This page contains all entries posted to Manufactured Environments in May 2006.
The Prodigal Son returns home
Posted by Daniel Stout on Wed 31 May 2006 at 10:57 PM
I was trying to describe my state of mind over the past couple of days and that old Luna song Freakin’ & Peakin’ popped into my head. The Realtor came over tonight, and I signed the papers. My place goes on the market tomorrow. That’s the freakin’ part. It’s exciting. The peakin’ bit is the rest of my mood. I’ve been feeling very emotional the past couple of days. All kinds of intense emotions pouring through me from minute to minute, hour to hour. I will miss this place. I’ve gradually been saying goodbye to people. Lots of hugs, and lots of time on the phone calling up friends in various places to tell them the news. I also resigned yesterday from the two non-profit boards I sit on. Soon this will all be nothing more than a memory.
BUT. But going to Wisconsin has got me excited. It’ll be a homecoming for me. It’s been a long, long time since I’ve lived in the state of my birth. I’ll get to see old friends and make new ones. Who knows what will happen? Not I, but it will certainly be good. Prodigal son, indeed.
Tags: freakin · hugs · intense emotions · iowa · iowa city · luna · peakin · prodigal son · wisconsin
Seasons Change…Ten at a Time
Posted by Daniel Stout on Mon 29 May 2006 at 7:38 PM
This Memorial Day weekend has been hot. It’s been in the 90s here in Iowa City. It’s a special Memorial Day weekend in my heart though because it marks ten years that I’ve been here. I moved to Iowa City on Memorial Day weekend of 1996. Somehow I ended up staying here ten years. Hard to imagine.
At this ten year mark though, I am also at an inflection point. I will be signing the papers this week to put my house on the market, and I will be leaving Iowa. I will certainly miss it, but I realize it is time for me to move on to bigger and better things. I don’t have any concerns about my place selling. It is only 4.5 years old, and I have been the only owner.
That said, I’m on the job market and looking in the Madison or Milwaukee area for IT work. I’m of course very adept at the web design and development side of things, but I also have a master’s degree in journalism so I can write and express ideas clearly. Here’s a PDF of my resume [removed].
I will miss my many friends in the area of course, and I wish everyone well. If you know of any positions in the Madison / Milwaukee area or know someone who does, drop me a line. Onward!
Tags: change · inflection · iowa city · madison · memorial day · milwaukee · moving · pdf · resume
Akismet in action and MT 3.3 due soon
Posted by Daniel Stout on Sun 28 May 2006 at 8:51 AM
We’ve been inundated in recent months by a steady stream of spam comments getting by our spam filters here on Manufactured Environments. I turned on comment moderation to prevent spams from getting published, but still the spam scripts driven by evil, evil people continued to bubble up from the underworld.
There are a couple of routes we could have gone with it. An easy one would have been to input some regular expressions into the filter that would have caught the vast majority of the spams coming in. One thing I noticed about the spam that was making it through the filter was that it had very specific constructions and variations. Apparently someone had spent many months to find the weak point in the default MT spam filters.
Just because I was feeling frisky, I decided to install the Akismet for Movable Type plug-in. Akismet is a spam filter that WordPress users are familiar with. It was developed by the same folks who developed WordPress. For whatever reason, they make a version of the plug-in for Movable Type, which is the software that powers this superblog.
The installation of the plug-in is easy as most plug-ins for MT are easy to install. The one onerous thing was requiring one to create a login at wordpress.com to get an API key. I thought this might be an underhanded way to get people closer to using WordPress, which it may very well be, but I see that one can create a login at wordpress.com without creating a blog as well.
In other blogging news, Movable Type 3.3 is due soon. The upgrade to MT 3.2 was tremendous, so we have high hopes for 3.3. I’ve been using Movable Type to manage this blog for the last three years. It’s only gotten better with age—it’s powerful without being overly complex. One feature I’m excited to see is the “vastly expanded template tag options for common content management tasks.” MT already has a rich template tag set—much richer than WordPress’—but it’ll be great to see what content management options Six Apart has added.
