stevengharms

Remember these simple tips from OnlineOrganizing.com [ source ]

* you don't have to commit hours at a time to accomplish a goal
* the greatest advances are the sum total of a series of small efforts
* commit to spending just 15 minutes a day
* do something that moves you closer to accomplishing your goal

I love Lou Reed’s “Sad Song” off of his album “Berlin”.

It’s … incredible. It may be, in spots, the saddest album ever….and not sad like “woe is me” but more like real life, daily life, sans real tradegdy is trulysad….And some bitch in Berlin done broke my heart.

I always imagine the actress Patricia Clarkson portraying this woman.

The best part of “Sad Song” is that the music is very uplifitng and cheery (strings and bird chirpings and whatnot) but Lou recites the refrain in a monotone (as if in rebellion to the song’s music). We feel his outsider status all the more keenly from this dissonance

And what could sum it up better but this lyrical run?

Staring at my picture book
She looks like mary, queen of scots
She seemed very regal to me
Just goes to show how wrong you can be


I?m gonna stop wastin? my time
Somebody else would have broken both of her arms

This song reminds me of travelling about in Hungary around Christmas 97.

I had just been to Berlin and seen the endless pirouetting cranes across the sky…and now I was in Budapest, with 90% of everything closed owing to the holiday, realizing I could pronounce no street name, and realizing that this was surely the pinnacle of fun. The beautiful Danube was gray and turbulent, the wind from the mountains of Pest swept across the long bridge and there I was.

During that time I bought Massive Attack’s “Mezzanine” - it’s one of those perfect ambient albums that I lost somewhere in the intervening years. I got a new copy from the Amazon marketplace and played it again today — what a master work!

And lastly, I’m listening to Stellastarr’s song “untitled” - stellastarr rocks, I hope they come to the bay soon. I love new new-Wave. I was bummed to have missed it the first time around.

I may be a bit too old to be listening to the local college radio station, it may be time to give it up and listen to the same 14 songs on Clear Channel stations….

But I’ll take that medicine when the last firey bit of blood in my veins has frozen stiff.

The other morning on kfjc i heard a really great quartet of tunes:

I have long been a fan of the Lu and recently came to like Ms. Holland this year, but Marissa Nadler is A-Mazin’. Her voice is somewhere between Jolie Holland and Hope Sandoval (chanteuse of Mazzy Star) but with a real Portuguese fado accent on it as well.

Very impressed.

Lastly Laibach’s tune was this gorgeous a-capella chorus rendering of the Beatles tune.

I also really liked the Cobra Killer track.

More good musics

Often hereabouts I am asked if my degree is in CompSci.

HELL NO

Computer Scientists are endlessly fascinated by optimization, IT guys (of which I number) are concerned with “can it even fsking be done?” IT guys do not care about memory usage, unless it makes things not work. CompSci guys don’t care about doing things merely, they want to do it in the most efficient manner possible (left to their own devices).

Case in point, CompSci guys find pages like this endlessly fascinating. Myself, I was ready to move back to Moleskineart after 2 minutes.

I realized i just posted a pic of master of darkness Paul Wolfowitz on Armistice Day.

OK, more than just occasionaly, most of the time.

Except for Wolfowitz and Perle, who are evil. Very evil.

Quick Reference:

Evil

Giuliani, OK!

Schwarzenegger, OK!

Ronald Reagan, mostly OK.

John McCain, OK!

Dwight Eisenhower, hella OK!

Abraham Lincoln (how the party has fallen!), super duper OK!

and….The Moderate Republican, OK!

In case you’ve been getting entirely too many useful things done lately, might I recommend you try out http://del.cico.us ?

I’m no longer hip in breaking the news of the existence of this site, but it’s front page (recently added links) is enough to make your Firefox browser’s open link in new tab function reel with use.

Here’s a list of links I found…

The latest generation of killer apps (the Trillian IM client, linux’s XMMS audio player system, the lamentably-dead Nullsoft’s WinAmp) all came with a feature allowing “skinning”. Much like our own epidermis, the guts underneath are pretty uniform - but by wrapping the application in a new skin you could make it ‘yours’.

Every college student knows the magic of a sofa cover - turn that hideous inherited couch into a sea of pastel blue thanks to a sofa cover.

A visual example should help you see just how much the same application can vary between two skins. Here’s a link to skins for XMMS.

Whiz bang, lay a skin on it and it went fro being kinda a boring simulacrum of a CD player to something sexy, glossy, and amazing. It’s “Pimp my Ride” for my desktop, American Chopper for your Comp’ter.

But all this is eye-candy — where’s the mind-candy that’s right, why don’t the applications we use the most allow us a flexible set of arcana commands to transform their visual layout or core functionality flexibly?

David Allen offers a kit that will mutate your MS-Outlook to match his productivity system Getting Things Done - but this seems like a script to create folders with names that adherents to his system will recognize and benefit from.

Ultimately though, the substrate remains the same: Outlook and Allen’s method but only a “skin”. The extensibility of Outlook is pretty small. As the guys at West Coast Custom who customize the jalopys on MTV’s “Pimp My Ride” have demonstrated, you can only “pimp” that which has the “pimp” spirit within. Sometimes things are “unpimpable”.

Allen’s system has “pimped” outlook as for as it can go, it’s maximized the “skin”. If we want to go subdermal, we need something better, something that Microsoft can’t get to (barring an amazing commitment to revolution)…

I think this is where The Mozilla Group got it right. They defined a meta-language that lets a moderaltely savvy computer user change the functionality of core pieces of Mozilla (XUL is the name of the language). In this age where more and more everyone who is good in their job knows how to write a bit of code (as indispensible as knowing a bit of Spanish in California) the desire to customize a bit will be in demand.

Or, like the Chopper gurus of Orange Coast Custom, will not the wealthy or well-heeled seek software that let’s them be them better and faster? Microsoft asks you where you want to go today - but only on their terms, with the blase tools they offer within the limits of their stifling non-disclosure agreements.

The future lies in extension, not in closure.

“Ah well I suppose it has come to this… Such is life” — Ned Kelly, Australian Highwayman and criminal folk hero

DATE: Tue, 09 Nov 2004 19:45:38 PST
From: Hotwire
Subject: Steven, escape the Bay Area with a 4.5-star vacation
giveaway!

After last week’s election this is one of the few areas I’ve got left!