Last night, a very unamusing t-shirt design came to me in a dream. Basically, you'd have an illustration of a bar of soap, a crowbar, some rebar, and so forth all fighting each other, underneath which would read (in big block letters) "Bar brawl!".
:: In which I use dark humor as a defense mechanism
Barrett loved road trips, so it was only fitting that we drove eight hours to visit him one last time. Here we see Chicago, Kentucky, and Tennessee on a weekend that, despite (because of?) being one of the more trying periods I can recall, contained some genuinely enjoyable moments. Those moments are vastly over-represented in this photo collection, because when the bad times come, nobody wants to be the jerk running around with a camera mumbling something like "...for posterity!".
That thumbnail's so awesomely pastoral and contemplative I bet you just can't wait for your friends to die.
My friend Barrett always had a unique sense of timing. Chronically both tardy and early, you could depend on him for calls in the middle of the night or weekend-long escapades together after which he'd disappear for a month. About three weeks ago, I received a random email from him. It said, in its entirety:
i just wanted to say that i love you guys.
you know, in case you forget.
i especially wanted to say i love you in purple.
barrett
And just now I found out he died yesterday. That email is the last thing I'll ever hear from him.
I'll try to eulogize him better later on, once the shock wears off, but I wanted to say to everyone that I love you, in any color. I don't say it enough, but I do.
I wrote a Perl script to query Google Maps with an address and get back a latitude and longitude. My coworker Jesse helped with the regex's, because I'm a dilettante.
Usage: ./go.pl "address"
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
my $str = $ARGV[0];
$str = &escape($str);
my $var = `GET 'http://maps.google.com/maps?q=$str'`;
$var=~s/.*(lat=\"-?\d+\.\d+\" lng=\"-?\d+\.\d+").*/$1/gs;
print $var;
print "\n";
sub escape {
my($toencode) = @_;
$toencode=~s/([^a-zA-Z0-9_\-. ])/uc sprintf("%%%02x",ord($1))/eg;
$toencode =~ tr/ /+/; # spaces become pluses
return $toencode;
}
Cop Rock is widely held to be one of, if not the, worst shows ever aired on network television. After a lunchtime discussion on the subject, I researched and found that Trio has put up three clips (RealVideo, Windows Media) to promote their re-running of this postmodern ironic masterpiece / WORST SHOW EVAR.
This thing never jumped the shark...it made a B line straight into it's mouth at light speed. When l saw coming attractions for this show, l thought it was a joke. Then l saw an interview with one of the stars and she was talking about how seriously they were taking the music, and how difficult the choreographed routines were. I'm sure the most militant right to life activist would've aborted this fetus at conception.
There's nothing like a night of big plans ending prematurely to leave one all dressed up, stranded, and despondent. Thanks to Webster Hall's rather strange decision to start a rock show at the elementary-school-glee-club-plays-the-retirement-home hour of 6pm (BV thinks this is an effort to keep their regular patrons happy [and has pictures of a automobile-pedestrian collision on the block adjacent to mine]), and thanks also to my refusal to believe/accept that I could miss the second opening act by showing up at 8:30, I arrived just in time to catch the last song from said second opening act (Dios Malos) and stand through the headliner's prolonged sound check only to leave two songs into their set. Blech.
So there Dr. Glasses and I found ourselves at the ungodly hour of 9:30 in a part of town where, to paraphrase Detective Joe Friday, it's not exactly advisable to stand around whistling, unless the artist whose song you're whistling is signed to an independent label (preferably Matador or Def Jux... maybe Vice), or better yet unsigned. And you should be wearing denim.
What happened next is blurred somewhat by an iced double-espresso shot and muscat gummy-induced haze, but on our way to a bar to kill some time we heard the distinct sounds of an apartment party wafting down East Fifth Street, and decided to straight crash that joint.
The beauty of crashing a random house party is multifaceted and unique. You are, in layered order of increasing transgression:
Infiltrating someone's close social circle
Doing so in a private setting
Doing so in the host's home
Carving pentagrams into a bathroom wall (optional)
Pilfering alcohol
Despite this bevy of violations emotional and territorial, you are not rebuffed or reprimanded but indeed welcomed. That is, of course, if the party is sufficiently large and you can hit the sweet spot of anonymity. And let's face it, there's a word for how two bespectacled twenties-something coming from a Fiery Furnaces show integrate with a party in that neck of the woods: blend.
So it was that we rang a stranger's doorbell, entered their apartment, grabbed a couple Red Stripes, stood around for a while, and left. Regular 007s, we were. At the very least we made the beer commercials proud.
I only really mention this because given my chronic meekness it's about the most antithetical behavior imaginable. I'm sure there's a party-crasher's guild out there shaking its figurative head in shame.
