Welcome SFGate readers

Well, somebody advertised my blog on a comments page on SFGate.com. So, I’ve gotten seven 10 15 hits today (and possibly counting)… I suppose that should make me want to post here, but really I don’t use this blog anymore. I still see it as a future home to record of my reading list, but I wouldn’t expect any regular posting. Too many other things to do…

If you’ve come here to hate on me because I know that a non-profit lawyer doesn’t make a profit from representing a plaintiff in a lawsuit (I know that’s a crazy and difficult concept for many to grasp): go for it. While I wish my fellow Americans were far less stupid than they are, I willingly admit to deriving some enjoyment from watching the stupidity unfold. As long as your comment isn’t an advertisement or just beyond the pale inappropriate, I won’t delete it.

Addendum: I just read the complaint from the lawsuit people are complaining about–they say it’s a “money grab.” Well, the lawsuit doesn’t even ask for damages. Reactionaries? I think so…

picture number two

I let flickr post the last picture for me. Not so sure about that. Let’s see how this one works… This is an exciting picture of my record player, some records, some CD cases, and some books. Because I’m sure you couldn’t figure that out by looking.

[I think the pic might be a bit out of proportion from when I resized it, but it's a stupid picture anyway, so I'm not going to worry about it. If you want to see it looking slightly better, click on the photo & view it my Flickr page.]

Also, notice the sag on the bookshelf! Classy, huh?

picture

Here’s a really bad picture I took of the capitol. I was standing in the street, so I had to hurry, plus I don’t really know how to use my camera or any of the fancy-schmancy internet photo hosting stuff yet. In other words: this is a test… this is only a test.

Noah Digital in Stereo

I’ve finally joined the modern world: I got a digital camera (as a gift from my parents for my upcoming birthday).

It’s almost small enough to swallow, which is exactly what I wanted.

Perhaps I will now add more personal pictures to this site.

Any suggestions for which photo hosting website is the best? Or the advantages and disadvantages of the different services?

(And, yes, I do like Wu-Tang. What of it?)

Let’s do it once… and take pictures!

Guatemala

My friend Al is building a building in Guatemala. Look at it here.

It looks pretty fancy and it’s only about $100,000 per condo/apartment/whatever. Of course, it’s in Guatemala City, not New York or San Francisco or wherever. Pretty cool though, even if he is an evil capitalist interloper (sort of, since he’s Guatemalan and American) exploiting the poor Guatemalan workers (communist rhetoric at least partly sarcastic).

Assuming I go there in August, which I’m still hoping to do, the building won’t be ready yet. But apparently Al’s uncle owns a jungle or something (owns a jungle???!!!), so I can go see that. I mean, I could go see jungle anyway, but how many people get to say, “I went to a jungle owned by my homie’s uncle.” (use of the word homie way more sarcastic than communist rhetoric.)

So I’m currently pretty fascinated by this jungle thing and, regardless, I am committed to going to Guatemala. If I can’t go in August for whatever reason, I’m going for about 5 days around Thanksgiving when Al has a party to celebrate the opening of his building.

—

I’ve spent the past few hours making a playlist of all the songs that I play over and over again.

I haven’t really discussed this here, but about a year ago I made the switch to mp3s, got a 350 gig hard drive (as a gift), and hooked the computer up to the stereo. I was very resistant to this for a long time, but my music collection just became too unmanageable to keep in CD format. I still get most of my music on CDs (except shows, which I typically acquire over the internet in FLAC or SHN, burn to CD for archiving purposes, then convert to mp3 for everyday playing).

It’s easy enough to make a playlist of songs I’ve played most over the last year because iTunes keeps track. Really, I can only go back to last June, which is when I got the Mac. I got the hard drive a few months before that, but lost the play counts when I switched computers.

Anyway, the real issue is that I’m almost 28 and have been buying CDs for about 15 years. I’m trying to make a playlist of songs I’ve listened to (and liked, at least at some point) going back a lot further than the last year. I’m being a bit haphazard about it because otherwise I’ll drive myself nuts, but I’m through about half of what I’ve got and I have a very enjoyable, easy-to-listen-to playlist. The idea is to have an essentially infinitely long playlist to play when I don’t want to be challenged in any way when listening to music. This serves that purpose.

I’ve been playing the list for the past hour or so. For amusement, here’s what’s showing now (last ten-current-next ten songs) [I've been tired & bored today, so I neatened this all up and added album titles & random comments]:

John Prine – Spanish Pipedream
(album: Great Days (box set))
(Blow up your TV)

Jimmy Buffett – Treat Her Like a Lady
(album: Jimmy Buffett box set)
(let’s go sailing)

Joe Strummer – Long Shadow
(album: Streetcore)
(Joe Strummer is soooo cool)

Paul Simon – Gumboots
(album: Graceland)
(You don’t feel you could love me, but I feel you could.)

Radiohead – Anyone Can Play Guitar
(album: Pablo Honey)
(I don’t have a comment about this one)

John Prine – Illegal Smile
(album: Great Days (box set))
(NOT a song about dope; yeah…)

Wilco – Outta Mind (Outta Site)
(album: Being There)
(Not Outtasight (Outta Mind)!)

