Apparently I’m not the only one having trouble getting MySQL and Python to play nice under OS X — last February’s post on getting the two to cooperate under OS X has generated a ton of traffic. Now I’ve upgraded to Snow Leopard and faced a handful of new challenges (but eventually got it working). Rather than scatter my notes, I’ve updated the original post with Snow Leopard instructions.
“Dad Rock” Isn’t a Bad Thing
Recently at Stuck Between Stations, Roger Moore has been on a tear.
Wilco: For Dads About to Rock, We Salute You
Wilco will always be too traditional for those who want them to be weird, and too weird for those who want them to be traditional.
Shatner Meets Sarah: Tundra on the Edge of Forever
For a long time after I first saw spoken-word artist Sarah Palin recite for a national audience, part of me doubted her existence. … But Palin is indeed real, and the past month has shown that I clearly misunderestimated her artistic skill. A governor is a lot like a performance artist, but with actual responsibilities.
Jacques Dutronc: 500 Billion Little Martians Can’t Be Wrong
I only remembered it was Bastille Day an hour before it was over this Tuesday, but I knew just what I wanted to hear. Jacques Dutronc is a revered figure in his country’s rock history that remains a total obscurity to many stateside. That’s a shame, because if there’s one person who can demonstrate that “French rock†isn’t an oxymoron, it’s Jacques Dutronc.
Populate Mailman Lists from Django Projects
I spent much of the summer building an intranet in Django for Miles’ school. Since the school is a co-op, we need to keep track a lot of stuff – charges, credits, and obligations, parents, students, teachers, family jobs, committee membership, the board, etc. etc. I’m happy with how the site came out, but unfortunately can’t share it here, since it’s a private site.
One of the goals of the rebuild was to put an end to the laborious manual process of maintaining the school’s multiple overlapping mailing lists. Since all of those relationships, people types, and groups were already stored in the intranet’s database, I figured it should be possible to run various queries and populate Mailman mailing lists from them directly. Due to the messy nature of the real world, the process was a lot trickier than it sounds on paper, but I eventually did get a smoothly working list generation system up and running, talking to our Django system and working with virtually no manual intervention. Members can update their own profiles and find that their mailing list subscription address has changed automatically a few hours later. Administrators can give someone a new family job or board position and that person will find themselves subscribed to the right mailing list for it later that day.
Since there isn’t much published out there on making these two systems (Django and Mailman) play nicely together, I decided to publish the scripts and document the recipe I used to get it all working. Hope someone finds the system useful.
Soon Obsolete
A week ago, I spied this sign, attached to a chain link fence on a construction site near my work. Thought it was strange, maybe a relic from a bygone era, but mostly just loved it as a metaphor for a seven-year-old codebase we’re about to ditch. Still, the words NONCHALANCE VIABILITY SURVEY rang in the back of my brain. This was too odd to be accidental.
Last night, I pulled up the picture again and noticed that it included a toll-free number. Decided to give it a call – why not? What I heard next was… well, you’ll just have to call it yourself and see.
So apparently the whole thing is an art project of some kind – subtle and “official-looking” enough to pass for just more bureaucratic signage, so easy to walk past, not notice, be ignored. But just below the surface is something that rings a bit like a Church of the Subgenius 20 years later. Digging deeper, found this SFMOMA article about the project (and related ones), which in turn linked to Elsewhere Public Works, who apparently run the Nonchalance Viability Survey. Dig the arcane command line interface at the Elsewhere site.
I keep thinking about how this sign could have been just a raised eyebrow to me, barely noticed. How much do we miss on a daily basis? In the swirling miasma of culture, there are unnoticed touchstones that lead to paths that goes as deep and as far as we care to follow.
Shatner Meets Sarah: Tundra on the Edge of Forever
For Stuck Between Stations, brilliant piece by Roger Moore on William Shatner’s dramatic reading of Sarah Palin’s Twitter stream, including a sideways reference to Swedish children’s books:
“It didn’t help that the author of her signature convention speech is a vegetarian animal rights activist, or that the names of her six children (Snipp, Snapp, Snurr, Flicka, Ricka, and Dicka) sounded too familiar. “
That’s when blueberry smoothie squirted out of my nose from laughter.
