Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
Hot damn — someone figured out [how to hack :hover support into Internet Explorer]! If I get some time this weekend, I’ll muck around with it until I can get it working on my site — one more step towards a consistent, cross-platform, standards compliant design.
(via Eric Meyer)
Some of my long-time readers (and family and friends) will already know that prior to moving down to Seattle, I spent around eight years of my time in Anchorage DJ’ing for a number of dance clubs. From City Lights, to The Lost Abbey, to Gig’s Music Theater, to The Eclipse, and finally to Studio 99, I spun practically every possible genre — alternative, industrial, punk, goth, 80’s retro, new wave, disco, swing, techno, house, trance, and even (though I grumbled a lot) the occasional top-40 and R&B — and had an absolute blast doing it.
I finally got tired of letting my old domain sit inactive after moving my weblog to TypePad, and have resurrected djwudi.com as a monument (however small) to my years as a club DJ. In addition to some oddly third-person ramblings about my career, there are no less than (though no more than) eleven different mix sessons posted and available for either download or streaming audio listening. Ten of them are even worth listening to — the eleventh (Difficult Listening Hour 03) has some truly horrendous trainwrecking going on, and I only leave it posted out of my anal-retentive need for a complete set.
Anyway, feel free to stop by, download or stream the mixes that are there, and (hopefully) enjoy! Who knows — I may not have a club gig anymore, but since I’ve still got my equipment and a ton of music, there’s always a slim chance that there may be more in the future…
As an added bonus, I’ve resurrected the last archived version of the Gig’s Music Theater website that I maintained for the club. This archive dates from March 30, 1998, and serves both as a nostalgic remembrance of one of the best all-ages clubs in Anchorage’s history, and as a monument to my web design and coding skills at the time. ;) Hopefully some of Gig’s old patrons might get a kick out of this (especially the pictures in the ‘Scene’ section)! I also have an archive of old flyers for Gig’s that I made, though I’ve mentioned those before.
Bush to low-income workers: “Look! I’ve revamped the payroll system so that more of you will get overtime pay! We’re talking \$895 million more in wages here! Aren’t I great?”
On July 10, the House…voted to support the Department of Labor’s (DOL) efforts to give 1.3 million low-income workers the right to receive overtime pay. Education & the Workforce Committee Chairman John Boehner (R-OH) and Workforce Protections Subcommittee Chairman Charlie Norwood (R-GA)…praised the Labor Department for its efforts to provide additional protections to low-income workers and ensure that they are entitled to overtime pay.
Millions of workers in America are not going to lose their overtime pay in the United States if DOL completes its proposed update to “white collar” overtime regulations. Unfortunately many Democrats, organized labor, and other opponents of this proposal are trying to scare everyone into believing that they will.
Bush gets votes.
Meanwhile…
Bush to employers of low-income workers likely to be affected by the changes: “Okay, here’s how you can get away with not having to pay them any more money after all! Aren’t I great?”
A proposed Labor Department rule suggests ways employers can avoid paying overtime to some of the 1.3 million low-income workers who would become eligible this year.
[…]
Among the options for employers: cut workers’ hourly wages and add the overtime to equal the original salary, or raise salaries to the new \$22,100 annual threshold, making them ineligible.
[…]
Employers’ options include:
[…]
Making a “payroll adjustment” that results “in virtually no, or only a minimal increase in labor costs,” the department said. Workers’ annual pay would be converted to an hourly rate and cut, with overtime added in to equal the former salary.
Essentially, employees would be working more hours for the same pay.
Bush gets votes.
And in the end, of course, real people get screwed.
Crap like this makes me sick, and really makes me worry that Bush and his cronies will be able to wheedle and manipulate their way back into the White House in November. I hope not, but I won’t say that it doesn’t make me worry.
(via Lane)
This week is the Macworld expo in San Francisco, and Jim has a good roundup of the current rumors posted. As Lane pointed out, I’ll certainly be keeping up with the news during tomorrow’s keynote, hopefully by watching the webcast in the morning before work. Expect lots of Macgeekery here tomorrow!
