March 2005 Archives

Decided to take one of those silly quiz things:

Taken from LJ:

How many total songs?
7580

Sort by Song Title
First: 'Till the End of Time, Delerium
Last: track 8 (it's in japanese: 黒い翼) off of Los Angeles by the brilliant green

Sort by time:
First: Let's Hear It For Nine Inch Nails, Nine Inch nails
Last: Essential Mix - 04.01.2001, Carl Cox Live @ Space

Sort by Album:
First track: (We Don't Need This) Fascist Groove Thing, Heaven 17, (We Don't Need This) Fascist Groove Thing (cd single)
Last track: LITTLE BUSTERS, The Pillows・他, フリクリ オリジナルサウンドトラック

Top Ten Most Played:
I Love Love You, Hideki Naganuma/Guitar Vader
READY STEADY GO, L'Arc~en~Ciel
HEY! JIMMY, HAV
Super Shooter, RIP SLYME
Cutie Honey, Koda Kumi
The Concept of Love, Hideki Nagnuma
A Place in the Country, Adam Ant
Puss n' Boots, Adam Ant
Future Is What We Are, Ken Ishii
Run Rabbit Junk, Yoko Kanno

10 most recently played: (Same comment as last one):
Place in the Country, Adam Ant
Take Me To The River, Talking Heads
You Won't See Me Coming, Jean-Jacques Burnel
Screw, The Cure
It Only Makes Me Laugh, Oingo Boingo
No One Lives Forever, Oingo Boingo
Greetings to the New Brunette, Billy Bragg
Like a Prayer, Bigod 20
Run Rabbit Junk, Yoko Kanno
HIT IN THE USA, BEAT CRUSADERS

Find "sex", how many songs show up?
18

Find "death", how many songs show up?
13

Find "love", how many songs show up?
442

So this morning I decided to record myself spinning and do up a little mix. This was pretty much my first time touching my turntables in at least a year (with the exception of around 15 minutes over the weekend). Overall it wasn't as bad as it could have been. I'm definitely not as tight as I was before, but that's just practice. And I still love that feeling of just blocking out everything else and spinning for a while. I just have to make sure and close the door to my room so that I'm not seen bopping about and looking silly.

Anyways, here it is: I Know You Want It (it's in AAC, cope) (Oh, and you might have to right click and do save as).

So I finally got my turntables set up again. It's been over a year since I spun. And pretty much all of my records are stashed away still. So I've decided to celebrate with a mix. This morning I went down and just randomly grabbed records from the ones that were easily accessible and I'll see what I can do with them.

The interesting thing is that a lot of what I spin has changed since I first started. There's a lot of old progressive trance in there that I probably wouldn't touch these days. Some of it is pretty good, but I'm sure there are more than a few things I picked up over the years that are trash. So it is definitely a tossup as to the quality of the tracks I'm working with. I guess this is a good time to go through and weed out any of the records I'll definitely never spin.

Hopefully I'll have a new mix up within a few days.

I haven't posted a Boing Boing link in a while, but this one was just too cool. I'd try it, but I don't have that much interesting behind my computer.

Transparent screen illusion: set laptop's wallpaper to a photo of the wall behind it

Transparent Screens is a Flickr photoset of laptops whose deptop wallpaper has been set to a digital photo of the walls and windows behind them, so that they appear to have totally transparent displays. The effect is striking. Link (via Boing Boing) (via Waxy)

Lately I seem to have this bad habit of buying CDs and then letting them sit around for a few months before I open them up to listen to them. The latest was Derrick Carter & Mark Farina Live at Om. I really have no idea why I waited so long and now I'm kicking myself. I've been bopping around to it all morning. I think I like the Mark Farina mix a bit more out of the two, but they're both great. Now I just need to put it on my ipod.

Douglas Adams
"The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair." [via Quotes of the Day]

The other day I posted about issues with spam in the search results I was getting at Feedster. Within hours there was not only a post on Scott Johnson's blog, but I got a nice message from him about how to remove blogspot results from my NetNewsWire searches there. I love to see companies being this on the ball. Especially a place like Feedster. I wasn't really looking for a solution right that second. I more was commenting how spammers seem to be doing their best to devalue a lot of the usefulness of the web.

So here's a quick thanks for the help!

