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October 30, 2005
Drop the needle
I couldn't wait for the CD so I purchased the new Biosphere album Dropsonde in vinyl, my first record purchase in four years or so. Coming on the heels of my recent Boards of Canada fake-track debacle (only possible in these digital music-obsessed days) it was a completely enjoyable, material experience. I was instantly in grade school again, fetishizing the platter and poring over the cover art as if I held a Rembrandt in my hands. Of course I immediately digitized it and have embarked on the daunting -- though so pleasingly nostalgic -- task of doing the same for all the 33's and 45's that I do not own digitally. On some of the records I actually remember every scratch and hiss as if they were part of the original recording.
Ways in which vinyl is better than bits:
- Imperfections in the vinyl, especially those caused by the owner (needle dropped too hard, flattening of the grooves from overplay, etc.) make that album more personal, indelibly stamping it as unique and yours-alone. Call it analog watermarking.
- At a glance you can instantly see the relative durations of all the songs on a side. Sorta like the advantage of an analog watch. You only need spatial awareness to see that you have a quarter of a circle's worth of time before your meeting.
- Perfectly hitting the blank grooves between songs with the stylus is damn satisfying.
- Cover art, cover art, cover art. Bigger, badder, bolder.
And the album Dropsonde? It is as good as they say. Geir appears to be infatuated with jazz percussion. The minimalism of Autour de la Lune is gone and occasionally a higher-range line ("melody" would be imprecise) takes over in a way reminiscent of his older work. Highly recommended.
Posted at 5:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Music
October 26, 2005
Black Sox no longer
Last night I had the crazy notion that, with a world champion team to call their own, White Sox fans would lose the massive chip on their shoulders about the Cubs. You'd not know it these days, but Cubs fans greatly outnumber Sox fans in the city and throughout the country (thanks to years of national coverage by WGN). Wrigley Field is a tourist destination by itself and while the new new Comiskey -- pardon me, The Cell -- is a great park, it still doesn't hold a candle to Cubs field and Wrigleyville. This has nothing to do with the quality of the respective sports teams, of course. It is all about the perceived sense of importance to the city. (And perhaps lingering guilt over the team's scandalous collusion with gamblers in 1919?)
Will the inferiority complex dissipate now that the Sox are the champs?
Posted at 8:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Chicago
Headmuffs
I have too many types of headphones I think.
- Earbuds for iPod listening during the commute. (Apple iPod Earbud Headphones, not the ones that come with the iPod -- decent sound, not great)
- Sweat-proof, collapsible headphones for running (Sony MDR-A35G S2 Sports Headphones -- love these, sweat is not an issue and I am one sweaty bastard)
- Crappy earbuds for inserting under hat when running outside in winter (whatever)
- Noise-cancelling for long plane flights and at work (Sennheiser PXC 250 -- LOVE these, highly recommended)
- Big padded ones for make-believe DJ'ing (Sennheiser HD 202 -- nothin' special)
When I travel I actually have three of these in my backpack. That's ridiculous. What is my problem?
Posted at 10:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | Topic: Science/Tech
October 23, 2005
Reluctant cheerleader
The World Series has me in a real dilemma.
Fact #1: I greatly dislike the White Sox. Or rather, I'm no fan of their fans who, you can be sure, would not be cheering on the Cubs if by some cosmic anomaly they made it to the World Series.
Fact #2: I love Chicago and I love that any of our sports teams is so dominant.
Fact #3: I am married to a woman with a great deal of family in Houston (more since Katrina) and so must deal with a large pro-Houston lobby.
I suppose it is better than a Sox-Cardinals series. That would have been too much for any Cubs fan.
Grandpa's gonna spin in his grave, but ... Go Chicago!
Posted at 11:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Chicago
October 21, 2005
The steam will rise again
Perhaps catering to its larger blue collar readership, the Sun-Times scooped the Trib in covering a story of great importance to the public bathers of the city. The good news is that the Division Street Baths are closed for remodelling and will reopen next year most likely, just in time for its 100th birthday. Thank goodness, but why on earth would they do this over the winter when we need it most?
Kudos to Greer for tracking this down. And, May, if you're not demoted at the Tribune for dropping this particular lead I may ask my vast readership to start a blogging campaign highlighting your journalist negligence.
Viva fat sweaty men flagellating themselves with oak switches!
