Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
Prairie and I are off to the San Juan Islands for the weekend to visit her dad. Never been there before, and I’m told it’s quite pretty, so it should be a good weekend (even if it does require waking up at oh-six-hundred [”What’s the ‘oh’ stand for? ‘Oh my God it’s early!'”] to get to the 9:30 ferry at Anacortes).
Back sometime Sunday evening…
Siouxsie‘s coming to Seattle — with the Creatures and the Banshees!
Coming to a US City near you in May & June, and you’re all invited..
We’re presenting these shows as “an evening with Siouxsie” as they’ll be neither solely Creatures nor Banshees but an all encompassing two hour show which will comprise classics & rarities picked from the whole of the Siouxsie & the Banshees & the Creatures catalogues.
We’re also thrilled to announce that ex-Kodo drummer Leonard Eto will be joining us as our special guest for the debut performance of songs from Hái!
The venues are mostly of an intimate size, (more sensorial), there’ll be no support so get there early as this will be one of those rare chances to see & hear la Sioux – up close!
see you soon,
xxBudgiexxAN EVENING WITH….SIOUXSIE
2004 U.S. TOUR DATESWed 19 May, Seattle, WA – The Showbox
Tel: 206-628-0221 or 800-325-SEAT ticketswest.com
Tix. \$27.50 Adv. \$30.00 DOS Doors: 8:00PM OnStage: 9:30PM (21+)
I so need to get off work early that day…
(via Sirriamnis)
iTunes: “Mars (The Bringer of Techno)” by Technoclassix from the album Technoclassix Vol. 1 (1993, 5:20).
Some jaw-droppingly impressive Photoshop re-creations of Gary Larson’s Far Side comic strips.
(via Boing Boing)
iTunes: “Dig Ophelia” by Rasputina from the album Thanks for the Ether (1996, 2:59).
I tell you, if I didn’t already have my iPod (and therefore no need for a flash drive), this would be so tempting!
He may be a representative of the dark side, but it’s hard to resist those tiny horns and cute chubby red body. At 4 1/2 inches long, our stylish and strange Devil Duckie Drive is a High-Speed USB 2.0 (1.1 compatible) personal data storage device for people who are going places.
Once you reach your destination, plug your Devil Duckie Drive in and put him to work. His expressive (and often hypnotic) eyes will blink as he reads and writes your data.
(via MacMinute)
Two LiveJournals have popped up to keep us informed of what’s really going on on Mars, without being filtered through the publicists at NASA.
First, Spirit Rover…
Monday, February 9th, 2004
9:56 pm
i’ve been staring at the same rock for two weeks.
stupid, boring rock.
this weekend i got my revenge. first i got to grind into it, then i drove right over it.
okay, i admit it, i had fun. i’d like to do more of this autonomous navigation thing. i knew i didn’t really need nasa telling me what to do.
And sister Opportunity:
**Friday, February 6th, 2004 **
8:23 am
squee!
I got to drive today! It’s so cool! I didn’t think I’d ever be allowed to go out on my own. NASA is so protective sometimes; it’s like they wanted to keep me swaddled in airbags forever. But anyways, I keep finding these round pebbly things. They get stuck in my treads. Do you think they’ll leave a mark? OMG what if Stardust saw me like this? No, it’s cool. It’s not like he’d ever come by this planet again…
Spirit is still “sick.” She swears she’s gonna drive to that crater any time now, though. She just wants to do it on her time and not when NASA orders her to. Like, whatever. Don’t tell anyone but sometimes I miss her.
Personally, I think this stuff is brilliant.
(via Boing Boing)
Interesting rumor via MacRumors:
According to one unconfirmed source, Federal Express may be looking to make a significant purchase of Macs to replace their current PCs.
Reportedly, the move is under consideration due to the recent wave of viruses that have swept the PC world.
While Macs are not inherently immune to virus attacks, most viruses have been written on the Windows/PC platform.
Now, this is “one unnamed source”, so it could easily be entirely fictitious, but it’s interesting to think about, at the very least.
As an added bonus, the MacRumors discussion thread for this item has a much higher signal-to-noise ratio than what I’m used to seeing in their forums, and I found this wonderful little point buried within, from MisterMe:
…there is more evidence for ghosts, UFOs, and Big Foot than there is for MacOS X viruses. People have actually reported seeing ghosts, UFOs, and Big Foot.
iTunes: “Thunder Kiss ’65 (Swinging Lovers)” by White Zombie from the album Nightcrawlers: The K.M.F.D.M. Remixes (1992, 4:46).
So, aside from a little silly noodling around a couple weeks ago, I hadn’t really done much with GarageBand since I picked it up. Since I don’t have a keyboard to use with it, I’m somewhat limited by not being able to use anything but the included loops. However, it occurred to me on the way home from work the other night that that should be more than enough to let me play around with remixing already existing work…
…and for some reason, Coolio’s “Smokin’ Stix” caught my ear as a likely candidate. While the subject matter isn’t really up my alley (dipping cigarettes in embalming fluid and smoking them to get high), the beats and rhythms are fun, and I thought I might be able to make something work with that as a base.
