electric relaxation

Well, I’m no maddox, but I have to say, this article on Kuro5hin brings tears of joy to my eyes.

About a year and a half ago, I quit my day job as a programmer and started burning through my savings (and at the end, borrowing money from family) in a quest to work for myself by making my own websites.

15 months later, I have one fairly successful website, a half-dozen or so failed websites, a bunch of debt, ruined credit and I’m back working for the man. For all you would-be webmasters out there, here’s my $25,000 dollar lesson.

Fortunately for you, dear reader, the pearls of wisdom subsequently imparted by this human paraquat can be summarized quite succinctly: “don’t be a complete f—ing retard”. The irony of course is that those who might most profit from such a lesson are the very same individuals who are by definition incapable of learning it.

I’ve slowly been plodding my way through No Direction Home, Martin Scorcese’s lauded documentary about the life and times of Bob Dylan. It originally aired on PBS a few months ago, and Lisa even TiVO’ed it for me; unfortunately, I need a certain concentration, a super-saturation of boredom permeating my atmosphere as an impetus to embark on these voyages of self-improvement, and Albany is one of those mystical places that furnishes this necessity (the others that I know of thus far are of course Salem, OR and Las Colinas Boulevard in Irving, TX).

At any rate, the film is excellent, if for nothing other than the fantastic soundtrack. What’s more, it helped me successfully if belatedly connect the cultural dots in a passage from one of my favorite books: “How many roads must a man walk down?” is the opening line from a famous Bob Dylan song.

P.S. I remained purposely vague in the description above, since of the two people who actually read this stupid blog, one of them still hasn’t read the books in question.

I have revisited this question time and again over my last four years of iPod ownership. Why is it so hard to build a headunit that just has a slot, that you stick your iPod into, and some dials and crap on it. I don’t care if the thing works while the iPod isn’t in it, or what other features it has or whatever. It doesn’t seem that hard. Yet everybody who builds the damn things keeps making these stupid cable-based things.

I wonder if it’s because they can’t fit a decent amplifier into the unit if they have the iPod hanging around in there. But even a double-DIN unit would be fine with me (though maybe that would cut off a large number of potential customers).

The taglines now have links to the iTunes store where possible; thanks goes to Lisa for pointing me at the iTMS Link Maker.

I guess the next step would be to populate the hover text with the song title, artist name etc. But actually maybe that takes away some of the mystery. Anyway, it’s getting pretty out of hand already so I’ll probably leave it alone for a little while.

Johnvey told me a while back about the discovery of a pristine Coltrane recording. It turns out it was one of three such discoveries this year, of phenomenal, yet previously unknown and unheard of jazz recordings; moreover, Slate went so far as to name them the three best albums of 2005. Two of them are Coltrane recordings, one of which is a collaboration with the Thelonious Monk Quartet, and the third is a collaboration between Dizzie Gillespie and Charlie Parker.

The majority of my many aborted attempts to broaden my musical sphere begin with a foray into jazz music. I’m fairly convinced that one day I’ll grow up, and start listening to jazz; the only question is which one will beget the other.

It’s no secret that my musical expertise falls off a rather steep cliff once outside my home turf. It’s not like I’m clueless, and I like to think I have decent taste; I just don’t have decades of invested time and experience to provide me with a solid foundation of utterly useless trivial knowledge.

The “Freebird” joke is a perfect example. I was bewildered by the skit in between tracks on Baron Von Bulls–t, though I still found it funny. After it came up again in a Questionable Content strip, I finally decided to investigate. The interweb smiled upon on me, as she often does, and blessed me with a lengthy explanation in but the third hit of my search.

In the Hindi movie I was watching with my mom, an advertisement scrolled by during the first song in the movie, in the letterbox area. Alone, that’s little cause for surprise; while it seems excessively intrusive by Western standards, Indian rental videos have been abusing that topographic region for at least as long as I’ve been watching them.

However, this particular advertisement caught my eye, because it was an offer to buy a ringtone for the currently playing song.

They’re all quotes from songs. I wrote a little PHP script that picks a random line from a text file and prints it. I was thinking it would be cool if each one was actually a link that pointed at the song in question, i.e. the lyrics or maybe even the song itself on iTunes (is that possible?).

I’ve recently come to realise that my addiction to television may be hereditary; my father has been mainlining the Columbo first season DVD set (a birthday gift from my mother) for a good chunk of my vacation thus far. In the closing credits for Murder by the Book, I was surprised to notice directing credit attributed to one Steven Spielberg. Sure enough, Spielberg directed the episode, and at the ripe old age of 22.

Anyway, Columbo kicks ass. Or maybe I’m just extremely fond of the seventies post-technicolor Panavision aesthetic when coupled with a smooth jazz soundtrack. It’s probably the latter, since I can actually stomach Charles Bronson movies.

I hate when other people actually execute on vague half-baked ideas that I’ve had. Oh well, at least they seem to have done a good job of it. So you go sign up at last.fm, and they have an iTunes plugin, and then other people can go look at everything you’ve listened to lately. Neat-o.

Update: They also have a WordPress plugin.

Update: Now I have the WordPress plugin. Check the sidebar.