March 2005 Entries
The other day I read this Tom Friedman editorial, dramatically subtitled “How will future historians explain why President George W. Bush decided to ignore the energy crisis staring us in the face?” It continues on about his “geo-greening” philosophy. Basically he is strongly advocating green technologies to wean our country off oil which he sees as a big part of the middle east problem — that we send so much money there which props up corrupt regimes and prevents real progress from being made in that area. He advocates a gas tax which would fix gas prices near $4 a gallon....
I’m a longtime (8 years!) Winamp man. My brother Kevin has been steadily singing the praises of iTunes for quite a while now. I’ve resisted. While I sprung for Anapod Explorer a long time ago for my iPod, so I didn’t really need iTunes, I found I was using it for iPod loading duties anyway. Particularly because Anapod isn’t licensed for other people’s iPods.
Well, I’m starting to feel like the forces of iTunes are too great to ignore and I’m ready to start experimenting for daily usage.
But there was one thing holding me back. My home audio setup...
From Boing Boing today:
Cory Doctorow: This "You Have Died of Dysentery" tee is a loving tribute to Oregon Trail, the classic 80s computer game that challenged you to get your settlers to their destination without their succumbing to cholera, dysentery, or other thermonuclear versions of turista. Jason on Preshrunk has written a lovely memoir of the game:
I spent three arduous weeks trying to circumnavigate the Columbia River. After that, I spent six weeks trying to hunt enough buffalo to feed my party. All the while my party kept dying of dysentery and cholera. It took me five...
I manage to avoid traditional fast food (McDonalds, BK, etc) most of the time in my city life. I don’t spend much time thinking about it other than my bi-annual birthday Big Mac. I read Fast Food Nation a while back and was as shocked and entertained as anyone.
About two weeks ago I saw Super Size Me.
I can’t stop thinking about McDonalds. Now when I pass by images of burgers and fries dance in my head in a come hither intensity I can only attribute to the film. The movie affected my subconscious in the opposite way intended....
Emily took this picture in Hong Kong at a beauty salon. What the heck is it for / caption contest!
I had one of those lucid nightmares last night.
Chillin’ with extended friends and family in some non-specific dream-made location, minding our own business, when a big group of well trained, modern pirates locked us inside and proceeded to pillage all our belongings, not just what was in our pockets, but somehow all our stuff that was worth anything.
When I woke up I didn’t immediately recognize that it was a dream and that I ought to figure out what to do next. What was I going to say to the police, etc. Awake(!) during this thought process. (this is...
Coming back from a delightful lunch at the ESPN Zone in Times Square I had that urge to buy a 20oz Diet Coke with Lemon or Lime treat. All I had in my pocket were $20s and my immediate reaction was “hey, forget that idea, I’m not going to break an Andrew Jackson just for a bottle of Coke”. This makes no sense whatsoever. Why do we do this?
This all led me to thinking about currency and whatnot and how we are just so tied to it all because we’ve gotten used to it. Here’s my plan: Abolish the penny and the...
Two nights in a row downtown:
Monday – Went to see the Red Wine Boys aka Jon Benjamin and Todd Barry’s comedy variety show. Guests included Eugene Mirman, Yo La Tengo and Brenden Small. Jon and Todd had zero prepared material and pretty much just relied on their innate funny. My favorite moment of the night was Brendan Small in his Captain Mustache character doing an impersonation of Louis Armstrong, Fat Albert and Bill Cosby hanging out (voices only).
Tuesday – Followed through on seeing the Head Set at Crash Mansion. You know you are getting older when you can go to...
I was in the mood for some Missy Elliott so I opened up Copernic Desktop Search and put in Missy. I didn’t really appreciate Missy’s role as a “featuring Missy E” in so many songs. Here are all the songs that feature Missy in my collection:
Beyonce f. Missy – Signs
Janet Jackson f Missy – Son of a Gun [remix]
Mariah Carey f Missy – Heartbreaker [remix]
Juvenile f Missy & others – Back that Azz Up [remix]
Redman f Missy – Dat Bitch
Angie Martinez f Missy – What’s that Sound
DJ Clue f Missy & others – Busa Rhymes (??)