Tags: akismet · comment spam · movable type · plug-in · six apart · template tag · wordpress
Do Not Resuscitate
Posted by Daniel Stout on Sat 20 May 2006 at 7:18 PM
An 80-year-old woman from Dyersville, which is just west of Dubuque here in eastern Iowa, had tattooed on her chest the words, “Do Not Resuscitate.” Good choice. This from the Des Moines Register, which broke the story. Of course getting a legal rendering on paper of Mary Wohlford’s health-care wishes might hold up better if it came to a court decision, but still it’s a pretty interesting thing to do. The story has gotten national attention as recent cases like the Terry Shiavo debacle live in recent memory. Congrats to Gary’s Professional Tattooing Studio, across the river in Galena, Illinois for getting a little free publicity, and a thanks to them for giving Mrs. Wohlford a senior discount on her tattoo.
Side note: I was a little disappointed to see that the dateline of the story on the DM Register’s website changed from Decorah to Dyersville. Decorah is the home of Luther College and our fellow blogger Faust Gertz. There is no trace of a correction on the website. The location simply changed within the past couple of days since the story was first reported. A quote in the story from a Decorah lawyer though remains intact.
Tags: decorah · des moines register · do not resuscitate · dyersville · garys tattoo · iowa · tattoo
The Future of Books
Posted by Daniel Stout on Mon 15 May 2006 at 6:12 AM
Interesting, longer article in the New York Times yesterday on the future of the printed word and how vast digital repositories will change things forever. The article, entitled Scan This Book!, was written by Kevin Kelly of Wired magazine. Books are being scanned in at a rapid pace. This work is even being outsourced to India and China where the costs are low. Simply pack up a few hundred thousand books in a shipping container, and there you go. Of course, foot traffic at libraries nationwide has been decreasing for the past ten years. Libraries have adapted to the changing norms of information retrieval, but the thought of access to huge databases of books from any screen is compelling. The article also talks about the extension of copyright and its effect on the public domain:
In the world of books, the indefinite extension of copyright has had a perverse effect. It has created a vast collection of works that have been abandoned by publishers, a continent of books left permanently in the dark. In most cases, the original publisher simply doesn’t find it profitable to keep these books in print. In other cases, the publishing company doesn’t know whether it even owns the work, since author contracts in the past were not as explicit as they are now. The size of this abandoned library is shocking: about 75 percent of all books in the world’s libraries are orphaned. Only about 15 percent of all books are in the public domain. A luckier 10 percent are still in print. The rest, the bulk of our universal library, is dark.
Tags: books · copyright · future of books · kevin kelly · libraries · long tail · nytimes
Freeform Faust’s playlist for May 13, 2006
Posted by Faust Gertz on Sat 13 May 2006 at 12:30 PM
Tune to KWLC on select Saturdays from 12:30pm–2:00pm (CST) to hear Freeform Faust.
| Artist | Album | Track | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Phil Lewis Of LA Guns | A Tribute To Styx | Mr. Roboto | Mike fills in for Faust, who is stuck in traffic. Mike speaks. |
| MV featuring Hanna | Mr. Roboto | Mr. Roboto | |
| Adam X | On the One and Two | Beroshima—-Domo Arrigato Mr. Roboto | Mike speaks |
| Eddie & Eedie And The Reggaebots | Eddie & Eedie And The Reggaebots | Some Velvet Morning | Via the 365 Day Project |
| 386 DX | The Best Of | California Dreaming | Performed by 386 DX/4MB RAM/EGA/40MB HD |
| 386 DX | The Best Of | Smells Like Teen Spirit | |
| Mark Century Corporation | For Women Only | Health #1 | Via the 365 Day Project |
| ? | ? | The VD Song | Via the 365 Day Project |
| Mark Century Corporation | For Women Only | Health #2 | Via the 365 Day Project |
| Gamelan Sangburni | “Smoking Cloves”—-The Bamboo Gamelan of Sangburni | Kebyar Duduk (The Dancer Sits) | Faust speaks |
| Liu Sola | Haunts | Witch’s Beads | Requested and provided by Listener Eric. Thanks! |
