Geekery

Whatever I’m geeking out about at the time.

Podcast 8: Eclecticism

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And again, I’m running late. Sensing a trend yet? This, then, is the next of my mixes to go up — and probably the last one for a little while, as I don’t have any ready to go up, and the next few weeks are probably going to be busy with apartment hunting for Prairie and I. Hopefully once things are settled down again, I’ll actually start putting new mixes up. That’s the plan, at least.

This is probably my favorite of the mixes I have available right now. There’s no real set style through the piece, I just slapped together a bunch of tracks that I happened to like a lot. Luckily, it all seems to work pretty well…possibly better than it should?

Standard disclaimer: All the mixes I’m posting were mixed ‘live’ — running a Pioneer dual CD mixer directly into my computer and recording straight to .mp3 — and have had no post-mix editing done in the computer. As such, they’re not flawless, but they’re not bad, either, if I do say so myself.

Here’s the link: Eclecticism (1h 17m 32s, 88.74Mb). Tracks included are:

  1. Dario G ‘Carnival de Paris’
  2. Goodmen ‘Give it Up (Batacuda Refrescante/Hot Tracks)’
  3. Chemical Brothers ‘It Doesn’t Matter’
  4. Fatboy Slim ‘Song for Shelter’
  5. Lionrock ‘Are You Ready to Testify?’
  6. A3 ‘Woke Up This Morning (Drillaz in the Church)’
  7. Psykosonik ‘Unlearn (Hot Tracks)’
  8. Everything But the Girl ‘Wrong (Deep Dish)’
  9. Annie Lennox ‘Little Bird (Utah Saints)’
  10. Clivilles & Cole ‘A Deeper Love (Underground Club)’
  11. Sagat ‘Fuk Dat (Raw)’
  12. Lemon Interrupt ‘Big Mouth’
  13. Technoclassix ‘In the Hall of the Techno King’

Girl talk, MT32b3, and Alan Moore

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Had a pleasant evening after work yesterday, when I headed up the hill to Charlie’s and got together with Melissa, her daughter (whose name I either didn’t catch or, more likely, have forgotten), Christa, and Erin. Quite fun, actually, being as I ended up in a situation I’ve stumbled into quite a few times before in my life and always enjoy when it happens — being the only guy in something of a ‘girl talk’ session. Laughter, rants about current and former lovers and friends, ongoing drama…all that fun stuff.

There are times when I really enjoy not being the “typical male”…or at least far enough removed from that stereotype that I can occasionally be around for such things. I may have worked over the years at decreasing the amount of drama in my life, but I must admit, I do enjoy being a spectator! ;) Quite enjoyable, in any case, and it seems that this may become something of a weekly event.

After coming home and chatting with Prairie for a while until she wandered off to bed, I upgraded my Movable Type beta installation to v3.2b3, which is essentially the final candidate build. Ran into one small oddity during the upgrade process, but after filing a bug report and having Brad Choate pop up in iChat to talk about it, I’m leaning towards it being a caching issue and nothing major with the system.

I’m looking forward to upgrading my main site to v3.2 once it’s finalized and I’ve had a chance to go over the new documentation. This may end up meaning that I do a full redesign — there are a lot of changes in the new templates, and it may take me some time to wrap my head around all of them. I’m not sure yet if I’ll upgrade the backend and keep the current design and then work on a new one in the background, or just go whole-hog and start over with the new basic designs…more to ponder.

I’ve also just finished reading Alan Moore‘s ‘V for Vendetta‘ graphic novel after the movie trailer peaked my curiosity about the original movie, and am currently working my way through Moore’s ‘The Watchmen‘. While Prairie (a confessed ‘book snob’) may giggle at me for reading “comic books”, I’m enjoying both of these, and ‘V for Vendetta’ in many ways seems very topical in todays world — which, given its subject matter, is actually a little disturbing.

