jolomo

2009-12-10T16:46:00.000-05:00

It was the night before Christmas

Here's a fun treat. In 1927 James Thurber wrote a hilarious version of "The Night Before Christmas" in the style of Ernest Hemmingway. Here's the beginning:

It was the night before Christmas. The house was very quiet. No creatures were stirring in the house. There weren't even any mice stirring. The stockings had been hung carefully by the chimney. The children hoped that Saint Nicholas would come and fill them.

The children were in their beds. Their beds were in the room next to ours. Mamma and I were in our beds. Mamma wore a kerchief. I had my cap on. I could hear the children moving. We didn't move. We wanted the children to think we were asleep.

Check it out, it's pretty funny

2009-07-09T16:29:00.002-04:00

No Depression archives online!!

OMG, can't believe they did it! My favorite music magazine in the last 20 years has put (as far as I can tell) every article, review and interview online. Start here: http://archives.nodepression.com

Hundreds of good articles, but here's the review where I found out about Blue Mountain (1994), Mike Ireland (1998), Jim Lauderdale (1998) plus many more. Just browse the interviews for dozens of treats. I think I have all of them in hardcopy form, but this is a lot handier.

2009-07-05T18:49:00.003-04:00

Darrell Schweitzer's

Five Theories of Book-Buying

The Fisherman's Theory of Book-Buying: You will never regret the book you bought, but you will always regret the one that got away.

The National Debt Theory of Book-Buying: You will never have read all the books you own, but any given book will be read eventually.

The Chemist's Theory of Book-Buying: Books obey the laws of gases: they expand to fill all available space.

The Gardener's Theory of Book-Buying: No matter how much you weed a book collection, it will always grow back.

The Pharaonic Theory of Book-Buying: Build a pyramid and read them all in the afterlife.

This was from the December 2006 issue of NYRSF

I've been culling and culling the books for five years now and while it's getting more manageable and more narrowly focused, there's still a lot of cruft floating around :)

A third or so is on Librarything

2008-11-24T17:33:00.002-05:00

Funniest thing I've read today (OK, I'm running behind) was this post from the fine folks at the Wren's Nest which includes two pretty interesting phone calls

BTW, anybody know how to get pingback or something like it working on blogger.com? I'm confused!

2008-10-17T15:20:00.002-04:00

Trader Vics

James Lileks scrounged up an old Trader Vics matchbook and put it in his museum. Great that the fonts and drawings were the same way back when. I'm glad Atlanta's Trader Vic's is still open downtown in the Hilton.

Too cool

Here's the link:

Matchbook Museum

2007-02-10T02:00:00.000-05:00

Why Wikipedia Wins

I've noticed all sorts of articles, blogs, radio and TV shows etc, using Wikipedia as a source especially in the last year. Often times it's used with tongue slightly in-cheek -- ie. can you believe this? -- but the trend is only going to become more pronounced. Why? As long as an article idea doesn't instantly offend other contributers either because of spam/commercial concerns, obscurity or axe-grinding you can create it. Thus any reporter looking for information on any subject may end up there first since "Google is just a frontend to Wikipedia".

If you've written something remotely interesting it will be adopted by other editors, expanded and made into great little bundles of knowledge. I can't begin to list the number of articles that I've started with just the notion that "there should be an article about this" and created a short stub and look back a year or three later to see a great entry. It's like magic.

Of course, you can't get out of responsibility entirely, you have to check your watchlists to fix vandalism and creeping idiocracy. But we're definitely creating the Hitchhiker's Guide to Life, the Universe and Everything. You'll get frustrated over certain aspects: perhaps the clutter (and nagging) of "needs citation" or some religious war of formatting or a nuance of phrasing but in general these arguments are settled in a reasonable manner.

In all of human history, there has never been a better source for fun learning! (It's my blog so I don't have to cite a source! Hah!)

2007-02-08T22:02:00.000-05:00

I haven't blogged for a while so here's a diary entry:

On Highland Ave just west of Elizabeth where everything's getting built on the north side, they had carefully scrubbed down the facade of the old Grinnell Sprinkler building (they waterproofed many buildings back in the day but not the Winecoff!) but this morning when I drove by the whole thing was being torn down. Oh well, at the least the building next door is being saved for a restaurant.

For lunch we tried a new place (for us), Papi's Eastern Cuban at Myrtle and Ponce. Their pork special was awesome, more like street food than Las Palmeros on 5th. Not sure if that's an east-west thing :)

Tonight, scheduled to meet the wife downtown so I walked to the train station. Noticed all the fences had been taken down along those goofy Inman Station condos: the brick columns are still there but all metal and wood fences are gone. No game at Philips but there was still a decent crowd at CNN Center. Noticed Rimini's Pizza finally closed, that's about the only truly wretched pizza I've ever had... gahhh. McCormick & Schmick's had a good crowd going.

Walked over to Centennial Tower (their accent lights at the top are looking fine), to check out the media opening for Thrive on the first floor. It was a nice space but severely packed. It will be interesting to see how they do in the future but they have a good staff to start. We wanted something more substantial for dinner and headed over to sidebar a place I've really missed since leaving downtown for midtown. I'll have to make point of getting down there more often. Good crowd there too.... and.... and the spot on the corner (formerly Icon, formerly (crap I can't remember)) is a new location of Slice from Castleberry. They didn't change the decor at all from Icon and it had a better crowd than the previous occupants usually got. Bravo! For some reason, I seem to remember there was supposed to be a new Slice over off Edgewood, but I cannot find no corroboration. Signing off. Peace, baby

2006-12-01T18:24:00.000-05:00

How 'bout the Tidy Bowl?

