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June 29, 2008 - July 5, 2008 »

June 28, 2008

Blogs upgrade on hold

Our blogs upgrade, slated for this morning, will probably be postponed. A server glitch at the Texas internet provider that hosts the blogs hasn't been resolved yet.

I've spent a few months building the upgraded templates and functions and want to get them launched, but it's out of my hands.

Hot day, headed for a cool drink and a good novel.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 2:24 PM | Permalink

June 27, 2008

Roots mp3s: Jimmy Cliff & Joe Higgs Live in '75

Jimmy Cliff & Joe Higgs, Live in Ann Arbor, Mich., Nov 11, 1975, from BigO, Singapore.

Jimmy Cliff calls Joe Higgs, the "Father of Reggae." According to Higgs' website (www.joehiggs.com), Higgs was hugely influential in the birth of ska, rock steady and reggae forms of Jamaican music, and was widely respected as a composer, arranger, and performer, but perhaps most of all as a teacher. Among those he tutored were Bob Marley, Derrick Harriott, Peter Tosh, Bob Andy, The Wailing Souls and Bunny Wailer.

But Higgs really caught the public's attention in the early to mid-'70s when he toured with Jimmy Cliff. At that time, Cliff was hot off the success of the movie and soundtrack, The Harder They Come (1972). For this 1975 concert in Ann Arbor, Cliff continued to perform a number of tracks from the movie.

Joe Higgs died of cancer on December 18, 1999. He was 59.

The first disc starts with the five minute Drum Song, a sweet jazzy warmup that says "We're starting, people..." and sets the tone for a concert that feels as laid back as Jamaica.

It's not the best recording -- Higgs is poorly miked on his first tune -- but there's a kindness throughout, with gentle percussion and Cliff's voice young and clear. A soulful, nearly nine-minute Many Rivers Too Cross is a highlight, as is the more upbeat Going Mad.

The second set will be available Saturday.

Jimmy Cliff holds a sweet spot in my own history: I wrote a review of the movie The Harder They Come in 1978 for the very first issue of The NewPaper, which you may now know as The Providence Phoenix.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 7:30 AM | Permalink

Projo blogs upgrade set for Saturday

Saturday morning we plan to upgrade the active projo blogs to a new version of the Movable Type software. All blogs will remain available during this process. Afterwards you’ll see a new look and some new features, and we’ll welcome your comments about them.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 7:00 AM | Permalink

June 26, 2008

Tattoos; Word of the Day in Congress; Astronaut deadline; Dubai's moving skyscraper

Strange and Beautiful Tattoos. Except for a couple that build the navel into the design, most are on the broad canvas of backs.

Related: The Skins They Carried: Military tattoos in the age of Iraq. Texas Observer.

To Ink or Not to Ink: 10 Questions to Consider at TattooFinder.com, a catalog of designs.

On the record: Capitol Words: The most often used word was on any given day in the U.S Congress. Friday's was "oil," Tuesday's was "veterans."

Space, but little time: NASA - Deadline Approaching to Apply for New NASA Astronaut Class

Maya 10k: Can You Live With Just 100 Things?. You gotta be kidding. Count my grapes.

There's hubris in moving parts: Dubai plans 'moving' skyscraper. BBC.

The world's first moving building, a 80-storey tower with revolving floors giving an shifting shape, will be built in Dubai, its architect says.

The Dynamic Tower design is made up of 80 pre-fabricated apartments which will spin independently of one another.

"It's the first building that rotates, moves, and changes shape," said architect David Fisher, who is Italian, at a news conference in New York.

"This building never looks the same, not once in a lifetime," he added...

There's a computer animation of the still-conceptual building at the link.

Train: containers: Take another look at the Singapore train plan, a very intelligent concept -- the train doesn't stop, the people go up to a car atop the train that will slide to a stop at their station. The car detaches and coasts to its berth on its own level as the train continues on below.

If you snooze, they really can't wait for you to get up top to your container. (It's container shipping at root.)

I blogged this briefly Monday, but the idea grows on me.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 2:43 AM | Permalink

June 25, 2008

The day Bill Gates tried to download a Windows program

Full text: An epic Bill Gates e-mail rant Todd Bishop, who writes the Seattle P-I's Microsoft blog, went back through internal e-mails turned over in antitrust suits against Microsoft to find the record of this day in 2003 when founder Bill Gates got to experience his own product firsthand.

I decided to download (Moviemaker) and buy the Digital Plus pack ... so I went to Microsoft.com. They have a download place so I went there...

...So after more than an hour of craziness and making my programs list garbage and being scared and seeing that Microsoft.com is a terrible website I haven't run Moviemaker and I haven't got the plus package.

Todd quotes at length, and offers a link to the pdf.

But Gates didn't fix it, did he?

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 11:24 PM | Permalink

George Carlin marathon starts tonight on HBO

George Carlin, from his final special for HBO, It's Bad for Ya, which aired in March, and will be shown again Friday.

MC at his own wake: Late comic George Carlin made 14 HBO specials over the years. The cable channel plans to air five of them tonight, beginning with his first, George Carlin at USC (1977), at 8 p.m. Thursday night there'll be six more, ending with his last, It's Bad for Ya, from earlier this year, in the wee hours. That one will also air again Friday night at 9.