Apparently the Rolling Stones just released a new CD of remixes of Sympathy for the Devil. For me, this is definitely a must-get (and thanks to the beauty of Amazon and credit cards, should be in my happy little hands in a few days).
Sympathy for the Devil has been one of my favorite songs for years, and I’ve collected quite a few versions over the years. I’m sure I don’t have all of the various versions out there yet, but so far I’ve managed to dig up:
I think that those are all the versions I have now, at least until this new disc appears on my doorstep (though as I’m still working my way through my CD collection, there may be one or two more that I’ve forgotten). According to Flocculent, the new versions aren’t bad at all, either.
“Pleased to meet you…won’t you guess my name…”
It’s official: Spirit (the first of two rovers sent to Mars) has landed successfully!
MSNBC: NASA rover sends snapshots from Mars
The first of NASA’s two Mars rovers landed safely on an open stretch within Gusev Crater on Saturday night and sent back screenfuls of black-and-white images, marking a successful start to NASA’s first ground-level exploration of the Red Planet in more than six years.
FOXNews: NASA Rover Lands on Mars, Begins Transmitting Photos
Within hours it began sending back photos of the Red Planet. Among the first was a tiny black and white image showing a sundial on the rover. Another showed the Martian horizon and portions of the lander.
Susan Kitchens was blogging the event live from the Pasadena Civic Auditorium at the Planetary Society’s “Wild About Mars” event. Part one contained all the pre-landing events and addresses, and part two covers the landing.
8:32 deceleration going as expected. parachute deployment soon w/in a minute.
1000+ mph…. 300 mph. Parachute detected! applause here in the room….
heat shields off! altitude 8000′ feet
airbag in approx 25 seconds.
we got radar lock (YES!)
retro rocket firing.. await word to confirm!
awaiting word that we are on the ground. wsigns of bouncing on the surface!!!!!!
applause!!!!!!! we got bouncing word. we heard we do not have signal from spacecraft. Rolling….spacecraft has to survive all boucning for landing to be a success…
vehicle could bounce and roll up to a kilometer from its initial impact point. Awaiting word.
the way that canberra is processing might be producing noise that makes it hard to hear actual signal. [heh. signal? noise? say it ain’t so!]
We are trying to get direct signal, and will keep doing so until earthset. Then there are two orbiting vehicles that can pick up signal and then relay it on to us. Donna is telling us about Pathfinder’s lack of telemetry, and the fact that this mission has lots of telemetry, so we’ve got lots of data.
If it bouncing around, and landed in a position so that the antenna is in right position. Bags have to deflate, and the petals open (and right themselves)
May have a data packet that might indicate someething from vehicle, but need a bit more time. Positive confirmation of signal. We’re down! (applause here, but no reaction in teh control room onscreen)
Awaiting semaphor tones from landed vehicle. That’ll take a lotta processing to come across.
Stanford University reports that it might have received signal from Rover independenbly
SIGNAL!! Applause. applause applause and handshakes. (applause here too! lots.)
Lots of very relieved, happy people onscren at flight control.
And, of course, there are lots more links available in this /. thread, and this Google News query.
Meanwhile, the Stardust comet-chasing mission is also successfully sending back images from the Wild 2 comet!
NASA on Saturday was hoping to receive the last of dozens of close-up photographs a spacecraft took of a distant comet, but officials did not expect to release more photos to the public until Monday.
The Stardust spacecraft took 72 images of the dark nucleus of comet Wild 2 during a daring flyby Friday that occurred 242 million miles from Earth. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration hoped to receive the last of the black-and-white images by late Saturday.
NASA so far has released a single black-and-white photo of the comet nucleus, thought to be just 3.3 miles across. It showed what looked like a giant frozen meatball pocked with sinkholes.
Too, too cool.
I’ve babbled before about my anal-retentive obsession with metadata when it comes to my music collection. Today, I remembered one of my major frustrations: the Madacy Music Group.
