Category: tech

Talk about software, hardware, electronics, and a myriad of other sex-repellent topics.

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haaaaumpph!


Been battling this sinus thing for more than a week now, my nose stuffs up at night and drains down the back of my throat. The snot makes its way down into my chest, and I’m still unsure what series of “tubes” in me it slithers down to get just where it lodges, but it gets there and sets up camp. Entrenched in whatever pocket it ends up in, I feel it there and am wont to hack and cough and “haaaaumpph!” it up. I stand in the shower every morning and cough and

Well, I’m now comfortable moving out of the realm of speculation and declaring that “hi” is indeed Keaton’s 1st word. Based on the context in which she uses it, and her little “hello” handwave that goes with it, I’m 99% positive she’s mimicking our own hi’s to her. I was telling Pat this weekend how, the first time I actually realized she was waving in response to my own “hi” or “bye,” it was pretty amazing. May seem simple, but to me it was confirmed comprehension and communication – it was the first time my own daughter had “spoken” to me, even though she didn’t use words (at the time), and I was thrilled.

On a somewhat related note, I was marveling the other night to Sharaun about how amazing I think it is that babies just learn how to talk. I mean, just by virtue of being around people who are speaking, their brains 1st memorize words and then start putting them together. It’s hard for me to think about learning something from complete scratch like that. It’s so different from, say, me signing up for a course in classical sculpture at the local community college. There, I’d have a teacher telling me things, a book to study from, tests to gauge my absorption and comprehension of the new things I’d added to my brain. For Keaton, though, she just learns by being immersed in it. I think about me being plopped down in the studio with a professional drummer, and doubt I’d be drumming myself in less than a year. So yeah, that she says “hi” is fairly awesome to me.

If you couldn’t tell by all my talk of “leaks” and “trackers” and whatnot, I’ve become completely engrossed with BitTorrent. And, believe it or not, I’m talking primarily about “legal” torrent activity. There are several trackers, both members-only and “open,” which enforce strict “no copyrighted material” rules and don’t accept illegal material. The better of these trackers trade only in live and unreleased material. Material previously known as, and only available as, bootlegs. Back in the day, I was obsessed with this type of material – obsessed with bootlegs. I’d pay up to $30 a disc for the rarest and most intriguing. But now, with BitTorrent, material not even available to high-dollar bootleggers (who were mostly funded by various international mafia) is all over the ‘net.

Private collectors are either getting savvy, or passing years and years of lovingly cared-for master tapes to savvier friends, and live and unreleased gems are showing up all over the place. Over the past couple months, I’ve been scouring these trackers and I’ve found some simply astounding material. Insanely amazing live shows from Neil Young, Santana, Hendrix, Zeppelin. Studio outtakes and sessions from Derek & the Dominos, the Allman Brothers band. I’m talking unbelievable stuff here, stuff that’s never been heard before, stuff that’s brand new, just unleashed on the world’s ears. And ohh… am I addicted; I’m sooo addicted. Only problem I see is when all these FLAC beauties fill up my 3/40-terabyte drive and I have to upgrade… but for now I’m just a-downloadin’ away.

BitTorrent is surely the future of filetrading, and I think it’s already bringing tapes long collecting dust on collectors’ shelves to the masses, and will only continue to do so at in increased level as time goes on. Great sites like etree and dime and tradersden, these places are doing wonders for the ease of obtaining uber-rare and exciting performances, and I’m fully on-board and keeping my ratio high for good karma.

One of the folks I work with recently brought me some honest-to-goodness saffron from Iran (yes, I know it’s illegal, but I find I enjoy it with my cuban cigars). So, tonight, I decided to try and use this “most exotic” of all spices and cook for Sharaun. I called another Persian coworker of mine to get a recipe for saffron chicken and rice. It turned out OK, needed more onions and salt, but it was pretty good. I’m actually very fond of the saffron taste, it’s super unique to me – Sharaun’s not so smitten. Anyway, I’m not sure I cooked it right – but it was quite palatable with a little salt. I don’t know, sometimes, why I write paragraphs like this… booooring…

Mischa, your fans care about you, please stop smoking.

