« December 2002 | Main | February 2003 »

Friday, January 31, 2003

My new band name...

...will be Ersatz Yakatori. That is all.

Posted at 02:02 PM | Comments (0)

Thursday, January 30, 2003

I don't know how to work the Lazy Web, deux.

Has anyone seen the charger for my digital camera? Fuck.

Update! 9:10pm!: Also, my Handspring. Double fuck.

Posted at 04:30 PM | Comments (0)

I don't know how to work the Lazy Web, so I'll just post this here.

My pal Amanda and I have just spent the morning trawling the bottom of the interweb trying to unearth some information about NO FRILLS brand products. Remember when you were a kid, there was always that one aisle in the supermarket lined with plain white boxes with the contents spelled out in a gigantic splay of black Helvetica? What happened to those? I know they've mostly been co-opted into cheezy supermarket brands, but why is there *no* information about these minimalist masterpieces to be found on the web? Surely *someone* must collect them?

I'm pretty sure I spied a box in a kitchen scene in Hysterical Blindness but aside from that, these things seem to have vanished. Dishwashing liquid. Tuna cans. Cereal boxes. Oatmeal canisters. We can both recall them so clearly from the 80s; why haven't they been co-opted like every other 80s motif available?

Anyway, the point of all this: find us some generics. Take a picture. Link it, yo. Love ya forever.

Update! 4:25pm! Eureka. Amanda's hubby found this:

And now we know we aren't crazy. At least in this instance.

Posted at 12:01 PM | Comments (2)

Wednesday, January 29, 2003

Sigh. Not again.

Looks like there's a new Metric song in a Dentyne Ice commercial (the one where the guy and girl bump into each other on a subway platform). Now I'll get to endure another 6 months of endless requests for copies of an mp3 of the song like I did after their iZone commercial. Yay.

Posted at 11:13 PM | Comments (9)

Social.

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine had his identity stolen.

He started receiving credit card and mobile phone bills in the mail for things he hadn't bought.

And last week, when I went back to school, I started to realize just how easy it is to get someone else's identity information and abuse it.

For example: I don't have a new ID card yet. To get access to one of the buildings at NYU, the guard asked me for my social security number. Um, I don't think so.

Learn more about protecting your SSN from abuse, being aware of social engineering, and monitoring your credit report.

PS Dear The FTC, Surely you of all government agencies can spring for a copy of Photoshop with which to make your stupid advertisement banners? Just rip open one of those pirated copies you seized at the border or something. ANd don't forget to check off the "anti-alias?" box. Love, Brian.

Posted at 09:17 AM | Comments (2)

Sunday, January 26, 2003

30,000

Hrm. Are you the lucky duckling to catch hit #30,000 to my blog? Scroll down and have a look-see. It's coming up real soon like!

Posted at 09:55 PM | Comments (2)

Friday, January 24, 2003

Well, hello my name is...

Simon for OS X.

It sounds just like the real thing. i.e. extraordinarily annoying.

Yet very addictive.

[annoying geeky stuff]

However, it's packaged as one of those self-destructing DMG (disk image) files which are now all the rage here in X land.

If you haven't seen one yet, it works like this: you download a disk image. You double-click the image. Rather than it mounting on your desktop, allowing you to run an installer or whatever, it simply launches itself, drops the program in whatever directory the image was, quits, and tosses itself in the trash.

I *think* the first widespread installer to act like this was Apple's Safari, and of course developers have been quick to copy it.

I understand the concept of simplifying the disk image. They take a lot of clicks. They're confusing to newbies and even mediumbies.

But I think the uncontrollable self-destructing DMG is a terrible idea.

No more backups? No ability to save a clean installer for any future use? Bleh bleh bleh.

[/annoying geeky stuff]

Posted at 06:41 PM | Comments (1)

Wednesday, January 22, 2003

One hour and twenty five minutes

until I become an undergrad again. Scary.

Posted at 03:30 PM | Comments (7)

Monday, January 20, 2003

Gasp.

Well, I've just had my first really terrifying OS X problem since I've settled down into a Jaguar groove.

Earlier this afternoon, I plugged my iPod in as I do almost every day, but it didn't mount this time.

I tried it a couple of different ways (iTunes running, iTunes not running, iPod off, iPod on, etc) but nothing seemed to work. The iPod did go into "DO NOT DISCONNECT" mode, but my Mac wasn't responding at all.

I thought maybe a quick logout and login would maybe clean up something behind the scenes, so I gave that a go.

Except I couldn't log back in. I just got a plain blue screen. No login pane at all.

I blinked a few times, which is my standard response to things like this. But, alas, this is not I Dream of Jeannie, so nothing happened.

Reboot. Let fsck run in the background. Nada. Fsckity fsck.

Log on to #macintosh on IRC. They recommended something called "single user mode" which looked more like "terrifying command line stylee" to me. But I gave it a go anyway, with a little help from the ever-handy Dive Into Mark, who had a nice troubleshooting entry which I googled up on my other computer at work.

Unfortunately, Mark's hints don't seem to be working for me. I can't move the local.nidb because the filesystem is read-only in Single User Mode. So now I'm fux0red, sitting here with a PowerBook that won't let me use it.

Waaah.

Posted at 04:43 PM | Comments (7)

Bed is for pansies!

I've been futzing with style sheets and archives and everything is a mess right now. Don't get your panties in a wad over it. I recommend you distract yourself from the mess here by seeing the dazzling and dreamlike film Russian Ark. Shot in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg in one continuous shot (!), it flits around "telling" a story of two men who tumble through time, visiting various eras of Russian history. The Steadicam work by Tilman Buttner is an absolute technical marvel but the film has a true, sad Proustian beauty beyond the DV-geekery. The guy playing Pushkin was kind of cute. And holy crap, were there ever a *lot* of extras in the final scene after the ball. Impressive and lovely, and really completely unlike anything made before.

Posted at 12:40 AM | Comments (1)

Thursday, January 16, 2003

Oh, righty. The golden streams thing.

I forgot all about the new mp3. Belle & Sebastian + Langley Schools Music Project (timpani! wood blocks!) + a healthy dose of queer politics and raunch = The Hidden Cameras. Sure the band name is kinda generic, but their URL is to die for. As is their singer/mastermind. Third from the left.

Oh, and the song is about pee. Enjoy it.

Hey, I'm feeling generous and unconcerned about trivial concerns like bandwidth. Have another track from the album, too. This one's called "Ban Marriage" and I *think* he says 'there is splendour in the harshness of bum' at one point but I'm not 100% sure. Performance art these characters are good at; enunciation they are not.

Posted at 06:48 PM | Comments (11)

Wednesday, January 15, 2003

St. Unmotivated of Inishowen

Oh, look, I'm alive. I'll be back in a little bit. Believe it or not, I'm doing an all-CSS thing, and it's almost done, and it actually works. I also have a new mp3 waiting. Promise.