dsandler.org

Pressing, grave problem: I spend about a minute disentangling my iPod earphones every time I take them out to use them.

I used to wrap them around the iPod, but the plastic of the phone casings would scrape against the housing, and the cord right at the plug would bend quite sharply (causing me some concern that I was fatiguing the wire inside). So I started just making a small loop out of the earphone wire (wrapping it around my hand, usually), and this is what leads inevitably to deep and inextricable tangulation. The iPod’s earphone wire is so pliable that it tends to get knotted much more easily than any headphones or earphones I’ve ever owned (including a pair of Philips ear-wrapping phones which have the skinniest wire I’ve ever seen on good-sounding audio equipment).

I’ve seen ads for the Sumajin Smartwrap (pictured at right). Anyone have one of these, or some other clever cord-coiling creation? Or is there some crazy new wrapping technique out there, requiring no additional hardware, that I’m not familiar with?

McSweeney’s: The Riddler Makes an Announcement. “I’ll be dividing my time between the condo here in Gotham and a summer place in Provence that Terrence and I acquired recently. As for your future, it’s a little murky, I’m afraid. I’ve had an offer from a Lex Luthor, guy from out of town, who may be looking to expand. Presumably, he’d need help, but I’m not sure you’d be interested. He’s awfully dour, to be quite honest. I’ve also phoned Joker and Penguin and raved about all of you. Jennifer has a sign-up sheet to meet with recruiters from their organizations.”

The editors of u2log.com offer their song-by-song review of the new U2 disc.

Sorry about that. Don’t know what the deal was.

James Cameron in Wired: The Drive to Discover. “Those high school touchdowns scored by Neil and Buzz and the others are trophies that have been gathering dust, but we still fantasize that we are the same team we were then.”

Matt (”Señor WordPress”) on Stop Worrying: “Only thing is the URIs are a little verbose.” Yeah, I’m still getting accustomed to the named URLs (a feature I was most excited about in WP). I keep forgetting to explicitly specify a concise URL slug.

It doesn’t help that I can’t figure out how to do it in MarsEdit without shortening the actual title (and thereby the slug as well). And I love my absurdly verbose titles!

Chris offers a neologism:

sh&-f&l shäk (n) The act, process or experience of stumbling across a song in a long iTunes shuffle play that you were not aware you owned, are embarrassed to realize you own, or both.

Oh, look: someone else who loathes U2 as much as this one. “Anyway, U2 has a new album coming out now, and based on the commercial, it sounds like the same pseudorock pseudoedgy schlock they’ve been putting out since at least 1993. If you like that kind of thing, feel free to download it and play it on their overpriced, underuseful Ipod. [sic]”

Oh, incidentally: If you knew who Bungie was before Halo, you must see Red vs Blue #43. Brill’.

Bungie.net is carrying a new interview with the RvB guys. “I don’t think you can call internet famous actually being a celebrity. I have never been recognized anywhere, but Gus gets it all the time. When he goes to Best Buy or Fry’s, he’s recognized about fifty percent of the time.”

I need to clarify something. I’ve been playing a lot of Gamecube games lately, which is odd, because usually there’s nothing to play on it and it just sits there like a bookend. I had some early calls on games that haven’t turned out to be accurate, and it’s something I want to rectify. Most recently, it’s Mario Tennis, which I felt you could skip safely when first I played it. After several days of play, I’m not so sure about that.

As seen on Slashdot, the Dallas Observer is running an article on the SMU “Guildhall” video-game programming graduate program, from the perspective of the brutally overworked students.

Metroblogging Houston: “It appears that, at least in the location I use (Westheimer ramp), the attendant leaves at 2am (on weekdays). As a result, because there’s no way to pay if you don’t have exact change, both lanes are open for you to use without paying. In other words, free access on the Beltway after 2am.”

“Like most of the nation’s ten-year-olds, I had an intense, private relationship with Snoopy, the cartoon beagle.” Comfort Zone: Growing up with Charlie Brown, a lovely exploration of Peanuts and life in the 70s, by Jonathan Franzen, in The New Yorker.

u2log has the U2 Rare/Unreleased track list (from the 446-song digital box set on iTunes).

Note: Beautiful Day : Always :: Vertigo : Native Son

Update: In the same day that we have Lego Trogdor, we learn about actual burninating of knockoff Lego.

Information Age (Australia): RSS: For Geeks Only? “Machines work best with machine code and that’s what RSS is - a semantically useful format that an RSS reader (i.e., your agent) can use to help you deal with the information tsunami that is approaching.”

(That’s exactly the kind of purple prose I have to work so hard to avoid in my own writing.)

That’s a really big … book, you have there…: “The first to comment was Skeletor the manager, who kept staring at the book as he rang up my order. I could tell he was going to say something, and eventually, he said, ‘Tom Jones, huh? I didn’t realize he wrote books. I thought he just sang those sexy songs. (wink, wink)’”

It’s official. All Houston record stores are lame, lame, lame. I called all over town to see which stores would be selling How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb (by U2, perhaps you’ve heard of them?) at midnight. The answer: zero. Cactus gets an ‘A’ for effort; they would be selling it, but their CD shipment has been delayed by our sudden monsoon. Failing grades go to Best Buy, Target, Wal-Mart (look how low I was willing to stoop!), and SoundWaves, which is surprising since I remember distinctly lining up outside the Montrose location to pick up the “Discothèque” single in ’97.

I will have to content myself with mp3s of this weekend’s SNL appearance, helpfully mirrored by the Coral peer-to-peer content distribution network:

• Vertigo 3:28
• Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own 5:28
• I Will Follow 4:28 (Amy Poehler’s ecstatic weeping inaudible on recording)

As the [SNL broadcast 11/20] ended, Bono could be heard saying, “One more?” as he returned to the stage.

A reader who attended the show tells us that the band gave an encore of three songs after the broadcast ended. They performed “All Because of You,” repeated “Vertigo” (without the countdown intro), and played a third song, which the reader cannot recall the title.

Can’t recall? Seriously?

The G-CANS project has been making the rounds today, which by itself is not worth a mention here. The fact that the thing looks like a videogame—but is in fact a real flood-and-runoff-control system underneath Japan—is, in fact, noteworthy.

So Chris posed me the question: “We can’t for the life of us think of the name of the designer who did all those prints for San Francisco (Presidio, Golden Gate Park, etc.)… Ring any bells?”

You bet. I used to have a bunch of those postcards, maybe six or seven years ago; I loved the Art Deco stylee, evoking liquor posters and agitprop. Of course, I didn’t remember who the designer was, either. An extended session of Google-groping ensued, finally leading me to Michael Schwab.

His website’s posters department has a few of the Golden Gate National Parks series, but the full poster series is out there if you know where to look.

So, as you may have noticed, dsandler.org is now a WordPress site.

How did this happen? How did I, unrepentant DIY code junkie that I am, abandon my own code and pick up an off-the-shelf product? Worse still: How did I end up with another PHP web application, after swearing an oath of fidelity to Python?

(continued…) (1,831 words)

Yes, I’ve changed things around again. If you’re having trouble finding what you’re looking for, let me know.