infobong.com

left behind to drown

Nigel has a great post that contends "Some people are so forcefully not writing about what's going on in New Orleans that it hurts." bOINGbOING has been doing an admirable job of sharing information about the tragedy. At first, they did their usual pointers to techie widgets, but they've shifted to more serious blogging as the situation worsened.

bOINGbOING relays an email message about the situation on the ground in New Orleans. The text criticizes the handling of the evacuation by federal and local authorities:

I broke down in tears reading this in the coffeeshop - does anyone know if this can be verified? I'm so ashamed to live in a country where such a policy is even conceivable, and where much of the media represents those left behind as criminals looking for a quick score.

stands with cindy

I should have mentioned this in my previous post, but Cindy Sheehan will be speaking in Austin tomorrow Wednesday, August 31. She'll be at the new city hall at 5:30. If you couldn't make it up to Camp Casey, but wanted to show your support, here's your chance.

Gold Star Families for Peace funded much of the Camp Casey goings-on, from the bus I took from Austin to the water provided on site to participants. I don't imagine that my readers have much extra cash, but donating to the group will help them on their bus tour to DC and continue their anti-war efforts.

big bag o' crap

I ran across a specialized USB cable for connecting to Rio mp3 players. The mp3 player is broken, so I wondered if I would ever need the cable again. I remembered that Rio has discontinued production, so I definitely won't be using it again. I almost dropped it in the wastebasket, but then thought that someone who lost theirs might find it at Goodwill Computer Works, a computer thrift store in Austin.

I can't wait for their computer museum to reopen, but just going to the store is a little lesson in recent computer history. The bins are full of connectors, cables, and jacks for plethora of forgotten computer devices. I still sort of regret passing on a Netpliance I-opener I spotted, since I wrote a research paper on I-opener hacking.

Remembering what a wonderful institution Computer Works is I decided to start a bag of things to take to Goodwill. Here's a sampling:

• cheap quart and two-quart plastic bottles. I used to use these to take water to school and around town, but I've finally admitted that the Nalgene-style polycarbonate bottles really are that much better.
  
• grotty PS/2 mouse from the year 2000.
  
• nice PS/2 Dell QuietKey keyboard. Now that I'm using a Mac, I doubt I'll ever use a computer with PS/2 ports again. I probably bought the keyboard at Goodwill in the first place.
  
• crappy landline telephone/answering machine combo. I don't keep a landline anymore.
  
• plastic pitcher that won't fit in my fridge.
  
• Compaq Aero Pocket PC. Dang, this thing uses a serial port. I don't see much point in a handheld device, but I used to download Web sites like NYTimes.com to this to read on the train. I don't ride trains much in Texas.
  Posted by McChris at 01:25 PM
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camp casey

I took a bus up to Crawford yesterday to participate in Cindy Sheehan's antiwar action at "Camp Casey." It was a worthwhile way to spend a Saturday. The weather was up in the 100s, and I certainly agreed with Cindy when she asked, "How could anyone choose Crawford as his vacation home?" I've posted more photos on Flickr.

theoretical and ad hoc statements

I'm TAing a class on film screen theory this semester. Janet asked me for suggestions on readings for the "new media" week, and I'm responsible for coming up with a screening of new media texts. This optical illusion (stare at the black cross) seems to be a good example for trying to apply film theory to new media. Unfortunately, what I know of film theory, I learned willy-nilly as an undergrad, so I can't pull anything out of my pocket. I probably know more film theory than I realize, so TAing this class will be a nice refresher, hopefully allowing me to integrate what I do know into a decent framework.

navel-gazing loop

Cat and Girl deal with media specificity in today's "Cat and Girl comic. Girl tells Cat, "If television's a babysitter, the Internet's a drunk librarian who won't shut up." It seems a little lame how often I point to this cartoon, but I enjoy its insights.

alternative to coffee

I've developed a taste for yerba mate. I haven't been drinking that much coffee lately, and green tea also provides a nice alternative, but I've still been interested in integrating Yerba Mate into my stimulant lifestyle. I see bags of loose yerba mate on sale around town, and I get sticker shock. $8.95 for a half pound!

Prowling around my neighborhood FiestaMart the other night, I saw a few shelves of yerba mate, and my curiosity was piqued. The store carries about five different brands of mate, and I picked up a kilo of the Cruz de Malta brand for $2.99. I wonder what could account for the price difference. It seemed to be of a lower-quality than the fancy mate I've seen. There are a lot of stems, but I don't think they affect the flavor. The fancy brands say that their product is organic and fairly-traded, but I wonder how prevalent pesticides and labor abuses are in mate farming. I wonder if this is just a matter of repackaging mate as a boutique product, and increasing the margins.

