Quartz City

Found on the Unofficial Apple Weblog in response to photographs of Steve Jobs’ Gulfstream V being published…

i bet even jobs has to use a tape adapter to play his ipod over the stereo on that thing…

Posted at 3:14 PM ET on May 19, 2005 by tom

1. Sightseeing via GoogleMaps satellite photos. (yeah, I know I mentioned this already)

(triangle bombing target in Nevada)

2. Insane Colombian drug lords that use their profits to build a zoo decorated with concrete dinosaurs.

3. The final resting place of the 2001 space station in an old field somewhere in the UK.

4. The 75th anniversary of the Chrysler Building

5. The peregrine falcons that live in the SBC building in Pasadena

You would think that the personnel department (I hate hate hate the phrase “human resources”) of a major national corporation/conglomerate would have their act together enough to actually follow through when they say “we’ll contact you the day before the interview to give you the exact location, where to park, and directions to fill out a short online form.” If you did think that, you would be wrong though.

Ah well, I knew that the phrase “overtime work to meet deadlines will be required” in the job description was a warning.

via here and lots of other people…

Total volume of music on my computer:
7682 songs, 19.5 days play time, 35.22 GB

The last CD bought:
Sleater-Kinney - The Woods

Song playing right now:
Golden Dawn - “My Time”

Five songs listened to a lot:
Delays - “Nearer Than Heaven”
Primal Scream - “Accelerator”
Curve - “Clipped”
Spacemen 3 - “Hypnotized”
Simple Minds - “New Gold Dream”

Open up your mp3 player and list the first song in each letter of the alphabet. Hey, if everyone else is doing it…

“A-11″ - Johnny Paycheck
“B Is For Brutus” - The Hives
“C. Bones” - Masha Qrella
“D-Bar-2 Horse Wrangler” - Slim Critchlow
“E De Manha” - Os Poligonais
“Face Place” - The Slits
“G-Song” - Supergrass
“H.S. Art” - Swell Maps
“I Ain’t Gettin’ Nowhere Fast” - Cab Calloway
“J. Rider” - Anonymous
“Kabaluere” - Antonio Carlos E Jocafi
“L.A. International Airport” - Susan Raye
“M-Train” - Pylon
“N.I.T.A.” - Young Marble Giants
“O Meri Jaan Main Ne Kaha” - Asha Bhosle
“P.X.R.5″ - Hawkwind
“Quand Mon 6,35 Me Fait Les Yeux Doux” - Serge Gainsbourg
“Radaio Tartus” - from Sublime Frequencies’ “I Remember Syria” compilation
“S.F. Sorrow Is Born” - Pretty Things
“T.V. Eye” - The Stooges
“U” - LiLiPUT
“V.I.P.” - Goldie & The Gingerbreads
“W holdzie fanatykom marszu” - 1984
“Xanadu” - Olivia Newton-John
“Y Control” - Yeah Yeah Yeahs
“Z-Bomb” - The Nuclear Regulatory Commisson

Via the Memory Hole…

Department of Motor Vehicles Director Ginny Lewis, backed by Gov. Kenny Guinn, decided to cancel the plate because its design prominently features a mushroom cloud, a familiar sight to longtime Nevadans who once watched the atmospheric atomic tests set off 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

The move immediately was criticized as a bow to politics, and Troy Wade, chairman of the Nevada Test Site Historical Foundation, called on Guinn Thursday to reverse Lewis’ decision….

Damnit, I seriously would have moved to Nevada just to get one of these awesome license plates for my new car (which I’ll get to in a bit). The California plates are just so damn ugly with a horrid script font that belongs more to a twenty-year-past-it’s-prime beach nightclub than a license plate. Years ago there was a proposal for a California “desert protection” plate with a wonderful mosaic design, but not enough people were interested enough for the DMV to move ahead on it. Time again to try a Joshua Tree or Mono Lake plate folks?

Though all the obituaries are namechecking Tony The Tiger and the Grinch, I always remember Mr. Ravenscroft for three things: 1. Being the narrator of the Laguna Beach Pageant Of The Masters. 2. The “No Dogs Allowed” song from Snoopy Come Home. 3. Having the greatest name ever.

