The Odds Are One

Um...

2008-05-08T09:55:00.001-07:00

Can somebody explain this to me?

That's "Mr. Nerd Gnome" To You

2008-04-29T12:26:00.000-07:00

We're in Wired this (where "this" = next) month. Therein we are referred to as "the nerd gnomes in Beacon Hill." This is, in fact, an improvement. At the beginning of my career in software I worked at That Software Giant in Redmond™ on their initial foray into the internet, MSN 1.0. Wired did an article in which they likened we happy few original web developers to the million monkeys typing randomly on tiny keyboards. So now I am, professionally speaking, a gnome. The metaphors grow ever more humanoid.

There isn't a ton in this article that I haven't already covered here at The Odds Are One over the last couple of years (oh please, Wired: web services hype is soooo 2006). I haven't yet mentioned Amazon DevPay in this space, which is weird on account of in most of the Web Service things I announce the launch of I am only peripherally involved, whereas DevPay took up my entire life until it launched last December. DevPay is a billing application wherein you the developer create a software product that runs on Amazon's Web Services, then we sign up and bill your customers on your behalf. The concept is actually pretty cool, and like the rest of Web Services, if it turns out to be a killer app, the thing it's going to kill is venture capital.

Amazon (and Google, Yahoo, and IBM, who aren't wasting any time getting into the space either) is taking away the big upfront IT costs: you want to run a business that's going to need four high-powered servers just to get going? You don't need to spend $10,000 on hardware and $100,000 a year on a sysadmin just to get off the ground. You rent the space from Amazon for $0.40 an instance/hour and $0.10 a Gigabyte/month. When you want to get bigger, you rent more space (AWS even gives you a volume discount). We are hoping, it seems, to provide the big guns for the revolution, and then to watch the little guys fire them off.

It Came From 1977

2008-03-02T18:09:00.008-08:00

The Odds Are One and The Calculus Affair are pleased to announce the release of bad quarto*, a ten and one-half song E.P. recorded for the 2008 RPM Challenge (which has, as will be noted by those of you possessing clever and new-fangled calendar-reading skills, just ended).

The full album will be released in approximately twelve lines of text. Here now is the advance single from the album. Click play. You know you want to.

The Calculus Affair quoteth now from our liner notes as regards bad quarto*:

This album is composed entirely of songs about or pertaining to plays by William Shakespeare. In addition to being The Calculus Affair's effort for the 2008 RPM Challenge, it is also an E.P. which heralds the release of a future album of epic scope: one song for each of Shakespeare's plays (37 or 38, depending upon whom you read). If you are a fan of The Calculus Affair, and you enjoy excessively long albums that sound like they fell out of 1977, keep an eye peeled.

And now, the long (for an entirely abstract and arbitrary definition of the word, "long") awaited (for a definition of "awaited" etc. etc.) downloadable mp3 version of bad quarto*.

Duke Of The Stratosphere

Every Day

Bone & Matter

Rude Mechanicals

The Archer

Prince Of Tyre

The Mob

Hell & Night

Q.E. I

Exit, Pursued by a Bear/Your Mother's a Statue

Coda (Duke Of The Stratosphere)

This EP also comes with the fun built-in game, "Guess Which Play The Song Goes With." This game may or may not actually be fun. As with all music by The Calculus Affair, we remind you of the following: Unauthorized duplication is strictly encouraged. We hope you enjoy.

OaO Presents: Hilarity for Nerd Sportsfan Rockstar Wannabes™

2008-02-13T14:26:00.002-08:00

Picabo Street, if I may digress again, is my second favorite winter Olympics subject, after curling. In my musician days I made up a song inspired by her name: "Peekaboo Street." My baby lived on it. It was writing songs like that that made me the man I am today: a former musician.

-King Kaufman

OaO Presents: Hilarity for Nerds™

2008-02-06T13:56:00.001-08:00

From my friend Tom:

I failed my saving throw against charisma and became a die-hard Obama supporter.

10 Gadfly Things

2008-01-23T10:15:00.000-08:00

I like this meme. I'm doin' it too. Ten things I've done that you probably haven't:

Played guitar with Jon Auer
Attended 3 months of public school held in a language I didn't speak at the time
Flagged down a British Rail train from a platform in order to get it to stop and pick me up
Acted on stage with Hilary Swank
Experienced the Ballmer Peak (during which I wrote a script to keep a fulfillment-center mechanical sorter running after the program that was supposed to run it had crashed)
Written a series of comic books
Written a role-playing game based on the character from those comic books, complete with 30-page rule-book
Recorded an album in the month of February (and will again)
Appeared on a PBS Show
Been at the Trevi Fountain on New Year's Eve

"Yes, God forbid that while talking to 60,000 public school students, the President should appear smart."

