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!)
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.
Gridwork
Circa 2:30pm, Oct. 18. Crossing Chicago River eastward on Lake Street.
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?
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.
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!
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?
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.
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?
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.
Mission Elapsed Time: 20:00:21:06:42:40
Recently this blog (and my Flickr account) turned 20 years old, forever in Internet years. I went back through it all, retracing digital footprints made on what feels like a different planet. Here are some highlights.
The Terror Tourist
A roughly monthly exploration of places in horror fiction — real or imagined, geographical or psychological — culled from The Heavy Leather Horror Show.
Subscribe to the podcast or the email newsletter or just read through the archives posted here.
The Ampcamper
How I hauled myself, two teens, an 80 lb dog, and a whole load of crap 4000+ miles across six states in twenty days using an electric vehicle. And survived to tell the tale.
