Archive for November, 2005
The last Friday of November is
Buy Nothing Day. Apparently, you can make a difference, and show the evil corporations who's boss by dressing like a zombie, wearing a
muppet wannabe, or the ultimate sacrifice - not spending a penny. This beings back memories of a discussion I had about kosher appliances (Wired article?) and how these appliances basically circumvent the rules of the sabbath. So if I buy an crapload of stuff on the day before Buy Nothing Day, eat and enjoy it all on the actual day but actually don't spend any money.... Is that alright?
November 13th, 2005
I uploaded some more mp3 mix sets to the
dj spyhunter site. Approaching Infinity and Epic are arranged with my favorite progressive breaks transitioning to epic trance style. Epic is much older; from 1999. The house set is much more like my style when I'm spinning for a crowd, or at a club (Though I don't usually play house that often). Lots of cuts, overlays, more fun. I'm trying to dig up my 'Live at Anthem SF' set from a few years back since people really like the funky breaks, but I'm having trouble finding the master copy. These are zip archives of mp3 files.
approaching infinity [progressive breaks / trance]
spyhunter's essential house mix [house / breaks]
epic [progressive breaks / trance]
November 12th, 2005
So what's even cooler than having a realtime list of
current quake activity in the San Francisco area? Realtime data straight from the
drum recorders that the USGS uses. Don't ask me to
interpret the darn data (dats whut purdy maps r 4!) but its nice to think that if I was a genius, I could extrapolate something meaningful from it!
November 12th, 2005
There was a post recently about an artist that tries to make already stressful lives more stressful by inventing all sorts of weird things. One of these is a
desk that has a built in conveyor belt system that dumps your stuff on the floor. This brought to mind an idea that I had a while ago.
I'm a pile maker. Meaning, I tend to leave stuff on tables, counter tops, shelves - probably just like a lot of people out there. Of course I don't deal with the growing pile of stuff as it accumulates and before you know it, there's a big heap of crap I don't want to bother going through. And so I don't bother, and it grows even more.
My idea is to make a home where most of the mess-gathering-surfaces are somewhat off kilter, tilted, slanted. Just enough so that if you put a phone bill on it, it would slide off onto the floor. If you tried to toss the clutter from your pockets onto the counter - hey presto! on the floor! All items would have to be put in their designated places (which would be flat of course -such as a drawer, filing cabinet, or closet) You could choose to keep certain areas flat (dinner table, coffee table, kitchen prep surfaces) or you could have special interactive plateware / cutlery / pots&pans etc that allow them to be used on the slanted surface (magnetic? interlocking? velcro?) The theory is that your home will stay much neater. Though I suppose instead of creating a crazy looking, custom built & expensive home like that, you could just clean your crap up every day. But who wants to do that - not me!
November 11th, 2005
I think it's quite interesting that on my microwave I can enter a time where the seconds portion exceeds 60 seconds. For example I can tell it to zap my hot dog for 4:89, or 5 min 29. Nothing really spectacular, but it does make microwaving a nuclear hot dog a bit more interesting. After you microwave a hot dog long enough, a transformation takes place in it's subatomic structure and it becomes a brand new tasty crunchy snack.
Microwave a grape cut almost cut in half and you get a rising ball of flaming plasma. And of course, nuking a CD or DVD is always good for a spark.
November 11th, 2005
ComBots - Combat Robots, the largest fighting robot show in the world.: "Fighting Robots return to San Francisco". Dude, I'm so there.
November 11th, 2005
Since I've now thrown myself headlong onto to the crowded and uber-trendy blog bandwagon, it was inevitable that I would at some point wind up using Flickr. That time has come. I will be posting quick and dirty snapshots of typography to Flickr as my
Typosnaps Series. The first of these is "Right to Pass", which documents the unusual embedding in property of a legal warning plaque.
November 11th, 2005
Mobile phones making a monkey out of Japanese
Nobuo Masataka, a professor at the Kyoto University Primate Research Institute and author of the monster best seller "Keitai wo Motta Saru (Monkeys With Mobile Phones)," argues that the proliferation of mobile phones has got young Japanese making monkeys of themselves, aping the behavior patterns of chimpanzees.
November 11th, 2005
On Kaufman’s Lab, there is a how-to about
Converting a vintage cassette recorder into an external Hard Drive. Now you data is safe unless someone throws out the old piece of junk tape recorder. This project makes me think of an idea I had about the faceplates on car stereos. Now, this probably has been done by someone already, but a company should make 'dummy' faceplates for CD head units that look like a cassette tape deck, or an 8 track player. So when you leave your car, your car looks like it has a seriously ghetto stereo. While I don't think your average Escalade owner would want to bother doing this, it could well prevent break-ins for more standard looking autos.
November 10th, 2005
From Gizmodo -
Shower-Shower Showers Showers: "If you install too many of these, you could feasibly cause the fabric of the universe to collapse. You see, this is a shower shower. It showers your shower, cleaning it after your shower. So if you showered the shower shower, and then showered the first shower shower then you’ve basically got a shower shower shower ad infinitum, leading to a rift in the space-time continuum which may require you to install new tile after a gate to Hell opens on your floor.
BONUS: Look at her rapture, her palpable joy. She presses the button and she showers the shower. What an age in which we live!"
November 10th, 2005
After seeing the stop-motion video for the song featuring the Prodigy's retro lyric, I mistakenly thought the lyrical snippet was from an old Altern-8 track. Well, I was wrong. But not a day later I randomly come across the track by
Tiga - "You Gonna Want Me" on an MOS Annual 2006 compilation - and whaddya know! This one does use a lyrical bit from an Altern-8 track! I don't think this is just a coincidence. Tiga seems to be on the bleeding edge of several trends, many of them emanating from the UK. Mash-ups. Using rock band vocalists for dance tracks (You Gonna Want Me has the guy from Scissor Sisters crooning on it) and last but not least, sourcing tunes and lyrics from the origins of dance music (late 80s, early 90s acid-house & hardcore) Put this all together, and you end up with weird coincidences like I just experienced. However, if I was really on my game, this all would have been old news. I'm so uncool. The
video is pretty interesting though, and is by the brother of Michel Gondry, Oliver 'Twist' Gondry.
November 10th, 2005
I like Gloomy Bear. I have a Gloomy Bear phone charm (oh yeah, you heard me) I would love a TShirt like this one (as far I can tell, it was only available at a comic con) But I don't love Gloomy Bear THAT much.
Pretty cool costume though - and not made by a fan, but for a Gloomy store in Japan.
November 9th, 2005
"Actuary lifetime"
"at the end of the proverbial day"
"Digital homeless"
Convivial
Livid
November 9th, 2005
The gang at Mythbusters tested the
Water Bottle Jetpack myth from a Japanese game show video. Seems like the game show people probably used some TV showmanship (erm, digital effects, wires?) to make it all happen, since Kari wouldn't have gotten much altitude, according to their experiment, even if they had let her go for it.
November 9th, 2005
At my workplace, the restrooms have the standard man and woman symbols, but those symbols are placed on
distinctly shaped plaques - Men have a triangle, women have a circle. I'm at a loss how to explain this symbol choice, and I'm not sure that such generic shapes can be attributed to a gender. If anything it mixes messages - like "Men must Yield". All this mysterious symbolism is due to a
California law that forces establishments to adhere to this system, as well as an additional sign for unisex restrooms that is a triangle IN a circle with the man/woman/ada symbols inside. Now tell me that doesn't make total sense.
November 9th, 2005
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