10 Random Songs

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From D: Put your .mp3 collection on random, list the first 10 songs it plays. No editing allowed (though I don’t mind editorializing, myself).

Mousse T: Horny (Clean Version) from DJ Mix 2000 (1998, 3:54): One of the side effects of DJing for years was picking up a lot of CDs that I otherwise wouldn’t have — this was one of them. Actually, this track is one of the more listenable tracks from the album (which really isn’t saying much), and I can at least listen all the way through (if I’m distracted) without jumping for the “skip forward” button.

The Vienna Boys’ Choir: Heiligste Nacht from Christmas in Vienna (1991, 4:26): I actually got to meet (and sing with, if I remember correctly) one incarnation of the VBC many years ago, when they came through Anchorage and I was still a member of the Anchorage Childrens’ Choir. This is an album that normally only gets played around Christmastime, as I’m no big fan of Christmas music, especially off-season.

The Sisters of Mercy: Torch from Floodland (1987, 3:51): I couldn’t listen to SoM for the longest time, after they got heavily overplayed at Sharkey’s, one of the earliest alternative clubs in Anchorage. Lots of SoM every weekend drove me away from them after a while. A few years later, I finally got back into them, and now there’s not much SoM that I don’t enjoy.

Queen: Don’t Try Suicide from The Game (1980, 3:52): While I’m a long-time fan of Queen, this has to be one of their worst songs ever. Why is it that Grand Master Flash has been the only artist ever to come up with an anti-(bad thing of choice) song that was actually good (in this case, his anti-cocaine jam “White Lines (Don’t Do It)”)?

Madonna: Vogue (Bette Davis Dub) from Vogue (1990, 7:28): I’ve always had a lot of respect for Madonna, and generally enjoyed the music she’s put out. No matter what you may think of her or her music, she’s managed to keep herself in the headlines and put out a lot of good, solid, pop/dance music for many years now, generally doing so entirely on her own terms, whether that meant being outrageously sexual, outrageously religious, or just outrageous. The famous Madonna/Britney kiss was one of the first big indicators I’ve seen from her that she might be slipping and getting a bit desperate for press — hopefully that was just a momentary aberration.

DJ H. Geek: I Don’t Know Who I Am… from 3 Years and Counting… (1998, 10:07): DJ Geek, aka Kory, is a friend of mine that I DJ’d with for a few years at Gig’s. He went from mixing to creating his own music, and was nice enough to occasionally toss a CD of his my way. These days, I’ll be listening to something, hear a track I don’t recognize right off, think “hey, that’s good…who is it?” and realize that it’s one of Kory’s tracks. Not bad, not bad at all.

Love and Rockets: Lift (Malibu) from Resurrection Hex (1998, 4:17): As good as it is, there’s so much more to LaR than just “So Alive“. Have any of the members of Bauhaus gone on to any projects that weren’t listenable?

Deconstruction: E-Trance from Trance Sexual (1996, 5:32): Random rather forgettable trance, really. Not bad, not great. Just there.

Die Krupps: To the Hilt from Rings of Steel (1995, 4:47): Die Krupps aren’t one of my favorite industrial bands, and many of the remixes on the Rings of Steel album are more impressive than the original versions, but they’re not bad.

White Zombie: I’m Your Boogieman from The Crow: City of Angels (1996, 4:29): Cheezy, yeah. Loud, yeah. And virtually always a lot of fun. Who needs actual substance when good samples, drums, guitar work, and a healthy dose of pure attitude will do?

99 percent failsafe

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I got a good laugh when Kirsten posted this, and I finally remembered to mention it here.

Laura Bush recently expressed her “shock” over the gay marriage issue. In this Salon article she goes on to talk about sex education, mentioning that abstinence is “100 percent fail-safe.”

This raised Kirsten’s eyebrows, apparently…

And it suddenly occurred to me that this was just a little off…I mean – the Bushes are hardcore christians, right?

That abstinence bit worked REAL well for Mary and Joseph, didn’t it? It’s 100% fail-safe, after all.

iTunes: “Perfect Tan (Bikini Atoll)” by Machines of Loving Grace from the album Concentration (1993, 3:21).

Apple out of debt

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Impressive, really — even with the economy in the shape it’s been lately, Apple has been doing so well that they were just able to pull themselves out of debt, according to this internal Apple memo:

Team,

Today is a historic day of sorts for our company. When I arrived back at Apple in mid-1997, the company was burdened with \$1 billion of debt. Through everyone’s hard work we turned Apple around, paid off the majority of our debt and began to amass a war chest of cash in the bank which has grown to about \$4.8 billion! But there was still \$300 million of remaining debt, which we decided to hold to maturity.

Today we used \$300 million of our cash to pay off this remaining debt.

Apple is now a debt-free company — for the first time in over a decade!

It sure feels good.