See also: Sensory deprivation
Posted at 9:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Chicago
October 19, 2005
One show, daily
I attended a taping of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart today in NYC. Great fun. Actually way more fun than I thought it would be. I guess I just figured it would be a little sterile in a studio setting, but it was actually funnier. For instance, I always assumed that the correpondent reports that are filed from "Baghdad" and "Washington D.C." -- obviously in front of a green screen -- were at least done backstage or something. In fact, the correspondents are mere feet from Stewart on stage and watching his off-camera reaction to their reports is hilarious. Sometimes it felt like he didn't know what they were going to say, though of course it is scripted and flowing past on the telepromters. The staff cracks up constantly too -- and why not? Just great to see how much everyone enjoys the show. There's a bit of a pre-show standup routine by a staffer that was really quite funny and then Stewart comes out to answer some audience questions. One guy asked Stewart how he felt about the fans who purchased the old show set on eBay and are touring around the country. He said he had not heard about it -- which I find very hard to believe. (Thanks for the tickets, Matty!)
Posted at 9:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: I Like
Please standby
Seems the blog's database is corrupt -- which has screwed up rebuilds, feeds, and search. Movable Type recommends upgrading to 3.2 and starting from a fresh db instance. Ugh.
So buckle up. It'll be a bit bumpy around here for a while.
Posted at 8:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Housekeeping
Gridwork
Circa 2:30pm, Oct. 18. Crossing Chicago River eastward on Lake Street.
Posted at 7:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Topic: Chicago
October 18, 2005
Out of steam
Something's up at the Division Street Baths, last of the venerable public steam and sauna houses in the city and one of my favorite wintertime retreats. The door is shuttered, the phone number is disconnected, and there's no notice of any kind about why it is closed. The baths have such a loyal following and checkered past that the complete silence seems very odd.
My pal Greer who is both a bath devotee and a novice gumshoe emailed Jesse Jackson, Jr. -- like his dad, a long-time fan of the baths -- who replied that he had no idea what had happened but that he was not pleased about it. Greer then called Alderman Flores whose office replied that the bath house building is undergoing complete renovation and should reopen in the spring.
But why no notice on the building? Why is the phone number disconnected? Something is not right here. Health code violation? Mafia?
Posted at 1:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Topic: Chicago
October 17, 2005
Me and my three readers disagree
Jakob Nielsen, geek advisor to the corporate masses who think they grok usability, has a column on the usability of weblogs this week. Over the last year or so I've watched Nielsen's always-tenuous grasp of the relationship of style to user experience slowly give way to a highly corporatized version of what constitutes good web design. In the current column he advises all kinds of wacky stuff but the one piece that clinches his inability to grasp what is truly happening in the blogosphere (yes, Jakob, I know you hate that word) is that he actually advises personal bloggers to stay on-topic or else risk appealing to the "low-value demographic" who actually read for diversity rather than singularity of topic. On-topic for a personal blog? Isn't that the opposite of writing about and for yourself?
If you have the urge to speak out on, say, both American foreign policy and the business strategy of Internet telephony, establish two blogs. You can always interlink them when appropriate.
Oh, really? A separate blog each time I plan on changing topics?
Good god this man does not get it.
Posted at 10:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Topic: Web
When the original just won't do
So what happens when you find out that an album you downloaded illegally because you were so anxious to have it that you broke a longstanding pledge not to deal with sketchy P2P networks and with every intent of actually buying the album when it was released -- hang on, let me catch my breath -- OK, so what happens when you do buy the album legally and you find out that five of the tracks on the album are fake, or maybe not fake but certainly not from this album if they are in fact by the same artist at all and that you in fact like those tracks better than the legitimate tracks (of the same name!) on the officially released album? What happens then, I ask!? You're in a real pickle, I'll tell you.
You know by now that I really love the new Boards of Canada album. 10 of the 15 tracks I had downloaded are identical, so it is safe to say that 66% of it my initial reaction is unqualified. But the other five tracks -- they are so typically Boards of Canada and fit in so well musically that I am almost incapable of admitting what is obvious. Someone -- maybe BoC themselves -- released a bogus copy of the album on filesharing networks. Yet, two-thirds of the tracks were legit. And the non-legit ones might as well have been from the same band they are so musically identical.
