Someone must have bumped the thermostat upstairs, because it has gotten quite chilly around here, at least compared to how the weather has been for the past few weeks. Time to closet the hawaiian shirts (and certainly the no shirt) and break out the sweaters again.
Post-Gig Analysis
Today’s gig was painful in a way only a very special combination of lost music and missing people can make it. If it was a bad group I wouldn’t be so disappointed, but the group usually sounds a lot better than we did today. On the upside, there was free food afterward that was quite good, and I was asked to participate in a much nicer group starting next year when they have an opening in the sax section, and I’m very excited about that. That in addition to being in the UH jazz band should fill the musical void that’s been in my life this year. Time to shed!
Send What?
This is not a post about the war. They’re doing something just like this in Houston, and I heard on the radio today that the two items really wanted over there are baby wipes and beef jerky. Now think about this a second, and tell me why when we’re spending billions a day we can’t get the fine men and women risking their lives for us some freaking baby wipes? Third party groups have to beg us for money for support operations when we already give gads of money to the government for the very same purpose? I’m sure there’s a good reason, I just don’t know what it is.
Gig Tomorrow
I’m going to be playing a big band gig on the Kemah Boardwalk tomorrow, Sunday, at 2 PM. Okay the gig is actually at University of Houston Downtown, and it’s going to be with the amazing pianist who won the Great American Piano Competition last year, Deanna Witkowski. There is more information here. I’m going to be playing lead alto and I have a couple of solos and we might do one of my features this week. I’m performing a lot less this year, but next year my schedule will be as such to allow me to participate in more groups with hopefully more performances like this.
For Those Lonely Nights
HoldTheButton.com. What else is there to say?
Compress Your Pages for Fun and Profit
Well hot diggity, the lovely Christine has kindly posted an article I wrote called Compressing Webpages for Fun and Profit to the Bloggy-sweeping website Scripty Goddess. Go check it out and make your pages faster. Every time you gzip a page an angel gets its wings.
Gallery: 3-29-2003
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Axis of… What?
Got this from my darling sister, enjoy:
Bitter after being snubbed for membership in the “Axis of Evil”, Libya,China and Syria today announced that they had formed the “Axis of Just as Evil”, which they said would be more evil than the Iran-Iraq-North Korea axis President Bush warned of in his State of the Union address.
Axis of Evil members, however, immediately dismissed the new Axis as having, for starters, a really dumb name. “Right. They are just as evil . . . in their dreams!” declared North Korean leader Kim Jong-il. “Everybody knows we’re the best evils . . . best at being evil.. . we’re the best.”
Diplomats from Syria denied they were jealous over being excluded, although they conceded they did ask if they could join the Axis of Evil. “They told us it was full,” said Syrian President Bashar al- Assad. “An axis can’t have more than three counties”, explained Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. “This is not my rule, it’s tradition. In World War II you had Germany, Italy, and Japan in the evil Axis. So, you can only have three, and a secret handshake. Ours is wickedly cool.”
International reaction to Bush’s Axis of Evil declaration was swift, as within minutes, France surrendered.
Elsewhere, peer-conscious nations rushed to gain triumvirate status in what has become a game of geopolitical chairs. Cuba, Sudan and Serbia announced that they had formed the “Axis of Somewhat Evil”, forcing Somalia to join with Uganda and Myanmar in the “Axis of Occasionally Evil”, while Bulgaria, Indonesia and Russia established the “Axis of Not So Much Evil Really as Just Generally Disagreeable”.
With the criteria suddenly expanded and all the desirable clubs filling up,Sierra Leone, El Salvador, and Rwanda applied to be called the “Axis of Countries That Aren’t the Worst But Certainly Won’t Be Asked to Host the Olympics”.
