A week late, my pictures from the 2003 New York Auto Show.
April 2003 Archives
There appears to be a new Hooverphonic album out with the slighly unwieldly title Hooverphonic Presents Jackie Cane (yikes! € 24!).
It, however, appears to be completely unreleased in either the US or the UK, which is something of a shame, because the music appears to be pretty good; a bit more swingy, John Barry-ish than their last (which, for the record, featured a single called "Jackie Cane").
Oh well. I guess it's a job for Limewire...
Update: After listening to the track samples on the website, it appears pretty obvious: aside from three or four singles, the rest of the album is filler. C'est la vie, eh?
And if you haven't done so already, you should go over to K-Dog's place and check out his Vegas trip reports.
No word yet, though, on when (if?) the Seattle trip reports will come out.
New iPods. New version of iTunes. New on-line music store (whole albums for $9.99! Take that, Tower!).
Go get it.
(oh, and there's a minor bug in the font rendering -- the fonts are coming out un-anti-aliased, which looks like crud. I presume this will be fixed in iTunes 4.01, undoubtedly to be released inside of a week)
(more notes: single tracks can be downloaded for $0.99; the download format is 128 Kb/s AAC, which allows for some kind of non-intrusive DRM; I would expect an AAC-to-MP3 converter to hit the market within days)
Updated: Here's a comparison between the font rendering in iTunes 3 and iTunes 4. Apparently this isn't happening to everyone...
| iTunes 3.0.1 | iTunes 4.0 |
 |  |
Ladies and Gentlemen, the 2003 All-Name NFL Draft Team:
| OFFENSE | DEFENSE |
| QB: Kliff Kingsbury | DT: Montique Sharpe |
| RB: Malaefou Mackenzie | DT: Tron Lafavor |
| FB: Ovie Mughelli | DE: Osi Umenyiora |
| WR: Taco Wallace | DE: Tully Banta-Cain |
| WR: Wilbur "Billy" McMullen Jr. | ILB/MLB: Hunter Hillenmeyer |
| TE: Vishante Shiancoe | OLB: Boss Bailey |
| OT: Courtney Van Buren | OLB: Pisa Tinoisamoa |
| OT: Makoa Freitas | CB: Blue Adams |
| OG: Montrae Holland | CB: Sammy Davis |
| OG: Vince Manuwai | S: Curry Burns |
| C: Ryan Pontbriand | S: Jeremy "Siddeeq" Shabazz |
Another Mirror Project Submission:
As my friend Martin put it: "Things are looking up! Soon so many unemployed people will have quit looking for jobs that all the good ones will be yours for the taking!"
And in other news, my motivation level has hit a new low this weekend. It's probably a good thing that breathing is an autonomic process.
The Canterbury Tales are on-line now, complete with side-by-side translation and a glossary.
It's really cool.
Forgot to serve the asparagus.
Guess what's for dinner tomorrow!
Undergraduate Gourmets, or Cooking on Campus: It's the latest thing.
Gawker has a new feature called Gawker Stalker; it's their (somewhat more informal) version of Page Six's Sightings.
However... the first time I saw the headline "Gawker Stalker", I thought that the editoral staff had somehow acquired a over-zealous fan.
Hunter S. Thompson on the tragedy that is naked bowling.
A new Noted Relationship Expert column is up at Mimeograph.
Tony Pierce is auctioning off a link on his blog.
Why didn't I think of that?
In the unlikely event that I have readers in Tulsa, be sure to check out Tulsa Opera's upcoming production of Don Giovanni, starring, among others, my sister in the role of Zerlina.
I used to know a girl from Tulsa (oddly enough), a young woman by the name of Heather Denslow. I wonder what ever happened to her.
Burt Rutan is in the running for the X-Prize with his the SpaceShipOne Project.
That looks purdy. I'd like a ride in one of those.
Megan McArdle has a new piece up at Mimeograph.
The ever-clueless Always-On Network sends Gawker an oddly worded, alternatively groveling and smarmy, request for a link exchange. Gawker, of course, goes to town on it (something about sending a knife man to a gunfight comes to mind). Of course, the erudite Ms. Spiers has already eviscerated Always-On on-line before. I'm personally shocked that a publicist wouldn't bother to try to do just a little bit of research first...
Jeff Jarvis kindly explains the traditional rules for linkage: "People will link to you IF YOU HAVE SOMETHING WORTHWHILE TO SAY."
He neglects to mention the other traditional way of getting people to link to you: getting them good and drunk...
Note the date change.
Click on the button to get to the official invite page.
ESPN.com's Jim Caple gives us a sneak preview of Mohammad Saeed Al-Sahhaf's new career as a color man for the Yankees.
I stumbled across this little toy a while back, but only rediscoverd it this morning: EtherPEG.
