nj

an homage

2009-05-25T00:07:50Z

If I Ruled in Hell...
(not) by Dr. Seuss

There once was a boy named Hieronymus Bosch
Who sat down one day and said, "Golly gee gosh!
All the pictures of Hell that those other folks paint
Are so tame that they seem rather awfully quaint."

"Now, if I ruled in Hell," H.B. went on to say,
"I'd start with a centerpiece sure to dismay.
A huge man, bent over, in bone-white, like this,
With monks climbing into his nether abyss.

"On his hat is a Flibbeti-Gibbeti-Hoot,
Which is partly a stomach and partly a flute
Being played by a Skeleto-Birdman, and aimed
At a penguin-like guy (who for now is unnamed).

"Those poor guys in Hell get no chance to unwind...
For the Whosity-Whatsis lurks not far behind!
Two ears and a knife pointed up at the sky--
(Quite enough to make Freud stick a fork in his eye!)

"Yes, I would sure change things," said little H.B.,
"If Lucifer handed Hell over to me!
Earth's sinners would shriek, and they'd run off pell-mell
For the next train to Heaven--if I ruled in Hell!"

hot sexy religious spam poetry

2009-04-24T19:37:10Z

I almost never see spam anymore, but this one managed to get through Gmail's filter:

=====

Subject: Better Sex foor Christian Wives!

Toboggan all at once. Hav

Better Sex foor Christian Wives!

Mingling their cries with homage and wondering holy ground. To bathe in
its waters washes away wide mouths wider still, smiling you better wait
down with her on the stone. The smoke began to fierce prowess. The kurus
cannot be blamed. On she dashed her pen across the revered name, and know
more than your superior officershey? You're of her head white teeth and
full red lips straight, in every man's garden and in every woman's. She.

Snackr, an RSS ticker

2008-05-11T16:20:48Z

(See? I promised my next post wouldn't be about gigs.)

I realized a few months ago that, unlike pretty much everyone else I know, I don't regularly use an RSS reader. Not that I haven't tried—I started with LiveJournal syndication on my friends list, then tried FeedDemon early on, and more recently tried out Google Reader—but never managed to form the habit of checking them regularly. Both of them are fine apps; the problem was with me. Every time I sat down and saw that I had a gazillion unread items in my hundreds of feeds, I didn't know where to start. Eventually I just gave up trying to keep up.

Around the same time I came to this realization, Adobe AIR 1.0 was publicly released. AIR lets you turn web apps (built in HTML or Flash/Flex) into cross-platform desktop apps on Windows, Mac, and Linux; it gives you APIs for doing OS-level stuff like filesystem access, local database access, window management, etc. I wanted to try to write an AIR app just for fun, and it occurred to me that I might be able to make something that would solve my RSS problem.

The result is Snackr, a ticker-like widget that lives on the bottom (or side) of your screen and scrolls random items from your RSS feeds. (It's called "Snackr" because it lets you nibble on your feeds. Guffaw.) Here's what it looks like (in this picture, it's docked along the bottom of the screen):

It runs on Windows and Mac OS X; if you install it from the Snackr homepage, it will automatically install the AIR runtime for you as well. It also runs on Linux if you install the Linux AIR alpha from Adobe Labs.

I'm actually finding Snackr really useful—it helps me keep up with blogs I want to keep up with, and also gives me a great smattering of items from sources I wouldn't normally read regularly. If you try it out, let me know if you like it.

gig tonight

2008-05-10T18:15:12Z

It's that time of the month again. 7-10 pm, Caffe Trieste Berkeley.

(I promise my next post will not be about my next month's gig.)

dear lazyweb: feedburner considered annoying

2008-03-10T07:28:44Z

[Update 3/10/2008: FeedBurner no longer seems to be doing this--my app suddenly started working with no changes on my part. Odd.]

When I try to access a FeedBurner feed from my Flex app, FeedBurner decides to hand me an HTML version of the feed, instead of, you know, the frickin' feed. Of course, if I go to the same URL in Firefox, it gives me the right thing. What do I have to do to get FeedBurner to realize that I actually want XML?

[Addendum: I know I can append "?format=xml" to the URL, and I guess I could just automatically add that onto any URLs I get from FeedBurner. But if I go to the base URL from Firefox, FeedBurner knows how to hand it XML; I want to figure out how it's doing that, so my feedreader will work with other sites that try to do the same trick (I've noticed at least one other site doing it).]

dear lazyweb: rss/atom formats

2008-02-29T19:27:35Z

Dear Professor Lazyweb,

Let's say that, for some stupid reason, I'm thinking of implementing Yet Another Blog-Aggregator-Type Thingy that I want to work with most blogs and syndication feeds that exist today. Which formats do I need to support? RSS 0.91? RSS 1.0? RSS 2.0? Atom? Others?

(I know I probably also want to support OPML for importing a list of feeds as well.)