The Wikipedia entry for yerba mate doesn't describe the social realities of mate production. This page from a mate vendor describes the production of mate, but doesn't suggest that there are social justice issues in the dominant mode of mate production. It uses green rhetoric to promote it's product. A page from another vendor touts it's concept of "Market Driven Conservation", complete with smiling, colonized people.

To end on a tangential note, I've long thought it would be fun to form a project called the Yerba Mate Center for the Arts. I'm sure I'm not the first person to think of it, but it seems like a good name for some kind of irreverent, collaborative something.

simple quest for answers

I think I will take a charter bus to Crawford Saturday, to support Cindy Sheehan and participate in the anti-war rally near the Bush compound. The bus leaves from the LBJ library parking, which is a convenient walk from my place. I'd encourage any Austin readers to join me, and contact me so we can coordinate.

If you don't think you can go up to Crawford this weekend, I'll point out a few upcoming events in Austin. On Sunday, September 11, Austin Against War is sponsoring a peace march from Gillis Park at South First and Oltorf to the new City Hall. This seems like a great way to counter the message of that day's "Freedom Walk" in DC, which is organized by the Department of Defense. (BTW, check out this great post discussing the way Americans use "Freedom.") Additionally there will be rally October 1 to promote the demilitarization of schools and get military recruiters off campus.

withstand hard commuting

One of the things I learned while I was in New York is that I really, really love riding trains. I like to observe the other riders and watch the scenery go past. I like to make connections at other stops, and I love feeling the speed as the train rushes through a tunnel. I got a little nervous when the 7 train goes high above Queens on a rickety El line between the Courthouse Square and Queensboro Plaza stops. I told Erich, "This is probably all the roller-coaster I need." I also learned that I'm unusually afraid of heights.

I think back to when I lived in Philadelphia. I'd frequently take New Jersey Transit from Trenton to New York, which combined with the SEPTA ride to Trenton, took about 3.5 hours. Checking out museums and seeing friends were a definite plus, but I don't think I would have spent so much time if I didn't enjoy riding the train and exploring the MTA subway system. I have fond memories of chatting with a Philly El operator who showed me around his cabin and boasted of how he can take the train nearly 60 mph in a three-block stretch and going out for drinks with a bus driver during March Madness.

bOINGbOING has a post today about a personal subway strap commuters can carry onto trains and busses to avoid transit schmutz. If you're that fussy, I think other factors are going to keep you from riding the subway (or living in the central city) before you worry about coming into contact with the subway bars.

Some people get really freaked out about germs, I suppose. I've been wandering through the back-to-school aisles here in Austin, and I keep seeing anti-bacterial hand lotion among the glue and crayons. Are Texas schools now requiring students to supply disinfectant? Or is this just for oppressively protective parents who want their kids to have clean hands? We certainly didn't have anti-bacterial lotion when I was in elementary school twenty years ago, so it seems like some kind of weird ghetto-futuristic artifact. If I rode the subway a lot, though, I might keep a bottle in my bookbag to use after grasping a particularly greasy handrail.

compelled a result

Here's an interesting NYTimes report on a speech given by Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens, where he laments some of the decisions he has made as a justice:

The right, particularly the Christian right, likes to whine about "judicial activists," who rule in favor of free-speech and against the public establishment of religion. Sometimes I wonder if rightists frankly lack the ability or inclination to understand nuance, but, often it seems like a disingenuous attempt at attacking the legitimacy of the constitution. Regardless, I think this was a brave effort by Stevens to explain that often the principles of the law push the justices into making unpopular decisions.

notes from overground

While I'm enjoying the air conditioning at a coffeeshop, I thought I would post a few brief notes about my New York trip.

• I took about 250 pictures on my digital camera, and I don't know if I'll get around to posting any of them. It's a little hassle to process and scan film, so it takes a while to post images taken with a traditional camera. But I'm much more judicious with my shots when I'm shooting on film. I take as many pictures as I want with the digital, and culling through the images and editing them in Photoshop can slow down my uploading process as much as film. The ease of creating digital images introduces it's own data-managment hassles.
  
• I get sloppy shooting on a digital camera, too. I started using the viewfinder to frame shots, because the LCD screen on my camera is hard to see in direct sunlight. When I shoot on film, I'm pretty careful about framing my shots, even when I'll be printing on an enlarger. On the digital camera, I just assume that can crop and recompose a shot in Photoshop, making it easy to take lots of bad pictures.
  
• I still haven't quite figured out the exposure and white-balance settings on my point-and-shoot digital camera to my satisfaction, which also means a fair amount of fiddling in Photoshop. I still don't think I'd want to go back to carrying my 35mm SLR around the city.
  
