January 2008 /

The Archives

• 01.28.08 /

  State of the Union? Om nom nom nom.

  Uncategorized | Permalink | 7 Comments

  No, Kristy and I couldn’t bear to watch.  Even if it was finally going to be Chimpy’s last, we just couldn’t make ourselves watch it.

  Truth be told, we’d nearly forgotten it, until Ruby suddenly dragged her George W. Bush chew toy (below)  out of storage and started attacking it.  Good girl!

  

  So as I said, we couldn’t watch it.  I’m sure I’ll be absorbing the content over the next few days from Atrios, DKos, S!No, etc.  Write me and tell me how you suffered through it, or, alternately, ignored it.  Kristy and I? We enjoyed some Flight of the Conchords instead (you must watch all of the Youtube clips immediately, then go out and rent the series DVD.  Seriously, go now and do it.  I’m not going to write any more in this post, so just go on.  <– well, nothing after that anyways.  Or this, I guess.  Bye.)




• 01.25.08 /

  Year-end Music Post

  Music | Permalink | 4 Comments

  Of course it would take me until mid-January to come up with a 2007-themed music post. But at least I have an excuse–I was trying to absorb the many many other year-end lists for more ideas.

  Not all of my favorite discoveries this year were ripped from the pages of Pitchfork/PopMatters/DrownedInSound et al.

  For an example, take Share What Ya Got, an album by Defiance, OH; I actually got this CD gratis from a friend at QQ4 (thanks Dave), left it in my computer room un-listened-to for months, and then got completely run over for it. I wouldn’t venture to suggest that this is an album for everyone, perhaps not even everyone who can stomach anarcho-folk; but while it boasts rather unrefined vocals, the album is also stuffed full of emotionally intense, literate lyrics that are a good match for where my head is at a lot of days. If this sounds like something you’d like to try, spin “Chad’s Favorite Song” and “I Don’t Want Solidarity If It Means Holding Hands with You.”

  Also far from the “indie” internet hype machine is the band Oppenheimer, whom Kristy and I discovered opening for They Might be Giants. Their sound–a kind of uptempo lo-fi electro indie-pop, featuring prominent vocorder action–is probably not something that you can be indifferent to. You’ll either experience an irresistable urge to nod your head, tap your feet, sing along, or maybe pull some pathetic indie-kid dance moves, or you’ll think it sounds like shit. Still worth the experiment if you ask me, especially gems “Nine Words” and “My Son, the Astronaut.”

  Los Campesinos are similarly infectious, though much more heavily hyped (especially from the wags at Pitchfork). These guys only have an EP to their name, but Sticking Fingers Into Sockets packs more fun into a smaller package than anything short of a Schedule 1 controlled substance. I dare you not to smile while listening to “We Throw Parties, You Throw Knives” (well, once you get past the very nearly cringy a capella opening, that is) or the wry “It Started with a Mixx.”

  As long as I’m not trying to engage in a lot of “here’s some great bands only I know” ego enhancement, let me just say that Radiohead’s In Rainbows should have been any honest critic’s pick for album of the year, despite the ridiculous press hoopla around its release. Any year that contains a Radiohead record is better for it, but this is actually their most coherent and consistently listenable set since OK Computer. Highlights for me have to include “Bodysnatchers,” “Reckoner,” and “Jigsaw Falling Into Place.”

  Although it didn’t win them Radiohead-size attention, Stars also released an album online this year, the outstanding In Our Bedroom After the War. If the showtuniness of Stephen Merritt’s Magnetic Fields attracted you or even failed to repulse you, and you think you might like to hear a hybrid of the “Reno, Dakota” sound with some of his more polished Future Bible Heroes material, listen to “The Night Starts Here.” “My Favorite Book” is a rather sweet love song, and “Barricade” is a lovely (no, really) envisioning of an affair between football hooligans.

  I’ve probably forgotten lots, and there are other bands that I’m having a hard time assigning to a year (Radio Citizen?), so this post might see some updates. I’ll make sure to mark them.

