The Weekly-ish Update

Random tidbits once again:

  • I'm really pleased with the results of my latest slate tile project. Now I'm itching to switch into woodworking mode. I'm super excited about the new episodes of the New Yankee Workshop: Norm is building kitchen cabinets. I plan to eventually build cabinets for the mudroom and perhaps the garage (as practice for the potential "big job" of the actual kitchen). I think I'll go ahead and buy the DVDs.
  • I'm gradually building up my home entertainment system to match the new TV. I've gotten a fancy HDMI-switching receiver and a fairly cool iPod dock thingy. Next on my list is a TiVo HD. Then some surround speakers of some sort (I'm still living in stereo, folks...). And then maybe an Xbox 360, finally. (Still holding out for GTA4 on that one.)
  • On the fitness front, my weight dipped below 200 pounds for the first time in a while yesterday. It's back above today, but we'll assume that's temporary. I'm going to join a climbing gym soon, I think. A great new motivator I have is the Garmin Forerunner 205 I got for Xmas. It's not as sexy as the new 405 everyone is drooling over, but it's pretty darned cool. Of course, now I'm obsessed with tracking the slightest walk / jog / jaunt to the mail box. When The Wife teased me about it I quipped, "Are you kidding? I'm gonna track my trips to the bathroom from now on!"
  • Lots of interesting gossip about former coworkers and new coworkers. That's about all I'll say about that, I suppose.
  • I'm still an Obama cheerleader, though I don't generally like to air my politics on this site. I like the look of things right now.
  • Trent Reznor isn't exactly excited by the results of the Niggy Tardust experiment.
  • TV sucks almighty ass right now. I know there's a writer's strike going, but why aren't networks taking better advantage by replaying some of the good stuff we might have missed previously? Example: AMC's Mad Men? (Ooh! There's an encore starting Jan 21. Nice.) At least I always have books to read.

So yeah... What's new with you?

Momma's (gonna be) a Mac User

My dear mother has made the leap to Apple computing hardware, which I welcome wholeheartedly. Of course, she had to do it whole-hog by getting an iMac and a MacBook, but I can't begrudge her having her toys. Plus she got a discount through her employer, so she was able to get everything nicely upgraded. Now I just need to get down there this weekend and install the wireless router I got her for Xmas...

Then we can figure out that crazy screen sharing action in iChat. That'll be awesome for remote troubleshooting, should it ever be needed.

Hey, how are ya?

Some random crap: My mommy got me a 40" Sony LCD HDTV for Xmas. I was planning to get something in the 46" range later in 2008, but 40" turns out to be plenty big (plus, it's free, yo!). That mother of mine is pretty cool. Even if she does have a thundering herd of Great Danes at her house (including this one and this one, who will make you cry).

---

Did you hear the Lakota have decided to secede from the US? I figure this is roughly equivalent to them going on strike. They're grabbing some attention and might get some sort fo concession from the US government, but in the end it will amount to nothing. Though, Brozo and I think it'd be fun if they started tolling traffic on I-90 and formed an army. How long do you think it would take for them to be labeled "terrorists" if they did that?

---

Did you hear that monkeys are as good at mental mathematics as college kids?

"We had them do math on the fly," Cantlon said.

The task was to mentally add two sets of dots that were briefly flashed on a computer screen. The teams were asked to pick the correct answer from two choices on a different screen.

The humans were not allowed to count or verbalize as they worked, and they were told to answer as quickly as possible. Both monkeys and humans typically answered within 1 second.

And both groups fared about the same.

Great. Just great.

---

Maybe they can help economists decide whether there's going to be a recession or not.

"A lot of the underlying resilience of the U.S. economy seems a bit unappreciated," says Citigroup economist Steven Wieting. "It's not clear that this is so large a burden that we can't muddle through this."

That's the best this guy could come up with? Muddle through?

