Dear Summer

My two favorite songs this week are Dear Summer (Jay-Z on Memphis Bleek's album) and Nas's Just a Moment, both downloaded from iTunes (one is a Slurpee free song, the 40 oz Slurpee with a song is such a better deal than a 99 cent small Slurpee!). I finally heard the Edan album, and it's ok. Not amazing. The Common album is going on 3 weeks, I think, in the shrink wrap. I should really open it and listen to it at some point, but I can't be convinced yet that it's worth struggling with the plastic wrap and stickers. This is why iTunes is genius. Besides the fact that I just get the specific song that I want, you click and then get a song. No icky stickers to remove, no trying to start a big enough tear in the plastic wrap, no almost snipping off your fingers when you stab at the plastic with an open pair of scissors. Anyway, the Nas song is also genius. I'm not the biggest Nas fan, but this is a sweet hook.

New York's City Island

Another item to add to my August trip to do list, visit City Island. I'd never heard of it until a few weeks ago, but it sounds incredibly interesting. Directions to New York's City Island: "If you're coming from New Jersey:Take the George Washington Bridge towards Manhattan...."

bunny

That's Kate with her new bunny rabbit toy, her birthday present from me. She has such a cute smile... and I love how she mugs for the camera. I need to bring a second camera to see her some time, and take a picture of her playing with my SLR. She puts it up to her face and tries to look through it, and turns all the knobs. She managed to get it into 'multiple' mode on me once, and it took a couple minutes of playing with settings that I never touch to reset it. Sneaky kid!

I'm going home and to PVD soon, and I've made a list of things that I want to do during that week:

1. Eat a bagel from Adam's
   
2. go to the Matisse exhibit at the Met
   
3. swim with Kate
   
4. lots of sailing
   
5. hang up a hammock over the brook in the backyard
   

sleepy

I'm in Boston with my just-turned-2-years-old neice this weekend. I've been taking care of her while her parents attend a wedding and see some friends who they haven't visited since Kate was born. So this evening, I put Kate into her stroller, stopped off to buy us both vanilla milkshakes, and walked all the way down Commonwealth from the Public Garden to Mass Ave. It was a beautiful evening- we went out just as the rain cleared, and the light was amazing. The trees were still dripping a little, and it was a wonderful, quiet walk. Then we looped back up Newbury St, and... KATE FELL ASLEEP! I've never, in the last 2 years, been able to get her to go to sleep. She needs her mom for that. I felt so happy and so proud, walking down the steet with her snoozing in her stroller. She's now snuggled up in her crib, still sleeping. Awww.

mix v3

The end of the mix CD project is at hand, for the moment at least. I ended up with a 2 CD set (tracklisting below, and I'm in LOVE with O.P.P again- what a genius song). I pulled a couple of the old songs off compilation CDs, which reminds me of something that I spent a lot of time dealing with this week:
??????

If you can read kanji, that should (I say should because I know fewer than 10 kanji characters myself, and when this post comes off my webserver, it's turned into ???s, looks like somewhere along the way I'm sending pages as ascii) say 'Various Artists'. I spent much time this week transforming a bit of code that recognizes when an album or book or movie is by Various Artists or Unknown Artist or Not Available or No Data into localized code. Hey, now I somewhat know the kanji for Various.


1979 - 1989
Rapper's Delight - The Sugarhill Gang - 1979
The Breaks - Kurtis Blow - 1980
That's the Joint - Funky Four Plus One - 1981
Making Cash Money - Busy Bee - 1982
The Message - Grandmaster Flash, Melle Mel & The Furious Five - 1982
Sucker M.C.'s (Krush-Groove 1) - Run-DMC - 1983
Boogie Down Bronx - Man Parrish - 1984
Roxanne, Roxanne - UTFO - 1984
Rock the Bells - LL Cool J - 1985
Slow and Low - Beastie Boys - 1986
Rebel Without a Pause - Public Enemy - 1987
Dedication to all the B-Boys - Schoolly D - 1987
Microphone Fiend - Eric B. & Rakim - 1988
Looking Down the Barrel of a Gun - Beastie Boys - 1989
75 minutes

1990 - 1999
100 Miles and Runnin' - N.W.A. - 1990
O.P.P. - Naughty By Nature - 1991
It Was a Good Day - Ice Cube - 1992
C.R.E.A.M. - Wu-Tang Clan - 1993
Who Am I? (Whats My Name) - Snoop Dogg - 1993
Fantastic Voyage - Coolio - 1994
NY State of Mind - Nas -1994
Protect Ya Neck - Wu-Tang Clan - 1994
Survival of the Fittest - Mobb Deep - 1995
Real Hip-Hop - Das Efx - 1995
California Love - TuPac & Dr. Dre - 1996
Pony - Ginuwine - 1996
Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Could See - Busta Rhymes - 1997
Los Angeles Times - Endo, Xzibit - 1997
Nigga What, Nigga Who (Originator 99) - Jay-Z - 1998
Still D.R.E. - Dr. Dre - 1999
68 minutes