Goodnight.

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liveblogging the leak


Work is busy… stoopid busy like cauliflower. Hey, did Tuesday’s blog ever go public?! I noticed last night that it was marked “private,” and wondered if anyone even got to read it… Damn, that makes me mad. I was proud of Tuesday’s entry and I effed it up. And, I was under the impression that people might be thinking, “Dave’s on a roll this week.” Instead, they were thinking, “Dave let us down again.” Damn damn – go read it, please?. Anyway for today, I had this huge story written thinking it would have an awesome ending, but I was wrong. So here it is, endingless, because I didn’t write anything else and, besides, I kinda liked it.

My story about “the night Neon Bible leaked” is pretty good. It may sound silly, but I literally felt like a small piece of a larger organism. It all started Tuesday night (well, started getting good). I was sitting on the couch refreshing a thread on a popular music messageboard over and over and over again. One poster said his French-speaking buddy got an IM from another buddy saying he had the album, that buddy would pass it on to the frog who’d in turn pass it along to the poster who’d in turn leak it to the masses. The only reason mass “bullshit” wasn’t called on said poster was his good repute with past leaky matters. Later, he confirmed the truity of the friend-of-a-friend story by upping a high-quality rip of a track that was, up until that point, only available as a shit 96Kbps rip (trust me, sounded awful on the iPod in the car). Hearing the song in good quality only got me refreshing more tabs in sequence. Load ’em all up: hipster forums, insider blogs, trackers public and private; load ’em all up and do the Control-Tab -> F5 -> Control-Tab -> F5 tango…

Real-looking item appears on a well-known public tracker-tracker, I decide to wait until it hits a more reputable source or someone confirms it as the real deal… try to stay away from public trackers, especially with something of this magnitude… screams RIAA honeypot. Refresh. Refresh. Refresh. Check the trackers, public and private. Refresh. Trackers. Refresh. Trackers. Firefox begins to lumber under the load, having been open all day its notorious memory leak has it consuming a whopping 123,000K of my available RAM – but I don’t dare close it and waste potential precious time. Back in the forum, the “this many readers are reading this post” count kept climbing and climbing as word began to trickle out. Original leakster returned to say he had to hit the sack, must have been bedtime where he was – no leak, hopes dwindle.

Three hours have gone by since this started, I’ve pretty much been buzzing around the laptop every five minutes to F5 my sources. In between, I’m writing yesterday’s (and this) blog, and half watching people make fools of themselves on American Idol. Man, time flies, I can remember thinking how long it would be until the next American Idol when the last one ended. I’m going to switch to present-tense now, as I’ve caught this entry up to real time. I’m still waiting for word back about the one on the well-known public-tracker… people on the boards are dutifully opening themselves to lawsuits in the spirit of keeping the rest of us informed. But now it’s too late, I have to go to bed… Sixish hours of sleep later and no leak. Off to work.

At work it was me and the boarders again, on the collective edge of our collective seats, watching the lead downloaders of the publicly-tracked (and widely assumed fake) file post their “percent completes.” I would keep the thread open in Firefox and F5 every few minutes, since I can’t load up the “questionable” sites here at work (well, I guess I can, but I’m not gonna) – I have to rely on the forums and blogs for news. I’ve already briefed Sharaun on how to kickoff the download at home if something budges. I feel like a man obsessed, getting worried about the buildup. It’s just… I’m waiting on the followup to what I personally think was the best rock album in the past ten, fifteen, twenty years (sorry Nevermind… and, when was Joshua Tree again?)… I’m a bit excited.

Work goes by, 8am to 5pm, meetings and phone calls and e-mails and meetings and phone calls. Work was stoopid busy like cauliflower. But, all the while I kept the internets in the taskbar, refreshing when I could. Nothing still. At home, I laid off a little… realizing now that most of the promises were bunk… and that we were no closer to a leak than when the first tracks trickled out weeks ago.

If you’re a praying person, I’d appreciate your petitions on behalf of the leak. Goodnight people.

