My friend John told me about this new thing he found: Oekaki. Apparently, you can draw on a webpage and then display it for other people… sort of like Flickr but without the camera. More open social networking brought to you by the friendly neighborhood computer.
John kicks ass because of the tree and the skull. Keep in mind, he drew these with a mouse in a Java applet. You can even watch him draw them in real time; it’s a little scary.
Seems it’s a good time to switch to Apple. They’re coming out with a new middle-of-the-road hardware interface for music codenamed ‘Asteroid’ that will make a nice complement to the sleek Mac Mini. I hope it was worth all the trouble they’re going through to deliver this news… Apple’s serious about the leaked features thing.
I already have a Firewire audio interface so I won’t be buying. ( =
I’m changing around the UI of the ol’ blog soon… this watered down Kubrick that everyone who is running Wordpress 1.5 is using is getting old. Maybe something inspired by the CSS zen garden? Maybe even this one?
This might not be news to anybody else but it is certainly news to me. It is, however, news that makes sense.
I like Moorcock’s work. From The Cornelius Quartet to The Elric Saga his anti-heros are fantastic, great reads. Both Elric of Melniboné and Jerry Cornelius are dispeptic, angst-ridden men trying to change the dominant paradigm of their worlds and seek out the meta-narratives that tie their lives together. Grant Morrison also achieves this very well. Have you read Seaguy or The Invisibles or maybe The Filth ? They will make your brain ooze out of your ears… probably fitting, since Mr. Morrison is a practicing Chaos Magician and wrote a book called “The New Adventures of Hitler.” I mean, come on! You gotta love it! I think these guys are trying to help save you, awaken something, twist something in your head until it pops so you can see what comes out.
Think of the viral advertising campaigns like McDonald’s recent I’d Hit It ads or that pesky “Da da da” VW bug commercial… why do sites like IFilm exist but to serve this need for the metatextual, the memetic in our lives driven by some base consumerism? Our own metatextual narratives are being co-opted by corporations trying to make a buck. They know about them and, until you do, you’ll be suckered. You’ll hum that jingle, you’ll blog about that commercial, you’ll tell your friends about that hilarious thing you saw on TV last night… and maybe that’s not such a bad thing as long as you realize what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. I’m not saying it’s all meaningful… it could all be total bullshit... but why not open up a bit, eh?
So, needless to say, go read Epic Pooh and meditate on the meaning of this image:
The cover for Harry Potter VI has been released. The Bloomsbury editions have a slightly different cover. Here it is all big-lookin’. And, I didn’t know this, but Bloomsbury has an adult version cover on their website… as far as I know, the adult version just has a different cover.
128 days to go.
Had an issue developing my todo application on Rails. It took me a bit of digging but I finally found out what was going on.
To get going I downloaded XAMPP and started up the MySQL server that got installed with it. That’s where I hit my snag. I started up the MySQL server, generated my scaffold, tried to browse to http://localhost:3000/todo/list and got the following weird error:
ActiveRecord::StatementInvalid in Recipe#indexInvalid argument: SELECT * FROM recipes
“WTF?” I thought to myself. After some digging, I found the answer1. It seems that Rails (smartly) relies on MySQL using its Brand Spankin’ New™ Password Scheme but XAMPP, out of the box, had MySQL configured to use the old password scheme. The upshot was that once I set my passwords in my database.yml to a blank line (don’t try this at home or in production, kids) everything worked out just fine.
Now I just have to get MySQL to use its Brand Spankin’ New™ Password Scheme.
1 This guy seems to be having my problem. This discussion is a good place to start to find out what went wrong.
You should go right now and watch Scent of a Robot. It’s just great… perfectly captures that “I’m-turning-into-a-drone-and-trying-to-cope-with-humor” thing I’ve been trying to achieve lately. We’ll see if there’s any success.
And, regarding my recent drive to switch teams: my new little Mac Mini should arrive on or before March 22, 2005. I can’t wait that long.
Amon Tobin is so cool. I just finished reading this interview that he did with Gamespot.
First off, he’s pretty sure his demographic is “computer geeks and nerds.” ( =
Then, there’s this question…
GS: ...The press pack for the soundtrack said most of it was recorded almost entirely with acoustic instruments that you then modified electronically. Did you play all the instruments yourself, or did you-AT: Actually there’s things that you’ll hear when you listen to the soundtrack which will be very revealing about all that. I’d rather not go into the recording techniques too much, if that’s OK?
GS: No, no, that’s fine. I won’t ask a magician for his secrets.
AT: That’s cool, cheers.
Sweet. All class, that guy.
