A U.S. sergeant on duty in Iraq had a panic attack after witnessing the mangled body of an Iraqi torn in half by American gunfire. When he sought counseling to deal with his grief, he was court-martialled for cowardice — a charge potentially punishable by death. The cowardice charge has since been dropped, and I know war is hell and all, but my god.
A bit of downtime this morning as we migrated the main birdhouse systems over from a Darwin server at Cliq to a RedHat server at Sonic’s data center. A few unanticipated glitches: DNS did some really weird stuff where some servers were caching [hostname].birdhouse.org but not birdhouse.org. Of course I thought my Apache configuration was to blame, so spent time chasing red herrings. The new server runs Apache 2 rather than 1.x, and some of the directives have changed. Got caught off guard when some of the old syntax halted httpd on launch. More fiddling.
Also upgraded MySQL from 3.23 to 4.0 (transactions!) and upped CommuniGate and SpamAssassin while I was at it.
Things are settling down nicely now. I’m not exactly thrilled to move from Darwin to Linux. Ultimately it’s not much different – Unix is Unix, in a sense – but there are pride and comfort factors. But there are also advantages, such as the fact that many control panel and billing systems are built expressly for Linux (though I’m still using WebMin, some home-brew shell scripts, and a homemade PHP/MySQL billing system).
The new server has around 4x – 5x more CPU than the old one, which has greatly sped up MT and other hungry processes.
More tweaking to do… then I’ll bring over the customer accounts.
Miles started experimenting with a baby fork recently, and is starting to get the hang of forking carrots, cheeseses, and mashed potatoes. If he can’t get an item properly forked, he’ll often pick it up with one hand and guide it onto the tines. Then he’ll hold his handiwork out for all to admire, before removing the morsel — again with the hand — and eating it. It’s a start. Last night he started work on the spoon.
Also this week: Playing maracas, relating simple narrative stories to us with gestures (as opposed to single-concept hand-signals), building up structures with the MegaBlocks (rather than just knocking them down), drumming on the table along with John Bonham’s “Moby Dick” solo, piling up blankets and pillows to make nests in which to kick back and chill, and … first mini-tantrums.
This year’s awesome box set was a gift from my brother: No Thanks – The 70s Punk Rebellion. Rhino put together 100 songs covering the period around 76 – 79 — great creative/raw music from Patti Smith, The Buzzcocks, The Mekons, The Germs, Pere Ubu, Richard Hell, X-Ray Spex, The Fall, Sham 69, etc.
Rhino did a good job keeping the catalog on the punk side of the punk / new wave tight rope (no B-52s here, though there is one Devo track). But at the same time, by stopping at the end of the 70s, the collection avoids the harsher, less musical (and less creative) spit and broken glass punk of the early 80s (Fear, Saccharine Trust, DK, etc.)
Though not every track is awesome or even “seminal,” it’s a really nice slice of a period that was a turning point in the evolution of my own musical tastes. At the time, I too was wearing a “Disco Sucks” badge on my backpack and dissing Led Zeppelin and arena rock.
The funny thing is that I believed my own tripe about disco and anthem rock. Now I’m simultaneously enjoying the incredible 2-DVD set Jimmy Paige put together covering a decade of Zep in video. Talk about “Hammer of the Gods!” The punks wrote off Zep and the like as pompous bombast — they wanted to take rock back to roots. And they did. But to dismiss Zep is to miss out on a whole other flavor of roots rock – totally elemental yet soaring, majestic. The Rhino collection is fantastic, but not one band on it can hold a candle to Zep in terms of pure passion, presence, musicality, intensity…
I’d like to apologize to my former self for years of digging punk at the expense of loving Zep.
Hooked up a Sony SACD player to our system the other day and popped in one of the newly remastered Bob Dylan SACDs*. Our MSB Link DAC is auto-sensing, and knows what’s plugged into it. Was amazed that as soon as the SACD started playing, the DAC’s signal detect lights went dark and the system went silent. Eh? The player is connected to the DAC via optical Toslink, but analog also goes out for other purposes. Using the player’s remote to enable the CD layer rather than SACD brought sound back, but it was clear the DAC was totally out of the picture (and the extra SACD data was being ignored).
