the Pacific Film Archive is running a Studio Ghibli program in June. i've always wanted to see Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, and of course i won't miss the new Howl's Moving Castle. i'm not much of an anime fan really, but ever since catching Spirited Away at the San Francisco Film Festival a few years back, i go out of my way for these opportunities to see Miyazaki's work on the big screen.

after almost a year in the East Bay, i'm finally moving back to San Francisco. i found a charming old house on Carmelita St. just off Duboce Park, only two blocks from my last SF place. the place is immense, with two bedrooms upstairs and living room, dining room, kitchen and office downstairs. large back yard shared with the landlady who lives in the basement. quiet street, shady but gorgeous, in a wonderful neighborhood. i couldn't be more excited. moving June 18th!

i just want to share how super cool Backpack is. thanks to Ted Leung for turning me on to it.

since just this morning i'm using Backpack to track wishlist items that Amazon doesn't carry, to publicly share small bits of data with my friends without having to make a new page on this site, to keep a list of tweaks to make and plugins to install for this blog, and to collaborate on a writing project (exchanging drafts, leaving comments).

for many years now i've dumped these random bits of info into text files strewn about my computers' desktops and home directories. now that i commonly use any of three different machines (office, home office, laptop), having all that available in a central location in a format that is extremely pleasant to look at is just, well, a breath of fresh air.

also, the site is a great showcase for modern design principles and best practices. when you enter a list item, it is added to the list without a page refresh, and it's highlighted for a few seconds to show that your operation was successful. the page is not cluttered with boxes of content; there's a simple toolbar that lets you hide and show only the functions that you care about. when you roll over a content item, controls for that item (like edit and delete controls for a list item) are exposed but are then hidden when your mouse leaves the item. little things like that truly do add up. very impressive.

i'm perhaps most excited about the sharing features. i can make a page public (viewable by all, but not editable) and/or i can share (read and write) with other Backpack users. this is a great way to allow people to collaborate, and it's easy enough for computer-phobic people to become comfortable with very quickly. and the obvious utility of these features validates the amount of thought the folks at work have put into the sharing features of our products. collaboration tools usable by regular people (not geeks) on platforms other than Windows are so desperately needed, and this tool shows in a very real, non-abstract way just how easy these things can be.

there are even more features, like task reminders and iCal integration, that i haven't tried yet. i'm sure i'll find uses for those things sometime soon. and the best part is that, like the ways i'm already using the service, they will be very natural and fluid extensions of the online-centric way i already manage my personal information (del.icio.us, upcoming.org, Amazon's wishlist and this blog to name a few heavily used services).

what an exciting time we live in, that community-minded people are providing these kinds of services that actually make peoples' lives better and easier, rather than streamlining businesses' supply chains or whatever miserable day jobs most of us have. when i started working at Critical Path in 1997, you would often hear after-work conversations about revolutionizing the way people communicate. well, folks, that's really happening now, at a very visible level. hopefully with Cosmo, Warhorn, and other projects i'm dreaming up, i can do my bit to contribute.

i spent yesterday afternoon adding RSS feeds to warhorn.net 1.5.0 (hopefully releasing by the end of May). there are feeds for upcoming conventions, recurring game days, past conventions (cos i'm a completist), and for each event. now it's easy to tell when a new event is scheduled or when somebody signs up for a game. awesome. i don't know why i didn't get around to this before now.

i'd also like to add iCal integration like that of upcoming.org - when on an event site, click a button to add a calendar to iCal. i need to be able to generate an iCalendar view of a game, though, and i can't find any PHP iCalendar utilities. the closest thing i could find was PHP iCalendar, but its iCalendar parser/generator code doesn't appear to be easily extractable. lame. you'd think something like this would be in PEAR already. and in fact it seems like they talked about it a couple years ago on the PEAR dev mailing list, but nothing seems to have come of it.

anybody going to Gen Con Indy this year? event registration opens tomorrow. always have to work out the schedule in advance and buy tickets as soon as reg opens, cos the most popular events sell out in hours. so, here's mine.

i made an iMix of songs that were referenced in the Blue Monday comic books. it's not comprehensive, because i've only gone through about half of the issues, so there will probably be a followup at some point, whenever i finish sorting the rest of my comics.

just found the first teaser for the lion, the witch and the wardrobe. yeah!! i love that i live in a time where the geeks of my generation have the money and the technology to make the books we grew up with into movies. i'm so fired up for this!

semi-monthly wishlist update. yeah yeah, i'm a little late to the party with some of these. i haven't been paying much attention to music lately. how can i catch up? what do folks read to keep up to date with new music? my only source is the Aquarius Records newsletter.