The second CD was the hard one, in particular 1993-1994. Such a great period, and incidentally, the year I really started listening to rap music. 36 Chambers is tossed around a lot as an album that changed everything, and with hindsight, I can hear that now. So much was left out of this set, though- and in particular, the lack of any Eminem stands out to me. This ended up the way that it did by my just tossing in songs, sorting by the Year in iTunes, and copying to my ipod. Then it went on a week's worth of bus rides, evening walks, morning walks, afternoon bug closing sessions, whatever, then pulling tracks off it a few at a time. So no "G" Thang, which is sad, but it didn't fit. No Summertime, but it couldn't hold up its place against O.P.P.

Ajax Mistakes

Ajax Mistakes - link from SvN.

mix cd tangent

1. start making that summer mix
2. put The Message and Summertime onto it
3. burn a rough copy and give to friend
4. get in discussion of good old hip hop and rap tracks.
5. go home and raid CD shelf and iTunes Music Store and notice that playlist has roughly 1 song for every year from 1980 to 1990
6. organize tracks by year, remember others to add, watch playlist grow

it currently looks like this:

Rapper's Delight - The Sugarhill Gang - 1979
The Breaks - Kurtis Blow - 1980
That's the Joint - Funky Four Plus One - 1981
The Message - Grandmaster Flash, Melle Mel & The Furious Five - 1982
Sucker M.C.'s (Krush-Groove 1) - Run-DMC - 1983
Roxanne, Roxanne - UTFO - 1984
Rock the Bells - LL Cool J - 1985
Slow and Low - Beastie Boys - 1986
Rebel Without a Pause - Public Enemy - 1987
Dedication to all the B-Boys - Schoolly D - 1987
Microphone Fiend - Eric B. & Rakim - 1988
Hey Ladies - Beastie Boys - 1989
100 Miles and Runnin' - N.W.A. - 1990
Summertime - DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince - 1991
O.P.P. - Naughty By Nature - 1991
Nuthin' but a "G" Thang - Dre & Snoop Dogg - 1992
Who Am I? (Whats My Name) - Snoop Dogg - 1993

That's at least 4 minutes too long for a CDR right now, though, so I need to yank something. I don't know what to pull, though, none of these songs sound 10 or 20 years old. A lot of them I haven't heard in years, and quite a few I heard last night for the first time, like Rapper's Delight.

summer mix CDs

I listened to The Best of Ride today, and fell in love with shoegazing all over again. Like I ever fell out of love with it, really. The last two months have been one band on repeat nonstop. So it was a well needed break to go with something that sounds completely different for a little while. Drive Blind is still looping my mind; out of the all the songs it's the one that sounds most like Curve to me, which is my personal shoegazing ground zero. This evening I played Demon Days on my laptop. I've blogged this before, but I was raised on a heavy diet of vintage Beach Boys (look at my name... yes, you'll find it on the Little Deuce Coop album. thanks dad). So I'm walking around, Gorillaz's playing in the background, thinking about how cute some of the songs are, and Don't Get Lost In Heaven comes on, and I thought my laptop had coughed up a long lost Pet Sounds track for a moment. Damon's voice, singing Beach Boys- it's just weird. I love it, but in a skewy, 'i never thought i'd hear something like this' kind of way. Feel Good Inc, which was the first single, is the best track on the album. I bought the single a month ago, and it was a good choice for them. The B-side to that single was even better than a lot of the album tracks.

All this has got me partaking in a summer music ritual, one month late. I make a mix CD on my birthday almost every year, but I forgot (was in NJ, working 13 hour days, dead ibook, everything) to do one this year. That's usually the soundtrack to the first part of my summer, so I'm putting one together now. There will likely be a Gorillaz song and a Ride song on there, and Hey ladies. Now I need to pick out about 12 more songs to fill it out.

Apple - iBook G4

My sister's iBook G4 arrived at the Geek apartment today to be set up & configured before being sent off to New Joisey. I wanted to set up a screensaver of Kate photos and some rotating desktops for her, but the photos that I use for mine are scattered across a bunch of photo CDs.

Option 1: find all my photo CDs, locate good photos on each CD, upload them, color correct them, and so forth.

Option 2: set my ibook and the new ibook down on the floor, enable sharing on my ibook, go to Network in one of the finder windows on the new ibook. And there was my ibook- connected, copied over Desktops folder, copied over screen saver photos folder, disconnected.