Steve

(via /.)

iTunes: “The Moon, Part 1” by Speakeasy from the album Common Ground (1995, 3:33).

Clumsy Brits

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According to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, in 2002…

  • 12,300 people slipped and fell on wood floors.
  • 20,000 people injured themselves while riding microscooters.
  • 5,310 people fell while pulling on trousers.
  • And 700 people (assumedly men) injured themselves while zipping their trouser zippers.

\<cringe>Ow.\</cringe>

(via Prairie)

iTunes: “Golden Dawn” by Ministry from the album Land of Rape and Honey (1988, 5:42).

Why the genealogy bug?

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Because it makes history real.

When I was younger, I claimed (only slightly tongue-in-cheek) that I couldn’t get into history because, “you meet all these interesting people — but they’re all dead!”

Thankfully, that attitude has changed as I’ve aged, and I’m constantly finding history more and more interesting. One of the big triggers for that change was the first time I started digging through the box of genealogical records that floats around our family, during one of its trips through our household. At first it was just idle curiosity, but then I started reading…

Random recollections of what’s contained in that box:

One family line can be traced back to Richard Warren, who came to America on the Mayflower.

The line of mom’s maiden name — Ward — can only be traced back a few generations. The popular theory is that a few generations back, the “family founder” was an orphan, and therefore a “ward of the state.” Hence, the family name of Ward.

One of my ancestors ran a stop on the Underground Railroad during the civil war.

During the westward expansion of America, one family lived in a little cabin somewhere out on the woods. One day the mother and father were off somewhere, leaving the children in charge of the oldest child, who was around ten or twelve, I believe. During the time they were gone, he realized that there was a mountain lion (cougar?) stalking the house, and he had to find his father’s gun and kill the predator before it made off with one of the younger children.

During the Revolutionary War, one ancestor fighting for the colonies was captured by the British. During the review of the prisoners on board a British ship, the captain stopped in front of him — it was his brother. They retired to the captains cabin and spent the next few hours in debate, each trying to convince the other to switch sides. Neither succeeded, the captured brother was set free, and neither brother saw the other again.

These are all things that when you read about them in the history books, they often just provoke a “huh…that’s neat” reaction. But when I sat there and read through these stories as they related to myself and my family, they resonated with me in a way they never had before, and suddenly it was all a lot more real to me.

I’m really looking forward to being able to get back into all this again.

Can you tell? :)

iTunes: “Sky Is Broken, The” by Moby from the album Play (1999, 4:18).

More on the genealogy project

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I spent some time last night following up on playing around with software for tracking my family’s history on our website. So far, things are actually looking fairly good — with the one caveat that I only have so much information in my head.

The first piece to the puzzle is GEDitCOM, a Mac OS X application that reads and writes standard GEDCOM files (I had no idea that there was a standard file for genealogy software before I started looking into all this). While it’s not the prettiest application in the world, it does appear to be very powerful, and I’m quite pleasantly surprised by the amount of information that the GEDCOM format supports.

Of course, I’m not sure why I’m surprised — I’m obviously not the first person to look into how to track all this information using a computer. I guess we all just like to think that we’re the first to come up with a good idea… ;)

The second piece is the web package I stumbled across the other day — PhpGedView. A set of PHP scripts, it was very easy to install and get up and running, all I had to do was copy the scripts into a directory on the webserver, tweak the permissions on two files and one directory, and I could log into the interface and start putting things together. Again, it’s not as pretty as it could be, but it does look like nearly (if not entirely) all of the functionality that I was looking for is there.

Once PhpGedView is installed, all you need to do is upload a standard GEDCOM file and PhpGedView parses it and creates the final website. Here’s the one spot where I ran into problems: each time I uploaded the GEDCOM file that GEDitCOM created, PhpGedView wasn’t able to parse it correctly, and I got a bunch of garbage data.

Turns out that the solution is fairly simple, and ties into an age-old issue between Mac and PC file formats. Mac systems use a different character to signify the end of a line than PC (DOS/*NIX) systems do, and when the scripts tried to import the GEDCOM file, they saw it as one really really really long line. I was able to get around this by running the file through BBEdit and switching the line break style, I’m sure there are many utilities to do just that floating around the ‘net for people who don’t have BBEdit.

Once I got that figured out, the import went smoothly, and as a result, the first version of our family tree is up. It’s very bare-bones at the moment (though not as bare-bones as it looks at first — just click around and experiment a bit to move around the tree), but mom promised to send me copies of the family’s “history box”. Once I get that and pop more information in, the tree will look a lot less sparse than it does at the moment.

Even better, though, is that PhpGedView does handle one of the bigger items on my wishlist — user accounts with editing ability. I’ll need to put together a simple “user’s manual/how-to”, but this will allow other people in the family to add and edit information to the database. Once changes are made, I can then download the updated GEDCOM file from PhpGedView to my computer, re-import it into GEDitCOM, and keep all the information synced between my personal workspace and the website. Not bad at all!