WHEREAS, Pedro's efforts to bake a cake for Summer illustrate the positive connection between culinary skills to lifelong relationships; and
WHEREAS, Kip's relationship with LaFawnduh is a tribute to e-commerce and Idaho's technology-driven industry; and
WHEREAS, Kip and LaFawnduh's wedding shows Idaho's commitment to healthy marriages; and
WHEREAS, the prevalence of cooked steak as a primary food group pays tribute to Idaho's beef industry; and
WHEREAS, Napoleon's tetherball dexterity emphasizes the importance of physical education in Idaho public schools; and
WHEREAS, Tina the llama, the chickens with large talons, the 4-H milk cows, and the Honeymoon Stallion showcase Idaho's animal husbandry; and
WHEREAS, any members of the House of Representatives or the Senate of the Legislature of the State of Idaho who choose to vote "Nay" on this concurrent resolution are "FREAKIN' IDIOTS!" and run the risk of having the "Worst Day of Their Lives!"
One of the perils of an open office space is when a coworker at the opposite end of the rather large room sneezes and you respond at a normal volume, only those immediately around you can hear while the sneezer remains unaware. As a result there are several overly-blessed people surrounding me, and a large un-blessed contingent far away. I am working on a blessing redistribution plan, but I fear those endowed with many blessings will not readily give them up.
Hitachi announced that they've developed a technology called perpendicular storage which will enable about 10x the storage to come to comparably-sized hard drives (get ready for a 600GB iPod), and to communicate this achievement to the media/public, they've put together a flash animation in the style of Schoolhouse Rock, which implies they think the average tech intelligence of the media/public is comparable to a small child. That's ok with me.
It will be interesting to the following, non-mutually-exclusive groups:
Fans of the original Schoolhouse Rock TV series
Simpsons aficionados familiar with the episode featuring a parody of that series (and really, you can't call yourself an "aficionado" unless you are)
Gen-Xers and Gen-Yers who remember the 1996 album tribute to Schoohouse Rock, featuring Biz Markie, Blind Melon, Daniel Johnston, The Lemonheads, a pre-TeaNY/Play/LES-fixture Moby, Pavement, and Skee-Lo
Back in college my roommates and I lived above a restaurant on a busy local street(the big web news of the day is Google's addition of satellite views to their mapping service, so here I'm demonstrating my status as "plugged in" and "cutting edge" by slyly including a link thereto [and then further signaling my ability to be "wry" and "self-deprecating" by pointing it out {which I also pointed out and have therefore subsequently undermined, but it was worth it to use curly brackets}]), and decided that our collective voice should be visible to the pedestrian and automotive traffic down below. The best (read: geekiest) way to do this was with a scrolling LED sign bringing pearls of wisdom like "take the money and run" and "it rubs the lotion on its skin; it does this whenever it's told" to passers-by on the street level.
I would already find the idea of a LED belt buckle almost orgasmically irresistible, but with the added justification of purchasing it as an act of sentimentality...
My cousin played Carnegie Hall on Saturday, so I took the opportunity to bask in a little Gilded Age opulence, which apparently means taking lots of pictures of the balconies.
Most of the Bittorrent tracking sites I've been using over the past months keep tabs on the pertinent activity of their users. The prime statistic used to gauge whether you're shouldering a fair portion of the burden is the vaunted "share ratio" - simply the amount of data you've uploaded divided by the amount you've downloaded. Keep this number high (preferably above 1.0) and you will avoid the ire of the trackers, who may suspend or even delete your account as a punitive resort. The broad idea is good - share and share alike - but the particular mechanics of it got me to a'ponderin.
Your download and upload numbers are measured the only way they can be, by tracking the amount of data transferred to and from your client. Everything you decide to retrieve counts as a download, and only what others decide to pull from you - not what you're making available, but what's actually pulled - counts as an upload. You could download a single mp3 of Isaac Hayes covering Tiny Tim, while sharing several gigabytes of rare video outtakes from Carrot Top: Live at the Apollo (too hott for TV), and if the demand for everyone's favorite prop-comedian/collect calling fetishist is nonexistent, your share ratio is zero*.
Something implicative happens here, when you try to quantify how well one plays with others. By selecting a criterion with which to measure it, you are forced to make more explicit assertions about its nature than when it remained a nebulous mental construct. The act of giving is defined solely as delivering data as opposed to making data available for delivery. Generosity isn't in the offer, but in the acceptance thereof. Or: we now have hard, unequivocal data proving it's not (just) the thought that counts.
Extrapolations:
1. The Bittorrent community is comprised of a bunch of pragmatic cynics interested in redefining the societal notion of what exactly constitutes a mutually beneficial exchange.
2. I'm waaaaaay over thinking this.
*Weirdly (and totally beside the point) however, if you uploaded without downloading I guess your ratio (x/0) would be "null set", "infinity", or however you choose to divide by zero. Congratulations, you're an altruist. With BT, as in life, this is theoretically possible, though I've never seen it.
