While I was on hold, they play the recording that says: “Hate your slow internet?” Um, yes. But their solution was to sign up for Comcast high-speed internet.

Would it have been so hard to have the width indicate the entire market? To be sure, mine should indicate in the chart that the numbers represent % of marketplace, but at least you get a feel for what “60%” really means. And it’s too bad that I can’t seem to get Google App’s’s charting to have the tick marks at intervals of 10. Still . . .

Here are the ones I consider personal favorites (and I’ll leave out the Guralnicks, Marcuses, etc., etc.). Maybe not actually the best, but I’ll leave the title as is to capture more links

Best rock book overall: Pamela Des Barres, I’m with the Band: Confessions of a Groupie. This is awesome because the account is from the present, but it’s punctuated (or maybe I should say perforated) by unvarnished journal entries from the period, and teaches well how absurd adolescent hero worship can be. Des Barres does a great job of critiquing yet acknowledging her younger, stupider, and more hormonal self.

Best history by way of interviews: McNeil and McCain, Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk. Everything in this book has to be read with a grain of salt, because the subjects tend to play around with their memories. Still, quite a read.

Best book on routine rock depravity: [Tie] Rawlings and Diggle, Steve Diggle’s Harmony in My Head; Bonomo, Sweat: The Story of the Fleshtones, America’s Garage Band. Great bands, questionable choices.

Best roman-a-clef: Thomas, The Big Wheel [about Elvis Costello and the Attractions, by the bassist]. Could have been subtitled: The Ego and the Id. This one was out of print for quite awhile: No doubt they were laying low fearing lawsuits from Declan MacManus.

Best book about a style: Davidson, We Never Learn: The Gunk Punk Undergut, 1988-2001.

Best reference: Robbins, The Trouser Guide to New Wave Records (first edition). Until this came out, it was impossible to figure out anything. Here and there are odd little mistakes that don’t exist nowadays in the era of Wikipedia, making the book all the more charming if you read it today or tomorrow.

Best book about collector scum: Milano, Vinyl Junkies: Adventures in Record Collecting.

Best scene book: Gordon, It Came from Memphis.

Best book about obscurities: Unterberger, Unknown Legends of Rock and Roll. Someone reading this today would probably deny that a lot of these are “unknowns,” but that is partly due to the impact of this book.

Best coffee-table book: Matheu and Bowe, Creem: America’s Only Rock & Roll Magazine.

Best serious memoir: Wareham, Black Postcards. From the Galaxy 500 / Luna front man.

Best serious biography: Ravenscroft, John Peel: Margrave of the Marshes. This began as Peel’s memoir, but was so ably completed by his wife, I’ll count it as a biography.

But the new DX . . . Greater contrast is a good thing. But where is the left-side button for turning the page? Every DX user I’ve talked to who has also used a regular Kindle has complained about this. It is really great to be able to turn the page with either the left hand or right hand. Meanwhile, the DX still has the crappy squeezed keyboard, which is a step back from the keyboard on the newer 6″ Kindle. Maybe in user testing the squeezed keyboard was more effective. But it sure isn’t for me.

And, still, the web browser is “experimental.”

I am a believer in separate reader devices (that is, separate from reading on your computer, phone, or tablet) but this device is not making headway.

It would be nice to have all of my gem documentation available locally. But I’m lazy. I don’t want to be typing “gem server” all the time.

So here’s what you do. Locate your appropriate gem command with “which gem”; I’m using rvm to run Ruby 1.9.1, so my answer is: /Users/jgn/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.1-p376/bin/gem

Then create a gemserver.plist file like so, replacing the path to my gem with the path to yours:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
	<key>Label</key>
	<string>localhost.gem.server</string>
	<key>ProgramArguments</key>
	<array>
		<string>/Users/jgn/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.1-p376/bin/gem</string>
		<string>server</string>
	</array>
	<key>RunAtLoad</key>
	<true/>
</dict>
</plist>

Now copy to /Library/LaunchDaemons

The next type you reboot, you’ll have your gem docs at http://localhost:8808/

Usenet News in Particular.
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Gosh.

In the olden days, you paid for a land line connection, and could make all of the calls you wanted. The SLA was rather robust, allowing for you to “just make calls” whenever. The agony of the phone company then was in switching: Did they have enough capacity to manage enough calls from a particular zone, through other zones, and then on to the other end of the call? Your bill was paying for switching capacity, amortized over time.

But now, of course, they just sell bytes. If only they would just bill me per byte (e.g., for the 2GB/month plan, around $0.000000011641532 / byte).

But no, we have all of this craziness regarding how many bytes you get for how much money; that I have to pay extra for tethering (even though I get no extra bytes); and that if I’m using an ATT hotspot for iPhone Wifi, I can’t tether my laptop through that (tethering is only through 3G).

Inane.

I just want my bytes. Give me my bytes. And let me monitor my own behavior (and conserve bytes, if I want to). And bill talk time as bytes, too. I think if we paid for bytes, maybe our calls would be shorter because we’d realize the cost of our own breath.

What IS that? Some kind of stylized “R” + “D”? And why is it the wrong size? Sheesh.

I think this is just allmusic.com being confused about two songs with the same name.

When you access a Google Calendar that is managed through a Google Apps username (e.g., you@example.com, as opposed to you@gmail.com), the standard lookup feed (example: http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/default/owncalendars/full) redirects after you access it. (Not the case for calendars owned by gmail.com addresses, it would seem.)

Well, bizarrely, in the Ruby implementation (which you can find here: http://code.google.com/p/gdata-ruby-util/ Ruby 1.9 version here: http://code.google.com/u/hoanga/), redirects are not handled properly.

Handling a redirect is a “must have” to get into the Calendar data for a Google Apps user.

The master code repository is hosted on code.google.com, so since it doesn’t provide for submitting patches as easily as Github, I’ll just lob a monkeypatch fix here . . .

# Fix for GData::Client::Calendar failure to follow redirects
module GData
  module Client
    class Calendar
      def make_request(method, url, body = '', retries = 4)
        response = super(method, url, body)
        if response.status_code == 302 and retries > 0
          @session_cookie = response.headers['set-cookie']
          # original wasn't capturing the redirect location
          redirect_url = response.headers['location']
          return self.make_request(method, redirect_url, body, retries - 1)
        else
          return response
        end
      end
    end
  end
end

For Rails, you can put this into a file in config/initializers