Leapt
Today we humans confront the arbitrariness of our method of telling time. It is Leap Day.
It is also my little brother’s birthday. He celebrates his seventh real birthday today, roughly twenty-eight revolutions around the sun.
Here he is in a similarly celebratory mood from a while back. Happy Birthday, Joey.
Lastly, it is Friday and that means cocktails. I’m tending bar for Friday Drink Links over at Coudal’s Fresh Signals. Cheers.
Shattered lakefront
A fractured floe along the shore of Northerly Island in Chicago. Obviously the scene of much upheaval, but it was completely still the whole time I was there. My son asked if the waves themselves just froze in place.
Does anyone know what process causes this? Is the west coast of Lake Michigan where Mother Nature tries to sweep the shards of winter under the rug?
Ninja
Yesterday morning I killed a man ninja-style for leaving poop on my property.
6:30AM. It is freezing outside with a windchill 20 degrees below zero. Rain had pooled everywhere and then froze on Tuesday afternoon into deadly flat, black ice. Then Tuesday night it snowed very lightly, just a sprinkling, enough to veil any distinction between ice and safe ground.
I was bundling up tighter than I ever have to go for a run. I was clad entirely in black, head to toe, only my eyes showing. I was a ninja. I had real ultimate power.
Preparing in my foyer I peered out to see a fellow walking his dog on the sidewalk. He was in shorts and slippers, clearly just out of bed. OK, fine. His hypothermia, not mine. Then his dog shat on my lawn. I waited for the guy to pick up his doggy doo-doo (as the city ordinance requires) but he did not. Perhaps he was too cold to think, wearing shorts when it was 3° out, this genius among men. Whatever the reason, he trotted off.
Photo by Dunechaser
So I emerged from the house, silently, as ninjas do. I caught his attention, pointed wordlessly to the crap on the snow in my lawn — and clearly scared the hell out of the guy simply by staring at him, as ninjas do.
This is where the exact sequence of events gets blurry for, as you probably know, ninjas move with such speed and dexterity that they can hardly be caught on film or remembered. I believe I performed a double backflip off my porch and smote the shorts-wearing poop-leaver dead in his tracks. (See image above.) Or, equally possible, he may have just slipped on the black ice at that moment and hurt himself quite badly.*
Either way he was taught a valuable lesson: ninjas dislike fecal vandalism.
* My son later noted, “Dad, you’re not a ninja. Of course he slipped. He was wearing slippers.”
Space opera
Lots of things happening heavenward today.
An astronaut whose mother was killed by a train while he was on the International Space Station for 120 days will return to Earth on the Shuttle.
The US Navy will attempt to hit a satellite moving at 22,783 MPH with a warhead-less missile launched from a ship in the Pacific. (Note to military: ever considered a self-destruct button on our spy sats? Or just telling the world we’re testing a new weapons plaftorm? That would work too.)
A total lunar eclipse will occur at 10:01 PM ET tonight.
A shape that resembles music
For the few of you who saw the 1998 electronica documentary Modulations* and the fewer of you who remember Autechre’s brief, perplexing interview, you may be surprised to learn that they can be remarkably insightful. Or at least the Rob Brown half of the duo was in a recent interview with Pitchfork.
Pitchfork: Do you ever feel limited by technology? Where you have ideas or songs that you’re imagining or certain arrangements that, because of the tools you have, can’t be realized?
Rob Brown: … The gear can guide you — you can choose one bit of gear and it’s obviously got its restrictions and its limitations, but at the same time, you’ve got to exploit what it’s capable of and what it’s best used for. Sometimes you try not to be too overly analytical, trying to let it flow for a bit first and see where it’s leading you and then see what sticks to it, see what it implies. A lot of it is implications. Some of our earlier albums, like Confield, are almost all implied music. But it’s cohesive because we spent long enough fashioning the idea down — to a shape, if you like — that actually resembles music.
Implied music, wow. And he’s not talking John Gage-y silence-type conceptual music. That idea — of a music that peripherally or fragmentedly suggests the music that informed it — really does make Autechre’s “difficult period” (Confield, Draft 7.30, Untilted) click for me. Go back and have a listen. But first read the whole interview. Oh and also, pick up the new one Quaristice. It’s a new direction that, well, implies older directions. Really digging it.
* Easily one of my top three favorite movie posters of all time.
Danger! Animated GIF from the early web!
Heed little Sisyphus shoveling the mound that never gets any smaller.
Ascent Stage is being upgraded. I’m bound to screw something up. Gloriously.
