This page contains all entries posted to Manufactured Environments in August 2003.

ninety-nine percent

Tonight, Meat Beat Manifesto’s 99% is on the stereo. Thanks to the Special Someone who bought this for me off of my Amazon Wish List — it just arrived today. This is such a great album. Unlike many heavy-duty electronic albums from that time (it came out in 1990), 99% has stood the test of time. Many thanks.

Blogging may be sparse for a few days as I head over to the Home Country for a little R&R. An old friend from high school, who happens to be deeply pregnant, is having an open house at her new house. Looking forward to it. I haven’t seen her (nor her husband for that matter) for about ten years. Funny how time flies when you’re having fun. But it seems like that’s been a theme this year — I’ve reconnected with a number of old friends. On my recent trip to California I stayed with Chris & Heidi who I hadn’t seen since 1995, when I was still in college, and Molly & Dan who I hadn’t seen in even a longer time. I hope to have a few more names to add to the list in a few weeks when I head up to my alma mater.

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Take me back to one more sushi bar

I was reading Rohde’s take on sushi and thought of my own recent experiences with sushi. It happened during my recent trip to Los Angeles. C & H took me too a Japanese restaurant one evening in Little Tokyo. The place was packed, but we soon got a table. I won’t say it was the first time I’ve had sushi, but it was one of the first.

C & H, being something of regulars there, knew exactly what they wanted and ordered various delicacies off the sushi menu. I opted for the package deal — a little bit of this and a little bit of that. But what surprised me was how good the sushi was. I guess I was expecting something with a strong (read: unpleasant) flavor. Instead, it was smooth and delectable. I was hooked.

Now, the city I live in is rife with Asian restauants — Japanese, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese, and so on — and I’ve been to most of them except for the 4 or 5 Japanese restaurants. I’ve found this was clearly an oversight. I’m making up for lost time and have since eaten sushi several times since coming back home. And let me tell you sushi is good. But I can’t help but wonder — is our Midwestern sushi fresh? Probably not as fresh as Little Tokyo, but it’s pretty good. Thanks, C & H for opening that culinary door for me.

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A New Year, A New Beginning

With classes starting Monday, this week is usually one of the busiest of the year. Everything felt a little crazy, and my phone was ringing off the hook. But I’m not complaining. It’s good to be in demand. My weekend is pretty much taken care of for me. I’m off to work for yet a few more hours today and probably some more tomorrow. Gearing up for the fall semester is always a lot more difficult than the spring semester. With the spring semester, you’re already in the swing of things. But in the fall, it’s starting something completely new.

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Show Desktop icon

They’ve been deploying new Dell desktops in my department at the university. It’s nice to have Windows XP at work since I’ve been using it at home for the past year and a half. (Dear Mac Users: I also use Macs…). Today someone asked me: “Whatever happened to that ‘Show Desktop’ icon in the Quick Launch bar?” Interesting question. I don’t normally show the Quick Launch toolbar so I hadn’t noticed it being gone. But sure enough, it wasn’t there on her system. I checked mine, it wasn’t there. “Strange,” I thought, “why would Microsoft take away a fairly useful icon?” Or perhaps not so strange. I noticed tonight that my Win XP Pro system at home has a Show Desktop icon when I turned on the Quick Launch toolbar. So apparently the IT folks in our department decided we didn’t need that icon.

But it was Friday, and I thought surely there’s an easy fix. We went Start/Help And Support and searched for “show desktop.” Only one hit in the ‘suggested topics.’ I had her look in the Knowledge Base. Sure enough there was the fix we were looking for. Or rather there was an article pertaining to the Show Desktop icon that linked to another article that actually detailed how to recreate it. Unfortunately the article (190355) was not accurate for XP. The fix didn’t exactly work and was certainly more involved than one would care for a simple desktop icon. Basically, you have to create a short SCF script and place it in the windows/system32 directory and then we created a shortcut to the file. The last step was the one that wasn’t right. The article said to copy the shortcut to some arcane directory buried deep in the system32 folder, but instead we just dragged the shortcut to the Quick Launch toolbar and the icon was automatically created. My friend had her Show Desktop icon, and I wondered why it had been removed in the first place.

UPDATE: J. writes to say that it wasn’t the fault of the IT people, but rather a problem with XP “copying standard items from the administrator profile to the all users profile.” At any rate, if you click the hyperlinked number above, you’ll be taken to the Microsoft support article that details how to fix the problem.

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File Sharing

As you’ve probably heard, the RIAA is launching or about to launch some lawsuits against individuals. People have been serving notice. The subpoenas have been flying. But what will it all bring? Better anonymization in peer-to-peer clients? Perhaps. An end to peer-to-peer file sharing as we know it? Probably not. Some are taking the RIAA’s hint and have stopped sharing. Others are blazing onward. But at the end of the day the problem has not been addressed. Do this RIAA: create a system where people can trade files on a subscription basis. Have people pay a fee and then be able to download. The artists/labels get paid and people find the music that they want. Even listening to myself type that, I think the RIAA is too conservative and too entrenched to setup something like that. Basically they want the distribution to remain unchanged — a one-way transaction: from store to consumer. Apple’s iTunes store and Emusic.com are perhaps the best two examples of that — and yet both are quite different from each other.

