The Brunch Table

From the Portishead news page:

We have noticed that there is some confusion on an album release called “Alien”. Please be aware that this is NOT a Portishead release. The band are in the studio working on new material now but no release dates are scheduled as yet.

Here’s a great bit that I found on a random blog while I was googling for “fire in the taco bell” (I’m listening to the 2 Many DJs disc). The original page doesn’t have a direct link to the entry, so I’ll reprint it wholesale here:

I've figured out one of the reasons I am unimpressed and/or unmoved by the money-centric name-branding of mainstream rap: it's not the coveting of material items or large wads of cash that's the problem, it's the boring shit they boast about having. Am I supposed to be impressed by an Escalade or a Mercedes? Hell no — anyone with a six figure income can have one of those. I wanna hear about Jay-Z cruising through NYC in an AMX-3 or some crazy-ass Barris Kustomized hot rod. I wanna hear about N.O.R.E. buying something completely ridiculous and ostentatious that almost nobody else can have, like a racing-tuned AMA Ducati Superbike or a three-story-high television or his own 10-acre video arcade with animatronic singing pimps and a go-kart track. Ghostface had the right idea as far as jewelry's concerned — a forearm-length gauntlet with a humongous eagle attached is probably a good start, but a ten-times platinum MC should probably get a ruby the size of a martini olive embedded in his navel, too, and maybe look into having diamonds spelling out his name surgically implanted into his forehead. And hell, rich people have an excuse to wear all sorts of crazy crap so take the Busta Rhymes route and go completely ridiculous with gold silk samurai pants and kinkajou-fur vests and shoes made out of the leather upholstery from one of Steve McQueen's Porsches. I mean, hell — if you're gonna be all bling-bling, then at least be over-the-top about it.

-Nate

Can’t wait ’til the day when I ride around in rocket cars
Wear short-sleeve shirts
And all I eat is chocolate bars
–Buck 65, Man Overboard (part 3)

After trying out the Apple Music store yesterday, I was almost convinced that I didn’t mind the fact that the purchased tracks were crippled by “rights management” encoding. I always find myself going back to the bit-rot question, though. When it’s 2030, and I’m sitting in my bubble-skyscraper apartment or mad max desert car or cyborg body, will I still be able to listen to the music that I’m buying today? Or more generally, which digital file formats are most likely to remain completely legible over the long term? (more…)

So, Apple did indeed dump a new iTunes, iPod, and digital music store today, and now that their server load has died down a bit, I’ve taken the software and service for a spin.

At first blush, iTunes 4 doesn’t seem shockingly different from its predecessors. The note in the iTunes icon is now XBox green instead of Aqua blue. Apple’s resident design wankers have changed the buttons yet again, to the flat metal look first seen in Safari. There’s also a new button in the lower-left corner, which shows and hides a new panel for displaying album covers. These images are provided with purchased songs, but there doesn’t seem to be any handy automatic way to get them for normal MP3s or CDs. However, it’s straightforward enough to open a browser and drag in the appropriate image from the Amazon or CD Baby site. These images are stored in the actual song files (in the ID3 tags?)–they don’t show up when streaming songs via Rendezvous, but if you copy the file to another machine (remember, boys and girls, for personal use only!), the album cover image is carried along. (more…)

The JEditorPane control in Java 1.3+, being a random proprietary HTML renderer, has a particular set of constructs that it supports and doesn’t support. Since my current work unfortunately requires an intimate familiarity with this passel of peculiarities, and my google-fu hasn’t turned up any suitable references, I’m going to keep an ongoing catalogue of my findings in this entry. If you find errors or stupidities (I freely admit that I’m not very HTML-savvy), or you know of a comprehensive reference, please let me know. (more…)

Here’s a great article about tweaking the image handling in the JEditorPane control in Java. This stuff might help me get rid of some obnoxious flakiness in one of the projects that I’m working on. (Specifically, sometimes “broken image” icons are still partially visible after an image has finished loading, and there are issues with when animated GIFs get played as well.)