And that pretty much sums up life in the world of me at the moment. Not quite sure what my plans for the weekend are, though there’s a lot of Seafair stuff going on around town right now that I may see if I can find a way to check out at one point or another. As is usual for me, though, I’m not planning much of anything more than about 20 minutes in advance…except for running off to work, which (insert overly melodramatic sigh here) I must go do. Off with me, then!

iTunes “24 Hour Man” by Lock Up from the album Something Bitchin’ This Way Comes (1990, 4:46).

The DJ Test

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Rebecca just got a job as a professional DJ for AMS Entertainment, and in her post celebrating her successful certification, mentioned that she’d had to take a test to get the job. This struck my sense of humor, and has prompted the following exchange…

Rebecca:

I just passed the test today, I’m finally a certified DJ for AMS Entertainment!! My first event is this Saturday afternoon!

Me:

…there’s a test for DJ’ing? (boggle) Is it multiple choice?

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Interestingness

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I’m probably one of the last people to actually make mention of this, but the big news in the Flickrverse over the past few days has been the introduction of two new features: tag clusters and ‘interestingness’.

Tag clusters are a great addition, analyzing photos by all the tags associated with them and then ‘clustering’ them with other photos with similar groups of tags. This allows for distinguishing photos of feline tigers from operating systems code named tiger, even though they both share the common ‘tiger‘ tag.

‘Interestingness‘ is much more vague. Here’s how Flickr explains it:

There are lots of things that make a photo ‘interesting’ (or not) in the Flickr. Where the clickthroughs are coming from; who comments on it and when; who marks it as a favorite; its tags and many more things which are constantly changing. Interestingness changes over time, as more and more fantastic photos and stories are added to Flickr.

In a sense, it works in a somewhat similar method to Google’s Pagerank system, using community interaction with the photos to determine what’s catching the communal eye at any given point. Page views, number of comments, how many people have marked a photo as a favorite, and the tags and groups a photo is assigned to seem to play a part in how ‘interesting’ it is deemed. Obviously, this isn’t a qualitative ranking of the photo itself, and shouldn’t be seen that way, but it’s a very nifty way to go bouncing through the Flickrverse and discover photos you might not have found otherwise.

Each user has now gained a list of their top 200 ‘most interesting’ photos as determined by the system. I was somewhat amused to check mine and find that of my top five, only one of them is actually a picture that I’ve taken — the other four are screenshots or satellite photos from other sources. I think I’ve got a lot more photos that are a lot more interesting than those — but then, a computer algorithm is only going to do so well at figuring this stuff out.

Here, then, are my current top five ‘most interesting’ photos:

Satellite view of the line to view Pope John Paul II laying in state. Punk Love I - Innocence Quicktime 7 rocks! Steve Jobs is Willy Wonka. Or something. My walk to work

And, for entertainment purposes, my current ‘least interesting’ photos (though these change more frequently, and as the ranking only counts 200 out of the 3492 photos I’ve uploaded so far, I guess they still count as pretty interesting…programmatically, at least):

Jake, Chris, Samantha, Jeff, Manuel, Josh, Seattle Weblogger's Meetup, Seattle, WA Fremont Solstice Parade, Seattle, WA Gay Pride Parade, Seattle, WA Blowing Bubbles, Fremont Solstice Parade, Seattle, WA 'Electric', Art Rage Studios, First Thursday Art Walk, Seattle, WA

iTunes “Somebody” by Veruca Salt from the album For the Masses: A Tribute to Depeche Mode (1998, 4:05).

Quick Black and White viewing in OS X

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A quick Mac OS X tip for photographers that I’ve found to be really handy in instances where you’d like to get an idea of how those color shots from your digital camera would look like when converted to black and white.

When you have your latest photos displayed in iPhoto (or whatever photo management software you use), just go to System Preferences > Universal Access and click the Use grayscale checkbox.

Simple Black and White previewing in OS X

Your entire display will switch to greyscale mode, and you can flip through your entire photo album to get an idea of which shots work in black and white and which don’t without having to tweak each photo that might work one-by-one. Obviously, it’s probably simple desaturation and not the same quality you’d get using Photoshop’s channel mixer or some other fancier technique, but it’s quite handy for a quick overview to narrow down which shots are the best candidates for black and white work.

iTunes “Running Wild” by Soup Dragons, The from the album Hotwired (1992, 4:02).

