Michael Hanscom

Enthusiastic ambivert. Geeky, liberal, friendly, curious, hopepunk; trying to be a good person. (he/him)

Gallimaufry 4

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Same deal: ten songs at random…

  • Amii Stewart, ‘Knock on Wood’, off of the Hot Tracks 15th Anniversary Collection: Gotta love the 80’s, and it’s fairly obvious that I do, given how many 80’s-era one-hit-wonders pop up in these lists. Another promotional dj-only remix from Hot Tracks. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any appropriate links on the iTMS.

  • Eurythmics, ‘I Need A Man‘, off of Eurythmics Greatest Hits: I’m a big Eurythmics fan, but this is one of my all-time favorites of their songs. I’m not quite sure if I’d definitively call it my favorite, but it’s definitely in the top three (along with Love Is A Stranger and Missionary Man).

  • Front 242, ‘Headhunter (Xingu Hill)’, off of Headhunter 2000: Headhunter 2000 is a two-disc collection of remixes of the classic Front 242 track. Some of the mixes are really good — this one, while not unlistenable, isn’t one of my favorites. It strips away too much of the melody, leaving little more than a series of distorted bleeps and bloops over chopped up samples of the original vocal track.

  • Random, ‘Rock Me’, off of Technorave 3: Technomania: I’ve got to admit, I’ve still got a fondness for early-90’s techno — back when techno was techno, and it hadn’t split up into the many different styles of electronic dance music that collectively fall under the ‘electronica’ label these days. Very simple and very repetitive, but somehow much of this stuff still works quite well for me (though, admittely, this one goes on a bit longer than it really needs to).

  • Lo-Fidelity Allstars feat. Pigeonhed, ‘Battle Flag (Radio Edit)’, off of How to Operate With A Blown Mind: The Lo-Fidelity Allstars team up with Pigeonhed to udpate Pigeonhed’s single. This is one of my all-time favorite dance tracks — and, in an unusual situation, is one of the few songs where I like the radio edit better than the album edit. Where the album track says “motherfucker”, the radio edit, rather than backmasking or just dropping the volume levels of the vocals for that word, electronically stretches out the first letter of the next word in the song. It makes for a really cool effect, and a radio edit that for once doesn’t sound emasculated when compared to the unedited album track.

  • L.A. Style, ‘L.A. Style Theme’, off of L.A. Style: More early-90’s techno. L.A. Style’s one big hit was James Brown Is Dead (which at one point could be found on nearly every single techno compilation ever), though they did have a couple more minor hits with Baloony and I’m Raving. I’ve got a very fond place in my heart for this album, as James Brown Is Dead is actually the first real techno track I can remember hearing, and it started getting me into the techno rave scene.

  • Marmion, ‘Schöneberg (John Acquaviva)‘, off of The Sound of Superstition Vol. 5: Modern European techno from the Superstition label. I picked this compilation up solely because I’ve found over the years that for some reason, Europe (especially Germany) seems to be the only region where “old-school” techno is still in vogue, and much of their electronic music still has strong roots in the early-90’s techno styles. This track isn’t anything special, but isn’t bad background, either.

  • ‘I Love Cats’: I have no idea who does this or where it came from. I do know that it’s sick, wrong, and very funny. Lyrics and download are available on this post from last March.

  • Sonia Dada, ‘Paradise‘, off of Sonia Dada: I first heard Sonia Dada on one of Seattle’s local rock stations, 103.7 The Mountain, where they were giving ‘You Don’t Treat Me No Good‘ heavy play. I really enjoyed that song, so went searching out some more of Sonia Dada’s work. This is a band I really need to pick up some albums by, rather than just the few tracks I have downloaded so far — musically they’re definitely good, but it’s the strong singing and harmonies that really catch my ear.

  • Jason Webley, ‘Pilgrim II (Live)’, off of The Halloween Special 2001: Regular readers will know that I’m a big fan of local Seattle artist Jason Webley. This is a live recording from his 2001 ‘Deathday’ show of a song which became ‘Counterpart‘ on the album Counterpoint. While Jason hasn’t officialy released any live albums, he doesn’t seem to mind the distribution of the bootlegs that have been recorded so far — you can find the ones I’ve collected so far ~~on my server here~~.