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birdhouse hosting has been in slow-growth, word-of-mouth mode for six months now and I’ve learned a few lessons, found out where my target audience is, and narrowed down the focus of the business. Time to crank it up a notch. Just got a business license and a birdhouse bank account, and made the decision to invest in a faster, beefier server, to be located in a data center with redundant connections, power supplies, hardware monitoring, etc.
In the midst of research, realized that it made more sense to lease a server and bandwidth together. Over the next few weeks I’ll be migrating accounts and systems over to a new 1.7GHz P4 blade running RedHat 9 at Sonic.net. I’ve been pretty committed to OS X hosting, but the lease I’m getting through Sonic is too good to pass up, and most of the hosting software in ISP-land is specifically geared toward Linux. In the future, when the business is fully self-sustaining, I’ll want to own the server, and at that point will likely switch back to an XServe, but for now it just makes sense for birdhouse to go this route.
Power outage? Hah!
Our power plant facilities consist of utility power backed by a 24 liter V-12 twin turbocharged Detroit Diesel generator, which generates 1024 horsepower and 750,000 watts of power.
Watched an amazing DVD last night – James Nachtwey, War Photographer. Nachtwey is one of a kind – has been on the front lines and in close with the people in Kosovo, Rwanda, Jakarta, and all over the world photographing the human face of war, poverty, and famine. He’s calm, centered, serious, and deeply compassionate. Much of this disc is difficult to watch, but don’t hesitate — his images (jamesnachtwey.com seems to be malfunctioning) raise something up in the soul, something non-political and yet profoundly anti-war (famine is usually a result of war, he points out).
Went to bed with his images in my head. When I woke up they were still there. There are few examples of a life better spent. It’s too rare to see documentaries made of people who are still alive, but Nachtwey’s life demands it. If he continues this line of work, his number will come up sooner than later; all the more reason to document while he’s still alive.
Unbelievable story at bushgreenwatch.com (nicely published out of MT) about how one of Bush’s judicial appointees argued for the continued bombing of a small island in the Pacific:
In the bird bombing case, conservationists sued to protect an important nesting island for migratory birds in the Pacific. They established that the U.S. military’s bombing of the island during live-fire training exercises violated the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Haynes’ team argued in a legal brief that conservationists actually benefit from the military’s killing of birds because it helps make some species more rare — and “bird watchers get more enjoyment spotting a rare bird than they do spotting a common one.” They argued the bombing was good for birds too, as it kept the island free of other “human intrusion.”
Though the judge received strong rebuke for the statement, Bush nominated him for a lifetime appointment.
Thanks Rinchen!
What do you get the one-year-old who has everything? An acre of land on the moon, of course. Whether the claim on this land is legit or not, they do make a pretty convincing argument on the site that there’s an actual basis to it. And if all their claims are to be believed, lunar land has gone up in value by a factor of 1,000 over the past 22 years. Who knows how it will skyrocket when humans actually start colonizing! So we bought Miles an acre for Christmas ($39.95!). On the northwest portion of the Sea of Tranquility, near the Crater Arago.
If it all turns out to be a sham, he’ll still be able to show his friends the deed when he gets old enough to understand real estate — which, at this rate, will probably be around age 3.
Adventure trip to The Sound Well in Berkeley to get a new needle for the turntable today – it was damaged when we moved, hadn’t listened to an LP for six months. Love to wander around in there, a jungle of amps and pre-amps and turntables and speakers from the past 50 years. They even have the exact same Pioneer receiver I grew up with, which they use as a test amp. Since the turntable I brought in was also the same one I used as a teenager, it was (virtually) reunited with the same amp it spent the 70s and early 80s with, which made me smile.
I heard one of the employees, a 50-ish man, saying to a customer: “Someone brought in one of those iPods yesterday. 2500 songs in a unit the size of a deck of cards. Sounded fantastic, too. Sometimes I wonder why we futz around with all this old gear. But then I remember. Because it’s simple.”
