for the ladies over in europe who might not be so into the world cup, switzerland created a fetching commercial full of beautiful men to lure you to their neutral lands. my favorite part is when the guy baling hay uses his pitchfork to dump a pile of hay right where he picked it up from. (via)

you can see a couple of photos from a trip to switzerland here. i also call that trip the skiing trip of terrifying death where i learned it is almost always better to drink spiked hot chocolate on the lodge then end up with your ski pole stuck through your arm with european children laughing at you.

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Thanks for all the thoughts & prayers. It's been an emotionally difficult couple of hours.

Thanks very much to Justin for sending this along. Apparently Panera's content filter is blocking this site:

Hmm. I don't think this site is filled with violent, racist hate speech (unless "Food Network Chefs" now count as an ethnic group). But I suppose I'm not the one who gets to make that call.

I guess I should be somewhat diplomatic, since I'm now patiently waiting for SonicWall to review our case. So I'll put it as gently as I can: SonicWall appears to be run by a bunch of goddamn morons. What'd you guys do, put "hate" into Google and ban all the sites that came up? If you're intent on being in the business of facilitating societal prudishness — surely a noble calling! — you ought to at least figure out how to do it properly, you miserably incompetent fuckwits.

Related: BoingBoing's guide to defeating censorware.

one of the things i miss most about chicago is, perhaps strangely, the el. i know - dudes are always masturbating on it, hobos poo in the corner, the howard station always smells strongly of urine, and the sounds that emit from it are unholy and unworldly. but it managed to sneak into a special place in my heart and stay there. truth be told, i love it much more than the metro, even though the metro is about 100x cleaner and the el didn't have a super duper last call thingie. anyways, gapers block (gawd how i wish atlanta had a gapers block) recently put up a piece about five films in which the el is a prominent feature. check it out.

i didn't catch the episode myself, but aly points me towards the pretty great opening montage of the season premiere of perennial zunta favorite "the venture brothers." i'll have to make a note to catch the next one.

and guess what? i may be getting a personal tour of the cartoon network while i'm down here! woot.

UPDATE: sorry, i had the wrong youtube link for the venture brother's opening montage. it should be fixed now.

holy crap. there is very little that can make me laugh to tears at 6:30 in the morning, but i think official blogcrush fontana labs, in the greatest blog-return ever, might have hit upon it. may i present you with rapebear.

UPDATE: as an aside, you should go through and read that blogcrush link. i forgot that was the night somebody got "i heart pumping" written on his face, along with a borf tag on the arm. it was wonderful.

does anyone know of a free or relatively cheap running club (or marathon training group) in atlanta that preferably meets on saturday mornings to run and is preferably not atlanta-singles-running.org? that group actually looks like exactly what i am looking for (though their runs seem a little far out), but i do not run to meet singles and i am scared. i run for the pain. yeah.

just fyi: pop candy has links to some nice mp3s from grant-lee phillips' latest album, which is a bunch of covers of great 80s tracks from the cure, R.E.M. and so forth.

a cool thing about work: generally, i feel like i'm working in the CTU offices on 24.

a few more cnn shots here.

these blogs are installing some wanderlust in me lately, so i thought i'd pass them on.

tania: an american living in cortona with her husband and apparently eating incredibly well. when we stayed near cortona last year i took several restaurant recommendations from her blog and all of them were spot on. plus she takes some gorgeous photos. my favorites include her series on "god spots," the weird little shrines you find all over tuscany.

betsey goes to china: betsey went to china (and the archives are on the site) but now she's living it up in singapore. she seems to go on getaways to india, thailand and hong kong every other weekend, so you're getting quite a bit of beautiful photos with her droll and sweet commentary.

sarah lane: some of you may know sarah as the adorable blond lady formerly of "attack of the show," which tommy and charles would watch all the time. she recently got married and her honeymoon involves a 13-month trip around the world with her husband (who was also on the show. i read somewhere they met on the show a year ago; was she dating kevin rose at the time? WAS THERE SCANDAL!?!). anyways. currently they're in turkey, and her most recent post features some amazing shots of the capadocia region, whose terrain reminds me a lot of my perennial italian favorite, matera.

the satorialist: not exactly a travel blog, but my favorite fashion blog (a photographer in new york who takes and posts pictures of beautiful people wearing beautiful and interesting clothing out on the street) has been commissioned by style.com to shoot the men's shows in milan and paris. but when he's out in the piazzas, he's taking shots of the italian ladies. and they are, as usual, stunning. the italians. oi.

it is now 12:30pm, and i've been at work for six and half hours. that's right: i pull the early shift at cnn.com, and let me tell you, it's a doozy. arriving to work by 6am is going to be, at least initially, much harder than i thought. though i was fast asleep by 10:30 last night with the trust of my handy sidekick named Extra-Large Dose of Nyquil, i am zombie lady today. three cups of coffee and a diet coke later, i am doing okay. the morning, with actual real work, has flown by; i get to leave in two hours! at which point i will go to the turner gym, which i've just joined, for my first workout in many moons. pray i don't pass out on the treadmill and get swallowed under.

anyway, i've been trying to take the positive spin on my work schedule. some upsides:

adrian grenier, whom i have an unexplainably huge crush on, was just on the cnn program american morning. does that film in new york? or does it film here? i DON'T EVEN KNOW. IS IT HERE IN ATLANTA? TELL ME!

UPDATE: i think it films in new york. of course. i'm sure celebrities aren't flying down to atlanta at the drop of a hat. bummer.

"jimmy down the well" and "sheffield shanty" from monkey swallows the universe. via 3hive. i have never heard a band who wanted to be belle and sebastian more.

"pull shapes" from the pipettes, via my brother. cute video and cute girl singers, too. everyone looks like they're on smiley acid and in the 60s, which is fun! some other fun songs at their myspace page. pretty much all of them are 60s-girl-group-inspired - not exactly orginal, but happy and fun and catchy, and what more do you want?

as for an official album of the summer, after having finally got the whole thing on my ipod, i'm going to have to go with charles on, SURPRISE, phoenix's "it's never been like that." it just does it for me.

Rachael Ray is getting her own daytime talk show. This is old news, but I just saw an ad for it on TV. And I am disturbed.

I went to the barbershop in the lobby of the office today. It was a weird departure from my normal national haircut franchise habits. The place was operated half by authentic-looking old coots and half by the sort of intense Asian women that tend to staff the low end of the haircut market. I got one of the latter.

But that wasn't the remarkable part. Rather, the bit that stuck out was the overpowering Republicanousity of the place. There was a picture of W on the wall; that was the first and most obvious sign. But once the haircut began, they started flooding forward:

• On the recent rain: When I timidly pushed the boring smalltalk about the weather forward by making a not-very-serious reference to global warming, the lady cutting my hair objected. "It's all God!" she insisted. "The rain, the wind, the water — we don't make any of that stuff. Whatever it is, it's God doing it." Okay.
• On Warren Buffett's Recent Charity: "There's something fishy. There's some gimmick, I just don't know what," observed the gentleman in the chair next to me.
• On the oil sands of Canada: There's a lot of them! It's going to be great.

