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January 27, 2005

Meet Chiplet

Wow, it really is small

I ordered this from the computer shop on campus two weeks ago, and have been checking my email with increasing frequency ever since, looking for that joyous email telling me it's arrived. Yesterday the email finally arrived, but just my luck it came just as I was about to catch my bus, so I had to wait until today to pick it up. Whoo-boy, it's cute. So small! So light!

After entirely too much futzing with the USB I got it working. I didn't even realize that I had USB 2.0 ports on my computer, so I initially tried to plug it into the USB port on my keyboard. No good, not enough power to charge it. I then tried using a USB extender to the back ports on the iMac, but it just wasn't working. Only then did I realize they were USB 2.0 ports, and somehow the extender just wasn't compatible. After all that, it works, but man, USB 2.0 is slow compared to firewire. That, or is writing to flash memory just slower than writing to a hard disk? Anyway, minor quibble.

Posted by lld at 04:59 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

January 24, 2005

Winning the spam battle (for now)

This addition to my .htaccess file has really reduced the amount of referer log spam I've been receiving, and as a bonus it also cuts down on comment spam (though I'm happily free of that thanks to MT-Blacklist, the .htaccess trick eliminates the bandwidth toll they can take).

It took some trial and error to figure out how to make this play well with the Movable Type-generated content that was already in my .htaccess file, since I've never ever monkeyed with this stuff before. The trick was to put these new instructions at the top of the file, above the MT content, and then to remove the "RewriteEngine on" line from the MT section. Otherwise the two identical lines cause a server misconfiguration error page.

Yes, this kind of inelegant method of blocking spam is inefficient and not 100% effective, but I'm seeing happy little 403 'denied' errors in my 'recent visitors' page from all the spamming domains, while legitimate traffic seems to be coming through just fine.

Posted by lld at 07:40 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

January 20, 2005

Snow and stress

Snow

This is a picture of the snow we got in Chapel Hill yesterday. This really about as bad as it got, it stopped soon after I took this and by the time I left work, the roads were clear. I'd say it was maybe a half inch of snow.

Here's an account of what happens to this part of the country when a half to 3/4 inch of snow falls in the middle of the day. Panic sets in. My experience wasn't this bad, but luckily I didn't have to deal with the freeway. I only had to wait 35 minutes in the low-20° dusk for a bus. For an amount of snow in which Iowan drivers would still be flying down the road at 70 mph!

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January 19, 2005

This is just to say

Yesterday I realized that the song I should have covered for NaSoAlMo is "The Metro" by Berlin. That song is great.

Posted by lld at 06:32 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

January 15, 2005

Two steps on the water

I really dig the Futureheads' cover of Kate Bush's "Hounds of Love", and I finally got 'round to getting their album off of iTunes a couple days ago, because Glorious Noise told me to. (Why is the album listed in iTunes twice, in both the Rock and Pop genres, at $9.99 and $14.85, respectively? Both feature the same number and duration of songs, but one has a later release date.)

They have a sound that I'd describe as nostalgic. Interpol got compared to Joy Division so endlessly that it became de rigeur, but why aren't people going nuts over the Futureheads' future version of the Jam? Are the Jam so off the radar now? On first listen the album is enjoyable, if a little samey, especially tempo-wise. Think the Jam with multiple Paul Wellers and serious vocal chops, with more skitter and jump and thicker accents--"lucky" becomes "looky", rather amusingly. I made breakfast while listening to this record this morning (pancakes from scratch and veggie sausages). So far the songs I already knew, "Hounds of Love" and "Carnival Kids" seem the best, but I could get into it, if after repeated listenings the lyrics to their originals prove interesting enough.

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January 12, 2005

The Highly Anticipated Music Post

As I type this, Stuffit is compressing my NaSoAlMo songs into one convenient .tgz archive. This is making my computer horribly slow and the words I'm typing aren't showing up on the screen right away, and that's a bit annoying. I really think a new laptop is on the horizon for me, right after a new iPod, but hmm, we did have our eyes on that hybrid Highlander that Toyota is introducing this year--What's that you say? Get to the point already? Sorry.

Here then are some songs I did for Douglas's National Solo Album Month thingy. It happened in November of 2004, and the charge was to write and record an album no shorter than 29:29, entirely by yourself. One of the songs could be a cover. Not a hard task for professionals or super-creative types, but I don't think that's why Douglas created NaSoAlMo. The way I saw it, it was for people like me who'd like to make music but lack motivation to overcome their shyness/self-confidence issues/laziness/other excuses. I found it grueling at times, uplifting at times, really fun and really aggravating, and hell on my back as I sat at the computer chair for six hours a night for about a week and a half (I did the bulk of the work while John was out of town, so I could make noise and not be self-conscious about it). I just made it under the wire--finished the last song on the last day in November.

I let the stuff sorta sit and age for awhile, because when I was finally done I didn't really want to look at it or listen for a good month. Yesterday I sat down with headphones, converted everything to mp3, and listened. Some of it isn't bad. Some of it is, but oh well, that's okay for now. Hmm, I just realized the album doesn't have a title, and since our DSL has the crappiest of all upload speeds, there's no way I'm changing it and re-uploading it. Ha HA!

Okay so here's the deal: I'm hosting this, but my account runs two other sites, so in the interest of bandwidth, I also uploaded a few individually just in case you don't want to download the whole thing. It's okay really, I don't expect everyone to grab the whole thing with the honest intent to listen to it all and save it, so if you just want to sample, you can.