Podcast 07: Where Time Becomes A Loop

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Ooops — and I thought I was late last week, when the mix showed up in the afternoon instead of the morning. This time, I’m two days late! Sorry about that…. In any case, here’s the next of my mixes to go up. We’re moving back into longer sessions again, with this one coming in at just under an hour. Of all the mixes I’ve had sitting around, this is one of my top three favorites, with my third favorite being last week’s ‘ToriMix’, and my top favorite coming next week.

Incidentally, DJ H. Geek (aka Kory Roth), the artist behind the second track in this mix, is a friend of mine from back in Anchorage who I used to DJ with at Gig’s. Good guy, and apparently living down in Portland now. RelveleR, who contribute the sixth track, is also part of Kory’s Collective Conscience team. More tracks from Kory can be found at his site.

Standard disclaimer: All the mixes I’m posting were mixed ‘live’ — running a Pioneer dual CD mixer directly into my computer and recording straight to .mp3 — and have had no post-mix editing done in the computer. As such, they’re not flawless, but they’re not bad, either, if I do say so myself.

Here’s the link: Where Time Becomes A Loop (58m 41s, 80.61Mb). Tracks included are:

  1. Orbital ‘Time Becomes’

  2. DJ Geek ‘Travelling (Long)’

  3. Erasure ‘Run to the Sun (Amber Solaire)’

  4. BT ‘Remember (Paul Van Dyk’s Recollected)’

  5. Blue Amazon ‘The Javelin’

  6. ReleveleR ‘Sourpuss (UBE)’

  7. Sarah MacLachlan ‘I Love You (BT)’

  8. ATB ‘Don’t Stop (SQ-1)’

  9. Aqua ‘Dr. Jones (Antiloop Club)’

  10. Orbital ‘Time Becomes’

July Seattle Flickrites Meetup

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Had a very pleasant time at the inaugural Seattle Flickrites Meetup tonight. I showed up just a bit after 7pm and hung out until the last of us left just a bit before 10pm. Not a bad turnout for a first gig, either. Eight of us ended up showing up: Weave, studiozoe, Voodoo Zebra, ChrisB in SEA, me, Tom Harpel, Shaylor, and kreminem.

Conversation bounced between the requisite gadget ogling, podcasting, and various Flickr groups and personalities, but by far the most popular topic for the evening was the “Seattle (n)ice” syndrome. Much (good-natured) fun was had at the expense of the only two “native” Seattleites in the group as we laughed about the inability for either of them to just pick up and do something without at least a day’s notice — bare minimum. A few days is better, if a week or two of warning can’t be given first. Otherwise, they’re just too busy doing something…even if it’s nothing at all.

My photos from the evening are up, and more are starting to appear: ChrisB in SEA‘s, Tom Harpel‘s.

iTunes “Push Upstairs” by Underworld from the album Beaucoup Fish (1999, 4:34).

LiveJournal Syndication Update

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Allrighty then…it wasn’t the solution that I was hoping for, but I think I’ve managed to fumble my way through a solution for my issues with the woody_eclectic LiveJournal feed.

Thanks to a comment from qweltor, I found out that there’s simply no way to disable comments on a LiveJournal syndication feed — they’re just on, like it or not. So, not only wouldn’t there be a way for anyone to go in and turn off the comments for the existing feed, but there wouldn’t be a point to my going in and creating a new feed account. That handily blew all of my already-conceived plans out of the water.

So, I ended up coming up with a new plan. And I do love it when a plan comes together…

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We Are the Web

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This month’s Wired has what is likely not just the best article I’ve seen come out of Wired in a long time, but the best piece I’ve seen in ages on the Web, where it’s been, and where it may be headed in the future.

Not only did we fail to imagine what the Web would become, we still don’t see it today! We are blind to the miracle it has blossomed into. And as a result of ignoring what the Web really is, we are likely to miss what it will grow into over the next 10 years. Any hope of discerning the state of the Web in 2015 requires that we own up to how wrong we were 10 years ago.

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