(If you need something to do in the meanwhile flip through Stick Figures in Peril at Flickr. Always good for a laugh.)
Snapshot of a summer day
Looks like Google Maps just did a refresh of Street View. Chicago proper has been available for a while, but they’ve just added most of my neighborhood, Roscoe Village. The shots were clearly taken on a beautiful day this summer. A little gift as we hunker down for even more winter weather. I haven’t seen the sidewalk through the snow in weeks.
Let’s start at the west end of my street where the Four Treys Tavern announces “Hey This Is a Party Block” to entrants (also the scene of the flaming garbage truck). Apparently the Four Treys has been on this spot since 1887. It’s a bit out of whack with the style of other bars in the area, a throw-back to earlier incarnations of the neighborhood. Part biker bar, part karaoke bar, part never-really-left-the-1970’s bar. Why the “Four Treys”, you ask? Location: 3333 N. Damen. (Took me, oh, two years to figure that out.)
Proceeding eastward down Henderson you encounter a typical streetscape of mostly single-family homes, part of the urban grid of 25′ x 125′ lots. My neighborhood restricts height to three stories except in a very few special cases. Basically no one towers over anyone else, sunlight is equitably distributed (or, more accurately, equitably not distributed) and the scale of the street stays mostly in line with the tops of the trees. It’s a charming block, a mixture of homes, a condo building or two, and renters. Jane Jacobs would be proud.
Interestingly, it is possible to date this panorama almost exactly without leaving the block. This is first because of the presence of MySweetRide on the south side of Henderson. (A dark blue/gray Honda Accord. Who can spot her?) Using my car’s Twitter archive I see that she was parked in this exact spot on Sunday, July 1 and then again on Monday, August 27. My first thought was that it had to be July 1 because of the number of American flags hung out in from of houses and the fact there are so many cars on the street (i.e., not a work day).
But the proof is at the other end of the block. Two flimsy roadblocks lean against the last house on the north side of the street. These barricades were loaned from the alderman for our annual block party, held on Sunday, August 26. (Other evidence confirms that the GoogleMobile was in town in late August.)
It’s kinda fun sleuthing about various lifestream data points on the web like this. In all I consulted Street View, Twitter, Weather Underground, Google Calendar, and my own blog and del.icio.us archives to figure out merely when a photo was taken. (I could have told you what music I was listening to when this shot was taken, but it was not, in itself, relevant to the problem at hand.) It’d be great to have some kind of meta-aggregator for the data-wake one leaves moving through time.
But mostly the new view is just a comforting reminder of a lazy summer afternoon. I suspect I will be returning to it for the smile it brings a few more times this winter.
——–
A couple of notes on Street View itself:
Never noticed this before, but there isn’t a single readable license plate I can find. I think Google has deliberately blurred every one of them. Amazing.
Would be great if you could link to specific orientation of the panorama like you can to a specific address.
How soon until you can annotate Street View like you can the maps themselves?
Good Apple, bad Apple
Lots of Apple news since Macworld in January. Figured I’d weigh in for those of you who look exclusively to me for technology guidance. (Tip: bad idea.)
In a very un-Apple-like move they provided significant software-based functionality upgrades to two existing products — the iPhone and the Apple TV — at no cost to owners. Now, I know that iPod touch owners bitched about having to pay $20 to make their units phone-less iPhones, but I have no sympathy for that. If you really wanted the extra functionality when you bought the touch you should have just bought an iPhone.
The new location-awareness functionality on the iPhone is jaw-dropping, not only in its accuracy but in the fact that it was software-only (no GPS) and cleverly uses cell tower and WIFI triangulation to figure out your location. It is like getting a whole new device for free. LOVE it.
But … where oh where is the iPhone SDK? I think pretty much everyone is tired of web-based apps that try to do things that a native, Cocoa app was clearly meant to. C’mon, Apple!
Today the Apple TV upgrade rolled out. Pretty much what Jobs announced — HD video, redesigned interface, rentals — but there is one feature no one talked about and it, too, is like getting a new device. The Apple TV now acts exactly like an Airport Express, showing up in network-connected iTunes in your home as just another set of speakers. Not only that, but the connection is two-way (unlike the Airport Express). That is, changes you make at the Apple TV by remote flow back to iTunes. Superb! Now my Airport Express is superfluous. Might have to stow that in my travel bag for hotel room rocking-out. (PVRblog has great coverage of the new stuff.)