I’ve been slowly working my way through re-encoding my music collection. I’d had it all ripped to my old computer as .mp3s, but now that I have my G5 with the extra storage space and processing speed, I decided to re-encode everything as .m4a. Less space, better quality, and all that. While I could have just pulled all the .mp3 files over and done a mass convert to .m4a, I wanted to get the best quality possible, which necessitates encoding from the original CDs. No problem — it’s a big project (with upwards of 1200 CDs to go through), but worth it in the long run.
As I’m going through, I’m ensuring that each imported CD has all the correct metadata for each track — title, artist, composer, and year of release — which most of the time isn’t a problem, as all this is generally listed in the CD booklet that comes with each album. However, over the years I’ve occasionally ended up with albums from Madacy, who seem to specialize in ultra-low cost compliations. I’m not sure how I end up with them, as they’re generally not something I’d go for (cheap in more than just price), but I’ve got a few.
The thing is, apparently one of the many cost-cutting measures that Madacy employs is simply giving as little information as possible about the songs included on their compilations. I just ripped a 3-disc set of Irish folk music where the only information given for any of the 44 tracks was the title — no performing artist, no composer, nada. Grrrrrr.
I know this kind of stuff (especially to this extreme) matters not a whit to most people, but dammit, it matters to me, and having to deal with a company this shoddy about their releases is just frustrating.
Has anyone else seen this particular NetNewsWire bug? Every so often when working my way through my feeds, I get a weird display glitch where a section of one post will be repeated over and over in the viewport, with each repetition getting slightly more blurred. A quick click in the display port clears up the display, but eventually this will pop up again. So far, I haven’t been able to pin down any one thing that triggers the glitch — sometimes it won’t happen for a while, other times it happens just about every time I use the space bar to move to the next article. Very odd.
This is under NetNewsWire 1.0.7 (it happened with 1.0.6 too), using the “combined” view and the spacebar to move among unread posts, on a stock dual 2.0Ghz G5.
It appears that I’m not the only one seeing this…I’ve added my own bug report too.
The New York Times has a decent overview of how to transfer vinyl recordings to .mp3 (or AAC, or whatever your digital format of choice may be). This could come in very handy at some undetermined point in the future, whenever the family record collection swings my way again (currently I believe it’s in Fairbanks somewhere with Kevin’s stuff, though I’m not entirely sure).
(via Paul Beard and Cory Doctorow)
Update: MetaFilter links to another site looking at the same process: Converting Tapes and Records to CD.
Phil Ulrich: I miss IRC.
Phil Ulrich: In some respects.Michael Hanscom: :nods
Michael Hanscom: been ages since I found a good irc chat, though
Michael Hanscom: i’ve occasionally toyed with the idea of checking into [#joiito] (or whatever it is), but I’m not sure if I’m “a-list” enough…lolPhil Ulrich: You are after the MS Incident, me bucko.
Michael Hanscom: :laughs
Michael Hanscom: notoriety counts?Phil Ulrich: Sure.
Phil Ulrich: ;)
Phil Ulrich: I like to think it does.
Phil Ulrich: Or else you could just show up and be A-list by association.
Phil Ulrich: Kind of like the losers at the party who hang around and get drinks for the cool people.
Phil Ulrich: Not to imply you’re a loser, again, of course. Phil Ulrich: ;)Michael Hanscom: LOL nice…
Phil Ulrich: We should start a B-list IRC chatroom.
Phil Ulrich: Lifestyles of the Inconsequential and Infamous.Michael Hanscom: lol sounds good to me
Michael Hanscom: there’s got to be more of us out there
Michael Hanscom: in the meantime, though…dinnertime for mePhil Ulrich: Pick a network, any network.
Michael Hanscom: bbl (at some point)
Phil Ulrich: Mmmm, dinner.
Phil Ulrich: You choose dinner over IRC? HEATHEN.Michael Hanscom: dinner…and Buffy
Phil Ulrich: Okay, that’s a winner.