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).

Re-Meme (‘Michael is…’)

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There’s a meme going around the ‘net right now (I’ve seen it on at least seven different blogs over the past day or so, I’m not going to search them all out) where you do a Google search for “$yourname is” (where $yourname is your name, and including the quotation marks) and pick the best ten results to post.

Rather than join in, I’ll just point you to the post where I did this two and a quarter years ago. :)

iTunes “Calling All Angels” by Lang, K.D./Siberry, Jane from the album Until the End of the World (1991, 5:11).

Live Octopus Tentacle

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Okay, admittedly, I’m no fan of seafood — generally, I tend to limit my meat-eating to animals with legs that stay on land most of the time. However, even if I were more into seafood than I am, I still think that I’d be far too squicked out to try eating a dish of live octopus tentacles.

In every scenario I played out in my imagination as far as eating this dish was concerned, I predicted nothing more than a brief slimy struggle then stillness — the last words of an insignificant creature low on the food chain. Silly me. I could not have underestimated my dinner more because once in my mouth, the tentacle went into attack mode and aggressively suctioned on to my teeth, tongue and bottom lip making it nearly impossible for me to manipulate my mouth in order to eat it. My dinner was instinctively trying to preserve its own life while attempting to take mine by asphyxiating me. Needless to say, I was just a little mortified by all this. It was—how would you call it—bleepin’ freaky!!! And if that wasn’t enough, the tentacle then launched phase two of Operation Indigestion and began to whip itself about in a frenzy like it was krump dancing. In my mouth was the mollusk version of the Tasmanian Devil, ferociously flaying at the roof of my mouth and gums. I could not believe it. The feisty, little shit was kind of hurting me. Immediately, I snapped out of the absolute stunned trauma of having to fight with my food and attempted to regain control of the situation. Overpowering the tentacle with my tongue and with a little assist from my fingers, I pried the wicked thing from my gums and teeth. At last the tentacle became vulnerable to my molars. Without hesitating, I bit hard on it over and over and over again while mumbling “Die! Die! Die!” Before it could resurrect itself and do a surprise attack like some slasher movie villain, I swallowed deeply and gulped it down. “Get in my belly!” I gasped.

The dust finally settled. After all that, how does live octopus tentacle taste? A little like fury fused with fear. Spicy and garlicky because of the sauce. There is no aftertaste but there are aftereffects. (Just don’t think about what the tentacle might be doing in your stomach.) It certainly doesn’t taste like cooked squid and nowhere near fried calamari. It’s almost completely devoid of flavor. Texturally it’s highly viscous, more resembling mucous. As far as attitude, it’s the meanest and rudest piece of food I have ever brawled with. And this was only the first piece.

And if that’s not disgusting enough, here’s a video of the dish in question.

Oh. My. Lord.

Never.

(via Pharyngula)

iTunes “Fight the Power” by Public Enemy from the album Fear of a Black Planet (1990, 4:42).

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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