At least that would be funny! I was looking over the list of NCAA bowl games for this year and it's nice to see familiar names like Sugar, Rose and Orange but man the sponsorship names are getting lame!

The Papajohns.com Bowl... ah, catchy. How about GMAC Bowl? Gheh. The MPC Computer Bowl has the double-whammy of sounding stupid and being tech-related.

But my pick for stupidest sounding name is
http://www.meinekecarcarebowl.com/
in beautiful Charlotte, North Carolina. Geez

2006-11-30T19:43:00.000-05:00

Take the A Train

This cool website lets you put together a list of all the various mass transit systems you've ridden on. I'm ticked now that I didn't make a point of riding in every city I've visited. I kind of made up for it in cities that have two different systems.... seems you always have to transfer when there's two :)

Do yours at b3co.com

Thanks for the link, Joe!

2006-06-10T01:02:00.000-04:00

A Real Butcher
I think they finally went out of business but last year I was able to get an old 1910s-era Corona typewriter repaired in Decatur and they did a fantastic job. It was awesome that I caught them in time, but I wonder about a bunch of older-fashioned-type businesses that have been hurting the last 30 years or so. Lately with a new grill I've been severely dissatisfied with grocery meat: Whole Foods, Publix and Kroger are all hit or miss. So, I returned to an old Decatur Square stalwart that had to move to Emory Village a few years back: Shields. You pick your cut, you pick the thickness, you pick the size of some delicious aged beef plus they make their own sausages and meatloafs. Yeah, it's about 40% more expensive but damn good and, while it's four miles away, it's probably the only real butcher within 30 miles of the house.

2006-06-08T23:30:00.000-04:00

Suburbia Extinctia?
An article by Seth Brown from two years ago had some interesting points about the high-tech industry, outsourcing and suburbia. He posits that places like Tyson's Corner and Alpharetta could quickly become Flint, Michigan. I.E. places where there's nothing to do since what was there happened to leave. I hear from people hiring in places like that who can't find folks who want to deal with the drive and avoid the gig -- no matter how cool it might be.

To me this doesn't seem to be related to the death of suburbia but what do I know?

2006-06-08T01:10:00.000-04:00

ROBOTS!!!

I've been trying to unload paper magazines for about 15 years now and some of the most beautiful artifacts I've had to part with are those old Omni mags from the 1980s. They did fiction (Gibson, Stirling, etc) and science tidbits and interviews with scientists and various other thinkers. In March 1985 was an interview with Edward de Bono who had an provacative suggestion: that "workers and unions, instead of retreating before robots, should take the initiative and get to own the robots, then lease them to the factory. I suggest a trinity concept betweeen finance companies, management and suppliers of labor or robots." Now this is a very bold idea which obviously never took hold: abstract the physical action applied to mass-produced sequences. But De Bono had another idea that can now be found in many a "wish it had happened thus" text, including for example Cradle to Cradle, where a factory's inputs should be downstream of its outputs and that lends to the notion that it doesn't pollute its own water and, by extension, anyone's water.

2006-06-06T23:16:00.000-04:00

Caught a lecture tonight from Mayflower author, Nathaniel Philbrick at the Carter Center in the hopes of not needing to buy the book but frankly I was inthralled. The period from 1620 to 1675 was almost idyllic, sure plenty of intrigue but not much civ-threatening violence. Then all hell breaks loose with King Philip's War. The losses were stupendous! Of 70,000 total people in New England they lose a higher percentage than were lost in the American Civil War. The English settlers were more than "decimated", most villages burnt, and survived by the luck of Benjamin Church who had been living happily with the Indians in today's Rhode Island. Fascinating stuff and like Philbrick said, I didn't know much between "The First Thanksgiving" and 1776. So, anyways, I guess I'll have to get the book!

2006-06-06T00:16:00.000-04:00

I don't get to look at blogs much anymore: funny how having everything blocked at the work desktop can change things :) So I happen to check Boing Boing today for the first time in months and what's at the top but a strange story about a back yard in Grant Park!

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/06/05/the_demon_fish_of_so.html

Not sure what this means for the future, but hopefully it's not one of my old houses!

2005-09-22T23:19:00.000-04:00

Bruce vs New Orleans

We didn't have all that great a time in Newahlins, it was February and cold and mostly rainy around St. Valentine's Day. Not all that impressed with Bourbon Street even with the Confederacy of Dunces ringing 'round my brain. The people seemed OK and we had a really short mass on Sunday with the back 2 pews full of sleeping bums.

I was hunting up bookshops and we ended up between Jackson Square & Esplanade on Decatur Street. I think the first thing we noticed were the drink rails at just the right hight on all the posts along that section. There was a Margarittaville which, although cheesy, had the best bathrooms thusfar, but across the street I had noticed a kind of dutch-door open bar called Molly's and after visiting Central Grocery we made it back there and spent a couple of days hanging out.

I remember sitting facing the street listening to the juke box and hearing a certain tune that just grabbed me -- Mary's from Jersey and I'm an 80's Springsteen fan -- but I'm not sure it clicked with either of us till ten minutes in or so. It was "New York Serenade" from his second album and I'd never really paid so much attention to it.

Hell, I was seranading! The crowd was so cool, the afternoon had actually turned a kind of chilly but sunny wonderful hue. We met this wonderful gal named Natalie who was a nurse (I pray you're fine!!) who had had a few relationships with guys that had ended up with the guy telling her he discovered he was gay. And we met the current guy and could just tell it was gonna happen again.