Note to CEOs: if you challenge someone to an arm-wrestling duel to settle a business dispute, be sure you’ve got the brawn to back it up. Recently, TeamTalk chief David Ware lost his challenge to MCS Global Digital over network sharing rights. Then, yesterday’s USA Today article about naked pilots mentioned that Southwest founder Herb Kelleher once lost an arm-wrestling bout over the rights to an advertising slogan. What is with these people?

Justina just called me an hour ago to tell me that they’re playing tonight and tomorrow night at The Middle East, and I now have tickets in hand! They still have a few tickets for both nights at the box office, if anyone’s in the area. Huzzah!

My trusty old AudioRequest is decent for playing MP3s on my stereo, but I’ve been using it less these days. For one, its fan and drive are very loud, particularly in contrast with my iBook, which whispers pleasantly in my peaceful home office. I’m also loath to leave it on because of the amount of power that it consumes. Finally, while the TV-based interface is pretty good, it’s less straightforward to control when you’re not in front of it (and I’m speaking as someone who wrote what became the core of their Java-based remote control app).

On the other hand, if one were to combine the silent, low-power, hackable SLIMP3 network MP3 player with the silent, low-power, geekto-fabulous 120GB Martian NetDrive server, it would make a compelling MP3 solution indeed. And the NetDrive supports the SLIMP3 out of the box. Yum.

I was reading The Great Good Place to Justina tonight as she worked on her puppets, and when I got to the part about restaurants trying to increase profit margins on every little thing (for example, pushing dessert wines instead of after-dinner coffee), it reminded her of this story. Apparently, Coca-Cola once ran a campaign to help restaurants combat “the water problem”–that is, the tendency of some people to prefer drinking unprofitable plain tap water rather than high-margin branded sugar water. More recently, the Sugar Association (!) has been trying to put the squeeze on the World Health Organization for advising people to watch their consumption of sugar-enhanced foods.

This image, from a Wired News story about what Palm’s supposedly doing right these days, captures one of the biggest problems that I have with PalmOS–its abysmal networking support. A wi-fi “dialup” process? Criminey.

The New York Times again proves its surprisingly good taste in games with a positive review of Disaster Report, warts and all. I have a half-finished review of my own sitting around here somewhere, but in the meantime, the Times review pretty much nails my feelings on the game. In spite of its ludicrous voice acting, overwrought plot, and technical roughness, it’s definitely the most original game that I’ve played this year. Its rather novel premise of earthquake survival makes for many wonderfully tense moments; you never know when the ground beneath your character will shift, forcing him to scramble to avoid sliding into the abyss or being crushed by a collapsing building. It’s definitely worth a spin if you have a PS2.

Here’s a quick rundown of some music that I’ve been checking out lately:

Goldfrapp, Black Cherry Unfortunately, Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory seem to have caught the synth-pop bug that’s been going around lately, and I’m not so fond of the results. The breathtaking sci-fi torch songs on 2000′s Felt Mountain certainly earned them the right to try anything that they wanted, but I wish that they had picked up their new idea of the future sometime after 1983. The handful of lovely soaring ballads is this album’s saving grace.

Portishead, Alien Speaking of torch songs, some release calendars had a new Portishead album scheduled for late March, but it hasn’t appeared yet. Searching the file-sharing nets turns up a few listings, but they’re either tracks from PNYC or songs from Mandalay’s Empathy, disingenuously renamed. So we’ll just have to wait for that. For Portishead fans desperately in need of a fix (if there are any left after the 6 years since their last album), there’s always…

Beth Gibbons and Rustin Man, Out of Season This side-project sets Beth’s lovely voice against a more folksly, upbeat backing, though Portishead-ish strings, organs, and jangly guitars peek in occasionally (Portishead bandmate Adrian Utley has several credits in the liner notes). Well worth a listen.