I bet a lot of people would argue that the iPod is simpler. Matter of perspective.
Great to listen to vinyl tonight.
Our neighbors, pulling out all the stops. Yes, that is Santa in his sleigh up on the chim-i-ney. Note how the lights bounce off the hood of the Cadillac SUV.
Amy entered one of her pieces into KQED’s Local Life gallery, where they’re having a public show / contest themed “Food as Art.” Amy has created a lot of work in this vein; it was tough to choose just one image.
LiveJournal has posted some recently updated stats, showing that of their 1.5 million registered users, about half are in some way actively posting / blogging on the LJ system. What surprised me most though is that users are 63% female, 36% male, and are overwhelmingly teenagers. Which in part explains why I always felt a bit adrift in the LJ community – it’s comprised primarily of 18-year-old girls. Of course there are tens of thousands of adults there as well, and it was with them that I formed community bonds, so I wasn’t really aware of the demographic skew toward teenagers at the time.
As many limitations as LJ has, it remains the only major blogging service with genuine threaded discussions, and the only service that makes sure that commenters see responses to their comments via email. These two features result in discussion activity that eclipses what you see on any other blogging system.
We’ll see what surprises the long-promised MT Pro has in store. So far… vapor.
Miles has learned to “pet kitty gentle,” which means Plato now lets Miles approach. Unbelievable patience on the part of the cat. Yesterday Miles walked up to Plato, who was lounging on the couch, petted him a few times, then took the pacifier from his mouth and tried to stick it in Plato’s mouth. Kitty was not interested and ran away, but I can’t help but think he appreciated the magnanimous gesture. I know I would have.
Pictured: Climbed up on the chair himself!
Unhappy with your DSL speed? Physically separate your LinkSys router from the modem by 2-3 feet and power cycle. Amazingly, we got 50% more speed this way. Apparently, there is some kind of body chemistry between LinkSys routers and some modems (ours is Zyxel) – an EMF bleed that interoperates in just the wrong way. We’ve always stacked these things before, no problem. But no longer. Amazing.
Reading a fascinating article in the current Wired (not online) about autistic savants and similar. The article quotes a section from Oliver Sacks’ “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” about a pair of twin boys who could not multiply or divide, and had great difficulty with addition and subtraction, but who nevertheless entertained one another for hours by reciting prime numbers up to 20 digits long to one another. They did not know how they knew the primes — they “just saw them.”
The article also refers to the young Andre’-Marie Ampere, who as a toddler could lay out complex arithmetic equations in stones and cookie crumbs, even though he could not yet read numbers.
To me, these are such amazing illustrations of the innateness, the universality of math. It’s not just a human construct. It’s out there, it’s real, it can be “tapped into” without any knowledge or advanced understanding of “how math works.”
Other prodigies tap into music in much the same way, like little Mo Kin the 3-yr-old xylophone prodigy. “Music is my favorite way of thinking,” says one child. The music of the spheres. Music, math, inspiration, we’re just floating in the plasma of them, grasping tendrils as they go by.
Last-minute invitation to usher tonight’s Anthony Braxton show at the Victoria Theater (same place Matthew’s Hedwig shows were, also the venue for the benefit show with Tom Waits a few months ago). Billed as a ten-tet, but there were 12 musician on stage. Braxton as always the chess-playing, leather-elbow-patch jazz composer genius surrounded by crazy virtuosos. Not sure who all was on stage, but recognized Dan Plonsey, Jon Shiurba, Scott Rosenberg, Gino Robair, others? No bass, interestingly — out of respect to Matthew? (Matthew was on Braxton’s last album). Multi-layered orchestral improv, more cerebral than bodily (I know some people bristle when Braxton is described that way, but it rings true for me). Braxton has been a hero for years, but I’ve somehow managed never to have seen him before.