Anywsys, the red-beans-and-rice place next door was amazing. The ambience was "Be Nice or Leave" and we ran into some of the same great folks there.

I listen to that magically long Springsteen tune alot and just imagine myself there and the city back the way it was and hope it all ends up with the great people of New Orleans back home again.

2005-08-11T00:53:00.000-04:00

Holy crud, am I an incredible slacker or what? What?
Recently got back into Paul Simon's solo work. I'd had it on LP for years but you can imagine how neglected that media was getting... Anyways, is second record in particular is just amazing. His tune Tenderness is just a revelation. Beautiful.

The well known American Tune and Kodachrome hold up perfectly but my other favorites just kill me more and more as I (ah hem) age: Learn How to Fall and Something So Right neither of which I think I can distill but both are necessary listening.

2005-03-18T18:57:00.000-05:00

To all the bookstores I've loved before

Got a real scare at lunch today when I read Cliff Bostock's column in Creative Loafing about Teaspace taking over A Capella Books's storefront.Yikes! That's my neighborhood bookstore, sure there'd still be Charis but they have an extremely eccentric selection and I know there's supposed to be a Barnes & Noble at the Edgewood Retail District but A Capella was a special little place.

Tonight I walked in and saw the tell-tale bargain discount shelves throughout the store but thankfully they're just moving. Over next door to the 5 Points Pharmacy on Moreland (down from Criminal Records and Junkman's Daughter). They're just selling the stuff they'd rather not move and plan to be open at the new location by next month.

After all that mental anguish, I started thinking about our other lost bookstores. Most recently was Mark Steven's Science Fiction & Mystery Bookstore which closed last year after moving from the Highlands (where Planet Smoothy just closed) to Cheshire and finally to Shallowford. It was one of the best genre bookstores in the US. Stars Our Destination in Chicago had a better location before they moved to Evanston then closed. NYC never had any contenders (SF Bookstore on Chambers, come on!) Second Foundation in Chapel Hill was pretty good but still no comparison. The best part of the store appeared after Oxford II closed and the vintage first editions were added as a mini-store inside the Cheshire location.

Which brings us to the Oxford Problem. The Pharr Road location was maybe the best browsing bookstore I've ever been to: Awesome magazine, non-fiction & fiction sections; quirky ex-auto-dealership space and one of Atlanta's best Classical music sections.

I wasn't a huge fan of Oxford II (Smith & Hawkins near Peachtree Battle) just because of the mediocre service and selection but have definitely since noticed just the loss of such a large used book store. The former basement comic store is now the only vestige left of the once mighty Oxford empire on Piedmont

The last of the Oxford clan I went to much was the Peachtree Battle location that sported an unparalleled computer book selection and great science and sociological sections. I acquired the large psychedelic posters that used to hang over the doors from the owner and am storing them in an undisclosed location.

Got any other lost treasures?

2005-03-10T16:53:00.000-05:00

Bobby Hutcherson recording guide

1963

McLean "One Step Beyond" does nothing for me

Moncur "Evolution" Hutch's work on The Coaster & Evolution is alright but in general don't dig it

McLean "Destination Out" none can defeat Moncur's "Love and Hate" (perhaps because of the Cassandra Wilson version?) and "Riff Raff" swings just right

Green "Idle Moments" Oh my! Everything here is amazing. With Atlanta's own Duke Pearson he finds nearly as worthy a rhythm mate as Herbie (5stars)

1964

Dolphy "Out to Lunch" I'll recuse myself from the one. I know it's well-loved but still leaves me cold

1965

Hutch "Dialogue" Yowza, him and Hill just cook. Favorite cuts: Catta, Idle While and Ghetto Lights (Mingus shout-out?)

Dex "Gettin' Around" Everything is great here but his playing on "Heartaches" is especially nice

Hutch "Components" Amazing piece of work. Only "Movement" & "Air" don't completely grab me

1966

Henderson "Mode for Joe" Paired with the amazing Cedar Walton, Hutch is somewhat invisible but has memorable solos on "Granted" & "Free Wheelin'"

Hutch "Happenings" My favorite of his solo records, in a 4tet with Herbie Bob Cranshaw & Joe Chambers. Everything but "The Omen" is 5 star and "Bouquet" is infinite stars -- I've loved this tune from the first time I heard it (ca 1988). Amazing album

Hutch "Stick-Up!" I always love dates with Herbie Lewis, and it's good but too much like a re-run of Happenings :(

1967

Hutch "Oblique" another session with no horns (not again that I know of till "Time for Tyner" in May 1968). From beginning to end a great recording!

1968

Hutch "Patterns" Another great date. I swear "A Time to Go" reminds me of every fusion act from 20 years later (Yellowjackets, Brecker, etc) but with Workman, and James Spaulding this is wonderful stuff.

Tyner "Time for Tyner" Wow! Not sure anything needs to be said here except to emphasize how much Hutch adds to Tyner's best solo recording -- fully integrated

Hutch "Total Eclipse" (cheesiest cover award) a fairly straight-ahead date with mostly avant-guard sidemen. Good but not great

2005-03-08T18:55:00.000-05:00

Smoking the State

OK, I don't really dig smoke in clubs & restaurants. This isn't a health issue, this is simply an unpleasantness issue. Food tastes like crap and my clothes reek of smoke when I get home which makes more laundry which goes against my lazy nature. But I love hanging out with the peeps, so I've made that concession to reality. I could just frequent places that have a non-smoking section or that ban it all together, but I prefer to drink in places within a block or two of the house for obvious reasons -- hell, that's why I live where I do. But of course, the government wants to get involved and usually with plenty of voter support but sometimes reality slaps them in the face.

