Good night tonight

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No particular reason for that, just a good night. Evan (the DJ at the Vogue) was doing quite well, and the club was just crowded enough to be definitely crowded, without being so bad that I couldn’t get on the floor and bounce around.

I’d brought in a CD of requests, but apparently the CD player at the club is picky and wouldn’t read the burned disc. Evan’s got the CD now, though, and he’ll re-burn it to a CD brand that he knows works, and then I might get some of my requests in. Here’s the playlist for the cd:

  1. Depeche Mode: Flexible/Just Can’t Get Enough — a mix of two of my favorite DM tracks from a bootleg CD called the Twelfth Strike.
  2. Psychic TV: I.C. Water
  3. LaTour: Allen’s Got a New Hi-Fi
  4. Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark: Pandora’s Box (It’s a Long, Long Way) (Constant Pressure 12″)
  5. Drum Club: Sound System (Underworld)
  6. MC 900 Ft. Jesus: If I Only Had a Brain
  7. Devo: Head Like a Hole — Yup, Devo covering Nine Inch Nails. From, of all things, the Supercop soundtrack.
  8. 12 Rounds: Pleasant Smell (Rethought by Clint Mansell and Keith Hillebrandt for the Nothing Collective)
  9. Information Society: Going, Going, Gone (Razed in Black)
  10. Propellerheads featuring the Jungle Brothers: Take California (and Party)
  11. Public Enemy vs. Winx: Bring the Higher State of Noise — A mash-up of ‘Bring the Noise‘ and ‘Higher State of Consciousness‘.
  12. :Wumpscut:: Wreath of Barbs (Gray/Scale)
  13. Billy Idol: Don’t You Forget About Me — Billy Idol covering the Simple Minds track from the soundtrack to The Breakfast Club.
  14. Pigface: Mind Your Own Business
  15. The Kleptones: Listen — A mash-up of Queen‘s ‘Radio Ga-Ga‘ and a few different Beastie Boys tracks.

On the way home I happened to bump in to Janice, who I’d met last month sometime at the Vogue. She was on her way home from the Noc Noc with a friend (Tom…I think), so I stopped to chat with them for a few minutes. Last time I’d seen her I’d given her my LiveJournal name on a matchbook (which she got quite excited about…in a world of cell phones and PDA’s, the matchbook technique was very “old school”), so I harassed her about not having tracked me down yet to say hi. Nothing like a little friendly teasing to round out the night!

Earlier today I bussed out to the University Village to stop by the Apple Store and picked up iLife ’05. I haven’t done a ton of playing around with it yet, but so far, I’m liking the changes in iPhoto 5. Poked around for a few moments with the other programs in the suite, but iPhoto’s the only one that I spent any real time with.

New toys, yay!

Tomorrow…well, later today, I suppose (I’m up way too late tonight) there’s a march and rally in support of equal rights in marriage being put on by Equality Now that I’m planning on hitting. It starts just up the hill from my place at Broadway and Pine at 1pm, then goes down the hill to Westlake Plaza. Should be interesting, and hopefully get me some good pictures, too. We’ll see…

iTunes “Going Going Gone (Razed in Black)” by Information Society from the album InSoc Recombinant (1999, 4:56).

Commonly Confused Words answer key

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Given the amount of interest that the Commonly Confused Words test prompted, and after prompting by Royce, I’m going to go back through and re-take it, recording my answers as I go through. At the time I originally took it there was only one answer key (for the “Beginner” section), though now there are answers for section two (“Intermediate”) also, so I’ll take a look at those too once I’m done.

Maybe among all of us, we can suss out where we’re stumbling!

Read more

Enterprise

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Over the past couple weeks, I noticed something interesting during my wanderings through the ‘net. During my near-obsessive investigation into Battlestar Galactica, discussion threads would often end up contrasting the new series to Enterprise, and I kept seeing people openly admitting that the first few seasons of Enterprise were dreck, but then going on to claim that their current season was actually quite watchable.

While reading some of the reports about the current fan-driven campaign to rescue Enterprise from cancellation, the same general comments kept popping up. Then I got into a conversation with a customer at work, and he ended up saying much the same thing.

Unconvinced but intrigued, I decided to see what I could find, and ended up downloading all of the episodes to date of Season Four of Enterprise and watching them over the past few days.

While I wouldn’t exactly say that I’m impressed, I do have to admit that I found this season to be far more bearable than what I had seen during the first season. It’s still by far my least favorite incarnation of Trek (out of TOS, TNG and DS9, at least, I’ve yet to see more than a few random episodes of VOY), but the overall feeling I got was that someone on the Enterprise team got their head out of their ass started actually listening to the fans and tried to turn the show around.

