dsandler.org

Exhausted.

So, we have furniture. Beyond that, we’ve got about six plastic cups, a bunch of towels, and our cats. The rest of the move happens this weekend—the little odds and ends and endless boxes that will, in E’s words, make us “Zeno’s movers”.

(Also: Is it a sign of some subliminal reluctance to bond with the new place that I’ve been here for about six hours and have just now thought to take my shoes off?)

dsandler-lan is down for the first time in years, and for the last time in Pearland. Hopefully we’ll be back up by noon tomorrow.

Looks like there are still some vestiges of GNE (Game Neverending, Ludicorp’s original product, since discontinued to focus on Flickr) inside the Flickr engine. I always suspected it (some of the URLs end in .gne) but now I have proof, thanks to the most excellent Rod:

Subject: [Flickr] Array.character_name has given you a Pro Account!

It’s somehow very cool to me (since I have had networked multiplayer environments on the brain since high school) knowing that, somewhere deep inside Flickr, I am a character in a game.

Paul Thurrott’s Tiger revew has gotten some buzz this weekend because, well, Paul’s a Windows columnist. (Look at the URL.) It’s a balanced tour of the new OS; no obsessive fawning, and no knee-jerk loathing either. What stood out for me is that he points out that Mail 2 has no clothes (or, at least, no consistent UI):

The brushed metal apps are still there, but the pinstripe style has been replaced, for the second time, with the “plastic” style. The token plastic application, incidentally, is Mail 2 […] The toolbar buttons, however, are bizarre looking and unlike the icons found in any other Mac OS X applications, another case of Apple trouncing all over its own user interface conventions. It’s astonishing to me that Mac fanatics let the company get away with that.

I guess I’m not a fanatic, then, because the screenshots of Tiger Mail have been really bugging me since they were first released. I had held out hope that the early pictures were of prototype versions of the app, with further UI tweakage to follow; clearly, that didn’t happen, and this is what we’re stuck with. Here’s hoping the app isn’t too hard to hack (first order of business: remove the bizarre pale-green button backgrounds).

This one’s for Chris: “Ikea” by Jonathan Coulton (mp3 lyrics).

Bonus track (also for Chris): (name withheld to improve song impact).

nin-dsandler-holding-on.mp3

Here you go, my first (and probably only^* remix of “The Hand That Feeds”, in the honorable tradition of Baron’s Just The Way You Are: Holding On And On (alternate link). If you listen to the original, and then look closely at the vocal track, I think you’ll agree this is how it was meant to sound. *wink*

* OK, I admit it: I made another one. It’s just as … questionable.

Oh, hell, it’s even on Slashdot now. (Boing Boing has a better set of links and a longer excerpt from the README.)

I can confirm that it plays fine in GarageBand 1.1 (if you’re willing to click through a string of inscrutable error dialogs, one for every sample). As I told Dave, I’m having a lot of fun looking through Trent’s source code, as it were—picking out and playing the background loops that give the song depth and texture when mixed in with the rest. But I wonder what a real electronic musician or mashup artist could create.

Update: this comment on the Slashdot story points out that, by default, new tracks in GB start with echo and reverb effects turned on but set at 0 (so they consume CPU cycles during playback without changing the audio). They can therefore be safely turned off (press command-I to open the info panel, twist open the “Details” region, click each instrument in turn, and disable the superfluous effects in the Details).

Update 2: Here you go. This is a very serious remix with very serious musical qualities. [serious stare]

Update 3: Actual fan remixes are starting to pop up (some more in this noisy thread).

Update 4: Oups, je l’ai fait encore.