Well, winter seems to be back, at least for a little bit. So I think that’s all the excuse we need to have some fun Wednesday night. This week, the first person to find me after I spin gets a free martini. How’s that for a deal. Not only do you get in for free, but one lucky person gets a martini. This is also the first of two free weeks in a row, so mark your calendars for next week too.

Changmian and Dubcoast present

*~The Analog Lounge~*
The relaxed side of things. Join us every Wednesday for a mix of
music styles in the lounge at Vertigo, with lots of mellow mixed in.
This week, we welcome back the one and only

Frantic [Suburban Groove Project] MA
(We had such a good time the last time he was around we just had to
have him back.)

The night is also extra special, because there is NO COVER CHARGE. So
come on down and check out Frantic upstairs and Anitya’s special guest
downstairs:
DIMITRI [G.B.U./twisted, Spun Records, Ibiza]
it should be a pretty kickass night.

The Analog Lounge with resident dj’s
Gregory Blake (Changmian) Boston
Special Pete (dubcoast music) CA
Peter Ellis (ttb) Boston
Pete Yagmin (Changmian) Boston

Wednesdays
@ Vertigo (upstairs)
126 State St. Boston, MA
617-723-7277
10pm – 2am
21+ with ID
$5 cover (gets you into both the Lounge and Anitya) (But it’s FREE this week!)
No dress code
www.changmian.com
www.dubcoast.com
www.vertigoboston.com
www.mapquest.com (directions)

Upcoming Guests:
04/16 – MJ [AudioDreamControl : Satellite : Galanta.net] MA
04/23 – DJ Headrush [wbrs : djheadrush.com] MA
04/30 – Defixio [Redlight : punkrocktechno] MA

To view our calendar online (with support for you iCal and Mozilla
calendar folk):
http://ical.mac.com/gblake99/The32Analog32Lounge

Also, as usual, if you’re a DJ in the Boston area and interested in spinning some Wednesday night, drop me a line.

Anyone up for drinks on Thursday night? I was thinking about an excursion to Miracle of Science, since I haven’t been there in ages. I just feel the need to go hang out and visit with some friends and blow off some steam. Wednesday nights are good for that, but I have to worry about club stuff so I can’t fully relax.

Too busy running around today to do things I want to. First I’m not going to get to Harvard for Dave Winer’s thing this afternoon. Hopefully I’ll get over there Thursday (finally). Also, I’m going to bail on Turntables and Beer tonight since it’s a street cleaning day tomorrow, which means parking will suck tomorrow (and I have a good parking spot now). Oh how I love spring in Cambridge (though they didn’t street clean today due to the snow).

Last night I braved the cooling air and headed over to the movie theater in Harvard Square to check out the US release of the Cowboy Bebop movie. I’d downloaded a fansubbed version of it a while back and had seen it already, but I was kind of keen to see it with the dub voices that I enjoyed so much during the series. I also wanted the chance to see it on the big screen with better sound than the fansub I had.

Overall, the movie was good. Not great, but good. Probably even a bit better than good. Let’s say very good. The plot was decent. In general terms it’s about some bad guy who’s got some freaky virus and is threatening to unleash it upon Mars. Of course, the crew of the Bebop get involved because there’s a huge bounty on the guy (and Faye witnesses his first attack). I’d say my only major problem with it was the pacing. There were a few scenes that felt like they could have been trimmed slightly and tightened things up. But beyond that there isn’t too much negative to say about the movie.

The dub cast is back for the movie and does just as good a job as they did in the series. The soundtrack is great (I’ve had the CD for months now). And some of the action sequences in the movie are amazing (there’s an dogfight scene that’s really cool, and I enjoyed the fight scene at the end a lot). Overall, if you enjoyed the TV series, you’ll probably at least like the movie. I also think it would work well for someone who hasn’t seen the TV series. I give it four out of five stars.

This is testing making a post via Kung-Log, a graphical front end for Movable Type. It’s pretty cool from the looks of it, though it’s missing some stuff to do with uploading files (not creating thumbnails).

I think the thing I find sad about the follwoing story is that it doesn’t surprise me at all. I’ve run into more than my share of people on the net who aren’t what they say they are. But damn, it isn’t often you get to see someone caught in this way. It’s nice to know there are still good people out there on the net.

How Joey’s blog saved his ass
Joeey “Accordion Guy” DeVilla posted a blog entry last week about how great his new girlfriend is, how fine it was to be dating a programmer girl-geek with a CS degree and a sweet job running the Alliance/Atlantis site she had. His comments-section was full of encouraging notes from his friends, glad to see him so happy.

But the next day, a stranger emailed him with the news that his girlfriend was not what she seemed: a recovering addict who abandoned her children, a compulsive liar and identity thief, a chameleon who lied about her education, employment and technical abilities. Joey met with the stranger and got the whole story, and confronted his erstwhile girlfriend.

She denied it all, but couldn’t even answer the most basic technical questions. Finally, in a fit of Columbo-like suspicion, Joey asked her a trick question — a very, very clever trick question that I won’t spoil for you here — and realized that his whistle-blower was telling the truth. Joey got the hell out of the relationship, saved from involvement with this very broken and creepy person by his blog.

Link[Boing Boing Blog]

Just another reminder that on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog

Happy Birthday, Astro Boy!
On this day, Astro Boy was created by Dr. Tenma. Happy birthday, Astro. [Antipixel]

Also of interest, a new Astro Boy show started airing just last night in Japan. I think they’re just showing the first episode now and the series itself starts later this year. I never saw the original, so it will be interesting to see this.

Internet-enabled toilet roll

A whole slew of bizarre household gadgets the Ideal Home Show in London this past week, including an cutting board that can surf the Web and an Internet-connected toilet roll that can display current news and stock prices, and print out the information on, you guessed it, toilet paper. Certainly provides an innovative way for people to show their displeasure with bad news and market crashes.
Read

[Gizmodo]

I can just see people never leaving the bathroom because of this, not wanting to miss a single moment of news.

Samuel Johnson: “Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those whom we cannot resemble.” [Quotes of the Day]

I was reading Leo Laporte’s recent blog post on spam filtering and decided I needed to get a little more firm handle on my mail filtering and spam filtering. I’ve been using the spam filter that comes with Apple’s Mail.app program and it’s pretty damn good. I’d say it finds about 95% of the spam I get. The nice thing is you can keep training it all the time.

I’m also experimenting with letting the mail program do all my filtering. I had been using procmail, but I think sometimes it would interfere with the spam filtering that Mail.app was doing. So we’ll see how it works. I’m also taking this time to clean out old old old mail that really has no use. I want to get better at managing my email.