(stuff i bought)

CHEVREUIL Chateauvallon
GUENTNER, MARKUS 1981
STARS Set Yourself On Fire
KAISER CHIEFS Employment
SUBARACHNOID SPACE The Red Veil
THIEVERY CORPORATION The Cosmic Game
VENETIAN SNARES Rossz Csillag Allat Szuletett
PHARAOH OVERLORD #3
APPRECIATION Healing The Father Wound
BLOC PARTY Silent Alarm
EARLY MAN s/t
G.A.T.E.S, THE Total Death
SIXTEEN HORSEPOWER 16HP (DVD)
REGGIE AND THE FULL EFFECT Songs Not To Get Married To
BRITISH SEA POWER Open Season
MAGNOLIA ELECTRIC CO. What Comes After The Blues
QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE Lullabies To Paralyze
V/A 12" / 80s
ISIS Oceanic: Remixes / Reinterpretations
MOUNTAIN GOATS The Sunset Tree
SLOUGH FEG Atavism
STYX The Complete Wooden Nickel Recordings
FALCONER Grime vs. Grandeur

ps: i buy at Aquarius whenever possible, but i use Amazon when necessary.

heh, from Aquarius Records New Arrivals #209, a recent split 7" with Caninus (pit bull-fronted metal) and Hatebeak (parrot-fronted metal). i want a cd ep!

CANINUS / HATEBEAK Wolfpig / Bird Seed Of Vengeance (Reptilian) 7" 4.50
Oh crap. It's here. It was indeed only a matter of time. A canine / avian metal meeting. Or something. On the one hand/paw/claw/side, there's Hatebeak, the grinding death metal juggernaut, fronted by lead vocalist Waldo, who just so happens to be a parrot! On the other, there's Caninus, a thuggy, metalic hardcore mosh pit bull of a band, fangs bared, leashes swinging, ummm, tails wagging. Yep, Caninus is fronted by tag team vocalists Budgie and Basil, both of whom happen to be pitbulls. If there was EVER a record made for AQ customers it's this one!!! Caninus is in full grind mode on this split, with spastic hyperspeed drum machines, buzzing lightning bolt guitars and Waldo's unmistakabe squawk. Caninus counters with some serious moshworthy metallic hardcore, bordering on death metal, with HUGE downtuned riffs, blasting drums, and a wicked array of snarls and growls and barks. And if there was ever any doubt, both bands ostensibly being joke bands, these guys are definitely true metalheads as the whole release is steeped in metal injokes. The Caninus cover art is Napalm Death's Scum album cover, except all of the people in the original are now dogs! The Hatebeak side is titled Bird Seeds Of Vengeance, named after the Nile album Black Seeds Of Vengeance, the cover depicting Hatebeak vocalist Waldo facing off against a bust of King Tut, the whole cover surrounded in Egyptian filligree. And then on the inside there is a photo of Waldo perched on what they purport to be the Spear Of Longinus, the actual spear that a Roman soldier used to stab Jesus in the side when he was on the cross! And then there's the Caninus lyrics, dense with metal / hardcore parody and written from the point of view of a dog (obviously)! Hatebeak declare "Avian Victory!" while Caninus proclaim "Go Vegan" as well as "Fuck You New York Post and New York Times" and in their thanks list give props to PETA, an animal shelter and even a pet supply store!! THE ANIMALS ARE NOW THE (METAL) MASTERS!!

i lied before when i said comments were working. turns out that upgrading from MT 2.x to 3.x requires a lot of hacking through templates to make comment registration work. i wound up replacing a lot of them wholesale. i haven't updated them all to use my layout and styles tho, so the whole site is kinda ghetto for the time being (as opposed to "minimalist" which is how i usually describe it).

i also got rid of a whole mess of obsolete stuff, like Yahoo news and thelist extracts and so forth and added syndication links (Atom, RSS) and an export of my NetNewsWire RSS subscriptions in OPML format. soon i will also have del.icio.us links and upcoming events. simple but fun stuff that lets you stalk me even more intensely.