Every few years of my life, the genealogy bug has bit me — now that it has again, it’s great that I’ve got the technology at my fingertips to be able to store and present it like this.

Now, mom — about that box… ;)

iTunes: “I Was Walking” by Poems for Laila from the album On a Wednesday (2002, 2:50).

Brain Drain

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There’s an excellent (as in must-read) article in the Washington Monthly looking at how the Bush administrations policies are driving creative talent away from America.

As other nations become more attractive to mobile immigrant talent, America is becoming less so. A recent study by the National Science Board found that the U.S. government issued 74,000 visas for immigrants to work in science and technology in 2002, down from 166,000 in 2001–an astonishing drop of 55 percent. This is matched by similar, though smaller-scale, declines in other categories of talented immigrants, from finance experts to entertainers. Part of this contraction is derived from what we hope are short-term security concerns–as federal agencies have restricted visas from certain countries after September 11. More disturbingly, we find indications that fewer educated foreigners are choosing to come to the United States. For instance, most of the decline in science and technology immigrants in the National Science Board study was due to a drop in applications.

[…]

…I’m convinced that the biggest reason has to do with the changed political and policy landscape in Washington. In the 1990s, the federal government focused on expanding America’s human capital and interconnectedness to the world–crafting international trade agreements, investing in cutting edge R&D, subsidizing higher education and public access to the Internet, and encouraging immigration. But in the last three years, the government’s attention and resources have shifted to older sectors of the economy, with tariff protection and subsidies to extractive industries. Meanwhile, Washington has stunned scientists across the world with its disregard for consensus scientific views when those views conflict with the interests of favored sectors (as has been the case with the issue of global climate change). Most of all, in the wake of 9/11, Washington has inspired the fury of the world, especially of its educated classes, with its my-way-or-the-highway foreign policy. In effect, for the first time in our history, we’re saying to highly mobile and very finicky global talent, “You don’t belong here.”

(via Tom Negrino)

Why gay marriage should not be legalized

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[Update:]{.underline}

When I originally found this piece, it was uncredited, and so I posted it as I found it. Thanks to Suchita for pointing me to the original source: the Gator Gay Straight Alliance at the Univeristy of Florida.

  1. Homosexuality is not natural, much like eyeglasses, polyester, and birth control.
  2. Heterosexual marriages are valid becasue they produce children. Infertile couples and old people can’t legally get married because the world needs more children.
  3. Obviously, gay parents will raise gay children, since straight parents only raise straight children.
  4. Straight marriage will be less meaningful if Gay marriage is allowed, since Britney Spears’ 55-hour just-for-fun marriage was meaningful.
  5. Heterosexual marriage has been around a long time and hasn’t changed at all; women are property, blacks can’t marry whites, and divorce is illegal.
  6. Gay marriage should be decided by people, not the courts, because the majority-elected legislatures, not courts, have historically protected the rights of the minorities.
  7. Gay marriage is not supported by religion. In a theocracy like ours, the values of one religion are imposed on the entire counrty. That’s why we have only one religion in America.
  8. Gay marriage will encourage people to be gay, in the same way that hanging around tall people will make you tall.
  9. Legalizing gay marriage will open the door to all kinds of crazy behavior. People may even wish to marry their pets because a dog has legal standing and can sign a marriage contract.
  10. Children can never suceed without a male and a female role model at home. That’s why single parents are forbidden to raise children.
  11. Gay marriage will change the foundation of society. Heterosexual marriage has been around for a long time, and we could never adapt to new social norms because we haven’t adapted to things like cars or longer lifespans.
  12. Civil unions, providing most of the same benefits as marriage with a different name are better, because a “seperate but equal” institution is always constitutional. Seperate schools for African-Americans worked just as well as seperate marriages for gays and lesbians will.

Not the best I’ve ever read, but not terrible, and has its amusing moments. Its heart is in the right place, though.

(via Something Positive)

Duck! The food’s shooting back!

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You will never lose betting on human stupidity.

A man and his wife ducked behind a refrigerator when bullets began exploding in their oven, authorities say.

Capt. Craig Kohlbeck of the Brown County Sheriff’s Department said the husband had put the ammunition and three handguns in the oven before the couple left on a vacation.

He told officers he thought the items would be safe there in case someone broke into the home while they were away.

After returning from their trip Tuesday, the wife turned on the oven to prepare dinner and the bullets ignited, Kohlbeck said.

No one was hurt.

Of course, as amusing as this is, I can see it happening. At one point many years ago, mom decided that she’d store some of her unused Tupperware in the oven. Later on, Dad decided to cook.

After she had to get new Tupperware, mom decided that there were better places to store it.

;)

(via Prairie)