If The Bene Gesserit Had to Face Tech Week...

It is tech week.
Tech week is the mind-killer.
Tech week is the little death that brings total obliteration.
I will face tech week.
I will stay up all night; I will work through weekends with completely irrational people.
And when tech week is over, I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where tech week has gone there will be only closing night.
Only strike will remain.

Double Dork Points(tm) to me for combining Dune and tech theatre into a blog post.

Minus several million for ripping off Jon Rosenberg.

Actually, now that most folks I know have survived tech week, his strip is more appropriate:

http://www.goats.com/archive/990517.html

Face your beers, people, you've earned them!

Good News for Internet Radio

I listen to a LOT of internet radio. At work, I listen to a "Steve Roach" (ambient/drone) station on Pandora, in a feeble attempt to keep my stress levels down. At home, I listen to the "Drone Zone" on Soma FM while paying bills (for the same reason). And Robyn and I have recently started listening to the live stream from AM 1710 out of Antioch Illinois (old timey radio drama) at night as we go to sleep.

For several years now, there's been a struggle between internet radio stations and record labels. The point of contention has been what constitutes reasonable per-song royalty rates that the labels could require for sites providing streaming music. For a while, it looked as if the rates would be so high as to force stations like Pandora and Soma out of business.

According to a recent article in New York Times, though, the record labels and online music services have reached an agreement that will allow sites like Pandora and Some to stay in business, while providing the copyright holders with some compensation for their music.

There seems to be some question as to whether or not this agreement will remain in place; but if it does I think it will turn out to be a good thing for the labels. More and more, streaming music services are replacing commercial radio stations as the place for listeners to discover new music.

It's The Amateur Dream Analysis Show!

Because the only thing Blogger needs more than angst-ridden poetry and LOL cats is people rambling on about their dreams. That being said...

A friend of mine and I have both been having persistent dreams about being lost/trapped in buildings. For me, it's a shopping mall/hotel complex with a weird princess-themed restaurant, in which I have tried, unsuccessfully, to pick up waitresses in hoop skirts and tiaras. Comparatively, his is a much more normal, multi-story maze of rooms. In my dream, I'm usually just wandering around, lost, while he has a very definite need to escape the building.

My thoughts so far:

Okay, so Zolar's Dictionary (Amazon link here: http://tinyurl.com/ly9p9r) says a dream of a very tall building indicates you "will have much success." Faces of strangers means you will have a "change of residence," while being stuck in a maze could mean you either, "are surrounded by unhappiness," or should, "beware of domination by insincere friends."

But that's all just a bunch of new age mumbo-jumbo.


The wife (who's had more psych classes than I) says that a building in a dream is a symbol for one's own mind. So if I were to play shrink, I'd say that the "unknown but important reason" for you to get out of the maze is that your mind is trying to work it's way through some problem.

If that's true, then the "lost in a building" dream is probably a pretty common one, much like the "showing up for a test completely unprepared" dream that most of us have had at least once. The particulars of these dreams, of course, vary from person to person, and focusing on those particulars may give some insight into what our mind is trying to tell us.

For me, the dreams always center around retail environments. That makes sense, considering that I spend most of my offline time trying to sell things. The sense of being lost is, I think, a projection of my desire to, once and for all, figure out how to be really good at selling. To extend the metaphor, the failed attempt with the waitress could be my fear of failing with a customer.

Why she's wearing a hoop skirt and tiara (and waving a little fairy-wand, now that I think about it) is anybody's guess.

The Himalayan Mixtape Project Continues

Your suggestions so far:

• Shake It Up - Yes!
• Stand Back - More of a parachute ride song, if you ask me, but I'm willing to give it a go.
• Sweet Child O' Mine - This, or Paradise City; I'm still deciding.
• Rock of Ages - Yes!

Also, I seem to recall hearing "Heart of Glass," on at least one ride.

This is going to be a little tougher than I thought. The songs need to be upbeat & high energy, a la Rock of Ages, but not too angry. Welcome to the Jungle, for example, would be just a hair over the line.