So my advice to you, is to hang tight for a little while longer. Wait and see how the lawsuits take shape and see who is targeted. I think we’ll have a better idea fairly soon of who the RIAA is after.

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Los Angeles Photos

There’s a slideshow of some photos I took in Los Angeles last month. Enjoy! There’s a few photos of Venice Beach, the Getty Center, and Mann’s Chinese Theater among other things.

I’m feeling more ready for the fall semester than ever. The days are getting dark sooner. Most of the students are back in town. After my exciting visit to the Central Coast wine country of California, I decided to take a continuing education course on wine appreciation this fall. I’m looking forward to learning more about wine.

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A Tale of Eric Meyer on CSS

Yesterday, I happened to be out at Barnes & Noble looking around. My purpose for being out at the mall was to find a pair of shoes. I wasn’t having much luck with the shoes though. So I stopped by B&N to take a break. I usually eschew the large stores, but Barnes has the largest selection of computer books in the area by far. So anyway I happened across a copy of Eric Meyer on CSS, a book I had been looking for. Feeling the frustration of not finding a pair of shoes in my size, I opted to justify my purchase by saying that I was making my mall going worthwhile.

But, I got home and the karma wasn’t feeling right. I had gone with convenience — the book was available and so I bought it. This was wrong thinking. Today I returned the book and felt better about it. I knew I could find the book downtown and so that’s what I did. I went downtown. First I stopped at Prairie Lights and apparently they’re completely getting out of computer books. I looked around for a while and then departed. I then headed over to Iowa Book and sure enough, they had Eric Meyer on CSS. And I picked it up. I felt better for two reasons: 1. I had purchased the book from a locally owned independent bookstore and 2. I had opted for right thinking and right action over convenience. In my view of the world, convenience is one of the great American sins. The quest of convenience will be the death of us all mainly because convenience comes over the value of economy. Convenience, simply put, costs more.

At the end, everyone comes out ahead. Barnes & Noble is so big that the return of one book is karma-indifferent. It won’t even register in their mega-opolis. Iowa Book comes out ahead by being a local purveyor of books, and at the end of the day Mr. Meyer gets his royalty check. And of course, the whole point of the transaction, which remains to be seen, is that I will learn more about CSS, which I’ve had a hankering for. Readers of my source code will note some differences on my front page — the CSS has been improved somewhat and the XHTML encoding has been streamlined. After being mostly self-taught in the arts of CSS and XHTML, I’ve decided to codify some of my knowledge through books — to enhance my knowledge of the technical crafts. Another book I’m keen to read is Zeldman’s Designing with Web Standards. Would anyone recommend this title?

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Kill Rock Stars

We’re headed down to the Java House tonight. There’s been some signs of students back in town. Bless those students. They don’t run this town, but they make this town run. I’ve got the computer on “mix” tonight — listening to random songs from my collection. It’s pretty much habit now: when I buy a new CD, the second thing I do is rip it onto my hard drive. I spend enough time on this thing to want a fairly decent selection of music while I’m working. I’m totally getting my money out of my emusic.com subscription. I’ve downloaded something like 8 gigs of music from them so far.

It’s great having some surprises when we’re listening to music. There was a point, when I had about 2,000 songs on my hard drive, when I knew every single song, and likewise there weren’t any real surprises. That’s the great thing about radio (when the stations are good) — surprise. It keeps me fresh when I can listen to new stuff that I haven’t heard before. So in recent months my music selection here has expanded thanks to the emusic site mostly, because now I’ve got something on the order of 5,000+ songs on my hard drive, and the surprises now abound. I figure I’ll probably cut off the emusic for a while. I’ve downloaded so much I haven’t had a chance to listen to it all yet. That’s the cool thing about emusic — you can download an entire album at a clip and it’s all MP3 files so you can burn them to CD for no extra charge.

After being initially skeptical of emusic for some months, I’ve joined and rather warmed up to the service. For a lot of people, they won’t have much music they’re looking for, but for me, there’s tons of stuff on there that I’m enjoying.

Buying music online seems to be pretty effective. You miss out on the packaging — it would be nice if you could download a scan of the cover art — but otherwise it’s a great way to get a hold of new music. It’s especially great when record labels are willing to share tracks with their customers. Kill Rock Stars of Olympia is especially aggressive in this area with dozens and dozens of songs available.

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2 Many DJs - As Heard on Radio Soulwax

When I was in Los Angeles, I picked up a couple of the infamous Soulwax releases, namely “As Heard on Radio Soulwax” by 2 Many DJs. Decent stuff and certainly n-JOIable. “As heard on Radio Soulwax” is a series of unpublished mix CDs. Mixes in the fine tradition of mixing beat mixed parts with relative classic music. So you have Salt N’ Pepa vs. The Stooges. Or how about Destiny’s Child vs. Nirvana. It’s the vocals of some bootylicious Destiny’s Child song laid over SmelLs like Teen Spirit by Nirvana. It’s hilarious stuff. To find out more about 2 Many DJs a Google search may help here.