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the liberated vandal


Saturday morning Keaton came down with the pukes. She returned her morning oatmeal to mom not but an hour after happily eating it, and the refused to eat solids for the remainder of the day. On top of that, all she wanted to do was sleep. Sharaun and I spent the day taking turns letting her rest on our chests as we lay or sat on the couch being lazy. I felt bad for her, as she was so obviously not herself, but a little part of me loved her resting quietly on my chest and being so snuggly – reminded me of when she was brand new. Under different circumstances, I would’ve enjoyed it – but seeing her so lethargic really bummed me out (and worried me a little, as we’ve not really seen her act like that before). But, Sunday was a new day – and she seemed pretty much her normal self. Sharaun and I figured she’d either eaten something that disagreed with her (not that we don’t know her diet or anything), or had some quick 24hr bug. Whatever it was, she seems OK now.

Speaking of Keaton, Sunday we decided to go spend all the money we’ve been avoiding spending on her. It’s time for her to get a new carseat, time for us to stop building couch-cushion forts and buy real baby-gates, and time to get some locking things on the cabinets she loves to get into. All told, we ended up spending ~$200. Kids are expensive, and you there’s little way to minimize that. It’s not like we’re making frivolous purposes motivated by want, we can’t avoid this stuff. Kids cost money, that’s for sure – regardless if you have it, they’re gonna consume it. So anyway, I worked on putting up the 8ft gate tonight (Sunday), and about twelve gnarly holes in our wall later I had it working. Of course, it’s a damn gate where I’m used to walking freely – so I can’t really call it convenient… but I guess it’s not that bad. A little spackle and spray-on knockdown later, and you’d never know how many swearwords I said during the procedure. Kids, man… they cost money.

And now, an exercise in “real” writing, just to see if I can still do it.

I used to hate people who fold the corners of the pages of books to mark their place. I always had this strange notion that books should be kept pristine, that they were valuable and deserved to be “taken care of.” For that reason, I used to cringe when I’d get a book from the library with creased dogeared corners every thirty pages or so, used to wonder at the disrespect for “community” property these people had. I know that may sound odd, coming from a guy who prizes his coming-of-age years for their social rebellion and watered down anarchy, but I that’s how I felt. Maybe it was because my dad had so many books, so many great books, as well as such a passion for reading. I somewhat realize now that my dad, much like me (or rather, I much like him), is a collector. The “what” of the collecting isn’t really that important, only during the time that “what” is the focus, really – no, it’s the collecting that’s important. Now see, I’ve gotten all off-track, and I’ve covered the my collector urges here before so – back to the page-folders.

Like I was saying I used to hate people who folded the pages of their books to mark their spot. I don’t hate them anymore, though. In fact, I myself now dogear pages in my books. Why? I think, partly, because I realize now that books are meant to be consumed, and as such would logically be subject to the same wear and tear that befalls anything that’s “used.” And, since we’re not yet in some post-apocalyptic state where paper or written history has surpassed gold in value, my concern with keeping books in “mint condition” was plain silly. Furthermore, I at some point came to the realization that owning books is somewhat pointless. For me, owning books is kind of like owning movies – it seems great to the collector in me, to the materialist in me, but in practice it’s rather wasteful and purposeless. Know how often I go back and re-read the books that I’ve bought and consumed? Rarely folks, so rarely in fact that if you were to express it as a percentage of the books I own vs. those I’ve gone back and taken off the dusty shelf to read again, you could argue that it was “in the noise.” (That’s statistician-talk.)

So, in a way, folding the corners of my pages to mark my spot as I read now makes me feel good. Who cares? Who cares if one day someone gets this very copy of this very book that I once read and desecrated? Say their friend buys it at my estate sale upon my death, and lends it to them… maybe they want to read “a classic,” or something. My folds won’t detract from the words on the page, won’t prevent them from enjoying the story – heck, at the worst they may serve as a point of confusion if this future-reader is, himself, a dogearer. But, thinking back to that disgust I once felt for the very person I’ve now become, I actually enjoy creasing that little corner; revel in my disrespect for the things I own. I mean, fuck that book, right? I’m going to buy it with money, I’m going to read it, and it’s going to gather dust in a bookcase until I die or my house catches fire or I sell or give it away. I’ll even unfold my last fold as I read through – no harm done, I care that much. So, each time I fold down one of those little corners and close the book shut to return to it later, I feel like I’m a little less materialistic, a little more “carefree.” Silly, ain’t it?

