fine whine

So ever since I read about them on Neatorama, I wanted to make some random CD covers. From what I read, the recipe was simple:

1. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random The first article title on the page is the name of the band.
2. www.quotationspage.com/random.php3 The last four words of the very last quote is the album title.
3. www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/ The third picture, license permitting, is the album cover.
4. The finished product belongs in the CD cover meme pool.

I turned out a few in as many hours. I tried to stick to the rules, but couldn’t bring myself to use the photos that were marked “© All rights reserved” when I knew there were ones licensed (via creativecommons) for derivative works, as this would likely be considered. Though I ended up reloading a few times more than I liked, I did come across enough to make these (and a few more that I’ll eventually upload).

Making fake album covers is nothing new to me. Back when I was first learning Photoshop I’d made many a cover using stock photography for a fictional band called “Spontaneous Grape”, going even as far as creating a fictional record label* to release them. But coming up with the titles was often the trouble, and moreover selecting photos that I thought would be interesting even more so. Without those aspects to worry about, I can crank these things out much faster.

Eventually I’ll get them up on flickr, annotated and everything else. But I’ve got to take a break from making them first.

* The name of the label was Ludd Records, and it was rather a bit of a dumb in-joke. One of my many online identities was that of “Luddite Industries”, which I thought to be a particularly sophisticated joke, in that the Luddites would not likely be operating a web site. Here’s the logo, which I drew in AutoCad, knowing it better than Photoshop at the time.

Someday I’m going to make a black t-shirt with this on it in white.

So with the holidays lately I’ve had a few weekdays away from my desk*. As is often the case when this happens, I had some errands to run, and interesting stores in which to stop nearby. At one point I found myself wandering through a MicroCenter (though I bought nothing), and near the video game section I saw something I wish I could’ve caught on video (and posted to youtube). But I didn’t have a good camera handy, and my phone’s movie mode would’ve been rather a bit lacking. So it’s time to dust off your imagination (take that, you click-happy tweens).

In front of me, there was a kid playing Guitar Hero. For those not in the know, Guitar Hero is a console video game that comes with a plastic guitar-like controller, and players push fret-like buttons while doing a motion similar to strumming, in time with popular rock and metal songs (or cover versions thereof). The kid appeared to have average skills, hitting the correct buttons at the right time. This was not the remarkable part, of course. Much more interesting than the player, was the kid standing next to him, fingers in the air, miming the same notes.

He was playing air Guitar Hero. There was, of course, a second guitar controller on the demo kiosk, but I think he was probably having more fun playing his fantasy version of the song than actually hitting the buttons. Or he was trying to be supportive of his buddy. Or perhaps he was doing a very convoluted form of mockery.

Anyway, I thought it was pretty funny. Guitar Hero, from my feeble attempts to play it, is already once removed from the actual experience of playing the guitar. This kid found a way to do it one better, I guess. And about 50 to 80 bucks cheaper, too.

* I almost wrote “…weekdays I wasn’t working” there, but with something of a slowdown at work I don’t know if I can count all the hours I was there as hours I really worked. I was there, and available for work, there just wasn’t any to do at the moment. Hence the deathmatch tournaments of Nexuiz, and before that, Marathon Infinity (through the magic of AlephOne).

Despite having joined a fair number of the social networking sites*, I don’t really do much on them other than upload a photo or two, identify some “favorite” music and movies, and connect with one or two people (often the same one or two on every site) and then I let my profile languish, logging in very occasionally to check the notifications that don’t show up in my email.

The flavor of the month this month is Facebook (see my profile) and I must admit, it’s a pretty clean, usable site that blows Myspace (see my profile) out of the water for ease of use, visual appearance, and third-party expandibility.

It’s no wonder there has already been a mass migration from the latter to the former.

One of the applications Facebook supports comes from movie rating site Flixster which I had already joined some time ago, played with, and hadn’t returned-the interface is slow, rating movies en masse is not simple, and not enough people used it at the time. I connected to a new Flixster account (see it here) and started rating movies again**.

Tired of that, I clicked over to the “never ending quiz” which had drawn Rebecca in, several months ago. It’s worse than I remember. More than half of the questions concern Nicole Kidman and Moulin Rouge or Alan Rickman and the Harry Potter films, none of which I’ve yet seen. Other questions are poorly written, with no capitalization, poor grammar, and misspellings galore.

But what bothered me the most was the True/False questions. Without a single exception every one was always “true”.

The questions, I should point out, are all user-submitted, and there are quite possibly millions of them. I’m basing that “every one” statement there on the thirty or so that I encountered so far.