| Liu Sola | Blues in the East | Boya’s Adventures | Ditto |
| Paul Pena & Kongar-ol Ondar | Genghis Blues [Original Soundtrack] | Kargyraa Moan | For Storm Bailey, even if he would never listen to this show. |
| Paul Pena & Kongar-ol Ondar | Genghis Blues [Original Soundtrack] | Eki A’ttar (Good Horses) | |
| Keita Asari | Jesus Christ Superstar | Everythings Alright | Via WFMU’s Beware of the Blog: Jesus Christ Superstar in Japanese (MP3s) |
| ? | Japanese Magazine Flexidisc (1984) | Untitled | 365 Day Project. Faust speaks. |
| Guitar Wolf | Jet Generation | Fujiyama Attack | The Daniel R Stout Rockin’ Song of the Show! |
| Buffalo Daughter | Pshychic | 303 Live | Faust speaks |
SUSE Linux 10.1 to be released tomorrow
Posted by Daniel Stout on Wed 10 May 2006 at 7:23 PM
openSUSE has the scoop: SUSE Linux 10.1 is due to be released tomorrow. There are two varieties that you can download for free or buy. There’s SUSE Linux 10.1 the commercial product from Novell costing $59.99. And then there is the OSS (open-source software), which is available for free. It’ll be available on this page tomorrow (Thursday). I’ve been using SUSE Linux for nearly six months now, and it is pretty great. I’m sure I’ll do a fuller write-up of 10.1 once I’ve gotten into it a bit. Looks to be lots of improvements over 10.0.
Tags: 10.1 · desktop linux · linux · novell · open-source · opensuse · oss · suse · suse linux
32-hour Sun Ra Radio Marathon on WKCR 89.9 FM NYC
Posted by Faust Gertz on Tue 9 May 2006 at 12:30 PM
Sun Ra Arrival Day Celebration
Monday, May 22nd at midnight to Tuesday, May 23rd, 8:20 am on 89.9 FM NYC & wkcr.org.The Sun Ra Institute and WKCR-FM are proud to announce the Sun Ra Arrival Day Celebration, a 32-hour radio marathon featuring work of the innovative and iconoclastic composer, bandleader, and keyboardist Sun Ra. Each segment of the festival will focus on a specific feature of Ra’s musical legacy: Standards and Ballads, The Swing Tradition, Solo Piano and Poetry, Late 1950’s and Early Rarities, Tone Science, Singers, and more. The Arrival Day Celebration will include exclusive recordings from WKCR’s archives as well as live special guest interviews with Marshall Allen, Director of the Sun Ra Arkestra, and Arkestra members of the past, present and future.
Preliminary Schedule
Sun Ra Potpourri
12—5am
The broadcast will begin with a variety of great Sun Ra sounds to warm up this event.
Sun Ra Plays Standards and Ballads
5—8am
The Daybreak Express show will feature Sun Ra’s performances of standards, ballads, and show tunes.
The Swing Tradition
8—9:30am
The Bird Flight slot will be an extension of the previous show, but this time focusing on the compositions of Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, and others. Little known facts: Fletcher himself once gave up his own piano chair to Sun Ra. Sun Ra wrote charts that Coleman Hawkins had difficulty playing. Monk was impressed, too.
Solo Piano and Poetry
9:30 AM—Noon
Our morning Classical show will present Sun Ra’s solo piano recordings, including an exclusive performance at WKCR in July 1977. This segment will also incorporate Sun Ra’s extensive poetic works.
Omniversity: Late 1950’s and Early Rarities
Noon—5pm
Phil Schaap will shine the spotlight on Sun Ra’s elemental work from the later 1950’s. Following this segment, we will shift into a survey of the very earliest recordings of Sun Ra, arranging for singers and performing as a sideman. Phil will be joined by a panel of scholars and band members, presenting the rarest of Sun Ra sides.
Tone Science
5—8pm
The synthesizer and abstract works of Sun Ra. Tune in for some of the most adventurous recordings of Sun Ra’s career. This segment will include both solo synthesizer performances as well as those with an ensemble.
From the Ark
8 PM—1am
The evening segment is expected to be the highlight of the marathon. We will play live recordings and interviews, with visits from special guests and a focus on materials from WKCR’s own "Arkives", as well as a collection gathered by The Sun Ra Institute. We will take some time to honor the current living-and-breathing Sun Ra Arkestra, under the masterful direction of Marshall Allen, and celebrate Marshall’s 82nd birthday a few days early. Stay tuned for extra features in the works, including remote broadcast from the Sun Ra House in Philadelphia.