This was in Reason magazine back in April 2002 (byline Charles Paul Freund). Winnipeg, Manitoba decided to "protect the children" and passed a law banning smoking where minors are present. Instead businesses from donut shops to bars and restaurants are banning minors instead!

Unfortunately the proposed Georgia ban doesn't include such clever loopholes.

2005-03-07T11:27:00.000-05:00

Edgewood Retail District

Via Atlanta Larry, here's an awesome overview of the new Edgewood Retail District. With many architectural drawings of the various housing and shopping configurations. I went to some of the early presentations Sembler gave in Inman Park, but I didn't realize how nice Caroline was going to end up. This is a real bonus!

Now, how are we going to fill in the east side of Moreland from Front Page News to the tunnel under the tracks? That used to be a line of large Victorian homes. I'd like to see a Summit's Wayside Tavern and maybe an auto parts store but the big question is: will anybody choose to walk through the dank tunnel under the tracks?

Even the Estoria/Krog tunnel connecting Cabbagetown to Inman Park is more inviting. And that one's scary!

2005-02-24T12:12:00.000-05:00

These folks called A Flock of Segers do clever visual puns on band names, movies, etc. This one's my favorite: Thelonius Monkees

2005-02-17T10:16:00.000-05:00

If you're ever curious about why Atlanta weather forecasts are inaccurate, take a hop over to Jon Richards' blog. Today he explains why it didn't get as warm as it was supposed to earlier this week, and why it's so cold today.

2005-02-14T16:39:00.000-05:00

Mad Latin makes some good points about the latest incarnation of Atlanta's Underground. Basically he suggests a Jazz club, a Blues club and more stuff to take the kids to before a Braves game which all sound like pretty good ideas. Maybe the old model train set upstairs could be resurrected?

2005-02-08T16:47:00.000-05:00

Oh my god, Google has done it again! This is the most amazine mapping software I've ever seen. Google Maps. Zoom into a neighborhood and search for Pizza, Books or whatever. This blows the Yahoo YP/Maps thing out of the water. This is even cooler than their scanned catalog collection that allows for text searches. What a company

2005-02-07T10:50:00.000-05:00

Here are some recent pictures of Fairlie Poplar in downtown Atlanta. Including the new Balzer Theater marquee and other nearby stuff

2005-02-03T17:05:00.000-05:00

Apparently this book called Atlanta Nights by Travis Tea is an intentionally bad work written by (otherwise) accomplished writers. Guessing it's not really worth reading!

2005-02-02T14:52:00.000-05:00

Found this via Planetizen. They have Atlanta amongst other cities Yellow Pages tied to thousands of still images that can show you what the storefront looks like. Click left or right to see what's next door. This is just a staggering amount of work and guaranteed to be out of date within a week! What a cool thing.

2005-02-01T17:08:00.000-05:00

Nice little essay calledUseful Dead Technologies on kuro5hin.org. In particular I miss regular volume knobs in cars! Buttons are soooo annoying. Being the owner of a little postage stamp front yard, I use a push, cylinder-style mower which I love mainly for the quiet (I hate loud motors), the little bit of exercise I get and the looks I get (I live on a street with lots of pedestrians).

2005-02-01T16:45:00.000-05:00

Caught this collection of 1960's Brazillian music over on Boing Boing. There're a bunch of LP sleave scans and many MP3's to listen to.

2005-01-28T21:43:00.000-05:00

A Better Toolkit

In an old (Dec 2002) Locus interview a writer, Orson Scott Card, who isn't a huge favorite of mine discusses the versatility of SF

Science fiction gives writers a tool set unmatched by any other genre. We can take our tools and step into any genre and do really well, but they can't take their tools and step into ours and do anything but flounder around. Our tools include most (but not all) of theirs. We have the ability to lead readers into a world that is not their own, step by step, without pain. We don't all do it -- there's plenty of bad science fiction where you have no idea where you are and what's going on. But from Robert A. Heinlein on, we've had the tools to do it without expository lumps, with the little details bled in. We train our readers to be able to absorb the changes, the differences between the world of the story and the world they live in, bit by bit and build up the picture slowly, frame by frame. Figuratively, we've learned how to start in a small room and only open the doors as we need to open them. The world expands as we move through it and as we need to reveal it -- which is way better than the horrible prologue that tries to give you the whole big world picture before dropping you into the story. We've learned techniques that actually work.

2005-01-12T15:42:00.000-05:00

Atlanta Parking 1953

Downtown had 18,507 spaces of which 16,460 were off-street and 2,047 were curb

of the offstreet spots, 11,609 were signle-level and 4,851 in structures of two or more levels

estimated demand exceeding supply: 600

(I'll have to hunt down current numbers for comparison -- anybody got a clue where that could come from?)