First step in the right direction was spending the first two episodes wrapping up the “temporal cold war” storyline. I thought that was a bad idea when it first popped up, and nothing I’d seen or read since then had convinced me any differently. Now that that’s over and done with, things seem to be improving.

They’ve also spent a few episodes working on the Vulcan culture, trying to explain why they’re presented so differently in this series than they ever have been before. It all came off as a little far-fetched, but at least they’re trying.

The storyline touching on the Eugenics Wars and augmented humans wasn’t bad (though I do wish that they’d used some other scientist as the antagonist — as much as I like Brent Spiner, how old must Soong have been by the time he died?), and it allowed them to finally create an explanation for the differences in appearance between the Klingons of the original series and those we’ve seen ever since The Motion Picture. A pity the second half of that two-part story became so muddled, as the first part was fairly strong, and the general premise is at least bearable (and no worse than some of the other convoluted explanations that have had to be created over the years to explain away various goofs).

So, I’ll admit that they’ve gotten better, and the current season of Enterprise is at least watchable. I still don’t think that there’s any great need for it to continue, though — let it die, and let the Trek universe have a few years to settle and regroup before trying to fire up the Paramount marketing machine yet again.

And please, please, please — no more bad ballads over the opening credits in any future incarnations of Trek. Someone (other than the people sitting through it week after week) really needs to suffer for that.

Saw

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Rick brought over Saw last night for me to watch. It’s a film that aspires to be a psychological/horror film along the lines of Seven…and fails miserably.

The premise starts interestingly enough: two men wake up chained on opposite sides of a room, prisoners of a psychopath who manages never to actually kill his victims. Instead, he puts them into situations where they have to kill themselves or others in their attempts to stay alive.

Unfortunately, Saw is burdened by two major flaws: a script that has a number of goofs, from plot holes to unrealistically stupid actions by the characters; and Cary Elwes, who continues to completely unimpress me as an actor. By the end of the film, the violence had gotten to the point where I nearly turned it off, and neither of the final two surprises surrounding the identity of the psychopath were surprising in the least.

I think the premise had promise, but the execution was so flawed that I ended up finding the entire film a waste of my time.

iTunes “Two Telephone Calls and an Air Raid” by Imrei, Shaun from the album Mortal Kombat: Annihilation (1997, 4:43).

Reconsidering

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I did something this morning that I’ve only done a couple times in the past, and have removed a post that had been published a few hours before. The conversation is still progressing (or, that is, it will be when I get home to check my e-mail again), I just came to think that it was a conversation better held less publicly.

So if you saw a post pop up and then disappear on this page or in your newsreader, that’s why. No glitch, just a reconsideration.

That’s it?!?

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John pointed out The Commonly Confused Words Test, so I gave it a shot. My results:

Advanced
You scored 100% Beginner, 93% Intermediate, 93% Advanced, and 61% Expert!

You have an extremely good understanding of beginner, intermediate, and advanced level commonly confused English words, getting at least 75% of each of these three levels’ questions correct. This is an exceptional score. Remember, these are commonly confused English words, which means most people don’t use them properly. You got an extremely respectable score.

Exceptional or not, I have to admit, I’m a little chagrined by that 61% on the Expert section. I’m generally rather proud of my command of the language, so getting a ‘D’ on that section of the test really makes me curious as to where I goofed up. Unfortunately, the only answer key available is for the Beginner section, which I scored 100% on.

“

iTunes “Today” by Ride from the album Just Say Anything (1991, 6:27).

TechNewsWorld commentary mention

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Just adding another link to the ever-expanding 15 Minutes category here. Romm pointed out a mention of me in a commentary piece on TechNewsWorld that was published a couple of weeks ago. It’s a nice mention, too, as in addition to the standard “another fired blogger” mention, the author also follows up with my reaction to the incident, and contrasts it to Ellen “Queen of Sky” Simonetti’s Bloggers’ Bill of Rights campaign (which I think is goofy at best).

Contrast Simonetti’s response with that of Michael Hanscom. He was on a temporary assignment with Microsoft when he posted a picture to his blog that he took on the Microsoft campus. Microsoft essentially fired Hanscom, telling his temp agency he wasn’t welcome on campus anymore, thus ending his assignment.

The picture showed a pallet of Apple Macintosh G5’s being delivered to Microsoft. Hanscom said he took care not to show anything in the background that would give away Microsoft secrets, security systems or even building locations. But since the picture was taken on its campus, it made public an activity that Microsoft has a right to keep low-profile if it chooses to.

Unlike Simonetti, Hanscom concedes that Microsoft had a right to toss him out. Although he is a blogger, he realized that the normal legal rules apply to his situation. He started blogging back when blogs were just called “personal Web pages,” so maybe he has enough history to see blogging in its proper context — it’s just publishing. It is not private communications among friends.

I just dropped a note to Philip Albert, the author of the piece, thanking him for that.

