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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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:

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…”

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.

Is a record not spun a record not played? Dragging a needle across old, brittle vinyl records or wax cylinders can damage them — not something you want to do with rare historical recordings. At the Library of Congress, researchers have developed a scanner that can extract audio from records by scanning them digitally - no spinning required. Images are analyzed and transformed back into audible sound. “Stuck” records magically become unstuck, while physically broken records can be pieced back together with great results.

How does it sound? “The machine is not adding its own color. It’s not adding anything of its own nature,” says the device’s developer. The samples on the NPR site are low-res internet audio, but the comparisons to the original are impressive, despite a persistent background hiss.

The technology could eventually become available to general consumers, meaning that the daunting task of MP3-encoding piles of vinyl would become way less daunting. It’s a strange and beautiful world.

Thanks Jeb

Jaw-dropping for geeks, probably an utter bore for everyone else. Download this perl script to a machine with perl installed and run it from the command line. Whoop-dee-doo, right? Now, open it up in an editor. Holy mother of Shiva. As mneptok says, “Some people have too much time on their hands.”

Very proud of our News21 (News Initiative for the Future of Journalism) team for the work they did on the Moral Compass, which asks the question “How do different religions view certain issues on sex and morality?” Spin the wheel and get answers on a host of questions covering masturbation, homosexuality, premarital sex, etc. from representatives of faiths including Catholicism, Judaism, Muslim, Buddhism, Methodist, Baptist, and more. Video interviews with clergy and others included. Nice work on the Flash interface!

The Moral Compass is part of Berkeley’s contribution to this year’s News21 project, Faces of Faith in America.

Over at Stuck Between Stations, we’ve posted a Francophile follow-on to last week’s Stuck on the Fourth of July to celebrate Bastille Day, this one titled Globe of Frogs: Stuck on Bastille Day.

For the past 231 years or so, a favorite American pastime has been to pretend to hate the French, while secretly admiring French cuisine, art, architecture, philosophy, and yes, even its music. And the French have helped us become ourselves.

Roger, Malcolm, Christian and me on the French and French-Connected music that stirs our souls, rattles our cages, rocks our worlds, and powers our trips. Serge Gainsbourg, Malajube, Magma, Jonathan Richman, Gong, and lots more.

Miles: “I’m going to sprinkle magic dust on your head and make you a rock and roll star! You’ll play drums and I’ll play xylophone.”

We then proceeded to form a series of bands with the following names, each of them dutifully introduced to an audience of one (Amy) with a shouted “El Cerrito, are you read to rock and roll?,” changing instrumentation with each iteration, none of them lasting longer than a few minutes:

The Electric Motors
Plato of the USA
The Growing Plant of the Maraca That’s Been Fired
Chocolate Powder of England
Blue Bamboo
The Electric Pennies
Chalk Dust Slipper

Update: gpx2txt has been superceded by gpx2ipod - please visit that page for up-to-date info and discussions.

Downside of geocaching: The time it takes to prepare notes, making sure you’ll have access to hints and other people’s logs when you get there, etc. And the printing it requires doesn’t feel good from an eco perspective. All this data is available in .gpx files on geocaching.com, but most GPS units won’t display that data.

Paperless caching is where it’s at, but generally assumes you have a PDA. So what if you have an iPod but no PDA? The iPod has this much-overlooked “Notes” feature - mount an iPod, look in the Finder for the Notes folder, and drop in text files.

Amazingly, I haven’t been able to find anything that does this cleanly on the Mac. MacCaching is interesting, but (strangely) sends entries to Address Book rather to Notes, and doesn’t preserve any of the metadata you need on the trail. The workhorse utility gpsbabel is able to convert .gpx files to plain text (usable with iPod Notes), but the GUI version isn’t capable of batch operations. So I wrapped a shell script around the command-line version of gpsbabel to help Mac users do paperless caching with an iPod.

gpx2ipod takes a folder full of .gpx files and converts them to plain text, then injects them directly into an iPod’s Notes folder.

In the future I’ll try and re-package this as an Automator action, no Terminal required.

Update: Version 0.2 is now available, and handles both individual .gpx files and Pocket Query-generated multiple-cache .gpx files.

Update 2: gpx2txt has been completely rewritten as gpx2ipod - now much more user-friendly, with stored preferences and all kinds of bells and whistles.