• Does anyone know of a Flickr plugin for Photoshop on OS X? I'm pretty happy with this plugin that allows me to publish to Flickr from iPhoto, but I would rather export from Photoshop.
  
• $30 seems to be the standard price for a limited-run T-Shirt in New York. I can understand the offbeat-T-shirt-as-status-symbol phenomenon, since I often buy funky, obscure shirts online. $20 is the most that I'm willing to pay for a shirt, but after looking at shirts in New York, I might not feel so bad about buying this $22 shirt from the Space 2026 collective in Philly.
  
• I insisted that my hosts go to P.S.1 with me, since I remembered the building itself was really interesting. On the way there, I worried that it was just a rehabilitated school, but, it was as weird and crazy as I remembered. It's a little hard to describe the experience of walking through the building, but many of the installations are integrated into the building and play off of its urban decay. I would have liked to spend more time there, but I'm glad we got to spend a little time there.
  
• Coming home to a broken air conditioner is a cruel trick. The last two nights in New York, I only got about four hours of sleep, and I got the about the same amount of sleep last night because it was so hot. The temperature inside was still around 90F when I woke up this morning. I was ready to spend a productive day at home, but, by 10am, it was so hot I had to leave my place. I'm feeling a little grouchy and scattered.
  

sweat 'til you bleed

I got back from New York at about 5 o'clock this afternoon. The first thing I did was walk over to the thermostat and turned on the air conditioner. It's funny how pockets of hot air remain after the AC runs. I opened up the pantry, and the air inside was still in the nineties while the rest of the apartment was 80F.

About half an hour ago, I felt hot and realized I was sweating substantially, so I looked up at the thermometer hanging by my desk. It read 88F, which is hotter than I like to keep my apartment. I assumed that I had the thermostat set too high, so I walked over to check the settings. It was set at a normal temperature. (The temperature settings on the thermostat don't map to real-world temperatures, so I use a combination of a thermometer and futzing to get the desired cooling.) I fiddled with the thermostat, sliding the bar so the AC would be sure to kick in, to no avail. Finally, I realized I heard a faint noise from the unit, but no cold air blew out of the vents. The fan in the air conditioner is broken. I can set the temperature as low as I want, but my apartment won't get any cooler.

Ugh, it's 85F outside right now, so I can open a window and sleep reasonably well, but we're expecting a high of 101 tomorrow, so it could get miserable if the landlord drags his feet on fixing the AC. I guess I should plan on spending the afternoon at the library or the movies.

traverses a broad terrain

I really enjoyed going to The Whitney Museum of American Art yesterday. I'll probably write a more extensive post about the art later, but I was amused by some of the books on sale at the museum. I saw a book written by a prof I'm TAing for next semester. It wasn't immediately obvious to me why The Whitney would sell Media Reception Studies, but I remembered they also have film series. At the counter, they had a slim volume, Habermas: a Very Short Introduction, which hardly seems like an impulse buy. I'm not sure what communicative action has to do with American art, either. I was intrigued by a CD they had on sale, Noise New York, which features cuts from folks like James Chance, Bush Tetras, and DNA. Since No New York is basically out of print hella expensive, this seemed like a good opportunity to get No Wave groups on CD, but I balked at the $23 price tag. I looked for a Destroy All Monsters book/video/sticker package I had seen there a few years back, but apparently the museum wasn't carrying it anymore.

Probably the funniest title I've seen in New York was a book I spotted at The Strand. I wondered if the author of Sex Pots: Eroticism in Ceramics came up with the title first, then conducted the research. I took a pass on this book, but I was tempted by a Jim Houser book I saw there. Although The Strand had it discounted, Babel seems to cheaper on Amazon. I managed to walk out with only a 55 vegetarian cookbook. Even if the recipes suck, it's the price of a magazine.

emergency flotation device

I'm up in New York, where I'll be looking at art, scowling at motorists, and otherwise hanging out for a long weekend. Posting may be light, or, due to my hosts' wireless connection, posting as much as usual.

I got in at about 6pm last night, and I've already learned a few new things.

• You can take liquor on the airplane, but you shouldn't put it in your checked baggage. I brought my hosts a bottle of Tito's Handmade Vodka - a local Austin spirit - and packed it in a suitcase. I worried about the pressure difference, but I worried more about breakage. Thanks to my bubble wrap skills, the bottle didn't break, but the seal broke, infusing my jeans with a few shots of vodka. I'm just glad I didn't bring bourbon.
• Downloading the past few days of "The Daily Show" was a good idea. A little bit of Bittorrent goes a long way on the plane. A guy in the seat in front of me had a picture of his young daughter on his desktop, but spent the flight reading interviews with porn stars in FHM and watching episodes of "The Man Show" on DVD. Creepy!
• You can take the Q33 bus from La Guardia to the subway, but that doesn't mean you should. It took at least 45 minutes to get from the airport to the R stop on Roosevelt. Although I would expect Q33 to be a major bus route, it bypassed major four-lane roads for a meandering neighborhood route on one-way, one-lane streets. I hate taking cabs, but apparently this is a situation where a cab ride is worth it.
• If you've embarked on an hour-and-a-half long bus and train ride, and you're worried about that suspicious vodka smell coming from your suitcase, go ahead and open up your suitcase. I think I could have salvaged more of the bottle of Tito's with a little strategic re-arranging.