2008-01-09T11:27:00.000-08:00

Barack Obama is making me a little sad that we don't have a tv (a feeling which arises during the baseball post season and at just about no other time ever). I think this is because I'm pretty sure his speeches are written by Aaron Sorkin. He speaks of "workers who organized, women who reached for the ballot, a president who chose the moon as our new frontier, and a king who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the promised land." He promised last night, "We will remember that something is happening on the streets of America, that we are one people, that we are one nation, and that together we can begin the next chapter in America's story with the three words ... Yes, we can." It makes me weepy.

But my question is this: is falling for Obama because of the poetry, because he's so good with the words, really any less shallow than voting for someone because he's young and attractive or because he looks like a cowboy and what's more 'merican than a cowboy or because he talks stupid just like me or because he's someone I'd like to have a beer with? Beers, cowboys, and stupid people do nothing for me (young and attractive I consider on a case by case basis), but then I wasn't the target audience on those, but boys with words...well he had me at "audacity."

And while I would argue that facility with words suggests other qualities like intelligence which might come in handy when running a country (but then I teach facility with words for a living and Obama didn't write his anyway), it could just be a question of what gets your rocks off. Still, if the folks who know about these things (myself, I wouldn't have guessed that stupid=electable or that speaking French=unfit to serve as president, so shows what I know) think that poetry is more marketable this season than dumb cowboy, already I feel we've won one. (About damn time too).

P.S. Bonus points for naming the West Wingepisode that lends the post title.

--mtg

The Calculus Affair Rides Again

2008-01-08T22:09:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure how long it will be up there before it's replaced in the rotation, but the Calculus Affair's contribution to "Beautiful Escape: A Tribute To The Posies" is the current track in the player on their MySpace page as of this moment. So, you know, check it out and stuff before it goes away. The album is scheduled for release from Burning Sky Records sometime in 2008. You should, like, buy it.

Merry All That

2007-12-25T00:29:00.000-08:00

This is what I used to listen to on Christmas Eve as a young lad growing up in what was, practically speaking, Canada. It is quite a listen, and you should check it out.

On the one hand, thinking of this thing that I used to listen to on CBC Radio on Christmas Eves long ago and being able to immediately have it is the greatest thing about modern life. On the other hand, it was nice to happen upon these things by accident, too.

Amazon SimpleDB

2007-12-19T10:30:00.000-08:00

Hey look, I'm blogging again! Amazon Web Services launched (or rather, announced) Amazon SimpleDB Service last Thursday. My part in the launching of particular web services is usually pretty minor--in this case they came to me on Wednesday and we had the following conversation:

Them: Hey, can you make it so that nobody can sign up for Amazon SimpleDB?

Me: Um. Yes. Yes, I can do that.

(I suspect that this is not funny to anyone except me, to whom it is hilarious). SimpleDB is a service about which (for some definition of "a lot," "people," and "excited,") a lot of people are excited, so for the first time we've launched a service that you can't actually sign up for yet (go here to see that, indeed, I made it so you couldn't sign up for it) in order to, as far as I can tell, build up the hype first.

I get all of my practice explaining these things these days by telling Mrs. Transient Gadfly about them, so here is the mtg-approved explanation of why SimpleDB is pretty cool. A relational database is a collection of tables of information that are linked in some way. For instance, say (utterly hypothetically) that you teach some level of college. You might want to have some information about your students. You'd create a table called students, with columns like "First Name," "Last Name," "Birthdate," "Address," and so on. You'd also probably want to create some sort of unique identifier, like "Student Id," since different students could have the same birthday, or be identical twins who are both named "Chad" because their parents are debilitatingly insane. Then you'd create a table called "Grades" that has a column for the name of the assignment, the grade on that assignment, and also a column for Student Id to match the grades to the student. This makes your database a relational one--the tables show information, but there's a way to relate them, since the Student Id in the Students table corresponds to the one in the Grades table. Now you can do a query, which involves going to your database and typing things like this:

select s.first_name, s.last_name, g.letter_grade from students s, grades g where s.student_id = g.student_id and g.assignment_name = 'response paper 1';

The query above a simple example of "SQL" ("Structured Query Language," pronounced, "Sequel,") and it's the standard language used for getting information out of relational databases . Both humans and computer programs that want information from this kind of database use it, it's pretty flexible and you can do a lot of things with it. Also, it's more or less a sentence: you can read it and, while you might not quite speak that language, you can get the gist of what it says.

