next nurblecast
Almost ready and going to rock.
In: music musings, nurblecast, random internet awesomeness
progress pt. 2
After initial enthusiasm, I’ve actually become quite annoyed with Movable Type. Complex things are possible, like making online photo galleries. Easy things, like adding a twitter badge, seem prohibitively difficult. Plus, if I wanted to mess around with Unix permissions all day, I’d become a system administrator.
I just want to write useless shit that nobody reads, not fuck around with FTP software all night.
So we’re going to try WordPress. I’m literally installing it as I type this, so no need to go looking for the URL just yet. When its semi up and running, I’ll be sure to let you all know.
Oops, Transmit says it’s done uploading! Time to leap into PHP hell for a while!
In: random internet awesomeness
We Do Not Torture
Not so sure that Bush’s statement still stands up to the laugh test, but this article from the Times should chip away at any remaining trust you may have had in the integrity of our War On Terroring.
He was asked when he had gone to Afghanistan and how he had met Mr. bin Laden. When he replied that he had never been to Afghanistan and had not met Mr. bin Laden, the Egyptians tortured him with electric shocks, he said. “I cry and I yell,” he said. “Also they gave me brain electric shocks.” He said he was forced to consume liquids that were laced with drugs “so you don’t know what you are talking about.”
In early April, he said, the Americans flew him to Bagram, the American air base outside the Afghan capital, Kabul. He was held there for almost a year, at times shackled and handcuffed in a small cage with other detainees, and further interrogated, he said.
“A C.I.A. person said, ‘We forgive you; just accept you met Osama bin Laden.’ I said, ‘No, I’m not going to say that.’ ” Even though polygraph tests showed that he was telling the truth, he said, he was shifted from cell to cell every few hours and deprived of sleep for six months.
Listen. Reading the article, this guy sounds like kind of a douchebag, but we don’t need to be torturing people for being douchebags. We shouldn’t be torturing people at all, but we do, and will continue to. We can play all kinds of games like letting the Egyptians do it for us, or defining torture as anything that kills you or ruins your organs (so if you’re not dead and your spleen still mostly works, I guess we didn’t torture you!), or Bush’s weirdly circular logic of “Torture is illegal, we don’t do illegal things, therefore what we’re doing isn’t torture, because I’ve made what we do legal.”
Whatever. These individual cases often have enough ambiguity to allow pro-torture conservatives to wiggle out either with patriotic platitudes or straight up insults (“would you rather die at the hands of a terrorist or risk mistreating a few dumbasses who where in the wrong place at the wrong time anyway?”). What this article is pretty useful for, though, is illustrating that there was clearly a well-oiled torture machine that shuffled the guilty and innocent alike from one shithole to another, beating them up and asking irrelevant questions at every stop.
What also seems obvious after reading this and dozens of articles like it, is that the machine was designed to torture people, it was NOT designed to glean information from them. I’m all for national catharsis, but this is gross. Beating up Pakistani loudmouths is not going to bring the Twin Towers back.
stories
I was at a party last night discussing the phenomenon of rehearsed personal stories. We all have them, they’re the stories about yourself and your life that you’ve told enough to know which ones work and which ones don’t, which ones are funny, which ones make you sound like an asshole and in what situations that might be okay, etc. You tell them while getting to know people, usually at parties. You tell them to amuse strangers. You get good at them because a lot of people ask the same questions when they’re making conversation, and I’ve found that it’s helpful to work a little bit on the answers to frequently asked questions because, hey, who wants to be the boring guy at the party?
I realized that living in New York has honed my roster of rehearsed personal stories by quite a bit, if only because a lot of the questions I’m asked now relate directly to my moving to New York, and I’ve had to tell those stories quite a few times now.
Anyhow. This all struck me quite suddenly during a phone call with my parents, I was talking to my Dad and he asked how my Christmas went. I responded with a perky, “It was good! It was fun!” then proceeded to tell the story of my week in Florida. Then my Mom picked up a line and asked how it went and I repeated the same “It was good! It was fun!”, with enough similarity to the first performance that my Dad actually said, “Well, I’ve heard this already” and hung up.
progress
I’m in the process of moving this whole shebang to Movable Type, partly because I’m a giant nerd, but also because it just seems better. After spending the better part of my christmas break installing an MT-based photo gallery on the girlfriend’s family website, I came away somewhat impressed; there’s a lot of cool shit you can do on the MT platform if you’re willing to get your hands dirty, and I’m just bored enough to want exactly that.
Some goals:
1) Twitter postings in the sidebar that don’t look lame
2) Direct and better access to nurblecasts. Nurblecasts playable directly from the blog.
3) better automation of nurblecast features. tags for artists. make the playlists more useful.
4) more options for posting from ye olde iPhone.
5) locate and re-link some of the old photos that got lost when I upgraded my blogger version.
6) fix formatting on old posts.
7) find non-retarded template to use with shiny new MT blog.
8) blog more often, about more interesting shit, and try to make visiting this blog a worthwhile use of people’s time.*
If you’d like to see how it’s going, the new blog can be found here.
*obviously this post, being on the old blog as it is, does not conform to these new standards.
In: random internet awesomeness
nerd slave
Merry Christmas, everybody.
Somehow I got roped into making a family photo album for the girlfriend, so now I’m spending a lovely Christmas evening in bed with a pair of laptops learning Movable Type on the fly and trying to figure out why we can’t just use flickr like everybody else.
Oh, and if you’ve never tried to upload data at a respectable speed from a Marriott outside Orlando, don’t. I’m getting about 100k/s, which is only slightly faster than writing it on a napkin and mailing it to the hosting provider.
In: random internet awesomeness
macaroni and cheese of champions
Just came back from a dinner party at which I served an objectively awesome tray of Mac ‘n’ Cheese. I have to say, and this is not ego talking, I did everything right, starting with lowering expectations by announcing weeks ago that I don’t really cook, which is technically true, but ignores the fact that when I do decide to make my own food, I tend to go for broke. I don’t re-heat. I don’t do frozen or powdered. I cook as if Tom Colicchio will be judging not just the result, but the process.
That’s not to say that I cook well, I don’t. Fuckups are frequent, and this is why I solicited advice, scoured the internet, and actually practiced the recipe earlier in the week before deploying it on my friends.
Most of the recipe is from this site, helpfully titled “the Worlds Best Mac and Cheese“. I like it not just because it’s based on a recipe from James Beard, or because it involves a roux, which I’d never done before but might be the secret to deliciousness in all things, but because it’s by someone named Patrick Fitzgerald, and I can pretend that in between indicting Scooter Libby and Rob Blagojevich, Fitz took a moment to do some chefery.
In: politics, random internet awesomeness
oil floor
Interesting. Oil is back down to $45 a barrel. Weird.
I’d assumed that there had been a drop, but I had no idea it was that sharp or deep. The repercussions of such a drop-off are also surprising. Suck it, Iran.
In: politics, random internet awesomeness
Sia on Letterman
So far I’ve watched this five times, and it still gives me chills:
Not to seem ungrateful…
So this is fun. I sent my laptop in to be cured of a known issue with its graphics card, and doing so left me computerless for just slightly more than a week. Curiously, when I got it back (just now), not only was it shiny and clean, and seemingly fixed, it also felt the need to re-send every iCal reminder message I’d ever set. I deleted a bunch of the text messages from my phone, and have just gotten 11 more. It’s helpfully blooping away next to me right now, at a rate of about one a minute, reminding me that Gilles Peterson is playing sometime in 2006, or that I have a job interview on Sept 1, 2004.
Weird.
In: random internet awesomeness