2005-01-12T15:24:00.000-05:00

Bleacher Gambling

Found this in some notes from a meeting with a bunch of old Atlanta Crackers players on 26 Aug 2003 at the Margaret Mitchell House

Buck Riddle who used to play first base was talking about all the gamblers in Poncey Park out in the left field bleachers. Here are some of the odds that would be offered on a per-pitch basis

Fly ball (caught) 2 to 1
Foul tipped 3 to 1

Anybody know more standard odds from those days? 1930s to the 50s

One more funny story. This from lefty pitcher Dick Kelly (~1954). They were playing an exhibition game against inmates in the Atlanta Pen. He heard this from the crowd

Take your time, you've got 20 years to get this guy out

2005-01-10T23:46:00.000-05:00

38 Months

From Liberty Feb 2005 (William E. Merritt)

[After Rumsfeld's answer to Thomas Wilson], a government flack named Pentagon Spokesman Lawrence Di Rita ... went on to mention America's huge industrial capacity and how we'd won WWII [which didn't answer] the question, why don't we have the army we might wish we had at some later time?

This is some time later. Counting from Sept. 11, 2001, to Dec. 7, 2004 -- the day Spc. Wilson asked the obvious -- we were 38 months and 27 days into the War on Terror. When we were 38 months and 27 days into WWII, it was March 3, 1945, and we had the army we wanted by then. In fact, we had it in Germany.

By March 3, 1945, the army we wanted had already won every major battle on the Western Front. By March 3, 1945, the army we wanted had kicked the Axis out of North Africa and Sicily, invaded Italy, conquered Rome, stormed ashore at Normandy, broken out, liberated Paris, pushed back the Bulge and crossed the Rhine. By March 3, 1945, the Secretary of War wasn't trying to figure out how to up-armor jeeps so American soldiers could survive routine supply convoys through already-liberated territory. On March 3, 1945, the American army was about to enter Cologne.

... having brought the Second World War to our attention [you have] brought some other facts to mind, too. Like how German soldiers nearly froze to death outside Moscow in December 1941 -- not because German industry couldn't produce winter clothing but because, with the Soviet armies collapsing during the summer, the Nazi government cancelled its war-production contracts. Then, when the snow hit the fan, the only way the Nazis could keep their young men from dying was to collect up all the ladies' fur coats they could lay their hands on and ship them east.

Now I don't want to make any unpleasant comparisons here, but the Nazis got into this mess because their civilian leaders were too savvy to upset the economy by spending more on the war than was absolutely necessary. So I leave it to you, Secretary Rumsfeld and Moughpiece Di Rita, to explain to me how what happened in Russia in 1941 is different from what's going on right now, with American families having to mail fashionable body armor to Iraq to keep their boys from being blown away.

And how, given the same 38 months and 27 days in which our parents built 90,000 tanks, tens of thousands of landing craft, 300,000 military aircraft, 600,000 jeeps and 7,000 ships, we are straining to turn out 15 sets of Humvee armour a day. And why, exactly, that isn't your fault

2005-01-04T18:09:00.000-05:00

Disturbing Stasis

Not sure if I like this but it does sound pretty accurate. From an interview with Neal Stephenson in the Feb 2005 Reason

terrorism is a much more formidable opponent of political liberty than government. Government acts almost as a recruiting station for libertarians. Anyone who pays taxes or has to fill out government paperwork develops libertarian impulses almost as a knee-jerk reaction. But terrorism acts as a recruiting station for statists. So it looks to me as though we are headed for a triangular system in which libertarians and statists and terrorists interact with each other in a way that I'm afraid might turn out to be quite stable.

This is a long way from the naivite at the end of Cryptonomicon, where basically a safe-haven for untrackable cash was the final product. Eegads

2004-12-28T10:19:00.000-05:00

This site has a great rundown of all the Beach Boys albums each with pretty interesting comments. You can find a nice list of who sings what here

2004-12-20T10:23:00.000-05:00

Recording Analog to MP3 in MacOSX

Didn't see a nice step-by-step anywhere, so here goes.

Stereo --> RCA "Y" on your RCA cable --> MDD Audio In

Under SoundSource:
Input = Soundflower (2ch)
Output = Soundflower (2ch)
System = Built-in Audio

Under SoundFlowerBed:
Soundflower (2ch) = Built-in Audio

Under Line-In:
Input:
Device: Built-in Audio
Source: Line In
Output:
Device: Soundflower (2ch)
Source (Default)

In Audacity:
I have "monitor input" on
Playback: Built-in Audio
Recording:
Device: Soundflower (2ch)
Channels: 2 (Stereo)

Gee Whiz!! (Thanks to criggins) This page on evilgeniuschronicles.org has links to all the software

2004-12-08T11:08:00.000-05:00

Bnrailstories.com is the home of William Brotherton's new book Burlington Northern Adventures. My favorite part was his description of growing up in Atlanta where the kids would jump on a frieght train from Peachtree Hills to downtown.

2004-11-30T15:52:00.000-05:00

Nice distillation of Hayek's ideas of how markets spontaneously form to solve problems from an interview with Bruce Caldwell, author of a 2003 biography of Hayek, in Reason magazine dated Jan 2005.

Paris gets fed

No one intentionally plans on feeding Paris, but millions upon millions of people get up every morning and get what they want for breakfast. How does that happen? Hayek's answer is that a market system ends up coordinating individual activity. Millions of people are out there pursuing their own interest, but the net result is a coordination of economic activities. And prices are the things that contain people's knowledge.

While talking about socialism and fascism's tendency to attempt to conduct things from the top pretending to have "perfect knowledge" (which, of course, can't exist in a single place)

...or paving over Iraq. I think Iraq actually is a perfect example of this. You don't just come in and say, "Here are all the institutions that have worked well in the West," and expect overnight changes. That seems to me to be a contemporary example of the sort of hubris [Hayek] argued against.

Much of this parallel's Jane Jacob's ideas of small incremental changes made by individuals and not plopping down giant chunks of new reality from above.