Eve f Missy –...
Y’all should check out my friend Michael’s band The Head Set (he’s on the right, the drummer).
"The Head Set are post pop and brit rock fused with what you might hear echoing out of a garage in Brooklyn, if there were garages in Brooklyn. They turn a different corner when other bands right now are going the way of disco rock and give us a new NY indie pop sound. Something different but something we are familiar with. A sound we love, taken to another level." - Gothamist
They posted some new demo tracks – full MP3 versions – here: Demos...
Seth Godin mentions “yak shaving”. The story is interesting, but the idea is that we spend a whole lot of our time, especially at the computer, doing things that are perceived prerequisites for doing the thing we really need to do.
He sums it up with the brilliant “Doing it well now is much better than doing it perfectly later.”
BTW: Evite lets you combine email addresses into one account.
Here’s the whole technical reason for the downtime.
An old Dell workstation (Dual P3 Xeon 550) functions as a VMWare GSX Server host. On that server lives four virtual servers: SQL Server, Web Server, Active Directory Server and Exchange Server. The hard-drive image files for the active directory server live on an IDE drive in an external firewire drive enclosure which has some bad sectors. 95% of the drive is fine, but the bad sectors currently hold some critical section of Windows that refuses to boot the AD server. I’ve had this same situation for the last year or so,...
I managed to squeeze two days of golf into this India trip at the Delhi Golf Club.
The best part are the caddies. There were five for our threesome. Our host had two caddies, one to help him with his game + give him pointers and one to carry his bag; I had my Yankee cap wearing caddy; Kirk (next to me in pic) had his caddy, the muslim in his red winter sweater-vest; Plus the agi-walla (no idea on the spelling there), the fore-caddy, basically he goes down the hole and finds your ball in the woods.
Now I...
I’ve expressed my adoration for Natalie Dee here before and when I ran across this MetaFilter post about a guy in Germany who will hand code an HTML->RSS scraper script for about $3.90 US I had the perfect candidate in NatalieDee.com. It was one of the very last sites that I actually have to visit daily rather than letting it come to me via RSS.
Carlo’s Bootleg RSS Feedpalooza
CoreyH’s custom Natalie Dee RSS Feed
Our host arranged two SUVs to take us to the Taj Mahal, a four hour drive from Delhi in the town of Agra. Other than the trip from the airport into Delhi, this was our first time to really see the country.
I have to say, the whole cows in the road, milling amongst the population never got old. I started counting cows on the trip and got to 217 before I figured out we had only been driving for ninety minutes. Other animals seen on this same trip:
17 camels
countless goats, sheep
4 elephants
1 bear (who looked pretty pissed off to...
Growing up I was never a PB&J lover. I’d eat them at friend’s houses, but never made them part of my routine. Running out of breakfast ideas, I happened to grab one of the pre-made PB&J’s at the deli next to my office. PB&J rediscovered! I’ve been eating them often enough (always for breakfast only) that I decided to buy the stuffs and prepare them at home, you know cooking.
I only use the Smucker’s Natural Chunky. For anyone that’s tried the natural brands you know that when you open the jar...
It is pretty clear Bush and fellow social security privatizers just want to do away with the whole program, not save it, but regardless it is fun to poke holes in the argument.
One of the best ones I’ve seen is this gem of an NYT Op-Ed from Paul Krugman.
The gist of the article is this: Bush & Co are arguing that the stock market will net better returns that the current government managed fund. Paul calculates that in order for the stock market to outperform today’s fund over the next 75 years, stocks will either be ridiculously overpriced (more...
My allergies are absolutely killing me on this trip. I powered through my Allegra supply the first week, leaving me high and dry in the anti-histamine department. I couldn’t take it anymore and asked our driver to take me to a pharmacy. There is a distinct lack of big western type stores in India, even in Delhi, the capital, where we are. The driver took us to a local spot, the type of place he would go. Everything was behind the counter and you had to tell the guys what you wanted. Fortunately my needs were relatively easy to describe...