Six Flags Hell
Don’t get me wrong – Miles and I had a great day at Six Flags Discovery Kingdom today. Father and son time, gorgeous day, a blast on the rides and quality time spent with elephants, sting rays, and walruses. But I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a mixed bag. Running through the experience is an undercurrent – or is it a main current? – of being either completely ripped off or force-fed Velveeta. Kind of like coming down from a Sex Pistols concert:
Lydon closed the final Sid Vicious-era Sex Pistols concert in San Francisco’s Winterland in January 1978 with a rhetorical question to the audience: “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”
Sorry if this sounds like cynical sour grapes, but couldn’t help but make mental notes of every sheister angle on the experience:
- Start with last night’s ticket ordering process. The Six Flags web site is clearly a multi-million dollar extravaganza… but one that’s both ill-executed and simultaneously designed to start digging spare change from the depths of your pockets right from the get-go. $5 “processing fee” to have tickets mailed to you I can understand. But if you choose to print the tickets at home yourself? You pay the exact same $5 “processing fee.” Zero cost to them, no choice for the consumer. A fin for the privilege of using your own printer and saving them the postage. And check out the quality of the tickets their site generates (click image at left)
Same when generated via all modern browsers I tested. So lame I had to call tech support because I wasn’t sure they’d actually accept it at the gate. Tech support said they’d never heard of this problem, though ticket takers later said they see it all the time. - How long should it take to discover something as simple as hours of operation on a web site for a theme park of this caliber? Give yourself a test and try to dig up this info from their site. How long did it take you? Lame.
- $15 for parking. Multiplied by, what, 5,000 cars? Day in, day out? Unadulterated extraction.
- Sign at entrance: “NO outside food or drinks allowed.” You’ll find out why in a minute. That means NO you cannot bring your own PBJs for the kids. NO you may not bring water from home.
- Yes, I know that resorts, airports, and recreation areas of all kinds charge exorbitant amounts for food. But check this out: $4 for water. $6 for small scoop of ice cream. $8 for a hot dog. And so on. What I don’t understand about this kind of pricing is that I thought that’s what anti-competitive / monopoly regulations were all about – ensuring that a free market can do its job. When there is NO possibility of competition in an area and when that area PREVENTS you from bringing your own food, WHY is this legal?
- Watching the killer whale show, a Jumbotron is used to give people in the crappy seats a better view. Nice, but abused. MC talks up the show, gives you a tease, then says, no lie, “We’ll start Celebrating Shouka after this brief message.” The message? A 60-second ad for the Six Flags credit card. Captive audience already payed $50 a head for the privilege of attending and they’re going to use the opportunity to upsell us on other products and services. Obscene. To add insult to injury, they followed that up with a smarmy “tribute” to the “men and women of our armed services who protect our freedoms.” How is that relevant to a whale show, or to Six Flags in any way? The whole thing felt cheeseball and insincere.
- Standing in line for rides, a nice opportunity to talk with your family. But no, Six Flags assumes we’d rather be watching TV during that time, so they hang LCD displays in the lines, on which they broadcast Jonas Brothers videos (please just kill me) and, yes, more ads for their products and services. Gag factor: 10.
- Remember those expensive beverages? It gets worse. Most concession stands offer a $12.99 (not a typo) soft drink cup — in hideous day-glo orange — that can be refilled with 5 cents worth of corn syrup and sugar at any other concession stand throughout the day for 99 cents. For $13 they better be refilling it free for a year! What really blew my mind was seeing how many people took them up on the preposterous offer. One giant goblet of sugar isn’t enough for one day – we’re going to need this thing full all day! Not sure what bothers me more – that Six Flags has the gall to make an offer like this, or that the math works out to a “good deal” in so many people’s minds. Ugh.
All that said, it was still a great outing. But they make it so bittersweet, shoving just enough rip-off culture down your throat to keep the whole experience teetering on the brink of “completely not worth it, no matter how fun the rides are.”
