This page contains all entries posted to Manufactured Environments in March 2005.

A Toilet for Purists: Thanks, Kohler!

Sam Teigen, our long lost man in The City, has become something of an expert on toilets. We heartily commend him for doing this job. At any rate, he points to a delightful little unit from Kohler called The Purist Hatbox Toilet. I think it’s one of those love it/hate it deals, but I definitely love it. Amazon.com doesn’t have the Purist® Hatbox™ unfortunately, otherwise it would earn a choice spot on my wish list. Any commode with both a trademark AND a registered mark in its name has got to be one hell of a good toilet.

All of us here at Manufactured Environments give a warm welcome to Sam and his blog and wish him well.

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Happy Belated Bunny Egg Day

Bunnies don’t lay eggs, but they do for Easter. I’m back in town after a few days on the road. Feels good to be back.

More to come. But in the meantime, I leave you with the True, Unadulterated Story of how the Sosumi sound on Macs came to be.

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Beatles Mash-ups—CCC’s Revolved

If you like Beatles mash-ups, you would have loved Irwin’s show today on WFMU. About 30 minutes into it, Irwin featured all 14 of Chris Shaw’s mash-ups from CCC’s Revolved. It made for some wonderful mid-morning listening. Don’t just take my word for it. Go to the archive (available in RealAudio and MP3) and listen for yourself.

CCC’s Revolved (Mash-ups by Chris Shaw)

The Beatles vs. The Jam vs. Beck

Tax Jam Pollution

The Beatles vs. Madonna

Eleanor Ciccone

The Beatles vs. Portishead

Sleeping

The Beatles vs. Coldplay

Rush of Love

The Beatles vs. Claudine Longet

Here, There and Everywhere

The Beatles vs. Genesis

That’s All Yellow

The Beatles vs. Jimi Hendrix

She Said Traffic

The Beatles vs. The Byrds vs. The Who vs. Deee-Lite

Sunshine A Go-Go

The Beatles vs. Badly Drawn Boy

And Your Bird Was Right

The Beatles vs. The Cure

Close to No One

The Beatles vs. The Monkees

Pleasant Dr. Robert

The Beatles vs. Goldfrapp vs. Norman Greenbaum

I Want A Spirit Machine

The Beatles vs. The Glenn Miller Orchestra

Got To Get You In The Mood

The Beatles vs. Nancy Sinatra

You Only Live Tomorrow

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Anarchy in the NJ

Commenting on the government shutdown in Hoboken, N.J, Jeff Gordon, a bartender at McMahon’s Brownstone Ale House on Willow Avenue, acutely observed that even without much government, life goes on in Hoboken. The state of this six month budget standoff has become so severe that Mayor David Roberts now risks being charged with fourth-degree crimes for spending any money, including for payroll. 550 municipal workers, including librarians and those who provide recreational and elderly programing, are forced to stay home without pay while so-called “essential” employees, such as the police, remain on the job.

The Mayor and Council president, Richard Del Boccio, hope to fix their broken government with even more acts of government. With the assistance of the state Superior Court, they hope to forcefully break the budget impasse and restore the government. I think they had better hurry up before more folks like Jeff begin to enjoy life without government.

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Highbrow Lament: Classical Music Online

The WSJ had two great articles on Monday about music in the digital era. Robert J Hughes writes of the problems of being a classical music lover (subscription req’d) with an iPod. There is a paucity of online offerings for classical music, which I can attest to. Places like iTunes Music Store tend to have just the popular stuff, and their catalog does not run very deep. (I just did a search for Steve Reich. They only have one album, and it’s not even from his Nonesuch catalog. ).