Harry Shearer
"If absolute power corrupts absolutely, does absolute powerlessness make you pure?" [via Quotes of the Day]

I use NetNewsWire for reading RSS feeds. One of the great features up till recently has been the ability to have it search places like Feedster and have the results show up as a feed. In the recent past my regular search for anything to do with Pulmonary Fibrosis has achieved nothing more than hugely long posts of spam (click and see). Since the 15th there have been around 27 hits on that search, only ONE of them being an actual post by someone. And all the offending posts have been at blogger.

I think Blogger needs to do something about this. Have a better way of detecting automated blog signups or something. Currently it has drastically reduced the usefulness of things like Feedster for me. At least Feedster does have the ability to filter out responses from some urls. I just need to see if I can get NNW to support doing that.

This article at the New York Times made me laugh quite a bit this morning:

Right Name, Wrong E-Mail In-Box

LAST fall, David A. Green was looking forward to his new job at a Manhattan real estate brokerage. Finally, he would be able to shed the e-mail confusion that plagued him because of the two other David Greens at his company.

No such luck. At his new company, Cushman & Wakefield, there was yet another David Green. And that Mr. Green already held the coveted e-mail name David_Green, following the company's convention for e-mail addresses.

At his old company, CB Richard Ellis, he had been, reluctantly, David.A.Green. Now he became David_A_Green. Hundreds of his e-mail messages went to the wrong David Green.

"I would have been better off being at his desk than at mine," said David A. Green, noting that the original, initial-free David Green is "most gracious about sending me the volumes of e-mails that go to him." [via New York Times: Technology]

So why did I find this amusing? This isn't a new topic. The sendmail FAQ has had a question on this forever (or at least since 1997). It still amazes me that people don't think that this might be a problem. When I was in college pretty much everyone had four character email addresses in the format (first initial)(second initial)(random alphanumeric)(random alphanumeric). Mine was gb1d. I can still remember pretty much all my friend's addresses from then too. It also helps to keep out people just spamming by sending emails to any old firstname_lastname address.

Steamboy opens this weekend for a very limited release. For once something is showing in Connecticut. But, why the heck is it New Haven and not Hartford. Once again, Hartford shows how lame it is. It would be nice to someday get something like this when it was released and not 6 months later at the local university.

It opens up in more theaters on the 25th, we'll see if it makes it to Hartford by then.

Joystiq and Game Girl Advance both reported on Blizzard banning accounts that were used for "Gold Farming" over the weekend. For those of you not familiar with the world of MMORPGs, Gold Farming is big business. People go around, and just kill monsters for high priced items and sell it off to make in-game money. They then sell the in-game money on places like ebay for real money. This is also done with rare magic items. The practice has been going on for ages. I remember hearing about people doing the same with Ultima Online and Evercrack.

The thing I'm finding baffling about both the posts on this is they seem to be coming down hard on Blizzard. Joystiq asks:

So, you pay for the game, pay your monthly subscription, only for Blizzard to say "you did something we don't want you to do, goodbye", and they kill your account. That's $50 wasted since, as was reported a while back, you can't transfer the serial number. Once it's used, it's used. Where should the line be drawn on what you can and can't do in a game you pay for initially, and continue to pay for every month? If people are stupid enough to buy a game's currency for hard cash, why shouldn't that be a legitimate activity? [Joystiq]

The answer is simple. You are breaking the policies that Blizzard has set forth for how they will run their game. This was not some secret policy that nobody knew of. On the World of Warcraft Policy Page it's right at the top of the announcements link. They even say what they will do to people they catch doing it (Of course, this gets to an even larger rant I have about how people don't read any of the game policies when playing). If this had come out of the blue I'd be able to understand complaints, but it didn't.

What do people think? If you are providing a service, should you be able to set the rules for the use of it? Does it matter if it is a game or something like an ISP? Or should having paid money immediately mean you can do what you want with that service, regardless of any Terms of Use?

It's snowing again. I wish it would just stop. Normally I probably wouldn't mind, but I'm already feeling cooped up and alone since my parents are out of town for a few days. Hopefully we won't get so much that I can't get the car out of the driveway. Bah.

Friedrich Nietzsche
"Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule." [via Quotes of the Day]

One of my more favorite shows from the past few years, Scrapped Princess, is finally coming out on DVD on 4/26/2005. From the web page:

Pacifica Cassul is known as the "Scrapped Princess." According to prophecy, she is the poison that will destroy the world on her 16th birthday. In order to avoid being killed, she must secretly wander the lands along with her two siblings who vow to protect the princess every step of the way. But being the Scrapped Princess means you must stay one step ahead of your enemy. Just how long will they journey before time runs out?