Je suis jalouse

A few years ago a new development popped up near my own subdivision. It was called Bradburn Village and was part of the latest urban development trend of "New Urbanist" communities. All I knew was that the houses seemed really nice (more than just "little boxes on the hillside") and that residents would have a pub within staggering distance. Some of the more extravagant houses even had carriage house apartments, which is something that catches my eye since we live with my mother-in-law. Alas, the real estate game in Bradburn is too rich for my blood (assuming we would ever be able to sell our current house -- not likely in these economic climes). That doesn't keep me from walking through the neighborhood (there's open space between us and them) or stopping into the aforementioned pub for black & tans with bangers & colcannon. I still like to grab the "for sale" fliers to see what's going for what and pine wistfully when the answers are "perfect" and "too much".

Then I run across this: The lucky bastards have near-weekly keggers! And of course, everyone who lives there loves it. I'd really like to get a peak in their Yahoo! Group for some real scuttlebutt, but I'm guessing I'd be mostly disappointed.

That social interaction would be a double-edged sword for me, though. Part of me wants to live in a "village" where everyone knows everyone else in at least a cursory manner. The other part of me wishes everyone else would leave me the hell alone. Forever. Give me a glass of beer, though and that second part tends to get out of the way. ;)

As it is, I live in a nice neighborhood in my cookie cutter (though mostly well-built) house. Several of my good friends live within a ~5 mile radius. I have nearby open space in which I can make my jogging attempts. I can still take advantage of some of the amenities in Bradburn, too -- I just don't get to stagger home from the pub, so I take it easy and save the staggering for when I get home later.

Mostly I just like to look at the houses anyway.

BTW: Bradburn isn't the only example of "New Urbanism" in my area. We also have Stapleton (at the location of Denver's former airport), Belmar (in near-by Lakewood), Arista (coming soon in even-closer Broomfield) and probably several others. Prospect New Town, in Longmont, was the first one to catch my notice. Too bad it's in Longmont. ;)

Bah! I'll show you "clubby".

I hate the Apple Store. I have from the beginning. I guess some people like it (or did like it), but I'm not one of them. I like to be able to actually buy things in stores without having to enlist a fulltime escort. Nothing frustrated me more than needing a new iPod, walking into the store, seeing a table loaded with iPods packaged for Christmas joy... BEHIND a friggin' rope. I stood there frozen, staring at my just out of my reach goal, thinking "How... Do... I... Buy... One...?" until I got frustrated enough to walk out and buy the iPod online from home.

Conversely, I was fine with the expectation of having to talk to someone when I wanted to buy my iMac. That's a big purchase with options involved. I'm fine talking to someone about that. I shouldn't need to talk to someone to buy an iPod, though. At least not until my credit card is out.

Happy 58th, Tom Waits

I suppose if I had to pick one musical artist to call my favorite, Tom Waits would be it. (Last.fm bears me out, too.) As I remember my childhood, our house was always filled with the music of people like Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, and Townes Van Zandt. These artists are still at the top of my list, but I always remember the similarly frequent times when the Tom Waits records were out. His voice always gave me pause. It was so different, I'd stop and think "What IS this? Why is it so different from everything else? And why do I like it so much?"

And then there was the cover for the Small Change album with its be-pastied stripper... Now THAT was something for my prepubescent mind to ponder!

And that really is the best part about Tom Waits. He makes you think a bit. He tells wonderful stories in his songs. They may be comical, maudlin, tragic or surreal, but they are all wonderful.

Happy birthday, Tom. May you have many more. Thanks for everything so far.

(And thanks to my favorite homebrewer, David, for pointing out the date this morning.)

Track o' the Post: Tango Till They're Sore from Rain Dogs by Tom Waits, because that album was always the most fascinating/baffling to me when I was young.

Ring Of Fire 31: Undisputed

We went to another live Ring of Fire mixed martial arts event at the Broomfield Event Center last night. Here are a few notes:

  • We were part of the posse for the wife of the main event title holder, Eliot "The Fire" Marshall, by way of a friend-of-a-friend relationship. This turned out to be both awesome and stressful. Can't beat the seats.
  • Bossman and I made $1 bets on each bout with the loser picking the next fight. I lost $4-5. :(
  • There were three female fights on this card. They were scrappers, too. I think the "Karate Hottie" should have to change her name since she lost.
  • Most of the fights didn't make it past the first round. One that went the full distance ended up 29-27, 27-29, 28-28. In Colorado, though, the 28-28 judge has to actually pick a winner... Weird.
  • I'm still tickled that Brothers BBQ caters the "VIP" tables. They also do a pork sandwich toss (in which the ring sluts and some Brothers folks literally throw pork sandwiches in paper bags into the audience). Awesome.