Actually there are two highbrow laments. Besides not being able to find much classical music online, the other problem is technical. A piece of classical music—especially symphonic works—may be indexed by multiple tracks for each movement of the work. But the music is played continuously so that the track numbers are somewhat arbitrary and are not audible within the continuous work. The problem is that when you rip your CD onto your computer gaps appear between the tracks. So if you’re listening to a classical piece spread over several tracks, there will be audible gaps between movements, which breaks the continuity of the music. Annoying, certainly. Apple’s solution to this problem (Microsoft doesn’t offer a solution for WMP) is a feature called “join tracks.” You can specify several tracks that iTunes should regard as a single work. As the WSJ article mentions, this is a kludge because once you join the tracks then you are no longer able to access the individual movements of a work but have to either fast-forward or always listen to the entire work.

The other article in Monday’s WSJ that I found fascinating was a piece called On the Wrong Track (subscription req’d) by Nick Wingfield. It talks about that song names and artist names from music you either download or rip can be really off, that is, the metadata can be disturbingly wrong. The article was talking about music in general, but it especially applies to classical music. I recently ripped all of my classical CDs into iTunes as AAC files. The metadata that iTunes automatically downloaded from Gracenote was stunningly bad. CD after CD. I know that most of Gracenote’s metadata is submitted by end users—people who were ripping their CDs and typed in the track names. The Gracenote CDDB database did a marginally okay job with my rock music discs, but the quality of it’s classical information was cringe-worthy.

So add poor metadata to the list of highbrow laments. All in all, the state of classical music online is poor. As far as sales go, there’s not much motivation for the companies to get it right: classical music makes up about 3% of annual music sales. Apparently that percentage is higher online, but still not enough to warrant much attention (though the WSJ article notes that classical is one of the few growth areas right now in music). What can be done about all of this? Shall we start a letter-writing campaign?

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Drum n Bass

iTunes seems to have a fascination tonight with my collection of drum n bass music so I thought I’d share with you this particular subgenre of electronic beat music. Electronica has always been about the subgenres and microgenres…little nuances that constitute a whole different crowd depending on the Dj and the music. Drum&Bass is IMO more aggressive and has bigger beats. It’s bodymovingmusic. Here a definition of drum n bass courtesy of Wikipedia. There are a bunch of dnb practitioners I would recommend, but tonight I’m thinking primary of my man Dieselboy. Dieselboy is a good poster boy for drum n bass.

So for a limited time, I’ll offer a couple of songs here. Two songs in MPEG-4 AAC format @ 320Kbps. You’ll need Apple’s iTunes or Quicktime to listen to them. One is Stratus - “You must follow” (14 MB) [removed] and the other is Hive - “Surreal Uncut (Teebee Remix)” (16 MB) [removed]. That Hive song is heavy, but oh man, it’s good. Both songs are from Dieselboy’s projectHUMAN. Rock out, my friends.

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Boys and their toys

Boys and their toys, originally uploaded by dreadfuldan.

I went to SXSW Interactive last year, and this is exactly what it looked like. The front and back rows were swarmed with geeks and their powerbooks. Note the use of the Official Geek Uniform of jeans and black t-shirts.

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Sifry on the State of the Blog

David Sifry, CEO of Technorati, has an interesting series of posts on the State of The Blogosphere. By interesting I mean if you like looking at charts and graphs, which I know you definitely do. He talks first about the growth of new blogs. Oooh, that was good, no? Okay, then he talked about how much we’re blogging including some interesting spikes over the past year or so. Wow. This is fun isn’t it? I think it’s good that there are people willing to take the time and energy to scope out the size and nature of the blog world. Five years ago, my blog was a lone voice weeping in the wilderness…uh..er, I lost my train of thought. Okay so Sifry’s third post is on the long tail and power laws. Whew. I’m done.

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Rock’s Oldest Joke

The Wall Street Journal has a great article about the history of people yelling “Freebird” at concerts. Freebird, of course, is an old Lynyrd Skynyrd song, and calling it out as a request seems to be a staple.

What struck me as interesting about this article is that it traces the history of Freebird back to Chicago of the late 80’s. That’s interesting because the first time I heard someone call “Freebird,” it was our very own Guest Blogger Faust Gertz who happens to be from Chicago. So the question on the table: How did you hear about Freebird, Faust?