Anyway, today I'm planning to hit The Whitney and The Guggenheim and whatever else strikes my fancy. Maybe I'll have updates and maybe I won't.

sliming and lying

The whole Cindy Sheehan story is really fascinating, but I've resisting the urge to blog about it here. What Sheehan is saying must really hit a nerve with conservatives and Republicans. It's as if there's only one legitimate response to losing a child to war, and Sheehan's protests over the war run counter to the behavior expected of her. It's really disgusting the way that commentators are defaming her. A local blogger made a point to calling her Unamerican. Of course I agree with Siva's assertions that "To quash dissent by sliming and lying about those who dissent is unAmerican. True patriots stand up to power when they see it abused."

It's horrifying to read about the angry conservative who ran down crosses bearing names of dead soldiers. It really does make me wonder if the right really supports the troops or if it just supports the war. I'm not as disgusted by the driver in Crawford as I am by media professionals like Bill O'Reilly and Michelle Malkin who attack Sheehan's character. This isn't framing a story; this is intimidation. To discredit Sheehan, Malkin published divorce papers filed by Sheehan's husband. Rather than acknowledging the social problems war introduces at the home front, these folks argue that Sheehan grief is trivial and has no right to speak.

increasingly tense situation

Here's an interesting IndyMedia story from a couple of weeks ago. Czech police used water cannons to break up a "freetekno" party called "Czechtekk 2005" in a rural part of the country. The article could use a couple of grafs giving a little background on the Czechtekk parties which have been held for the past twelve years. I'm guessing Czechtekk is an outdoor electronic music festival comparable to Burning Man in the states. I did originally assume that 'Czechtekk 2005" would be an activist Linux user convention, which only proves how completely unhip I am.

The party took place on rented land in a rural area. According to the article, police legitimated their actions by stating that the rental contract was invalid and began stopping cars headed to the party. The article suggests that the contract was valid, and the police wanted to break up the party from the start.

It's interesting how this story hinges on land rights. Land rights have come up in the Cindy Sheehan story in a similar way. Local residents have tried to ban parking along the highway to Bush's ranch, and I'm sure that their reasons have as much to do with Sheehan's beliefs as they do with the traffic she brings. Although the hearing has been scheduled after Sheehan and Bush plan to leave Crawford, Camp Casey is moving to a private patch of land. The owner, Fred Mattage supports Sheehan's project, but, interestingly, he's a distant cousin of the man who fired a gun near the protester, claiming he was getting ready for "dove season."

I'm sure Texas and the Czech Republic have different attitudes toward land rights. I would expect Texas property owners to have a stronger inclination to enforce property rights, so it's a little surprising the lengths to with the Czech police went to kick people off of property. The folks in Crawford are complaining about events on publicly-owned roadsides, but their claims are couched in a property-owner's entitlement.

routine requests

My mom just called me on behalf of my Uncle Jim, who served as a Marine in Vietnam during the mid-1960s. Apparently Jim has misplaced his discharge papers and wondered if my mom would know where to find them. My mom assumed that they would have been lost years ago, but told Jim that I would know how to retrieve them from the government.

Mom told me that Jim replied in disbelief, "He can do that?" When she said that, I sort of chuckled, and said, "Well, I've spent most of my adult life as journalist or graduate student," but, frankly, I didn't know where to look. A quick search revealed that military records can be obtained by filling out an SF-180 or "Standard Form 180," but I later found that the National Archives (which maintains veteran data) actually has a site, vetrecs.archives.gov, specifically for veterans who want copies of their military records. Here's a nice page describing how to retrieve military records.

It turns out that anyone can use an SF-180 to request military records. I immediately thought it might be fun to fill out an SF-180 about Uncle Jim, my dad, and the president, although I doubt I'll learn anything new about Bush. But Uncle Jim lives in South Austin, and I'd probably learn a lot more if we just chatted about his service over a cup of coffee.

tiny little jewels

Jill points to an interview with Brian Eno where he discusses his process creating the Windows 95 startup tone. According to Eno, Microsoft's agency told him that they wanted a piece that expressed a variety of intangible qualities - in 3.25 seconds.