Canada, Mexico and Australia formed the “Axis of Nations That Are Actually Quite Nice But Secretly Have Some Nasty Thoughts About America”, while Scotland, New Zealand and Spain established the “Axis of Countries That Want Sheep to Wear Lipstick”. “That’s not a threat, really, just something we like to do”, said Scottish Executive First Minister Jack McConnell.
While wondering if the other nations of the world weren’t perhaps making fun of him, a cautious Bush granted approval for most axis, although he rejected the establishment of the “Axis of Countries Whose Names End in ‘Guay”, accusing one of its members of filing a false application. Officials from Paraguay, Uruguay, and Chadguay denied the charges.
Israel, meanwhile, insisted it didn’t want to join any Axis, but privately world leaders said that’s only because no one asked them.
Personal Details
A remark was made to me the other day that there are scarce personal details of me on this site, a fact I can’t deny. This obviously means one of two things:
- My life is so interesting I’m currently in negotiations with MGM over the rights to be used as the basis for the next Bond movie, or
- My life is so incredibly boring that if I were to post details of it here people would actually fall asleep while reading and then the comment section would be full of random letters as a result of people’s heads hitting their keyboards.
The jury is still out on this one. Anyway, so today I was eating a cheese sandwich…
Gallery: 3-28-2003
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My Plan for Spam
Well I’ve had more spam getting through my previously perfect Spam Assassin wall so I’ve spent a good part of tonight teaching my personal Bayesian filter about my mail and what I think is spam. I’m feeding it all the good mail right now, because I’ve been deleting all the spam rather than saving it in a folder. In hindsight I should have been holding on, but my emotions got the best of me and that delete button feels so good. In the coming weeks I’m going to be posting a series of essays talking about improving your email, a subject I have given a great deal of thought to. These will be slanted toward average Joe hosted on a shared Cpanel server (like from Spyder Hosting or Blogomania) but they will be universally applicable to anyone technically minded. That said, I’m looking for one or two people to proof the articles and try these things out before I post them, so if you’re interested in taking control of your email and wouldn’t mind helping out, drop me a note and I’ll put you on the list.
It’s A Beautiful Day
Today has been groovy because I finally got my ethics paper back and it got an 8, which was a little disappointing till I checked and remembered that this teacher’s grading scale has 7 and above as an A, so in fact I got a solid A. What paper you ask? Well it’s on Divine Command Theory and the Euthyphro Argument, and the entirety is available online in PDF and XHTML format through the link above. Which reminds me I still need to make a system to highlight some past notable post.
Install
It’s that time again, where I’m forced to spend hours and hours reconfiguring everything and installing programs so I can be productive with this computer. I kept a list just for grins, and here it is:
- Winamp 2 (To listen to while doing the rest.)
- SecureCRT (Gotta have SSH.)
- Diskeeper
- Roboform (I’m lazy.)
- Google Toolbar (Need to find updates and such.)
- Photoshop 7 (I’m a very young Jedi here.)
- Topstyle Pro (Makes me warm and fuzzy inside. Rumored to prevent eye bleeds.)
- Cute FTP Pro
- Adobe Acrobat
- ASPI Layer
- Audio Catalyst (Music habit.)
- Office XP (Bloatware at its finest.)
- Kazaa Lite (Music habit.)
- Personal HOSTS File (Feel free to grab. Tweaked so Yahoo works.)
- DeadAIM (Chat me up @ saxmatt02.)
- Palm Desktop (Sync it up.)
- Studio MX (Gotta pay the bills.)
Burn Him!
Gallery: 3-26-2003
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Message From Above
Ever want to see those really cool leaflets that we drop from planes on countries we’re invading. Obviously the tactic is to horrify them with gratuitous Times and bad cartoons until they surrender. Hat tip: Typographica
In Sony World Again
Well, I finally got my laptop back. Yes, that laptop. My trusty GRX-570 is back with (apparently) a new motherboard, power system, LCD, and AC adaptor. So basically the keyboard is the same. It took them almost three months to fix it, which is the most ridiculous thing ever, but I must say that it feels quite nice to have it back in my hands and it’s running great. It’s going to take some getting used to a laptop that is at least an inch bigger and several pounds heavier than the one I used for so long though. I’m not even sure this will fit in my new bag! Time will tell though, and I must admit it’s nice to be at 1600×1200 again. If you haven’t visited the photolog lately, there are a couple of new days of pictures with some hilarious candid shots.
