.flac

Over the past few days I've endeavored to make available to you a .flac version of They're More Afraid of You Than You Are of Them. I've only been partially successful, which I have come to accept as my lot in life. The impasse occurs precisely here: ".flac" is, in the luddite eyes of GoDaddy's server's IIS, an unrecognized filetype. So although the file sits happily on the server and is accessible by ftp, attempts to access it via http are summarily rejected. I've contacted customer service regarding this issue and was told rather matter-of-factly that there were no plans to add .flac to IIS anytime soon. In other words, I might as well go scratch.

IIS does indeed recognize .zip files, though. So if .flac is your favorite sauce and you'd like to see how you like it on TMAoYTYAoT, please be my guest. But you're going to have to download it all at once in a gigantic .zip file. At this point if you have any complaints I'll kindly remind you that the shit is free.

Why bother with all this so long after originally making it available in .mp3? I was going through the master recordings (done at my old office after hours, if you'll recall, so I needed to clear them out before I left the office for good) and I started to be bothered by how much worse the .mp3's sounded to me than the original uncompressed .wav's. So I figured better late than never.

Other things I've had on my mind lately:

• I'm really pumped for the new Springsteen.


• I also think the new Counting Crows song "Cowboys" is really good. It reminds me of the heights they reached whilst recovering satellites, which was their high water mark (imho).


• The day I get my hands on batteries I can power with pee is going to be a triumphant day indeed.

Okay, cool. That is all. Carry on.

every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end

Well, I haven't finished BioShock. In fact, it's probably going to take me forever to finish it. I've been busy.

This Monday I gave my 2 weeks notice at my current job (where I've been for 3 years) to take another job in a completely different field.

I'm going to try teaching. Sort of. I'll be working for a small SAT prep company, teaching kids how to totally pwn the test ("pwn" is not an SAT word).

I probably haven't mentioned it on these pages before, but I've always really liked standardized tests. I'm good at them. I've also for years kicked around the idea of teaching, but have never been able to pull the trigger because...I'm a wimp. Or, I was a wimp.

Today for breakfast, I had victory.

BioShock

It's not as if I've been doing too much writing on here anyway, but you probably won't be hearing from me again until I'm done with BioShock.

Some things happened

1. I did an interview on we also ran with Jaymay, who is marvelous, fantastic, wonderful, and extremely gifted. It's the interview I was teasing in this post...it just took a little longer for us to get on the same page what with her playing shows all over the UK and me having way too many questions.
2. I bought a new car. It's a Toyota Yaris. It weighs about the same as a lawn mower. I just filled it up for the first time since I drove it off the lot. Initial calculations indicate that I'm getting 37.7 miles per gallon. Nice. Buying a new car is totally weird.
3. I've been doing some writing for Amie Street, which is cool. I'm finding a ton of great music because of it (The Seedy Seeds, The Absent Arch, False Heroics) and it's really forcing me to sit down and write every single night -- even moreso than I already have been with we also ran. It's good for me. Of course, They're More Afraid of You Than You Are of Them is available on Amie Street for a pittance, if you feel guilty just getting it for free here (which you shouldn't).
   

I really thought when I set out writing this I'd have more than 3 things. 3 hardly warrants a numbered list. Profuse apologies.

New York System

A hamster's lifetime of dreams were realized for me last week when I made, in my own kitchen, real live New York System Wieners. It all started earlier in the summer when I stumbled upon the only place in the known universe that actually makes the sausages, but now it's done. Birds sing a little sweeter in the morning these days.

God Bless America

From the New York Times:

To the Editor:

When George W. Bush was governor of Texas, he presided over more than 150 executions. In more than one-third of the cases -- 57 in all -- lawyers representing condemned inmates asked then-Governor Bush for a commutation of sentence, so that the inmates would serve life in prison rather than face execution.

Some of these inmates had been represented by lawyers who slept during trials. Some were mentally retarded. Some were juveniles at the time they committed the crime for which they were sentenced to death.

In all these cases, Governor Bush refused to commute their sentences, saying that the inmates had had full access to the judicial system.

I. Lewis Libby Jr. had the best lawyers money can buy. His crime cannot be attributed to youth or retardation. He has expressed no remorse whatsoever for lying to a grand jury or participating in the administration's effort to mislead the American people about the war in Iraq. President Bush's commutation of Mr. Libby's sentence is certainly legal, but it just as surely offends the fundamental constitutional value of equality.

Because President Bush signed a commutation, a rich and powerful man will spend not a day in prison, while 57 poor and poorly connected human beings died because Governor Bush refused to lift a pen for them.

David R. Dow

Houston, July 3, 2007

The writer is a professor at the University of Houston Law Center who represents death row inmates, including several who sought commutation from then-Governor Bush.

