~jeff
What arouses Kal-El’s mating urge? Did kryptonian women carry some subtle mating cue at appropriate times of the year? Whatever it is, Lois Lane probably didn’t have it. We may speculate that she smells wrong, less like a kryptonian woman than like a terrestrial monkey. A mating between Superman and Lois Lane would feel like sodomy-and would be, of course, by church and common law.
…geez, way to overthink it, Larry.
~jeff
OK, maybe not everybody’s like me, maybe they don’t slave over the fuckin’ thing for a year before getting anything done,” he says, referring to his meticulous work habits in the recording studio. “OK, fine, but still, man, can we at least figure out what we’re tryin’ to say before we start jacking off all over the tape?”
…indeed. I saw him play with Mr. Bungle on the “Disco Volante” tour and it was amazing stuff — the album still stands up, and “Desert Search for Techno Allah” still gets me every time. His exceptional work with Secret Chiefs 3 is worth checking out as well.
~jeff
Ok, so partially out of curiosity, and partially out of geeky challenge, I set about trying to download back episodes of This American Life. It was simple at first. Downloading and peering inside the .m3u playlist from their site showed the mp3s actual url as being http://audio.wbez.org/archives/tal/304.mp3 or somesuch. You could just download them from your browser. But then after all of this “deep linking” hullabaloo, they got fancy. They switched to a shoutcast server, which basically does the same thing as the old system, but is a little more picky about who downloads content. It looks for a user-agent string (a.k.a. browser identification) from a known mp3 player, and will reject you if you try to download the source mp3 file with a standard browser. So now we have to change things up a bit.
Launch Firefox, enter about:config in the address bar and press enter.
Right-click anywhere on the page it opens, and select New String
Add “general.useragent.override” as the string name, and “iTunes/4.7 (Macintosh; N; PPC)” as the value.
Now the Shoutcast server will let you through, thinking Firefox is iTunes. But if you try to download an mp3 in Firefox, it will just try to open it in the browser window, which besides sucking, sucks. Soo, you have to whip up a little html page that looks something like this:
<html> <body> <a href="http://url.of/episode/300.mp3">300</a><br> <a href="http://url.of/episode/301.mp3">301</a><br> <a href="http://url.of/episode/302.mp3">302</a><br> <a href="http://url.of/episode/303.mp3">303</a><br> <a href="http://url.of/episode/304.mp3">304</a><br> </body> </html>
Save it as a .html file, open it in Firefox, and start option-clicking away. Once the files are downloaded to your desktop, feel free to kick back with some organic coffee harvested by free-range migrant workers and get your hipster nerd-on at your leisure.
And, yes, I seem to have changed my mind.
~jeff
If you are not a huge nerd, quick! look away:
$ sudo mkdir /var/mysql
$ sudo ln -s /tmp/mysql.sock /var/mysql/
…this is just mostly so I remember. For some nebulous security reason, Apple changed the location of the MySQL socket file in 10.4.4 and higher, and everytime I install MySQL on a new mac server, I forget that. These two commands make a symbolic link from the new location to the old location, so everything MySQL-ish on your Mac can continue to work.
~jeff
Nah, just kidding. It’s actually here. And, it looks pretty darn good, even if for whatever reason it completely ignores the real story behind how Spidey got his black suit*.
~jeff
*The last part of that sentence should of course be read in your interior “Comic Book Guy” voice, which honestly is the way I hope you read the entire site. Worst. Footnote. Ever!
~jeff
I treat my desktop like a shelf. Life for files on my desktop is nasty, brutish and short — as far as I’m concerned, the desktop is an exceptionally temporary place to plunk what I’m currently working on, work on it, and after that, I group all the assets together in one semi-intelligently named folder and file it in the “Documents” folder of my home directory. This technique works pretty well — other people work in other ways, as evidenced by their perpetually crunked up desktops, but certainly metadata search like Spotlight* or trigger launchers like Quicksilver in Mac OS X or Deskbar in Gnome or Launchy in Windows make the “file janitor” paradigm of projects like this largely obsolete. Cool mouse gestures though.
~jeff
* check this out — it makes Spotlight genuinely useable. I curse the lame-ass, totally broken “live update” of the Mac OS X Spotlight search window, I curse it, I curse it, I curse it.
As a long time, highly public proponent of the fluffernutter — made exclusively with Wonder Bread and Peter Pan peanut butter, of course — I’m pleased to see Rep. Kathi-Anne Reinstein taking a brave stand on this downright sticky issue**.
~jeff
* Yeah, like that’s the problem in our schools. Here’s the problem, although it’s not a popular position: a whole lot of teachers in MA (and I would suspect, nationwide) are relatively useless, lazy dullards with little to no interest in their subject, active disdain for their kids, and whose primary skill is filling out paperwork. I would suggest the only thing worse than leaving a child unschooled is having the child half-ass schooled by some of these slow gas leak huffing underachievers — at least the unschooled kid might work up some steam on his or her own to learn, but inflicting some of the low-quality, spirit-destroying teachers I’ve met throughout the years in MA on unsuspecting kids is downright sadistic. Trust me — I’m not wrong. I wish I had an answer here instead of a bitchy rant; testing would be a start, but testing wouldn’t weed out some of the worst barnacle-like public workers. Higher salaries would at least attract a more professional and presumably engaged level of employee, but even then the outcome is questionable, and the lazy lampreys already ensconced in the system would still continue to benefit. End of rant, sorry about that.
** Also sorry about this.
