Snarkout Announcements

Because Anne demanded it

This is not the sort of thing I do, but Anne PLSJ (which is pronounced "Pludge") tagged me, and I'm growing sick of maintaining radio silence. Still and all, I feel dirty. The next thing up will be reporting which Harry Potter character, then maybe a little kitten icon indicating that I am feeling "frisky" today, then picking a fight over who's allowed on my LiveJournal friends list.

Total volume of music on my computer (which is pretty much unrelated to the total volume of music on my iPod):

12.2 gig, 8.4 days, 2406 songs (some of which are half-hour or hour long radio shows). I'd say this represents roughly a quarter of my CD collection.

The last CDs I bought:

The Evens, s/t
The Deathray Davies, Midnight at the Black Nail Polish Gallery
The Sadies, Favourite Colors

Song playing right now:

"Words and Guitar", Sleater-Kinney (true when I started; now playing is "It's Nothing to Me" by the Sadies)

Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me:

"Washington, DC" by Stephin Merritt/the Magnetic Fields, from 69 Love Songs -- Every word of it is true.
"Jackson", by Johnny and June Carter Cash, from At Folsom Prison (among others) -- Redfox and I sing this as a duet sometimes. "Ring of Fire" played at our wedding, not this, because who wants the fire to go out?
"Mechano", by Burning Airlines, from Mission: Control! -- Crawling from the wreckage of Jawbox, Burning Airlines is up there with Fugazi as the definitive DC band for me: intensely overintellectualized, undanceable, ferociously tight. This album lived in my CD player for about six weeks straight at one point in college.
"Precision Auto" by Superchunk, from On the Mouth -- Superchunk's No Pocky for Kitty was the first indie album I ever bought. It is entirely fair to say that it changed my life, at least in a small way. On the Mouth is the album I listen to more, though: a collection of jewel-like stories about breaking up and not getting over it (thankfully written before emo was emo), even if all the songs sound the same.
"13 Monsters" by Lightning Bolt, from Ride the Skies -- Just the name of the damn song gives me an earworm.

I'm going to tag Drew, Nick, Rosebaby, Kathryn (whose answers are reasonably sure to make me feel a million years old), and AXT. I hope all of them have more willpower than I did. (Miranda Gaw has already succumbed and is thus immune from my icky meme. Curses!)

Let us never discuss this post again.

Finagle's Law takes no vacations

I am back. Italy was beautiful. I ate at my first Michelin-bestarred restaurant, and it was jawdroppingly good; I can only imagine what it's like to hit one of the handful of places the Michelin reviewers think merit three stars. I was hailed on. Unlike one of my friends on the trip, Alitalia did not lose my luggage. I saw some famous (and often very good) art. I got sunburnt, but not badly. I bought a sweater, solely so I can sneeringly announce that I bought it at this super little shop off the Piazza d'Espagne in Roma. I drank a great deal of excellent red wine and ate a great deal of gelato. Everything was very nice.

Of course, my first major outage in three years occured while I was off enjoying myself; my beloved host had to switch ISPs, and I was not around to fiddle with my DNS registry. Sorry to go off the air; it won't happen again, be assured, until the universe realizes that I am again away from computers for an extended period.

I wanna be vacated

Regular readers (thank you, everyone!) may have noticed that I've been posting less lately; things have been awfully busy, because I've been getting ready to go on vacation. Hallelujah, that day is finally here. I'm going to be away for two weeks, hopefully far away from a computer, drinking wine, eating good food, and pretending I'm in a neo-realist movie. Posting will resume in late September. In the meantime, please check out the links in my sidebar and bookmarks page. (They aren't highlighted in my sidebar, but I'll point out Ramage, Kempa, Bookninja, and Waxy (as well as the rest of the gang aggregated by the highly useful Upian Hotlinks page) as good sites to read and to borrow links from. Have a good time in my absence; I'm going to try to. Things should pick up a bit, including some movement on the Jumpcut front, some technical changes I'm thinking about making to the site, and some long-stilled projects, when I get back.

Akin Fernandez clarifies

One of the nice things about having a website with a modest amount of Google juice is that people occasionally come across what I've written about them, either through vanity searches or checking their referrer logs. (Occasionally what I've written is not nice, and I feel bad. This is another reason why I would be a very poor journalist.) Andrew Plotkin, one of the legends of the current interactive fiction revival, wrote in with some comments about interactive fiction, and recently my post about randomness and "numbers stations" prompted some feedback from Akin Fernandez the man behind the Conet Project (CDs still available) that I thought I'd pass on. Outside web application development and a few specialized facts about mathematics that I still recall from my undergraduate education, I'm not really an expert on anything; I'm someone who reads widely and has access to Google and a good memory for weird anecdotes. I try to get the facts right, but I occasionally print the legend. When I wrote that Satchel Paige integrated the American League a helpful reader wrote in to remind me of Hall of Famer Larry Doby, who I certainly shouldn't be expected to remember, because it's not like he's a Hall of Famer who led the A.L. in home runs twice or anything. If you ever run across something that seems gratuitously incorrect, please send me a note, and I'll fix it.

Milestones

Yesterday, I posted my 300th Snarkout entry. I don't think it was particularly good, but it was a chance to sneak in "300" at the end. I'd estimate that I've written somewhere north of 120,000 words since I started doing this in April 2001; that's a good-sized book. I also posted my 200th entry to the sidelog. I've only been doing that for a few months, but it's awfully addictive; I see why Graham and Anil are so hipped on the form. My two hundredth link was to the Wayback Machine archives of the weekly "Work" column of the late Word.com; Word was an okay web magazine before it sold out to fish oil producer turned dot-com meteor Zapata (aka Zap.com), but "Work" was absolutely brilliant: a series of interviews with people about their jobs, from the mundane (garbage collectors, waitresses, and truck driver) to the titillating (dominatrices, pornography writers, and strippers). They interviewed Lawrence Block, Wendy Day, and the Mayor of Los Angeles. They interviewed Lauren Wacht, a shockingly articulate model; they interviewed Bob Braine, who showed what salesmen sound like when they're not being asked to serve as great metaphors for America. (Answer: Like you and me, mostly, only a bit more disillusioned about cameras.) I looked forward to its arrival every week. Then Word went to a hideous pay model, and then Zap.com (and Word) went away. And the Wayback Machine only got a few of the entries. (If anyone has the complete set, please email me.)

What a grand, fragile medium this is. I hope I've done my part.