The whole thing is right here: NaSoAlMo.tgz (35 MB) Took this down. Contact me if you REALLY want to hear it; otherwise, maybe I'll re-work some of them for later 'release'.

So there you go. I hope you like it. I wish I had the time to go all out and make cool cover art and stuff like Mark did, and maybe someday I will, but knowing how much time it took me to simply upload this stuff, let's not hold our breaths, k?

Update: Fixed the download link for "Holiday Junction", sorry friends.

Posted by lld at 09:07 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

January 09, 2005

Hey wow

I just saw my ol' college friend Kevin Rich on a Burger King commercial. JD was flipping through the channels just as I'd gotten up to go downstairs and get dessert (a plate of fruit and fancy cheese), and I saw a face I recognized. My brain instantly said person I've seen before, and I almost turned around and kept going, figuring it was just some actor I'd seen in other places. Then in an instant it changed to person I know, a familiar feeling from watching a friend of mine on a show last year. But then I realized it was a face from college that I hadn't seen in years, someone I hadn't talked to since graduation (I've been bad about keeping up with just about everyone). He was a theater major back then--our class also produced theater major and my former neighbor Emily Bergl, who starred in Carrie II a few years ago. That's cool, I'm so glad he's getting good work.

Posted by lld at 09:13 PM | TrackBack

January 02, 2005

This is the start of what was

So, 2004. Looking back, it wasn't a great year for the world--the election, the economy, war, oil, natural disasters. For me, however, it was a year of growth and improvement both personally and practically, and it was great.

In December 2003 we packed up all of our belongings into a truck and sent it on its way to a new state in a completely different part of the country. We put our cats in the car two days later and made our drive to the new house--three days, two frazzled cats, and many miles later, we arrived.

The new house is bigger than our two previous houses combined, three whole bedrooms! A dining room! One of the first things we did after arriving in the new place was buy a futon, both to sleep on while we waited for our stuff to arrive (it took a week or two) and to put into our guest bedroom for use by potential guests. We made an early decision to not put the TV in the living room, but to instead put it upstairs in the guest room. It would just look better that way, we figured--we both hated that the TV became the central attention-sucking point of our previous small one-bedroom houses. The stereo would go downstairs, and a couple of the bookcases.

That turned out to be a very wise decision, to have the TV in an out-of-the-way place to where one had to specifically go, eliminating that lazy out-of-convenience TV watching that had sucked us in before. Added to that, the fact that our backyard trees prevented us from being able to get satellite TV reception (and super high cable rates) means that we hardly watch the idiot box anymore. It's really nice to be free of it. There are a couple channels I miss--ESPN, and the Independent Film Channel, but we have great indie video stores here and the internet provides plenty of sports news and scores. In 2004 I largely stopped watching TV. These days we turn it on to play Nintendo, and to watch the Simpsons if we remember.

The other thing we did in 2004 that we had never done before was spend a lot of money on furniture. We have always in the past shortchanged ourselves dramatically on furniture--we bought from the auction in the tiny town we lived in, and even then, if something we wanted went past $40 or so we'd stop bidding. We had thousands of dollars in the bank but we didn't even have a bed for months--we squeezed together on the couch every night. We did eventually spring for a new mattress set and bedframe after realizing our auction-gotten bed was just inadequate, and a couple of decent bookshelves once I swore I'd never buy anything made of pressboard every again. But beyond that we just didn't try, and consequently our house was always something that depressed me a bit.

So in our new house we did it right, from the start. We bought a really nice dining room table and four chairs, and a wine rack; we shopped and shopped for just the right couch and coffeetable and after six months or more we bought. We got the refrigerator we wanted, rather than one that was just functional. We moved in to this and turned it into this (and then this) with a couple of paintbrushes and a couple grand or so. We learned that old adages are often really true, and' you get what you pay for' is one of them.

I sorta feel like in 2004 I learned how to really live, and I don't just mean by spending tons of money on myself. I mean that part of treating yourself well is making yourself comfortable in your surroundings, and for me that meant a sincere effort to make our house a place I'm happy to live in, and happy to invite others into.

With moving across the country comes a new job, unless you're one of those people who seem to make a living doing internet things that I haven't really figured out. I started a new job in January 2004, and I really feel good about it, here at my one-year anniversary. The people are great, even though the university suffers from severe administration-bloat, which makes things way more difficult than they need be--why do I fill out a time sheet if I'm salaried? It's juvenile. I think we're doing some cool work and we seem to be generating results, even though science moves always at just a slightly slower pace than you (and your professors) would like.

I've made some great new friends too, in my new town, and I'm really glad that my shy self has managed to meet so many people on my own. However I think that my self-confidence is wavering a bit--every time I tried to make music this year I ended up with a major inferiority complex. Even things that struck me as good sounded like embarrassing failures the next time I'd listen to them. I'd have moments when I wanted to never try to make music again, since that would be easier than the cycle of trying and then hating it. It doesn't help that I've become less patient and totally unable to focus lately. But, my desire to try again always comes back. I'm still working on this, but I despair of truly becoming self-actualized when it comes to me and musical creation.

Hopes for 2005? To focus, to concentrate harder on what I'm doing. (I need some of nature's ritalin, whatever that may be.) To make more art, to waste less time. To try harder. I really think I could do good work if I tried harder, and I sure as hell don't want that to be my one regret when it's all over.

Posted by lld at 07:29 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack