Monthly Archive for August, 2002

Would anyone even notice if the Freedom Canary stopped chirping?

Published
by
Benjy
on Tuesday August 27, 2002
in Berkeley, Government and Politics
. 11 Comments

I've got a little ritual I wanted to share: On campus, there is a Free Speech Monument. "This soil and the airspace extending above it shall not be a part of any nation and shall not be subject to any entity's jurisdiction," it says. And every time I walk across Sproul Plaza, I walk straight towards that monument, and go out of my way to walk around it.

The freedom that that monument embodies is important to me, and I don't want to waste it with random foot traffic. I want to save the freedom for when I need it, for some moment when I need to stand in an ungoverned circle of earth and say something people don't want to let me to. Seeing everyone else arbitrarily step all over that monument is just a sign to me of how much people take their freedom of speech for granted, and how little they actually think about it.

It's good that people can take our freedom for granted, but that doesn't mean they should. If we don't think about it regularly, how are we going to notice if it's taken from us piece by piece? A Freedom Canary?

10.2 + FruitMenu = Unhappy Powerbook

Published
by
Benjy
on Wednesday August 21, 2002
in Mac OS X and Software
. 1 Comment

As a warning, if you're upgrading to OS X 10.2 and you're running Unsanity's FruitMenu, you should definitely uninstall FruitMenu before doing the upgrade. FruitMenu caused me a lot of mysterious issues that took me about an hour to figure out the source of. In particular, contextual menus anywhere would crash the application in question, and OmniWeb's favorites tool bar folders would crash OmniWeb. Since uninstalling FruitMenu, all has been well, though I do anticipate a 10.2 compatible version.

More on 10.2 when I'm less busy... The short version of it is that it's just a little bit faster everywhere, but Mail and the Finder are significantly better. Mac Help, however, has become a hog that takes 4 minutes to start up.

Later: FruitMenu has been updated, and is good to go on 10.2.

Unlimited Sunshine 2002

Published
by
Benjy
on Sunday August 11, 2002
in Berkeley, Concerts, Music and iPod
. 2 Comments

Last night I was at the Unlimited Sunshine concert at Berkeley's Greek Theater, and I had a great time, despite a few little issues here and there. Here's a brief rundown of the the bands.

  • Kinky - This band was a lot of fun. Their music would probably be a lot of fun at a dance club. We had a lot of fun commenting on their bass player, who spent at least half their set squatting in some form or another. We decided he had a fear of heights.
  • Modest Mouse - Huh, I didn't care for them much. They just seemed kind of angry and thrashy. The lead singer was complaining about having a cold and losing his voice throughout. There wasn't much to move to in their music, either, so at best, even the fans of the band were just sitting around bobbing their heads.
  • De La Soul - Hip Hop isn't exactly my thing, but I was able to enjoy this nonetheless. It was nice to have something to move to after Modest Mouse, and I actually enjoyed De La more than Modest Mouse. There was a fair amount of discussion amongst the audience along the lines of "I wonder what De La Soul thought of the audience? I wonder what it must be like to be De La Soul on this tour?" One of the guy said ~"I have personal authority from Cake to say that, if you guys don't get into it, they won't come on." Which made sense, considering that Cake asked for a fair amount of crowd participation as well.
  • The Flaming Lips - As tyler said upon seeing them take the stage, "Crazy motherfuckers." Even if you didn't like their music, you probably could have enjoyed this sequence of the show, because there was so much going on besides the music. Seeing them live motivated me to dig out the two Flaming Lips albums I own to put onto my iPod, though, to see what I think of them seven years later.
  • Cake - Hey, this was fun. They were headlining for a reason, eh? Anyway, the one single complaint I had was that John McCrea was perhaps a little overfond of his rattle instrument. By the time the encore rolled around, I couldn't help but laugh every time he grabbed that thing from the ground.

    Highlights for me included The Distance, Comfort Eagle, Sad Songs and Waltzes, and Sheep Go To Heaven.

    Other people enjoyed Stickshifts and Safetybelts a lot, but I've never cared much for that one. Other songs played included Short Skirt/Long Jacket, Frank Sinatra, Comanche, Guitar, Jesus Wrote a Blank Check, and the encore ended with Jolene. The set was perhaps a little short, but it was definitely enough, because after mostly standing around for about six hours, I was getting pretty tired.