Seriously, this all happened over the course of maybe, maybe twelve minutes. No mention of brutalizing detainees, but if I'd had the extra time afforded by using a credit card instead of cash, I'm sure I would've heard something.

Gaze upon this bottle, ye blog readers, and despair. Chipotle beer. Yes. That's right. Chipotle. You thought that it was just getting into your ketchup, and mayo, and tortilla chips, but you were wrong. It's everywhere. Doctors are now warning pregnant women not to eat fish because of dangerously escalating oceanic chipotle levels.

I really, really don't understand the appeal. Jalapeno peppers have a perfectly nice taste when they're unsmoked. Smoke does not immediately make things taste better. Sure, it works well with meat and a few other things. But it's a great way to ruin perfectly good cheese, and when applied to vegetables it tends to completely overwhelm them. Plus it's somewhat bad for you.

The other lesson, aside from the seeming inevitability of a chipotle stripe being added to boxes of neopolitan ice cream, is that Rogue brand beer is terrible. You can't trust those people. I've seen them put chocolate — actual bittersweet chocolate — into perfectly innocent stouts (I know, other people do this too, but they're no less dangerously insane). Beware the beer iconoclast: he doesn't have your best interests in mind. He's just trying to look cool in front of his brewer friends.

Still, in my mind Rogue is only the second-most objectionable beer company. Worst of all is Dogfish Head. This is thanks to their Chickory Stout, which I had the misfortune of sampling some years back. I'm not sure what chickory is — I think people used to eat it during the Civil War, possibly to distract themselves from the pain of battlefield limb amputation — but I know it's terrible, and should never, ever enter a human mouth. That was far and away the worst beer I've ever tasted. And I've consumed entire glasses of skittlebraü (tip: drink it quickly, while it's still clear and delightfully rainbow-colored, rather than thick, chalky and brown).

since all of cnn seems to operate entirely using IM, i've been obliged to create a new handle: CNNCatherine. i'll still use pablohoney on my laptop in the evenings, but during the day, i will be rocking the cnn name. so add me!

UPDATE: or CatherineOnMac. that's right, i've got two computers, one of which is a mac, which is good, cause it'll help me figure out if i really want to buy one or if they just drive me insane. so far it seems more of an insanity type thing, but that's mainly because i'm just not that good at using them yet.

i last left you in my fascinating tale of my weekend atlanta activities the night of the joys of spreading, catching and sharing disease. i mean, the joys of female faith. after escaping the traffic around the phillip's arena and the cnn building and checking out east atlanta the next morning, tommy and i discovered the joys of an establishment native only to atlanta: target.

Last week JP, Catherine and I were having a few beers and talking about places we'd lived. We enthusiastically agreed that Vermont was beautiful, Chicago was awesome and Montreal was cool. And eventually Catherine mentioned that she was about to move to Atlanta. JP said, "Oh."

"What? C'mon, it can't be that bad," one of us protested.

"No no, Atlanta's fine," JP continued. "It's just that it doesn't have any redeeming qualities."

Well, having just spent nearly 48 hours in the city, I now consider myself something of an Atlanta expert — or at least able to politely disagree.

Judging by when Orbitz left a voicemail for me, US Air decided sometime last night that my flight would be delayed by an hour — this wasn't the unforeseen pushing back a schedule, but rather a profound philosophical disagreement between USAir and myself about when the flight ought to take off. In a truly impressive display of meteorological synchronicity, this decision pushed takeoff smack into the middle of a newly-arrived thunderstorm. So I got to spend quite a bit of quality time on the ATL tarmac. That's when I wrote this, and tried (and failed) to publish it from my phone. It seemed like a good time to record my initial impressions of the city — if you can think of nice things to say when about a city you're sitting on one of its runways — wishing that you were merely an hour late and instead comforting yourself by shooting beams of pure hatred at the weather, control tower and anyone else passing by — well, then the nice things must be true.

I should get this out of the way first: Atlanta is kind of a freeway-choked hellscape. There's no getting around that. You have to drive to get anywhere. To some extent, I think the mark of genuine city-hood is how unnecessary cars are. By that score, Atlanta is a miserable failure, a gigantic suburb rather than an honest-to-god city. It's sort of like LA, only with an appropriate sense of embarrassed modesty.

But that's my only real complaint. You may have to drive to get anyplace, but once you get to that place, it tends to be pretty nice. Patronizing conceptions of the south notwithstanding, the area is considerably less choked with national franchises than you'd think. There are original stores, and bars, and restaurants -- more than you'd find in DC, at any rate. It's great.

It's an attractive city, too. I liked the skyline. I know my architecturally-inclined friends are recoiling in horror right now. "What is he thinking?" Kriston is yelling at his laptop. "Doesn't he realize the buildings don't look like the headquarters of a bank run by Darth Vader? And that they don't all look exactly the same?!"

Well, to be honest, I do realize those things. But the extent of my architectural phillistinism really can't be overstated: staring at the Coca-Cola building and noticing that it seemed a little drab, I joked to myself, "Why don't they just make it look like a giant bottle of Coke? Hahaha." Then, a moment later, I thought, "Hmmm.... That might not be that bad." See what I mean?

Finally, to slip back into the aforementioned patronizing conception of the south, the residents' sense of hospitality has to be factored into any judgment. Everyone was extremely sweet and helpful -- first and foremost among them Catherine's new landlord, Jeannie, who patiently drew lots of excellent and much-needed maps for us, and even went so far as to make dinner reservations on our behalf. Hell, even random neighbors at the bars were friendly, pleasantly introducing themselves and unselfishly sharing tales of martial animal cuteness (which I'm sure Catherine will regale you with later). And Catherine reports that, while I was fetching the car, the gentlemen at the bar proved to be quite friendly, too. It's because they're so hospitable, you see.

Anyway, that's the verdict: it's too hot and has way too many cars, but otherwise Atlanta seems perfectly nice. Although I have to say that the charms of its runways did begin to wear a little thin after an hour or so. And sweet tea remains completely unfit for human consumption.

allow me to take you on a step-by-step journey of my amazing atlantian adventures this past weekend. it is a magical land of SUVs and super walmarts, of crowded interstates and warm biscuits, of wicked thunderstorms and creeping moss hanging over brick verandas. it's weird, but it's nice. it's THE SOUTH.

huh. maybe i shouldn't buy a mac. TELL ME WHAT TO DO, INTERNETS!

(also: scroll down to the bottom of jake's post for some wonderful news about futurama. or, you know, just click that link. i like to think the fact that tommy and i have seen every rerun of that show at least three times on adult swim has played some small part in its resurrection.)

WE HAVE ARRIVED.

