Vertical Hold

The 2008 Music List

2008-11-29T04:29:59Z

I enjoy listening to music immensely. I used to fancy myself a collector, and having a Tower Records employee for a roommate didn’t really help that situation. When I happened to travel to other towns I would lookup the used music shops and spends more time than I really should have flipping through CDs and vinyl. There was a brief period of time when I thought I could make a nice chunk of change going around buying up rarities and selling them online. This was, of course, before the days of eBay, Amazon, and every other interweb outlet for used music. To further carbon date myself, CDNow still existed and had a telnet interface. Normally this is when I would yell at the kids to get off my internet and then regale them with stories about how we used to have modems and resumable downloads with Z-Term.

But, I digress…as I am want to do.

My intake of new music has certainly slowed down. As with all people growing older, I attribute this to the crop of bands “today” being mostly crap. Luckily for me, this is a timeless truth. So now even when I venture into the realm of “new” music, it almost has to pass a litmus test of sounding vaguely like a band that I already like. As a for instance, Joy Division leads me to Interpol, which in turns leads me to the Editors. Unfortunately, none of these bands had an album release in 2008 (Joy Division “Best Of” doesn’t count, Interpol’s Our Love to Admire and Editors’ An End Has A Start were both 2007).

The good news is that technology is getting close to that point where it almost seems like magic. I use the soundamus service to find new releases based on music that I already like. It takes the bands that I’ve told last.fm that I like/listen to and runs that through Amazon to give me a calendar of releases that I’m probably going to be interested in, be it bands I already listen to or ones that Amazon thinks I’ll like. This is incredibly cool, even when it only tells me about bands I already like (see: Oasis, James, Flogging Molly, The Killers, etc.)

The following list are the albums that I bought in 2008. Yes, I know that 2008 isn’t over yet, but my soundamus calendar tells me that there aren’t any interesting releases (not counting singles or EPs) coming out in December. This isn’t a review and they aren’t ranked, although I hope to write more about the music of 2008 that I really liked next month. The band links are to last.fm pages and the album links are to Amazon MP3, with the lone exception of Chinese Democracy.

Bloc Party - Intimacy
Bomb The Bass - Future Chaos
The Charlatans - You Cross My Path
Flogging Molly - Float
Gnarls Barkley - The Odd Couple
Guns N’ Roses - Chinese Democracy (iTunes)
James - Hey Ma
Kaiser Chiefs - Off With Their Heads
Keane - Perfect Symmetry
The Killers - Day & Age
KMFDM - Brimborium
The Kooks - Konk
Ladytron - Velocifero
Meat Beat Manifesto - Autoimmune
Moby - Last Night
Nine Inch Nails - Ghosts I-IV
Nine Inch Nails - The Slip
Oasis - Dig Out Your Soul
Ok Go & Bonerama - You’re Not ALone
The Raconteurs - Consolers Of The Lonely
Thievery Corporation - Radio Retaliation
The Ting Tings - We Started Nothing
TV On The Radio - Dear Science
Vampire Weekend - Vampire Weekend
The Verve - Forth
We Are Scientists - Brain Thrust Mastery
Weezer - Weezer (Red Album)

So, there it is.

We're Still Still Alive

2008-11-28T18:04:37Z

The short version:

The house got finished in April and I haven't bothered to update this site. Let's just say the backyard doesn't look like this anymore.

We're Still Alive

2008-01-07T01:42:20Z

It was a pretty scary way to start the day.

Kat was in bed when the tree came crashing in. She got a bump on her head and on he knee, but that was all. Oh, and the scare of her life — and mine.

Offers of assistance have come flooding in, and for that we will be eternally grateful.

We are in a holding pattern right now as nothing can really be done until the tree is completely removed from the house, and that will hopefully happen tomorrow. Then the “fun” will begin. I’ll try and keep the progress updates coming. But you can count on updates on Flickr and Twitter.

Where Did I Go?

2007-12-31T18:00:35Z

It’s been a very quiet year on Vertical Hold. For those that only know me or follow my adventures via this site it must have seemed like 2007 was a year of quiet introspection, or something. Not really.

Movable Type is a good platform for writing. I just don’t do a whole lot of writing these days. I think that I should, but when I take time to sit down and try and say something, the ideas evaporate. I also feel that I have nothing original to add. There are 18 quadtrillion sites out there saying things. I’m sure at least one of them covered what I was going to say.

Maybe 2007 is the year I concede defeat. I am not an information producer, only a consumer.

The year was good for making new friends and strengthening bonds with existing friends. For that, I’m very grateful.

I hope it was a good year for you as well. Here’s to making 2008 even better. /drinks

Fix That DVD Player

2007-12-09T17:02:32Z

Here at Pat and Kat central we try to be sustainable. We recycle, although not as thorough as some. We try to keep energy consumption down, although not as much as others. The point is that we try to do the right thing.