By jove, I think I’ve still got it. Now back to our regularly scheduled program.

Know what feature I want on my iPod? I want a way to have a living “smart” playlist which contains everything I’ve recently added to the device. I know, iTunes has this functionality in some capacity – but I, unless I just don’t know how to use it right, it doesn’t work the way I want. First off, realize that I’m one of those “fringe” users whose MP3 collection is larger than his iPod, I also don’t use iTunes to listen to music – so I have nothing it the “library” there – as I use the software only as a means to get tracks on my iPod. Also realize that 99% of what’s on my iPod is complete albums, I don’t typically do the one-song thing (although this the iPod itself has changed my longstanding usage model here to some degree). So, what I want is a “smart” playlist that creates a pointer to all the albums I’ve added in the last couple weeks – and I want it sortable by album, artist, song, etc. just like the standard iPod browsing menus. That’s right, I want a playlist, or perhaps subsection more accurately, that sorts just like the regular menu system but only contains stuff I’ve added in the last two weeks. That would be awesome, right? A little sub-menu showing only new stuff. I mean, it’s hard to keep up with what I’ve dragged onto there sometimes…

Still no Arcade Fire leak, just the same five tracks over and over again. Word is that promos are in the wild, so you’d think it would’ve made its way onto the information superhighway by now – but, alas, I wait still.

Goodnight.

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leak! leak! leak!


Wrote to paragraphs last night, gave up and never posted them. Here they go.

So everyone thinks my glass-lung dream has to do with smoking, eh? Not a bad interpretation, actually… and now that I think about it maybe it was smoke I was seeing fill the chambers, not “tinted breath” as I described it yesterday. Either way, it was one of those cool dreams that you actually get to remember – so I figured it meant something. Thankfully, and this is something I don’t say often, this work is dragging at work. This week, though, I’m glad it’s dragging… I need all the time I can get to pull everything I need together before Friday. I’m sitting on the couch now in my boxer shorts, and I swear I can smell my own ass… that, or these shorts were dirty when I put them on. That’s gross to me.

Tonight Sharaun and I had dinner with some long-time friends, I mean from-back-in-FL friends. They have a daughter (who I remember being born) who’s now in 2nd grade, and I got to talking about her about what kind of things she’s doing in school. Trying to think back, I remembered things like have to write what time it was on a drawing of an analog clock and counting little drawn quarters, dimes, and nickels to answer things like “how much money?” As we talked, I decided that I’d head into the garage and actually pull down the box of “David’s Old Stuff” my mom had given me a few years back. Sure enough, I found a math test I took in 2nd grade – and lo and behold: clocks and change. What a memory, huh? I love looking through that box, and someday if I get a working scanner I’d like to digitize and write about some of the cool things in there. I’m also glad my folks saved all that seemingly mundane stuff, it’s loads of fun to look at now – I’ll make sure and do the same for Keaton.

Know what I hate about every single iPod case I’ve tried? All the holes are either hard to get to, or, when easily accessible, made only to fit the standard iPod headphones and charger. That’s just dumb. Most decent headphones or 3.5mm jacks have thicker plugs than those skinny white iPod earbuds, so it’s just stupid not to give users a little more wiggle room if they decide, like me, that they hate the pain-inducing standard earbuds. And, “unauthorized” car charges and wall charges for the iPod are available on eBay for pennies on the dollar – and some are, not surprisingly, a little differently-sized than the OEM or licensed ones. Stupid for these case guys not to think about that. I should go into business making iPod cases… I wonder if there’s good money there. Hear that entrepreneurs?, now you know how to set your case apart from the rest – appeal to those with after-market and bootleg plug-ins. Easy as that.