The Beatles – Eleanor Rigby
(album: Revolver)
(look at all the lonely people)

Gin Blossoms – Found Out About You
(album: New Miserable Experience)
(wow, I’m like 13 all of a sudden)

The Doors – The Crystal Ship
(album: The Doors)
(not exactly in the unchallenging category)

Beck – Girl
(album: Guero)
(beep doot beep beep chirp beep, whatever)

The Velvet Underground – I’m Waiting for the Man
(album: The Velvet Underground & Nico (aka the banana album))
(Velvets were amazing, but Lou Reed has lost his allure)

Modest Mouse – The Good Times are Killing Me
(album: Good News for People Who Love Bad News)
(the night before Jimmy Buffett’s Tryin’ to Reason with Hurricane Season)

The Band – Across the Great Divide
(album: The Band)
(amazing dance song)

Billy Bragg – A New England
(album: Back to Basics, which is a compilation of BB’s three pre-Elektra albums, including Life’s a Riot with Spy vs. Spy, which had A New England)
(the reason I know the word “pram”)

The Flaming Lips – Five Stop Mother Superior Rain
(album: In a Priest Driven Ambulance)
(You’re fucked if you do, you’re fucked if you don’t)

Postal Service – Such Great Heights
(album: Give Up)
(oh the beat…)

Wilco – What’s the World Got In Store
(album: Being There)
(close your eyes and go to sleep)

Cracker – The Good Life
(album: Gentleman’s Blues)
(what is a lesbian james dean?)

Camper Van Beethoven – Balalaika Gap
(album: Telephone Free Landslide Victory)
(cracker-camper two-fer is total coincidence)*

Groove Armada – Fogma
(album: Goodbye Country, Hello Nightclub)
(i hate the term trip hop, but GA is trip hop at its best)

Asterisk: * It’s a not the album with Balalaika, but why did Camper release an album in 1988 dedicated to Patti Hearst (Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart)? I mean, how freaking random. Oh, right, that’s probably the answer to my question. I almost wish it had been Tania that came up on the playlist, or perhaps anything from New Roman Times, the best concept album ever in whatever genre Camper is. Perhaps the only one… Camper might be a genre unto itself: politically-interested, stoner alt-folk-country-rock maybe?

Onward: So, the playlist is on random play and it’s not a very representative list, but amusing nonetheless. Also some embarrassing stuff on there, but I can’t have a blog without embarrassing myself a little. (I mean, my last post referenced dead baby jokes, how much more embarrassing does it get?)

—

And finally: I got Spades for the Mac today (Championship Spades Pro). But it doesn’t work. The computer doesn’t follow suit. I sent in a bug report. I had the game on my PC and it worked well.

Longest post ever!

Let’s do it once…

Arrrr!

I’ve just learned that my pirate name is Mad Tom Read. I was told that:

Every pirate is a little bit crazy. You, though, are more than just a little bit. Even through many pirates have a reputation for not being the brightest souls on earth, you defy the sterotypes. You’ve got taste and education.

Close enough I guess. I should have answered the questions less honestly to get a more fun result. ah well.

Pirate names here.

That’s it for this one…

NYTimes.com

Both the Times and CNN have recently “updated” their websites, making similar changes to style and format. (See comments by the editor of NYTimes.com.) Bigger fonts, more “tabs” in webpages, more video. ESPN.com has made some somewhat similar changes.

The changes on espn.com are disastrous to those of us who use tabbed browsing (I use Safari and in my PC days used Firefox).

The Time and CNN.com changes at least seem valuable in theory. I’ll probably get used to the bigger, bolder fonts. I don’t really use the video features, so that kinda bothers me on CNN.com where video has become ubiquitous. That looks to be the future of the Times online too.

My big complaints about the modified website are that the opinion page links on the front page are in a more out of the way spot, there is about 50% more wasted white space on the screen, and the fonts all look a little choppy and uncomfortable. It does, however, look like the overall content and organization of the website will be improved as these changes go into more full effect.

So, I guess I’m taking a wait and see attitude toward the Times and CNN.com’s changes. ESPN’s are horrible, just like the last time they made changes. Last time, they also had to change a lot back. With the Times and CNN, I don’t really have any good alternatives, so they’ll keep my business no matter what. I’ll dump ESPN for CBS Sportsline and Fox Sports in a second.

That’s it for this one…

Google Earth

Apparently Google Earth for the Mac has finally been released. I can’t wait to get home and install it (although, that’s partly because I don’t feel so good and simply can’t wait to go home today). My PC is crappy and I don’t want to run anything like Google Earth, so I will be happy to be able to use it on my iBook. We’ll see how well it works, though.

Okay, how funny is it that Google’s blog is a Blogger site? (So, not that funny, but sort of funny anyway.) I mean, I know Google owns Blogger, but you’d think they could have the Google blog just be “googleblog.com” instead of “googleblog.blogspot.com.” Perhaps a Blogger plug, I suppose.

Happy Friday.

Fun to offset my whining

e-mail to the future

Okay, so I just came accross this, but it turns out it was created by somebody I went to high school with. Given that my high school had about 70 people in a class, that’s pretty unusual.