The other day our cheap-o Panasonic DVD player stopped working. The power light would blink and that was it. No eject. No nothing. Just blinking. Less than optimal for a DVD player. The good news is that if you google for the model and the problem you find out that you have a blown capacitor. If you, or a good friend, have a soldiering iron, you are about $0.10 away from fixing your DVD player and saving some space in a landfill.

The good news is that our DVD player is fixed. The bad news is that I bet a lot of these relatively easy to fix problems are going unfixed due to the disposable nature of electronics today.

McCain v. McCain

2007-11-24T16:31:10Z

At one point, McCain promised if elected to hold weekly televised briefings to the nation on Iraq as long as there are U.S. combat troops there, “even if only C-SPAN carries it.”

That may not rank with Dwight D. Eisenhower’s pledge to go to Korea to end that war. But it does underline McCain’s determination to break with what he repeatedly described as “four years of failed strategy” in Iraq by the Bush administration. He believes that the 2007 “surge” tactics long resisted by Bush have put Iraq in position to achieve a modest goal of no longer being “a killing ground for young Americans.” As a decorated war hero, McCain has the credibility to settle for modest goals that a New York mayor, or a Texas governor, might not have.

Jim Hoagland
Republican Role Reversal
The Washington Post

Senator and Republican presidential candidate John McCain reiterated his support for the war in Iraq on Monday when he spoke to a crowd of about 200 at Blackstone’s Café in downtown Beaufort.

“Despite what you may see from other sources, we are winning in Iraq,” he said.

McCain: ‘We are winning in Iraq’
Jeremy Hsieh
The Beaufort Gazette

Throwing Rocks

2007-11-14T04:09:31Z

Mark Pilgrim used to like helping people. Then Movable Type pissed him off and he went to Wordpress, and the world went on without any general acknowledgement of the event. Then Apple pissed him off, and he eventually made his way to Ubuntu, and the world went on without any general acknowledgement of the event. Then OS X Leopard (10.5) came out and a bunch of people like it, bought it, installed it, and the world…you get the idea.

Mark thought these people were fucking stupid. Hell, he was using Ubuntu and it worked for him. He had his Freedom 0 and that’s all that mattered. What more could anybody want? He even made a video once using Ubuntu and it had captions! Mark was still confused at how people could like getting fucked by companies so much.

Then one day Dan Benjamin wrote a guide on how to compile and install MySQL on 10.5 just in case they couldn’t wait for the official installer from MySQL. Mark seemed to think that anybody who needed that guide was fucking stupid. Only stupid people compile software these days! Even though compiling software is probably part of Freedom 0, you shouldn’t do it because you’re fucking stupid. At least, that’s the impression I get from Mark. I think you’re awesome and amazingly intelligent. Even if you do like paying for an operating system that makes it hard to make movies with captions.

I wonder if too many people threw rocks at Mark when he used to help people? Maybe Steve Jobs kicked his puppy?

Gmail Rough Spots

2007-11-11T16:22:14Z

The “new” version of Gmail is pretty nice. Chat finally works in Safari 3. Contacts are way screwed. That’s okay. Gmail contacts don’t work. The idea of auto-populating contacts is interesting, but in my case, deeply flawed.

Gmail wants to treat contacts the same as e-mail. Keep everything and just use search to find it. Which, okay, that fine…until you do something like silly like use Plaxo (a service that will sync up address books).

So I decided I wanted to start fresh. I have 523 “contacts” in Gmail. I have 166 entries in my local address book. So, are those extra 357 entries really contacts? At some point I must have sent them mail. It’s very likely it was a thread started by a group I know that don’t understand the concept of mailing lists. So, every message has a To header with 35 addresses in it and everybody just hits ‘reply all.’ Some of these people even have college degrees. But, I appear to be finding a tangent in my rant.

So, tabla rasa. I’ll just nuke all the Gmail contacts and import my local address book. Right?

Wrong. First there was some issues that were completely my fault. Contacts are screwing in Safari. Okay, fire up the Fox. Firebug is mean to Gmail. Okay, disabled. Still, nothing. Not even a screwed up rendering like in Safari. Just, nothing. Ah, Better Gmail for Firefox breaks it. Disabled. Okay, select all and delete. Right? Again, you couldn’t be more wrong. Gmail will only let you delete 20 contacts at a time. The only way to select 20 contacts is to individually click 20 checkboxes.

Oh hell no. It’s frustrating because storing all those contacts for use in Gmail is fine. But, it’s my data and I do have other places where it would be useful. Having limited control is hard to deal with.

The Move to Leopard

2007-11-03T15:47:30Z

The decision to upgrade was pretty easy. We have two “must not break ever” apps, Aperture (for me) and World of Warcraft (for kat). Everything else is just the standard stuff that should never break from an OS upgrade (Firefox, Adium, etc.).