There's raging debate over whether these tracks are from another band or from early BoC -- and in fact there appear to be different bogus albums out there -- but the point is that I fell in love with an album that was musically holistic, but which I now know to be not what the artists' intended. But, truly, the "fake" tracks make a better album.
This is like falling in love with the cover of a song before ever knowing the original and not liking the original when you finally hear it.
Bad John, bad. Filesharing bad!
Posted at 1:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Music
Older blog entries
Talk about age discrimination. Older posts are the bane of blogs because (1) they virtually become invisible when they move off the home page and (2) they are the targets of almost all comment and trackback spam. And yet, and yet, we love them. We need to link back to them and bring them into more current discussions.
So, I appeal to you, blog readers, to help me with something that should be simple. I want to create an "Older Entries" link at the bottom of the home page that takes you back a few weeks sequentially so that you can continue reading after the cutoff point for posts on the main page. On these pages you could conceivably go "forward" again in time. I've seen this functionality on various blogs but I'm not sure how to do it in Movable Type. Gotta be a simple tag, archive template, or plugin, no?
Posted at 10:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Topic: Housekeeping
October 16, 2005
Escher streetscape
Last year I wrote about running to the lake just ahead of the street-by-street drawbridge openings. I thought it'd be a fun thing to do with kids so yesterday we did the reverse. Being fall, the boats were all coming back in for winter docking and we were poised at 9AM at the Lake Shore Drive bridge. Up it went and in they came as we raced the stroller against the boats to the next bridge westward. That one -- Columbus Ave., the largest movable bridge on the river system -- was fun since you can actually stand on the shore path underneath as it heaves upwards. You'd probably not be surprised by how much crud comes raining down when you are standing right next to the base of the bridge fulcrum, though I'd wager you wouldn't think of it until the last second. We had to huddle underneath the double-stroller's sunshade to hide from the pummelling of street detritus: dirt, pebbles, cigarette butts, and other things probably left best unconsidered.
Only 18 boats at a time can be let up the river because of limited idling space between the bridges in the loop. That makes for a hectic season for the CDOT. Still, there's nothing quite as cool as the sight of three consecutive bridges going up -- except maybe watching the mix of horror and exhiliration on the face of a four-year-old who thinks the roadway is going to topple straight over on him.
Disruption to traffic? Of course! But well-heeled yacht-owners have rights too and since the the Chicago River is a federal waterway Da Mayor ain't got no say.
Posted at 6:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Chicago
October 13, 2005
iPod concerns
Dear Apple, I have some questions for you.
First, did you just break every gadgety add-on ever created for the iPod by removing the extended headphone port at the top? I'm not sure who you've pissed off more, your customers or companies like Belkin and Griffin. (Update: if that doesn't irk 'em, this will.)
Also, what the !@$%&? happened to the 80GB iPod? We know you bought the big hard drives from Toshiba. What are you using them for?
Lastly, so you're giving us rights-managed video and disallowing us from burning to CD/DVD? Must we submit a urine sample too?
C'mon, give me some love here! Please. I want to give you more of my money, but you are not making it easy.
Your friend,
John
PS - Front Row only for new iMacs? You think we PowerMac owners didn't need this about two years ago?
Posted at 8:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Science/Tech
October 12, 2005
Roar in the Gobi
China launched its second manned spaceflight today. The Shenzhou VI capsule carried two astroanauts (taikonaut is the word used previously, though I'm not seeing it employed this time around) and much-improved living quarters into orbit a few hours ago for a 5-7 day trip around the Earth. A module attached to the capsule itself will be left in space, presumably as some kind of remote-controlled lab, but details are vague. Vagueness is typical of the Chinese space program, but my colleagues in Beijing confirm that the launch itself was a big news event, broadcast live on state TV. That's progress. The first launch -- like the first Soviet launches so long ago -- was kept a secret until the capsule was safely in orbit.
A light snow was falling at liftoff, reports say. I'd like to see a picture of that. There's something about a light blanketting of snow preceding the cataclysm of a rocket launch that's pleasantly odd, almost like a Photoshopped image.
One wonders if this launch was actually delayed since last week the People's Republic celebrated National Day and a launch event, source of such national pride, would have made sense then. If it was delayed this is a good sign that China has their launch priorities in line. Perhaps they've learned from the close-calls the early Soviet space program had in trying to launch in conjunction with politically-significant events.
The long march to the moon continues.