So the main event was the main reason we were there. Bossman's wife works with Eliot's wife, so we all turned out to support him. He had looked really good the first time we'd seen him in one of these ROF events, so we weren't too worried event though the competition, Rob "Maximus" MacDonald was definitely a step up for him. The rest of the people in the "Fire" posse were great folks, too, it should be said. It really was a nice night out except for the idea of the nice lady down the row from you, whom you've just met, watching her husband getting beat up in the cage.

Which is unfortunately what happened. When MacDonald came into the cage I noticed that his shorts were branded with the Gym Jones logo. I immediately leaned over to The Wife and Bossman to whisper "Oh shit... Gym Jones is super badass." This proved to be prophetic as MacDonald tied Eliot up at will and slammed him to the mat like a rag doll over and over. After round one, Bossman's wife asked me "What's your take?" to which I arched my brows and said flat out "Really bad for Eliot!" It got to be hard to watch. The dude just seemed so much stronger than Eliot.

The commentary on the Gym Jones site sums it up well:

Rob won (referee stoppage in the second round). He was fierce, and shockingly strong; able to take Marshall down seemingly at will. Eliot showed great class and respect both before and after the fight. It was a privilege to see them do battle.

The fight was stopped in the second as MacDonald had Eliot mounted and was pounding him with a full-bore ground & pound. Eliot's wife didn't react well, needless to say (though it probably wasn't what you're thinking). When I got the chance to talk to him at the Foundry afterwards, Eliot admitted that his head just wasn't in it. I realize that you'll have that in this kind of game, but I do wonder how big of a set-back this will prove. He was the ROF light heavyweight champion and seemingly on his way up to the next level -- and certainly a great guy, but he failed at his first defense of the title... I'm curious what will be next for him.

Gettin' the band back together!

Did you know Dickie and the boys are doing a Mighty Mighty Bosstones reunion thing with a series of shows at the Middle East? The gang is all 40-ish now, but it seems most of them couldn't find anything else they wanted to do.

This video got me a little misty for my BU days. Like the time I saw the Bosstones tear up the CollegeFest shindig at Hynes Convention Center (probably in 1993...?).

Go get 'em boys!

You want I should freeze or get down on the ground?

For the record, my legs have chosen the first option, though the second could be imminent the way things are going. (Also for the record, there's no point to this post. I'm just whining about how hard it is to get in shape after letting myself become a fat bastard. Feel free to ignore or tease as you see fit.) You see, some stupid section of my stupid brain decided my walks weren't good enough and that I should try to jog for as much of it as I can. At this point, I'm walking/jogging a loop that is just under 3 miles and all of my jogged chunks add up to a mile or so. I do this on the weekends only, because the days are so short now that it's pitch dark by the time I get home, and my little loop lives in unlit open space with coyotes and junk running around in it.

You'd think a solid week would give the legs enough time to recover, eh? Not so much. The outsides of my thighs have been cumulatively seizing up, and I've come to the point where I feel like I'm floating a millimeter from full-bore debilitating cramping. I'm not sore, really... I just have this muscle on each leg that in near permaflex and it's throwing me off a bit.

I'm trying to figure out what to do. Last night I dowsed myself with Tiger Balm, but that has no long term effect. I suppose I should chow on some bananas. Maybe take some magnesium & vitamin E.

It's really no big deal, but it is keeping me from improving when I do go for my walk/jog, because my legs have next to nothing to give when I get out there.

Bleh.