Trying to run a database like this has a lot of problems, where "has a lot of problems," is code for, "costs a frickin' crapload of money." First of all, you usually have to get somebody to design one for you, for a definition of "somebody" equal to "a person who makes upwards of $150 an hour...."

Calvino: Do you think TG is over-using this, "noun, for a defintion of noun that equals something different than the generally accepted definition of noun" construction?

The Stoat: Yes, for a definition of, "yes," that means, "the fall of Roman Imperialism."

...followed by the cost of the hardware and the cost of maintaining it and keeping it backed up for when your server's hard drive dies, all of which tends to be expensive. So while there's pretty much no way to get around this general headache and cost if you happen to be a large and/or complicated organization, it's a kerfuffle of a problem for small-to-medium businesses that need to keep relational data and run queries, one which has, in the past, led otherwise perfectly sane people to use Microsoft Access.

Much like Amazon S3 lets you offload the responsibility of making sure your data is correctly backed up and always available over to Amazon, Amazon SimpleDB does the same thing with your database. SimpleDB doesn't reach the complexity of a relational database that you'd query via SQL, but in this case that might be a good thing. It doesn't require you to employ a database administrator, and you don't have to worry about your server crashing. As with all Web Services, it's limited in speed by the pipe you have going from your machine to the interwebs, but for small to medium applications that's not really a problem anymore.

cult of authorship

2007-10-29T00:27:00.000-07:00

here are some things:

1) i went to graduate school during most of the second half of the 90s. so i know the author is dead. my students say things like, "we can't read it that way because that's not what shakespeare intended." i usually say: how do you know what shakespeare intended? but in my more honest moments, i say: who cares? and i mean that lovingly. i mean to say what shakespeare intended matter less than what you learn and think yourself.

2) i hate the red sox.

3) nonetheless (re: #1 not #2), i am having this week a little love affair with richard russo (who lives in maine so, for all i know, might be a red sox fan and who, for that matter, grew up in new york -- albeit state, not city -- and so could even be a yankee fan which would be worse though perhaps not tonight). we went to see him read on tuesday night, and i felt about being in the same room with him the same way i feel about seeing neil finn in concert. richard russo, i am here to tell you, is very much alive. and i wanted to touch him and/or cook him dinner as i do all people i am having worship of (okay, really neil finn and richard russo are it, but only because i have very high standards).

i am doing a bad job of making a point here, so i will start a new paragraph and maybe that will help. my points are these:

a) i asked richard russo a question when he took questions. i never do this for a number of reasons, but one, surely, is the author is dead, so who cares what he thinks. but people were mostly not asking questions or not asking good ones, so then i raised my hand and asked a good question -- the best question of the night (though, let us admit that, as much as anything else, i ask questions about books for a living) -- and he blushed and i blushed and he laughed and i laughed and everyone laughed, and i was so nervous and adrenalin-rushy i could barely talk. then i stood in line so he could sign my book.

b) however, richard russo is my colleague. the man reminds me of a college english teacher because (until he won a pulitzer prize) he was one. he reminds me of my exdepartment chair. he reminds me of the people i work with and the people i read and write with. he is not to be worshipped, not because he is dead, but because we just work together, so whatever.

c) holy crap is richard russo a good novelist. and a nice guy.

d) so, to sum up, not someone to idolize because he's just a colleague AND he's an author who should be dead, but still i want to make him soup. there is something to this, but it will have to wait until another day because am i grading papers? no, i am blogging. and is richard russo grading my papers for me while i blog about him? no (though probaby not because he's dead but more likely because at least the third best thing about winning a pulitzer prize must be not having to grade papers anymore).