With all the iPhone hype we’ve heard over the past couple of months, one burning question has remained unanswered. Until now.

Miles has been riding with training wheels on his bike for half a year now. Somehow, a sunny summer evening seemed like the perfect time to try ditching them and flying free. He had a bit of trepidation, and after his first wipe-out he declared his “new” bike “stupid” - said he wanted to give it as a present to a 7-year-old. Then he said he wanted to try again. Riding on the grass turned out to be the magic ticket, and made wipeouts fun. Within half an hour he was flying free and ecstatic. Strange, almost comical coincidence - practically every crash was complemented by the ping of a baseball on aluminum bat in the diamond we shared a field with.

QuickTime video

Music: Marty Robbins :: The Story Of My Life

Before there were Shriners driving tiny cars in stupendous fezzes, before the advent of tinfoil-helmet-wearing denizens of alt.black.helicopters, before there was Rogaine and hair transplants and “Ladies will love you” infomercials, there were ordinary Joes just like me seeking ever-elusive hair re-growth methods. Available solutions were on par with perpetual motion machines - like this marvelous Hair Hat advertised in Popular Mechanics, 1928.

This new invention—the result of an experience gained in treating thousands of cases of baldness—is in the form of a new kind of hat. It is worn on the head just 10 minutes a day. No unnecessary fuss of any kind. Just put the hat on your head. Wear it 10 minutes. And that’s all there is to it. Sounds impossible, doesn’t it? All right. Then let me emphasize this fact. I don’t care how thin your hair is. I don’t care how many treatments you have taken without results. Unless my discovery actually produces a new growth of hair on your head in 30 days, then all you need do is tell me so. And without asking one question, I will instantly— and gladly—mail you a check refunding you every penny you have paid me.

How does it work? “My new invention gets right to the cause of most of hair troubles — the starving dormant roots.” I’m thinking the technology was more akin to the placebo effect, but who am I to say?

Amazing weekend hiking, geocaching, playing with Dad at El Dorado National Forest near Tahoe (not near the burned area). Saturday at Pipi Creek, grooving with the boulders and the foliage and dragonflies. Found a natural swimming hole, Miles stoked to swim and climb the slippery face of a mini-waterfall.

Sunday on the backside of Silver Lake, hiking up to the well-hidden natural treasure Granite Lake, a great stone basin under pristine skies. Found a water snake, which Miles followed along the banks until disappeared with a ripple beneath the surface. Lunch on the banks of nearby Hidden Lake, watching postcard reflections dance in the afternoon heat.

Had some excellent geocaching adventures. Saturday evening, traipsing through thickets with M, running out of time, Miles held up a thick stick: “Daddy, what’s this funny log?” Noticed the saw mark around the middle, and had him pull one end. Cacher had hollowed out just enough space for a medicine bottle containing a log book and pencil. So creative. Would I have found it without M’s help?

Sunday thought we were getting close to Minkalo Cliffs cache, when the GPSr started pointing uphill. Realized we’d have to backtrack and scale a butte overlooking Silver Lake. Gorgeous. Got to the cliff edge and found the compass pointing down again. That’s when I realized some climbing was involved. “Remember, no one is forcing you to do this,” said the cache page. Decided to go for it. 20 ft. down, found an ammo box wedged into a crack. Yelled the prizes down to Miles, who was hanging out in the trees with Amy. Left a travel bug that had originated in Hawaii and was asking to be left at Tahoe views… only to find later that evening that it already done a Tahoe circuit and was headed back for Hawaii. Heh - that’s the game.

Total recharge of a weekend. Ready for anything.

Flickr set.

A couple days late, but hey - tardiness is a hallmark of countless great musicians, so I guess we can ride that wagon too. The crew of Stuck Between Stations has teamed up to compile a comprehensive, all-over-the-map, annotated 4th of July audio/video playlist: Stuck on the Fourth of July. From James Brown and Gerald Ford to Wilco and Public Enemy to Robert Wyatt and Sleater Kinney to Wendy Rene and Funkadelic, to XTC and the Minutemen. It’s what America means to us.

Many thanks to Roger for the nutty amount of legwork required to pull this one together.