And this week’s bonus track:

iTunes “Haunted When the Minutes Drag” by Collide from the album Vortex (2004, 7:43).

Homeless Vet

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My mind misinterpreted a sign I saw while walking back to work from lunch, and I ended up spending the next few moments contemplating a world with destitute veterinatarians on the street corners, holding up their handmade cardboard signs as people walked by, begging for “Spare Change or Sick Puppies?”

Maikeru

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According to the Japanese Translator…

This is what the name “Michael” looks like in Japanese:

Maikeru (Michael)

It is pronounced “MAIKERU“. (Consonants are pronounced more or less the same way as in English. “A” sounds like a in father, but shorter. “I” sounds like ee in meet, but shorter. “U” sounds like oo in hook, but with less rounding of the lips. “E” sounds like e in met.)

(via Gregor)

BBC Interview on Blogging

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British blogger Tom Reynolds was recently interviewed by the BBC (RealAudio link, good ’til 1/17/05 or so) about his weblog. He was joined by a few other people, representing both pro- and anti-blogging viewpoints, and the interview is definitely worth a listen — they cover quite a few points, including some back-and-forth about some of the same topics regarding bloggers rights that I addressed recently.

(via Terrance)

Moving to del.icio.us

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As I’ve been more and more interested in using tag-based taxonomies to categorize and track things, I’ve been looking more and more often at using del.icio.us as a bookmark manager and potential replacement for my linklog.

Admittedly, when I first looked at del.icio.us a while back, I didn’t really understand what the deal was, or why it was so special. After spending time bouncing around Flickr and finding all sorts of interesting photographic work by exploring the tags people had used to categorize their photos, though, it finally clicked — del.icio.us was using the same concept to classify virtually the entire web. Oh! Now I get it!

So the old linklog has been removed from my sidebar (though the archives still exist), and has been replaced with a list of the most recent fifteen items added to my del.icio.us page. There’s an RSS feed available too, though as I’ll be using FeedBurner‘s link splicing ability to add my del.icio.us links to my main RSS feeds (just as I do for my Flickr photos), subscribing to that is definitely optional.

It may be a day or so before the links get spliced in, though — for some reason, FeedBurner keeps telling me that ‘djwudi’ isn’t a valid del.icio.us ID. Funny, del.icio.us thinks it is…I’m going to have to work on that.

Update: FeedBurner tracked down the issue they were having with connecting to del.icio.us, and I’ve updated my feeds. Both the ‘full posts’ and ‘full posts with comments’ feeds have the links spliced in, and the The ‘eclinkticism’ feed has been switched over to my del.icio.us links (if you were subscribed to either of my full post feeds and the linklog feed, you’ll be able to delete the linklog feed now). The ‘excerpts only’ feed has been left as-is (it doesn’t include my flickr photos, either).

Update 2: Well, it seemed like a good idea. However, that was a bit too much all in one feed. Links have been taken back out of the full-post and full-post-with-comments feeds, in favor of leaving them in their own separate feed. I’m also wondering if I should pull my Flickr photos out of the main streams, in favor of making everything mix-and-match. Seems better to let people pick and choose what they want to pay attention to rather than forcing everything on them all at once….

The part I’m happiest about was figuring out a very easy way to integrate my del.icio.us links into my site without having to deal with extra Movable Type plugins, installing extra software, or the like. del.icio.us provides an HTML feed of recent links, so I just set up a simple shell script, then use cron to run it every hour on the hour. Here’s the script in question:

#!/bin/sh

curl -s -f -d rssbutton=no -d tags=no -d extended=body http://del.icio.us/html/djwudi -o /Library/WebServer/Documents/eclecticism/delicious.tmp

mv -f /Library/WebServer/Documents/eclecticism/delicious.tmp /Library/WebServer/Documents/eclecticism/delicious.inc

echo “del.icio.us linklog sucessfully updated!”

