Geekery

Whatever I’m geeking out about at the time.

Soundtrack for a Century

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A couple weeks ago, on the way back from Ellensburg, Prairie and I stopped off at a Fred Meyer’s so that she could pick up the Chicago soundtrack. While we were there, I browsed through the racks, and stumbled across a two-disc set of Broadway tunes, from 1932 to 1997. It looked interesting, so I picked it up, and we listened to it on the way back to Seattle.

As it turns out, that set was just one of twelve in the series Sony Music 100 Years: Soundtrack for a Century. Sony has dug into their vaults to compile an absolutley astounding collection of music — ranging from an 1890 recording on wax cylinder of John Philip Sousa conducting the United States Marine Band in “The Washington Post March” up to Lauryn Hill’s 1998 pop hit “Doo Wop (That Thing)” — across all genres, and encompassing a ton of songs, both popular hits and little-known gems.

I’m slowly working on collecting the entire collection, and so far have picked up four of the sets (Broadway: The Great Original Cast Recordings, Pop Music: The Early Years 1890-1950, Pop Music: The Golden Era 1951-1975, and Pop Music: The Modern Era 1976-1999), have two more held for me at Barnes and Noble (Rock: The Train Kept A-Rollin’ and Folk, Gospel and Blues: Will the Circle Be Unbroken), and will be picking up the rest of the series as I can and where I can. Great collections, and I’ve really been enjoying going through these.

iPod troubles

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Well, this bites. I’m having problems with my iPod. Normally I’m pretty good with getting things fixed, but I think this is beyond my abilities. Bleah.

Problem one: every so often, when plugging in the remote to the jack on the iPod, or just bumping the connector, the iPod will “short out” and reset. It’s more or less a minor annoyance — the iPod will reboot and start right up again, and the only real lasting effect is that the date and time need to be set — but an annoyance nothenless.

Problem two: iTunes doesn’t know that my iPod exists anymore. As far as I can tell, this behavior started after I applied the Security Update 2003-03-03 system patch. The iPod mounts to the Finder just fine, but nothing I can do seems to clue iTunes into the existence of the iPod.

I’ve tried applying the 10.2.4 Combo Update (even though I’d already updated to 10.2.4 using incremental upgrades, rumor has it that using the combo updater will fix a number of issues), completely deleting and then reinstalling iTunes, and completely resetting the iPod as outlined in Apple’s iPod troubleshooting pages. Nothing’s worked.

Luckily, my iPod is still under warranty, so I went ahead and placed a service request through Apple. I’ve never had to do this before, but I’ve read good reports on Apple’s turnaround time for service, but for the moment I’m without music when I’m not at home.

For some people, this might not be that big of a deal. For me? This bites. Hard.

Especially when some of the people at work insist on listening to “smooth jazz” — one of the few genres of music that I would gladly wipe from the face of the planet. Ugh. I want my iPod back!

Rocky Horror Muppet Show

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Frank N. Piggy? Miss Piggyfurter?

What do you get when you cross a love of the Rocky Horror Picture Show with a love of the Muppets?

Some of the most truly bizarre pictures I’ve ever seen — the Rocky Horror Muppet Show. Apparently the troupe that does this is based here in Seattle — I have got to find out when this goes on and show up!

Also, while it’s not the best (ahem…most amusing) review I’ve read on their site, the notorious ultra-conservative Christian movie review site CAP finally got around to posting their RHPS review.

Ignominy in this cult flick included homosexual song and talk, homosexual presences and practices, and vulgar behavior such as a man’s head between a man’s legs behind translucent drapes; detailed statue nudity, nudity in plain view and behind translucent drapes, intercourse behind the same; inappropriate touch (both hetero- and homosexual) and begging for it, very brief clothing, group licking/kissing; transvestism, adults in underwear, suggestive (homosexual) eye movements; vulgar positioning in very brief clothing, explicit homosexual song/dance; expressions such as “There’s no crime in giving yourself over to pleasure” speaking to trying homosexuality. Among the non-sexual ignominy were the three/four letter word vocabulary, God’s name in vain both with and without the four letter expletive, an unseen but heard pickax murder, raygun murder, cannibalist meal of Meatloaf (I wonder from where that idea came). There is more, a lot more but the point is made for the wholesome moviegoer.

(Muppet pics via BoingBoing, CAP review via The Zen Room)

Star Trek personality test

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Wil pointed to a Star Trek Personality Test based on the Myers-Briggs system. I wasn’t sure what to expect for an answer, but apparently the author did a surprisingly good job of translating the Myers-Briggs questions to a Star Trek format, as I ended up scoring as an ISFP — the same result as when I took an online version of the actual Myers-Briggs test!

Anyway, here’s what the Star Trek test said about me…

Read more

The Tide is Turning

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This is a song originally from Roger Waters’ album “Radio K.A.O.S.“, though I first heard it as the finale to the 1990 live performance of The Wall in Berlin. Posted here as a message of hope — something that’s all too rare these days.

I used to think the world was flat,
rarely threw my hat into the crowd,
I felt I had used up my quota of yearning.
Used to look in on the children at night
in the glow of their Donald Duck light,
and frighten myself with the thought of my little ones burning.
But oh, oh, oh, the tide is turning…
The tide is turning.