(we actually arrived several hours ago but have been hanging out and eating and viewing the down with our lovely hostess, jeanie, who is subletting me my lovely room in her lovely house for the summer.)

but, anyway! atlanta! seems pretty cool. much more to come, probably sunday.

and, before the clock strikes midnight: to tommy, and jeff, and jon, and charles, and all the other beer drinkin boys out there - i wish you a very happy beer day. i am too sad not to partake in a celebration this year.

Controversy! So, This American Life, the astoundingly good public radio show, finally got around to ditching the irredeemable RealAudio format for its online offerings and put everything up as mp3s. Geeks, doing what they do, immediately created podcast feeds out of this newfound bounty. Then the trouble began.

TAL seems to be run by nice and generous folks, but they sell their episodes through iTunes and Audible.com. They also give royalties to their contributors and the folks they license music from (they have good taste in music). These entanglements mean that they can't endorse the free downloading of permanent copies of their shows — although they seem to be okay with old episodes being streamed off of their website (they wrapped the new mp3s in m3u playlist files; for the non-tech-savvy, this would conceal the downloadability of the underlying mp3s and appear to be a stream-based offering).

TAL has begun contacting the folks who put up the podcast feeds and politely asking them to take their feeds down. The feed maintainers have all complied, so far as I know. But folks aren't uniformly happy about this, or convinced that TAL is unambiguously in the right. BoingBoing has been operating a clearinghouse for the resulting discussion. See here, here, here and here. Folks seem to be backing off due to their fondness for the show, but the copyfighting contingent isn't particularly happy.

That sums up my position pretty well, too. I'm conflicted about this. I love This American Life and I want it to survive. And, after reading this glowing profile, I'm pretty much ready to pledge my undying allegiance to Ira Glass.

On the other hand, I don't really believe in the idea that content producers have a right to restrict how their work is consumed after it's been given away in one format. Consumers shouldn't be begrudged the right to time-shift programming and consume it as they see fit. That's the underlying idea behind DRM, and it'll produce an incredibly irritating system for interacting with our culture if it's allowed to take hold.

So what to do? Compromise — and be discreet. The dopes who submitted their homebrew TAL feed to the iTunes Music Store had precisely the wrong idea. If TAL doesn't want other folks to decide their distribution system on their behalf, I suppose that's fine. So long as they don't bother those of us who quietly make use of technology to more easily enjoy their show, everyone should be happy. I'll admit that it's not a very democratic solution, but it seems like the best one available at the moment.

And on that note, if you happen to have a web hosting account available to you that can run PHP scripts, you might be interested in the one I whipped up this afternoon (you'll probably want to secure it from prying eyes). Also: shhh!

sorry for the dearth on my part for the past few days - they've been doozies. sunday my dad and i flew into chicago at 7am, spent the entire day packing, and fell asleep at like 8pm. monday we packed up the truck (with the assistance of the lovely kevin) then drove six hours and spent the night at a quality inn in richfield, OH. (our thoughts, summed up the morning after - catherine: "quality inn maybe isn't the best name for that place." dad: "yeah. the quality part should be in air quotes.") the next morning we arose at 5am, drove drove drove, and got to my parents' house at 1pm, where we promptly unloaded the truck and collapsed in a heap.

anyway, tommy and i head down to fine, fine atlanta on friday at 6am, and i need your help! can you recommend me the following:

-things to listen to in the car (podcasts, new albums, books on tape)
-fun games to play in the car besides tommy's and my standard one of "roadkill!"
-a nice restaurant in atlanta to eat at on saturday night. not, like, SUPER NICE AND FANCY, but something cute and good.
-a yum barbeque place in atlanta to eat lunch at
-a bar that doesn't make me want to shoot myself in the head

do i even have any atlanta readers out there? i know i had a few chicago readers when i started out in that town that were quite helpful...but in any case, everyone can help out with the car activity listening stuff!

BTD, Unfogged, Kriston — all have been having trouble with their Movable Type 3.2 installations. The culprit in all cases seems to be an overabundance of comments and trackbacks in the junk folders — for some reason these continue to be indexed as part of day-to-day MT operations. Eventually the load gets too large, scripts start timing out, and shared hosting providers shut you down for consuming too many resources. Maybe it's just a coincidence, but I'm not convinced — assuming a constant level of spam, these breakdowns have all occurred very close to one another. It looks to me like an inevitable shortcoming of MT 3.2 is surfacing.

From what I hear, SixApart hasn't been very helpful — despite these folks owning licenses. I'm sure this new Vox thing is going to be very cool, but they probably ought to spend some time fixing their existing flagship product, too. It seems to be breaking in a fairly serious way.

For those MT users who haven't crashed yet, all I can suggest is that you delete everything from your junk comment and trackback folders. That hasn't been a cure-all for everybody, but it can't hurt.

UPDATE: Check out the comments for more detail from Becks on the problems Unfogged ran into. Spawning lots of individual Perl processes isn't necessarily a bad thing (or avoidable, given MT's overall architecture), but the scripts clearly need to be made lower-impact — at least until the submission is definitively identified as non-junk (at which point resource consumption can be escalated).

Meanwhile, WordPress, MT's chief rival, continues to not-quite-intrigue me. I like that it's in PHP and that it's open source. But it's not capable of handling load in its default configuration, and it's been built with a nasty coding approach that, while intended to make template designers' lives easier, mostly just infuriates me with its quirkiness, opacity and illogical nature.

Gizmodo has a hands-on with the Sidekick 3, which apparently will be unleashed on T-Mobile customers in 8 days. Perhaps it's just the Gizmodo reviewer's lack of familiarity with the SK platform at work, but I find this piece somewhat discouraging. Yes, there's Bluetooth, an audio player and a slightly better camera, but large parts of this review read exactly like the author is talking about the Sidekick 2:

Little notifier icons in the top right corner inform you when you have a message in IM, mail, or SMS/MMS. Messages appear in a little bubble for a moment before disappearing, so you can assess the value of emails and messages before reading. There is an airplane mode that turns off the wireless and basically lets you browse your mail like a madman but little else.

The trackball is a real winner. It lights up with all the colors of the rainbow—actually about 10...

The battery lasted one full day....

Voice quality was fine and reception as about as good as can be expected. One pet peeve—it would lose its GPRS connection and only a full reboot would get it back...

Ah well. I think the GPRS speeds have been bumped up, too. If that's the case, it's probably enough of a reason to upgrade (the Bluetooth is the main attraction for me). Still, I was hoping for better battery life... maybe even... GPS? I know, I know, I'm asking too much.

"This group should not to be confused with the real-life band The Misfits, led by Glenn Danzig."

Words of wisdom.

Ezra's completely right about Entourage. It's weird. Not Ezra being right about something — he does that all the time. Rather, he's right in noting the weirdness of the show being so entertaining despite its almost complete lack of actual conflict. I was talking with some folks about this last night, and we all basically agreed: people like happy endings, and there's only one place to get them on HBO.

But I'm still conflicted about liking the show. If I ever met anyone like the main characters (aside from E), I have no doubt that I'd hate their guts. I'd probably spend the evening trying to make them look dumb, then cowardly backing down from any resulting threats. You know, like that jerk from that scene in Good Will Hunting who ended up not liking those apples very much.