So I started writing my own True/False questions, and (unsurprisingly), making them False. It’s a much bigger challenge, fabricating believable movie trivia, than it is to merely copy an item from the Internet Movie Database’s extensive trivia archive.

So far I’ve written eight of these questions (and seven other multiple choice questions) and I’m proud to say that the quiz-takers (who number more than a thousand as of today) have only been correct at most a third of the time. You can see the complete list of questions I’ve written here. I admit I bookmarked the link and have checked it a few times just to see how I’m doing, and the numbers amuse me.

One example? As of right now, only nineteen of 1,133 people guessed that I’d made this up: “While filming Man on the Moon, Jim Carrey performed weekly comedy shows in Los Angeles, in character, as Andy Kaufman.”

As a kid I greatly enjoyed the game Balderdash, though I didn’t get many chances to play it.

Anyway, to the quiz. As my questions began appearing for the other people (they’re supposedly random) and I kept answering others, I began to see other new questions that were also false, though none (I say this humbly) as convincing as mine.

Now I can play the quiz and know that some of the True/False questions may actually require some thought after all. Frankly, though, I think I’m enjoying writing them more than answering the other ones.

* I’d link the complete list, but based on what I saw from upscoop and pipl, I can’t even remember all of the ones I’ve joined. A halfway-comprehensive list can be found on my about page.

** I was a bit inconsistent - apparently I’m only 84% compatible with myself.

Welcome, Carnival of Breastfeeding readers. My wife put me up to this, but as long as she does the majority of waking up late at night, and changes more diapers overall, I’m generally willing to go along with what she tells me to do.

So our daughter is breastfed, basically exclusively, other than the applesauce*. That said, she’s eaten in a variety of places, public and otherwise, and every time I’ve been ready for somebody to be outraged. And waiting.

Except that nobody is bothered by it, to my befuddlement. I aggregate a few “new dad” blogs, and they rarely fail to point out a new media blitz when some celebrity in NYC or L.A. pulls up or down her shirt and gives her kid some milk. The blog and/or youtube comments following those articles are very, very informative as to the great gulf between the folks who find ‘feeding fantastic, and the ones who are disgusted by the very notion of its mention, let alone seeing any portion of an exposed breast. Likewise the stories of women thrown off airplanes for offending more prudish passengers or flight attendants.

But out in the real world, I can’t seem to find anybody willing to vocally object, or to even sneer, or look away in disgust. Either I’m ignoring such people, or they just aren’t out there, around here. A couple weekends ago shoppers passing through the hoity-toity upscale mall portion of Columbus’s Easton shopping mecca might have glanced, in the front window of Claire’s (an earring and cheap jewelry boutique, for those of the non-female persuasion), a distraught baby with two new holes in her head, getting some comfort food from her mom.

For the record, I’m still not convinced getting Natalya’s ears pierced before she’s old enough to pay for it was a good idea. I have no such reservations about her being breastfed, and again, am almost sad nobody else seems to object either.

Not that I’d throw down my gloves and get into a good scrap with the offended party, anyway, but I’d point out that my wife would give them a good talking-to.

As for this Carnival, here are some more links:

• Jessica’s post
• breastfeeding.blog.motherwear.com
• breastfeeding123.com
• mamaknowsbreast.com
• thelactivist.blogspot.com
• breastfeedingmums.typepad.com
• crunchydomesticgoddess.com
• nursingyourkids.com

* I don’t really count shoving spoonfuls of peaches and sweet potatoes into her mouth “feeding” as I think of it as, more or less, an early, pediatrician-approved form of torture. The mashed-up bananas, well, once she’s started eating more than she ends up wearing, then I’ll figure out what I think of those.

… or rather, lack of content.

First, let me be the last to wish everybody a Happy New Year 2007*. I never intended to let the entirety of January pass without writing anything at all, but the fact that I’m actually writing this on February second would show that exactly that has happened.

I didn’t have any drafts started for the month, at least not in my software.

This is not to say that nothing interesting has happened; only that writing about it isn’t atop my to-do list anymore. Coincidentally, neither is beating up the denizens of Azeroth - I’m almost completely weaned from the World of Warcraft, too.

But enough about things virtual and insignificant.

It’s been a big month for our daughter, too. Just last week Natalya started attending daily day care, and Jessica’s gone back to work. Our day-to-day routines continue to evolve - I now wake up more than twenty minutes before I leave as it is my responsibility to feed (and sometimes re-clothe) Natalya. I think I’m going to assemble a DVD or two of TV episodes to watch in the morning as I feed her, since my initial experiments into holding a baby, a bottle, and a Playstation 2 controller have been less than successful.