--mtg

Death of the Rock Star

2007-10-15T11:59:00.000-07:00

From Stylus Magazine:

The lower tier support structures have splintered as the kids who used to save their cash for college rock become ragingly omnivorous: your average hard-working indie band now competes with Justin Timberlake, Thai pop, and some Nonesuch Explorer disc that David Byrne namechecked on his blog. They also have to compete with 100 years’ worth of records that are better than anything they’ll ever make. We have endless choices, and almost none of them see the spotlight. But the real problem is that artists chase the spotlight in the first place. And anything short of superstardom looks like a consolation prize. Consider a different model: cooking. Cooks aren’t rock stars. A few turn into international celebrities, but they’re the exception. Most chefs run a kitchen and feed people ten feet away. In big cities or backwater towns, nobody looks down on you if you’re feeding them well. And there’s plenty of room for amateurs. Have someone over for dinner, and you’re a civilized host; break out a guitar, and you’re an asshole.

I wonder, as the author of this piece does, if what will happen with the endless and infinite distribution of endless and infinite music by endless and infinite artists will result in music returning to what it was before music could be recorded: the main purview of the musician being the living room.

Four or five months ago when I was thinking about this problem, I decided that the reason people didn't go out wading into the muck of the basement musician to find things worth a listen was that it was just too frickin' hard to filter. I tried with the little music capsule at left to add my own filter to the noise and it lasted about a month before I gave up, and the capsule has been stuck on Grizzly Bear since July (still a great band you should check out, by the way). I'll take it down the next time I'm thinking about it. In any case: individuals' blogs becoming little mini-Pitchforks: Not The Answer.

I don't what the answer is, but I'm pretty sure the Rock Star isn't going away: we need Him or Her for the same reason that we need religion. On the other hand, I am now equally sure that the The Recording is going to kill The Recording Artist. Hey—I should write a song about that.

Cat In A Box Redux, Redux

2007-10-12T16:30:00.000-07:00

So as you might have guessed, I was not the first person to note that an inanimate object can collapse the Wave Function

Analogous effects (to those seen in the Schrödinger's Cat experiment)...have some practical use in quantum computing and quantum cryptography. It is possible to send light that is in a superposition of states down a fiber optic cable. Placing a wiretap in the middle of the cable which intercepts and retransmits the transmission will collapse the wavefunction (in the Copenhagen interpretation, "perform an observation") and cause the light to fall into one state or another.

(Wikipedia). I seem to have not understood the nature of the Wave Function in this particular case--basically the answer seems to be that Geiger Counter has a wave function representing the decay or lack thereof of a particle (and the life of the cat) that's different than the person outside the box who doesn't know jack about the outcome of the experiment until he opens the box. Such is, apparently, a feature of the Copenhagen Interpretation of reality.

In this interpretation of the universe, the experiment just seems a lot less compelling to me, because the Geiger Counter and the human outside the box will never disagree (that is, the Geiger Counter will never report that the particle decayed while the human later opens box and finds the cat alive). Maybe I'm not seeing the point here, but this seems to reduce quantum weirdness at the macro level to "Stuff that's true that you don't know yet."

I don't know why I'm writing this as a blog entry since, I dunno....something.

Cat In A Box, Redux

2007-10-10T22:45:00.001-07:00

See here, here, or here.

It occurs to me just now that the Geiger counter makes the observation. The Geiger counter collapses the wave function. In all interpretations of Schrödinger's cat that I've ever read, the implicit interpretation is that human consciousness is required to make an observation and collapse the wave function. But there's no reason that this should be so--the Geiger counter, just like a human, is a device that responds to stimulus. Its failure to be as complicated as the human observer doesn't disqualify it from being able to make the observation. The wave function collapses before the gas canister is smashed or not smashed. The cat is dead. Or it is alive.

Probably like 200,000 people have had this insight before me, but whatever--I write a frickin' blog. Anyway, that was it. As you were.

Still More Hilarity For Nerds™

2007-10-10T16:59:00.000-07:00

Today's XKCD:

Did you really name your son, "Robert'); DROP TABLE Students;"?

No, really. There's nothing to see here.

The Inquisitivists, Episode 0

2007-10-03T00:04:00.000-07:00

This is a test of SketchCast (tip of the virtual white board pen to Jack's dad), which is a pretty freaking cool piece of technology. Speaking of people who are freaks: me. I am a huge one.

Still working out the kinks in the audio, sorry about that. Also, towards the end I say "fuck," so don't blast this audio in your workplace or nothing.