Seriously, Turtle is a perfect instantiation of some of the most despicable Dude Archetypes of all time. The show's apparent endorsement of the douchebag lifestyle makes me wonder what company I'm putting myself in by liking it. Whatever demographic it is, I have a feeling it includes a lot of dudes who spent most of their college years proclaiming how "money" various things were. I'm not particularly comfortable with that.

But there's no helping it. The show's got sharp writers, nonstop wish-fulfillment and an unpretentious way of presenting its thoroughly pretentious subject matter. Plus, Jeremy Piven is a comedic force of nature (his thoroughly wussy yogic journeys notwithstanding). Who am I to stand in his way?

I donno, man. I have misgivings. I know that it's my duty as an aspiring liberal elite to pledge my undying love for all things Garrison Keillor. Just look at my friends: Matt and Emily are both currently leaping to the guy's defense, and Charles was practically brought up with Garrisonianism as a secondary religion (complete with weekly Sunday observances). Keillor writes in magazines I wish I wanted to read, and A Prarie Home Companion is, obviously, one of dear NPR's biggest properties. It seems like Keillor's creative output should be right up my alley.

But it just isn't. I will grudgingly admit that his Mr. Blue persona is merely Salon's fourth-worst regular columnist, but that's more of a testament to Carey Tennis and Anne Lamott's staggering solipsism and King Kaufman's pugnacious irrelevance than anything else. And I'll also admit that I'm intrigued by the PHC movie. But that's just because Maya Rudolph is hilarious, the rest of the cast looks great, and Lindsay Lohan appears to play a wayward and impressionable young girl.

I should say that I'm not biased against PHC's central conceit: I actually like the idea of old-timey radio-ousity. Ask Catherine! I'm a big fan of The Big Broadcast on WAMU, where Ed Walker plays crackly serials from the golden age of radio (this is because I am a million years old). But PHC just isn't particularly remarkable, authentic or generally good. Okay, you've got some wry Wodehouse-ian banter, and some authentic-sounding musical performances, and various nods to the idea of an older, better time. That's all fine.

The problem is that this package comes wrapped in a masturbatory reverence for an imagined Midwestern cult of mediocrity. I get that the asceticism is part of the joke — except it isn't, not really. The overarching straight man routine is never tweaked or explored or used to anyone's advantage. God forbid that Keillor or anyone else be forced to sacrifice a drop of dignity. They can put on a good old-fashioned program of entertainment, by gum — it just can't be too entertaining, is all. That'd spoil the fun, you see.

And to top it off, this allegedly charming slice of Americana is perpetrated by exactly the sorts of liberal-minded folks that perpetually find themselves stymied by the country's appetite for rosy-hued nostalgic bullshit. I'm sure there's a gay married couple somewhere in Lake Wobegone who the neighbors have made some charmingly off-the-mark comments about. But let's get real — we come to bury Mayberry, not to praise it.

Perhaps I'm misjudging the appeal of Keillor and his Prarie Home Companion. I have to admit that I don't think I've ever made it through an entire episode — the only show on NPR that makes me change the channel faster is Michael Feldman's ponderous (and incorrectly phoneticized) Whad'Ya Know. I feel as though I've heard fragments of plenty of shows, however. And in my admittedly brief experience, the joke seems to be that the show isn't all that funny — or happy, or sad, or dramatic, or moving. Its only concern seems to be in promoting a sort of bovine stoicism. I really don't understand the appeal.

On the other hand, I don't have any relatives from the midwest, and I drink kind of a lot of coffee. I wouldn't be surprised if one of those is the source of my incomprehension.

Some things everyone can agree on: an evening that begins at Russia House and ends at Recessions has been badly misconceived in at least one way. Fortunately, it was still pretty fun.

We were celebrating Kriston's emancipation from the working world, as he quits his glamorous cancer-research-editing lifestyle in favor of freelance writing. I know just how arduous it is to pursue a career from your couch and in pajamas, so I was ready to buy the guy a few condolence drinks.

Russia House was the plan — I'd been bugging folks to go for a while. Not because I enjoy being packed into a tiny, expensive space filled with preppies, tourists and aspiring Eurotrash. it's just that every guy wants to feel like James Bond. Or, failing that, he'd at least like to be treated like shit by a hot Russian girl (even if it's just the waitress). Russia House doesn't disappoint on either of these counts.

But we'd barely gotten through the vile infused vodka sampler before our numbers grew too large and we had to move. Brickskellar? Nah. In keeping with the places-we-don't-usually-go theme, we decided to head to Science Club. But it was mostly reserved for private parties, and its remaining corners were packed. Where to?

If you don't work around 19th and L you might not be familiar with Recessions. Let me get you up to speed: it's terrible. Located in the basement of an anonymous hotel, it's a drop-ceilinged, fake-stone abomination that may actually only exist in a 70s-themed parallel dimension. The prices are low and the staff is friendly, but as you sip your enormous Bud Light it's tough to escape the feeling that you're just there as cover for the guy who's cooking up a bucket full of heroin in back. Also, the internet jukebox seems to be connected to a different and considerably crappier internet than the one you and I are familiar with.

For a while and for reasons I can't explain Recessions was serving as EchoDitto's preferred happy hour destination. So it was nearby, I knew it, and Catherine wanted to see what all the complaining was about. So we descended into and onto Recessions.

I'm afraid that's pretty much it. We had a good time; Catherine took some photos. One word of warning to future patrons, though: when Catherine and I left, a little after midnight (we had to drive to the airport in about 4 hours), the bartender had to unlock the front door to let us out. I think you can count on the beer being cheap, but escape is far from guaranteed.

So, uh, I accidentally screwed up our RSS a while ago. Sorry about that. An effort to include the extended portion of entries ended up producing some incorrect XML. Everything should be better now (or shortly, depending on when FeedBurner reindexes us).

let me give you all a little piece of sage advice: NEVER, EVER, IF YOU CAN EVER HELP IT, MOVE. ESPECIALLY NOT THREE TIMES IN UNDER A YEAR. IT'S A LITTLE BIT OF A BITCH.

take that as you will. as i sit amidst the ruins of carboard boxes and stacked ceramic bowls on my bed pillow, which is the only surface available on which to exist vaguely comfortably, i am still thankful - because i have the awesomest dad ever. on father's day itself he flew with me to chicago and is helping me with this total mess, not to mention driving back with me tomorrow morning. i am a lucky lady.

i'm also thankful that my week in d.c. was kinda great. dinner at palena, drinks all over the city, sporting events, family time, boyfriend time, friend time - it was wonderful to be back, even if it was for a shorter period than i would have liked. i still have a few more days there next week, but come friday, i'm off to the ATL till september (d.c. visits will dot that time, of course.) pictures forthcoming of the most recent activities as soon as i've puttied the shit out of my walls.