My Himalayan Mixtape

The great thing about writing a blog that's read by tens of people (hi mom!) is that I can, on a whim, call upon your combined brain-power, thereby saving me the trouble of using my own.

That being said, and bearing in mind that you failed me miserably the last time I asked for help, here's your assignment: I want to compile a mixtape for my 40 minute commute to work. I need it to be upbeat and high-energy to get me "pumped up," about selling theaters and theatre accessories for 8 - 10 hours. My solution: the music they play on the "Himalaya" ride at the traveling carnival.

So, dear reader, leave me a comment with the song or songs you best remember being played (or think would be played) as the soundtrack for a tilted, supercharged carousel. I have a few songs already in mind, but I don't want to skew the results.

All I'll say is, "Fox on the Run."

Photo by sambeaner77.

I Just Deleted the "Most Recently Played" Sidebar

I've realized that most of the music I listen to is either via iTunes radio (or the Rhythmbox equivalent when I'm booted into Linux) or other streaming sites. These services do not play nicely with Last.FM, or Last.FM hasn't figured out how to collect information from them, I don't know. The point is that unless I'm streaming music from Last.FM or listening to my library on iTunes, Last.FM doesn't have a clue what I'm listening to and the results get all screwy.

For example: according to Last.FM, my current favorite artist is Brian Eno, and the last time I listened to music was on Friday, when I listened to the entirety of the Sigur Rós album "Ágætis Byrjun." Now, I did indeed listen to "Ágætis Byrjun" on Friday (and enjoyed it very much, thank you) but I've since listened to Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue," DJ Shadow's "Preemptive Strike," and a collection of Jonathan Coulton songs on the CD player in my car. I also listened to an hour or two of Classical Music on Magnatune while doing some homework.

As far as I can tell, Last.FM has no way of when I listen to music on anything other than iTunes, iPod, or their site. And there's nothing wrong with that, I guess, if that's how the majority of their users listen to music. I don't, and so my "Recently Played" box has been empty for the past few months. I finally got tired of looking at it and just deleted it.

Enjoy the new sidebar with tons of Amazon.commy action!

Why I Follow William Gibson on Twitter

So William Gibson has a Twitter account that less than 8,000 people follow.

To be clear, I'm talking about the author of cyberpunk classics like Neuromancer and Johnny Mnemonic; the man who made "cyberspace" a household word; probably the first science fiction author you would think of if I said to you, "internet." And he has less than 8,000 people following him.

To put this into perspective:

• Wil "Wesley Crusher" Wheaton has over 650,000 followers
• Neil Gaiman recently passed 444,444 (I know this because someone TOOK A PICTURE)
• Hell, even LeVar-f'ing-Geordi-La-Forge-Burton has over a half-million followers

I guess this would be understandable if his "tweets" were the usual, "I'm having breakfast with the fam, I made bacon!" sort of prattle. (Or Mr. Wheaton's color commentary on the NHL playoffs, for that matter.) But here's the thing, William Gibson always, ALWAYS has the good shit, AND HE SHARES IT WITH YOU:

EXEMPLI GRATIA:

"Black Cable" in and Around DC (a growing problem for developers):
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/30/AR2009053002114_pf.html

Bicycle Parkour in Scotland:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z19zFlPah-o

And this, about which I can think of nothing more to say than, "very, very cool, go check it out."
http://www.flickr.com/groups/lookingintothepast/pool/

Happy Free Comic Book Day!

Nerds of the world rejoice! Today is the first Saturday in May, which means it's Free Comic Book Day!

My preferred method of celebration: grab a non comic-reading friend or relative, get out to your local shop, and don't leave until THEY pick out a comic.

The Tallest Man on Earth

I've told you about The Tallest Man on Earth, right? I haven't?! Quick! Watch this video! No no no! There's no time to thank me now! Do it later! Click! Hurry!

Bacon Is A Vegetable Is A Rip-Off UPDATED!