Something About The Human Condition

2007-09-19T15:38:00.000-07:00

This is one of the first things I ever blogged:

This week (in The Stranger) there's a two page spread, consisting entirely of type that appears to be about .000016 point Times New Roman, from (a man who) appears to have, in the past, claimed to be the reincarnation of Christ....(He's) not on the same plane of existence as I, whereas he's clearly got a lot on his mind and has gone to great lengths to say it, whether anybody else is listening or not (though probably orders of magnitude more people are reading his thoughts than are reading mine these days). (Apparently in the process of writing this entry I have been possessed by the parenthetical-comment making spirit of David Foster Wallace. Sorry about that). (Have you seen that David Foster Wallace wrote a book about infinity? It's like irony is dead. Or something that's like irony, only with more footnoted digressions). I can't understand his symbolism, or metaphors, or what his personal shame is, or what he thinks mine is. But what really is the difference between this Manifesto-Man and somebody else with a lot on their mind, say David Foster Wallace?

It turns out that difference was that he was dying of brain cancer.

UPDATE: Searching for info on this guy (who co-founded Seattle's Essential Baking Company), I found a forum discussion of one of the ads he put into the Stranger. Some highlights:

sickbadthing: Fuck the crazy shit he puts in the ads... has anyone had that fucking bread? The Rosemary Diamante is awesome fucking bread. The FUCKING BREAD IS AMAZING. I just want to talk about the fucking bread, guys. It's good, okay? Gosh.

Violet_DaGrinder: Yeah, I don't care if Osama Bin Fucking Laden were making it, that Rosemary Diamante? That's some good fucking bread. If the beautiful salt on that bread is made from evaporating Jesus's tears, then that's some tasty, tasty pain. On some fucking fantastic bread.

Little Round Mirrors

2007-09-13T14:39:00.000-07:00

Three Songs played on the Canterbury Jukebox, Seattle WA, 09/06/2007:
"Dear Prudence"—The Beatles, The Beatles
"Waiting Room"—Fugazi, Thirteen Songs.
"Everybody Wants To Rule The World"—Tears For Fears, Songs From The Big Chair

I first moved to Seattle eleven years ago. A contingent of my friends from high school had attended the University Of Washington and remained in the city after graduation--we had lots in common in high school but less after college, a trend which continues to this day. I miss them, but this tends to be the way of ones life, I find.

We used to have Sunday brunch at The Canterbury on 15th. It was a smoke-filled dive bar at the time with terrible short-order food, but it was the only place in Seattle you could go with a group that varied in size from five to fifteen and find seats on a Sunday morning. If the brunch group had a ringleader (as it was in high school), it was Josh Rosenfeld. I met Josh when I was fifteen, after he moved to Bellingham from Telluride, and he was absolutely the coolest person I had ever met. He wore untucked dress shirts, ties, and big sneakers. He had huge blond curly hair, and he knew about all the cool indie music there was (Josh is now the head of Barsuk Records, so his coolness is another trend which continues to this day).

Josh also played bass in a band called This Busy Monster, and the first time I saw them play they opened for the band fronted by Sean Nelson, another brunch attendee, called Harvey Danger. I don't go out to see bands much any more (not that I am old or infirm or anything...I dunno, I guess the high school crowd was the one who put me on to good local bands, and I don't see them much), but I did then, and thereafter any time Harvey Danger played I went and saw them. They put out a record. A DJ on KNDD started playing one of the songs, "Flagpole Sitta," some stuff happened, some other stuff happened, and so on.

I had a point about life here, but now I don't know what it was. It was something about listening to the song that shares a title with this post (off the third Harvey Danger album which you can download for free by going here), in which it seems that being part of a band that suddenly broke absolutely huge and came tumbling back down to earth just as suddenly was simultaneously the best and worst thing that ever happened to him. It was something about going to Canterbury again, which is kind of a nice place to hang out now that there's no smoking indoors in Washington State. I think it might be that I'm firmly in my mid-thirties now, and my three-song playlist on the Canterbury jukebox last Thursday is as cool as I ever was, and as cool as I'll ever be.

The Modern World Is An Insane Place, Part 47

2007-09-10T12:14:00.000-07:00

If for some reason you're not on the Amazon Mechanical Turk mailing list, you're probably not aware that right now you could be helping look for Steve Fossett, the American aviator who went missing somewhere over Nevada last week.

As of this writing there are a little over 130,000 unexamined satellite photos of Nevada uploaded to Mechanical Turk, and more appear to be coming from Geo Eye at about the same rate that people are working on them. I just went through about 20 of them, and so far my impression is that Nevada contains a lot of nothing.