UPDATE: puttying is strangely satisfying. especially on zero hours of sleep and a few red bulls. anyway, the flickr stream has been updated with some random shots.

you know there is something fundamentally wrong in this world when one of the bush daughters gets to see a radiohead show and i don't.

Trend prediction! I think that the next skill that IT recruiters are going to be looking for without knowing why is knowledge of KML. It's really just a simple XML format that lets you keep track of geographical locations. Check out that Wikipedia link — KML's not rocket science, but it seems like it's suddenly showing up all over the place.

Maybe it's just my perception of it. Irongeek put together a KML-based hack a while ago allowing a database of unsecured wifi access points to be mapped into Google Earth, but I just saw it today. But there are other, more timely signs: cheap GPS loggers like this one and this one seem to be popping up very quickly. And Mologogo appears to have only gotten KML support in January. I'd say we're hovering near buzzword-dom.

There are plenty of other ways to store geographic data, but Google Earth seems to have tipped the hobbyist balance in favor of KML. Everybody says that location-based stuff is going to hit big in the next year or so. Seems like KML is going to be the format of choice for powering it.

That is all!

Also, I swear, entertaining blogging to resume soon. I'm brainstorming, people.

Because I've been working pretty hard this week, and because my plate of things that have to get done right away turned out to be relatively small today, I decided to treat myself to a little recreational nerdery this afternoon. Sadly, it wasn't successful. But I'm posting anyway in order to help the nerds of the future.

See, I really, really hate that MySpace doesn't let you link directly to songs. Not necessarily the raw MP3 (though my hardline copyfighting inclincations say they should), but at least to the band page with something in the URL that tells it: "Play this particular song. Don't just randomly select one of the other, crappier ones in the featured playlist. I want to send this to my friends, goddammit."

So I fired up Ethereal and the Firefox LiveHTTPHeaders plugin and started looking at the conversation that happens between your computer and MySpace when you click on a song in their Flash audio player.

First things: an XML file comes back, specifying the playlist. It's called mediaxmlprovider.xml, and it's served by a fairly easy-to-find URL (which has to be passed some of the random codes specified in the HTML of the band's page — I didn't bother to confirm this, but it seems pretty likely). The contents of the file look like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<profile>
<timestamp><![CDATA[1150454435]]></timestamp>
<name><![CDATA[regina spektor]]></name>
<playstoday><![CDATA[33341]]></playstoday>
<downloadedtoday><![CDATA[0]]></downloadedtoday>
<totalplays><![CDATA[1811136]]></totalplays>
<autoplay><![CDATA[0]]></autoplay>
<allowadd><![CDATA[1]]></allowadd>
<playlist><song bsid="7548074" title="Fidelity" songid="0" plays="685573" comments="" rate="" downloadable=""
imagename="http://c.myspace.com/BandSongs/48/41/3071484/bs7548074_m.jpg" imagedesc="Begin To Hope<br>2006 Sire Records" filename="48/41/3071484/3071484_c4b21abc.mp3" url="http://home.myspace.com/Services/Media/mediaHitCounter.ashx?i=MIGdB
gorBgEEAYI3WAOuoIGOMIGLBgorBgEEAYI3WAMBoH0wewIDAgABAgJmAwICAMAE
CNxa3NiUig5fBBBBZNK8fzHa3nXq%2fQXZNaSJBFClWYkcVz5a2X%2bUe5yft5iC9Cn
mboEQKrW%2fPBrUqXlO7VwTgCxy%2bptjwvoaQsx2O4AAqXzpF63IosE0kZY0bsZ
k1XznxMS9l8rzeTgwz14T9w%3d%3d" lyrics="" purl=""/><song bsid="7494789" title="Better" songid="0" plays="358965" comments="" rate="" downloadable=""
imagename="http://c.myspace.com/BandSongs/48/41/3071484/bs7494789_m.jpg" imagedesc="Begin To Hope<br>2006 Sire Records" filename="48/41/3071484/3071484_141017ab.mp3" url="http://home.myspace.com/Services/Media/mediaHitCounter.ashx?i=
MIGdBgorBgEEAYI3WAOuoIGOMIGLBgorBgEEAYI3WAMBoH0wewIDAgABAgJmAwIC
AMAECLuj4EHcSIfyBBD5z%2fO%2bh8P26LaTqDiG07JMBFBq5PV2kJDM%2b07hGBsp
xCmC3nxdreIiWFPw4nt3onOecM5NqoOaEjWPyNYCOvCD8X77svdho%2bSmW7Ok
a9F67YoFS10RfyZ0UADznDzj6ZJelg%3d%3d" lyrics="" purl=""/><song bsid="67359" title="Us" songid="42627" plays="336564" comments="42627" rate="42627" downloadable=""
imagename="http://c.myspace.com/BandSongs/48/41/3071484/bs373400284_m.jpg" imagedesc="Soviet Kitsch<br>2004 Sire Records" filename="48/41/3071484/3071484_e2b7a709.mp3" url="http://home.myspace.com/Services/Media/mediaHitCounter.ashx?i=MIGVBgor
BgEEAYI3WAOuoIGGMIGDBgorBgEEAYI3WAMBoHUwcwIDAgABAgJmAwICAMAECFG4n
aZwuIbOBBDLD%2flDSGXRFNcjgKaiVaXWBEjwVg5Sd1IoyLFpHt%2fb85q41kwbAwufnVR
CexWU%2fziYdY66mVw7vIGNx37awMxokOQ%2foEtupSdopInRyczeNZCRfb3wI4G1VIM%3d" lyrics="" purl=""/><song bsid="67063" title="Ghost of Corporate Future" songid="42522" plays="387912" comments="42522" rate="42522" downloadable=""
imagename="http://c.myspace.com/BandSongs/48/41/3071484/bs356236944_m.jpg" imagedesc="Soviet Kitsch<br>2004 Sire Records" filename="48/41/3071484/3071484_8fcdc23f.mp3" url="http://home.myspace.com/Services/Media/mediaHitCounter.ashx?i=MIGVBgor
BgEEAYI3WAOuoIGGMIGDBgorBgEEAYI3WAMBoHUwcwIDAgABAgJmAwICAMAECPTQc
TjZI5BPBBDldE4GvP%2bEfHTN%2bZP%2fyPupBEhHCQ6QrxvOGCaM5nRpJPRJO35ivJEb
6%2f%2fTVNDzWOPiZj04wesbPi6WP9jUubZFoXdQ7UIW92EqnCvEOnYM9c1Mqfdoyzy4
ZZ0%3d" lyrics="" purl=""/>
</playlist>
</profile>

Those yellow parts look pretty promising. In fact, it seemed like this might be susceptible to a variation on this method (which has since become outdated). But those mp3 filenames are relative URLs, not absolute, and I got 404s when I tried them against any of the likeliest domains & paths.