Late today, two more tracks from the new Arcade Fire album leaked to the internets. Along with the three that already leaked, that makes five of eleven – nearly half the album. I swear each leaked track sounds better than the last. Even more exciting, along with the leaks, message boards and scene chatter was filled with rumors that the whole LP will be uploaded before the night’s end. Now, seeing as I’m writing this on Thursday night – I have the smallest hope that I might actually be listening to the new album on the way into work tomorrow. So here I am, alternating between writing the blog and pressing F5 on the three leakiest trackers I know. Write a sentence, F5, write a sentence, F5… c’mon Neon Bible… you can do it!

Goodnight.

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the list


A real hodgepodge today, folks.

When Sharaun and Keaton and I were home in Florida the past couple weeks, I had some time to hang out with my stalwart buddies Andy and Kyle. These are guys who I’ve known since my initial days in Florida after moving from California, give or take. You can get a bit of history on them here on my now-defunct and no-longer-linked anywhere “cast of characters” page (the page got too outdated and I always felt I was slighting someone with their “bio,” so I scrapped the whole idea). Anyway, one night we were sitting outside at a little brewpub on the beach, amassed around a table enjoying beers and conversation, and the topic turned to the shenanigans of our past (it often does). Andy mentioned that, at some point when he and I were in college (at arch-rival institutions), we’d bounced an e-mail back and forth between us called “the list,” in which we tried to document some of the funnier and more memorable events from our “wilder” youth. What’s more, he said he still had “the list.”

Well, here we are just two days back from Florida and Andy lived up to a promise he made to me when I heard he still had the list – he scanned it in and mailed it to me. Seems like he printed it on an old dot-matrix printer way back then, and reading it now I was surprised to find how many things I actually remembered quite well. In fact, I’ve even written about some of them here on the blog. My long-term goal, though, is to write a paragraph about each line item on the list (at least the ones I can remember). Anyway… you can check out the list in it’s entirety here: page1, page2, and page3. There are some hilarious stories hidden behind those little one-liners. (Actually, I just looked again at Andy’s scan, and the dates show we did it in June of 1996 – a mere year after graduating high school. So, at that point I was still in junior college and not true university, as I stated above (just trying to be factual here, folks)).

Got turned onto the newish “Tapers Section” feature of the Grateful Dead’s massive meandering website from a music forum the other day. Every Monday, a new bloglike entry is posted, and each post is chock full of MP3s representing snippets of shows played during that week in Dead history. A stellar concept if you ask me, but I’m not surprised the Dead are, even posthumously (as a group, at least), on the cutting edge as far as digital music – I’ve written about my respect for their progressive distribution ideas before. Anyway, if you’re a Dead fan, or just want to get an idea of what the whole Dead “thing” is about, the “liner notes” style of the posts accompanying the music lend a lot of contextual goodness to the aural experience. So go ahead, feed your head.

Over Christmas I mentioned to my brother-in-law that our digital camera hasn’t been working right ever since Sharaun dropped it into the cat’s water dish at 2006’s Halloween Bash. He asked what kind we had, and when I said Canon, he mentioned that when he called Canon customer support when his camera’s flash crapped out after the warranty period expired they offered him a “upgrade.” Turns out that Canon runs something like a loyalty program where owners of older model digital cameras can get cut-rate prices on newer models as part of an official “upgrade program.” There’s scant information on this program on the web and it’s not to be found at all (at least by me) on Canon’s official website, but if you call 1-800-828-4040 (in the US) and tell them you’re current make and model they’ll let you know if it’s upgradeable and to what. In my case, my S400 is upgradeable to an SD450 for $159. Not bad compared to the Amazon price of $317. Another buddy called about his A30 and they offered to upgrade him to an SD550 for $189. A better deal for him, to be sure, but the $159 price for a working, newer camera sure is enticing to me. Haven’t jumped on it yet, but likely will soon.

Goodnight.