The Singers
1—2am
This hour will give a closer look at Sun Ra’s work with vocalists, including his R&B and Doo-wop efforts.
Overnight Sun Ra
2—5am
Daybreak Sun Ra
5—8:20am
Sun Ra will again be the focus of Transfigured Night and Daybreak Express. Here is another chance Travel the Spaceways with Sun Ra and The Arkestra.
Back in (mobile) Action
Posted by Daniel Stout on Sun 7 May 2006 at 5:29 PM
After the apparent demise of my laptop recently, I was left without mobile computing options. Thankfully I’ve got the laptop back now. They replaced the video card and all seems to be well. My HP zt3010us is computing well again. It actually took two tries to get it fixed. I dropped it off at the local Best Buy, and they shipped it to Chicago. The folks in Chicago re-seated the video card and thought all was well. It was fast turn around, but the problem wasn’t fixed. After the first fix, the machine would sometimes boot, but it had lots of garbage on the screen and would lock up after a couple of minutes. The first time out they charged me for the privilege even though they didn’t do much of anything. I took it back last Saturday, they shipped it to Chicago again, replaced the video card this time, and shipped it back. I got it on Wednesday. And because it was a re-do, they didn’t charge me at all the second time. I’m pretty happy with Best Buy’s Geek Squad at this point. It was really cheap then to get my laptop repaired. They were cheerful, and I’m totally blown away at how fast they got my computer back to me. It’s working great now, and I have the oh-so-geeky Geek Squad to thank for that. I’ve never used the Geek Squad before, but my impression of them is they rock. And note, I didn’t have any special warranty on the laptop. They just took it in and worked on it. So thanks to the Geek Squad guys at the Coral Ridge Best Buy store in Coralville.
Tags: best buy · computer death · coral ridge · coralville · geek squad · laptop
Freeform Faust’s playlist for May 6, 2006
Posted by Faust Gertz on Sat 6 May 2006 at 12:33 PM
| Artist | Album | Track | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scott Walker | The Drift | Cossacks Are | |
| Scott Walker | BBC’s Culture Show | The Return of Scott Walker | via WFMU’s Beware of the Blog. Includes link for the video of this segment. |
| Scott Walker | The Drift | Hand Me Ups | |
| US Department of Agriculture | PSA | George and Ethel | via WFMU’s Beware of the Blog |
| US Department of Agriculture | PSA | Sal and Arnie | ditto. |
| Ashra | New Age Earth | Sunrain | Faust speaks and reads the weather. |
| Eddie “The Old Philosopher” Lawrence | PSA | The DJ Philosopher | via WFMU’s Beware of the Blog’s ‘Nightmares of DJs Past’ |
| Xiu Xiu | La Forêt | Mousey Toy | |
| Bardo Pond | Selections Volume 1 | Cymbals | |
| Cluster | Cluster 71 | Track 1 (15:33) | |
| Louis Barron | OHM: The Early Gurus of Electronic Music | Main Title from “Forbidden Planet” | Faust speaks |
| Tiny Tim | Tiptoe To The Gas Pumps | These five Songs Of Energy Crises Past via WFMU’s Beware of the Blog. | |
| Diana Gardiner | President Nixon, Don’t Ration My Gas | ||
| Bobby B. Baker | Take Your Oil and Shove It | ||
| Bobby Butler | Cheaper Crude Or No More Food | Supposedly the only song ever played on the Paul Harvey show | |
| Wendy Mae Chambers’ Car Horn Organ | Star Spangled Banner | ||
| Jolie Holland | Springtime Can Kill You | Springtime Can Kill You | MP3s available from ANTI |
| Jolie Holland | Springtime Can Kill You | Crazy Dreams | |
| Sam The Drummer | Sam The Drummer Tells Famous Fairytales For Your Children | Little Red Rhumbahood | Via the 365 Day Project |
| Sam The Drummer | Sam The Drummer Tells Famous Fairytales For Your Children | S.S. Rhythm | ditto |
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