by Chris Barrus
1. Sightseeing via GoogleMaps satellite photos. (I’ve mentioned this before)
(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”
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?
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.
I’ve been (un)steadily freelancing since the beginning of the year and since things have finally settled down into a routine it’s time to spew out some free advice…
First, if the job advertisement doesn’t list a salary range it means they expect job applicants to be desperate enough for work that they’ll undervalue themselves. If the position remains open for a long time that means other applicants have wised up. Corollary to that, if you apply for a job and don’t hear anything for over a month that means that they hired someone else who later wised up and split. You are now their second or third choice.
If the position announcement has incomplete sentences, poor grammar, or misspellings don’t even bother with them. This isn’t just a Craigslist issue – I’ve seen this on more “corporate” job sites.
If you do get work, make sure sure sure that you have some sort of employment agreement that covers the pay rate and period. The agreement doesn’t need to be complex, just something that will help prevent you from getting screwed.
Anil Dash is much more eloquent with the last piece of advice than I could be:
I talk to a lot of consultants, freelancers, and small businesses who do web work, and I used to be a freelancer myself, so sometimes I get asked for advice on how to price one’s goods and services.
I think I came up with my best suggestion today, and it involves only two simple steps:
- Slap the client in face.
- Tell the client your hourly rate.
If the person looked more shocked, horrified, offended, hurt, saddened, or wounded by the slap in the face, then you are still pricing yourself too low.
Your mileage my vary, this is not to be construed as legal advice, eye-poking may be substituted for slapping in some states.
1. The “op-art carnival vs. 1970s futurism” design aesthetic of Braniff Airlines.
2. The “Visual Music” exhibition at MOCA in Los Angeles. Don’t miss the companion book.
3. The ridiculously charming and catchy Volkswagen Jetta ad known as “Independence Day.”
4. The fantastically groovy 1966 cult German television show Raumpatrouille.
5. Logic System. YMO spin off band that circulates around moogsploitation, straight-up technopop, and leftover tracks from the Cosmos television series. I somehow picture this playing at a western-themed truck stop in Japan somewhere.
I started a new job in South Pasadena so I’ve been taking the train to work, but Friday was an exception. The last thing I expect to see in heavy traffic at the I-710/I-405 interchange is a fly-by by a fully operational B-24 bomber and I was so stunned by it and the neat buzz the engines made that I forgot to take a picture until it was well out over downtown Long Beach.
Apparently it’s at LGB for a couple days.