pearl, this was the most exhilarating show I’ve seen in a long time. Didn’t really have any expectations – just thought it was going to be good country music. So was totally unprepared for the range of this guy. First of all, he plays the “guit-steel” – a double-necked combined guitar and pedal steel guitar in one body. Apparently, the idea for this thing came to him in a dream, and put him on a quest to find a master guitar maker. Sounds great, looks great. He rests it on an elementary-school music stand rather than around the neck.

Four-piece band, all in sharp-fitting silvery suits (suits make such a difference). The bassist a wirey Alabama (?) nerd, flat-top rhythm guitarist, and the drummer an apparent cousin of Samuel Clemens – about 60 and playing a single drum and cymbal. “No city of drums on this stage, ladie and gents – when you know how to play, you only need ONE drum.” And he proved it, too.

They play Johnny Cash / Ernest Tubb-style country – honest stuff. But the thing is, it’s not just country. This is what happens when you grow up hearing Peter Frampton and the Moody Blues and watching Jello-brand gelatin commercials and make country music. It’s not fake country, not camp country – it’s the real deal, but it’s also, like, late 21st century or something. Just stomping, but with these breakout guitar solos that border on freaky, super staccatto hammer-on stuff, Hendrix blues. Like 7 degrees of camp, no more. Maybe a little more. I kept thinking Eugene Chadborne was going to take stage and turn the whole thing inside out.

Towards the end they went into this medley of TV and movie theme songs. It was relentless, punishing, hilarious. Hawaii Five-Oh, Secret Agent Man, Bonanza, I forget what else, but at one point you’re suddenly hearing the five-note aliens theme of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” played on the guit-steel. The audience busted a gut. Then it got way out – like lightning, he detuned his E string down about three octaves and played the mothership’s part. Back and forth between the human and alien parts, slick as snot. Then suddenly he comes out of Close Encounters and into Dueling Banjos. Like WTF?!!! Just amazing.

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LiveJournal, O’Reilly, and RSS

Ack packet via : LiveJournal now supports automatic RSS detection, and you can output your LJ blog in RSS format just by adding /rss to the end of your LJ URL.
Will take some experimenting to figure out how best to take advantage of these new capabilities. My goal is to have the equivalent of an LJ friends page but that also picks up on non-LJ blogs. Don’t have a lot of time for fiddling. Pointers welcome.Meanwhile, O’ReillyNet invited me to post a blog in their authors blog collection. So what I’m going to do is keep my LJ blog for personal / miscellany, but put all my tech-related posts in my ORA blog. I’ll also install a permanent link from this blog to that, eventually.

Jon Udell on Personal RSS aggregators: “The relevance engine that powers the emerging RSS network is, very much like Google’s relevance engine, decentralized and ultimately social in nature. The raw output of the online news collective is filtered for me by people doing what they do best: spotting patterns, alerting the tribe.“

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Goodbye Bike

Almost a year after the accident, I finally sold the motorcycle. To an Apple employee, no less (WebObjects team). Cool guy. At least I know it’s going to a good home. Not sure why it took me so long. It’s been out of the shop for ages. Just couldn’t bring myself to do it, even though I had already agreed that I wouldn’t be riding it anymore. The guy came to check it out last night, test drove. Offered me a fair price, money for the housing fund. Tonight after work I drove it into SF for him (he was a bit nervous).

But when I got on the bike I realized it was just 35 miles shy of turning 10k miles. No way could that opportunity slip through the fingers. Warm summer evening. The final hurrah. Headed the opposite direction from the highway, up into the Oakland/Berkeley hills, straight for the Grizzly Peak ride. Taking it easy at first, hadn’t done any serious riding in a year, slowly building back up toward the old speeds. But not pushing it. Once bitten and all that. Just felt so good, that time of the day when the light is all golden, everyone is inside eating dinner and watching jeapordy and the hills are on fire with sunset light, smell of pines and eucalyptus, distant ocean smell, the twisties all to myself.

Got really contemplative about it. Of course a big part of me wants to keep the bike and enjoy summer on two wheels. And this other part of me, this new part, that knows so viscerally what happens when you blow it once for a split second, and this other part that’s like genetic programming, self preservation for the sake of the kid (the kid is, after all, the rhetoric I used to sell the bike – “gotta do the dad thing.”) Anyway, I made my peace then and there, leaning into a left hander. Enjoy it this once more, and say goodbye. I feel okay with this. It’s fine.

Gassed up for the buyer and timed it just right – 10,000 miles rolled over on the Bay Bridge heading west into the dusk, the sea all purple on either side, summer night sky coming down, getting cooler. Patted the tank and thanked the bike for the life lessons we took in together, and for all the fun. Got kind of choked up. It was good.