They've also got a trailer in Quicktime and Window's media linked to there. Definitely one to check out if you haven't before.

Uh. I really have no response to this. I saw the story and had to go listen. It's just mindboggling.

'Chickenpox Parties' for Parents Wary of Inoculations
Oregon is experiencing a growing phenomenon of "chickenpox parties" -- events where parents wary of getting their kids inoculated against chickenpox knowingly expose them to infected children to build immunity. [via NPR News: Health & Science]

McDonalds is starting a new ad compaign urging people to get some exercise.

McDonald's Says It's Time to Exercise

MCDONALD'S has a suggestion for Americans, who are becoming obese in alarming numbers: get some exercise. The company, under fire from those who say its food plays a role in the nation's obesity problem, introduced a marketing campaign yesterday promoting physical activity as part of a balanced life. The theme: "It's what I eat and what I do ... I'm lovin' it." The campaign includes commercials that largely dispense with traditions like showing the product, the restaurants or people eating food. One spot even tells viewers, "Maybe you should spend less time with your TV." [NYTimes]

Phil Ringnalda does some tests to see if spammers are smart enough to grab email addresses that have been escaped as numeric character references. I was surprised to find that spammers weren't going this little extra mile.

Spammers are lazy<

Last July, wanting to prove that simplistic protection of email links by just escaping them as numeric character references (a@b.com to produce a@b.com) was a lousy idea — and how could it not be? even without any economic incentive, it wouldn't take me long to write the code needed to harvest them just fine — I put an encoded SpamMotel address in my sidebar, along with a fresh address in the unprotected part of my accessibly spamproofed address. I figured it wouldn't take long before the encoded address was getting just as spammed as the other.

This morning, when I got my third actual email through the encoded one (I guess the "Harvester Test" headline wasn't quite clear enough), I finally remembered to turn it off and take it out. The final tally, for the encoded address: 46 spams, 3 actual emails; for the unencoded address: 2632 spams. Apparently, if you don't have time to really harden an address, it's worth taking the time to at least convert it to NCRs. Lazy spammers. [via phil ringnalda dot com]

I've argued for ages that just escaping email addresses like this was an example of security through obscurity. Of course I'm sure spammers everywhere will now be looking to change this.

DC comics recently got into the manga biz with their CMX imprint. I'd been kind of excited as they were picking up two titles I was really interested in getting: GALs and Tenjou Tenge. TenTen was just released and already it sounds like a disaster.

TenTen is a fighting manga. It tends to be quite violent and has quite a bit of fanservice. In japan I believe it had a Mature rating. CMX, which uses the slogan "Pure manga -- 100% the way the original Japanese creators wanted you to see it," chose to edit the series and release it as a teen title. Needless to say the manga community isn't thrilled. Many bloggers and comics news sites have already posted about it. It will be interesting to see if DC has any response.

I'm also posting about it because it hits one of my biggest peeves with some manga releases these days. The habit of tweaking art so that they remove things that might be inappropriate for whatever age group they are targeting. One of my favorites is Hikaru no Go. Where at the end of the first volume we have someone putting a blob of gum down on the center of a Go board. In the actual manga, it's a cigarette. Of course this leads to the second volume where someone is upset about the character "putting out his dirty gum on the Go board." Please, just translate, don't start tweaking things like this. If there is content that isn't appropriate for an age group, don't market it to them.

When my parents went to New Mexico on vacation last year they discovered elk. It is one of my mom's favorite meats now. After their trip they ordered some elk and last night I got to try some of it. I have to say it was quite good. The taste was mild. I wouldn't have guessed that it wasn't beef.

From what I understand that in comparison with other meats it is actually not that bad for you at all. Especially when you look at things like fat content. I hope mom gets some more soon.

Someone online mentioned a site with shots of the International Snow Sculpture Championships. The winning one is stunning. I'd love to see shots of it in the process of being sculpted.

One of the things I love best about World of Warcraft is its sense of humor and pop culture references. I started a new undead character today and while running through starting area ran across three zombies. Their names: Daniel Ulfman, Karrel Grayves, and Stephen Bhartec. Every once in a while Daniel says things like "You really couldn't blame him...", "No one lives forever...", and "Where's the rest of the guys?"

I couldn't stop chuckling about it the whole time I was playing. Brilliant.

Edit: And I just had to kill Samual Fipps.

Umberto Eco
"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth." [via Quotes of the Day]