Goal Oriented

When I switched my home computing empire from my dying home-built, full tower PC to my new 24-inch slab o' sex iMac everything went pretty smoothly. I managed to transfer all the files I cared about over, and Google Browser Sync made setting up my new copy of Firefox so easy I was kind of left with a "that's it?!" feeling. I left the PC running, but I haven't had to jump on it yet, so I'm about to rip out the hard drives and toss it. The biggest part of the move from my perspective was my iTunes library. Firstly, let me say yes, I use iTunes. I know some ubergeeks who scoff at such an idea, but I don't know what they are trying to do with their digital music that I can't do in iTunes. Most importantly, I figured out some sweet-ass "smart" playlists that made it easy for me to play the sort of thing that suited my mood at any given moment.

Which brings us to the point.

When I copied my iTunes library to the iMac most of the meta-data came over fine. Things like star ratings, comments, and such all came over without a hitch. The only thing that I lost was last played date, play counts, skip counts, and things like that. I can sort of wrap my head around why this is the case -- It's a new player, so nothing has been played (or skipped) on it.

It bums me out, though. Now my fancy "Favorites" playlist which consisted of 5-star tracks that had been played more than X times and skipped fewer than Y times is completely empty. My "Been a Long Time" playlist featuring 4 & 5-star tracks that hadn't been played in past 3 months (but had been played at least once) is empty. My "Unheard" playlist now has 11,000 songs on it -- and that's only because I've listened to at least 1,500 since making the switch.

And that's the rub. I can't leave it be. I NEED to get this music listened to and back into its proper buckets. I am on a hardcore music binge right now. Even if I don't feel like listening to music, I'll put the iPod on shuffle and not put on the headphones. This strikes me as ... compulsive. I just can't abide the current situation, though.

How would you react? Is it my own fault for working out such convoluted playlists? Should I just be content with putting my iPod on shuffle most days? Should I consider this an opportunity to create some new wacky playlists (already there, honestly).

---

Track o' the Post: Rehab from what will probably turn out to be Amy Winehouse's last album, Back to Black, which is still totally worth having, even if girlfriend is a batshit crazy junkie.

Martian Colors

I've been intrigued by synesthesia since I read The Man Who Tasted Shapes sometime in the second half of the 90s. It seems so bizarrely wonderful: numbers might have colors, musical notes might also have distinct hues - or perhaps shapes... It's just freaky to imagine, and more significantly, it illustrates how seemingly arbitrary the brain's powers can be.Now Kottke points us to this post, which in turn quotes a Scientific American article about a wonderful phenomenon:

We also observed one case in which we believe cross activation enables a colorblind synesthete to see numbers tinged with hues he otherwise cannot perceive; charmingly, he refers to these as “Martian colors.� Although his retinal color receptors cannot process certain wavelengths, we suggest that his brain color area is working just fine and being cross-activated when he sees numbers…

Martian colors! That rules.

Is it wrong to be jealous of an "abnormality"?

---

Track o' the Post: Bright As Yellow from Glow by The Innocence Mission, because I'm a little girl sometimes.

Lexicographic Smackdown

Having spend a number of years in/around Boston, I can testify that it becomes increasingly believable that the Irish may have invented the world. Perhaps this tendency isn't only a Beantown phenomenon, as illustrated by this NYTimes article about tracing a large portion of the modern slang dictionary to the Irish Gaelic tongue. The book, for which the article is basically an advertisement, is actually called How the Irish Invented Slang.

Like I said, though, it's kind of easy to fall for these types of hypotheses (for whatever reason). Luckily, the intarwebs are full of differing opinions on just about any subject you could imagine. In this case, the counterpoint is solid:

In January 2005, I challenged Cassidy to present all of his evidence. I told him that I’m the descendant of three strains of Irish, four strains of empiricist, and the son of a bluster-catcher, and I said he was going to have to do better than trot out the same-old “they’re all against me!� argument of every perpetual motion inventor.

To date, what he’s provided as evidence is flimsy and fouled by scholarly incompetence.

Just fair warning, if you're at all like me and tend to fall for the various romantic myths of the various Celtic peoples. Besides, everyone knows the Scots invented everything! ;^)

Here's tae us Wha's like us Damn few, And they're a' deid Mair's the pity!

