another weekend

By anders pearson 07 Jun 2004

lani finally made it up for a visit this weekend. just in time for new york to be cold and wet. coming from texas, it hadn’t even occurred to her to bring anything warmer than a t-shirt, so she had to spend the weekend wearing my sweater, which is practically a dress on her.

met up with jP and tamara for dim sum saturday morning followed by gooey sweets from the chinese bakery and music shopping. on our way back to the subway, we took some side streets to avoid the crazy throngs of tourists clogging canal street. on one of them, we stumbled across what must have been a DJ’s wet dream. there is a music library, which gets two copies of every piece of vinyl that is released plus lots of radio stations donate their extras. twice a year, apparently, they go through their inventory and sell off their thirds. most of what they were selling had probably never even been played but it was all cheap. i think jP could have easily spent the rest of the day there (and all of his money) if we’d let him.

back at my place, we watched Bubba Ho-Tep, and a few hours of VH1’s “100 Most Metal Moments of All Time”, which was remarkably entertaining.

sometime around 10, i was tricked into going out to williamsburg. i could have sworn that lani asked if i wanted to go to brooklyn “tomorrow” and i agreed. next thing i knew, she was dragging me to the subway. it was a fun time though. we met up with jP, tamara, and julia at blair and daphne’s, ate some falafel and zaater, drank some PBR and played Barbie, the board game. then we watched Blood Diner, which was absolutely hilarious.

on sunday, i dutifully followed lani around while she went clothes shopping and unsuccessfully shoe shopping. then we had some pastries with Sky and Masha and finally watched The Dead Zone (Sky and Masha have been attempting to watch every movie Christopher Walken has been in).

GENERATION OF SWINE

By Thanh Christopher Nguyen 04 Jun 2004

I’ve been reading Hunter S. Thompson’s GENERATION OF SWINE. It’s very entertaining. It is a collection of his articles from the 80’s, mostly surrounding the political world, but branching out with a strong mechanic’s hand towards everything that puts fear into the hearts of fathers and revelry into the rest of us. I recommend it to almost all readers. It is good in many ways, and for those of you that cannot read for lenghier periods, either because you are too busy, or your attention span is without you, each article is short – articulate. Here are some examples to entice you, you bastards…

<p>&#8220;Tenure is short in the fast lane.&#8221;<br />

&#8220;There is no need for the president of the United States to be smart. Year-end polls show him always to be the &#8216;best-dressed,&#8217; the most popular, and the most-desired donor to all sperm banks. They laughed at Thomas Edison, but they whimper like dogs when they come to the gate of the White House.&#8221;<br /> &#8220;The only way for a reporter to look at a politician is down.&#8221;<br /> &#8220;The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason.&#8221; </p>

dots

By anders pearson 03 Jun 2004

saw the legendary pink dots last night. excellent show. i’ve seen them once before and i’ve also seen edward solo. they’re never disappointing.

go see them. that is all.

Literary Data Base...

By Thanh Christopher Nguyen 03 Jun 2004

I’ve been building, for years, journals and journals of quotes and passages from my reading. I was thinking, at first, about building a large search engine that would bring up quotes on various topics. I’m sure someone has already done this, and that you can get book after book on quotes with a Topic based Index. But I want my very own. I think I can easily do it with a spreadsheet program. How, Anders, do you have your little keyword thingy set up? If I were a programmer, I’d steal the code, but I’m not a programmer, and I’m well out of the stealings&loans business.

FYI

By Miguel Diaz 01 Jun 2004

When I hit “Reply to This” I get ‘Error occurred while processing this directive’ above the little reply box…

memorial day weekend

By anders pearson 01 Jun 2004

fairly uneventful, but satisfying weekend.

  • dinner party at sky and masha‘s.
  • used CD shopping
  • met the inventor of the Shoulder Holder & Trouser Houser, who was once a student of timothy leary
  • watched the re-release of Life of Brian in the theatre (they re-released it to counter the Passion)
  • watched Logan’s Run on TV.
  • got some work done on Thraxil but not much else.

21:44

By Thanh Christopher Nguyen 31 May 2004

“We are all slaves to the water… It is the last pure thing in the world.” -Skinner

<p>&#8220;Writing is a hard dollar, but it is a lot better than reaching up inside some maddened cow and grabbing a breeched calf by the legs.&#8221;  &#8211; H.S. Thompson</p>

Everything you thought.

By Thanh Christopher Nguyen 31 May 2004

Anchors do wear pants behind the desk, but as soon as the camera is turned off – at every commercial break, and every pre-taped package – they crack jokes, and thoroughly destroy their aura of professional unbiasedness. They sound like high-school trendy people, but they’re awefully nice to my face. Some even draw silly cartoons while delivering the news – yes, on the papers they constantly shuffle (which do actually have things written on them that they seldom pay much attention to). I edit their video. I make them look good and bad, depending on how good or bad the photographer was, and how motivated I feel at three in the morning.

feeds

By anders pearson 26 May 2004

thraxil now has an atom feed in addition to RSS. the urls are http://thraxil.org/feeds/atom.xml and http://thraxil.org/feeds/index.rss respectively. (there are also individual user feeds in thraxil.org/_your username_/feeds/ if you don’t want to read everyone’s posts).

you may have noticed that the RSS feed is at a different location than it used to be. i’ve got a permanent redirect setup, so this should highlight all the aggregators out there that don’t properly support HTTP response codes.

you may also notice the lack of the ugly little orange ‘XML’ buttons”. the feed urls are in the HTML head so they can be autodetected. i will also eventually put up a sitemap that will link to them. i think that RSS/Atom feeds are the kind of thing that should be totally transparent to the user. it should be good enough to just point your aggregator at thraxil.org and let it auto-detect the feeds. if your aggregator doesn’t work that way, you should think about finding a better one, or requesting that functionality from whoever maintains it. news aggregation will have a hard time escaping beyond the hardcore web geeks if end users have to understand the mechanisms.