PHP4 is seven years old now (amazing!), and PHP5 has been out for nearly three years. But while v4 has gotten pretty long in the tooth, the massive entrenchment of web apps targeted at PHP4 has prevented anything like rapid uptake for version 5. As many as 80% of PHP hosts were still running 4.x as of June 2007. Web hosts who undertake an upgrade risk breaking thousands of customer applications - not OK. But something’s got to break the cycle, which is preventing developers from taking full advantage of all the chocolaty, O-O goodness in v5.

GoPHP5.org is assembling a list of major open source PHP apps committed to dropping all support for v4 by February 2008 as a way to goad hosts into undertaking the difficult transition. The Drupal, Symfony, and phpMyAdmin teams have already signed on, while the WordPress hackers are eager, but wary of the fallout.

Google ad sales rep Lauren Turner spoke out against Michael Moore’s “Sicko” on a corporate blog, but didn’t stop there. She went on to tell the healthcare industry that Google was there to help them fight back. The industry could counter “Sicko,” she suggested, by buying Google ads promoting all of their good qualities.

I’m all for corporate blogging — transparency is good. In this case, what’s transparent is the fact that Google (or a Google employee - remember, this was a corporate blog, not a corporate statement) feels that advertising is a fine way for deep-pocketed corporations not just to sell products, but to cloud debate on an issue that affects the whole public sphere.

Machinist: But it wants us to believe that we should resolve public policy disputes through search marketing? Advertising is no longer just for selling soap — it’s for democracy, too. Note, first, the irony: Michael Moore accuses the industry of throwing up a haze of marketing, P.R. and lobbying to hide its practices, and Google tells Big Healthcare to respond by buying up more ads.

Turner later posted an apology for the post, but only for her error in framing Google’s policy on the blog; the idea of pushing AdWords/AdSense as a great way to shape public opinion, rather than just to sell products, stood.

New at our music writing project site Stuck Between Stations over the past few weeks:

Roger Moore: Tom Waits’ High-Stakes Wager on Waits’ spiritual insurance policy.

Me: Mutato Visual, on Mark Mothersbaugh’s postcard making obsession.

Roger: Stuck Between Radio Stations, on troubled times faced by low-power FM radio stations.

Practice in Front of a Bush: Captain Beefheart’s Ten Commandments for guitarists.

Standing in line with Miles for a soft pretzel at Marine World yesterday, found myself staring at big sign hawking a giant plastic bucket emblazoned with the MW logo, which one could fill with a choice of popcorn or cotton candy for a mere $7 (”Buck Refills all day!”) and thinking of Michael Pollan.

In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan describes the tricky relationship between capitalism and the food industry. You can always sell people more shoes or CDs - we just make space to accommodate them. But humans have a built-in limit to how much food we can consume. Food makers who have to satisfy shareholders’ demands on the bottom line to sell more [widgets/chalupas/corn products] every year have a tough job.

The tension between nature-limited appetites and capitalism’s need to expand, always expand, explains two things: 1) The obesity epidemic, and 2) The relentless introduction of absurd new food combinations in the drive to manufacture desire. Fast food joints re-conjure new variations on the same old limited palette of ingredients. Taco Bell sells little beyond tortillas, cheese, beans, and beef, yet manages somehow to find new ways to recombine them into Mongo Chalupas and Super Beefeater’s BurrTacos year after year. Fruit Loops Cereal Straws are drinking straws made of Fruit Loops material, lined with powdered sugar. Each suck of milk from the bowl brings a mouthful of sugared milk. When done, eat the straw. You see where I’m going with this.

The giant bucket is not a recombinant food creation - what could be more elemental than popcorn or cotton candy? The giant bucket represents the other kind of attempt to sell more food - gi-normous portions (is there a 128-ounce Coke portion available yet? If not, give it time). But it does represent an unbelievable markup on one of the cheapest food items you could possibly manufacture, with the possible exception of bottled water.

We resisted the giant bucket and enjoyed our pretzel, but the entire day at Marine World felt like equal parts pleasure and pain, this weird collision between enjoying the marvels of the deep blue sea (the people mover that carried us along the inside of a glass tube through a tank filled with sharks and sting rays was an experience of rare beauty) vs. a miasma of the most crass and offensive commercialism, not to mention the depressing weight of massive crowds, overpriced everything, and long lines for just about anything, was confusing.

Next time we either head for the tidepools ourselves or bring our own lunch (though park rules explicitly forbid this - wonder why?)