the current theme in life: rebuilding.

computers, that is. right now, i'm messing up my entire life at home and at work. at home, i've finally started to kick about the setup of the 2nd computer, meaning i'm moving data back and forth and completely confusing my hands as i'm always typing on the wrong keyboard now. that, and installing applications, which i've remembered are somewhat customized in that i've always used the cracked, hacked and adfree versions, which requires relocating.

the plan was to do XP and debian, but the XP CDs didn't work at home, so i did a mock setup at work on a spare laptop, which worked for some reason. debian was another matter altogether, in that various net install versions weren't going onto the net to get the packages. so, i'm going to default for a while with 2000 on the new box, leaving the old one ready for debian, or redhat as the fallback.

then there's the new production work; moving the big list locally, with its own special domain name. i stayed a bit later at work trying to import the whole thing but moveable type kept hanging on anonymous comments. the good news is that a lot of the work is done, but now, it's tweak time and it's looking sloppy.

there's orphaned laundry, there's strange email, there's bad routers, there's evil registrars, there's lovely untouched weather outside. and i'm monkeying around with the gears behind the scenes.

fitting.

i see graig's updated the dirty monkey, which i'm about twenty CDs behind on. maybe i'll go all haiku review, further alienating our mute audience. el silencio.

...and i'm still typing on the wrong keyboard! grrrrrr....

friday night, jayme and i went to see the new ipod/itunes launch at the soho apple store. there was a queue that wormed around the entire block, which i would have seen if i exited work the western side, except a fire alarm messed up everything. the complimentary posters were handy when a downpour struck, although i was stubborn to keep mine intact since i was going to send it to someone else (that and the limited edition t-shirt; i know one mac fan who'd like it).

although liz phair didn't show (or was she supposed to? now i'm not sure) and glassjaw did a few songs on the little stage, along with the shiny white gadgets, richie hawtin AKA plastikman did two sets, mixing up the choons on two ipods and a mixer, which, as you can see below, makes for freaky gear. i've always wanted to experience the full plastikman dj session, especially an allnighter, but until now, i've never seen him before. and i though he was bald and had glasses.

shrug – if you could only scratch the ipod, then i'd already have at least four, two of them supplied with the original jogdial instead of the touch-sensitive wheel. of course, i'd break or lose everything but i'd be in my own little world, smiling under my placation.

according to my rough math, my entire cd collection would take up 72 Gb at 128kbs MP3, although i'd prefer 256 for better stereo sound. throw in the cassettes and vinyl and this could easily push higher. if i had actual time before i moved from toronto, i would have ripped as much of my collection as possible and sell off the bulk. however, graig continues to curate from under his desk and i appreciate.

one day, i'll relent and buy an ipod, but only if they could record, then i'd give in. and hook up to the stereo, the car and the radio. in one year, i predict for a perfect merger between appliances, bluetooth aside.

then again, maybe i should stop prognosticating and start continue procrastinating.

it's come down to this: throwing all the money to take a playground bully, leaving the bigger boys with bigger toys alone and the needs of some of the home crew adrift. no matter what the world thinks.

still, new york partied for saint patrick's day, a warm spring day, drinking before the beginning. everybody dressed in green. sombre but not afraid. i like the fact that i saw the same little red-haired boy and his rambunctious boston terrier pup when i left to work this morning and when i returned home. that's hope.

in more frivolous news, around the same time as jeremy was fiddling around with it (in public no less!), i tinkered with the rss feeds (1.0 or 2.0). of course, my main beef is getting a proper viewer or aggregator to work properly, so i don't fully experience the benefits. i like the idea of reading multiple blogs through a wire service, but my attempts with various apps have been fruitless thus far.

i wired up my new scanner, the one i bought on saturday last night, but only rebooted this evening to trigger the drivers into effect.

test scans: 1^st being a jon blues explosion 7 inch vinyl i bought at their recent show.

if i only i had a turntable to listen to it. of course, i could try scanning the vinyl into mp3, but i'll be more conventional once i buy my 1200s. one day, in the future, when i don't buy other hardware.

or once i figure out my dual country tax situation. or when i can afford a mixer at the same time. the used market is ravenous.

wait — don't i already have mp3s of some this already? or did a few tracks appear on acme plus: the european version?

okay, i'm getting distracted here.

and internet explorer freaks out over <br clear=all /> like it does over with the comments page for some freaking bizarre reason, so here's a whole space of useless information that will act as a wrapper yet exhibit my intense frustration with such a shoddy browser. are you reading this? good, because if i get started, i can go for hours on stylesheet deficiencies and interface glitches, yet over 90% of you use it as a browser. patty the pirate says ARRRRRRR....

