First piece of comment spam

Somebody left me my first piece of comment spam today! Or at least, I noticed it today. I'm touched. Of course, I deleted all the spam, but I can't tell you what it means to me to know that some automated device out there picked my blog to deface. Thanks to all.

I ♥ eMusic

(That's supposed to be a heart. If it's not, your computer is heartless.)

Everybody knows about iTunes, but eMusic, another online music store, seems to be much less well known. Check it out: 25 cents a song or less, restriction-free MP3 files (play anywhere), tons of independent labels in all genres. There's no major labels but so what? I guess it's my folk-and-jazz bias, but I don't really miss not having whatever the hit of the week is with all this great stuff out there. And this month they added 138 albums from Smithsonian/Folkways, which may not be a major label to anybody else, but in the folk world it is. (Of course I already have a lot of those on CD, but not all by any means.)

And no, eMusic doesn't pay me for this. I just love it. And I want to make sure lots of other people pay them money so it doesn't go away.

Another small enterprise I'd like to support is the small natural food store on Jackson at 15th St. in Oakland, the name of which I can't remember. It just opened this year and I hope it survives, because they have fresh Grace Bakery bread every day and I enjoy having the good fresh sourdough bread within a close walk of my apartment (although I do prefer Semifreddi's bread). It's what a convenience store would look like in a world where all grocery stores were Whole Foods.

I hope they last, although I have my doubts since Jackson St. is not a thoroughfare and it's not really visible from 14th St., which is. And of course the real Whole Foods will open up soon on 27th and Harrison (in a historic building that was originally a cable car barn). That is going to be good for the city (although their labor relations could stand improvement), but I hope the little store on Jackson does enough business to survive.

Caveman Poetry

From the "Men Only" forum on Cafe Utne. Written on the premise that men don't talk, they just grunt.

---

Short Works (1998)

urgh rurgha brarcho
argh urgha hurgha unka
brah urgh urgha urgh brah

---

Urg urgula ursula rhar,
Grugh untafa arghuma slar.
Urgh trufunta ghror,
Nurf zantuta tror,
Burgh zapurgha arpuga shar.

---

Zap urgha murfa zippa gror --
Hrorf urgha grorgha zar --
Oogh oogha argha rhorfa yoz
Grogh trufa oogha dhar --

---

OGH: A gurgh mo rargh urgh ugh argh urgh rargh urgh,
     zar urgha nurkh ayargha rharhga sar,
     frarh zurgha nurf.
UNGH:                     Urgh narfa nurfa zorgh?
OGH: Za rhorgula zappa yargha zippo,
     nay argh urfula zar hrorgha lippo.

---

Petrargh (2001)

Ab urgh zippa rhorgha argh urgzoohor
Urgunk rurgha brarcho urgh argh ukrugh
Urgha brah urgh hurgha unka akhbugh
Zoopa zurgh akhrunka rhar arhorkor.
Drorhga zippa zongho zip khraorgor
Khrajongo ukloranga rhor ka urghugh
Hrorf oogh ooga arghror ughza ooghugh
Groghdar darkhon arko oorgha zooghor.

Ghoogha urkha zargho dhrargo arka
Zargha urgh agrorgha zark a zimbo
Hrargha oorga zarpoo hhrorka.
Ghrunga oogha oogh uklor oogh dhrorka
Eezar ghoha zar akrhon akh kambo
Yagho zargha zim bakorgha yaka.

MacDesktops.com

This is old news for lots of people, but I've been downloading background pictures ("wallpaper") lately from MacDesktops.com. I don't really know why the guy calls it MacDesktops, as the images should be perfectly usable on any operating system. There are a number of images of Macs and Apple-related things, but for me the landscapes and waterscapes are much more pleasant to look at. Images are in a wide variety of resolutions -- I haven't seen other sites where the images are not only in the standard 4:3 ratio but are also in widescreen resolutions like 1920x1200 and 1680x1250.

Anyway, I like the pictures and sent the guy $20, since I've used a lot of his bandwidth downloading them. Check it out.

Got Maskirovka?

Some time ago, PETA sued the California Milk Advisory Board, alleging that the "Happy Cows" series of ads were false advertsing.

My mother and I were driving north on US-101 to Santa Rosa when she noted some cows by the roadside. They looked happy to her, she said.

I thought for a moment and said, "Those are just Potemkin cows."

Web pages should not steal focus

Here's what happens to me today:

1) Go to page full of links. Open two of them in separate tabs.

2) Click on first tab.

3) Read page in first tab.

4) Click on link to newspaper story from first tab.

5) Before newspaper story loads, click on second tab.

6) Read headline in second tab and realize you don't want to read the whole thing.

7) Hit command-W to close tab.

That all works fine, except that I didn't know about step 6a)

6a) Newspaper story loads in first tab, and demands focus, so first tab magically comes to the front.

Which means, of course, that my command-W ended up closing the first tab and not the second one.

Argh. Whoever invented the thing that allows web pages to say "me! I'm supposed to be the top window! me! me!" should be forced to program nothing but embedded processors for thermostats the rest of his/her life. The "blink" tag had nothing on this.

Open source implementation of Mac OS X APIs

I wonder if someday there will be an open-source implementation of the Mac OS X APIs (other than GNUstep).

I hope that if so, it will be called "Cider."

When the rain falls...

You know the smell of the first rain after a dry spell? It has a name. It's called petrichor.

Sorry about the outage

I'm not sure for how long the blog was down. It turns out that one of the library files on the server was truncated somehow, so every time the blog program tried to run, it gave a syntax error. I have no idea how something like this could happen to the server's Perl installation. Very odd.

If I were a carpenter

Just one verse so far.

If I were a carpenter, and you were a walrus
Would you lure the oysters away, would you share the mollusks?
If a hatter were my trade, would you come to tea?
Would you draw from the treacle-well, and take the dishes behind me?