So, first off, there's this blog called Baconation-baconation. I'm not linking to it directly because I don't want the three people who read this blog (hi mom!) to give them any additional traffic. I'll get to why they thought their blog was so nice they had to name it twice in a second. First, let me rant.

The blog itself is pretty terrible. The animated .gifs in the right-hand column are particularly distracting and annoying, and the content seems to be a regurgitation of other articles on the web, put there simply as a framework for click-through images of their CafePress products.

What really gets me, though, is that a good many of the products offered in the "Baconation" Cafe Press store are stolen images from other, talented, artists.

Example: They offer products with something eerily similar to this design (see above) by rstevens of Diesel Sweeties fame. Trust me, even if you're credulous enought to believe that two people could come up the the phrase "bacon is a vegetable," the other dudes' design is clearly a rip-off of Mr. Stevens' work.

As if that weren't enough, the Baconation jerks then decided to rip off one of my favorite bacon-related webcomics of all time from XKCD. I mean come on people, what's next? Stealing the title of your crappy blog from some other bacon-related blog? OH WAIT YOU DID THAT TOO.

UPDATE FROM RSTEVENS:
"The crappy Bacon is a Vegetable rip-off shirt was taken down thanks to all you rad Twitter people!"
Hurray for Twitter-based crowdsourcing!

Holy Crap I Want This

Commodore 64 Original Hardware Laptop

"This is a fully functional Commodore 64 laptop using actual hardware, specifically the C64C motherboard which was one of the last and smallest revisions. It uses a Gamecube power supply in place of the original power brick.

For storage there’s a device called the 1541-III DTV to “emulate” a floppy drive using an SD card. (Click here for more info) The SD card is formatted FAT-32 so you can dump disk images on it using a PC, and read it with the C64 - pretty cool!"

Demo Video:

In case you were waiting for it:

We can do holograms now.

Doctorow Reviews Sterling Novel / Bashes Hippies

Not really, but I couldn't resist that headline. Over at BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow has a review of the first Bruce Sterling novel in a while to pique my interest, The Caryatids; he also provides this thought about the future of environmentalism:

"...in Earth's future -- and in Sterling's -- there's no going back to the land for us. Not because the land is too poisoned, but because billions of charcoal-burning hunter-gatherers are far more hazardous to the planet than a neatly ordered world of cities in which technology is used to minimize our footprints by giving us smarter handprints."

Take that, all you tree-hugging dirt lovers.

Cory Doctorow's Review of The Caryatids @ BoingBoing

Webcomics Say The Darndest Things

Roast Beef: The invisible hand of this particular economy may wear a fingerless glove and write checks at the gas station but damned if this money don't have square edges and a certain legal tenderness...It also has tuberculosis and the Hantavirus so I'm gonna go microwave it for a bit

Grrl: "If you need me I will be listening to tape hiss in my room."

Vermont Pete: "I stimulated your mom's package last night."

Randall (see above): "I take the Jurassic Park approach to parenting."

Hovercat: Morbid Edition

So it's been a little while since last I played Hovercat but I thought I'd give it a go. I've been in a pretty morbid mood this week, so I tried "robot suicide." The results were better than I'd expected.

Top of the list was a story from last March about a man who built a remote-control device that could fire a pistol repeatedly. He then used the device to commit suicide outside his home in Australia. FOXNews.com's headline?

Australian Man Gunned Down in Driveway by Killer Robot

The second result was (to me, at least) a really sad commercial from the 2007 Superbowl, about an industrial robot who gets fired from his job at a GM assembly plant. These days it's all the more poignant by its reflection of what many American workers are going through.

And finally, I found a robotic art installation from 2006 featuring "C3" a robot designed to commit suicide by "drinking" Coca-Cola and then spraying the beverage onto itself. Enjoy!

THE Decade of Rock

So we (the office) have been charged by our Fearless Leader to make mix tapes for prizes and glory. Twice before I've attempted this challenge, and both times I was met with bitter failure. The first time out, we were supposed to pick the ten best rock and roll songs, period, from the Beatles' era through to 12/31/1999. The second challenge was to choose the absolute worst songs of the 1980s, which I wrote about back in 2006. Coincidentally, that post marked the first time I realized that people other than myself occasionally read this blog.