    The encore opened with this introduction: ~"I've been borderline forcibly coerced into playing a song that I don't think I know all the lyrics to... But we'll try it anyway. This is another unprofessional thing that Cake does. Not only do we not use setlists, but we play songs we can't." The song in question was a cover of Black Sabbath's War Pigs, and he did indeed fail to sing the line "in the fields the bodies burning as the war machine keeps turning" repeatedly.
  • The Hackensaw Boys - Okay, so after Kinky we were sitting down, with our backs against the wall in front of the stage, so we totally didn't see these boys coming. We stood up and turned around when the crowd cheered, and The Hackensaw Boys were literally right in front of us. At the sudden sight of an eight-piece blue-grass band, tyler exclaimed "Where the fuck did they come from?" Anyway, there was no spontaneous square dancing (as Lauren suggested happened at the Seattle show), but it would have been impossible for me not to enjoy these guys. They played before Modest Mouse, before De La Soul, and before Cake, and were definitely one of the highlights of the evening.

LinkStew Digest, August 9th, 2002 Edition

Published
by
Benjy
on Friday August 9, 2002
in Alcohol, Beer, Berkeley, Berkeley: City, Digest, Politics, Star Trek, Television, They Might Be Giants and iPod
. 1 Comment

Here are entries that I was going to write in the last week, but were aborted for one reason or another:

  • Mention that any of Chimay's beers have surpassed my previous favorite beer, but in particular, the Chimay Blue (aka Chimay Grande Réserve) is my new favorite. It's a nice dark Belgian Ale with a smooth texture and complex flavor, and it's easy to drink despite its 9% ABV. Of course, it's a little too expensive to drink very regularly, but what do you expect from something brewed by Belgian Monks? It's still damn good, though.
  • A discussion of Berkeley's proposed law on requiring local businesses to brew only Fair Trade coffee, and attempting to draw out a corollary on how this could potentially apply to beer. Aborted because I couldn't make said corollary into a joke that made sense.
  • I was going to comment that with Star Trek X apparently being "A Generation's Final Journey," that means we won't be getting a Star Trek movie with Q. Then I was going to make a joke that if it meant we had to wait until Star Trek Q for Q's movie, then maybe it was alright, because the thought of that many Star Trek movies makes me ill. The joke died, however, when I rememembered that there is no Roman Numeral Q. D'oh.
  • Discussion of the disturbing discovery that They Might Be Giants songs are 18.71% percent of my music 3875 song music library (though only 12.73% of the duration of my library). NIN was a distant 2nd, making up a mere 3.4% of my songs. Perhaps more disturbingly, though, is that different versions of a mere 4 TMBG songs (Istanbul, Particle Man, They Might Be Giants, and Birdhouse In Your Soul) make up 1% of my entire music collection! What's even worse about this is that there's only one version of Istanbul, Particle Man, and They Might Be Giants I really like, but I keep the rest around because I don't want to delete a song out of the middle of a bootleg or other collection. At least I listen to at least half the variants of Birdhouse that I have. Anyway, the point is that if you had any doubt that I'm a TMBG fanatic, you now have incontrovertible evidence.
  • Yesterday's iPod software update made me a very happy camper, because now my iPod will update my iTunes library with updated Play Counts and Last Played times, so my iPod listening habits can be taken into consideration when creating smart playlists.
  • TMBG is going to be on Conan O'Brien again on Wednesday, August 14th. By which I mean the will actually air on the 14th, as in the one that starts 30 minutes after the 13th ends. Hopefully they don't play Robot Parade like they did last time. Four of Two would be a much more reasonable choice, I think.
  • While reading alt.music.tmbg last night, I came across a link to this interview, wherein John Flansburgh and John Linnell interview each other. It's very amusing and very revealing, I think. They talk about everything from other's perceptions of their music to their high school science teacher to emotion killing bacteria.
  • The guy who cuts my hair (which happened today) looks totally like Tom Cavanagh (Who plays Ed on the TV show Ed).
  • And finally, if I weren't completely busy with work, I'd totally be at TMBG's 20th anniversay concert next week in Central Park. ::sigh::

So now that you know what I would have written about, aren't you glad I didn't write about it at length?

