l-dopa

Good news, everyone: ldopa.net is now listed on the iTunes Podcast directory. So, if you subscribe to the ldopa.net podcast, you’ll get all the media (audio, video, whatever!) we create here at ldopa.net auto-magically delivered to your computer via iTunes. Nifty!

(If, for whatever reason, you’re not down with the Glorious People’s Republic of iTunes and/or you’d like to use another podcast client, the link to use with other clients is here.)

~jeff

In lieu of flowers…

Friend of ldopa.net Jon Land got all married up in NYC to the wonderful Jill Shuler this weekend, and what’s even better is that they thought to invite us ldopans to the whole thing. Thanks so much, Jon, and congratulations; everyone had such a great time. I haven’t picked out your wedding gift yet, but I’ll just give you a hint: blank DVD-Rs… I’ve said too much already.

Here’s the happy couple dancin’.

~jeff

My wife got her first motorcycle last week. Today was the first outing on public roads. It went great.

Excellent marketing; in fact, I bet the marketing department at Blue Mountain is still trying to figure out the inexplicable sales spike in this particularly ill-translated product.

~jeff

Dreamhost.com has great deals and very good support in general. Today is their 8th anniversary, so they are running deals on their packages. 80% off everything, assuming you sign up for a year.

Use promotional code 888.

I’ve been working on this test animation, on and off, for about a week. The music was recorded and the source video was shot all in one day, but it’s taken about a week to animate. I’m very proud of how it came out; the DVD-quality version is really pretty, but since you’re not at my apartment, this smaller QuickTime version will have to do:

Norwottuck Rail Trail (use QuickTime 7 or VLC to view)

~jeff

You have to love Apple’s innate sense of showmanship; they “innocently” release this 36k teaser jpeg for an October 12th press event, and the entire internet tips over and catches fire with *wild speculation*.

I hope it’s not a video iPod, or I might have to sell another kidney.

~jeff

I was asked recently by my girlfriend to make an hour-long playlist of ambient techno and electronica that was suitable for running and/or exercising to. My tastes lean towards the most abstract entries in the genre, and thus I failed rather big; some of these tracks have no easily discernible downbeat at all; the Orb track, for example, has seven straight minutes of whooshing ambient noise. I tried riding to it yesterday and sure enough, it wasn’t a great motivational tool. Still, it was an interesting failure at least, so I thought I’d publish and annotate the playlist:

*Water From A Vine Leaf: William Orbit, Strange Cargo III*

An semi-oldie but a goodie; I like William Orbit, even though he kinda looks like an art-school version of me. This track is your standard Techno™ brand techno; if I had stayed with the simple 4/4 loop style on display here, I probably would have done a lot better.

*Blue Room: The Orb, U.F. Orb*

I love the Orb. No one inhabits Floydian space like they do, and *U.F.Orb* was easily their strongest album. This track has one of the best basslines ever recorded, thank you Jah Wobble. But yeah, like I mentioned before, there’s over seven minutes of weird wooshing noises up front on this track; not an inspiring exercise song.

*Run: U. Srinivas And Michael Brook, Dream*

Two guitar players, one ambient soundtrack and one Indian mandolin. There’s some nice drones on display here, but the backbeat is too hard to find if you’re not a tabla player.

*Everything Is Alright: Four Tet, Pause*

I almost put “Joy” in from the newer Fourtet album, but that’s a little much.

*Jacknuggetted: Manitoba, Up In Flames*

Hazy electronica; I love that organ stab that comes in midway through.

*Makeout Stakeout: David Last, The Push Pull*

This is the most up-tempo cut on the excellent “Push Pull” album, and even this isn’t that fast. What was I thinking?

*One More Time: Daft Punk, Discovery*

I have a soft spot in my head for this album that goes back to when Josh first played me some Daft Punk; we were also building a fire in a fireplace and I think we forgot to open the flue. As the wood smoke inhibited our higher brain functions, I “warmed up” to this album; I’m still not sure if they’re making fun of Lionel Ritchie. Make sure you don’t get the remix album!

*Bees: Caribou, The Milk Of Human Kindness*

This song inhabits the strange space between Creedence Clearwater Revival and electronica. Most people didn’t even suspect there was a space there.

*Music Is Math: Boards Of Canada, Geogaddi*

Tucker believes that listening to this album all the way through gives the listener strange and wonderful magical powers. Seriously, he does. Maybe he’s right.

*High: Skalpel, Skalpel*

Swedish? I think it is. Good midtempo track.

*Iambic 5 Poetry: Squarepusher, Budakhan Mindphone*

Nice “wind-down” song. I love the way Tom Jenkinson plays bass; if it were up to me, there would be a new Squarepusher album every week.

So as you can see: I failed miserably, as most of these tracks are too abstract to work as tempo motivators. These are all great songs on great albums, though. If you have any suggestions for actually functional exercise tracks or playlists, send them along.

~jeff

This is an outrageously good television ad for the Sony PSP.

~jeff

Andy Rooney thinks the war in Iraq is too expensive, and he’s right. I love it when someone the elderly might actually listen to speaks out against the Bush administration. I also love it when old guys reference Dwight Eisenhower and the like — who will I get to reference when I get old and curmudgeonly, Jimmy Carter? That will *not* make me sound very cool.

~jeff

Well, I normally try to avoid getting myself caught up in crazes, but I do seem to have gotten a bit caught up in the Sudoku craze. Has anybody else been wasting their time on these puzzles?

eyeOS is a web-based “operating system” that has a file repository, an address book, a web browser, a calculator, and some other gee-gaws. They all live within a really strange windowed environment inside your web browser. It’s fairly useless, with a questionable bunch of icons representing the various apps, but it still manages to be kind of cool.

To set it up on Mac OS X:

• Decompress the download and install the resultant eyeOS folder in the “Sites” folder in your home directory.
• Following the instructions in the DOCS/QUICK INSTALL MANUAL text file, chmod 777 a couple of the directories so the environment can save data.
• You’ll have to enable PHP by uncommenting the two lines that contain “php” in your /etc/httpd/httpd.conf file, and then restarting Apache/”Personal Web Sharing”.
• After that’s all set and PHP is enabled, just point your web browser to “http://localhost/~username/eyeOS/index.php” (replacing ‘username’ with your short user name).
• Install an mp3 player? Sure, why not.

Or, to test it out in a far easier fashion, just visit one of the “test installs” that are already set up.

Parenthetically, sometimes people posit a “GoogleOS”, something much like the eyeOS: a modeled or simulated desktop metaphor “OS” with apps literally in a browser. I think this demonstrates how (functionally speaking) that would be a pain in the ass — the desktop metaphor, while comforting, is rendered almost completely moot when inside a browser. What would be more efficient is a set of integrated web-based apps, which each app being a separate web page… which is what I suspect Google is working on right now.

~jeff

Writeboard has been released by the folks at 37 Signals, and sure enough, it’s nifty. It’s a collaborative online writing space with versioning, Backpack and RSS integration — and a very minimal user interface and feature set, but I think that’s probably just as well for what is essentially a writing tool.

~jeff

Here’s a great compilation — 48 tracks worth — of the sources to DJ Shadow’s classic “Entroducing…“, broken down by cut. It’s fascinating to see where the loops came from, but more than that, there’s some great old tracks here.

~jeff

p.s. this is probably illegal