The piece also mentions his producing work with U2. I find it a little disappointing that Eno's work with U2 routinely receives attention while he has also produced classic records for famous bands like Talking Heads and Devo, as well as curating the No New York compilation. I suppose it pulls in readers who may be casual music fans, but his other projects are far from obscure.

counter-cultural capitalist orthodoxy

Circa has a nice piece discussing the legal troubles of Steve Kurtz. It provides an overview of how federal law enforcement has harassed the Critical Art Ensemble member, but its strength lies in how it generalizes his problems to discuss shifting institutional attitudes toward artistic and intellectual production.

The bio notes that the piece's author Gregory Shollette has edited a volume, The Interventionists: Users' Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life. The title certainly got my attention, since the high-art projects I find most interesting are tactical cultural interventions. The UT library doesn't have this book, so I'll ask if anyone can recommend it.

nose bleed

This morning I woke with a nose bleed, only blood wasn't coming out of a nostril. In bed, the tip of my nose felt weirdly sore, so I got up and looked in the mirror. My nose was smeared with blood and was sore to the touch. (It didn't occur to me to take a picture until later.) I wonder how I would have scraped my nose like this in the middle of the night. I hadn't imbibed any alcohol, so that rules out a drunken stumble in the middle of the night. Maybe I dreamt I was nuzzling a baby panda and abraded the skin rubbing my face in the sheets.

misleading review blurbs

The use of decontextualized pullquotes is nothing new in movie marketing, but comparing the pullquote to the actual review can often offer minutes of entertainment. Here's a column online called "Blurb Racket" that documents these pullquotes and compares them to their sources. As Stay Free! suggests, Mr. Bialik should pare down his picks a little, but there's still some choice material to be found:

When the quotes are put into context like this, one wonders why Sony ever needed to concoct the phony reviewer David Manning.

made for walking

At at about 3:45 this afternoon, I remembered that I wanted to pick up a book at the Fine Arts Library on campus. There really isn't a bus that goes from my neighborhood to that building, and I remembered it was relatively cool and breezy, so I decided to walk over to that library. It was still a little breezy at 4pm, but it had gotten well up in the 90s, and I was sort of thinking this might not be the most pleasant walk.

When I got to Fine Arts, I was pretty sweaty and a little tired. At the circ desk, I remembered that I had a book waiting for me over at PCL, UT's main library, so I decided to walk over there as well. I pulled out a bandanna, wiped off my brow, and headed uphill to the other bibliotheque.

After I got my book, I read for a few minutes, then looked at my watch and realized it was happy hour at Little City. A half-price iced coffee sounded pretty refreshing, so I walked down The Drag to the other side of campus and got me some java. At this point, my sweet SEPTA baseball cap was completely soaked with sweat, but I was lovin' my iced coffee as I read a chapter out of my book. As six o'clock rolled around, I decided I didn't want to walk back home, so I headed down the block and waited for the bus.

I've marked my path, with notes, on Flickr:

I'd estimate I walked a little under two miles under the hot Texas sun, and, at the end of it, I felt pretty tired. I run further than that nearly every day, but I don't run with a full backpack and in the heat of the afternoon. I had also spent about two hours at the gym earlier today, so I feel alright about being a little tired.

actual online behavior

Jon Lebkowsky lists some of the findings of the comScore blog study, which "sponsored in part by Six Apart and Gawker media." Some of the findings, like "Compared to the average Internet user, blog readers are significantly more likely to live in wealthier households," agree with my qualitative sense of blogspace. But one finding caught my eye. "Political blogs were the most popular, followed by "hipster" lifestyle blogs, tech blogs and blogs authored by women." I'm not surprised that political blogs and tech blogs top the list, but I wondered how my blog fits into the blog ecosystem.

In comScore's ontology, I suppose infobong.com would definitely fit in the far-too-loose "personal" category. They list Kottke.org as a personal blog, which deals as much with technology as it does pictures of cats.

Since no one reads this site, I wondered what category I should join to increase my traffic. "Blogs authored by women" is probably out for the time being, and, while this blog contains a fair amount of political content, I think the Internet is supersaturated with political blogs. The "hipster" lifestyle blog seems most doable with the current direction of this blog. I could provide scenesters with valuable tips on grilling cactus and shoe-shopping in Tulsa. When I was in college, I did fantasize about becoming "The slacker Martha Stewart."

When I started this blog, I had a conscious media/tech editorial direction, hoping to make this a destination for finding information about Internet media from left-leaning perspective. That effort fizzled pretty fast. I've often consciously thought of this site as a 'zine, an exercise in self-publishing for the sake of self-publishing and a place to share with others my concerns. On that level, it seems to be fairly successful. Like a 'zine I tend to publish when the spirit moves, and I try to address issues that haven't been blogged extensively.

appeal to many marketers

Cameron Marlowe offers a good caveat to the blog research report released today from an outfit called comScore today. Saying, "It this is a marketing survey, and as such should be carefully scrutinized before drawing any conclusions," he decribes some of the for-profit marketing company's methodological weaknesses.