2004-11-04T21:09:00.000-05:00

The Political Post
Not sure what this thing is but it wasn't really political. After reading Jeff Jarvis's post about the most recent general election I felt I had to add my two cents.

I'm a libertarian. If the year was 1900, my core values would be called "liberal" (and still are in the UK) but in the US the definition has shifted. Those being: rigorous defense of private property; freedom to talk to whomever I choose about whatever we care to; to do anything in the privacy of my home; to protect myself if attacked.

The reasons I could never vote to re-elect Mr. Bush are the limits he and his cohorts are trying to put on civil liberties (in the name of war -- not good enough) and the absolutely appalling amount of money they are spending (this with a supposedly "conservative" Republican House & Senate). Unacceptable.

Working with President Bush and neo-conservatives for four more years

Essentially repeal the dissabilities acts. They're fine for federal property or whatever but they are killing transit. Any city trying to develop a subway in the modern era is f*cked because of elevators and such for this tiny minority of the population. Transit is absolutely mandatory for a funtioning metropolis (and lots of people like to live in cities).

Reform the court system: I'm not talking about a GOP point (activist judges), that point only exists because the congress has been so spineless for the last 50 years in vote-pandering and the courts are trying (as a very last resort) to reign in obviously anti-constitutional measures. I'm talking about trials. First of all, if you lose a criminal prosecution F*CK YOU you don't get to go for civil damages. You lost. Smokers: F*CK YOU, watch movies or listen to radio dramas from the 1930's it's obvious everybody knew smoking would kill you, it's your own damn fault. Fat people: F*CK YOU, eat less. Alcoholics: F*CK YOU, stop drinking. Parents whose children are exposed to "bad things": F*CK YOU, you don't get to strangle our cultural flora because you don't have time to spend with your spoiled brats.

Enforcement: save everybody a bunch of money and forget that marijuana is illegal. If you want to go through the hassle of repealing various sections of federal law, go ahead, but just forget this little war ever happened.

War making: call it the Department of War again (please, no more euphemisms) and do whatever money and manpower allows but for gods sake don't stretch the Good Americans who had only signed on to be your National Guard or Reserve Troops into an army of aggression. That's no fair and you know it. You will push their patriotism to the breaking point. These people have jobs and families and are only signed up for emergencies -- back off!

J.Edgar Hoover techniques: just pretend like you can't surveil network packets, library books, video rentals. Don't mention it, even if you do do it. Give up on tapping cell-phones. Jeez

Enforced technology: give up on pushing HDTV, that's not how technology is adapted. Stop using Microsoft for anything important, it's crappy and will bite you in the ass.

Anyways, good luck to you and GOD BLESS AMERICA

2004-09-22T13:28:00.000-04:00

Nice description of Heidegger's idea of an individual (Dasein) in his culture's "thrown-ness" from Schele & Freidel's A Forest of Kings: The Untold Story of the Ancient Maya

As we grow to adulthood, every human being acquires a special way of seeing and understanding the world and the human community. This is a shared conception of reality, created by the members of a society living together over generations, through their language, their institutions and arts, their experiences, and their common work and play. We call this human phenomenon "culture", and it enables people to understand how and why the world around them works.

This leads the chapter attempting to explain how they experienced their world. As the authors explain the sacrament of blood-letting, they come to an interesting analogy

In our world, for example, we could not imagine letting blood from our bodies, as the Maya did, in order to communicate with our ancestors. Such violence seems crazy and "uncivilized" to us. On the other hand, the ancient Maya would find our war-time custom of drafting young men to go and fight in the place of the leaders of our nation both barbaric and cowardly. Maya lords fought their own battles and a king often paid for defeat in the coin of his own capture and sacrifice.

This is a fascinating book which also serves as a primer for basic hieroglyphic translation.

2004-08-16T15:51:00.000-04:00

Going through the first edition of The Rolling Stone Record Guide (the Red one from 1979) and noticed a whole bunch of highly rated acts I've either never heard of or don't have any of. Here's a list of them all

Joan Armitrading
Asleep at the Wheel
Atlanta Rhythm Section
Average White Band
Barnstorm (Joe Walsh project)
Moe Bandy
Bobby Blue Bland
Jimmy Buffet
Burning Spear
Cafe Jaques
The Cars (first album)
Clifton Cheneir (Bogalusa)
Elvis Costello (armed & aim)
CCR (Green & Willy)
Dramatics
Narvel Felts
Lefty Frizzell
J.Geils Band (monkey)
Hall & Oats (red ledge)
Hickory Wind
The Impressions
The Jam
Garland Jeffreys
John Martyn
Herald Melvin
Modern Lovers
The Moments
Moonglows
O'Jays
Persuasions
Tom Petty
The Platters
Poco
The Robins
Smokey Robinson
Rufus (chaka khan's old band)
Otis Rush
Doug Sahm
Skyliners
Joe South (atlanta connection)
Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes
Spinners
Starbuck (atlanta connection)
Gary Stewart
The Stylistics
Billy Swan
Tavares
Toots and the Maytals
Porter Wagoner
Steve Young

2004-08-12T10:51:00.000-04:00

Just caught up with Ellen Ullman's novel The Bug and thus far it's a fun read. Takes place in a mid-1980's software company writing C code for a windowing Unix system. I enjoyed this quote on page 71

Debugging: what an odd word. As if "bugging" were the job of putting in bugs, and debugging the task of removing them. But no. The job of putting in bugs is called programming.

