Month: May 2005

Someone at work forwarded around this fake BBC article about a lion taking on 42 midgets in Cambodia. MetaFilter mentioned it the other day, pretty funny stuff.

But then another co-worker, Josh, the one that introduced us to the 6 train Celsius system, brought up this:

Sometimes truth and fiction are closer than we think.

Yesterday, the NY Times carried this report of the discovery of a new species of monkey. A New Species of Monkey Found in Africa

And yet they were scooped by The Onion, who just a day earlier, carried this report: New, Delicious Species Discovered

I don’t read the full Onion articles beyond the headlines enough. My favorite quotes:

“We couldn’t be more thrilled!” German researcher Dr. Jerome Keller told reporters Tuesday. “Very few scientists are lucky enough to discover a new species, let alone a mammal with a palatability on par with a tender, juicy steak.”

“This is a seriously tasty creature,” Keller added. …

Keller said the new species boasts a gular sac, a distinctive trait that separates it from other species in the Ateles genus. “The gular sac is a throat pouch that can be inflated, allowing the animal to make loud calls that resonate through the treetops,” Keller said. “More importantly, the pouch can be stuffed with nuts or dried fruits prior to roasting.”

At the Seattle Show Last Night, I Went Outside and Played a Few Songs for the People Waiting in Line to Get In.

How great is that?

My blogging performance has been off this month. Two reasons why:

1. I have this project at work that is big, vague and has no immediate pay off other than I can say “I did it” and it is hanging over my head. Everytime I fire up BlogJet I get that sinking feeling of guilt that I should be working on Project VisioBoy instead.
2. A little overwhelmed by incoming content. The most remarkable new NewsGator feeds? Matthew Yglesias, FutureFeeder, A Hamburger Today, LifeHacker, Overheard In New York 

Don’t worry, this is strictly temporary and the blog-faucet is poised to re-open soon.

Was on a tour of the South this weekend. Visited Greer South Carolina, bought some fireworks and went to the dirt track stock car races in middle Georgia.

I’ve got this new hot shit workstation. Things are good. Mostly.

I own a M-Audio Delta DiO 2496 which used to work fine, but when I moved it into this new box it garbles badly when I write data to my terabyte raid 5 array. (I just like saying that, I do have four 250 gig harddrives, but in actuality it is a RAID5 array and it only works out to around 700 gigs usable.) Note: I need coaxial spdif outputs only for this card.

All the reading I’ve done points to an IRQ sharing problem. Can you believe that it is 2005 and I’m troubleshooting IRQs?

I spent too much on this card and the solution of going out and buying another one just isn’t sitting well.

My responses from m-audio so far have all been cut-and-paste jobs out of the help desk manual. update: they just released new drivers for this series of cards. I’ll try that. mumble grumble…

I’ve been doing a great deal of procrastinating lately — I won’t go into the why’s.

But this afternoon has been different, I’ve been closing loops and firing out emails like a champ and it is crystal clear why. I’m going on a mini-vacation tomorrow and Friday and you are always most productive the week before a vacation or in my case the day before two days off. We feel compelled to get things out the door and wrapped up before we leave. This was cited in Getting Things Done if I remember correctly.

I’m hoping to capture this feeling and continue when I get back.

http://www.woodmans.com/ Home of the famous fried clams.

Here are all the shows in my “upcoming shows” Outlook 2003 Search Folder. I don’t know if I’ll be able to make it to all of these, but there they are…

http://upcoming.org/event/17606/ May 14: Crystal Method/evil 9 @ Spirit at Spirit

http://upcoming.org/event/19231/  May 20: Hot Hot Heat, Robbers on High Street, The Blue Van at Webster Hall

http://upcoming.org/event/18703/ May 26: Rilo Kiley at Webster Hall

http://upcoming.org/event/18167/ Jun 10: LCD Soundsystem at Webster Hall

http://upcoming.org/event/18969/ Jun 14: Mouse on Mars at Knitting Factory

http://upcoming.org/event/17457/ Jun 16: Iron & Wine at Webster Hall

http://upcoming.org/event/19252/ Jun 20: Modest Mouse w/ Camper Van Beethoven at Central Park Summerstage

http://upcoming.org/event/17330/ Jul 14: Dinosaur Jr. & Broken Social Scene at Central Park Summerstage

http://upcoming.org/event/19316/ Aug 05: RJD2 and Diplo at Rocks Off Boat Cruise

Side note: Dinosaur Jr is loud. I just bought a pair of ER-20 “high fidelity earplugs” from Etymotic. They are specially designed to lower overall noise levels, but at all frequencies equally, so you can still hear the band as they meant to sound, but at non destructive volumes.

The Sneeze has a series of these going:

Jokes From the Booster Seat II

“It’s time once again to enjoy the comedic stylings of my son. So sit back, relax…”

Q: “What do you get when you cross a sandwich, a person, and a car?”

A: “A flying sandwich pit!”

Segue to this Onion great:

Another Comedian Ruined By Parenthood 
 
AUSTIN, TX—Ed Corgi, once hailed as one of the area’s funniest and most ribald stand-up comedians, has lapsed into mediocrity due to the 2003 birth of his daughter Grace, a friend reported. “Ed used to get up there and just spit venom against the entire world until the crowd was dying,” fellow comic Rick Haste said. “Last week, I saw him do a bit about grape juice and another about how hard it is to get a stroller in a car trunk. He did swear a lot as he pantomimed folding the stroller, but still.” Corgi’s new sitcom Grape Juice is currently in development at ABC.

Spent the last two days in New York County jury duty.

Thanks to a last minute reminder from Amanda I brought my laptop — whew. They had kickass wireless access for $9 a day. Day one, I didn’t get called at all and just worked away on my laptop the whole time. Delicious Vietnamese Pho for lunch which is a suggestion I took from Mike Doughty’s blog.

Today I made it to around 11 without getting called and then they made an announcement similar to this:

“This is a very special time in the courthouse — it is jury appreciation week and we have a special event in courtroom #300. I’ll now call out names randomly” My name was called.

We went down to one of the bigger court rooms and were given film waivers. They were video taping us. It turned out to be an event about the history of juries for high school kids from NYC, roughly half the audience. Us actually summoned jurors were really just seat fillers. The format was Ferris Bueller style “Can anyone tell me what cross-examination is…” It was awkward, but tolerable until the speaker started asking the high school kid’s opinions on judicial topics. Ugh, it had been a while since I had been exposed to high school kids in this context. They fell into three types 1) total jokers just looking for peer points 2) enthusiastic, but clueless 3) I had to restrain myself from walking across the courtroom and putting them in a headlock. Mario Cuomo, former governor of New York made an appearance and made an awkward speech about his opposition to the death penalty and ducked out.

After enduring almost two hours of this nonsense they gave us a key chain and released us. I was only mildly disappointed to not actually sit on a jury or even go through the voir dire — what? don’t know what that is? Well maybe you should go visit a high school in New York State in a few years from now and watch the civics class video about juries and look for me in the back.