Disclaimer: The original recording of Coolio’s “Smokin’ Stix” is ©1994 Tommy Boy Music, published by Tommy Boy Music/Boo Daddy Publishing/All Nations Publishing (ASCAP)/Frankly Music (BMI); was written by A. Ivey, T. Conway, and A. Feldman; and contains samples from “You Want It You Got It” performed by B.T. Express, courtesy of Roadshow Music Corp. I am not charging for or attempting to make money off of this remix. Please don’t sue me. :)
So, for the past couple days, I’ve been fiddling around with GarageBand and Amadeus II, first using Amadeus II to snip the song into lots of little pieces and attempting to isolate the vocals from the background music (which was only partially successful), then re-assembling everything in GarageBand with my own choices of drum beats, instruments, and electronic bleeps and bloops.
And now, finally, it’s finished (or at least, “finished enough” — I could probably keep tweaking it nearly indefinitely).
Download it here: Coolio’s “Smokin’ Stix” (DJ Wüdi Remix) (4:03, 4.6Mb, 160kbps MP3).
I don’t think it’s perfect, but I don’t think it’s too terribly bad for a first project, either. Hopefully some of you get a kick out of it too — but feel free to let me know what you think, good or bad!
Avi Rubin, one of the primary authors of a highly critical look at Diebold’s electronic voting machines, decided to answer some of his critics, put his money where his mouth is, and spend a day as an election judge, working with the very machines about which he had expressed strong security concerns. In his very interesting recap of his day, he admits that some of his concerns may not be as much of a worry as he thought — but others may be far worse.
In our paper, we described how the smartcards used by these machines had no cryptography on them, and we made the widely criticized claim that a teenager in a garage could manufacture smartcards and use them to vote 20 times. I now believe that this particular attack is not a real threat — at least not in the primary I worked today. […] In general, multiple voting attacks during the election are not likely to work in a precinct such as the one where I worked.
[…]
There were also some security issues that I found to be much worse than I expected. […] The security risk I saw was that Diebold had designated which machine would be the zero machine, and at one point, all of the vote tallies were loaded onto that one machine in memory. That would be the perfect point to completely change the tallies. There is no need to attack all of the machines at a precinct if someone could tamper with the zero machine.
[…]
I continue to believe that the Diebold voting machines represent a huge threat to our democracy. I fundamentally believe that we have thrown our trust in the outcome of our elections in the hands of a handful of companies (Diebold, Sequoia, ES&S) who are in a position to control the final outcomes of our elections. I also believe that the outcomes can be changed without any knowledge by election judges or anyone else. Furthermore, meaningful recounts are impossible with these machines.
I also believe that we have great people working in the trenches and on the front lines. These are ordinary people, mostly elderly, who believe in our country and our democracy, and who work their butts off for 16 hours, starting at 6 a.m. to try to keep the mechanics of our elections running smoothly. It is a shame that the e-voting tidal wave has a near hypnotic effect on these judges and almost all voters. I believe that after today’s experience, I am much better equipped to make the arguments against e-voting machines with no voter verifiability, but I also have a great appreciation for how hard it is going to be to fight them, given how much voters and election officials love them.
(via Jason Kottke)
Two Japanese phrases I need to remember (and possibly eventually learn to pronounce…):
Both found in the midst of Jonathon Delacour’s return to weblogging, wherein he explores some of the dissatisfaction that has been creeping through many weblogs of late, and reminds us that there’s more to all this than just the echo chamber.
…the spirit of this thing we were all so in love with—which for me, in its best moments, has always been a celebration of the beauty and sadness of everyday life—is indestructible (as long as the dabs of grit keep seeping into the oyster shells).
My current employer has a set of required training courses that all employees have to take, ranging from the standard sexual harassment training to machine-specific courses. Not a terribly big deal, generally.
Except right now, when I’m working my way through a course on Internet Explorer — a course that has an expected time to finish of three and one half hours. I just learned what an “address bar” is, what a “link” is and what happens when I click on it, and how to resize and move a browser window around on my screen.
I think I can feel my brain dribbling out of my ears.
On the bright side, these courses at least allow you to turn off the audio narration, so I can just click through the steps as quickly as possible. Hopefully, this will allow me to finish in something less than the expected time.
[Update:]{.underline}
A quick clarification on one issue that was pointed out to me. The training sessions offer audio narration, but even when you turn that off, all steps must be followed before one can advance through the course; after the course, there is a quiz to ensure that the testee has retained the information given. While turning off the audio allowed me to progress at a far faster rate than I could have otherwise, I didn’t entirely skip or disregard the training. I also passed the quiz with flying colors — yay me! :)
Now that I’m done whining, it’s back to training, where I’m currently learning all about how to search for information on the ‘net via MSN Search and Yahoo!
Wheeeeeee!
(Of course, the really ironic part to all this is that it’s web based training. On how to use the web. Hilarity ensues.)