.....yeah buddy.

meanwhile, test 2: a black/white shot from my dearly departed lomo supersampler.

i think that's mount pleasant cemetery, at the northeast corner, where my great aunt is buried.

...actually, i can tell by looking at the full-sized shot. mt. pleasant, 100% certain.

of course, what i'm going to try to do is update kiefer microsite. the 3rd anniversary of his death is this saturday, yet i never manage to put more photos or any stories of his life up. the guy who found him keeps asking how his life turned out, and my parents could only show those few pages. not the best way to hold a good buddy's memory, for sure, but i'll do it, sooner rather than later.

one thing i'm now reminded of is that i have yet to visit any cemeteries around here yet, which is something i normally try to do when i go somewhere new. in thunder bay, i lived 3 houses down from riverside cemetary throughout the 1980s, which had a great maze of forest overlooking an eroded bank as the mackenzie river (which looks nothing like that by the cemetery, or else it's make for a solid business model).

then again, central park and prospect park are gorgeous green spaces for new york already, with the same number of squirrels and birds. can't complain about that.

funny how playing with a scanner turns into a rumination on death and the public spaces devoted to it. i'm a flyfisher in my own stream-of-conscious ramblings, and i'm overquota.

beautiful indeed;
sauna mov'd successfully.
refresh DNS.

new IP address
as humble server nestles
in its new warm home.

argh — remember how i said i couldn't figure out how to do the cross exposure mimic thing in photoshop?

let me rephrase — i didn't know how to read the instructions on how to do the cross exposure mimic thing in photoshop. to be honest, the mac os screen capture confused this (current) windows user, meaning i didn't know the little karma symbol in the toolbar was the activator.

here's a bit of trail and error on that broken window pane on crate & barrel before i saw miss gyllenhaal (bigger images available when you follow the link associated with the thumbnails, doncha know...):

*sigh*... i was once an attentive student. for real.

okay, what do i try next?
merging light and dark shots?
contrast masking?
buying a better digital camera to try this shite on? (nix — why spend extra money now?)

okay: here's the melancholytron in action.

i did end up figuring it out last night, but i managed to crash the computer and drain the cordless mouse batteries at the same time. not sure how, but there was a ghost from the dying machine:

whatever i did, i like. a lot. i have to incorporate that somehow into a bigger work, but i think i'll keep plugging away.

meanwhile, ideas continue to mull on a specific photoblog (congratulations to all the 2003 photobloggie winners) and maybe a storytime section. just because, i should make specific sense once in a blue-green moon.

[listening - the sugarhill gang: rappers' delight (extended mix - the 13 minute version!).]

well, the big news du jour is google bought blogger. most everyone's favourite search engine (privacy concerns and exploitable flaws aside) has expanded to buy evan's old faithful weblogging tool and company, which makes for the promise of more mainstream acceptance for the oddity the blogosphere is still considered.

general opinion is mostly positive although with the odd reservation.

my take is that this should allow pyra labs its first instance of stability and hopefully, many of the backend problems that made me switch to movable type will be addressed. whilst it may not mean that we'll be blogging for dollars quite yet, maybe this will afford many other developers to look at the self-publishing and more human interpretations of the online experience, which means only more content from people who may otherwise be deterred.

the guy who replaced me in the toronto office has been working on a phone interface lookup and one of the nice flourishes is a picture of our massive wall of digital lines:

this makes me slightly nostalgic, as i had to pick up the entire PBX command centre from scratch (with help from two people who had no idea), and in time, i mostly effectively passed it on to my successors.

but to me, this was my zen garden, where the freakish stress from the other work could be alleviated by sorting out the thatch of little blue/white wires and figure out why someone's phone was misbehaving (most likely from when i went too zen and created silence).

then again, i have new stones to rake, so i bequeath the punch tool.
meanwhile, this will be my background for the next while, replacing my super closeup of the sun.