Regards,

nj

gig recordings

2008-02-29T07:05:27Z

Recordings from my last gig. Getting better, I think. Invitation, Hackensack, Footprints, and Sugar are decent. Reflections would be pretty good if it weren't for a couple of clams in the head.

gig tonight

2008-02-17T01:48:21Z

You know the drill: Caffe Trieste Berkeley, 7-10 pm. Our group is turning into a pretty fun little unit. Stop by if you're around!

email woes

2008-02-15T03:48:42Z

Once again, my catchall alias seems to have been turned off somehow, so I missed some email today. If you happened to mail me and got a bounce, please resend. Thanks.

people who have become parodies of themselves #82

2008-01-26T21:11:05Z

"Testosterone to me is so important for a sense of well-being when you get older," Stallone says.

random appearance of me

2008-01-19T00:20:28Z

Apparently this picture of me (second from the left in the row of four) showed up in Intel's CES keynote. They were showing off a mobile device that's running Adobe AIR, and I guess the person on our experience design (XD) team who built the AIR demo randomly decided to use my picture. I'll have to go tell him I'm going to sue him.

gig tomorrow in Berkeley

2008-01-18T21:34:56Z

Hey, I'm actually posting with more than 24 hours notice!

My monthly Caffe Trieste gig is tomorrow (Saturday) from 7-10. It's in Berkeley at the corner of San Pablo and Dwight:

http://www.caffetriesteberkeley.com/

gig in SF tonight

2008-01-11T16:57:07Z

I'm playing a gig at Bird & Beckett bookstore in Glen Park tonight from 5:30-8. Note that the bookstore has moved to 653 Chenery (not all the pages on the website have been updated yet)--I haven't been to the new location, but apparently it's bigger and has an actual bandstand now (and they've apparently tuned the piano). Stop by if you're nearby.

gig tonight

2007-12-23T02:04:53Z

Forgot to post well in advance, as usual, but I'm playing at Caffe Trieste in Berkeley from 7-10 tonight. Stop by if you're in the neighborhood.

interesting consequences of growing up in a suburb #73

2007-12-02T19:53:14Z

It wasn't until I was in my late twenties/early thirties that I learned that "yard" and "lawn" aren't synonyms.

marble madness

2007-11-27T06:34:54Z

A bunch of Rube Goldberg machines made from household objects. Apparently these are interstitials on a popular Japanese kids show. Much more clever than the usual marble-ramp stuff--there are lots of little surprising details.

gig tonight

2007-11-17T19:22:38Z

Caffe Trieste in Berkeley, 7 pm.

the american idea

2007-10-23T09:31:21Z

I don't normally go in for this sort of thing, but I decided to submit an essay to the Atlantic's American Idea contest. It's rather pat, but as an exercise I thought it came out pretty well:

The American idea has at its heart a fundamental contradiction: between patriotism, civic duty, the power of law, and the collective good on the one hand, and individualism, libertarianism, and free thought on the other. This contradiction is deeply ingrained in our national myths and rituals. We salute the flag and revere the Constitution, but we also admire the dangerously unconventional Thomas Paine and the smugglers and rioters at the Boston Tea Party. (One wonders what the proponents of the "Broken Windows" theory would have thought had they been there to witness that seminal act of public indecency.)

Neither end of the contemporary political spectrum escapes this contradiction. On the "left", we trust women to make choices about their own bodies, but distrust the free market; on the "right", we want to regulate marriage but not corporations. Both sides profess to encourage debate and discussion, yet both are susceptible to groupthink and echo chambers.

In mathematical logic, when a system contains a contradiction, all propositions become true. Perhaps the contradiction embodied in the American idea is what generates the messy diversity of opinion and behavior that, at its best, invigorates our society.

(The dig at the "Broken Windows" guys is in there because they contributed a lame essay to the original Atlantic issue that published famous people's essays on the "American idea".)

gig tonight

2007-10-20T18:20:53Z

I have a gig tonight at Caffe Trieste in Berkeley, 7-10 pm. It's my first gig in a few months, but the bassist is trying to see if he can make it a regular thing, which would be cool. Stop by if you're in the neighborhood!

RIDICULOUSLY WONDERFUL

2007-10-13T03:56:48Z

http://www.avclub.com/content/videocracy/2329

email was down, now it's probably not

2007-09-19T20:36:52Z

Email to my personal address appears to have been bouncing lately. I think it's fixed now, but if you send me any email in the last couple of days, please resend. Thanks.

san francisco allegedly assists our nation

2007-08-14T16:35:01Z

Wiretapping on Folsom Street? Moo.

http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/003914.php

adventures in wifi

2007-07-17T03:00:36Z

Okay, so I now have my main router plugged into my cable modem, and a secondary wireless router plugged into the main router via a hard wire. Everything's basically working, except...

My "main" router is on channel 6, and my "secondary" router is on channel 11 (same SSID, same key). Because of the way the house is laid out, the secondary router is actually more centrally located, so most things should prefer to connect to it. However, I'm finding that my laptop is insisting on preferring the main router on channel 6, even when it's right next to the secondary router (and NetStumbler shows a much higher SNR to the secondary router). I have to get pretty far away from the main router and manually disconnect/reconnect to get it to look at the closer router. Do wireless devices look for lower-numbered channels first or something?

iPod physics

2007-07-13T16:34:54Z

Apropos of news that listening to an iPod increases the severity of lightning injuries, I have my own fun iPod-related physics question.

I've been taking BART a lot lately, and I've noticed that on my way home, when I'm in the Transbay Tube or just coming out of it, my (5G) iPod's volume control will sometimes briefly fluctuate, as if I had touched the scroll wheel.

I'm assuming that some kind of electrical interference is confusing the scroll wheel and making it think it's being touched. Has anyone else noticed this?

best sentence from spam EVAR

2007-07-12T23:33:21Z

"i want to withdraw your prepaid index in my ass."