Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
Whatever I’m geeking out about at the time.
The music in Apple’s clever Intel processor ad sounded really familiar, and after running it around in my head for a bit, I figured it out.
It’s Moby‘s ‘God Moving Over the Face of the Waters‘, which I have on the soundtrack to Heat (which, incidentally, is one of my favorite soundtrack albums, and a really good movie to boot).
Just in case anyone else is curious.
“God Moving Over the Face of the Waters” by Moby from the album Heat (1995, 6:58).
This is just sad — sixteen of the twenty-five displayed TrackBack pings to Seablogs are TrackBack spam. Is anyone paying attention to moderating the site?
“Goody Two Shoes” by Adam and the Ants from the album Rock and Wave Vol. 1 (1982, 3:29).
I came across an article in today’s Seattle Times about Andy Rosen, who’d taken a lot of photographs of the early punk scene in London — and is just now starting to showcase a lot of never before seen photos on Flickr.
Rosen had a successful photography career from 1976 to 1984, completely embedding himself in the early punk-rock scene in London.
He began as the bands were starting up, and by the time the punk-rock scene exploded, he had a real in. He lived with some of the musicians and was friends with some people who became musicians.
But back then you needed money and more than a card reader to see your shots, so a lot of Rosen’s film never got processed. It got boxed up and stored at mum and dad’s. That includes all the photos he finally uncovered and developed last year, and sat on until now.
The collection he’s put up so far (and, apparently, he’s just getting started), is amazing. Simple Minds, Depeche Mode, Bauhaus, Siouxie Sioux, The Sex Pistols…tons of shots that have never been published before.
On top of that, he’s set up a weblog where he’s recounting some of the stories behind the photos — the photo shoots themselves, his relationships to the subjects, how he was able to get the shots he did. Tons of incredible documentation of the time and the musicians.
For instance, a very early performance by The Clash at a small Boxing Day 1979 gathering with about fifty family and friends in attendance:
At the time the Clash were just another punk band – better than most but definately not the Rock Stars they were to become. Funny thing was I shot about 10 rolls of black and white and decided not to develop them. Money was tight in those days – so I would sometimes just not bother processing the film if I felt the band was not worthy of the expense. Looking back on it what an idiot I was. Years (two decades) later I stumbled on a whole bag of unprocesed film I had left In london at my mum and dads. There they were clearly labaled THE CLASH. I excitedly processed them and to my amazment I relaized I had captured a precious moment in Rock And Roll history – which might never have been seen. A band in all their innocent glory – playing to fifty people – moments before they were to etch themselves into punk history as one of the most prolific Punk Bands ever.
This is great, great stuff. Thanks for sharing all this, Andy!
And…we’re back. The server my site resides on went down about 3pm yesterday, and didn’t come back until sometime this morning. Sorry ’bout that — these things do happen from time to time, though.
In the meantime…
Yesterday, a customer came wandering into the store. “Hi there,” I greeted him. “Anything we can help you with today?”
“Yeah, I wanted to look at a couple cameras.” Then he paused and took a closer look at me. “Um…are you Michael? Of Eclecticism?”
I laughed. “Yeah, that’s me.”
“I’m Joe — Pop Astronaut.”
And another connection was made between the online world and real life. We chatted for a bit, then got him set up with the camera he’d been considering. Small world!
Small bits related to my recent re-acquaintance with television:
Last night, Prairie and I finished our Desperate Housewives Season One marathon, which we’d been working on for the past couple weeks. We’ve both been enjoying watching Season Two on Sunday nights, and have been borrowing Season One so that I could get caught up on all the back story.
Battlestar Galactica has started up again also, and I’ve been doing my best to avoid any articles about the first episode of the second half of Season Two until I get a chance to watch it myself. The episode is sitting on my ‘puter…I just need to get a chance to watch it! Maybe tonight…
Finally, Lost finally starts up again this Wednesday — and because I’m working until 10pm that night, I’m not going to be able to see it until I get a chance to download it! Grrrrr…stupid work. ;)
And I think that pretty much brings us up to date. Plans for tonight are light: work ’til 6pm, do my reading for school tomorrow, have dinner, and watch tonight’s Desperate Housewives. Non-stop excitement, I tell you!
Snagged from lemurlad — and as he pointed out, these results shouldn’t surprise anyone who knows me.