It's possible that URLs like http://c.myspace.com/BandSongs/48/41/3071484/3071484_8fcdc23f.mp3 were just being clever, noticing my lack of a myspace.com HTTP referer, and lying to me about the file's presence. But I don't think so: I went to the page of a random band that offers downloads and found that the URLs used to obtain the mp3 look like this:

http://mp3download.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=bandprofile.downloadSong&bsid=11466&song_name=Its Dange&fid=1943559

There's no redirect or anything like that going on here. It looks like they've set up a dedicated mp3 gateway that serves the song out of a non-public part of their filesystem. This lets them lock things down as tightly as they care to — ie, they can check against the database to see if a song is genuinely supposed to be downloadable before sending it out. Nuts.

Of course, the Flash player still has to get the audio somehow. But I don't know enough about Flash to figure out how that happens. If I had to guess I'd say that it might use a proprietary (and secure) Flash streaming audio solution. It's still possible to grab the audio to an mp3 — until we get trusted computing forced on us, it'll always be possible — but for purposes of linking directly to mp3s, there isn't a lot of remaining promise here. Not that I can see, anyway.

Ah well. Perhaps a cleverer geek will pick up the mantle and figure out how to make MySpace mp3bloggable. Or perhaps MySpace will eventually remove its head from its ass and allow incoming links to specify particular songs. Till then I'll maintain the attitude of apathy and gradually-spreading terror that I'd been directing at the site up until this point.

check out this photo from miss andnotu. i've been obsessed with it since she posted it. it might be my favorite photo...EVER. it simultaneously breaks my heart and makes me happy.

second fave, of course, is the crazy apple car.

my beeeyootiful, talented, incredibly smart and soon-to-be-wahoo (WAHOOWA) lil sister graduated from high school yesterday. excessive photos can be found here. the best part: tom davis gave the speech, which was actually pretty funny. even funnier: when my brother graduated from thomas jefferson in 2001, davis spoke there as well...and gave the exact same speech. canned speeches: a congressman's best friend.

best baseball game ever tonight (thanks kriston!) - i mean, except for the nats losing. a lot. because, in addition to delicious beer and sausages and free little american flags and stuff, we had TWO FAMOUS SIGHTINGS. (ahem, for d.c.) outside, while tommy and i were lounging around on the armory steps, we saw MARK WARNER. be still my heart. it was actually our second sighting - we'd seen him apple-picking in charlottesville once. second sighting: david gregory of nbc. not as awesome, but still kind of cool. people in the bleachers actually recognized him. d.c. is such a dorkily awesome town.

i hope my brother's sub base in san diego is a wee bit more welcoming than this freaky russian one. (this link and the one below via waxy)

neat to think about - can you believe that just five years ago iPods and social networking sites amongst other ever-present tech and media things weren't part of our day-to-day lives? five years from now, "which products, used by few today, will be essential?"

can you believe it?

just a note to say that i see that cappseus has been uploading pictures from his fine, fine trip to chicago at the end of april. (what kind of flickr delay is that, anyways? i start getting the shakes if i don't upload stuff to flickr in under eight hours.) this shot? we're probably posting to effing zunta or something. regardless, it's what we look like 75% of the time.

i'm not gonna lie: i miss chicago something awful. it's really been hitting me hard the past couple of days. i miss my neighborhood; i miss the slew of bars and restaurants and boutiques; i miss the lakefront running path and i miss the sidewalks full of people (d.c. somehow seems a little more deserted); i miss the best drinking buddies west of the mississippi not on the east coast and i even miss class, as stressful as last quarter was.

at the same time, it's really really weird how easily you can slip back into the rhythm of a city, and i seem to have done that with d.c. and it's nice.

yesterday i woke up when tommy said goodbye and headed to work (which means i slept in a little; the bastard doesn't head out until 9:30 or 9:45). i spent a couple of hours tooling around on the internet then headed out of the house. i walked my well-worn path down to chinatown where i spent a couple of hours browsing at urban outfitters and h&m (not exactly d.c. institutions, but still fun). i hopped on the metro (i still had money on my smartcard, woo) and went up to dupont circle, where i stopped by alberto's for a slice of pizza, then went to get my hair cut by little john at studio 2000 (g., we chatted about you and your loveliness!). later in the evening i went with folks to the f.w. thomas reading at the warehouse, which was funny, and ended up for one person with an art purchase. everyone came back to porch it up afterwards, where i learned how deliciously dangerous ginger ale and whiskey is. but, i woke up hungover free! i am bionic woman!

today i woke up again at tommy's goodbye, headed out to azi's for a coffee and a croissant (one thing d.c. has over chicago is a good independent coffee store with illy coffee within a block of the apartment!). i headed out later for lunch at pizzeria paradiso (i swear i've eaten more pizza since i've come back to d.c. than i did my last month in chicago) with a bunch of medillians. we stopped in at the d.c. newsroom (13th and F) where i heard about the wonders and perks of the national press club (free gym, taco fridays, free breakfasts). jen and i then headed to the museum of natural history, which, something like 15 years since i've been there, is still teh awesome. i'm still obsessed with that elephant in the entrance hall and the insect museum. then we headed up to the national gallery of art, where we ate gelato. and i have to say, i was impressed. i had remembered thinking the cafe's gelato sucked last time i tried it, but the frutto di bosco and zabaglione flavors at least were delicious this time around. it's no snoopy, but, hey. i'll take what i can get.

and lots more fun stuff coming up this week. my little sis's graduation; dinner at palena; galileo grill; possible nats game; celebratory affairs with kriston for him finishing his job. woo, d.c.!

Unsigned editorials are terrible. I realize that I should be getting into the habit of dutifully reading the ones on offer from the Post and Times so that, during the dinnerparties of the future, I can cluck my tongue insightfully over the latest institutional outrage (in between lighter conversational fare, e.g. "Preschools Are So Expensive Now" and "We Think The Maid Is Stealing From Us").

But I just can't do it. They're like particularly badly-written blog posts, except without a name to offer accountability or references to back up their bizarre arguments-by-fiat. If newspaper editors had any brains they'd ditch the unsigned editorials (and political endorsements) immediately, before people start laughing in their faces in social settings. But I suppose they're too focused on fomenting the next war (how'd that last one work out for you guys, by the way?).

