anaya
By anders pearson 22 Oct 2002
i would be derelict in my duties if i didn’t publicly congratulate cristian and his wife on their new addition.
blood
By anders pearson 21 Oct 2002
tried to give blood today, but they sent me away because my pulse was too high. i think i just have a higher metabolism than normal. any time anyone’s checked my pulse, it’s been really fast, my normal body temperature is closer to 99.5 than 98.6, and i seem to be able to eat huge amounts of food without gaining any weight.
<p>sister was down visiting for the weekend. we basically drank a lot of beer, watched some movies, and hung out. on saturday we went to a nice party at <a href="http://www.cynthialawson.com/">cynthia</a>’s apartment. on sunday we wandered around chinatown a bit.</p> doko?
By jp 20 Oct 2002
has anyone heard from tuck since he went back to china?
carjacking
By emile 20 Oct 2002
friday night i parked on the riverway in boston, between a “live parking” sign with an arrow pointing away from my car, and a ramp, which had plenty of clearance. i went out with my lady friend, and upon return, there was another car parked where mine had been. after a call or two, i discovered that i had been towed for parking in a live parking zone, which i wasnt. but as they already had my car, and wouldnt give it back without 95$ i was pretty much fucked. they also towed me to the opposite end of the tobin bridge, meaning i either forked out another 4$ in tolls, or chug through downtown traffic for an hour. how is this shit legal? oh thats right, boston is a fucking corrupt pile of human waste. i guess they werent happy enough robbing me on the tolls leveraged against the metrowest, but nope. 95$ carjacking courtesy of some nightstick straddling pig fucker tagging a bonus for quota. all of the sudden i remember why i hate cops. if there were any clean ones, i’d be a happy camper. but untill then its the simple fact that they carry guns to augment their lack of self esteem, and i am a pacifist. not much of a toss up. so now i get to work all weekend to try to catch my budget up to the bullshit carjacking of friday. and if anyone of you can explain to me how stealing someones car and refusing to give it back without a hundred bucks is anywhere short of justification for a distaste for fuckwit cops, id like to hear it. maybe ill go take some photos of the parking space and the sign that doesnt say its illegal. then i could either throw them away or send them to the city of boston, both having the same effect because no one gives a fuck.
Badly Drawn Boy
By Mark Boudreau 18 Oct 2002
For those of you who don’t know who Badly Drawn Boy (aka Damon Gough) is, find your favorite MP3 service and download these three songs: Once Around the Block, Stone on the Water, and Pissing in the Wind which all appeared on BDB’s first album, The Hour of the Bewilderbeast. Those songs will give you a good idea about what BDB is all about. He’s a songwriter. He writes pop rock music, although when I use the word pop, I mean it like how Paul McCartney writes pop songs, not pop in the way you’d use it to describe ‘Nsync.
<p>Well, the whole reason I bring this up is because <span class="caps">BDB</span> played at the 9:30 club last night and I was in attendence. I guess you could call it a concert, but many times during the opening show of his new US tour, it seemed more like a dress rehearsal. He has a new album coming out on Nov. 5, which is great, but also unfortunate, because all the new songs he played were unfamiliar to the crowd, which, Damon noted, made it tough for everyone. During the first 45 minutes of the show, the band wasn’t very comfortable for various reasons (A bad harmonica, songs that had never been played live, songs that Damon decided to experiment with on stage, etc). The last hour and a half of the two plus hour set, however, saw the band start to come together and saw the more recognizable <span class="caps">BDB</span> songs surface, which ended up making everyone happy. I’d be really interested to see <span class="caps">BDB</span> again at the tail end of this tour, to see how they refine the songs over a good bit of touring. Overall though, he was engaging and the songs were great, though many of the layers that you find in his recorded music get lost in a noisy club, but the essence of the songs stayed true and made it all worthwhile.</p> fibre
By anders pearson 17 Oct 2002
when i bought my desktop machine a little over 3 years ago, it came with an onboard yamaha soundcard that, at the time, didn’t have any linux support. for a couple months or so i just lived without sound.
by november or so of that year, i’d gotten pretty tired of not being able to listen to my mp3 collection. but, being an extremely poor student, i couldn’t exactly spend a lot of money on a new soundcard. i got about the cheapest one i could find, an ISA soundblaster 16, for about $12. all i had for speakers at that point were a couple little computer speakers so it really wasn’t that bad a setup. the card has served me faithfully ever since.