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Gummi Louise

Amy started having her first “weird pregnant cravings” the other day – for gummi sharks, of all things. So I bought a pound of gummi and made a gummi mandala for her to come home to.

gummi amy

Louise got into it too (note little licking of little lips).

gummi louise

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Plugging the Analog Hole

This was floating around the other day – Plugging the Analog Hole – a fairly chilling piece on attempts of the entertainment industry to convince lawmakers to clamp down on ALL analog-digital converters. Sound innocuous?

If ADCs are constrained from performing analog-to-digital conversion of all watermarked copyrighted works, you might end up with a cellphone that switches itself off when you get within range of the copyrighted music on your stereo; a camcorder that refuses to store your child’s first steps because he is taking them within eyeshot of a television playing a copyrighted cartoon; a camera that won’t snap your holiday moments if they take place against the copyrighted backdrop of a chain store such as Starbucks, which forbids on-premises photography because its fixtures are proprietary works.

Stay tuned.

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Puzzler

OK, a puzzler for you webmaster types (spoiler below).

So I get a call from my a client that two of their people were having trouble logging into the alumni database. I tested these people’s logins in every browser I had handy and they worked fine. No one else was having problems logging in. I went to the job site and sure enough, I couldn’t log in as anyone from two machines, both running IE6. Javascript was enabled. Cookies were enabled. What the heck was going on?

The site uses HTML hosted on a virtual domain at earthlink and database data coming from phpwebhosting.com, all married together in a frameset. Login authentication is handled via PHP sessions.

So why weren’t any logins working from IE6? Give up? This one took quite a while to figure out.

[ … spoiler … ]

First of all, PHP sessions are really just a simplified wrapper for a specialized form of cookie. So start with the realization that cookies aren’t getting planted even though cookies are enabled in the browser.

IE6 has a cookie tolerance slider that defaults to Medium. On the Medium setting,

“Internet Explorer prevents Web sites from storing third-party cookies that do not have a compact privacy policy or that use personally identifiable information without your explicit consent. The browser also prevents Web sites from storing first-party cookies that use personally identifiable information without your implicit consent.”

Compact Privacy Policy:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/using/howto/privacy/config.asp

Ah. So now I have to find out how to implement a compact privacy policy. Jeezis christ. See also:

http://www.w3.org/P3P/

and

http://news.com.com/2100-1023-268478.html?legacy=cnet

And finally, I find the deployment answer in a PHP forum. This affects me because the site is pulling HTML and PHP/data from two different sources:

“MSIE 6 has an inaccurate definition of third party cookies. If your domain is hosted on one server and your PHP stuff is on another, the IE6 P3P implementation considers any cookies sent from the second machine “third party”. Third party cookies will be blocked automatically in most privacy settings if not accompanied by what MS considers “an appropriate Compact Policy”. In order to make this new piece of tweakable garbage happy I’d suggest you’d par exemple send

header(‘P3P: CP=”NOI ADM DEV PSAi COM NAV OUR OTRo STP IND DEM”‘);

before sending your cookie from your second machine. This header enables your cookie to survive any privacy setting.

So in the end I went to privacycouncil.com, filled in the wizard, which generated a CPC similar to the one above, and started sending it in the header of auth.php.

What a huge hassle. And I shudder to think how many sites this going to affect. There’s a good intention behind it, but it’s virtually useless, since you can virtually make up the privacy policy (it doesn’t have any necessary bearing on ACTUAL privacy) and meanwhile, it’s going to make a hell of a lot of sites inaccessible.

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A.V. Club

Re: credibility of the Tom Waits interview below – theonionavclub doesn’t appear to be satirical at all – rather an offshoot of theonion. My theory is that they’re just expanding on the brand – reaching for the same audience with more than just humor. Seems like a pretty good site. Smaht kiddies.

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Chicken Head

Give a man a chicken head and he eats for a lifetime.

chickenhead
as he appeared with the rubber chicken head I made him wear for his starring role in Visit To A Sad Planet.

chickenhelmet
With principal shooting complete, the chicken head had nowhere to go and nothing to do. So our hero cut it in half and gummed the business end to his motorcycle helmet.

Ladies, admit it – you want to date this man. Serious inquiries to .

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Gracenote Database

There’s so much conflicting data out there on whether or not MP3s and digital music distribution affect CD sales, but this is a first : Eminem’s as-yet-unreleased CD is currently the 2nd most popular CD being stuck into CD players, according to Gracenote. Also interesting that Gracenote can track popularity of CDs being played regionally (presumably by mapping IP addresses to geography). Not that I feel sorry for Eminem, mind you, but anyone who insists that digital music means more record sales has to take this picture into account.