Today's an exception, though, because the Post's anti-net neutrality editorial is so staggeringly dumb that it deserves to be reprinted everywhere — to ring throughout the online universe as an emphatic testament to the fact that Writing, Editing, and Not Being A Total Fucking Idiot are three distinct disciplines.

here's a pretty, poppy mp3 to brighten up your day. via 3hive, it's bob mould's song "hormone love."

i do believe tommy and i will be headed to the warehouse theater tonight to catch the f.w. thomas reading. if you can believe it, i've still never been to the warehouse even though it's like five seconds from the apartment, so i am excited. should be a good literary time.

i feel like a traitor somehow, but i thought i should let you all know...sometime this summer, i do believe i'm going to buy myself a mac.

a few factors have played into this decision by me, a lifelong PC user. 1. tommy thinks i should get one because i like pretty things and don't use a computer for much more beyond internet, email, photoshop and word processing (he says his reasoning is less simplistic than that but it's true, i do like pretty things). 2. i'll actually be making more money at cnn this summer than i've made at a job before, thereby allowing myself to actually purchase my own tech goodie instead of getting it as a gift from tommy. i might even get a new ipod. and/or a sidekick. 3. pretty much every single one of my friends has a mac and i am nothing if not a conformist. even my relatives are working on me. at dinner with the family last night my cousin brought out her laptop and let me play around with it while she talked about all its awesomeness.

so, yeah. sorry PC diehards. the transition won't be for a while, and i'll certainly keep the dell around, but it appears it's time for a change. scary!

the party? was teh awesome. a smaller crowd than we were anticipating showed up, but that was actually good because a) more time to talk to wonderful people and b) lots of leftover beer that we'll need help killing the rest of the week. highlights of the evening included seeing all the great regular zuntaparty folks plus a few new faces, getting to know some of the lovely echoditto crowd that have made tommy so happy these past months and meeting the absolutely charming becks, one of my favorite bloggers. i mean, any night that ends around 4:30am with a bottle of whiskey being passed around and a rousing episode of karaoke revolution can't be a bad one, right?

emily was particularly gung ho with tommy's camera last night so you can expect some flickr action soon. thanks so much to everybody who came out!

UPDATE: drew comes through with the first photos.

UPDATE II: here's tommy's set.

Just received via comment spam:

Now, I'm just a simple country blogger. Your modern marketing concepts confuse and astound me! But it seems, even to my old-fashioned and no doubt primitive sensibilities, that if you're trying to appeal to bloggers and blog readers, you should conduct your marketing campaign in a manner other than by hiring scumbag spammers to pollute our sites, insult our intelligence and generally infuriate us. Peddling d1sc0unt v1agr4 is one thing, but for a movie, where you're trying to build "buzz" and "word of mouth" about your project, you'd think it would be important for that buzz to be about something other than what a bunch of assholes you are. Just a thought.

Oh, and I hope your pathetic ought-to-be-direct-to-video abomination is out of theaters before the first showing is over. Go to hell.

tommy and i had the pleasure of attending ryan and lisa's wedding last night at the arts club of washington, and it was looooovely. everything about the ceremony was wonderful, including the vows that each of them wrote, which i usually pshaw. but tommy pointed out that it helps vows if you happen to be excellent writers. anyway, they both looked gloriously happy, the arts club was a beautiful setting, lisa was beautiful, the dinner was incredibly delicious, the cake (which was actually artfully arranged cupcakes from cake love) was actually....really good. i guess when you do let them sit out long enough they are, in fact, yummy, contrary to my previous thinking. the open bar was very open, and the dancing was fun. and one of my favorite parts of the evening? ryan, on his wedding day, was kind enough to bring me a stack of dcist temporary tattoos. god bless the boy.

photos here. frankly, a lot of them are really terrible - some because i didn't want to blind everyone with flash, some because i went on to get kinda drunk. but peruse freely!

enough people have sent me this awesome mcsweeney's list that i now know for sure that the legacy of Noisy Upstairs Neighbor will live on through the power of the internets. good riddance.

woah, i had no idea guster had a new album coming out. i know it's not very cool to like them (though i don't know why), but i adore them, and uncle grambo's glowing review of their new lp has me excited. in addition to me about to put the new phoenix album, gnarls barkley and thom yorke (courtesy of the capps) on the ipod. it's looking to be a pretty good couple of weeks for music. time to start making a party mix!

don't forget: charles, tommy and i will be hosting a fine, fine party tomorrow night, starting around 10, and you're all invited. if i somehow neglected to get you the evite, just shoot me an email asking for details. my favorite "yes i'm coming" evite response thus far:

Michael (06/05)
if only to get to the bottom of this "tommy" craze, i'm there. plus i'm eager to discover that catherine is more than an alias that you created on your blog.

interesting theory. if tommy keeps popping in and out of the bathroom in a blond wig...well, just be prepared.

one of the best things about coming back to d.c. is the opportunity to reimmerse myself in retarded pop culture shit/music/commercials that are floating about on cable, which i didn't get back in chicago. observations:

-i still have a lady crush on the lead singer of the pussy cat dolls
-i still have an irrational love of the fanta commercials
-nick lachey seems sad
-teri hatcher looks like a reanimated zombie

ah, mtv/vh1. how i've missed you. up next: food tv!

i'm home! tommy picked me out of the 125 middle schoolers crowding the baggage claim, cabbed me home and made me a burrito. you don't get this kind of boyfriend service in chicago, i tell you.

i blogged on the flight over. and by blogged, i mean "scrawled an incoherent screed on the back few pages of my book, which was the only writing surface i had available." believe it or not, i STILL have one final due tomorrow at noon, but if i get that done, i will faithfully type up my nonsensical words for you.

It appears that Cox Cable is throttling access to Craigslist — presumably because Cox offers its own classified ad service. Via Dave Winer.

I can pretty well measure how rough a day it's been by how late it is when I open my RSS reader. It's 3:19 at the moment, and I'm only juuust thinking about hitting that BlogLines button. That means things have been busy.

It appears there was some sort of attack on our server farm at work; I was up late & early doing the roundup and launching a client site (and, uh, drinking, although not for the early part); and yesterday was so frantic that I still had two dozen or so emails left from it that actually needed answering.

On top of that, LastCall's Metro capabilities are broken. Given its relative stability thus far, the likelist suspect is a subtle change in RideGuide's HTML. The original HTML was a mess, resulting in some decidedly non-robust regexes involved in its parsing. It wouldn't take much to send them spinning off into oblivion — which is what I suspect happened. The smart money is on it being a real bitch to track down, too.

On the upside, Catherine gets into town tonight! Here's hoping absence has made her begin to consider Perl debugging a romantic way to spend an evening.

Between the LASIK and my generally geeky ways, my friends give me a lot of shit about my potential for becoming a post-human abomination. Digital-themed tattoo? I've thought about it, but probably not. RFID chip? Maybe in a few years. Intracranial bluetooth headset? Eh, I'll wait until I start seeing them in rap videos. I'm not actually all that anxious to modify my body in permanent ways.

But this... Oh man. I want this. The ability to feel electromagnetic fields, people. To tell when a wire is live, or a hard drive is being read, or a transmitter is on, or if a surface is ferrous. It's just a little too cool. Make it safe, then sign me up. Sorry, humanity.

remember when i pointed you towards the video of somebody putting a roll of mentos into a bottle of diet coke? well, somebody went on to do the next logical step: 200 LITERS OF DIET COKE AND 500 MENTOS. (via)

I feel weirdly guilty about posting this: it's fundamentally a recommendation that you go enjoy some writing that wouldn't exist if not for a wonderful guy's terrible misfortune. But I'll pass it along anyway, for those few of you who read this site but not unfogged.