---

Track o' the Post: Erin Go Bragh from Dick Gaughan's Handful of Earth. (Dick Gaughan, it's worth noting, is a Scot and something of an internet geek. Nice!)

Ron Paul's New Pile of Money

Ron Paul isn't Rudy Gulliani or Mitt Romney, which - although both good things in my view - keeps him out of the limelight in most of the coverage of the race for the Republican nomination for the 2008 presidential election. I'm no fan of Republicans in general (especially the Neo-Con breed that seems so hell-bent on robbing the nation of its civil liberties), but Ron Paul is at least interesting. He's more like a libertarian in Republican clothing (which some would argue is what Republicans were supposed to be). Anyway, he's got fair amount of grass-roots support, and he's been keeping himself on the fringes of the Republican primary radar.

Now, a bunch of those grass-roots supporters have organized this fund raising drive, with pretty astonishing results so far. The stated goal was $10 million for the day, and I definitely doubt they will get close to that. They have however crossed the $2 million mark as I type this.

Awesome.

To be clear: I am in no way endorsing Ron Paul. I don't agree with several of his more passionate stances. I only think he's the most interesting thing going right now as far as politics goes. Did you hear Obama was on SNL? And Hillary might have a really hot girlfriend? See what I mean? Wait... That last one could actually be pretty cool, if it's enough to make Hillary go away. ;)

Download NiggyTardust

May I humbly recommend that you point your web browsing application on over to Saul William's new album The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust!, which was produced by Trent Reznor (Mister Nine Inch Nails to you) and is available as either a free download in 192Kbps MP3 format or a $5 download that lets you pick between the 192, 320Kbps MP3, or lossless FLAC formats. Now, if you ask me, $5 is just about the perfect price for an audio experience such as this. That's pretty much what I paid for the new Radiohead thing, too. It's even more pleasant when I know the money actually going to the artist.

And not only do you get to feel good about "sticking it to the man" by circumventing the record companies, you'll also get what I consider a rather enjoyable album. (Added bonus: Somehow the MP3s have lyrics/blurbs that show up on the iPod. This is magic to me.)

Back on the Mac

So after successfully waiting for the release of Leopard (the latest version of OS X), I ran out the other day and plopped down my rewards-earning MasterCard to purchase a 24" glass and brushed aluminum sculpture known as the iMac. It's the 2.8GHz CPU with 2GB of RAM, and the 500GB hard drive, and it's the tits. I even dig on Apple's new waffer thin keyboard, somewhat to my surprise.

As I type this, I'm in the middle of the 2+ day operation of shifting my ~145GB iTunes library around on my decrepit PC in preparation for the big copy to the iMac. This is what I get for not opting for the default storage location. (I'm actually not sure all this is even necessary, but I'm doing it anyway.)

Once I do that and decide whether or not I can live without Quicken (I only use it for bill scheduling and the forward-looking calendar/bar chart widget -- There's nothing online that offers that feature. For anything else, Mint and the online banking offered by my bank does the job.), I'll be able to format the drives on my PC and burn the thing. Or research whether there's a convenient drop-off for computer/computer component recycling, I guess...

This is a homecoming for me, as I was a Mac user back in my college days. Having been convinced that computers were evil by my Pascal programming classes, I opted for a PowerBook Duo - one of the coolest units to come out of the House of Jobs in the 90s. After that, I switched to a Gateway PC almost completely based on price. Then I was always using PCs for work (as I, ironically, moved into my career as a web "programmer"), so I always stuck with PCs at home, too. The advent of OS X was a big deal to me, and I'm been lusting for a new generation Mac since then.

I've always kept The Wife running on Apple hardware, though. She finished her Masters degree with a G3 iBook and got upgraded to a Mac Mini not too long ago. (Her brother is rocking a Mini these days, too.) The iBook is still limping along as our living room computer.

Since the beginning of this year, I've been lucky enough to work on a Mac Pro five days a week, so the transition back to a dying PC at home was hurting me more and more. All this adds up to me spending a chunk of change for a big white box that was heavy enough to wind me by the time I lugged from the Apple store to my car outside the mall.

I'm almost free!