  Update: I’m adding one more from the trendy pile, an album from last year that has been a real grower for me the past week: Of Montreal’s Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?. Although I am known to be partial to Elephant6 bands, this disc was tough for me at first, because there is a certain element of pretension in titles like “Heimdalsgate Like a Promethean Curse” or “Gronlandic Edit.” But it’s impossible not to be won over by the propulsive retro shimmer of opener “Suffer for Fashion,” the rippling strut of “Edit,” or the self-conscious black humor of “Promethean Curse,” wherein our narrator pleads with his own mind: “I’m in a crisis… come on mood shift, shift back to good again… Come on chemicals, come on chemic-uh-uh-uh-uh-uhls…” This album was high on many critics’ year’s-best lists, for reasons I frankly could not appreciate until recently. You’ll have to give this one a while to work on you, although you’ll have an easier time if you start with the winning “Suffer for Fashion” or “Promethean Curse.”




• 01.21.08 /

  Technolust

  Tech | Permalink | 11 Comments

  I have spent most of this past weekend working with Kristy on a stylin’ redesign of kristyland (go for the glitzy makeover, stay for the excellent writing and humor), but before that I’d spent a large part of the past week playing with my newest favorite toy.

  With my trusty iBook looking more and more like it was destined to spend the rest of its working life on a desk with an unreliable display connection that its hinge exacerbated, I followed the latest MacWorld keynote with great interest—I’d already resolved to pick up a new MacBook Pro (on credit, naturally, how much do you think I make?) if the great AAPL would only update the line. Alas, the sexy but overpriced MacBook Air dominated the conference, and as it doesn’t really meet my needs, I went with a cute newcomer that Kristy and I had been courting the few days prior: the remarkable Asus eeePC.

  At somewhat less than 9″ x 6.5″, a svelte 0.82″ thick, and weighing in at a scant 2.02 lbs, sporting a small but speedy solid-state hard disk, the eee is clearly intended to redefine the ultra-portable market. Although there are many entries that outclass its 900mHz processor, its tiny SSD hard disk, its stock 512mb of RAM, or its 7″ 800 x 480 screen, none can compete with its price point: $400. Replete with a webcam, wireless, several USB 2.0 ports, and an integrated MMC/SD slot, this little gadget handily outclasses my hapless Mac, and has become somewhat a totem for hardware and software hackers in the brief few months since it became generally available. I had intended to pursue some of the more exciting mods (an internal 3G card for constant cellular internet access, a touch screen, Bluetooth) but already find it hard to picture life without my little pal, which I’ve named Soyuz.

  

  Left to right: my eee; my hand (for scale); an eeeXubuntu screenshot

  It comes with a pretty decent operating system, a customized variant of Xandros, but in the end it didn’t give me enough flexibility. Fortunately, hackers fond of my Linux of choice, the much-ballyhooed Ubuntu, were kind enough to come up with a custom version of my favorite Ubuntu, the lightweight Xubuntu, specifically for the eee, replete with a full complement of drivers and a detailed install guide. Awesome, amirite?

  I installed an entire development environment on the 4Gb drive, occupying most of the space (but who cares? I have lots of SD cards) but squeezing in an office suite, a database server, a web server, and interpreters for basically all of the languages I’m interested in playing with (ok, I ended up removing Erlang to make space, but I’ve still got OCaml, CLISP, Haskell, Python, Ruby, c++, and Obj-C). Plus a LastFM client I’ve been using heavily, a nice picture browser for when I want to check out some photography while mobile, and plenty of internets toolz. Not to mention compiz, which was a serious revelation—the eye candy it provides is at least equivalent to OS X once you tweak it up enough, and it gives me my much-longed-for Expose functionality (hint: they call it “Scale”). In fact, as the screenshot will show, I’ve basically managed to turn it into an OS X-alike.