That you can search for a pilot missing over Nevada from your desk is pretty insane already. What, to me, is more insane was the one sentence uttered at our weekly operations meeting this morning. We look at graphs to see how our services are performing, and a fellow engineer pointed to a particular point on a particular graph and said, "...and this spike here is from people looking for Steve Fossett."

And there you have...something...in a nutshell: a rather monumental confluence of information, technology, and zeitgeist conveniently translated into one easily digestible data point. We now return you to your regularly scheduled modern life, already in progress.

But Maybe I'm Wrong

2007-09-06T14:38:00.001-07:00

It dawned on me this morning that Fred Thompson is going to be the next President of the United States.

And then, in lieu of re-living the 80's all over again, I will be forced to shoot myself.

Rant of An Aging Hipster

2007-09-04T12:12:00.000-07:00

The Gadflies spent Saturday at the Bumbershoot Music Festival in order to see Crowded House, who opened this year's mainstage festivities. Mainstage at Bumbershoot is a high-school football stadium, with the stage in one end zone. We camped out at the stage an hour before the show started and stood through Crowded House (who rocked), a half hour of setup, and then The Shins (who did not).

Also, apparently I'm old now.

At the beginning of Crowded House's set, the pit (such as it was) was dead. This I could understand—it was the first show of the day, people were standing around waiting around for awhile, and Crowded House's fans are generally our age or older. Crowded House also has 20 years of experience playing large venues, and they soon got the crowd into it. Their set ended, and as we sort of expected, the crowd shifted around a little bit but nobody really went anywhere, as The Shins were coming on in thirty minutes.

Except apparently that's not what happened. I looked down at the Bumbershoot guide in my hand, and looked up again, and all of a sudden we exceeded the age demographic of the crowd by a good 15 years. It was as if, as mtg said, we were in a cartoon room, and they had flipped the floor over so that you were in the same place but with totally different furniture.

(Here I should offer up something about, you know, the nature of people who want to stand at the front of the stage versus the (sane) people who sit 500 yards away in the stands watching from a safe distance. In our recent trip to the UK, mtg and I took an overnight bus from Edinburgh to London; we reached the station and absolutely everyone else on the same bus was college student-aged, they being the only demographic that weighed the economic cost of staying over a night in London or Edinburgh greater than the extreme discomfort of braving seven hours sitting upright in a moving bus. In summary, the Gadflies are kind of crazy people.)

In fact I was kind of excited, because I had not been in a good racous crowd since I went to see Basement Jaxx with Glenn Simpson at the Showbox, and that was a long time ago. mtg was somewhat less excited as she could no longer see and was suffering some claustrophobia, but being that I was now the biggest person in the audience, I was able to maintain a little space for us. The opening synth roll of "Sleeping Lessons" began as the Shins walked out on stage, people cheered, it was all very exciting. "Sleeping Lessons" is the perfect song to open a concert because it has this great moment where the song blows up from ambient into big crunching guitar rock, so I was expecting the crowd of 16-year-olds to do the same thing...

...and they didn't. They just stood there. Then the Shins proceeded to play their show managing to not interact with the audience in any way, such that the audience continued to pretty much just stand there. Moreover they played a set that, excepting an admittedly awesome cover of Pink Floyd's Breathe, was technically perfect but not discernibly different from listening to a Shins CD at home. Eventually, some excitement occurred when some spry members of the youth of America started crowd surfing, and here arrives my next complaint.

ATTENTION YOUTH OF AMERICA: If you are holding up part of the body of a crowd-surfer, DO NOT BODILY SHOVE THE PERSON FORWARD. You have to support him or her until you are sure the next person ahead of you (or behind you or to the side of you, depending on which direction the crowd-surfing flow is going) is ready to receive him or her. CARRY--DO NOT PUSH. That is all.

In conclusion, I would like to say that when I was a lad, if somebody wasn't carted out of the pit in a stretcher, it meant that a shitty band was playing. Also, I walked to school in the snow uphill both ways, and we respected our elders. No, wait...not respected. Held them in deep and profound contempt. That was it.

Hitting The Medium Time

2007-08-20T14:19:00.000-07:00

Hello again. My vacation, strangely bracketed with posts about the profoundly awesome state of the Still-Inexplicably-Microsoft-Dominant Global Software Paradigm, has come to an end. I'm sure you were all destitute without your semi-weekly postings about the philosophical implications of...uh...stuff.