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Latte Art

latte poured by Kyle at Victrola Coffee, originally uploaded by tonx.

Sometimes your barista outshines herself and creates wonderful art on the surface of your latte. Here’s a fabulous gallery of photos on flickr of latte art. [thx, bb]

If you’re interested in making your own artwork, read this latte art guide from CoffeeGeek. They also have some samples—I love the etched designs.

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Technorati: ManufacturedEnvironments is in Top 2%

February and March have been good months for us here at Manufactured Environments. To confirm this, Technorati says that Manufactured Environments is now in the top 2% of all blogs on the Internet. We’re pleased as punch about that. So tell your friends about us and help us break into the top 1%!

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Half.com

Scott is about to celebrate a year on the blog, and I was reminded of conversations I had with him around this time last year. Scott gets into his music like I do. Talking about music so much last year reminded me of a lot of great music from the 80s and 90s that I wouldn’t mind hearing again. Yeah so? Maybe you too have gotten past the college years and are remembering music from those early days. High school music. College music. That sort of thing.

Through those conversations I came across a site that’s run by eBay called Half.com. It’s like a retail store within eBay. You can search for music, movies, books or whatever just like in eBay. And actually you use your eBay account to access the site. But instead of bidding in an auction, it lists sellers who are selling, say, a U2 CD at a certain price. The price depends on the condition of the CD—ranging from ‘acceptable’ on up to ‘brand-new.’ And of course the price is dependent on demand.

What I’ve discovered is that there are tons of great old CDs from “my time”—stuff I enjoyed listening to while I was Music Director and a DJ at KWLC—for very cheap prices. Lots and lots of great CDs to be had for $1.99-$3.99 or even cheaper. So instead of bidding, you just click to buy the CD if the price is right, and within a few days the CD shows up in your mailbox (shipping usually runs $2.49). It’s a lot less hassle than the auctions, and I’ve found it’s a much more reliable place to find long lost CDs, because the sellers can leave an item up on Half.com for an extended period. So check it out. It’s Half.com, and they didn’t pay me a dime for this recommendation.

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An elixir of typography

I can’t believe I haven’t already told you about Marian Bantjes’ site called Quatrifolio. If you’re at all interesting in design and typography, you will love her website. I’ve been drinking deeply from the sweet vapors arising from the screen whenever I visit Marian’s site. Check out some design samples in Graphics and then head over to the Patterns. My eye loves this work—captivated by texture and intricacies it is.

If you haven’t had enough, delve into Marian’s personal site at Bantjes.com.

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Social Networking for Academia

A friend of mine pointed out that since Friendster has long since been deserted, that the action in Social Networking has been going on over at TheFaceBook.com. Now maybe you’ve tried out Tribe or Orkut or any other myriad of sites. But if you’re a student, faculty or staff at a college or university then check out The Face Book dot com. Hey, if the kids like it then it must be good. You can find my profile over here.

(As an aside, the only glitch I could see on TheFaceBook is that in the field that lists where I’m logged in from (such as On Campus or whatever) it says that I’m currently logged in from the Chi Omega house. Go figure.)

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Joe Garden in 2009? You decide!

My friend Joe Garden, staff writer for The Onion (Jim Anchower, Jackie Harvey, etc…), coauthor of Citizen You: Helping Your Government Help Itself, and man of the people, is taking his case to the streets (or at least the web) and empowering you to have your voice heard. Throwing his hat into the ring, Joe announced his campaign to replace Late Night host Conan O’Brien in 2009. You can read all about it at his web site, VoteJoeGarden.com.

Joe says we cannot afford another Craig Killborn. I couldn’t agree more. I don’t think we can afford another Jimmy Kimmel either. So the choice seems clear enough to me. Vote Joe!