by the way, i just want to give a shout out to Six Apart. i opened a support ticket because i couldn't figure out how the hell to make comment registration work. Sarah from the support staff got back to me within minutes with several links to knowledge base articles, FAQs and external blog entries on how to solve my problem. her quick and super helpful service was much appreciated. i've always thought highly of the Six Apart folks (their disinterest in hiring my friends notwithstanding), and this is yet another positive experience. thanks!

update: i added the del.icio.us and upcoming.org links via the MT RSS feed plugin. it was even simpler than expected, once i figured out how to install a plugin into MT. i also finally figured out how to set up categories and tagged almost a year's worth of entries. what a productive day! now i'm off to finally see Hitchhiker's Guide.

i was a bouncer briefly back in the summer of 2004. my friend Lisa bought Eli's Mile High Club, an old blues club in Oakland, and reopened it as an indie rock joint with live burlesque shows on Tuesday nights. i moved back from Brooklyn where i'd been living for six months, building a system for serving ads in real time into computer games, to be mister security guy for her.

the part of Oakland where the Mile High is located (just down MLK from MacArthur) is not the safest for waifish indie rock girls to park and walk solo. i like to think that my bald/bearded/sideburned mug and offensive lineman frame were enough to deter most of the drunken bums from hassling people most of the time. i never had to deal with any real violence, luckily, although i did get a death threat from one ass clown who was so drunk/fried it took him 5 minutes to parallel park in front of the club and then tried to get me to bring our door girl outside for a chat.

i can conclusively say, however, that my bouncing experience was nothing like this guy's. at this point, i'm happy to live vicariously through a random person's blog and employ myself in a field where i can possibly actually distinguish myself.

my recent roommate had a couple of cats (creatively named Boy and Girl). a few months ago she brought home one of those laser pointer keychains. within minutes we were driving the cats crazy with it. you know how cats like to chase the red dot around.

well, it turns out some jackass patented that. no, not the laser pointer - the nutmaking of the cats.

A method for inducing cats to exercise consists of directing a beam of invisible light produced by a hand-held laser apparatus onto the floor or wall or other opaque surface in the vicinity of the cat, then moving the laser so as to cause the bright pattern of light to move in an irregular way fascinating to cats, and to any other animal with a chase instinct.

full text here

according to my pal Chuck, the word on the street is that a 12 year old kid whose pop is a patent attorney is the "inventor" of this "method".

seems like an april fool's joke, doesn't it?

thanks to lawyer-wannabe Dan for interrupting studying for finals to call in this important tidbit.

yesterday somebody started a "Struts with PHP" thread on the Struts users mailing lists. folks were sort of scratching their heads about how one might use PHP for a webapp's view layer rather than JSP. come to find out there's relevant Java Community Process work going on: JSR 223 Scripting for the JavaTM Platform.

the mind boggles at the possibilities. if you think about the spectrum of sizes of web sites and apps, you'll recognize that there are folks like me who love living in the (comparatively) big and bloated J2EE Model 2 world, and those like my pals Olivia and Creighton who prefer the simple, light, zero-XML-and-properties-config-files, embedded-within-Apache world of PHP, mod_perl and the like (that is not to say that you can't do a simple, lightweight web site with servlets and JSP or a complex webapp in PHP - i've done both - but i think the 80/20 rule applies here). a PHP/Java bridge would let all of us collaborate on projects using our favorite technologies in our own spheres of influence. hey, we could rewrite the back end of Suicide Girls in Java!

anyway, a draft was out for public review, so i'll pull that down and give it a read the next time i burn out on World of Warcraft. am looking forward to embedding a PHP interpreter into Tomcat and seeing what my friends and i come up with.

today is Day 4 of not smoking. the first evening i wanted to kill myself. since then it's been pretty smooth sailing. most times when i would normally have a smoke (after a meal, when getting in the car), i think "it's sorta weird to not be smoking right now" and then go back to whatever i was doing.

the process has been much easier than it ever was the times i tried to quit years ago. i think low-carbing and regular training sessions at the gym have rebuilt my willpower, which was at an alltime low in the late 90s. i am looking forward to the next few months of abstention from cigarettes, booze, bread, potatoes, and sugar. i don't need the white man's poisons. my body is a temple. a really big temple.

i just upgraded to Moveable Type 3.16. comments should be working again, but they require a TypeKey login. f you spammers!!! please let me know if you encounter any problems. thanks!