When I used to write for computer industry magazines, I frequently relied on research reports from private research groups like IDC and Gartner to get a sense of the computer market. I was pretty aware that these surveys didn't necessarily contain false data, but the research companies were out to make computer companies happy. These companies make money by either selling research reports to corporate managers who want to understand trends in the market or doing company-sponsored research. A good chunk of the private analysts were former computer industry journalists, and the analyst work seemed to operate as a "shadow academy," giving respected opinions that often influenced the direction of business. The company I worked for launched few ill-fated media properties based on the predictions of these analyst firms. I haven't heard of comScore before, but it seems to be trying to gain a reputation in this business-analysis world.

In a soon-to-expire column, Paul Krugman describes how private-sector think tanks have emerged as a force that can counter claims academics have made in good faith with research that intentionally pushes a neo-liberal or conservative agenda. While I don't think that analyst firms like IDC are quite as cynical as many think tanks, I do wonder if think tanks evolved out of these private research firms as much as they did out of the academy.

If someone hasn't already done it, it would be interesting to do a history of private research firms to see the economic and cultural forces that led to their emergence. David Noble's America By Design is a pretty interesting history of private companies cultivated United States universities as vocational schools for white-collar engineers and as independent research firms to advance their business interests. If corporate America has done so much to shape universities, why would research firms emerge?

back-to-school look

My casual sneakers are developing holes, and I'm starting to think about getting a new pair of kicks to wear to class, the coffeeshop, and wherever else it is I go besides the gym. I've long been intrigued by the Adbusters-affiliated Blackspot Sneaker, which is an effort to produce an affordable, durable sneaker with fairly paid labor. I don't have a lot of success buying shoes on the Internet, unless I already have a pair of a particular shoe. (You try being nearly six feet tall with a size 8 foot.) There aren't any retailers in Austin that sell Blackspots, so, with my upcoming New York trip in mind, I decided to see if I could check them out in the big city.

The list of retailers revealed that there are two places in New York City that sell Blackspots, but I was surprised to see that a store in Tulsa, Earth Friendly Goods, carries both the sneaker and the boot. I'm sure I drove past the store in the Cherry Street district the last time I was in town, but I never would have thought to look there. I'm impressed there's a Blackspot dealer in my hometown, but not one in the whole state of Texas. I'm not going to be back in Tulsa this summer, so I suppose I could wait until Christmas to check them out or just go to one of the retailers in New York.

arduous labor

The humor of today's "Pearls Before Swine" comic turns on the recontextualization of older texts into newer media forms. I don't want to spoil the comic, but Beethoven is stressing over the longevity of a piece he is writing, and, by the last frame, the narrative flashes forward to how Beethoven is heard today. The comic raises some familiar questions about reception and "remediation."

I wondered if Beethoven would have really wanted "the working classes - the commoners - to hear my music and know my name" or even worried about how his music would be received. From my grade school music classes, I remembered that Beethoven is used an exemplar of Romanticism. While this Wikipedia section argues that his music is not necessarily Romantic music as such, he would have been working in a Romantic intellectual environment, so it seems possible that he would have been concerned about longevity.

It's interesting to contrast the use of "Für Elise" as a ring tone and Brian Eno's equally familiar Windows 95 startup tone, which was specifically commissioned by Microsoft. The startup tone was deliberately created to integrate into a social space outside art venues, while Beethoven could have hardly anticipated the pervasiveness of recorded music we have today. The Beethoven piece certainly gained popularity as a ring tone because it's familiar and, more importantly, it's in the public domain. Despite the differences in intended audiences, it is interesting to note how both compositions have integrated into our aural environment today.

memory torture me

While I was writing the previous post, I got "Wiki River, take my mind..." stuck in my head. It's a lame parody of Willie Nelson's "Whiskey River," and it's even lamer when your head won't let go of it. Either my acculturation to Austin is complete or I'm drowning in a Wiki river.

where in or around

Today I pointed someone to DavisWiki today, so I thought I might mention it here. I've never been to Davis, California, and frankly the only thing I knew about the town was about its slightly icky fistualted cows. Although I have no familiarity with Davis, a lot of the entries are entertaining. It also seems like it has the potential to be a useful way to share information about the cities. If I were moving there, I would find this page about local coffeeshops useful. The Wiki also includes the entire Davis municipal code. It's also up on the city's Website, but having it in the Wiki could make it easier to integrate into discussions about local issues.