From Keith Olbermann:

the cliff walk

Was in Rhode Island this weekend for a wedding (congrats Maribeth and Tom!) and finally checked something off my to-do list that's been lingering for a pretty long time. I walked The Cliff Walk in Newport all the way. I'd done parts of it before, but yesterday I did the whole thing.

So the whole thing is like 3.5 miles, but then you have to walk back. That's right this lazy sack of bones made it 7 miles yesterday, which is probably more than I walked in the entire month of May (maybe kidding). Here are some pictures I took that are not artistic at all:
Other people have taken nicer pictures and posted them on flickr.

Here's something else that just occurred to me today: the New York Post, that bastion of journalistic integrity and pithy headline commentary, has been making awesome puns and wordplay in giant white block-type forever. Lolcats are awesome and all, I'm just saying that if one is to give credit where credit is due, some credit might be due to the NY Post.

more like INcontinental, amirite!?

I've been blogging 2 or 3 times a day lately, just never here. Mostly because there haven't been that many good stories on the web lately about excrement. Thankfully, this story got my creative juices...flowing. Poops on a plane. So awesome. Call Sam Jackson.

Today a nasty thunderstorm was rolling over the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge as I was coming home on the Belt Parkway. It was really awesome. Here's something else awesome I just found while googling to make sure I spelled "Verrazano" correctly:

Its monumental 693 foot high towers are 1 5/8 inches farther apart at their tops than at their bases because the 4,260 foot distance between them made it necessary to compensate for the earth's curvature. Each tower weighs 27,000 tons and is held together with three million rivets and one million bolts. Seasonal contractions and expansions of the steel cables cause the double-decked roadway to be 12 feet lower in the summer than in the winter. (mta.info)

I've been playing some guitar again. The other night I scribbled what may become the first verse of the first song I've written in a long time.

It's funny because writing songs has never been easy for me, but it's also never seemed so daunting. The first time around I guess I didn't expect much of myself, and the end result was something I consider to be a solid okay. If I end up writing more songs and releasing another record, I want it to be at least kinda good. And with that at the front of my mind, I've been some degree of paralyzed.

But seriously though...how about that plane with the poop on it? So awesome!!!

we also ran

In case you didn't click the link in the last post: My reign as the Program Director of PulverRadio officially came to a close last month when the station was shut down. About 50 million different factors played into its downfall, and I like to think most of them weren't directly my fault. So, I'm still working in the same office, but no longer programming a radio station.

I had a bit of a groove going with the blog at PulverRadio, though, and I've decided not to let that die with the rest of the site. So I'm slowly (very...slowly...) moving the archives over to a new place, and I've started writing again after a short exile. If you care what I think about music, you are cordially invited to visit we also ran. In the next few days, I'll hopefully be posting an interview that I'm really excited about...

Ian Bell on faux-hawks

Ian Bell, a friend of mine and the guy who hired me to run PulverRadio almost 3 years ago, has recently returned to the blahgosphere with a vengeance. A lot his content is pretty techy, and maybe not of interest to you, seeing as you're reading my blog, on which a lot of the content is total bullshit. That said, His most recent post really resonated with me.

Every day I drive from Brooklyn to Melville, NY for work. It's right near the Nassau/Suffolk county line, which is to say: my commute is not short. And since there is often traffic, I have a lot of time to get close to cars in front of me and read their vanity plates and bumper stickers. On Long Island, if bumper stickers and fake ribbon magnets paint an accurate picture of the driver, there's a LOT of "Never Forgive, Never Forget" sentiment, which I think begets the political environment we currently find ourselves in: one in which we're encouraged to "Never Ask."

Ian's post takes issue with the "faux-hawks" (I see what you did there) that didn't bother to ask any questions after 9/11, and now shrug off responsibility simply by saying "we were lied to." I agree with him when he says:

A hockey coach of mine once said that the hardest-working player on the ice should always the guy who just screwed up. That rule also applies here. If you succumbed to the rhetoric of the Bush sycophants and joined the march (to send other people) to war only to realize your mistake later, you owe more to your fellow man than to simply claim you were lied to. You need to, at last, take action to stop the injustice in which you were complicit.

But based on the extremely scientific data I've been collecting on my daily commute, I'm more concerned about the seemingly large number of people who still aren't asking any questions.

I've been losing a lot of sleep lately (really) thinking about stuff like this.

...

Oh, and while I'm getting all politicky, I wanted to point you towards MoveOn's just-launched virtual town-hall on climate change. They're inviting whoever you want them to, and asking questions you tell them to ask. At the very least (and I suspect this is the real point) it will send a clear message to presidential hopefuls that there are a lot of people who will be thinking about the climate when they cast their ballots next year.