Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
Whatever I’m geeking out about at the time.
Woohoo! Turns out that Adriaan, the mad genius behind Kung-Tunes, liked the writeup I did of how I integrated Kung-Tunes into my site design. Not only did he link to me from his site, but he tells me that he’s added a link to the writeup in the Kung-Tunes readme.
Thanks!
I found a fun little toy to play with today — a little program called Kung-Tunes that ties into iTunes (my .mp3 player), grabs whatever song I’m listening to at the moment, and writes a small text file to my website. That file is then integrated into the page whenever someone hits my site, giving them an instant readout of whatever I’m listening to if I happen to have any music playing when they visit.
Useful? Not in the least. Just cool.
Well, I did a bunch of coding tonight, and have v1 of my site redesign up and ready to beta-test.
More details on the redesign are in the rest of this post. Unfortunately, as all I’ve re-coded so far is the main Long Letter page, they’ll revert to the current design. Still, at least I’m started, right?
I’m not sure where or when I picked Parable of the Talents up, but I found it while digging through my book box at one point, and finally got around to reading it. Neat stuff — though apparently it’s the second book in a series (the first being Parable of the Sower), so now I’ll need to go search that book out to get more details on the first part of the story.
PotT is the story of Lauren Olamina, a woman with a mission to spread the word of Earthseed, a religion with the destiny of bringing mankind to the stars in a post-apocalyptic (though not nuclear) near-future America. America has fallen from its status of world protector into nearly third-world status, torn apart by wars with Canada and the newly-seceeded nation of Alaska, and run by a ultra-conservative religous fanatic as President.
Told as a memoir of Olamina’s life though the difficult years of the growth and destruction of her first Earthseed community as written after her death by her estranged daughter, a fascinating portrait of a woman driven to a purpose, no matter what the costs, is painted. Using excerpts from Olamina’s journals to present her side of her cause, and ruminations by her daughter to give an alternate view gives a wonderful portrait of a very intense and controversial woman at a very trying time.
Hopefully there’s more coming…and I’ll definitely need to flesh out the story with the first part sometime soon.
The Itsy-bitsy spider…
…isn’t so itsy-bitsy, and is more likely to be climbing up a television tower than a water spout.
I just got back from seeing Eight Legged Freaks.
Was it a good movie? Well…honestly, no, it wasn’t.
Was it worth the money? Definitely! Movies like this aren’t supposed to be good movies — they’re supposed to be fun! Which ELF definitely qualifies as. A silly premise, scientific accuracy thrown out the window, sterotypical characters, and cheezy lines, all add up (in my world, at least) to a very enjoyable couple hours at the movies.
It’s not, however, as good as either of the two movies it immediately invites comparison to — Arachnophobia for the creepy-crawly spider jitters, or Tremors for the pesudo-50’s horror movie homage. Arachnophobia had better (though, of course, still questionable) effects, and the more realistically sized spiders in that one were much more freaky for me than the oversized beasties in ELF, and Tremors has a slight edge in the sense of humor — ELF wasn’t bad or humorless, but wasn’t quite as tongue-in-cheek witty as Tremors managed to be.
Still — quite enjoyable, and I had a lot of fun watching it.
One of Depeche Mode’s greatest strengths is also their greatest weakness. The band comes up with some of pop music’s most inventive lyrics, and at the same time, they always give the impression that they’ll arbitrarily sing about anything, as long as it’s depressing.
— Beth Massa, reviewing Depeche Mode’s ‘Exciter’ album for Amazon
So yesterday I had to get up really early to get the U-Haul I’d rented to move all my equipment out to Casey’s wedding back to the shop by 9:30am. Setting the alarm for 8am was a little painful, but I managed to do it, and got the van back on time. And I even got it for a discount — whichever employee had rented me the van had screwed up when they put in the odomoter reading, so rather than charging me mileage for the 70 miles or so I actually drove, I just got charged for 10 miles total — just under $40!
Once that was done, I started taking the bus back home, but as the bus started going by the Seattle Center, I remembered that the Bite of Seattle food festival was going on. So, I hopped off the bus — and happened to get off at a stop right at Rick’s front door! So, I wandered up to his place, grabbed him, and we spent the rest of the day wandering around the Seattle Center, listening to good music and people watching.
Well, okay — girl watching. Summertime in Seattle is such a nice time for finding eye candy, and yesterday was gorgeous — cloudless with a projected high of 88 degrees. Lots of eye candy!
Anyway…(ahem). At one point in our wanderings, we started hearing a group performing “Papa Was A Rolling Stone”, which has always been one of my favorite songs. We headed over to see who was performing, and it turns out that it was an absoutely incredible acapella group called Kickshaw. These guys can make the most incredible sounds with their voices — one of the five of them can even do an astounding (and practically flawless) imitation of a DJ scratching on a turntable…just amazing to see. We ended up staying there and being blown away by the rest of their set, and I picked up a copy of Superstar, the one CD they’ve released so far. While it doesn’t have the energy that their live performance does, and they’ve added a member since it was recorded in 1999, it’s still not bad at all…and I’m looking forward to having another chance to see these guys.
It was a great day — I made it back home at about 10pm, quite happy — and quite sunburnt. Thank God for Aloe lotion…! It was well worth it, though.
Nathan Torkington, one of the staff over at O’Reilly is documenting his experiences as he moves from a Windows-based PC to an Apple iBook. Gotta love articles that state:
I plugged in the digital video camera (editing be damned!) and it Just Worked. I built
wgetand it Just Worked. I downloaded VM and it Just Worked. I plugged in a three-button mouse and it Just Worked. I came to realize something: I’d been with Microsoft for so long, who are complacent and hoard their customers, that I’d forgotten what it’s like to use an operating system built by people who want it to cooperate with the rest of the world. It’s good.
(via Daypop)
Doomsday Book is another one that dad loaned to me. A very good sci-fi novel, set in England both in the near future and in the 1300’s, as an archaeologist travels back into the 14th century to study the people of the time first hand, and gets trapped there when a mysterious illness starts infecting the people in the modern world, leaving her to deal with the onset of the Black Plague in England.
Willis does an excellent job balancing the grimness of the situations both in the past and the present with some wonderful touches of humor to help keep things from getting too distressing. Coupled with some insightful looks into both joy and despair, and you’ve got a Hugo and Nebula award winning novel. Good stuff!
Those who surf the Web using a Mac tend to be better educated and make more money than their PC-using counterparts, …tend to be more Web savvy, with more than half having been online for at least five years…are 58 percent more likely than the overall online population to build their own Web page and also slightly more likely to buy goods online, according to the report.
(via MetaFilter)