I thought about WikiProject:Seattle, which is a project to create articles in Wikipedia about local issues in Seattle. I wondered why you would want to create a separate Wiki for Davis, rather than start a Wikiproject. One advantage a separate site might provide is that you can nurture a different culture from Wikipedia. Wikipedia's culture is pretty established and pretty rigid. This rigidity might prevent giving the writing a local flavor and might intimidate people who would otherwise find a local wiki a useful tool.

in contrast, DavisWiki emphasizes having fun and nuturing a community that exists on- and off-line. One of the main tabs on each page is a list of individual user pages, where users can list their interests and post photos. Wikipedia offers similar functionality, but it is not a prominent feature. The Wikipedia profiles are geared toward sharing quasi-professional qualifications and interests, while the profiles on DavisWiki tie users to the community. There seems to be an effort by some users to use the site for establishing contacts offline.

DavisWiki doesn't seem to follow the Neutral Point of View policy at Wikipedia. NPOV seems to abate a lot of the flame wars or at least provide a roadmap for resolving disputes. (I'd argue that the policy also generates a fair number of disputes, but those disputes are often interesting.) For a local site, this policy might be too restrictive and limit otherwise useful content. For example, an activist might want to document a protest, but might be too constrained by the policy to share explain the protest and share information.

The norms of Wikipedia would also quash some interesting content. An entertaining section like the one about "Environmental Impact Reduction" in the entry on kegs would be deleted in WIkipedia. This post is sophomoric, but it provides the reader with some flavor of the college town, The Mystery Picture feature would make little sense on an international site like Wikipedia, but here it engages readers with their community. DavisWiki makes an effort to engage with the community, and it could mature into a useful resource for the town.

fired up and in attendance

I had no idea that Austin has a local case modding organization. Austin Modders provides an online forum for sharing pictures and tutorials. I was thinking about the extent the Internet may have spurred the case-modding hobby; despite the physicality of the case-modding, it seems that users would be more apt to show their work to other modders online instead of working for an audience in meatspace. Wikipedia has a short history that was probably written by enthusiastic case modders. I didn't find it so enlightening, but the entry led me to the Austin Modders site. Austin Modders don't seem to have regular face-to-face meetings like Austin Bloggers or a user group, but it looks like they sponsor competitive case mod shows.

I don't have any interest in doing case modding myself, but it would be interesting to check out a case-modding show.

reverberating beyond the borders

Oklahoma recently passed a law blocking employers from banning guns on their premises. The state legislature thought workers should have the right to bring their weapons on private property. The law is being challenged in court by corporate interests who assert that their constitutional property rights allow them to decide their own gun policy. The NRA, which is defending the law, is framing the issue in terms of the second amendment.

I'm no fan of guns, and I'm frankly a little embarrassed that this is happening in my own state, but it raises some interesting issues. This post at "TPM Cafe House of Labor" points out that this assertion of property rights threatens "proposed local laws to require companies to allow the public and/or union organizers onto their property."

What I find more interesting is what this means for worker's rights generally. The WSJ article says, " in a surprise search, Weyerhaeuser Co. sent gun-sniffing dogs into the parking lot of its paper mill here. Mr. Bastible and 11 other workers were fired after guns were found in their vehicles." If Oklahoma passed a law specifically allowing guns in company parking lots, presumably that means employers are free to search you and your car at anytime? I'm guessing that if guns can be banned, employers could ban all kinds of media-making equipment like cameras or computers.* I don't expect anyone would try to take up this issue on First Amendment grounds, but random searches of employee vehicles seems like an unnecessary intrusion into workers affairs. It's too bad this issue has come up in the context of the Second Amendment.

*Look who hasn't taken a media law class.

big as a stick of butter

I just saw the pictures today, but, boy howdy, those newborn pandas are phenomenally cute. I like how they're all pink and fuzzy with their eyes nearly invisible. Apparently, Pandas have a hard time breeding in captivity, so my congratulations go out to the zoo professionals (and the pandas) in China and Washington.

What do you call a professional that works in a zoological garden? "Zoologist" seems to refer to any biologist that specializes in animals, while "Zookeeper" sounds like a working-class job, and I assume that the people responsible for caring for these pandas have advanced degrees.

smaller offspring

The takeout place El Chilito has finally opened up at Manor and Cherrywood in East Austin. I haven't eaten there yet, but it seems to be doing a brisk business. There's no indoor seating, but at lunchtime there's plenty of folks eating tacos under the awning in 100-degree weather. In addition, a house at Breeze and Manor is being remodeled for "Clementine Coffee Bar," according to the sign. It looks a little upscale for my blood, and I saw a notice today that a beer and wine license is pending. Regardless, it's certainly nice that I'll be able to take a short walk to a coffeeshop and an inexpensive Mexican place.