Posted at 7:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Space
October 10, 2005
Lunar threepeat
Tom Hanks has a thing about the Apollo program. I suppose you could say I do too. I've been interested in NASA and spaceflight since I was young, but what really what set me on my current path of obsession was the Hanks-produced and -introduced HBO mini-series From The Earth To The Moon from 1998. It was extraordinary television, dramatic and intelligent. Only after that did I dive into Apollo 13 in earnest. It was one of the first DVD's I ever owned and it still is the benchmark with which I test new AV gear at home. (Pay attention to the surround sound field as the camera pans along the fuel pipes just before liftoff.) I treated Apollo 13 as a kind of alternate chapter to From The Earth To The Moon, even though the film preceded the mini-series by three years.
So, Hanks is back at it with Magnificent Desolation: Walking on the Moon 3D, an IMAX 3D short film. Like most IMAX it is a temporary fun, not exactly satisfying after the fact. Add in the 3D glasses -- something I have not worn since Jaws 3D in the 1980's I'm pretty sure -- and you have enough gimmicks to truly stack the deck against the show. You really can't tell the story of Apollo in 55 minutes and you certainly don't have elbow room for narrative arcs so what Magnificent Desolation aims for is merely to make you feel like you are walking on the moon. This it achieves. My four-year-old was reaching out to grab the moondust that was kicked out into the audience via 3D. The best effect was the now-typical pan way out (ala Titanic) from the lander to a very broad shot of just how alone the astronauts actually were, not a shot that any Apollo-era photo could ever provide. The only aspect of drama in the whole thing was a play off this loneliness where they enacted an emergency scenario, thankfully never used in six moon landings, where the astronauts were stranded after a rover malfunction kilometers from the lander. One of the astronaut's oxygen was low and they had to hoof it back to home so they buddy-breathed their way back to spacecraft. It was very well done, but the whole time I was thinking that when we do go back to the moon (and by "we" I guess I mean the Chinese) it will be a hell of a lot easier to fake a moon landing than Capricorn One. We won't even need O.J. Simpson.
In the end it was satisfying, but only in the way that an amusement park ride is. Cheap thrill, go home, forget about it -- except to blog it. The show interspersed a bunch of actual footage of the landings, but because of the resolution difference -- 1960's-era film versus six stories of IMAX screen -- meant that the footage was shown picture-in-picture as a small overlay. This will be the fate of so much pre-HD footage in the future, jarring you out of the experience merely because the effect is so low-res.
Magnifcent Desolation had a bit of an agenda too. They interviewed kids to see what they knew, mostly focusing on what they didn't, about the Apollo program. One child, a young latina, said she'd love to go to the moon. Her story and her crayon drawing of how she would get there was dramatized at the very end in a future scenario where said child was the commander of an extensive moon base, making ample reference to the fact that humans have not stepped foot on our satellite in over thirty years. It won't change the fact that there is no public will to do this any time soon, but it was powerful nonetheless.
So, I recommend this if you can see it in an IMAX theater. If not, the DVD will underwhelm. Sorta like saying, if you can buy a ride to orbit, do it. Otherwise, wait for the movie.
Posted at 4:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Space
October 9, 2005
The always-ending story
My two-year-old refers to books as "the end". Sing-songy, up-down. "The end." If he wants a book he will point to it and say "the end". Walking down the aisles of a bookstore a few weekends ago was an endless parade of "the end, the end, the end."
In addition to being cute, this is also useful since ending a story -- and being able to say "the end" -- is the best part for him. So you never have to worry if you're not up for reading a longish story. Just quickly proceed to "the end."
However, I'm not sure he'll be as interested in the looping, sometimes endless hypertext fiction as I am.
The end.
Posted at 9:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: The Darnedest Things
October 7, 2005
Reason: none
I have come to believe that the harder a company has to fight for customers the worse they treat those customers. Take cellular providers, a business with a high degree of customer turnover and which faces intense competition from rivals.
So I was screwing around with the data services on my Cingular phone yesterday. I noticed a thing called MobiTV which promised television broadcasts to the phone. Three day free trial. As is typical for non customer-focused initiatives like this, if you do not cancel in three days you will be billed. Oh and of course, unlike signing up, you cannot cancel via the phone. Well the service stunk. The video was jerky and pixellated as you'd expect for a non-3G network.