But … the movie rentals. Apple, thank you for high-def, thank you for 5.1 audio, but what the hell were you thinking limiting movie playback to a 24 hour period? Do none of you have children? Have none of you travelled overseas before? I rarely watch a movie in a single 24 hour period. That’s just asinine. Please tell me this is just more movie studio idiocy (like DRM) and that you didn’t actually think this was a good idea.
Leopard: QuickLook may be the best thing in OSX in the last three major revs. Seriously. Has changed the way I work. Time Machine, well the jury is still out. I’ve not needed it (he says as his hard drive armature plows a furrow into the disk platter.)
But … Spaces? Useless to me. And if I initiate it one more time by dragging a window to the screen edge accidentally I am going to scream. Stacks? Totally useless. If someone can show me how this is any way more usable than a flat depiction of filesystem hierarchy I would be willing to buy you a tasty beverage.
MacBook Air: sexy, awesome. Love the lack of CD/DVD drive.
But … would this really last five minutes in a house with mischievous children? No, it would not.
And lastly, where praytell are the new MacBook Pros? Gotta have some of that Air multitouch trackpad goodness!
Aural decoration or, further adventures in filtering one’s music library
Last Saturday was our school fundraiser, an elaborate auction/party. One of those things you just don’t think as being a big deal until you have children in school. The amount of planning required is only slightly less ridiculous than the amount of money raised.
Last year when planning began I was appointed in absentia to be the “entertainment chair”, meaning the music guy. Naturally I envisioned myself on the decks slamming beats late into the night. But no, that wouldn’t do. Couldn’t really, as the focus needed to be on getting people to make outrageous bids for items, not crowded on a dance floor.
So I hired a band. Working with them put me right back in high school when playing keyboard in a band was pretty much the most important thing I had going. (You might remember such acts as The Jerks, Big Green Milk Truck, The Young Republicans, and Relativity. Wow, now there’s a blog post that needs writing.) I had to resist every urge not to rent a smoke machine, ’cause, I mean, who can rock out without a smoke machine?
Anyway. There was also the issue of “interlude” music, what to play from my iPod during times the band was not on. Easily the most challenging playlist I’ve ever put together. What exactly is the mood that you want to set at an auction? Classical, too stuffy. Country, wrong demographic. Classic rock, too retro. Jazz, maybe, but either you like it or you don’t. It was so much more difficult than I imagined. I needed an angle.
The city of Chicago helped me out. Apparently our local airports will soon play only music from bands from Chicago. They’re covering all the genres, but leaving out really upbeat stuff. No Pumpkins or Ministry, probably no R. Kelly. The reasoning is that people are already on edge at an airport and don’t need 160 BPM to push them off the cliff — a similar problem to my own, in a way.
So I sliced my music library by Chicago-based bands. There’s no tag for this, of course, so it was all manual. Last.fm’s tags helped out immensely — but wouldn’t it be cool if Last.fm could actually add biographical data to MP3 headers? I added “chicago” to the grouping tag for all this music and put together a smart playlist to segregate it.
Andrew Bird
Califone
Chicago Underground Trio
Exploding Star Orchestra
Kanye West
Ministry
R Kelly
Sir Georg Solti and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Smashing Pumpkins
Styx (huh?)
Sufjan Stevens (honorary, only for Illinois)
Tortoise
Wilco
OK, fine, but that includes everything from Sir Georg Solti to Alain Jourgensen, neither appropriate. So, using Tangerine I generated a new playlist of Chicago-related band tracks between 100 and 145 beats-per-minute with medium intensity.
Lastly, I removed stuff that would, you know, upset those of fragile sensibility. Like, say Ministry’s Stigmata: “School families, silent auction table three closes in — cutting my face and walking on splinters, I lost my soul to the look in your eyes!!! — whoops, sorry. Next track.”
So what did I end up with? 239 tracks became 59, far more music than I needed. Full track list after the jump.
The method was dorky, both horribly imprecise and overly complex, and unknown to anyone that night. Yep, just right.
Next year: embedded subliminal messages. Bid more, you will bid more now!
Austin calling
Not sure if it is the winter weather that gets to me or what, but even when I say I am going to travel less this year I can’t avoid the gravitational pull of South by Southwest.
This year I’m not a panelist or a panel organizer — and that’s just fine by me. More time to wade through the ever-growing lineup of panels. (Note to infoviz geeks: some kind of topic-based link-node visualization of the panels would be mighty helpful for charting a path through it all.)
Looking forward to hanging out with old friends and those of you I only ever see at this conference.
For the morbidly curious, this year I think I’m skipping the Nuclear Tacos. As you know, those bad boys did unspeakable things to my insides. Perhaps this year the tale can be told.
See you in Austin!
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.
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