Obits here and here. IMDB entry.

I’ve been looking up Arizona ephemera recently and one of the things I crossed paths with was Organ Stop Pizza in Mesa. Apparently, you needed gimmicks to get people to go get pizza (isn’t good food enough?) so enter the Mighty Wurlitzer which apparently has superseded the pizza as the star attraction.

Meanwhile, I was plowing through some mp3 blogs and ran across House Plant Picture Studio, who (when they aren’t searching for the grave of Karen Carpenter) took the time out to post some mp3s from the 70s-era Organ Stop Pizza album (scroll down).

I hate CDs. Actually, I’ve disliked them for awhile but there really wasn’t anything I could do about it until existing desktop tech made it feasible to replace large sections of my CD library with digital copies. Before going any further, this isn’t a rant about the inferiority of digital music, compressed waveforms, or hoary old arguments about digital versus analog fidelity. At least I’ll try not to rant…

Anyway, my hassle with CDs are with them as physical objects. CDs are great in small numbers or as temporary storage, but once you accumulate a lot of them (say hundreds) the inconveniences exponentiate. I’ve been doing a lot of traveling lately in anticipation of resettling in another city and the idea of moving a couple thousand (I stopped counting years ago at 2000) CDs gave me migraines.

Okay okay, queue up the World’s Smallest Violin to play “Boo hoo, Barrus has too much music,” but that wasn’t my first thought. The geek SysAdmin in me looked at all this music as a data administration problem and quickly concluded “gosh there’s a lot of single-point failures here.”

Look at it this way, how many of you have or know someone who’s had CDs stolen from them? Your car or house might have been broken into, or you’ve had a portable CD player stolen with a disc still in it. Really annoying. Now multiply that by some super-obscuro CD-R release from a Kiwi band that tours the US once every ten years or by some ultra-expensive Japanese-only release that took eons to special order. Really really really annoying.

Not surprisingly I picked up an iPod early on and left all my CDs at home. I use a laptop full time so anytime I picked up a CD I ripped it to disk and listened to it that way. My stereo conked out a couple years ago and I never bothered to replace it. My ears are shot from too much drone rock so I don’t notice data compression artifacts at all. Packaging? Who cares… with a few exceptions (IPR, Factory, and Rhino’s box sets), music packaging has been dead since 1987. Why haul around boxes and boxes of CDs when you can carry just about everything in a shopping bag full of DVD-Rs?

Easy? Sort of… Going digital with a huge record collection creates a data management problem. iTunes is a pretty good music data interface but it gets unwieldy when you have thousands of files. My current listening pile has 8208 tracks and I have roughly 150 DVD-Rs of archived MP3s/AACs. Hard drives are getting large enough that I could conceivably put the whole works on a single drive (though I’m obsessive enough to use two and mirror the whole works). With the release of the Mac Mini, a lot of folks were kicking around the idea of a Mini-based media server, but I want something more server-oriented, perhaps a scaled-down Xserve with only one processor and one drive bay, but with input/outputs for whatever interface (analog audio/video, FireWire, optical, etc.) I want to throw at it.

Before the custom hardware though iTunes could use a couple improvements right now to make it perfect. Multiple library support that could handle offline discs so I could search archived tracks. Additional metatags instead of just the one “genre” tag would be nice. Couple that with Spotlight support for all the ID tags (e.g. show me all “radio show”-tagged tracks from 1962 that are longer than 30 minutes) and I’ll be a happy camper.

Between GoogleGlobetrotting, Google Maps Mania, Google Sightseeing, Scavengeroogle, Interesting Google Satellite Maps, and Sprol you need a separate blog to keep up with the GoogleMaps blogs.

Anyway, my contribution to GoogleMaps sightseeing is the site of Rice Army Air Field in eastern Riverside County. The air base was used in World War II as a training area for pilots who were ground support for Patton’s army that trained nearby. California Highway 62 stretches across the picture and the Colorado River Aqueduct is just north of the highway.

GoogleMaps link.