Entries from May 2005 ↓

Eddie Albert, star of ‘Green Acres,’ dead at 99.  That’s 6 of 10, with about a month left on the clock.  However, since the pope left the popularity board, Eddie Albert’s been the most common pick.  So pretty much everyone got that one.

So help me here: both the new Queens of the Stone Age and System of a Down start with a slow-moving, contemplative "Intro" track that’s all menacing and unlike anything else on the record.  (I sort of want to lump Coheed and Cambria and Mars Volta on this rant as well, but I don’t know that they employ proper "introductions" on their records: just movements.)  What’s with that?  If people are buying more single tracks or downloading just the songs they like, the introduction track is almost like an incentive to buy the whole record (since it’s not worth 99 cents on its own).  Is rock copying this move from hip-hop records?  Or is rock trying to break out of "genre" by adding this as a new compositional element?

Interesting, anyway.

(Also interesting: both SoaD and QotSA just put out albums with a significantly different mix of contributers.  Serj doesn’t write or sing on his album as much as he used to, and everybody remembers Nick getting kicked from his band.  They both played SNL last month, and these two records are about the only competitors so far for rock album of 2005.)

Yeah, I know.  I’m not even really that busy.  I’m enjoying a great pre-summer post-birthday wave of not-doing-much.  But it doesn’t get me on this page all that often, and so I lose track of when I last posted, and that doesn’t motivate me to stay in posting mode.  Here’s three ways to tide yourself over while you wait breathlessly.

• You’re not reading the sidebars, are you?  There’s new links over in the del.icio.us sidebar nearly every day.  Every URL that might have future value to me goes there, with a little note as to why I thought it was interesting.  Leave aside the whole business about tagging and social networks and blah blah blah: it’s like another whole weblog (with just links), and when I don’t have more than a sentence to say about something, I throw it over there.  So read that.
• Better yet: get yourself a Bloglines account, and subscribe to the RSS feed here.  The default feed for this site (pretty much, bear with me if I’m wrong) contains both my del.icio.us posts and my main-site posts.  On the other hand, with Bloglines, you could subscribe to both and not miss anything anyway.  But that’s not the point.
• Damn it, you haven’t joined Flickr yet.  Do it.  My new rule is that if anyone besides me is included in a picture, it stays in the "friends/family" class until I get some written thing from them saying "hey, make that totally public: I don’t find it embarassing".  So that’s pretty much every photo I take / post, and you’re missing out.  Find me, make me a contact, and you’ll see what few (very, very few) other audience members are seeing.  (Also, post your own photos, because I dig that.)

So, usual audience: thanks for your attention.  Random people Googling for "slipnuts", "Coheed and Cambria", "Amerie torrent" or "gay moby", you may return to your searches now.

Not my kids, the baseball team.  This is screwed up.  The Twins can’t even wake up right.

Mulholland was hurt by the end of a
feather sticking out of his pillow when he rolled over in bed at the
team hotel. The feather scratched the white of his eye and caused
excessive watering and irritation all day. He was to have it examined
by a doctor.

Strange?  Mulholland is the third Twin to be injured in his hotel room this season, joining infielders Jason Bartlett, who missed two games after tearing a fingernail adjusting the TV in his room in Detroit last month, and Juan Castro, who couldn’t play in Bartlett’s place that day because he couldn’t move his head after waking up with a stiff neck.

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DCP_4567, originally uploaded by dnordquist.

Okay, all, listen up.   I just got off the phone with a nice man at some medical hair restoration place, and he said that I’d called asking for help with my baldness problem. 

"Uh, no."

"That doesn’t sound familiar?"

"No."

"You’re not experiencing any hair loss?"

"No."

"Must be a prank, then… sorry about that."

"No problem."

So, first off, is it one of you?   Because until someone confesses, I’m going to start punishing you all at random!

Okay, that won’t work.   You know what, if it’s you, I’m sad for you.   Because you didn’t even get to see my confused expression.

But then I thought, hmm, maybe someone at work can see something I can’t.   So I took a couple shots of the back of my head, and lo and behold, there’s something kind of pinkish about the back of the part there.   It’s more "AFTER" picture than "BEFORE", but it’s still photographic evidence of something I wasn’t really aware of.

I turn 29 Friday.   Not nervous about that at all.

I got an email last night from Noah, the KQRS web guy saying that they’d added a daily podcast to the existing KQ Morning Show streaming page.  Good news for fans of that program, which I am, or at least was recently.

The delivered MP3 appears to be about 80 minutes long, and so they’ve dropped it to the lowest decipherable bitrate.  (I chose decipherable over acceptable because the quality is certainly distracting: I couldn’t listen to it for very long.)  I think there might be some VBR business going on, since my iPod isn’t fast-forwarding or rewinding very accurately (and even pause seems to jump you somewhere else in the file). 

So maybe it’s 2 hours, and iTunes just reports it incorrectly.  Either way, it’s significantly condensed: without Tom Petty and commercials, you pretty much get news, chatter, interviews, and bits, which are the best parts of the show anyway.  Everyone probably is sick of hearing it by now, but everyone with Firefox + AdBlock, an iPod and a TiVo is going through exactly what I’m going through: a heightened awareness for ads wherever they are.  This kind of delivery for this kind of show is something of a surprise (because the ads pay for the show, right?  Or the show is there to get people to listen the rest of the day?), but I’m glad they’re giving it a shot.

And for the uninitiated: the KQ folks are rude and mean and fairly one-note in their tone and commentary.  They are, though, definitively Minnesotan, and according to most reports, they have a larger share of their market than any other morning radio program in any other market.  I grew up listening to them, and so did pretty much everyone else my age from here. 

So welcome to the podcast world, KQ!

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we love hoes, originally uploaded by stevilbot.

Sorry for the lack of updates lately. While I live my life and gather stories of standing in line, I’ll let you ruminate on this modified sign from the Mall of America, captured on a picture phone by flickr’s own stevilbot.

Umm, accoring to the past tour dates page on RFTC.com, my favoritest band in the whole wide world has played two shows in the past two years.  I bought their last album the weekend Paul Wellstone died (October 2002).  The intervening 30 months have bought us an excellent Hot Snakes record and another from the Sultans, but the website never gets updated, I never get any news about them, and I haven’t read anything about any new projects.  At this point, I would take a kids’ record.

The link I posted to del.icio.us earlier worked!  It was a perfect template to generate a comments-bearing RSS feed.  I am not having a whole lot of luck in Firefox itself (you shouldn’t be loadng feeds there anyway, except as a Live Bookmark), but Bloglines happily takes it.  Now you can keep track of me, and everyone else who’s chiming in here.

We popped into the Apple store on Saturday, and checked out the cheapest notebook computers they have.  (Cheap!)  Christie loaded the site you’re on right now, and saw the new look for the first time.  If you don’t reload / restart your browser, it might be weird until you do.  I think I started messing with it Thursday, and I think I’m done.  As great as it is to be able to hack up the stylesheets and all that in a webapp window, 1.) TypePad, as a site, is slow.  (I know, here we go again.)  And 2.) if I had the files right here in front of me, I’d version them and back them up and be a little more bold about tweaking things.  Plus I could preview things locally and not bog down the TypePad servers with my upload/preview/revise business.  (I KNOW!  AGAIN!)

Anyway, that’s just the first of the trivia notes.  The second is that Christie also pointed out that dnord.com (without the www) returned an error.  I thought I’d fixed it, but now it shows my registrar’s placeholder page.  I’ve tweaked it so it should redirect to www.dnord.com, but that might also affect www.dnord.com itself (setting up an infinite loop), so if that becomes a problem, let me know.