jeff's WebLog : music

oppressive fork clarinet

jeffdav — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 19:32:00 GMT

Raymond's eagerly awaited spam-graph post went live today. Since he works downstairs I got a sneak peak at it earlier this week. Since then I have been thinking about spam a bit. Spam used to really annoy me. I have an old university account that does nothing but accumulate spam now, but I login and delete the 40 or so new spams everyday. They fall into several catagories:

Unreadable - I use mutt to read my university mail and it does not support any strange character sets. This is the catagory the majority of e-mails fall into.

Creatively Formatted - These are the ones that do stupid tricks to get through filters but in doing so give themselves away as spam. For example; V/i/a/g/r/* !?!!, [M | 0 | r | t | g | a | g | 3 |] a.p.p.r.0.v.ed!!, etc.

Creatively Subjected - These are the insidious ones that put things in the title like "Our meeting on tuesday..." and come from cs-admin@<myuniversity>.com. I can usually spot them.

Randomly Subjected - These are my absolute favorites. These are the mails that have a few random words in the title. These things make great rock band names. This is the reason for this post. Everything up until here was merely context. I got one today that was perfect: "oppressive fork clarinet."

Anyone want to play drums in OFC ??

recently consumed culture

jeffdav — Tue, 10 Aug 2004 00:16:00 GMT

Wicked was a very clever take on The Wizard of Oz and a great vehicle for exploring the nature of evil. The new McSweeney's is something no comic lover should be without. Wonderland seemed to me to be a sentimental waste of time, but some people go in for that sort of thing. I prefer views of highschool more in line with Napolean Dynomite, except I think I am too old to care about the highschool-sucks-and-everyone-just-wants-to-be-loved genre anymore. The Breakfast Club and Heathers filled that void in me. Other recent movies in one sentence: Dodgeball was funny, King Arthur was long, Anchorman was what you would expect, The Bourne Supremacy was sold out, The Castle in the Sky reminded me of Spirited Away (same guy, aparently). I let Scott borrow my copy of the new The Cure box set, so I have not listened to all of it yet. There is a good cover of Purple Haze as well as the more widely known terribly bad cover. I had a really drunken night at the See Sound Lounge. I do not know why I enjoy that place, but I do. Slate continues to amuse me.

In other news, kayaking/camping in Sechelt, B.C. was amazing. We saw seals and only joked about trying to club them. Camping at Shi Shi is always amazing and I recommend everyone camp there (or somewhere equivalent on the pacific ocean) at least once before they die. Also I was accepted to the Univeristy of Washington's Computer Science Professional Master's Program. But do not worry--I will only be going part time so I can continue to make browsing the Web with IE better.

what have i been up to?

jeffdav — Mon, 21 Jun 2004 22:36:00 GMT

In May I was in STL, visiting my family and friends.
This past week in of June, I was in NYC visiting friends, visiting museums, eating good food, drinking lots of Hoegaarden and Guinness.
Between STL and NYC I went to the Van Gogh exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum.
Yesterday I got my Kayak out into Lake Sammamish.
I really like the new Modest Mouse CD.
I am reading The Collapse of the Third Republic, because I find that sort of thing interesting and the French Guy I eat lunch with sometimes said he failed history and had no idea what went on.

So my question is, why I can I not get prints of every piece of art work I come across? Why do museum shops only have prints of the most famous paintings? Is there some wierd copyright thing going on? Is it not cost effective?

windows media player 10 tech beta

jeffdav — Wed, 09 Jun 2004 21:17:00 GMT

I installed the WMP10 Tech Beta on my workstation here at work. At first I was mildy annoyed by some UI bugs, but it is a beta and I have faith they will hammer those out. What really made my day though was a new play list feature. I had added a carefully chosen subset of my music collection and was reading some site-o-links. I clicked a link and it turned out to be a video. The video promptly played in WMP, destroying my play list as has happened so many times in the past. But, lo! There was a little line of text saying I could click 'previous' to return to the play list that had just been destroyed. This made me indescribably happy.

new rock

jeffdav — Wed, 31 Mar 2004 22:06:00 GMT

I got the new Amadan CD in the mail on Monday. Their first CD was about halfway between Grafton Street and Dropkick Murphys. Their new CD definatly leans toward the Dropkick Murphys end of the spectrum, even with the singer from Grafton Street making an appearance. Overall I would say it is a great CD that is worth buying, but I am not sure if I like it better then their first disc.

I also pre-ordered the new TMBG disc coming out soon.

In other news my friend Moswald was in town visiting the other UMR CS folks out here all weekend. The weather was nice; we visited Kerry Park and The Troll and wandered around downtown and capitol hill. We also played lots of video games. Mostly Halo and Tetris Worlds.

“I call him Tankey.” -- Mos

dear washington music purchaser

jeffdav — Wed, 25 Feb 2004 07:22:00 GMT

I got one piece of snail mail today. It was a check for $13.86 from the “CD MAP Antitrust Litigation” entity. I am shocked. I was sure I would never get it. I wonder how long I will have to wait for the Internet to grow enough and litigation in this country to occur frequently enough for me to make my living from joing class action lawsuits from the comfort of my home.

I wonder if this is taxable income.

Raymond and the work I participated in for the IE P3P stuff has me obsessed with privacy policies. I wish I remebered what the CD settlement policy was. I bet the information (Name, Address) I gave them is worth more then $13.86. Especially when I cash the check; it confirms I exist at that address. Theoretically.

Speaking of CDs I got that Johnny Cash box set from American. There are some really great songs on there, but man, the opus to price ratio is not real good. For future reference, these are the good ones: [2](10) Brown-Eyed Handsome Man (with Carl Perkins), [2](16) Bird On A Wire (Live with orchestra), [3](2) The L & N Don't Stop Here Anymore, [3](3) Redemption Song (with Joe Strummer). The one with Joe Strummer is the best. Maybe more when I listen more.

(I promise to post more IE-related stuff when I can.
I have been too busy with getting it done.)

tuesday update

jeffdav — Tue, 17 Feb 2004 21:10:00 GMT

Well, the Cracker/Camper show last night was really good. I always find it interesting to see who else from works shows up at rock shows. Interestingly enough, there was a large overlap in attendence between this show and G3. Anyway, we staked out good spots near the stage. This is important because I like to be able to see the player's fingers on their instruments. I knew about fifty per cent of the songs played. I think I can play every bass line from watching their bass player. While watching Camper Van the thought occured to me that they were a bunch of slightly above average musicians who came together to form one heck of a band.

Question: What is the (current) difference between Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven?
Answer: A guitar player.

It is amazing the difference a guitar player makes. The Cracker songs were much more intense. It was a good set, but the encore was... well... annoying. They played three songs in some wierd medly jam-band style. The violin player had a gameboy (original) to keep him occupied, but we had to just stand there. Bleh.

Cracker played a song off their new disc called Duty Free. This is strikingly similar to a song by Ike Reilly of the same title. I assume they both derived from the same source. Does anybody know what that source would be?

In other news, the team is working very hard to drive to zero bugs. To help unwind on fridays I have set up a dedicated Halo PC server. Well, it helps with my stress levels.