I need to see a dermatologist about a funny dot of skin under my eye. My doctor tries to expedite a referral. But I have to wait two weeks for it to arrive. The number on the sheet that arrives yields a busy signal every day for a week. I call back my primary and am told that my doctor isn’t authorized to make a referral to a dermatologist and I need to call my insurance and get temporarily assigned a new primary care physician in order to get a working referral. Call my insurance (wade through interminable voice-activated phone tree, which of course does not transmit any of the information I’ve entered over to the worker who ultimately responds), who has no idea what I’m talking about. I give them number of my doctor’s office, he puts me on hold, calls them, I wait on hold for 11th time today. He gets back to me, then says my doctor doesn’t exist. He names a doctor I had two years ago, not my current. Everyone totally confused. Finally it’s (presumably) straightened out. Now I just have to wait another week for a replacement referral sheet and then make the appointment.
Seems like this kind of stuff happens every time I need to do anything in our medical system beyond having my blood pressure taken. And yet people continually refer to our health care system as “the best in the world.” I don’t get it.
I regularly delete spam comments from this blog via MT-Blacklist, but have a policy of not removing non-commercial comments no matter how weird or off-topic, and regardless how much I disagree with them.
But this morning I awoke to find “white power” comments scattered across some older (totally out-of-context) posts, linking to a historical revisionist site “debunking the myth” of Martin Luther King. New policy: I leave up everything but commercial messages and hate speech. I guess “no matter how much I disagree” does have a threshold after all.
Just received news that a childhood friend has passed on. Fallen to metastatic breast cancer, most likely a result of treatments for Hodgkin’s disease, aka lymph cancer, which she had dealt with for more than a decade. Stephanie was in her mid-30s. Stephanie and her sister and me and my brother used to play together when we were neighbors in Santa Clara in the 70s, and our families were friends. Aside from a reunion in the 90s, we had mostly fallen out of touch. I had heard that she had beaten the disease a while ago, but apparently it returned with a vengeance. Stephanie (on the left, above, with her daughter and mother) was living a very holistic life in Hawaii with her boyfriend and their young daughter Aurora. Her mother tells me that Stephanie faced death with total acceptance and love, and that her guru guided her out of this world. Of course I find myself wishing we had stayed in better touch through the years. Blessings, angel. You were a very bright star. You still are. The s’mores were great.
At the Subaru dealership today, the salesman ushered us into the Finance Manager’s office to complete our transaction*. Miles was going a bit stir-crazy, so the salesman had given him a balloon to play with. The woman behind the desk stood to greet us, then said to the salesman, “Can I ask you to please remove the balloon from the room? They freak me out.” The salesman looked somewhat surprised, but complied (Miles was a sport about it). Her request was so matter-of-fact, not the words of a crazy person at all, just a simple request, however surreal. I had never heard anything quite like it. Nothing else she did or said in the next 15 minutes was the slightest bit unusual.
When we got home, I Googled “balloon phobia” and turned up a rather detailed page on a treatment program for sufferers of balloon phobia, aka globophobia. The endless variations of the human mind. Strangetude.
*After months of research, test driving, hemming and hawing, we finally decided on a Subaru Forester. The first new car either of us has ever owned. A car to serve us for the next decade. Now champing at the bit for a good road trip.
Downhill Battle brilliantly critiques the financial model of the iTunes Music Store, noting that they’ve blown a great opportunity — they could have leveraged internet distribution to give the artist a much larger cut of every song sold. Instead, iTMS is just another iteration of “the man” abusing the artist. The site challenges iTMS to post the artists’ cut for each song right there in the UI. Similar discussion going on here.
First of all, Apple gets 3 times as much money as musicians from each sale. Apple takes a 35% cut from every song and every album sold, a huge amount considering how little they have to do. Record labels receive the other 65% of each sale.
Interestingly, Apple recently removed the claim that iTunes is “fair to the artists” from their web site. Downhill Battle claims this change as their victory.
And yet, Apple is losing money on ITMS, according to CNET.
My take: The solution proposed by Downhill Battle (download from free services, then donate money directly to the artist) puts wayyyy too much faith in humanity (reminds me of libertarianism’s fatal flaw – sounds ideal on paper, but no way could it ever work). Hate to sound so negative, but really — what percentage of people are going to have a download festival on Kazza and then go donate money to the artist through a separate channel? Bzzzzzt. Ain’t going to happen.