The full schedule: HBO: George Carlin: 1937-2008

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 10:40 AM | Permalink

June 24, 2008

Free mp3s: Clapton live, '74

Eric Clapton - Laidback Live at Nassau Coliseum, Uniondale, New York, June 30 and September 29, 1974. 30 tracks.

...The tapes for the 1974 concerts remained in storage for a very long ti me. Only over the past 10 years have they come into wider circulation through bootleg labels in Europe and Japan and from collectors.

Perhaps all parties felt uneasy with the performances. Clapton was not always drunk. The shows however did not project the new direction he was heading, to be a blues journeyman. The '74 shows were Eric Clapton's PAST. His albums after 461 Ocean Boulevard showed him taking control of his career and steering it closer to the roots of his music. While some find these albums a bit boring, the same cannot be said of his electrifying '74 shows. They were the last time he showed off his flash, his rock guitar, his electricity and his mettle in such quantity....

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 12:26 PM | Permalink

June 23, 2008

News of Marie Antoinette? (London) Times puts searchable newspapers online (1785-1985)

The (London) Times -- founded in 1785 as The Daily Universal Register, renamed The Times in 1788 and now owned by Rupert Murdoch -- has digitized its newspaper archives:

* Every issue of The Times published between 1785-1985, digitally scanned and fully searchable
* Click and drag navigation
* Save, print, e-mail favourite articles
* 150 topic pages, plus magnificent archive photo galleries

And it's free, for now. (Registration seems to have kicked in since I wrote this earlier today and forgot to publish it. Some of these links may work, others may throw you the speedbump.)

It would have been spectacular if reports of the American Revolution had existed, but we'll have to settle instead for the French Revolution:

Execution of the Queen of France -- Marie Antoinette's decapitation by guillotine was reported on Oct. 23, 1793.

Excerpt (what looks like an 'f' is actually an "s"; "ci-devant" means "from before," the old regime.):

Later, but special, an August 13, 1868 review of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

Have at while it's still free.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 8:37 PM | Permalink

George Carlin splits; The train that never slows; Motorized suitcase

Farewell to George Carlin, Saturday Night Live's very first host, to whom no cow was too sacred:

Religion has convinced people that there’s an invisible man…living in the sky, who watches everything you do every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a list of ten specific things he doesn’t want you to do. And if you do any of these things, he will send you to a special place, of burning and fire and smoke and torture and anguish for you to live forever, and suffer and burn and scream until the end of time. But he loves you. He loves you and he needs money.

L.A. Times obit: Counterculture comedian tested the limits of speech and society, (and the source of the photo).

George Carlin, the dean of counterculture comedians whose biting insights on life and language were immortalized in his "Seven Words You Can Never Say On TV" routine, died of heart failure Sunday. He was 71.

Carlin, who had a history of heart trouble, went into St. John's Health Center in Santa Monica on Sunday afternoon complaining of chest pain and died later that evening, said his publicist, Jeff Abraham. He had performed as recently as last weekend at the Orleans Casino and Hotel in Las Vegas....

I think he'd have fun with his NYT obit, which manages to use the obscure adjective "splenetic" in the headline: George Carlin, Splenetic Comedian, Dies at 71.

Splenetic: 1. Of or relating to the spleen. 2. Affected or marked by ill humor or irritability. n. A person regarded as irritable.

Aw c'mon, George's humor was never ill.

Update, 9:33 a.m.: The day shift arrived and changed "splenetic" to "irreverent."

The YouTube collection of Carlin clips

More: Remembering George Carlin at NPR.

Passenger insertion: Trains that pick you up without stopping

This is a concept for Singapore’s Metro Rail Line...The idea is that people who want to board the train get into a smaller car that piggybacks onto the moving train as it passes through the station. To get off, you get into the smaller upper car while on the train and it unhitches at the station.

There's video, but I'm having fun imagining all the ways you could drop people into a speeding train, and pluck them out of it.

On the case: Motorized suitcase saves your back at Computerworld. Its little wheels have motors. It would be even better if it could find its own way home.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 8:53 AM | Permalink | Comments 1

June 22, 2008

Surreal snow globes at last; Color thesaurus online

I loved snowglobes as a kid, although there wasn't usually much going on in them. The Chinese knockoffs in the discount stores in recent years are less magical.

In these globes by artists Walter Martin and Paloma Munoz there's a lot going on. We just don't know what.

Shake Up The World With Creepy Snow Globes at the oddly interesting InventorSpot showcases a selection of the pair's stranger scenes in a bubble. There are many more at the artists' site.

Should these break down your childhood preconceptions of what's acceptable inside a snowglobe, and inspire you to dabble, you can make your own. There's plenty of time before Christmas to perfect your concepts.

The colors of names: An On-Line Color Thesaurus at Mostly Color. You start with a color name, get samples, and you'll see its antonyms too.

 purple haze   drab

Here's the most interesting page on the Web to fans of pinpoint precision color-picking: The full spectrum, microsliced, with the many names each incremental step is known by.

Hat tip to MeFi for these fresh links, among the best on the bitstream tonight.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 12:20 AM | Permalink