Musical news has transpired during this middle time: whereas before I went on vacation there existed in the world a total of zero (0) compilations featuring songs by The Calculus Affair, there now exist not one, but in fact TWO (2) such CDs. Men Of Luggage appears on The Best Of Sound Aid, a compilation in support of Heifer International (favorite charity of The Gadfly family), which you can buy (or listen to clips, if you like to hear things first) from CDBaby by clicking here. The Man Who Used To Hunt Cougars For Bounty appears smack dab in the middle of Indiescent Exposure, a compilation of artists from the 2007 RPM challenge. In the theoretical world of our imagination, this album comes out on the Hear Music label this fall (in reality, these things are fraught with peril). In the meantime you can stream the album here (you should do this, and you should buy this CD if it ever comes out, because it is a frickin' awesome album) (and not just because it contains a song by me).

Calvino: Why should I purchase either of these CDs? I can already download these two songs for free, and I probably won't really like anything else on either of them.

The Stoat: Caché, my eponymous friend. Ignore the obvious and mundane "it's a good cause," or "you should support the independent musician blah blah blah," arguments—not that they aren't compelling, but they pale in comparison to the associated coolness you will acquire.

Calvino: What are you talking about? Have you read If on a winter's night a traveler? I am already totally cool.

The Stoat: Agreed, but consider the level of coolness you would attain by not only being the author of the greatest meta-novel in the modern literary canon but also being friends with an actual musician. We're no longer talking about just knowing some dude somewhere who records music in his basement. Other people, random people totally unknown to either of you, have taken your friend's music and deemed it, in some way and for some definition of the term, "worthy".

Calvino: But isn't it already too late? How can I differentiate myself from these unwashed masses who are, even now, flocking in to attempt to claim ownership of this associative coolness?

The Stoat: Your coolness was assured from the moment you met in high school/college/glee club/your cousin's Bat Mitzvah. These other people are relative late-comers. You already knew him in the proverbial "when." So of course you have these two compilation albums. And the album he recorded four years ago that he only gave to his close friends that the hoi polloi haven't heard of. And the mp3 demos of a couple of new songs he's working on that he emailed to you a couple of weeks ago. You're just that cool.

Calvino: AND I wrote If on a winter's night a traveler.

The Stoat: And you wrote If on a winter's night a traveler.

Microsoft: Now Using Client Platform Dominance to Make Random Server Applications Arbitrarily Unusable!™

2007-08-20T11:06:00.000-07:00

The cause of last week's Skype outage unmasked:

According to Skype the outage was caused by “a massive restart of our user’s [sic] computers across the globe within a very short timeframe as they re-booted after receiving a routine software update” which The Register points out was Microsoft’s monthly patch Tuesday. Patch Tuesday is the time of the month Windows users receive security updates that often result in widespread reboots by Thursday.

Awesome. Again.

What are the Odds that I am Transient Gadfly?

2007-08-08T01:43:00.001-07:00

Lower than you think.

Hello to the OddsAreOne portion of the blogosphere out there. P & L are in Scotland seeing 47 plays per day. I'm trying to do some blogging, but find my computer logged into TG's account - so I just couldn't resist the temptation to make a quick post.

Microsoft: Now Making Software We Didn't Write Unsafe to Use!™

2007-07-30T10:05:00.000-07:00

A series of messages Friday from the Security Department of an unnamed IT company:

We have been made aware of an extremely serious security vulnerability affecting Mozilla Firefox versions 2.0.0.5 and below. The vulnerability allows an attacker to execute code on your computer if you browse to a malicious web page using Firefox. Exploit code for this issue is available in the wild. The currently available exploit code is designed for Microsoft Windows XP SP2. It is not clear whether other platforms are vulnerable to modified versions of the exploit.

The followup message a few hours later:

IT Security has done some extensive testing, and we are ready to adjust our statement as follows:

• If you do not use Firefox at all, you are safe.
• If you’re running an OS other than Windows, you may safely run Firefox.

If you prefer or require Firefox under Windows to do your job:
• Launch Internet Explorer, and click on Help, then About Internet Explorer.
• If your IE version number begins with 6.0, you may safely run Firefox.
• If your IE version number begins with 7.0, you must revert to IE6 before running Firefox.

Awesome.