It's a ethernet sniffer that specifically sniffs graphics files (JPEG and GIF files, to be precise) that float by your ethernet (or 802.11) port.
It's not much fun if you don't have a real network to plug into, but you can have lots of fun with it at work.
Assuming, of course, that you actually have a job.
Why the fuck are unemployment benefits taxable? Why the fuck don't they just give me less fucking money in the first fucking place?
Fuckers.
It's Sunday Fun Day over at The Donk. Check it out.
From the indispensable Gawker:
He says that he and his wife are sitting in bed watching it [the Discovery Channel], and as a diagram of the solar system flashes onto the screen, his wife remarks that she didn't know the earth revolved around the sun. ... "Oh, shut up!" she snaps. "You don't know how to get to Neiman Marcus! Which do you think is going to be more useful?"
Where I come from, that's grounds for divorce.
I can't decide what's cooler:
- this 82-inch HDTV from Mitsubishi (the "largest-ever" they say), or
- the fact that these guys are actually using Movable Type to publish a large part of their website (as opposed to, say, adapting their already-existing CMS, the way that MSNBC seems to).
Well, I guess that interview went too well:
"They felt you were too smart for the position and would be bored in it."
It could be worse: I could have been too dumb for the position.
I guess I won't be moving to Miami, then.
Stupid Verizon.
Stupid tax program.
I'm going to take a nap now.
They write themselves.
Muskrat shortage leaves Rotary Club without fund-raising dinner and imperils a S. Jersey tradition.
I mean, really, does it get better than that?
Missed out on Baghdad and Basra? Be first in line in Damascus or Pyongyang! Looting tips from kuro5shin.org.
Greg Maddux's line last night: 5 2/3 IP, 12 hits, 10 runs (7 earned), 3 walks, 7 strikeouts, 2 homers, an ERA of 11.05.
Opponents are batting a whopping .397 against.
If he keeps going like this, the biggest question regarding Mr. Maddux will no longer be "When will he get win #300?" but "Will he be in baseball at the end of the year?"
A new story is up at Mimeograph.
(oh, and also posted over at blogcritics)
(and over at Mike Wolf's A Case For Song)
Gawker passes on the news that Renee Zellweger is (reportedly) hustling guys at Nobu to get them to buy her dinner.
The biggest problem, as far as I can see, with this story is that it presumes that Renee Zellweger actually eats anything...
This poem is about a friend of mine (not the skinny naked blonde picured, for what it's worth). Actually, it's not really about her, it's about the author, but she's a large part of it.
It's a little weird reading it, to glimpse a little sliver of an intensely personal part of her life. It would be rather different if it wasn't her, I think; the objectivity of anonymity also obscures relevant details and knowledge.
It's easy to forget that the people who appear in poems and stories have lives outside their literary context; that they have jobs both mundane and varied; they have pets, apartments, cars, friends; brothers, sisters, parents. They have a context outside the context.
And really, it's just a bit weird reading about a friend having sex, too.
Hm. Not exactly what I wanted to say, but I guess that it's going to have to do for now.
Mark your calendars.
Are Ray Parker Jr.'s "Ghostbusters" and Huey Lewis and News' "I Need A New Drug" the same song?
Or do I need a new drug myself?
What's wrong with Greg Maddux? In two starts this year, he's only managed 9 innings of work (not getting out of the third inning in his last start), and given up 17 hits, 4 homers, and 14 runs, 11 earned (an ERA of 11.00).
Prior to this year, his stats averaged out over two games worked out to 14 innings thrown, 12.6 hits given up, 0.78 homers, and only 4.37 earned runs (a career ERA of 2.83).
With the Braves currently in last place in the NL East with an impressive 1-4 record, this is a bad time for the future hall-of-famer to have the wheels come off.
Laura Palmer's Secret Diary: the blog.
Neatly tying the last two posts together (really, I can't make this stuff up): how to make a Starship Enterprise out of a 3.5" floppy disk.
For sale: A Star Trek Apartment. Transporter not included.
More pictures can be found here.
Related: the Space: 1999 room.
Now that's really cool and really useless: a guy's managed to make a floppy disk RAID with OS X.
Earlier this evening I was talking with a couple of guys about old computers (really old, like PDP-11 and PDP-8 systems connected to via greenscreen terminals and DECWriters...) and emulation systems. Funny how sometimes these things come together.
UPDATE: Mike Whybark managed to track down the actual web page that describes this feat, replete with pictures.
"Colossal squid" surfaces in Antarctic, reports the BBC (yes, these are bigger than Giant Squid; it's estimated that these puppies can grow up to 25 meters, or nearly 100 feet long.)
Mmmm. There's some good eatin's on those...
It lives.
Beta testers needed.
Not to mention writers.
In some sort of cosmic April Fool's joke, New Yorkers weary from the coldest and snowiest winter in years looked out their windows this afternoon to notice that was snowing. Again.