Well, this time you're not getting off so easy! By reading this far you have now entered into a legally binding agreement to provide me assistance in this year's challenge. Here it is: pick the decade that had the best music, and provide one track from each year to prove it. For the purposes of this challenge, a "decade" is defined simply as a span of ten years, not necessarily "the 80s," etc.
Now get to it, anonymous readers! I expect playlists in my comments section by Monday morning!

RIP Khan, Number Six: McGoohan and Montalban Die in L.A.

Wired.com's Underwire blog is currently running nice obituary columns for Ricardo Montalban ("Fantasy Island" and "Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan") and Patrick McGoohan ("Secret Agent Man" and "The Prisoner") both of whom passed away today. Montalban was 88, McGoohan 80.

I have many fond memories of both "Fantasy Island" and "The Prisoner," but I have to admit that "Fantasy Island" was often formulaic and - I think - mostly stood out because it followed the stupefyingly vapid "The Love Boat."

"The Prisoner," on the other hand, never failed to challenge and surprise the viewer. Hell, the three-minute(!) opening credits sequence had more suspense than a full episode of other spy/action shows of the period. Oddly, though, whenever I think of "The Prisoner," it's the closing credits I remember most. The surreal self-assembling penny-farthing and those blaring jazz trumpets will forever be my link to one of the best television shows ever.

Sigur Rós Song in the Latest Prince of Persia Ad

So I'm watching TV today (Spike of all networks but, hey, they're running a CSI marathon in between the Girls Gone Drunk ads) and I see an ad for the latest Prince of Persia game. I just about fell off the couch when I realized that a song by Sigur Rós was being used as the soundtrack. I just started listening to them, and now they're showing up on national television. Coincidence? You decide. Check it out:



I find that the song is "Sæglópur," from their 2005 album, takk. An interesting side-note: most of the song is actually sung in "Hopelandic," a sort of gibberish non-language invented by the band. More on that here: http://www.montrealmirror.com/ARCHIVES/2002/103102/music3.html. Thanks, Wikipedia!

Let's Progress! (My Favorite Songs of 2008)

So I finished the list, it's posted below. Note that it's not in table format, because that's still way harder than it should be. And now the list:

TITLE - ARTIST
White Winter Hymnal - Fleet Foxes
Lost Coastlines - Okkervil River
We Got the Power (Love Letter from America) - The Born Again Floozies
Believe - The Bravery
The Places We Lived - Backyard Tire Fire
Jesus, Walk With Me (The Sound of Arrows Remix) - Club 8
All Night - Damian Marley
After All (feat. Talib Kweli) - Lupe Fiasco
The Modern Leper - Frightened Rabbit
Sax Rohmer #1 - The Mountain Goats
Dance, Dance, Dance - Lykke Li
Valerie Plame - The Decemeberists
You've Done It Again, Virginia - The National
Top Yourself - The Raconteurs
A-Punk - Vampire Weekend
Immigrant Punk - Gogol Bordello
San Bernardino - The Mountain Goats
Starálfur - Sigur Rós
Ching-A-Ling - Missy Elliot

In the unlikely event that there are readers of this blog, the more astute ones will have noticed that Dance, Dance, Dance by Lykke Li was not on the previous list. So I didnt' hear it until after making the first round list. So sue me.

The Most Awesome Picture Ever

So, as of this writing at least, if you go to Flickr and search for "the most awesome picture ever," (but without the quotes) the first hit you get is this:



This is a picture I clipped from a copy of Lighting Dimensions magazine, back in the 90s when there still was such a publication, and it's followed me through two states, three jobs, and four homes. "Leko guy" has lived on refrigerator doors, office dividers, and whiteboards, and he's still just as awesome as the day I found him.

I wish I could find the photographer (Douglas Edmunds) and tell him just how much joy this picture has brought into my life. I'll just have to hope that some day he'll decide to look around for the most awesome picture ever and be pleasantly surprised.