I've lived in this neighborhood for three years now, and the last year has seen a lot of new restaurants on what used to seem like a desolate strip of road. It seems like Manor is turning into a smaller version of South First street with a row of restaurants and, perhaps, retail. Also El Chilito and Clementine seem more geared to people who actually live around here. In comparison, the John Mueller's Barbecue and Hoover's seem to attract creeps from other parts of the city, clogging the sidewalks with their oversized trucks and ignoring "small car only" parking signs.

Mueller's customers are egregiously odious. Everyday, customers are parking on the sidewalk, forcing me to run in the busy street, and are rude, if not outright hostile to pedestrians. I find it offensive when the drivers don't look like their from the neighborhood and the building itself is an eyesore. Perhaps one upshot of the sudden growth on Manor is higher rent or property taxes will put that place out of business.

Update: I walked over to El Chilito and got a veggie burrito for lunch. The sad, scrawny thing used a "taco-size" tortilla and set me back four bucks. The veggie burrito didn't have any beans, and I'm pretty sure that the menu said it came with beans. Finally, they were cooking the vegetables on the same filthy grill they were cooking meat. Ickie! Compared to what I could get for four bucks at Wheatsville, this place is a ripoff.

mixed minutes decimal format

I've been playing around with the High-Yield Detonation Simulator featured today on bOINGbOING. I decided to map a nuclear blast at the UT tower, and found this page that lists the GPS coordinates for many UT landmarks. I'm not sure what the point of this page is. At first thought it might be for GPS users, but, if you're wandering around campus and you can't find the tower, I don't think a GPS unit will do you much good.

These Google Maps hacks have been around for a few months, and, in blog time that's like forever, but I do appreciate many of the applications people have developed. The High-Yield Detonation Simulator is much nicer (although more difficult to use) than Map-A-Blast. I'm going to New York in a few weeks, so I poked around for subway maps integrated with Google Maps. This is the best one I've found yet, although it doesn't seem to play nice with Safari and doesn't allowing panning around with the keyboard. I looked around for a hack that maps cool coffeeshops in Dallas, but either there aren't any cool coffeeshops in Dallas or no one has gotten around to making one yet.

run run run run run run away

Unsurprisingly, it's been pretty hot here in Austin. One of my pleasures has been sitting outside at a coffeehouse as the sun sets. My apartment building doesn't exactly have a nice outside space to unwind. I really enjoy going to Café Mundi, sitting below the banana trees and smelling the fumes wafting from the El Lago tortilla factory across the tracks.

Saturday night, I was near campus at sundown, so I decided to go over to Spiderhouse, which has a garden that looks like a funky junkyard. I'd forgotten that the coffeeshop would have live "entertainment," so I was a little annoyed when I went outside, but I hoped for the best.

There was some geeky white dude playing acoustic guitar on the makeshift stage. When his song ended, he tuned a couple strings on his guitar, and said, "OK, this next song is a cover; some of you might not know it."

"I wonder if I know it?" I thought to myself.

"It's a song by Talking Heads." He paused and said, "It's off their album Talking Heads '77."

"Oooh, which one will he play? Maybe 'Uh-Oh Love Comes to Town'?"

With undeserved confidence, he said, "This one is called 'Psycho Killer'."

"No, no, poopy no!" I thought to myself, "Everybody knows this song."

If the dude was some kind of experimental folk artist, deliberately trying to induce the kind of obsessive annoyance that comes from a stupid person carrying on a loud cellphone conversation in the train seat behind you, he is a master of his craft.

My thoughts were racing. "Who doesn't know this song? O my goodness, this is awful. Seriously, who doesn't know this song? I used to hear this song on the radio in my Bug, driving to high school. They play this on the classic rock station in Tulsa, Oklahoma! Who possibly wouldn't know this song?" Considering Austin's alarmingly large population of music geeks, I don't think the guy should have assumed that a crowd wouldn't know the piece.

After the song was over, a heavyset woman came up from behind me and interrupted me from my reading. She held a metal bucket, and asked, "Do you have a quarter so the singer can get some ramen noodles?" I'm sure I gave her a look of genuine hostility, but I grudgingly fished a quarter out my pocket and tossed it in the bucket.

I put Talking Head '77 on the turntable this afternoon, and I immediately started dancing. I felt really goofy and lighthearted, in a way that I haven't felt in a long time. I loved Talking Heads growing up. I was a goofy kid.The summer before high school, my friends and I would watch the video for "Once in a Lifetime" over and over again, trying to replicate David Byrne's dance moves. I used to mow the lawn with my best marching band posture, so the CD wouldn't skip in my early-90s Discman. It was good to feel that way again.