But, I urge you not to simply give your vote to Joe, but to demand something for it. Make him earn your vote. For example, I would see to see Joe hire Chicago’s Behold The Living Corpse as the new Late Night band. Can you make that happen Joe?

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OOOTTAFVGVAH

Amalia has challenged us all with a Readers’ Contest. See, Amalia is studying to be a nurse and is learning more than she ever dreamed possible about human anatomy. Her midterm is coming up and she needs some help. So the challenge: craft an original mnemonic from the first letters of the 12 cranial nerves.

Here are the names of the nerves, in the order in which they must remain:

Olfactory
Optic
Oculomotor
Trochlear
Trigeminal
Abducens
Facial
Vestibulocochlear
Glossopharyngeal
Vagus
Accessory
Hypoglossal

That works out to be OOOTTAFVGVAH. So here’s my shot at a winning mnemonic:

On Other Ontologies That Triumph, Amalia Forgets Very Glabellar Villi Are Heavy.

I’m positive that’s the winning entry, but if you’d like a stab at it be my guest.

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Welcome to Guest Blogger Faust!

Manufactured Environments gives a warm welcome to Guest Blogger Faust Gertz. Faust hails from Chicago and is the webmaster at a certain liberal arts college. Greetings and salutations!

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Faust loves WFMU even though they hate Sun Ra

My favorite freeform radio station, wfmu.org, is in the middle of their annual fundraising marathon. I made my pledge (RealAudio clip) during Ken’s show. Besides a warm fuzzy, I will soon be receiving tons of swag goodies as well as Ken’s DJ premium, Moptop Mashups. I also believe that my pledge inspired at least one other pledge (RealAudio clip).

I might have pledged more if Mike “The Overseer” Lupica hadn’t recently posted a film depicting the grisly destruction of Sun Ra’s The Solar Myth Approach, Vol. 1 (the LP no less) and proclaimed “We hate Sun Ra and we are not telling you why.” While saddened by this declaration of hate, I will endure and continue to broadcast messages of intergalactic peace and love on Sun Ra Radio, which can be heard (almost) every Saturday from 3:00—4:00pm (CST) on KWLC 1240AM. Some of those tracks will be resurrected this weekend and lovingly dedicated to Mr. Lupica.

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Running Mac OS X on Windows: Pears and Cherries

For years, Mac users have been able to run Microsoft Windows on their machines thanks to a product called VirtualPC. Once made by a company called Connectix, it is now owned by Sir Bill. But why not run Mac OS X on a Windows machine?

Thanks to an open source project called PearPC that may now be possible. To add a little intrigue, a company called Maui X-Stream has produced a “rip-off” of PearPC called CherryOS that they’re selling for $50 a pop, according to Wired News.

A G4 emulator for Windows is of course an awesome idea. The web designer in me sees a real boon for Windows-based designers who want to test their creations on Mac browsers. In other news, Linus Torvalds uses a Mac.

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750+ Free Songs—Thanks, SXSW!

The SXSW music conference is an annual spectacle to behold. In the past, they’ve had MP3s of bands playing available for download. This year the good folks in Austin have provided a torrent of 758 legal songs in MP3 format (2.6 GB worth) of the bands playing this month at the conference. Download away!

This monster torrent of free music got mentioned over at Wired News.

P.S. If you’re wondering what a torrent is, check out BitTorrent.

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First Ten Programs on New Install?

To go with this Slashdot thread, what are the first 10 Windows programs you’d install on a freshly installed machine?

I tend to wipe Windows machines about once a year, which keeps things running smoothly. The first ten apps I install, more or less in order:

1. Mozilla Firefox
2. Mozilla Thunderbird
3. Norton Internet Security
4. Adobe Creative Suite
5. Macromedia Studio
6. Apple iTunes
7. AOL Instant Messenger (AIM)
8. Mic rosoft Office
9. BitTorrent
10. Nero

A mixture of open source, freeware, and corporate stuff.

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