Satellite buzzing through the endless night,
exclusive to moonshots and world title fights.
Jesus Christ — imagine what it must be earning!
Who is the strongest? Who is the best?
Who holds the aces, the East or the West?
This is the crap our children are learning.
But oh, oh, oh, the tide is turning…
The tide is turning…
Oh, oh, oh, the tide is turning.

Now the satellite’s confused,
‘cos on Saturday night
the airwaves were full of compassion and light,
and his silicon heart warmed
to the sight of a billion candles burning
I’m not saying that the battle is won,
but on Saturday night all those kids in the sun
wrested technology’s sword from the hand of the war lords.
Oh, oh, oh, the tide is turning…
The tide is turning…

The tide is turning.

Zeno's Paradox

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Ever since I read Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, I’ve had the paradox postulated by Zeno of Elea (c. 450 B.C.) bouncing around in my head. To summarize the paradox:

Zeno’s Paradox may be rephrased as follows. Suppose I wish to cross the room. First, of course, I must cover half the distance. Then, I must cover half the remaining distance. Then, I must cover half the remaining distance. Then I must cover half the remaining distance…and so on forever. The consequence is that I can never get to the other side of the room.

What this actually does is to make all motion impossible, for before I can cover half the distance I must cover half of half the distance, and before I can do that I must cover half of half of half of the distance, and so on, so that in reality I can never move any distance at all, because doing so involves moving an infinite number of small intermediate distances first.

I knew there must be a solution, as we all do manage to move around quite handily, I just never knew what it was. Luckily enough, I managed to stumble across an explanation of the paradox and its solution today. Nifty!

(Via Jason Kottke)

On battling stereotypes

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When you’re a member of Suncoast‘s ‘Replay’ membership program, one of the benefits is their Request magazine. It’s about what you’d expect from this type of magazine — 50% advertising, 47% advertising thinly disguised as content, and about 3% that’s actually somewhat interesting to read.

The current March/April issue has a rundown of six top Oscar contenders: Nicole Kidman, Jack Nicholson, Julianne Moore, Tom Hanks, Jennifer Anniston, and Robin Williams. In the article, there were two quotes from Nicholson and Hanks that really stood out to me in the differences between how the two actors confront the stereotypes they’ve been saddled with — and illustrates why I tend to think more of Nicholson than I do of Hanks.

Discussing his role in About Schmidt, Nicholson had this to say:

More difficult, [Nicholson] says, is crafting a performance real enough to make the audience forget everything they know about the personality behind the character. “Almost anyone can give a representative performance when you’re unknown. The real pro game of acting is after you’re known — to ‘un-Jack’ the character and get the audience to invest in a fictional person. In order to keep growing as an actor, you have to learn the devices that keep you from just relying on what works for you.”

Then, regarding Road to Perdition, Hanks said this:

…Hanks insists that changing his image wasn’t the reason for taking the dark role. “That would take into an account a falsehood that it’s possible to change your image. You can’t do it,” he says. “[The audience] walks into a theater with a preconceived idea of everybody in the film, but hopefully that switch goes off, and you just watch the movie.”

In other words, while both actors know that they’ve been sterotyped — Nicholson as absolutely insane, and Hanks as the “nice guy,” Hanks just shrugs his shoulders and does his thing, while Nicholson actively works to challenge himself both in his roles and his acting to stretch both himself and his audience’s perception of him.

Good for you, Jack.

Search improvements

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I spent some time last night working with the search software I have installed on djwudi.com, tweaking and improving it so that it gives much more useable results.

While MovableType does include its own search function, I’ve chosen not to use it for djwudi.com because I have a number of pages that live outside of my weblog, which MT would not be able to search. However, I’d run into a bit of a problem with the search engine I am using, and I think I’ve finally got it solved.

The issue that came up was simply that because the search software had indexed the text of every page on the site, there were certain words that were essentially useless to try to search for, because they’re repeated on so many pages. For instance, I was trying to find a page where I’d written up a short description of the MT TrackBack functionality — unfortunately, a search for ‘TrackBack’ returned hits for every single page on my weblog, because they all had the word ‘TrackBack’ on the page.

Digging through the documentation for the search software yesterday (yes, I know, actually reading the instructions is so uncool, but it really does help sometimes…), I discovered that there is a very simple way to tell the search software to ignore certain areas of a webpage. So, some tweaks to my templates to ensure that the software only pays attention to the actual content of each page, and ignores all the navigational or presentational mumbo-jumbo, and I’ve got a far more useable search feature than I did previously. Woohoo!

Catching up, part two

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This time, the focus is on Macintosh goodies. All you PC-using heathens can read on in wistful fantasyland, or just find something else to do — like reinstall Windows again. ;)

  • Enough people linked to PerversionTracker that I finally had to take a look. Looks like I’ve got another regular read! Any site that the Opera webbrowser has “taken the cake, and it is filled with plague and cottage cheese,” and that it is “slower than a squashed waterbear” defintely gets my approval. (Via Brent Simmons, along with many other Mac-based weblogs)

  • I’m probably the last Mac afficionado to find out about this, but it looks like Safari is actually going to get tabs. Nifty! (Via MacSlash, MacRumors and others)

  • This could be a fun toy to play with: VoiceBox, a tiny app that will take text files and convert them to audio files using the Mac’s speech synthesis. It will even ‘read’ RSS feeds, so I could listen to websites on my iPod while going to work! Useful? Dunno yet. Cool, though. (Via Rael Dornfest)