YAFHW

Published
by
Benjy
on Tuesday August 6, 2002
in Irritations, Mac OS X, UNIX and Vocation
. 1 Comment

So at work, I've been doing a lot of work with Mac OS X's NetInfo database. In particular, I'm generating password and group files to import into the database via the niload command. Since I wanted "old" accounts to be deleted from my OS X clients, I looked at man niload, and found the following option:

    -d: Delete entries which are in the directory, but not in the input.

Exactly what I wanted, right?

Heh, after I spent an hour tonight beating my head against `niload -d` not deleting entries that weren't in the input, I absent mindedly typed `niload --help,` and here's what I saw (emphasis mine):

    -d: delete (override) existing entries from NetInfo when the input contains a duplicate name

    -m: merge new values into NetInfo when the input contains a duplicate name

    Note: only one of -d or -m may be used. If neither is given, existing entries in NetInfo will be unchanged if there are duplicate names in the input

Gah! Inconsistent documentation is the bestest! So this means that I've got to iterate through each entry currently in the NetInfo database, and if that entry isn't in the in the input (and isn't some form of "local" account), then use `niutil destroy ...,` which makes me sad.

YAFHW = Yet Another Hour Wasted.

Pondering how to conceptually organize the Berkeley Bloggers list.

Published
by
Benjy
on Saturday August 3, 2002
in Web
. Closed

Today in my referral logs for Berkeley Blogs, there was a yahoo search for "bloggers." Near the top of the results were NYC Bloggers and London Bloggers, and Berkeley Blogs was a little further down the list.

First of all, this just served to remind me that I'm not going to have time to enhance the Berkeley Blogs page any time soon. Not only is it August, but I've also severely overcommitted myself for at least the next month.

Both the NYC site and the London site are so well done that it makes Berkeley Blogs seem like a pathetic little disorganized list. Which it basically is... Hell, it's not even stored in a database. Anyway, I'm embarrassed to have something I maintain in the company of those two sites.

Second, those two sites got me wondering how I could better organize the Berkeley Blogs list. Both NYC and London Bloggers are organized by subway stop, which is a tremendously spiffy way to visualize things, and it left me longing for a similiar tactic for Berkeley.

The biggest problem with Berkeley is that students come and go so often, so spatial organizations would quickly become outdated as people leave the city. Lots of people on the Berkeley Blog list right now don't even live in Berkeley anymore, but I'm not about to remove them. They're Berkeley Bloggers by association. For example, Berkeley has shaped who I am and how I blog more than anything else, and so at least some part of me will always be a Berkeley Blogger even once I'm out of here next summer.

So one thought was to just offer a whole bunch of checkboxes for "association with Berkeley," including "Current Cal student," "Cal Alumni," "Berkeley Resident," "Former Berkeley Resident," and so on... The biggest problem with that is trying to figure out how much granularity to build in. Certainly Cal would get several categories, because it's so hard to ignore, but would what about other schools? I'm afraid that with Berkeley being the polarized place that it is, I'd offend someone by overlooking some tiny group.

Anyway, these are just quick thoughts on a busy Saturday afternoon as I eat dinner before I get back to work. If anyone has any other ideas for how to better organize Berkeley Bloggers, please share them.

Music on my mind.

Published
by
Benjy
on Thursday August 1, 2002
in Books, Games, LinkStew and Music
. 3 Comments

So, in case you can't tell, I've totally had music on my mind for the last couple of weeks. I think that's because music is the only form of entertainment I've had time to worry about with all the time I've been spending at work. I can listen to music while working, but books and games tend to suck me in much more with that infernal contraption innocently called "plot."

In the last couple of weeks there have been at least half a dozen music related posts I didn't write. There were several shelved reviewlets about TMBG's No!. There were my ramblings that basically amounted to me being excited about the Cake concert I'm going to on the 10th. There was the one about my sudden realization that I like Radiohead much more than I knew. And there were several others.

For some reason, focusing that heavily on music didn't feel right, so I curtailed that line of discussion before it got even more out of hand.

Besides which, August is now upon me, which means that my time will now be even shorter. So sorry for the disappearing act, but at least I feel less guilty now that I've explained what's going on.

Enjoy August y'all, because I'm certainly not going to have time to.