Awesome. I just about did a small "I love Bonjour" dance around my living room rug.

More workers do business on a global schedule

In the Seattle PI yesterday More workers do business on a global schedule - This is actually a really good article about the odd hours that post-geographical (oooh buzzwords!) work entails. Despite years of video conferencing hype, it's really instant messaging, SMS, and email that make the 3 continent world I work in actually function, so the article is right on there. Maybe not surpisingly, the reporter missed the biggest pain of working like this. It's not being paged at 2 AM to help out Tokyo. It's lag- if I fire off an email in the AM to an office in Europe, I most likely won't see any answer for 24 hours. When you have 6 week product development cycles, 24 hours is a big bite of time. Really, I love my job, I love working crazy schedules, but even in college I did weird stuff like wake up at 6 AM one day and noon the next, so it works nicely for me. I wouldn't switch to a group that didn't work with people in our other offices, since it makes things so interesting on a lot of different levels. Not just technical ones, although parsing XML with kanji in it isn't exactly something I thought I'd be doing ever in my life. I got a huge grin on my face the first time one of our JP editors used "-san" in an email to me- it's really all the little things. I hate to think about doing it with kids, though.

weekend update

Number of bruises: 5 major ones, lots of other small ones
Number of scrapes: 3
Number of ruined pants: 1
I'm completely addicted, though. This morning I went down Myrtle Edwards park to Magnolia, then back, and had so much fun. I can actually turn it and handle most hills, and it's the sweetest feeling in the world to skim down a small curvy hill. Also shocking, a lot of skiing techniques actually work- like turning, I swear a lot of the muscle movement in your hips is the same. Or unweighting your knees to get over bumps, same thing. Snowboarding never seemed to have any of the same movements as skiing (the 4 or so times I tried it), but then again, in snowboarding your feet are strapped in place. That was one reason I just couldn't get into it... I have no idea if it's the correct thing to do, but I've been defininitely shuffling my feet around on the board a lot to shift my weight. The closest to a trick that I can do yet is bear down the back & kind of tap the front of the board side to side, which is how I've been making sharp turns.

darkrooms

When I was home last time, I took a photo of Cameron standing on a rock- kind of nice, but you can see his retractable leash cutting right across the picture. Thanks to Photoshop CS and 5 minutes with the rubber stamp tool, cameron with a leash becomes cameron with no leash. It's a half-assed job, but it works well enough. We'll see how the prints come out. I really miss darkrooms, though, the meditative aspect of it, the precision, putting on some music and spending hours to get a good print out of a negative, standing over the bins, and everything. It's been about 5 years since I was in a darkroom, and I like digital, but darkrooms and chemicals and photo paper are completely different. I really need to look into the Photo Center NW up on 12th.

sunshineKate on Flickr

A long time ago- 1998 and early 1999- I did an internship with an IBM Internet Technology research group. They were working on ways to blur the line between "your computer/your harddrive" and everything else on the internet. There was some nice software that put the Yahoo search tree into your Windows explorer tree, so you could click through it the same way you clicked through your folders. Kind of neat for the dark ages of the web. I just installed a Flickr upload Dashboard widget, and the second thought I had was, "wow, this is what we wanted to do back then". (My first throught was "aww, kate, i love you, you crazy smidgen" (; ) So, here's the photo that I dragged from my desktop, to the widget, and had magically! uploaded:
Kate on Flickr

My ibook is back from Apple, with its 3rd logic board. The fuzzy sound problem seems to be fixed as well as that whole "won't boot" problem. While at the Apple store, I had my old 256 MB RAM card taken out and a new 512 MB one put in, so it's now running 640 MB of RAM... 10 gazillion times more than my first computer which had a whopping 64k. I just installed Tiger, and I'm thinking of putting mysql, pine, and some other Unixy stuff that I use onto it. I've always held that my ibook is my "relaxing" computer, but it would be nice to make use of the X11 integration that comes with Tiger. Also on the to-do list: download a few Dashboard widgets, set up some alarm clock software, upload new photos of Kate from last weekend.

Next Stop Grand Central

I've been working on building Kate's book collection for almost two years now. Next Stop Grand Central is going to be the next addition to her bookshelf, hopefully she'll enjoy the bright pictures until she's old enough to read it. There's not too much of a story to it, but got so much style that I had to buy it. The pictures inside, especially the hippie in bellbottoms, had me convinced that it was written in the 1970s, but it's not very old. The story, such as it is, meanders around the page with text looped around each small picture, so you can just pick and choose to read the bits that interest you, which I think is a neat way to write a book for children.