Great, so how do I cancel? Online, OK. First three tries, server error. When I finally got through I found that I was in fact charged $10 for the free trial. Now I'm not a linguist or an economist, but there's something that seems, well, not free about a $10 charge. Anyway, there was a form to request a refund. Indignation rising -- why the hell should I have to challenge a charge from a free trial? -- I submitted the form, dutifully filling out the "Why are you requesting a refund?" text box. I refrained from using profanity.
That is, until the next screen informed me that my refund request had been denied because I had exceeded the refund limit and that I had to call customer service. Let the cursing begin! Actually I started the call composed, explaining that I thought it not terribly customer-friendly to make us jump through such hoops to cancel. The support representative, clearly a jaded, shrivelled, flourescently-tanned troll of a human being, informed me that I could not request a refund for a charge that had not yet hit my bill. She was, in essence, saying that I had to wait for the next billing cycle -- which would clearly throw me over the three day "free" preiod -- and then call in to ask for a refund. Insanity. I explained the illogic as clearly as I could and then she put me on hold for 15 minutes to run to a supervisor.
Do you know what she told me when she returned? I'm sorry, sir, the reason your refund request was rejected was because you need to select "none" in the "Why are you requesting a refund?" box. What the fuck?! Ah, yes, Cingular: where you only get a refund if you refuse to state why you want one. Makes perfect sense. GRRR!
Is there any cellular service provider that actually puts the customer experience first? No, really. I cannot continue to pay these people money.
Posted at 9:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Notes
October 6, 2005
Happy holidays
Rosh Hashanah, Ramadan, and the Chinese National Day holiday all overlapped this week. Interesting trivia, except that my three main projects -- One Voice (in Israel), Eternal Egypt, and somethin' somethin' going on in China -- are all on hiatus. Wonderful, really.
But why the hell am I still so busy? Answer: all the stuff I never get to because of "real" work. If I had another week then I would really be living the life of leisure, but of course all holidays come to an end.
Posted at 7:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Topic: Work
October 5, 2005
Motorcycle Giger
Interesting figurines of sci-fi movie characters made completely from motorcyle parts. Alien, Predator, Robocop, and Dragonheart. Full size at Flickr.
(Shop near Lincoln and Newport.)
Posted at 9:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Art/Design
October 4, 2005
Brothers in knob-twiddling
Mike and Marcus of Boards of Canada recently gave a great interview to Pitchfork where they revealed that there is an unreleased acoustic version of Music Has The Right To Children and -- after an off-the-record pause to debate the point -- admitted that they are, in fact, brothers. The reason for not publicly admitting it? They wanted to avoid comparisons to Orbital, another fraternal British electronica band -- one that happens to occupy the same stratum of respect that I have for BoC.
So that got me wondering. Is there something about a brotherly relationship that leads to exceptional musical collaboration? Certainly there are many bands composed of family members, but specifically two brothers?
I'm not convinced this isn't coincidence, but perhaps -- perhaps -- this has to do with the bedroom-studio nature of electronic music. That is, like most electronic music neither bands' music requires elaborate studio setups or live recording. It is compact, home-brewed, and easily something that you'd be able to yell "hey, brother, come listen to this!" from the other room. This, as opposed to the rock band evolutionary culture that normally includes rockin' out in a friend's garage or at a party down the block. It's less conducive to experimentation in the home and, maybe, less conducive to collaboration between brothers.
Who knows?
Posted at 6:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | Topic: Music
October 3, 2005
A new word, a product idea, a hygiene request
mel·o·gram·mat·ic adj.
The deliberate, ostentatious use of non-standard grammar online to make it seem like you're hip and casual but also smart enough to know better.
Idea: create Band-Aid type bandages that are pre-printed with arm or leg hairs on them, allowing a more seamless blending with the furrier individual.
Do beard trimmers with the little vacuum attachment actually work?
Posted at 10:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | Topic: Notes
October 1, 2005
Happy birthday, Ascent Stage!
Plink! One year ago today I added a single drop to the ocean of blogs. 255 posts and 397 sidebar links later I 'm still enjoying it. If reading this blog is 1/100th as pleasurable as writing it then maybe the audience will come back for year two.
In honor of this milestone I'm performing a few upgrades which I'll roll out this week.
Thanks for reading, everybody!
Posted at 8:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Topic: Housekeeping