[listening - underworld: bruce lee.]

okay: can anyone explain the kazaa participation level algorithm? over the past week, as i take and share alike, my level has dipped down to under 100 after the p2p app stopped sharing my files, but today, after using it for the first time in a week, has now skyrocketed to over 500, making me a guru of sorts. i didn't hack any registry entries recently - i just left it on for an hour or so.

can anyone explain what the fomula is? or is this a kaaza lite thing?

really: i have no complaint. it's like seeing an unmarked dial that keeps bouncing along on its own accord, and you're left wondering whether you're doing well, or whether you should flee to the woods. mildly hypnotic but slightly disturbing.

[listening - cibo matto: king of silence (dan the automator mix).]

take two: after a browser crash. *grumbles*

one thing i try to avoid doing is going gaga over new gadgets or toys. maybe it's a reaction against frivolous spending, saving money or avoiding disappointment, but there are better things to do than incessantly gush over the latest device, thinking i need the doodad du jour.

that said, i'm way overdue on a turntable. i've borrowed friend's geminis and abused roommate's akais, but it's been three years or so since i've had a proper one to use, and i've continued to buy vinyl since then, which i haven't heard.

part of it is the fact that my receiver doesn't have a PHONO port (oh, what was i thinking), so i'd need to get a pre-amplifier, or at least a mixer to bypass and use the auxiliary port. after scratching my merry heart out and tricking it out (only a bit), then i'd want to be able to hook it up to the computer to cut and mix mp3s.

well, my drool factor is on when i see the potential of going the opposite direction: making vinyl out of mp3s. behold -

for a humble $15.000, i could make wax using the vestax vrx 2000. vestax jumped on the scene recently with their own turntable, which can outwoosh the old 1200s club standard. i would die to be able to make records at home, but i couldn't afford that. or justify it. it'd be cheaper to make dub plates and get them pressed.

still...

meanwhile, i'll be kinda happy for now after getting the sound card up and running again. i'll go pout later. and keep my hopes lower, like an ibook. or the archos mp3 recorder. or those addictive ipods....

(just because i paid the credit card off for the first time in 6 months doesn't mean i go back in the hole right away...)

this morning, the space shuttle columbia broke up over texas as it readied to land, leaving a sonic boom and a trail of poisonous debris in the sky.

scary considering the challenger explosion was commemorated during the flight, which i remember from 1986. seeing the caterpillar cloud footage over and over again.

poisonous debris, israeli astroanaut, another teacher onboard...this story continues. metafilter and slashdot are watching.

nevertheless, seven good people died today, living their dreams and let us not forget them. i posted a list of the seven on the big list in tribute.

we'll all be in space again one day.

[listening:
the invisibl skratch piklz: the shiggar friggar show!
john oswald: grayfolded [disc 1]
miles davis: bitches brew [disc 1] (from the 2 disc re-release, not the 4 disc box set)
all used; amazing what people throw out.]

quiet cold weekend at the castle: went and saw adaptation friday night and that's the only obvious indication of liveliness thus far. still in the midst of recovering (or managing) by flu, so i'm not trying to push myself that hard.

soon, very soon, i will tell you the increasingly baffling tale about my lack of a land line phone and my frustrating art of using the bathtub as my mobile phone zone, but i'm waiting for things to either straighten out perfectly or worsen to the point of disbelief.

aside from the extincition of bananas and the soon-ending farce that is the current toronto mayor, and driving parallel with my musical theme of pastiche and improvization, i'm going to react to the copyright extension act's upholding by the u.s. courts in the same way as a few other webfolk are: i'm freeing up my unspoken copyright on my content.

specifically, i'm using the attribution sharealike license, meaning that you're free to use the content on the eggnog site, just so long as you credit my work and you ensure that any derivative work (i.e. whatever incorporates my work) follows along the same license...or, more simply, whatever you take, you have to then share (or within fair use). one day, i'll be more public domain, since i do want to see how my work develops over time (rather than age for however long the copyright extends in your neck of the woods), but for now, i feel like a simple collaborator in a massive exercise, using my crayon to colour my part of the universe.