Tom Snyder in Tomorrowland

For Stuck Between Stations, Roger Moore revisits Tom Snyder’s signature 1970s/80s interview program The Tomorrow Show, on which Snyder shared a stage with the likes of Joe Strummer, Iggy Pop, John Lydon, and a shockingly bare-faced Bono. Tom Snyder in Tomorrowland:

When a haggard, bloody-lipped, gap-toothed Iggy Pop came to the interview chair looking like he had just gone fifteen rounds in the ring with Leon Spinks, Snyder had the good sense to hold back and let him get his bearings for more than four minutes. Then Iggy started riffing on the distinctions between Dionysian and Apollonian art, and tossing off a prodigious list of musical inspirations.

Also: The secret connection between Wendy O. Williams of the Plasmatics and Martha Stewart, unveiled at last.

Music: Frank Zappa :: Rat Tomago

Speed Bump

Tired of SBC/Yahoo! dropping our DSL connection two or three times a day, and slobbering over the promise of 3Mbps, made the jump from DSL to Comcast cable today (our contract was about to expire anyway). Expected the worst, but the install couldn’t have gone smoother (including Le Cable Dude stringing coax to the other side of the house, making child’s play of the impossibly cramped rabbit hole we call a crawl space. 30 minutes later, we’re ripping.

Had heard some bad things about DNS latency issues with cable connections, but so far it’s running like an electric pig slathered in deep-fat-fried butterballs (that’s a good thing). Ran the dslreports speed test just before disconnecting DSL and then again just after bringing up the cable:

SBC/Yahoo! DSL:
622kbps down
309kbps up
57ms latency
Comcast cable:
2956kbps down
1423 up
59ms latency

IOTW, nearly 5x faster in both directions, at roughly the same price. What remains to be seen is whether Comcast will extend the introductory rate indefinitely, as SBC had offered to do.

Compare to average broadband speeds in other countries:

Average broadband download speed in the US is 1.9 Mbps. It is 61 Mbps in Japan, 45 Mbps in South Korea, 18 Mbps in Sweden, 17 Mpbs in France, and 7 Mbps in Canada.

Coda: Called in to cancel the SBC service, and selected “Disconnect service” from the phone tree menu — which of course landed me on hold for 40 minutes. Finally couldn’t wait anymore, so Amy said she’d try it later in the day. She waited on hold for 20 minutes, then hung up and called back. This time she selected “Connect new service.” Big surprise, she was talking to a helpful rep in 2 minutes flat. The rep asked why we were canceling. Amy: “Because the service sucked.” Rep: “So I’ll just write down ‘Customer regrets that they were unable to resolve technical difficulties with the service.'” Amy: “Could you also write that the customer regrets that she and her husband were made to wait over an hour on hold between the two of them?” Rep: “Sorry about that. Amy: “Could you also write down that the customer regrets that AT&T chose to have her listen to “Message in a Bottle” while on hold?” The rep dutifully wrote down her comments, then read them back. “Customer regrets having to listen to Message in a Bottle while on hold.” “Anything else?” “That’ll do it,” Amy responded. And that was that. File under “Reasons why I love my wife, #246.”

Music: Stereolab :: One Note Samba-Surfboard

Geeks vs. Nerds

Curious about the difference? First definition for “geek” in Merriam-Webster’s dictionary:

1: a carnival performer often billed as a wild man whose act usually includes biting the head off a live chicken or snake

In contrast, “nerd” originates with M. Theodore Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss:

The American Heritage Dictionary in fact credits Dr. Seuss as the originator of the word nerd, which made its first appearance in his 1950 book, If I Ran the Zoo: “And then just to show them, I’ll sail to Ka-Troo And Bring Back an It-Kutch a Preep and a Proo a Nerkle a Nerd and a Seersucker, too!”

So that clears that up.

Music: King Curtis :: Ridin’ Thumb

Keep Your Chin Up

Tree Had an amazing day at Angel Island with the family last weekend. Made our way to the 800-foot peak over miles of switch-backs in absolutely perfect weather. Views of the Bay Area from the top like I’ve never seen before, picnic lunch with the birds, lovely ferry rides there and back. Did some good geocaching along the way, including my first 4.5-star terrain rating grab. Amy spotted it first — a camouflaged Nalgene bottle hanging from a limb 30 ft. up the backside of a tree. Pretty much in plain view, but the climb was hairy. Unscrewed the lid one-handed to find a dry pen and a damp log book, which meant another trip down and back up again to get the log signed (it don’t count if you don’t sign). Just scary enough to get the adrenaline going… but resulted in a crowd of muggles gathered around. Not much I could do about that once up there (“Chill out – don’t draw attention!”), but the climb was a nice little nitro boost to an already perfect day.