Koop, Waltz for Koop This one’s a couple years old, but I just discovered it while browsing around the handy All Music Guide. Most stuff labeled “acid jazz” doesn’t really do it for me, but this is a smooth, percussion-happy album that showcases several talented vocalists. Check this one out if you liked Kruder & Dorfmeister and/or Flanger’s Midnight Sound.

Vulva’s School Carolee Schneemann
1995, 7 min, color, sound

A performance in which Schneemann personifies an irrepressible vulva, which engages two animal hand puppets in a clamorous deconstruction of sexual bias in French semiotics, Marxism, patriarchal religions and physical taboos.

In his 1986 book The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins argued that the origins of life were no longer as mysterious as they once appeared. He suggested that life began with inorganic crystals, which spontaneously stack new materials into a shape determined by their “seed.” Two crystals built out of the same raw materials, introduced into the same environment, will compete for those resources; the one with the superior stacking technique absorbs and destroys the loser. This kind of “natural selection” among crystals has produced the geometric crystal shapes we see today–less efficient stacking forms were weeded out in this competition.

Certain kinds of inorganic crystals attract the building blocks of organic matter, weaving them into their stacking patterns to create simple protein shapes. At some point, says Dawkins, a crystal stacked in such a way that the protein shape it created–only a side effect–could continue to absorb new protein materials and stack them on its own. (He wrote this before prions were discovered, but this hypothetical first living thing sounds an awful lot like a prion, a single rogue protein molecule that dissassembles your useful proteins and turns them into copies of itself.)

Now, this goes a way towards explaining the origins of life, but it doesn’t explain a second mystery: sexual reproduction. Asexual reproduction is so much more successful–think of how many simple single-celled creatures there are, compared to multi-celled colonies of sexual creatures like us. The traditional answer is that sexual reproduction leads to greater complexity through mutation. (Introduce some sexually-reproducing single-celled creatures to the right environment, give them enough time, and they will turn into elephants. With asexual creatures, they’ll stay pretty much the same.) But mutation has great risks, and complex organisms are more prone to breakdowns. Where is the reward?

Maybe it’s here. Scientists examining the Chernobyl mutations have found that several species of area worms have begun to change over from asexual to sexual reproduction. That in itself isn’t remarkable–I seem to recall that a bunch of creatures can switch their own gender after the fact, including frogs and the mutant dinosaurs from Jurassic Park. But the number of sexually reproducing worms in the Chernobyl area keeps increasing, year after year, while the asexuals die out. The theory is that a mutation produced by sexual reproduction is making them more resistant to radiation.

Yay for our side, I guess. ‘Course, it was us complex organisms that irradiated the little guys in the first place….

Lustration. Strangely enough, it literally means “purification.” It’s used to describe the purging of officials from the old regime under a new government.

“Excuse me, can I change it, it’s making me sick?” Without waiting for an answer, the guy gets up from his table in the student lounge; he flips the TV from CNN over to a movie. Sean Connery’s face fills the frame.

“Don’t talk to me about criminal genes,” Sean brogues out at us with barely-contained disgust. “Nelson Rockefeller, that man’s got criminal genes the size of grapefruits.”

I never thought to thank the man for changing the channel. That’s the most beautiful thing I’ve heard all week. Criminal genes the size of grapefruits. Genes the size of grapefruits. Wow. I wonder how big a grapefruit’s genes are?

Does anybody know what movie that was? It also had Matthew Broderick in it.

About five years ago, I introduced two people to each other at lunch in the school cafeteria. They ended up getting married and having a kid. It’s kind of strange to think that I’ve caused a certain specific new human being to be created.

Anyway, I just googled my own name and discovered that I’ve also brought a specific high school football song into the world. They actually credited me for the music–it’s a MIDI file that I wrote around 1995, the theme from the movie Animal Farm. They think it’s the Russian National Anthem. I ain’t gonna tell ‘em.

A squad of California high school cheerleaders, singing the theme music from a 1954 British cartoon about Stalinism. “Hail to Schurr High School / Mighty and Strong / We’ll meet and conquer every foe / Our whole life long…”