Months ago, Amy and I discovered this immense graphical treasure trove — digital archives of posters created during the Works Progress Administration. Hosted by the Library of Congress, more than 900 posters of the 2,000 known to exist are online both as thumbnails and as 50MB TIFFs ready for printing. Because we the people paid for all creations of the WPA, no copyright baggage is attached.
It took a week of evenings to sift through most of the collection to find a pair to have framed for Amy’s birthday. Finally settled on this subterranean “See America” cave scene, plus a less stark wildlife image. (Warning: Many URLs at the library of congress have the string “temp” somewhere in them — these will break after a few days, rendering your bookmarks useless. Amazingly clueless and frustrating when dealing with a collection of that size).
Had them archivally printed with a process called “color span,” then framed in 1930s-style cherry frames. They came out amazing. But I should have known better than to try and select art for an artist. Amy’s eye is so fine; of course she wished she had been part of the selection process. Bumbling husband means well.
Amy’s birthday today, went to SF MOMA to see the Diane Arbus exhibition. One of the largest collections of her work ever assembled, and they’ve done an amazing job with the supporting material – her cameras, journals and letters, works in progress, bracketed frames, etc. all on display, with running commentary from multiple sources. I’ve seen a lot of those images over time, but never the original prints, and never all at once like that. Inspiring.
kurt von finck recently passed me a note out of the blue – his personal ruminations on how SNL’s musical guests actually mattered once upon a time. Changed our minds. Turned us on. His experience and memories mirrored my own pretty closely, and I asked his permission to re-run the note here (follow the links for background).
I happened to listen to the Elvis Costello/Beastie Boys version of “Radio Radio” recently. Very, very cool of Beastie Boys to re-create this moment with Elvis on the 25th Anniversary special. It reminded me of the two early SNL musical guests I remember. Seminal stuff at 12-14 years old.
The first was Elvis Costello’s 1977 “Less Than Zero-Radio Radio.” I already owned the “My Aim Is True” vinyl album, and at first was psyched to hear him sing “Less Than Zero.” Things didn’t work out that way.
Man, I was blown away. A new song, and the lyrics were a scathing indictment of the disco and recycled crap (Allman Brothers vs. Molly Hatchet) “classic” rock my friends were listening to. I can still see it in my mind. Here’s the episode blurb and a link to the actual performance in MP3.
The other musical act I remember is Devo. This one more people seem to remember, maybe because it was in the next season, when SNL was really becoming popular. I remember wondering if they were a goof or not, probably because of the Booji Boy sketch that preceded their second song. I think that was “Jocko Homo” (their cover of “Satisfaction” being the first tune). Here’s the blurb.
Kinda figured you all would remember one, if not both, of these performances. SNL’s musical acts today just kinda suck. “Radio Radio” has sorta come to pass, and even bands like The White Stripes seem kinda hackneyed. I want something new.
Amen to that. SNL’s musical acts were something to look forward to in the 70s and early 80s; almost a reason to watch the show in and of themselves. I got turned on to so much music from that soundstage. From the same period, add The Specials and The B-52s (if you’re going to remember this, you have to remember these acts as totally fresh). The Clash, Joe Jackson, The Cars, Sun Ra, Zappa, Talking Heads, Ornette Coleman, Blondie, The Roches, Gary Numan, Captain Beefheart, Fear, Laurie Anderson, P-Funk… If you check the musical history of the show from season to season, you can see that the creativity quotient starts to decline in the mid 80s. By the 90s it’s pretty much all pop, no risk.
It’s not all SNL’s fault that we’ve reached the current nadir or creativity on that stage – music was in the midst of an especially fertile passage. But still, there are dozens of interesting acts out there who could be filling the musical minds of new viewers with that raw thrill… the feeling that music could go anywhere, be anything, just keep exploding outward in a million new directions. Creative stuff is out there. SNL has just decided that the Clear Channel route is safer and more lucrative.
Filthy lucre.