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took a couple days off


Took a couple days off last week, had a couple evenings too packed with post-5pm work residuals and, more importantly, supping with friends. Lately I’ve been valuing our friends a lot, I think it has something to do with the ease at which our whole transition from childless-to-parents went with the clique. I love the little things about having a solid group of friends: hearing the unlocked front door open and wondering who’s coming in, the comfort in being able to speak casually, passing Keaton around the room, and, of course, sharing food and drink. The communal meal seem to me like something that’s been at the heart of human interaction from the beginning of time. Seriously, tho, we’ve got some great friends. Let’s go.

Wasted some time Sunday morning trying to help figure out the latest in internet mystery vogue. I first saw it over at reddit, but apparently it made it’s debut on some Russian website – where a psychiatry professor posted it as a problem for his students to solve. What is it? It’s a painting, one which the professor says contains “sure signs” that the painter has a mental illness. The challenge to the students, and, by proxy, the the internet at-large once the word got out, was to identify the signs and illness. Here’s the original version of the painting, from a Russian webboard – where the comments number into the multiple thousands. Leading theories suggest obsessive-compulsive disorder, agoraphobia, paranoia and depression. Problem is, the professor who posted it said he’d come back with the answers in a few days and has since dropped out of cyberspace. Take a look, thoughts? Anyway, I bet the thing will have been “solved” in the reddit comments by the time this post goes live anyway.

Sunday evening I made the near-final step in my CD-ripping project – tossing all the Beatles CDs I’ve verified as MP3s. It was a very hard thing for me to fill the recycling bin to the top with the fruits of my college obsession with Beatles bootleg collecting. Oh, I saved all my factory-pressed discs, as I have some very rare ones, but I pitched all the CD-R copies of albums (hundreds and hundreds) that I traded for over the course of six or so years. As I dumped the piles of discs into the bin, I saw certain ones go by that I could recall spending hours and hours on: crafting homemade artwork in Photoshop and paying money to print it on the laser color machine at Kinkos, printing and affixing cd label stickers, etc. Hard to throw it all away, but liberating in a sense too…

Updated Keaton’s pictures today, like a good dad. Check ’em out.

Goodnight folks.

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rainy weather prelude


Monday and it was back to work for me…

These two-ish weeks between Thanksgiving vacation and Christmas vacation are always a bear. A difficult-to-concentrate time bookended by memories of, and lookings-forward to, days spent away from work. In highschool, I recall our guidance counselor counseling against letting “senioritis” creep in during those last months, weeks, and days prior to gradation. And while my near two-week Christmas vacation is hardly as big a respite from the millstone as graduation seemed to be at the time, it sure possesses some of the same Siren-song draw. I sit at work and think about hanging out with friends and family in the uniquely temperate weather of a December in Florida… it’s an affliction.

Sunny California is currently busy making a mockery of its state motto, tossing up a knobby middle finger of cold and rain. Honestly though, I like the winter weather, and am glad for it.

Note: Somehow, this afternoon when I wrote that initial sentence, I had intended it as a segue into the rest of this paragraph where I talk about the fact that I haven’t yet put away all the Halloween decorations. Now, however, having written the intro sentence a few hours ago and coming back now to finish, I have no idea how a prelude about rainy winter weather was supposed to lead to that topic. So, without attempting some fancy link between the two, I’ll go right into the Halloween topic now.

I still haven’t put away all the Halloween decorations. Chiefly among them, the 100lbs+ coffin is still sitting in the garage, impeding our way in and out of the house and forcing me to ease the truck in ever so delicately to avoid crushing it’s presswood walls by pulling in too far. Seeing that thing there every day, still unstored for next season, and remembering back to how much trouble this year’s decorations were – I’m beginning to dread the annual Halloween setup, ending up in the same kind of love/hate relationship I have with Christmas decorations. If I don’t get that coffin lashed up to the rafters soon, I’m going to end up hating it so much that I won’t want to bother repairing and reusing everything for next year.

Read this article with a bit of cautious interest today, hoping my decision doesn’t make my vision all milky someday down the road…

Goodnight.