Sometimes capitalism – and the culture that laps it up – makes me want to cry.
Miles in the Mirror
Digging through some old images, stumbled across this one, shot by Miles (age six) while playing with my camera. Quite beautiful … seems to have a real sense for the camera. He must get that from his mother.
Peter Brantley, Vision Forum, Swedenborg
Birdhouse Hosting is pleased to welcome several new web sites that have gone live over the past few weeks:
This blog seeks to advance the use of network-based communications and media to develop new services and products that enable people to enrich their lives and transform our society through web and mobile technologies.
The VISION FORUM, a ministry of the Episcopal Church of the Transfiguration, was founded in 2008 to increase awareness of the reality of the human condition and the promise of hope and healing offered through education and the arts leading toward a sustainable, just, and peaceful world.
Finally, a lovely church site for a wonderful local community:
The mission of the Hillside Community Church is to provide a place of worship for the community and to facilitate spiritual growth.
Mt. Diablo Solo
Another great solo day trekking Bay Area backroads – this time to Mt. Diablo. Not having a full day to play with, drove in half way and parked at a placed called Junction, then hit the Summit trail and hiked all the way up. 82 degrees heading in, but temps dropped as I neared the peak. Wind started whipping, and black streaks of rain separated from the clouds. Only ended up getting dumped on for five minutes, thankfully. Exhausted by end of day.
Surpassed the 300 geocache finds marked, and then some. Also nabbed three “earthcaches,” which have no container or log but instead are about discovering and learning about some unique geological feature. Highlight of day – doing the multi-cache at the summit. After I had done the math and got to the final location, took the cap off a fencepost and was greeted not by the cache but by a colony of swarming earwigs, right out of a horror movie. Awshum.
Some devilishly clever containers today – like the normal-looking pinecone shown, and the fake plumbing – you had to remove the pipe assembly, then turn the valve and a Bison tube tumbled out. Loved it.
Slideshow above does not include captions – view set at Flickr for those.
Significant Objects
Birdhouse Hosting is happy to welcome Significant Objects, the latest brainchild from Hermenaut Josh Glenn. The project is so interesting I’m going to run the whole back-story:
Rob Walker and I are amateur students of the “cathexis” via which significance accrues to inanimate objects, particularly ones that aren’t as obviously meaningful as, say, heirlooms, travel souvenirs, or objets d’art. Rob’s “Consumed” column in the New York Times Magazine attempts to figure out why consumers respond the way they to do particular products, from consumer items to TV shows; while a book that I coedited, “Taking Things Seriously,” asked 75 writers, artists, and other creative types to describe the surprising significance of unlikely-looking objects found in their homes, offices, and studios.
Agreeing that narrative — stories — is the vehicle through which insignificant objects become significant, Rob and I decided we’d run a test. We’d ask authors to tell stories about worthless objects that Rob and I had purchased at thrift stores and yard sales for a couple of bucks at most. Would said objects then become significant? If so, how to measure such a transformation? Rob’s brilliant/funny solution: Put the objects on eBay, using the authors’ stories as the Item Description (while making it clear that the story was fictional), then see if the objects sell for more than we paid for ’em. We’d pass along all proceeds from the eBay sales to the authors; and we’d send the item and also the story to the winning bidders.
So this spring we contacted 35 authors, some of whom we knew and admired, and others whom we just admired. The response has been very gratifying, indeed. Posted today: Great object-oriented stories by Lydia Millet, Matthew Battles, Annie Nocenti, Lucinda Rosenfeld, and Luc Sante. Coming soon: More objects, and stories by Stewart O’Nan, Matthew Sharpe, Cintra Wilson, Ben Greenman, Michelle Tea, Kurt Andersen, Rebecca Wolff, Mark Frauenfelder, and Bruce Sterling, among other talents. Eventually we hope to publish 75, or maybe 100, stories about these ex-insignificant objects.
I won’t keep sending emails, but we will post one or more new objects/stories to the website every weekday. So stay tuned! Please read the stories, leave comments, bid on objects (cheap!), and most importantly, please help me SPREAD THE WORD.
