Surj Patel has decided to build a Linux-based homebrew GSM cell phone from scratch. This is absolutely heroic. I’m currently with Sprint, but if Surj succeeds in this project I’d definitely switch to a GSM provider if it meant I could build my own Linux phone.
Pixies were undoubtedly one of the most influential bands of the late eighties, and in fact arrived just slightly ahead of their time: just as they were breaking apart, Nirvana was breaking alternative music into the mainstream. All in all they left behind four studio albums and one EP, and since their demise a CD of B-sides and one of live performances in the BBC studios have been released, as well as a handful of collections, rarities, and some limited-edition recordings of their 2004 reunion tour. What was missing was … well, this DVD.
Pixies is an exemplary DVD retrospective, one by which future music DVDs can be judged. On a single disc it collects all of the band’s videos, one complete concert, and two documentaries — one follows them on an early tour of Europe, and the other is a retrospective featuring live footage, interviews with the band, and an assortment of musicians and critics discussing the band’s impact and importance. The videos range from early demo reels to more polished MTV-style stuff, and the documentaries couldn’t be more different, either: one’s just tosses you on the bus to tour with the band, while the other is all talking heads and inset album covers. My favorite bit was the concert footage — I often find myself cringing at my favorite bands’ live work, especially the frequently hopeless attempts to duplicate on stage the tight harmonies and intricate soundscapes made possible by high-priced producers and computer software, but the Pixies sound almost exactly the same live as they do on disc — a little more stripped down, maybe, a little more raw, but basically the same. And unlike a lot of self consciously pensive musicians these days, they all look like they enjoy what they’re doing — Kim in particular is clearly having a blast throughout.
If you’re a Pixies fan, this disc is essential — it’s not just another shameless cash-in, it’s a great up-close look at a band at the peak of its powers. There’s a lot of material here, every bit of it worthwhile. Don’t miss it.
I got a Gmail account pretty soon after the service went live (and I’ve got 100 invites available if anyone needs one), but I mostly only use it for online sweepstakes, news site registrations, and other things that I suspect might result in “affiliate offers” — I do filter spam on my server, but I don’t want to make it work any harder than necessary. And it’s obviously been working — recently I noticed that there were over a thousand messages in my Gmail spam folder, and it’s set to delete anything more than a month old in that folder. Even for a dedicated spam-catching address, that’s a bit much for my taste. So I decided to try something a little unconventional: unsubscribe from the spammers’ distribution lists.
The conventional wisdom, of course, is that you should never do this, because it only confirms to the spammers that your address is valid, causing them to send you even more spam than before. But what did I have to lose? Worst case scenario, I’d invite myself, sign up for a new account, and drop the old one. So I cleared everything out of that folder and for the next week I diligently clicked the “Unsubscribe” link on every spam message I received. It was a pretty significant time commitment, but incredibly, it worked. Spam is now trickling in at a rate of slightly less than one message per day. I’m still unsubscribing to those messages; with any luck, I’ll be able to bring it down to effectively zero.
Whether this is a result of recent anti-spam legislation, or whether I just happened to be getting spammed by the most ethical online marketers in the world, I don’t know. But it just might be that the conventional wisdom no longer applies in the war against spam.
Halloween is over. When I was a kid, Halloween was one of my favorite holidays. Now that I live in a building with a security door, sometimes I barely notice it. But reading this Fark thread reminded me of a few of my favorite Halloween stories, and since it’s been a while since I’ve shared these stories online (and also a while since I’ve posted anything on this blog), I thought I’d take a few minutes to type up some of my favorite Halloween memories.
Several years ago, when I was in high school, my dad and I decided we were tired of giving out candy to the same kids I went to school with. So in addition to the usual assortment of candies that year, we bought a couple armloads of Libby’s Potted Meat Food Product. If you’ve never seen it (check the canned meat section of your local supermarket, near the SPAM), it looks kind of like spreadable vienna sausage paste. There are several brands available, but Libby’s won us over with its combination of low price (fifty-nine cents a can, if I recall correctly) and disgusting ingredients (my favorite: “cooked partially defatted pork fatty tissue”). We kind of buried it under the real candy and palmed it as we dropped it into the high school kids’ bags — still, one can of it was sitting on the doorstep the next day, and frankly it’s a miracle that no cans came flying through the window that night.
The year after that my cousin and I took over the Halloween duties, and after much thought we decided on a Christmas theme. We bought Santa hats, played a “Reggae Christmas” CD I found somewhere, and handed out candy canes. Most kids thought it was pretty funny. One little girl, probably about three years old, was petrified when we threw open the door and yelled “Merry Christmas!” We then balanced a two-pound fruitcake on her plastic pumpkin. She remained rooted to the spot until her father picked her up and carried her away. We also gave some kid a one-pound marzipan pig mounted on its own cutting board, and another got a framed certificate for Excellence in Costume Design.
The next year we toned it down a little bit. Fewer and fewer kids were trick-or-treating, and we knew we wouldn’t be able to unload as much stuff. Toward the end of the night we actually went for a walk, found a group of kids, and promised we’d give them everything we had left. They followed us home, where in addition to dumping about a pound of candy into each of their bags we gave one a whole smoked trout. They went quiet for a moment, and then one said, “Oh, this is where Laura got that award last year.” That warmed our hearts.
But the next year was our last. I think we got fewer than twenty trick-or-treaters all night, most of them high schoolers in street clothes with a mask or a little fake blood. We gave sardines and bouillon cubes to those slackers, but our hearts weren’t in it anymore.
I realize I’m a little young for nostalgia, but Halloween just isn’t what it used to be, and I for one blame the parents. When I was a kid, no one thought twice about sending three or four kids out alone, after dark, to beg for candy from complete strangers. These days that doesn’t happen much anymore, and yet the crime rate is actually lower than it was back then. I think parents have been watching too many TV cop dramas. And now what am I supposed to do with all this potted meat?