Another interview

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I just got done with a lunchtime phone interview with Nick Jesdanun, a reporter for the AP. He’s still finalizing his article, and as this is going to be a wire story, there’s no telling where it might show up, but there’s at least a chance that my name will start popping up again over the next day or so (possibly as early as this evening) in the midst of another story about blogging, jobs, and the occasionally unfortunate intersection of the two.

I’ll toss a link up when I see it, but if one of you kind folks happens to catch it before I do, feel free to let me know!

Update: Prairie wins! She found the story first: Blog-related firings focus on policy. Just a small mention, but I’m in there…

In 2003, a Microsoft Corp. contractor was fired after posting photographs of computers from rival Apple Computer Inc. at a loading dock. Because Michael Hanscom had described a building in his posting, Microsoft said he had violated security, he said.

[…]

Microsoft refused to comment on Hanscom’s case, but pointed out that it encourages blogging and has more than 1,500 unofficial bloggers – the bulk on Microsoft’s official Web sites.

Update: And here’s a CNN version of the same story, courtesy of Tim.

Anybody hungry?

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Every Tuesday night, I have about the same routine. I get home from work a little after 5pm, Prairie and I chat via iChat until about 7pm, and I browse through NetNewsWire while we’re chatting. At 7pm, I close down NetNewsWire, order some pizza, and pop in a DVD.

Tonight went as normal, but by 8pm, my food hadn’t shown up. This is rather unusual — I live just a few blocks away from the pizza place, so their quoted 45 minute delivery time is usually closer to 25-30 minutes — so I gave them a call to check up. The girl that answered the phone checked my number, and told me that there was no order in the system for my number. Obviously, someone had screwed up when I placed my order, so she re-placed my order, giving me my dinner for free.

About twenty minutes later, my buzzer rang, and the pizza guy showed up. He handed me the pizza, and then handed me my bill as he apologized for running late. Late? A bill? Interesting — apparently my first order did get placed after all. I signed (since this was the order I’d placed in the first place) and sat back to munch and see if the second free order was also on its way.

Sure enough, twenty minutes after that, there was another buzz at the door.

So now I’ve got lots of pizza. Guess I’m good for a few days of munching.

Hm.

Anybody hungry? :)

iTunes “Pussy (We Want Some)” by Lords of Acid from the album Pussy (1998, 5:39).

Keeping New Readers

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Problogger has a short series of posts with tips on how to keep readers who have stumbled across your site via a search engine hit or some other method. Interesting stuff, though nothing groundbreaking, and as it turns out, I do most of what he recommends already.

In Part One:

(Anybody surprised by those last two? I know I’m not…)

In Part Two:

  • Good individual page design: I think I’m pretty solid here. My individual pages match my main page, with some slight tweaks here and there to better fit their status as more focused pages than the main page is.
  • Make your message clear: I’m not so strong here, but then, I don’t really have a single focus for the site.
  • Provide pathways into your blog: Suggestions here include obvious links to the home page, an about page, and archives, all of which I have prominently displayed at the top of each page.

In Part Three:

  • Links to other relevant entries: Another one I think I’m pretty solid with, thanks to the category links beneath the title and the ‘Related Entries’ section of the sidebar.
  • E-mail this entry to a friend: This one I don’t have set up. I’ve seen it other places, but never figured it would have that much use. Maybe I should re-think that one.
  • Promote via newsletter: This one I’m not even interested in trying to maintain. I’m bad enough about keeping up with things (including, at times, this site), trying to maintain a newsletter of any sort would die a quick death. Again, though, as I don’t have a specific focus for the site, that’s probably less of a concern for me.

In Part Four:

  • Promote your RSS feed: Sometimes I wonder if I should do more here — while I have the ‘Feeds’ link in the site menubar, there may be people who don’t recognize the significance of that. Perhaps renaming that to (the dull but obvious term) RSS would be a good idea. I’m not sure if there’s much need or demand for me to start enabling RSS feeds for every post on my site, though I consider it from time to time.
  • Search this site: Again, we’re good here — the search box is nice, obvious, and ‘above the fold’ on every page.
  • Break up longer posts into multiple posts: My only difficulty with this one is that I never plan long posts, they just sort of happen…and then they tend to be stream-of-consciousness enough that it would be difficult to break them apart. I don’t think I’ll concern myself with this one too much.
  • Be interactive: While I don’t always respond to every comment left, I do keep track of any comments left here, and do my best to respond as much as possible (time, energy, and available brainpower dependent, of course).

Not a bad set of tips, all in all. Maybe I’ll tinker with a couple more things here and there.

(via Neuvo)

iTunes “Acperiance 1” by Hardfloor from the album Harthouse: The Point of No Return Chapter 1 (1993, 8:58).