Ogged stopped blogging a while ago to focus on real life. We were all sad to see him go — aside from being a nice guy and the internet's foremost expert at facilitating highminded conversations about lowbrow topics, he's got a writing style that's elegantly spare, tightly constructed and extremely clever. His cobloggers and replacements have done a great job since he left — but Ogged is Ogged, and I and a lot of other folks missed him.

Well, the good news is that he's writing again. The bad news is that he's writing about his illness.

But I suppose there's not much to be done except to try to avoid embarrassing the guy by feeling guilty for enjoying his work. So head on over to his new site, read some great blogging, and add to the tidal wave of good thoughts that's headed his way.

couple of mp3s that are making my day a bit brighter:

phoenix - consolation prizes

nelly furtado - crazy (gnarls barkley cover)

and, i know i said it many times before, but check out phoenix's myspace page and listen to long distance call. it's teh awesome.

my days lately:

aforementioned bear suits...yup.

pretty sailboats.

sand on the beach.

rehearsals in the forum.

trying on found necklaces.

packing.

being incredibly, incredibly sad about leaving chicago.

sigh.

I wrote about the GNU Radio project a long time ago, but my efforts were probably fairly incomprehensible . Today Wired has an excellent story that profiles the project, explains why it's so cool — and does so in more lucid terms.

The signal processing applications that are opened by this project are truly mind-boggling. The linked article mentions that some folks are already using it to track which department store window displays are the most popular by triangulating the cellular keepalive signals emitted by shoppers' cell phones. That's just astoundingly awesome.

real life snake on a plane.

While maintaining control of the single-engine plane with one hand, Coles grabbed the reptile behind its head with his other.

"There was no way I was letting that thing go," he said. "It coiled all around my arm, and its tail grabbed hold of a lever on the floor and started pulling."

badass. (via)

proof the universe doesn't hate me (or, at least, tolerates my presence): as i was starting the arduous process of, you know, moving, about four days before i have to get out of here, i packed up garbage bags full of crap like my entire fridge, and that stack of lucky magazines i'd kept for god knows what reason the entire year. i dragged them down to the dumpster where i noticed all of them were absolutely overflowing with crap. jesus, i thought, what a pain in the ass. i dumped my trash on the floor and surveyed the situation. and what should mine own eyes see but my own salvation: the reason the dumpsters were overflowing is that there were boxes. millions and millions of boxes in perfectly usable condition that someone who had obviously just moved into the complex had used. having spent $20 just that morning on four boxes from the fedex around the corner, i literally did a little jumping dance. and then i made five trips between the dumpster and my apartment, carrying those precious boxes under my arms like so much discovered treasure. yes, i spent my sunday morning rummaging through dumpsters for cardboard gold. it was good. and now back to the packing!

i also just uploaded a bunch of photos to my flickr stream - most of me looking like a drunk ass, as usual, and i can't imagine you really want to see those. but i was walking around downtown chicago this afternoon on my way to a dinner party, and took some shots of that. the location of the dinner party was, i also thought, photo-worthy, as it was the corner condo of a building next to the drake hotel on lake shore drive with the most amazing view. here's the set of the evening.

I've finally got all of my photos from the beach uploaded — you can find them here, if you're so inclined.

And of course, I'd be remiss if I didn't link to DOG V. CRAB, the video sensation that's sweeping the internet. The two combatants both struggled for victory. The real winner? The viewing public.

The video portrays just a small part of the overall fight. Credit to Genevieve for capturing as much she did; Wreck had already cornered a ghost crab behind some fencing earlier in the day, but nobody expected him to find another one. He sniffed and jabbed for a while as the crab warily snapped at his nose — I thought it could go either way at that point. But one quick lunge from Wreck wrapped things up decisively.

Is this kind of shit just a DC thing? I'm with Rusty: these ridiculous private online clubs creep me out. Aside from the invite-only Bittorrent tracker where I'm a member, of course (ah, hypocrisy).

Judging from some recent conversations I've had, it's not just the Georgetown set, either. Sigh. I completely understand and accept that the internet revolution is a chance for our generation of geeks to play high school all over again (this time we can win!). I just wish folks were interested in doing it better.

Maybe I'm being naive about all of this. I donno — I certainly wouldn't want to make the DCist staff list open to anyone who might want to join and observe our editorial process. And I genuinely believe in a right to privacy. But these virtual cliques still leave a bad taste in my mouth.

Last night I went with Yglesias and most of the folks from work to go see Al Gore's new movie, An Inconvenient Truth. And it was good! The built-in advantage to a movie like this is that , since it consists of Al Gore showing charts for two hours, everyone automatically assumes it has to be "better than you'd think". And, somewhat paradoxically, it is.

At times it's touching; near the end it's inspiring. Above all it's convincing and well-executed. Still, I'm kind of dreading the popular reaction to it. I'd say it's a toss-up at this point — a lot of folks really want to dislike Al Gore, yet they're running out of ways to plausibly say he was wrong about, well, pretty much anything. I think any potential backlash would have to run more on wingnut vitriol than on the doubt-inducing pseudoscience that's been the global warming debate's chief currency up to this point.

We've seen the basic conservative playbook for this applied to Michael Moore. And while I'm sure this movie is more carefully constructed and vetted, the unfair criticisms of Moore worked just as well, if not better, than the substantive ones — and they could work here, too. Potential Gore-belittling strategies: freeze frames of what could be a bald spot; the segment with Gore as leader of the Vice Presidential Action Rangers, in which he gets a phone call and blows this whole oil-company-conspiracy thing wide open; or the fact that he kind of looks like he's wearing somebody else's skin, like that alien cockroach in Men In Black. And of course there are the deadly, deadly snails.

Worst of all would be if somebody found a problem with one of his slides. Climate science is complex, and I have no doubt that some caveats were elided for simplicity's sake (or maybe that's just Exxon's pernicious influence talking). I'm pretty optimistic on this score, though. He's a smart dude, right? Right.

Overall: four carbon-neutral switchgrass farms out of five. Definitely the best-produced educational video that high school science classes will see during the '06/'07 school year.

if i haven't killed myself, a classmate, or a small animal by the end of today, it will have been a success!

UPDATE: no animals or people were harmed in the process of this day. now i get beer and pool so am happy.

Some of you might remember me asking for career advice a while back. I ended up deciding to take the new job, then blogged the first day. Then everyone at work discovered this site (using their strange internet powers), and, aside from some generalities, I haven't mentioned it.

Well, let me fill you in. It's been about six months, I think. People use the phrase "it was the best decision I ever made" to describe getting a hair transplant, or buying a boat, or ordering a Cobb salad. So I'd like to avoid joining their idiomatic ranks, but I can't. It just seems so obvious. These are the smartest, coolest, funniest, most talented people I've ever worked with, and the job itself is interesting, varied and rewarding. I look forward to work every day. Okay, every non-hungover day.

The reason for my gushing: we're hiring. If you're geeky, really smart and interested in working in the non-evil sector, you should think about applying. You'd like it. Seriously.