  The small keyboard is at least tactile and responsive, more than I can say for the chiclet keys that Apple for some reason brought back with the MacBooks and with which they’ve saddled the Air. I’m already typing almost as quickly as on my Apple Extended keyboard, although it’s not anywhere near as comfy as my Microsoft Natural Pro ergo keyboard that I brought to work.

  I couldn’t be happier with this little piece of tech. I’m delighted to have passed on the Air and purchased this budget notebook out-of-pocket, and Kristy likes it so well she’s considering buying one herself. Still to come: RAM upgrade (not a hardware hack, they provide easy access to the DIMM slot) and actual productive work!




• 01.10.08 /

  My Backups, Let Me Show You Them

  Tech | Permalink | 4 Comments

  For some time now, I have been touting my offsite backup solution, using a free (as in speech) software gem called rsync to keep a remote backup of some of my most important files on a server at my web host. This works out great for me, because I get wayyyy more storage space and bandwidth there than I actually need.

  The best things about this solution are:

  1. It uses some of that extra space!
  2. I get to keep my backups offsite–no more worrying about how to get HAL out of the apartment if there’s a fire.
  3. It only uploads stuff that has changed, so I can back up a 30Gb archive of photos with it and on most days send no new data.
  4. I can limit its bandwidth–so it’s no skin off my back if a job runs all day, because as long as it’s creeping along at 20kB/s, I can still browse like nothing was happening.

  On the other hand, setting it up was a little bit… complicated. The initial setup, my photo and personal stuff backup, took about two days. I have added instructions on how to back up shares from other machines; figuring that stuff out took about a day as well. So not exactly intuitive, although now that it’s done I can just forget about it completely.

  I took some time to document the process, and I put up a tutorial at http://intargc.com/rsync.html.  The software I used to write up the tutorial, TiddlyWiki, is a bit idiosyncratic.  Very useful, however!  I suspect that one day there may be a blog post about that as well.  Anyways, the point of that remark is that there is one very large file to download initially, but be patient–that’s all the downloading you’ll need to do.  Hope your computer does OK with Javascript, too

  Anyways, I realize that this is totally uninteresting to a decent percentage of my readers (such as may still exist).  So sorry about that–I’ll try to have something more generally-appealing next time, although odds that it will be music-related are good.




• 01.07.08 /

  New Year, New Home

  Personal | Permalink | 6 Comments

  I don’t know how often I’m going to post. I just can’t seem to keep up with it, and I have more important promises to work on keeping than to myself, about a vanity blog that nobody reads by now.

  2007 was… well, it was a year that I’ll never see the like of again, that’s for sure. A lot of beautiful high points that you’ve all heard about if you know me, some downs that I haven’t felt like sharing. I guess that makes it sound like it’s been a rough time, but it hasn’t all been. I often tend to be somber when I’m reflective because I don’t take the time to reflect while I’m happy. But I’m not happy or sad right now, just neutral, just like the year’s been.

  But hey, new years are supposed to be new beginnings, aren’t they? Kristy and I are beginning this new year in our swanky new apartment in the South Loop. We’ve traded in our 45 minute commutes, our four flights of stairs every time we left the apartment, our creaky slanted wooden floors, and our beloved Lincoln Square. We live in Bertrand Goldberg’s River City, a beautiful piece of architecture and a landmark in its own right, though it’s overshadowed by its older sibling, the “corncob towers” of Marina City. Get a peep at our view of the corner of the loop (pictures of the apartment interior are delayed pending the completion of unpacking efforts):

  

  Not too bad, eh? We’re still discovering the neighborhood, but we’re blocks from increasingly-trendy Printer’s Row, and we’ve already found a great Italian restaurant minutes away. Easy access to the freeways, near the LaSalle blue line and brown line stops or the Harrison red line stop… transportation is great and we’re close to so many ethnic neighborhoods we could never explore from the far North Side where we used to live (Chinatown, Italian Village, Bridgeport, Greek Town, Ukie Village, Pilsen…)

  It should be great fun!

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