Friday 03/24/06
Scott Adams (yes, the Dilbert guy) has an absolutely great story about James Blake's comeback in the Indian Wells tennis tournament. I don't follow tennis so I hadn't heard about this, but it's simply amazing, with an incredibly moving ending.
Thursday 03/23/06
Woo! Comcast has upped my bandwidth! I'w now getting a good solid 10 Mbps down (I remember when that was a typical LAN speed) and over 1 Mbps up. If this site seems a little zippier to you, that's probably why.
The cheaper tier is now about the same speed I used to have, which will come in handy when it's time to renew in a couple months...
Proposed slogan: "Comcast. We've upped our bandwidth, now up yours!"
Wednesday 03/22/06
FlapArt: fake book jackets designed to incite reactions in the people who see you reading.
Tuesday 03/21/06
The Wand: absolute power corrupts absolutely. Don't miss the second ending!
Friday 03/17/06
Mike Whybark's got a great true story you should go read.
Great article by Bill Holland from Billboard magazine on the problems record labels have had archiving old musical recordings. Some of this will make you cry.
Thursday 03/16/06
The good news is, the property owner is renovating the apartments where I live. They do need it badly and the revamped apartments (I saw the model last night) are quite nice.
The bad news is, when my lease is up I've got to move out so they can renovate my apartment. I can then either move into an already-renovated apartment, or put my stuff in storage and live somewhere else for a month, then move back into my current apartment after it's renovated. Or of course I could move somewhere else entirely.
I was really hoping not to move again until I was ready to buy a place. I especially was not planning to pay several hundred dollars and endure two moves to end up in the same place I already live in, and I definitely was not planning for my rent to go up $200 a month (gotta pay for the renovations, you see).
Still thinking about what to do. I like where I live and I'm sure I'd like it even better after the renovation. And it's not like I can't afford the extra money, and it'd probably be worth it too. But we're inching toward house payment territory here. For a couple hundred more a month, I could have a condo.
There were a few people at the renovation open house last night who are on month-to-month leases. Those people are basically boned because they are subject to being immediately kicked out so their apartment can be renovated. At least my lease lasts for more than another year, so I don't have to make a decision right away. Still, if I decide to stay, it might be worthwhile for me to volunteer to move early to get a better choice of renovated apartments.
Friday 03/10/06
This is just to say
I have eaten
the brownies
that you gave me
last night
and which
I should probably
have shared
with my cow-orkers
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so gooey
(apologies to William Carlos Williams)
"Alas, poor Yorick! I ate his skull, Horatio." Chocolate skulls made from a mold of a real human skull, using a special mix of chocolate to mimic the appearance of old bone. Only, er, $143!
Thursday 03/09/06
Vonage sure is a bunch of screw-ups. I got their service when I moved into my current apartment in August 2004. A year later I decided to switch to SunRocket. After SunRocket ported my number, I called up Vonage and canceled. Whereupon Vonage proceeded to continue to bill me for three more months. When I called them on this in January, they refused to give me a refund for the overbilling. Fine, whatever, I'd have my credit card issuer deal with it.
Now a couple weeks ago I started getting calls during the day from someone at Microsoft. The mystery caller didn't leave messages, but this morning I happened to be home and saw an unfamiliar cell phone caller and answered. It turned out to be some guy who has been calling his "new" Vonage number periodically to see if it was working yet. Yes -- Vonage gave my phone number to someone else. Since I'd already ported the number to SunRocket, this means that if a Vonage customer calls the number, they get this other guy, since that number is in their system as belonging to him, but if he calls that number from outside Vonage, he gets me, because the national number database has SunRocket as the number's service provider, and they know it belongs to me.
About 15 minutes after I got off the phone with him I got a call from a Vonage rep and explained the situation to him. Hopefully they'll take care of it now, but given their past displays of incompetence, I am not optimistic.
Pac-Man being chased by a ghost (and other animations) on your bike wheels. It's all thanks to an "easy-to-make electronic kit toy" called SpokePOV.
Wednesday 03/08/06
An IRC client in 38 lines of code? It's picoIRC, written in the misunderstood Tcl scripting language.
Why is there a sawed-off shotgun on the International Space Station?
The Taquito Moment: the relationship test you didn't know you were even giving until the other person failed it.
At comic conventions, Walt Parrish of Tacoma has asked numerous artists to draw their characters on cliffs. This turned out to be oddly inspiring, and he's now amassed more than 400 sketches and earned the nickname "The Cliff Guy."
Monday 03/06/06
Ben Folds rocked the house at the Paramount last Saturday night. It was the first time I'd seen him perform and it was a hell of a lot of fun. The crowd was enthusiastic and gave the opener, Chris Mills, a lot of love too. He deserved it, he was very good.
Ben's set focused on his recent music. I think he only did one song from the Five's first album ("Philosophy"), three from Reinhold Messner, and nothing at all from Whatever and Ever Amen. It must be a relief for him not to feel obligated to play "Brick" anymore. He did do both "Army" and "Not the Same" (both of which include audience participation) despite rumors that he was getting tired of "Army." We were treated to his cover of "Bitches Ain't Shit" but, sadly, no "Rock This Bitch," and no Shatner songs (of course, those probably wouldn't really work without Shatner).
Unlike his previous tour, where it was just him and a piano, he did have a drummer and a bassist with him, thus recreating the Ben Folds Five sound -- Lindsay Jamieson and Jared Reynolds, who played on Songs for Silverman. He did a few songs solo as well, however.
Ben revealed that he's been working on the soundtrack for an animated film for DreamWorks, Over the Hedge. He apparently spent the last couple of weeks editing bass drum tracks in Pro Tools and says that if they gave out an Oscar for the tightest bass drum track in an animated feature, this would be a shoo-in.
I was amazed at the variety of people who came out to this show. Sure they were almost all white, and I only say "almost all" just in case there were some persons of color up on the balcony where I couldn't see them, but it was quite a wide range of ages and "types." I'm pretty sure that the five people sitting in front of Kristine and me constituted an entire Folds-loving family (a rather liberal one, given the profanity that laces half his tunes). But no matter their age, nearly everyone seemed to know the words to every song and often sang along -- on key. There wasn't a dry eye in the house as he did "Still Fighting It," the song he wrote for his son, and it was oddly touching to see a bunch of kids tearing up to "Fred Jones Part II," a song about a retiree.
If you have a chance to go see Ben Folds on this tour, take it, especially if you've not seen him before.
Friday 03/03/06
Some guy really hates Bellingham. From his description it sounds like they have the Seattle Freeze up there, only more so. I don't think I'd find it as stultifying as he seems to, but it does seem slightly closer to pathological the way he describes it.