2004-07-29T10:41:00.000-04:00

Synthesists
I just re-read this Heinlein essay and I'm not convinced anything is going on with the creation of this new field of science. Certainly not in any institutional way

The greatest crisis facing us is not Russia, not the Atom bomb, not corruption in government, not encroaching hunger, not the morals of young. It is a crisis in the organization and accessibility of human knowledge. We own an enormous "encyclopedia" -- which isn't even arranged alphabetically. Our "file cards" are spilled on the floor, nor were they ever in order. The answers we want may be buried somewhere in the heap, but it might take a lifetime to locate two already known facts, place them side by side and derive a third fact, the one we urgently need.

Call it the Crisis of the Librarian.

We need a new "specialist" who is not a specialist, but a synthesist. We need a new science to be the perfect secretary to all other sciences.

But we are not likely to get either one in a hurry and we have a powerful log of grief before us in the meantime.

Today the forerunners of synthesists are already at work in many places. Their titles may be anything; their degrees may be in anything -- or they may have no degrees. Today they are called "operations researchers", or sometimes "systems development engineers", or other interim tags. But they are all interdisciplinary people, generalists, not specialists -- the new Renaissance Man. The very explosion of data which forced most scholars to specialize very narrowly created the necessity which evoked this new non-specialist. So far, this "unspecialty" is in its infancy; its methodology is inchoate, the results are sometimes trivial, and no one knows how to train to become such a man. But the results are often spectacularly brilliant, too -- this new man may yet save all of us.-- R.A.Heinlein in "Where To?" 1950/1965

Not really sure if there's been any movement on this except for the many "Meta-studies" that have been published recently combining lots of experimenters' results. I suppose it could be in the realm of the creative amateur: feature magazine writers, Usenet, websites, etc.

2004-07-28T11:18:00.000-04:00

Todd Rundgren on the Music Business

From an interview with Todd Rundgren for Linux Magazine (July 2004)

I believe in the free software movement, open source, and all that other stuff, because basically I'd like to live in a world where everyone was rich to the point that they could just give away everything to anyone else: you see someone with a lack, and you have what they need, so you just give it to them, and that's life.

That's not real, I understand, because as brilliant as we all are, we're still dominated by an animal [instinct] that causes us to reflexively protect what's ours. It's as if we're saying, "If you steal my television, I will die, so therefore I have the right to shoot you." Now, if I catch you stealing my television, my attitude is "I feel a little creeped out that you snuck into my house, but if you need the television so freakin' badly, take the damn thing. I can get another TV."

I sort of have the same attitude about the file swapping and things like that. As a matter of fact, it's different for music than for almost everything else. Most musicians and most people who work in the music business have already forgotten what they felt the first time that music touched them.

And in that sense, I consider music a human sacrament. Music was intended to bring you closer to the mind; it was intended to heal, not only physically, but mentally; it was intended to express things that cannot be expressed in any other medium.

What we've done over the past 100 or 150 years is essentially profane this sacrament by saying that you can't listen to it unless you pay for it. And I have a problem with that.

I think musicians were better off when you first of all proved your skill as a musician by pleasing some people with your output, then by pleasing someone with money, enough so that they'd support you so that you could create music. And yes, there was "commercial pressure" (laughs) to please your patron, you know, to write music to please your patron. But, of course, once you did that, you were free to do write anything else you wanted.

Unfortunately, that's gone. And now the bollocks at the RIAA -- who to me are just a bunch of evil thugs -- are trying to intimidate listeners to convince them that music has no sacramental value, that music is simply a product that they own, and that their way is the only way that music can possibly be transferred.

I strongly believe that musicians will always make more money performing their music live for people than they will ever make selling records. Records started out merely as a promotion for a musician's live performance and, in only a very few exceptional circumstances, that's still true. Musicians, if they want a healthy income, must face that fact that they have to go out and play. If they play well enough, people will continue to come hear them play.

Record labels make very poor patrons. Audiences make better patrons, because you can deliver a song at the right time and change their lives, something that makes them loyal to you for a lifetime. It's up to the audience to directly find the musicians they want to support and give them that support directly.

And, essentially, I've been setting up the mechanisms for that. Patronet is my online subscription service that allows audiences to find the artist that they want to directly support.

In exchange, a patron receives what a patron always receives: a first look at whatever the artist is creating and some sort of interaction that an audience-at-large may not have or may not even desire.

With a system like that, why the hell would an artist care about selling records? Artists would just want people to hear what they do, which has always been the objective.

So the troubles the music business has now, I say, it deserves them. It deserves to just die and disappear. And I hope it does. I hope every single label, one after another, just goes right out of business. I pray for it, nearly (laughs).

Because what'll happen after that is that the music business will be back in the control of musicians.

2004-07-27T14:46:00.000-04:00

Breakdown of the human body's 6.71 x 10²⁷ atoms. I have 2 x 10¹⁹ gold atoms. Woo-hoo!!

2004-07-27T13:52:00.000-04:00

Poverty & Struggle

From a Smithsonian story on Xerox inventor Chester Carlson

... his mother had always somehow managed to make the family's poverty seem like a game -- a challenging puzzle that could be solved with good spirits and ingenuity.

I meant to extend this with more examples but I like this quote so much I wanted to put it up at least as an idea by itself. Oh well!

2004-07-27T13:24:00.000-04:00

ATLANTA TIME MACHINE Great site. They did a similar thing in the Boston Globe when I lived there in the mid-90's. This guy did a nice job matching the angles of the original photos -- sometimes it looks like he had to stand in the middle of some busy streets!