I haven’t added many new photos of her to my gallery recently, and in fact haven’t taken as many either. But I do have a few to upload, and have no intentions of stopping taking pictures anytime soon.

So then you ask, other than not taking pictures of my daughter, what have I been doing these last several weeks?

At work I’ve been spending a considerable chunk of my time doing workshops that are not exactly in the scope of my day-to-day responsibilities. My day-to-day responsibilities have not exactly shrunken to accomodate these added demands, however, and as such have had some extra workload issues.

As such, I’ve been borrowing a laptop at night. A laptop which, I have discovered, gets better wireless reception than any of the ones I’ve tried before in my house. In fact I am able to piggyback onto the wireless network of one of my neighbors across the street, as long as I stick to the front rooms of our house, particularly near the windows. I’ve entertained the notion of trying to figure out exactly which house houses the router to which I connect, but haven’t tried very hard so far. I have, however, finally seen the first season of Arrested development and the first two of NBC’s The Office, and I must say, they’re quite funny.

Of course both shows would be perfect feeding-time entertainment, but this idea has only occurred to me after I’ve already watched them, before I was consistently feeding Natalya every morning. I suppose I could always re-watch them, of course.

As ever, though, watching TV shows is the merest fraction of the time my TV is on; I’m watching movies at pretty much my usual pace. Unusual, however, are the movies themselves: I’ve begun watching Bollywood movies. Though I haven’t made it through ten of them, I (arbitrarily) decided to watch 50 Hindi movies by 2008, though I may need to revise that goal to ‘movies from India’ to better cover the non-Bollywood films (i.e. ones not in Hindi). Even from the few I’ve seen I have much about them to write, and hope to get around to doing that soon, since I’ve been bouncing the ideas around in my head for quite some time.

At the risk of promising almost nothing and still failing, I’m not going to make any promises or resolutions about posting more.

And any rumors that this post is timed to match yet another threadless sale are, well, nonexistent until now, and entirely untrue. They are, in fact, doing another sale, however this time around to save $5 per shirt you need to buy two of the same, for you and ostensibly for your sweetheart. This is also your chance to stock up on duplicates, I suppose.

Whenever Jessica and I inadvertantly wear the same color shirt I’m tempted to change clothes - I’m not sure I’d be interested in wearing the same (trendy, hipster approved) shirt as her. So it goes.

* Or may I be one of the first to wish a Happy New Year of the Boar? Chinese New Year is rapidly approaching - it won’t be 4704 much longer!

I can’t resist it any longer. Threadless has been running a $10 sale for almost the entire last month, and it’s over Thursday.

I’m considering buying only one this time around: The downside of genetic engineering.

Other notable designs:

• The Communist Party
• Funkalicious
• No Repeats!
• Mechanical Mayhem
• Calling Home
• Memories, Sweet Memories
• The War Against Work
• THIS Is How The World Ends

But enough about shirts*.

December is not the brightest month, generally. If I put any stock in all of the newly discovered ‘disorders’ (or owned stock in the companies that make drugs to treat them) I self-diagnose myself with a mild case of Seasonal Affective Disorder, whereby as the seasons get colder I’m less of my warm self.

Except that that’s pretty much what happens to most people, to some degree. The days are shorter and darkness falls earlier and earlier; people don’t leave their warm abodes as often, fostering cabin fever, and then there’s always the incessant Christmas music that is inescapable from Halloween on.

Every year I’ve been posting to this site I’ve posted less and less during the month of December. This year I’ve got even more of an excuse: sleep deprivation.

Which brings me to the baby. She’s been doing pretty well - we’ve got her on something of a normal schedule at night, at least, whereby she sleeps from about 11 until 5 in the morning. Unfortunately in order to get her to do this we need to keep her from getting too much sleep during the daytime - and by ‘we’ I mean Jessica during the day, and me after dark. Some nights she’s okay with the plan, but other times she cries and cries, until I can find the one magic fix, which is never the same night to night. Sometimes she just wants to lay on the floor or the table, other nights she wants to be rocked in the rocker, some nights I walk with her on the treadmill for half an hour, and sometimes she calms down in the swing. It’s never the same thing one night to the next, but I guess that’s just how babies are.

I have set up a photo gallery of sorts, and you can look at it by clicking on the ‘/photos’ link above. At some later date I’ll post more information about where the pictures are and how you can get better copies of them, for printing and such, but at the rate I’ve been writing lately that won’t happen until February.

Until then, well, happy holidays and stuff.

* The best way to shop is the stock chart. The usual disclaimers apply: All of the Threadless links, except the one in this sentence, contain affiliate information for me through which I get store credit if you buy a shirt. Or lots of shirts. They make great gifts, you know!