At any rate, I picked up a shitload of music out in Los Angles, and I’ll be looking at some of these fabulicious CD’s in the weeks to come. Some you may have already heard, such as Basement Jaxx’s “Rooty” — but others will be completely new to you, because that’s the kind of guy I am… Unending surprise after surprise.

I’ve got Soulwax pt.1 & pt.3 and I might be enticed to make a copy if y’all sent me a CD-R of something. At any rate, the people on my mailing list will be enjoying a bit of that with my freshly mailing mix CD :Los Angeles 2003:. I’m looking to get a streaming copy up on the website soon. I’m thinking I’ll have to take down a few of my other streaming mixes because I’m running out of disk space on the server. Each of these 80-minute mixes takes about 20 megs of space after they’re rendered in Real audio.

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But when you sleep, where do you go?

My blog’s feeling a little neglected. After a three week vacation, and then this week I’ve been dragging my feet a little — it still feels like summer… Damn, what’s up with that? Time to buckle down and get back to work. The summer is nearly over here in La La Land. In two weeks the semester starts and then the shit really hits the fan. I’m looking forward to it. In June it’s nice when all the students are gone and it’s pretty easy to get a table at your favorite restaurant, but then .. this town get’s kind of lonesome when all the students are gone for too long. We’ve had our fun and now it’s time to kick the academic year into high gear, you know?

The past week I’ve been making strictly soy lattes at home. I’ve been using Silk vanilla soy milk, and I’m pretty pleased with the results. The grocer was running a special on Silk — $1.80 for a half gallon. That’s a reasonable price. I went to the food co-op and they had Westsoy half gallons for $3.99. And that Westsoy stuff is much too sweet for my tastes. I like my milk bitter like the coffee at the bottom of the 24-hour diner’s coffee pot. Just kidding! But damn, Westsoy is really sweet. If you like chocolate milk, you’ll love vanilla Westsoy. Yeah, I’ve been pretty happy with the Silk soymilk, it’s cheap and it does the job.

I’ve been having a bit of jealousy over my California friends. They go to this place called Trader Joe’s that has a lot of organic foods, but the stuff is really cheap. I love the local food co-op here, but their prices are pretty insane on a lot of stuff. I really want to shop at the Co-op, but when I look at my little bag of food and the amount I just paid for it, I go into shock. The grocery store now has an organic aisle, and they’re carrying more organic produce. I think a lot of people go through this same problem … Is it better to support the locally owned business or to buy your stuff at the mega store for cheaper? I support local businesses when I can. I do most of my music shopping at the Record Collector downtown, which is by far my favorite music store. But all the little shit I need around the house like toothpaste and shampoo I tend to buy from Target or sometimes Walmart. But where else do you buy that stuff for that kind of price? What’s the alternative here? Walgreens? I don’t think so. Our precious economy has been overrun by the conglomerates, but at what price? Devils in Arkansas are calling the shots now, kids.

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Redesign

Here’s a redesign of the DanielStout.com front page. Similar but different. If I like it, I may redesign the rest of the site based on this design. We’ll see. I’ll give it a little chance to air out and see what I think of it in a few days. Comments are appreciated.

So raise your glass in good cheer. I’m drinking a glass of Big House Red from Bonny Doon, a winery that a friend told me about on my recent trip up the Central Coast of California. Fortunately the local food co-op carries Bonny Doon. But alas, no Gainey. Soon! Soon!

UPDATE: I decided to nix the redesign. It’s not a bad design — and I’m sure I’ll find some uses for it elsewhere… but for the flagship Daniel R Stout site, it just didn’t have enough texture. People who know me well know that texture is the primary vocabulary I work with visually. For the interested, the proposed redesign can be found here [removed].

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Welcome back, Dan!

Ross today noticed that I hadn’t posted to my blog since my return from California. Hello, people! Hello, world! Okay, so anyway it was a great trip. I spent most of the time in Los Angeles. I was staying with friends in the Silver Lake area. And then I headed north for a few days to San Luis Obispo. I haven’t had a chance to go through my photos yet, but I will in the next day or two. It’s been a busy time since I got back. I helped a dear friend load her moving truck — and she’s off to Minnesota. I’ll miss her.

J. writes today that she’s back from KC. We’re doing lunch later in the week.

In the meantime, I offer you a little frivolity over at Muffin Films. [tip o’ the hat to navelgazer]

I did a lot of music shopping in Los Angeles, and I’m pleased to report that I’ve already gotten a new mix together of music that I picked up out there. I spent a lot of time at Amoeba Music of Hollywood, Rhino Records, Tower Records, and other joints. People on my mailing list should expect the new mix in the mail shortly — I’ll be mailing them out Tuesday. If I get the time, I’ll post the new LA Mix onto this here website for your streaming pleasure. I’ll keep you posted.

Well, that’s all the news for now. I appreciate your patience in waiting for my vacation to finally end. But end it has. And now back to the Business of Blogging!

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