95 Genius Points
WOOHOO! You seem to know as much about this movie as I do! You’ve done brilliantly. So brilliantly, in fact, that you may deserve to wear Chris Knight’s underwear. You have achieved the rank of Real Genius Genius. I’m so proud.
My test tracked 1 variable How you compared to other people your age and gender:
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You scored higher than 96% on Genius Points |
Link: The Are You a Real Genius Genius Test written by dasnugglebunny on Ok Cupid.
“Return to Innocence (Long and Alive)” by Enigma from the album Return to Innocence (1993, 7:07).
No, no — not Plato. Plato Learning, Inc. They’re the company that provides the online program that we’re using in my math class.
It’s not that the program is bad — in fact, it seems to be simple enough (I’ve only gone through the introductory “this is how it works” section so far), and their website lists a number of success stories and awards for the program. It’s simply that after going through the first section and poking around at the CDs, I can’t find any good reason why the software is Windows-specific.
Basically, the entire setup is HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PDF, and Flash, with a Windows shell that it runs inside. To start a session, you go to the PIM site, choose your school, and then you’re presented with the options to do a lesson or check your progress. When you choose to do a lesson, a small nscc.iss file is downloaded. That file is actually a minimal text file with five small variables:
[Site Info]
Site=NSCC
SID=SD1
externalserver=isswebdb.academic.com
Server=isswebdb.academic.com
PORT=1521
Windows has .iss files registered to the shell program, which then connects to their servers using the information passed on inside the .iss file. After a quick logon/password check, the shell program then proceeds to run the courses off of the provided course CDs.
As best I can tell, the shell program needs to do four things:
.iss file,In other words, absolutely nothing that requires Windows. The only thing preventing them from being able to offer the home-based services to Mac users as well as Windows users is the lack of a Mac-based shell. While I’m no programmer, I really have to wonder about just how complex something like that really would be…I’m guessing not terribly. Certainly something a major educational software company should be able to handle hiring a Mac programmer to do.
Ah, well. Macs are still the minority, so things like this aren’t exactly a surprise. Annoying and frustrating, yes — but not a surprise.
Amusingly, figuring all this out gained me a small “star moment” in class today. While about half the computers in the classroom were handling the nscc.iss file correctly (downloading it and triggering the launch of the shell), the other half apparently didn’t have .iss registered as a known file type under Windows. For those students, clicking the ‘do a lesson’ link resulted in nothing but a standard Windows “I don’t know what this file is. Open it or save it?” dialog box. Saving it, of course, did nothing, and trying to open it just presented the “pick a program” dialog box. Neither the students nor Ms. DeSoto had any clue what was going wrong, or how to get around it.
While my computer had worked as it should, I was watching the guy next to me fumble his way through trying to get things to work correctly. When the “pick a program” dialog popped up he started scrolling through it, and I noticed a program called issstub.exe pass by. Figuring that there was a good chance that issstub might handle .iss files, I told him to give that one a try — and as soon as he chose that one, the shell program opened right up, connected, and was ready to go. I pointed this out to another couple students who were having the same problem wile Ms. DeSoto watched, and then she passed the process on to the rest of the class. Success!
As the hour ended, I was packing up my bag when she walked by and patted me on the shoulder. “Thanks so much for finding that — you saved my day!”
Hey. Day number two, and I’m already sucking up to the teachers. ;)
“I Was Born to Love You” by Queen from the album Made In Heaven (1995, 4:49).
I’ve been using the free traffic monitoring service StatCounter for some time now to get an idea of how much traffic I’m pulling in. Here’s a look at the past year’s traffic for Eclecticism:
A little bit more work on improving the tags.app implementation here.
By default, tags.app’s results page from performing a tag search is very sparse — simply a bulleted list of post titles, presented ten at a time. One of the first things I did when tweaking my install was to enhance the page a bit by adding post excerpts, author, and time/datestamps to each entry. I also added a list of ‘related tags’ in the sidebar of the results page.
While tinkering around with adding the tag search field tonight, I realized that it shouldn’t be hard at all for me to add easy tag intersection searches to the tag results page. A few tweaks later, and it’s done: when a search on a tag is performed, the list of related tags now includes a small ‘[+]‘ symbol before each tag. Clicking on the tag itself will start a new search for that tag alone — but clicking on the [+] will add that tag to the search (and narrow down the ‘related tags’ list dramatically). I’ve been playing with this, and it’s making it very easy to drill down through the thousands of entries on the site very quickly.
Code snippets follow.