a year ago, when i moved into my apartment and actually had a bit of money to spare, i bought myself a very nice, high quality surround sound receiver and speaker system. so at this point, to listen to mp3s, i was taking the output of a headphone jack on a $12 sound card and running it into the input of a $600 receiver.
eventually i got a big hard-drive, ripped my entire CD collection, and filled the rest with music gotten from my <a href=”http://www.emusic.com/“>emusic.com</a> subscription. now i’d turned the computer into the centerpiece of my entertainment system. virtually all listening to music in my apartment was through the computer, and hence, through that $12 sound card and cheap 1/8” to RCA converter connecting it to the stereo.
last week i finally smartened up. started doing some research into cards with optical SPDIF outputs (since my receiver has an input) and eventually selected the <a href=”http://www.digit-life.com/articles/zoltrixpro6/“>Nightingale 6</a>. it was reasonably inexpensive, had optical SPDIF (without requiring a full drive bay like some of the creative labs cards), and advertised full linux support (this was confirmed on some linux mailing lists).
it came in the mail yesterday. installation was almost too easy. i stuck the card in, compiled the <a href=”http://www.alsa-project.org/“>ALSA</a> driver for it and it worked. well, the analog output worked immediately. i was unable to get the digital output working until i realized that that digital output channel was muted by default.
so now my setup is vastly improved. i’ve got a perfect, distortion free link straight from the media player on my computer to a high quality digital receiver. life is good.
huh. did someone have a bad day?
By lani 15 Oct 2002
got this in my browser. i imagine some pissed of technician taking it out on a little known error. heh heh heh.
<p>—</p>— Unfortunately, Microsoft has added a clever new
— “feature” to Internet Explorer. If the text in
— an error’s message is “too small”, specifically
— less than 512 bytes, Internet Explorer returns
— its own error message. Yes, you can turn that
— off, but <strong>surprise</strong> it’s pretty tricky to find
— buried as a switch called “smart error
— messages” That means, of course, that many of
— Resin’s error messages are censored by default.
— And, of course, you’ll be shocked to learn that
— <span class=”caps”>IIS</span> always returns error messages that are long
— enough to make Internet Explorer happy. The
— workaround is pretty simple: pad the error
— message with a big comment to push it over the
— five hundred and twelve byte minimum. Of course,
— that’s exactly what you’re reading right now.
—
Satan Oscillate my metallic sonatas
By Chris Williams 14 Oct 2002
OK, so upon reading my last post, it dawned on me that the first line actaully was moderately congruous with the remainder of the message. Hooray for serendipity. In the interests of veracity, here’s the real story…
<p>So I was a few sheets to the wind a few nights past when I sent an e-mail out to a former significant other o’ mine. ‘Twas her birthday and all, and we hadn’t spoken in about a year. That was my Caesar-ish Rubicon quip. The fact that it blended in so wonderfully with my present employer’s ignorance of my skills just made things a tad more ironic. </p>
<p>Thppt.</p>
<p>One of these days, I’m gonna make a stone cold sober report…</p> the staxxx
By anders pearson 14 Oct 2002
last night, comedy central showed a movie called ‘Porn n Chicken’. quality-wise, it was about what you’d expect from “comedy central’s first feature-length film”.
but it was filmed at <a href=”http://www.columbia.edu/“>columbia</a>. living in new york, you get used to having to detour around film crews. at columbia, we probably get more than our fair share of filming (eg, parts of Spiderman were filmed here). but actually seeing this movie explains some of the stranger things we saw out our office window this summer. like two people wearing chicken masks and nothing else running back and forth on the south lawn with security chasing them.
the plot basically involves a bunch of students who decide to film their own ivy league porn movie. they film it in the library after hours and called it ‘the StaXXX’. i found this pretty amusing because my office is in the library. they have no idea…
dots
By anders pearson 12 Oct 2002
the Pink Dots were amazing.
<p>just four people playing in a small club, but they manage to sound as big as an orchestra. since their music ranges from industrial to goth to psychedelia to folk music, they tend to draw a diverse crowd. kids with tattoos, studded leather clothes, mohawks and excessive facial piercings came with their moms, who seemed just as excited about the show. </p>
<p>the opening act, Origami Galactica, was mediocre ambient stuff. pretty boring to watch. he almost redeemed himself at the end by taking a hacksaw to a bass guitar, but even that didn’t sound quite as interesting as you’d think.</p>