The Install

I was totally fooled at first (because I didn’t actually read the screen) by the DVD integrity check. That took forever. It took longer than a trip to Trader Joe’s. Literally. I went to TJ’s and got provisions for dinner and when I got back it was still only at 91%. I wasn’t going to take the chance after hearing about a bum DVD that somebody got. Sure, it was a long-shot that I got a bum DVD, but these upgrades come along so infrequently, what’s another 30 minutes?

After that I’m not sure what happened because I was off watching Samurai Champloo. If you like Cowboy Bebop and The Boondocks, you’ll dig this. Except for this random squirrel creature that shows up as a plot convenience device, it’s pretty awesome.

First Impressions

I’d like to change the login screen background. Google and ye shall receive. I mean, it’s a awesome shot. I’m just not a big purple kind of guy. That’s all.

Safari is much faster on the web apps that I use. I live on the web, so a fast, stable browser is very important to me. I’ll have to give Firefox another chance to see if my crashing problems have gone away.

Mail will be interesting. The biggest upgrade to Mail for me came from GMail opening up IMAP. So, I’ll see how that goes. I know I’ll be using it a lot more at home now. At work, Outlook is still the Boom King.

Address Book is still in need of a cleaning after a failed experiment with Plaxo. I strongly recommend against syncing Plaxo with GMail contacts and then Plaxo with your local address book. Google has a funny way of counting somebody a contact and it doesn’t yet jive with my own ideas. Time Machine would have saved my bacon on that one.

Time Machine I have yet to try. I need to buy a new external HDD. It would be interesting to see somebody try and track drives sales with the Leopard release. I’m betting Time Machine will cause a little surge in sales.

Spaces I’m just getting used to. I think they will be more useful on the laptop than the iMac. Although, depending on how it plays with WoW, kat might find it very handy.

The other 8 trillion features that I haven’t seen or used are all awesome and well worth the upgrade, or something like that.

MT Upgrade Complete

2007-10-20T17:47:20Z

Wow. What can I say, other than the MT 4.01 upgrade was completely worth it? I run on Dreamhost because I’m cheap and I understand the Pick Any Two rule. My first attempt at upgrading to MT 4 went down in flames. Entry rebuilds would die (get killed actually) before they could complete. Basically, I couldn’t do anything to the entire site. So, that sucked. The site just stagnated as I waited for things to magically fix themselves. Whatever they fixed in 4.01 did the trick.

Thank you Six Apart.

I can now go back to procrastinating about revamping Vertical Hold.

As always, you can find “fresh content” at tumblr.

Update: Okay. Things are a tiny bit fubar right now. Going from v3 to v4 templates is, well, interesting. Things other than the main index will be screwy until I can hammer out the kinks.

Update 2: Wow. I think I’m just rusty. But the publishing system has changed dramatically. This might be what I’m looking for.

False Advertising

2007-09-25T04:52:01Z

Some of you know that I did a session at JA-SIG titled 'Lessons Learned from Rails Development.' It went over pretty well. Some of the feedback was for "more technical details."

Friday I gave the same talk to CNet in San Francisco. Unfortunately it was during their normal "Friday Tech Training" time. This talk is not a tech training. You can take a lot of topic to go into more detail away from this talk (and thankfully I did see a few folks scribbling furiously at the right times).

You cannot go into sufficient technical detail in a 45 minute talk unless you constrain yourself to a ridiculously narrow topic. I'm serious. You might be able to get some good technical info about Migrations in 45 minutes. But you would be hard pressed. It would be hard to deliver outside a lab environment.

So, to the folks that were mislead about the nature of my talk, I apologize. I hope the funny photos made up for having to sit through an hour of me talking.

Getting Traffic

2007-08-08T13:55:03Z

It's very hard. It's taken over 3 years for this site to get ~200 readers (not page views) a day. Even then, it's mostly spiders scurrying around on the internets, sucking up all the content they can find. I guess some of them must be spambots or something more nefarious.

Anyway, just another time to plug my content on tumblr. Maybe MT 4 will be as easy to use as tumblr for those one off photos from your phone that you don't want to post on Flickr or that crazy quote that you wanted to stick somewhere but didn't have time to give any context.

We'll see.

Analog Twitter

2007-08-07T03:41:19Z

Safari 3 Beta and GMail

2007-08-02T06:30:24Z

If you're having problems sending e-mail in GMail when using Safari 3 Beta, try logging out and logging back in.

Tumblr

2007-08-01T05:46:56Z

I tried a number of tumble log packages before finding tumblr and none of them ever really captured my attention. I could never find anything that could give me the ability to produce something like Anarchia (which if you don't follow, you should start immediately). But tumblr made all those failed experiments fade away into the haze that is my long-term memory.

It gives me a place to put all those camera phone pix that I don't want to upload to Flickr.

It gives me a place to put link that I don't want to put into delicious.

It lets me just post quotes from web pages. And by "web pages" I mean Fake Steve.

It does all this with what can only be described as a magic bookmarklet, without which tumblr would be just another "web 2.0" site that I would quickly abandon.