2004-07-26T11:04:00.000-04:00

There is a natural progression in art forms: simple, then lovely, then distant, then abstract, then death of the form. Simple can be clumsy and unsophistocated or plain and clear . Lovely is self-evident. Distant begins to pay too much attention to the way it's executed, too self-referential, a third person perspective. Abstract takes the navel gazing to new extremes, typically skill is still important but it's more about propping up something artless with bogus theory and claims of "this is important" where obviously if it was important it wouldn't be necessary to proclaim it so. Death is when the artifact is completely devoid of any pleasure-giving, it must have a placard beside it specifically telling the fickle public why it is art for without that placard it would be misunderstood as just a piece of crap. Death can also be recursive reproductions of any of the earlier stages over and over again.

Painting did this: flat gothic, Botticelli, impressionism, Picasso, Pollack

Art music: Gregorian chant, Mozart, Bruckner/Debussy, Berg/Schoenberg, Billy Joel piano sonatas.

The art forms that were mature by the 1800's are especially prone to this cycle as technique became highly respected. Newer forms were slightly more resistant. Jazz fell to it because the skill level was so high: Armstrong, Miles, Monk, Miles [second quintet], Ayler followed by reproductions of each era over and over again.

Because the artists in those last two stages were considered "important" everyone had to take account of them. New artists were required to reconcile their expression with these ideas. Rock was able to totally sidestep it because skill was never as important. Acts like Zappa, King Crimson & The Residents may come around but nobody follows: technique-wise they can't and record labels won't let them. The furthest along popular rock ever got was Distant with bands like Talking Heads. Country never made it past Simple & Lovely except maybe play-with-the-form work by guys like David Allan Coe (see, it already gets less enjoyable)

Abstract is the trap of the insecure

2004-07-22T16:45:00.000-04:00

Battle of Atlanta

140 years ago today. Just had to post this from Sherman's memoirs

Along the railroad they were more successful. Sweeping over a small force with two guns, they reached our main line, broke through it, and got possession of De Gress's battery of four twenty-pound Parrotts, killing every horse, and turning the guns against us.... These combined forces drove the enemy into Atlanta, recovering the twenty-pound Parrott guns -- but one of them was found "bursted" while in the possession of the enemy. The two six-pounders farther in advance were, however, lost, and had been hauled back by the enemy into Atlanta. Poor Captain de Gress came to me in tears, lamenting the loss of his favorite guns; when they were regained he had only a few men left, and not a single horse. He asked an order for a reëquipment, but I told him he must beg and borrow of others till he could restore his battery, now reduced to three guns. How he did so I do not know, but in a short time he did get horses, men, and finally another gun, of the same special pattern, and served them with splendid effect till the very close of the war. This battery had also been with me from Shiloh till that time. (Vol II, p81)

The area involved has streets named "Battery Place" and "Degress Ave". According to a battlefield guide, the battery just south of the railroad cut lost their guns but had men and horses so Capt. Francis DeGress was able to match them to his recovered battery. He also said DeGress had spiked the guns before giving them up; but Sherman contradicts that saying the guns were turned on them. Wonder which is true?

2004-07-20T11:36:00.000-04:00

There's a bunch of small presses around these days.

Original Books
Four Walls Eight Windows Paul Di Filippo, etc
Golden Gryphon Press collections of short fiction
Meisha Merlin Publishing fun authors
Night Shade Books chapbooks
Subterranean Press darker stuff

Reissues of Classic Works
Hill House Publishers collector quality
Old Earth Books Pangborn, Doc Smith
Stealth Press Books Heinlein & old Nebula collections

Reissues and Complete Collections
Haffner Press Jack Williamson, etc
NESFA Press incredible SF finds

Keep track of everything at Locus Online's Forthcoming Books page

2004-06-22T10:51:00.000-04:00

Sysadmins have so many important roles, but I was thinking
about one that doesn't get much mention: we seem to be the
holders of a company's memory

I get numerous calls (as do my co-workers) of the type:

Why was this done? (even when it was done by a different division
5 years ago)
Where was this originally? (database, dmz, webserver, whatever --
again whether we had anything to do with it or not)
Do we use this anymore? (when it doesn't even run on a machine we manage)

Why the heck is that? I actually do enjoy getting some of these
questions: it gets me calling people I haven't talked to for a while,
going through old notes, old invoices, etc.

I'm thinking the nature of running a number of unices over the years
requires that we're good at stuffing random bits of arcana efficiently
in our bald, little craniums. Certainly since 2000 many of us have stayed
where we landed when the tech-boom busted so we've been around a while
and have worked directly with lots of other employees that have moved
on or changed positions or just don't remember things as well.

It just amuses me the number of phone calls I get or over-hear
co-workers getting that seem to come out of left field.

The sysadmin as company historian

2004-04-13T14:14:00.000-04:00

Complicated road structure

The magic roundabout is truly bizarre. Caught a reference to it in the misc.transport.road FAQ. It consists of a traffic circle which contains 5 smaller traffic circles. Don't think this would fly in the states!
Nice picture and article of one in Swindon
more detail
List of all known magic roundabouts

2004-04-02T20:35:00.000-05:00

What buildings can you see?

Until last week I could see the Bellsouth tower, but it's getting blocked by some of the new apartments at the Mead development which also blocked what little I could see of One Atlantic Center. I can still see Bank of America building and SunTrust Plaza. Until the leaves grow in I can barely see the downtown Marriott, 191 Peachtree, the Westin and Georgia Pacific building.

What can you see from your house?