The curl command retrieves the HTML feed of my links and saves it to a file, which mv then renames (this ensures that there won’t be an issue if the file is being updated at the same time that my webserver is expecting to be able to read from it), and echo returns a short message letting me know that the operation concluded successfully (cron e-mails me the confirmation message each time it runs…and I may turn that off soon now that I know everything’s working). Then, anytime someone loads my site, a simple PHP include loads the delicious.inc file into the page. Quick and simple.

Oh, and the name of the shell script?

deli.sh

iTunes “867-5309 Jenny (Hot Tracks)” by Tutone, Tommy from the album Edge, The Level 2 (1995, 5:31).

Search for WMDs Ends

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It’s official: after two years, the search for WMDs in Iraq has been called to a halt.

The hunt for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in Iraq has come to an end nearly two years after President Bush ordered U.S. troops to disarm Saddam Hussein. The top CIA weapons hunter is home, and analysts are back at Langley.

In interviews, officials who served with the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) said the violence in Iraq, coupled with a lack of new information, led them to fold up the effort shortly before Christmas.

Four months after Charles A. Duelfer, who led the weapons hunt in 2004, submitted an interim report to Congress that contradicted nearly every prewar assertion about Iraq made by top Bush administration officials, a senior intelligence official said the findings will stand as the ISG’s final conclusions and will be published this spring.

(via Atrios)

Face Analyzer

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Jacqueline pointed out the Face Analyzer, an automated online tool where you upload a photograph and it process the photo to determine everything from your nationality to your personality. This struck me as worth killing a few minutes playing with, so I grabbed a recent headshot of me from when I got my new glasses, and sent it in. The results were something of a surprise:

100% SE Asian, Female

100% South East Asian — and female.

I never knew. You’d think that my folks would have clued me in about this at some point in my life.

Undaunted, I cropped the photo down a bit so that there was less background, wondering if giving the system less background junk would help it concentrate on my face.

100% SE Asian, Male

Well, it at least got the sex right that time. I’m really curious as to how it’s coming up with the nationality, though — to most people (who, admittedly, aren’t automated software systems [or if they are, I haven’t figured it out yet]), the red hair and pale-to-the-point-of-translucence skin tends to indicate northern European ancestry, typically either Irish, Scottish, or possibly the general Scandinavian areas.

I guess they’re all wrong. South East Asian it is. After all, if you can’t believe what you read on the ‘net, what can you believe?

The personality profile section was just as silly, and just as accurate.

Malicious Software Removal

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Sure, I knew Microsoft was evil, but I never expected them to actually brag about it. Today brings the release of their Malicious Software Removal Tool, though, so I guess I was wrong.

I’m curious just who they expect to be excited about this announcement. Malicious software removal? It’s bad enough that so much of their software is fairly malicious in standard day to day operations, but now they’re actively promoting a product that, judging by its name, will gleefully and with great gusto go rampaging through your computer, removing the most useful pieces of software it can find?

What hubris! What unmitigated gall!

 

What?

It’s a tool to remove malicious software?

Oh. Well, that’s different.

(via /.)

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Who are you?

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So.

You’re the head of a highly secretive company.

You’re known for being temperamental and very mysterious.

The goods your company produces are highly popular, but they’re developed in secret.

When they’re introduced, they’re invariably accompanied by much anticipation, a media blitz, and fans worldwide salivating over the newest products.

Who are you?

Read more

6 year old webserver

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While talking with Prairie about how Macs generally tend to have long lifespans, I looked up the original introduction date for the 350Mhz Blue and White G3 that acts as the webserver for my site, and found out that it was originally introduced on January 5th, 1995 1999.

That’s just a few days over ten six years that this machine has been around, and it’s been running pretty much 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for the four years that I’ve owned it (I bought it used in February of ’01). It’s still going strong, too, chugging right along day after day.

Not bad…not bad at all.

_Wow_, I’m a dork. I really don’t know how I managed to confuse ’99 and ’95 when I was looking up the date, but apparently I did. Thanks to Dan for pointing that out.

Six years still isn’t bad, though…

iTunes “Walking on the Sun (Geek In Highwaters)” by Smashmouth from the album DJ Goodies (1995, 6:12).