It’s that time again - Threadless is throwing another ten dollar tee-shirt sale. As usual that link and this one are for my own personal gain, but hey, you’re going to buy the shirts anyway, right?

For me, right? Men’s large.

August is New Music Month, at least for me. Over the last few weeks I’ve amassed what I hope will prove to be a fairly decent collection of new music. Now I just need to listen to it.

First of all, I joined eMusic.com with a 100-song free trial (email me and I’ll give you the details - the regular one is only 25 songs). I was very methodical in my picks, making sure to have as close to that 100-song limit chosen before downloading a single track. eMusic gets a bad rap for not having many mainstream artists, but I was more than able to find albums I wanted and some that sounded intriguing*.

Before I mention the new artists I found, I was exceptionally pleased to see new releases from two groups I really like:

• Comments of the inner chorus by Tunng. I was turned onto Tunng by an offhanded Warren Ellis blog mention, and have been hooked ever since, going as far as to track down their album as an English import. I didn’t pay very much for it on eBay, but now I see that eMusic has it, as well as this new album I’d not known they’d released. Their music isn’t for everybody, but I enjoy it thoroughly.
• Last train to Mashville by A3. Well before gaining widespread popularity (and one-hit-wonderness) for the theme song to The Sopranos, A3 found their way into my collection from a discount bin. On their debut album they called their music “country acid house” and even that isn’t broad enough a definition. Over the years they’ve put out a number of decent albums (including second-most-recent Power in the blood, available on the site though it is somewhat disappointing) but this one is a stripped-down, acoustic version of many of their hits, including a cover of John Prine’s “Speed of the sound of loneliness” that sounds like a fair-to-middling country song they way they do it, but the fun’s in knowing how they’d done it before. At least, for me.
• Buildings and grounds by Papas fritas. Back in the days when I lived within broadcast distance of WLUW I listened to a lot of what most people would call “college radio” or perhaps “indie” while I drove to work and back. I’d hear something I’d like and write it down, hoping to look it up and hunt it down later. Many songs and groups I was able to find (for example, Belle and Sebastian) but many eluded me, including the song The way you walk by Papas fritas, which they would play at least once a week, seemingly to taunt me. I never saw the album on the shelves at the libraries, or used or new music stores, and I wasn’t willing to shell out the cash to buy the rest of the disc, tracks-unheard. But now I have it, and access to their entire discography, thanks to eMusic. Now I only need to figure out if I still like their songs, I suppose.
• Just like the fambly cat by Grandaddy. Grandaddy’s another indie radio darling, though one that the libraries seem to buy. Here again is a new release I hadn’t know about, and I doubt the library will pick it up anytime soon, my requests notwithstanding.

I didn’t just pick up music from groups I recognized, but I’ll write about the other tracks I downloaded once I’ve given them a few more spins.

* Pun intended.

In college I took a geography class taught by the then-editor of Goode’s World Atlas, John Hudson. Though a good teacher, he was also pragmatic and understood that, to reach more than just the interested third of his students (and in particular, the ones sitting up in the balcony tossing back a few cold ones), he’d need to spike his slideshows with interesting and funny slides. This he did, showing us amusing sights and signs from all over the continent, all the while attempting to teach us all about the geography of North America.

While I remember less than I should of the material (to this day I can’t recall where durum is grown, and if it is in fact used in the making noodles or something else) I do remember a few of the photos. I’m pretty sure he didn’t have this one, for when we discussed the midwest, but it would’ve been among his collection. If you click on the photo above* you’ll see why I took the shot.

Or you can look here:

It truly boggles the mind, this “Nameless Creek”. It’s something of a logical fallacy, along the lines of “This statement is false” or some such.

* The photos above are hosted by Zooomr, and I have posted them because they are giving free “pro” accounts, with additional privileges I do not know, to bloggers and people like me. Thanks Andy for the heads up. I’m a pathological joiner of anything free, so it was a given I’d try this site out. Can it compete with flickr? Only time will tell.

Threadless* is doing their irregularly scheduled ten dollar t-shirt sale again. Shipping starts at $5.50 and the shirts rock. The sale ends this Wednesday, but all the cool stuff will sell out well before then. Such as this one.

Since the site’s getting somewhat hammered, I recommend using the stock chart for the sizes you wear.

* Note that the link contains a secret tracking code for me, so that if you order, I get some small pittance of credit. I’ve been saving up, so I bought myself this shirt for less than the price of shipping. Thanks to all who have used my link, and thanks to anyone else who does so today or tomorrow.