I Now Have… Pants
The weekend was a ton of fun, starting off with me barely recovered but going to Rene’s birthday party (which has pics up now), next day getting a Tungsten T and meeting some H-Town people (Kathy and Christine summarize nicely), and then taking an unexpected road trip on Sunday to Navasota and meeting my sister. You see, when I left Austin after SxSW I was in a little bit of a hurry and I ended up leaving 3 pairs of pants, 2 belts, and 3 shirts. I just flat out forgot them. Picked those up and had lunch with my sister and her roommate. Charleen has a thousand stories. We visited a graveyard with an ancestor buried there and it was an interesting experience all around.
Today was a beautiful, beautiful day. Many ups and downs, but the highlight was that the new lenses for my glasses came in. My prescription has changed quite a bit, and I’ve been seeing the world in sort of a haze for I guess a year now. As I waited for them to put the new lenses in I walked from store to store, browsing at Radio Shack, listening to some music, eating a slice of apple pie, and when I got my glasses back I put them on and gasped. There couldn’t be a better time of the year for this to happen. As I walked outside I felt the sun kiss my skin and the trees are beautiful and OH MY GOD look at the amazing leaves I can see each one. Everything is so incredibly crisp I just want to grab it and make sure it’s all real.
On Google and the Future
Sometimes things will come up in conversation that bear repeating, but where the barrier to packaging it in a ‘publishable’ form seems too high for whatever your time restraints at the moment. So this is a snippet of a conversation with the inimitable Joe Clark that pertains to his article on Google:
MM: Logical points.
MM: I think Google’s update cycle for all but a few is ridiculous though
MM: it favors fresh content, but it’s out of sync with what’s fresh
MM: I remember one engine, perhaps Teoma when it first started, offered *instant* inclusionMM: I think a system like what you suggest would be abused, but in a way so easily trackable and correctable it would actually help to weed out junk.
JC: I see.
MM: Let’s say you “ping” Google telling them your page has updated. They check, get newest content, integrate it, the world is a better place and everyone is happy. Let’s say you resubmit the page an hour later, hoping to get a fresh bonus or something, it would slap you on the wrist for having no new or significantly different content.
MM: If the page was, say, 20% different, then it probably should be reindexed, and the old page should be dropped from the index because none of that is there anymore.
JC: Well, that’s making sense.
MM: Plus it can tie this all in with the link-votes pageranking to give instant pageranks to every page, instead of the psuedo-pageranks they often use now
MM: I forsee a day when you hover over a link and it preemptively tells you the pagerank of the linked page in a tooltip or the status bar.
JC: Cripes, kid, you’ve got a visionary hidden underneath there.
JC: Are you gonna publish this s— or what?
JC: then again, you’re not done yet. carry on.
MM: And if the page isn’t in the index yet, get it! Moreover what are they doing with all that juicy information they’re getting from Google Toolbars? I’m sure something interesting could be done with that, a la [that company that starts with an A] but with more relevant ranking than pure traffic.
MM: Publish? Not enough time.
MM: Google is always looking for new things to do with their current data, but they’ve done very little in terms of making their data more timely.
JC: just copy and paste what you wrote and blog ‘er.
It’s hard to say no to Joe, so here I am.
The Oscars
“The Oscars, comparatively, are like a five-hour high school graduation with nicer clothes and no beach balls.” Amen. I get more and more tired of the entire industry every time I see one of those gaudy magazines that obsesses over every insignificant detail of people who I don’t think our society should be idolizing.