Music: Black Heat :: Wanaoh

Phishing Quiz

How good are you at identifying phishing scams? Interesting quiz at siteadvisor.com showing screenshots of 10 real sites and their phished counterparts side by side. I consider myself pretty well versed at picking out the tell-tale signs, but only got 8/10. What’s really scary is the fact that the quiz called me a “guru” for getting that score – which means that 20% of phishing sites are good enough to fool pretty much everyone (although the screenshots from the two I missed didn’t show the URLs, which is probably the most critical clue, though even those can be made to look convincing, or wholly spoofed in various ways).

How’d you score, and what threw you off?

Music: The Meters :: Chug Chug Chug-A-Lug-(Push N’ Shove)-Part II-(w Meters)

.command for OS X Shell Scripts

For the next version of gpx2txt, I was looking into AppleScript wrappers and other methods so users wouldn’t be required to run Terminal.app, when I discovered that under OS X you can rename a shell script with the “.command” extension and it’ll run with a double-click. Works a treat – no path issues even. Next version will be much more user-friendly.

Music: Manu Chao :: Luna y Sol

Coffee-Rubbed Steak

Cool: Open Source Food, a site for eaters who want to share the love.

We’re not professional cooks, we just love food. We want to share, learn and improve ourselves with the help of like-minded food lovers. Open Source Food is a platform for that.

Looking forward to trying out this coffee-rubbed steak, and … dang, there’s a lot I want to try on the site. Curses! No search engine.

Recipes are Creative Commons licensed.

Music: Bole 2 Harlem :: Endegena

Monk’s Dream

Those of you who have been checking Birdhouse for a long time may remember Rinchen, one of my oldest friends, who used to comment here. Two years ago he sold everything he owned – including his amazing record collection – and moved into a Buddhist monastery for three years of almost total silent meditation. At intervals he’s able to take time out to communicate with friend and family, so a while back I wrote him asking what music ran through a monk’s mind, hoping to run it on Stuck Between Stations. A few days ago received a beautiful perambulation on Sun Ra, John Cage, Sly, Jorge Ben and more.

The Cruel Shoes

Old Shoes Farewell, awesome old shoes. You may well be the best friends my feet ever had, but all that hiking and scrambling and geocaching has taken it’s toll. I can’t stand to see you go, but you’re blown out, frayed, fried, bedraggled and besmirched, and pebbles are starting to get in through your sides. Guess I’ll keep you around for lawn mowing or something. You’re way too noble for the trash. Hey there, new kicks! I promise to learn to love you, despite the fact that you make my feet look like they’re bent inwards at an impossible angle, reminiscent of the stars of Steve Martin’s seminal short story The Cruel Shoes:

New Shoes Carlo disappeared into the back room for a moment, then returned with an ordinary shoebox. He opened the lid and removed a hideous pair of black and white pumps. But these were not an ordinary pair of black and white pumps; both were left feet, one had a right angle turn with separate compartments that pointed the toes in impossible directions. The other shoe was six inches long and was curved inward like a rocking chair with a vise and razor blades to hold the foot in place. Carlo spoke hesitantly, “…Now you see why…they’re not fit for humans…”

Music: Zero 7 :: Salt Water Sound

New WordPress Sites

This is becoming (for me) the summer of pushing the envelope with WordPress – bending it to become a full content management system, rather than just a blogging tool. Between work and home, have been converting a couple of sites over the past few weeks – one from an old-school static site, and another from Movable Type to WordPress.

landwater.com represents the environmental and historic preservation law firm Rossmann and Moore – I’ve been working with them since forever. Their old static site (originally designed by baald, who comments here sometimes) has stood up to the years amazingly well, but it was time to move on. Now in WordPress, office assistants there can finally update the site without having to learn Dreamweaver or FTP. I love the way WP pages can become children of other pages. By nesting them, you get a hierarchal URL structure automatically, and can use the workhorse wp_list_pages() function to generate structured HTML lists, which in turn can be styled as CSS fly-out menus. Throw in the My Page Order plugin and non-tech editors can rearrange the hiearchy (and thus the menu system) via drag-and-drop. So elegant.

At work, have been on a mission to get all Movable Type sites converted to WordPress by the end of summer. The first of the two largest projects is pretty much done. North Gate News Online is the publishing arm of J-200, the journalism bootcamp all first-year students endure. The site has been a CPU-sucking Movable Type hog with a hideous design (my fault!) for years; as of today it’s majorly multimedia-enabled WordPress site with its own podcast feed (nothing there yet). This is a soft-launch; all the tech is ready and waiting for the next crop of J-200 students. OK, we’re showing too much roof, but the design is leaps and bounds beyond the old site. Using a ton of plugins to handle Flash, QuickTime movies, embedded audio, image pop-ups, etc. But most impressive is WP-Cache, which gives you the static page performance of MT combined with the dynamic page behavior of WordPress. Poetry.

The biggest WP challenge of the summer starts on Monday – total rebuild of China Digital Times, which has much more sophisticated needs. Looking forward to the challenge.

Music: Leo Kottke :: Blimp