Archive for June 2003

Holy crap!!!  I just woke up to a HUGE noise outside.  It sounded like an 18-wheeler had a wreck.  It was way too big of a noise not to investigate, so I threw my clothes on and went outside just as the sirens started coming. It was an empty schoolbus that crashed into a city bus right on our corner!!!  The driver of the schoolbus seemed to be the only one hurt, and it wasn’t bad, just a cut on the neck I think.  The passengers in the city bus were just waiting patiently inside for the thing to start up again.  So thank god, there were no bad injuries… the front of the schoolbus is all smashed in though.  I dunno, I just had to tell y’all, ‘cuz it’s the first time I’ve heard anything THAT enormous get into a crash.

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I’ve started going through all my online accounts, registered software etc. to notify anyone who cares that I’ll no longer be using the SpamCop address.  I’m very sad about it, but Julian didn’t change his mind, he’s still going to work with Cyveillance. (Read my old post about it if you’re confused.)

This is largely a political decision on my part, I realize that, but I made my decision and now it’s time to follow through with it.  I have less than a month to go, the clock’s tickin’ and I have a shitload of accounts to update.  Wish it didn’t have to come to this, but oh well.  :-( I still think SC’s the best tool for the job!  If only… if only…

Just finished installing yet another plugin, Kalsey’s MTSimpleComments.  It lets you merge comments and trackbacks together into one seamless list.  I’ve been getting more and more trackbacks, and they weren’t really being utilized, or even clearly shown on my website the way they should’ve been.  Big thanks to George for smacking me with that clue-by-four!

My brain hurts, I think I’ve had enough for today.  But at least it took my mind off getting boo-foo’ed by the robots.  :-|

Despite heavy surveillance of my site logs, I keep getting hammered by robots trying to download hundreds and hundreds of pages at once.  In some cases it’s just stupid IE users who bookmark my site and enable the ‘make available offline’ mode — they’ll check the option that lets it crawl a site however-many levels deep, and it ends up downloading my whole frickin’ site.  It’s making me furious!!!  GRRRRRR!!!!!!!  I really need to install some sort of throttling mechanism so I won’t have to keep banning them by hand.  Something that won’t affect the normal user, just the rapists.  I do have a spidertrap installed but it’s only catching the ones that are foolish enough to access the trap, which only happens once a week or so.

Sorry for ranting about this again.  Just makes me so mad, and wastes so much of my time every day.  Bastards!!!

When did this appear and how come I never noticed it before?  People actually getting paid for their work… what a concept!!  I’m so used to my entire life’s work being given away for free on the internet (whether I like it or not), it seems too good to be true.  I wonder how it’s working out for them?  It’s funny because yesterday at the barbecue, somebody sez to me "You charge $2.99 a month for people to read that thing, right?" I just laughed and said, "No, it’s totally free, where’d you get that idea?" And now I see this.  Weird.

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John and I have been watching the news about the porch collapse that killed 12 people last night.  This must have been right around the same time we were eating with Paul and Alison at the Golden Apple, just down the street on Wrightwood.  Oh my god!!!  It’s on CLTV right now.  ::shudder::  I’m praying it wasn’t anyone I know, but judging by the toney neighborhood where it happened, I kinda doubt it.  Either way it’s horrible, but still… please don’t let it be anyone I know.  Please?

Left: My producer and oldest friend in Chicago, Rian Murphy of the band Chestnut Station. In the middle: Lindsay Anderson of the band L’Altra — we’re pals and we’re gonna play music together soon. :-D On the right: our pal Paul Caporino of M.O.T.O. and Chestnut Station. Of course I took more pics but only the COOLEST people are letting me use them for my website.  Show no shame, y’all!!

Can anyone tell me the name of this church?  It’s the one on Lincoln & Wrightwood, across from the Golden Apple.

I TiVo’ed Gillian Welch on Conan O’Brien last night.  She kills me.  Kills me!!  I wanted to work on music today but I could NOT get that tune out of my head so I just said fuck it.  I’m trying to concentrate on "My Sharona" but it’s not working at all.  See, this is the reason songwriters should just refuse to listen to other people’s work.  Arghhh!!!

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Metafilter just reported the death of Strom Thurmond.  His departure is no surprise considering his age, and his dinosaur segregationist idealogy certainly won’t be missed.  What really surprises me though, is that TheState.com actually has the nerve to run the EXACT SAME tribute page that got leaked by the paper three weeks ago.  At the time, the Senator was not quite dead yet — the memorial page was done in preparation for his obviously upcoming demise, and sat unprotected on their website, just waiting for some smartypants Farker to come along and google it up.  It went straight to The Smoking Gun so you can do your own comparison.  Sometimes the media just boggles my mind, seriously. How dumb can they be to run the page again and not even mention their earlier gaffe?

I finished demo’ing a new song today (=yesterday).  I’m not telling you the title though,* because I’m too paranoid of all the replicants.  There are SOOOO many Eda-wannabes out there, god knows!!  I have to get it on a record first, or at least play it live before I go around revealing titles and shit.

Okay, I admit it, it’s just a dumb-sounding title and I think the song is a lot better than what you might imagine if you just heard the name.  Modesty first!!  But Rian liked it, and John liked it too, so that makes me very happy.  I need to write a lot more, for sure.  You don’t have to tell me I need to get another record together!! And a new BAND, and get another booking agent and, uggghhh.  There’s just too much organizational crap you have to do to get the ball rolling.  Bleccch.

* It’s called "Lucky Charm".  I’ve played it live at this point so I guess I can tell you!

John asked me if I knew of any Cocteau Twins lyrics sites, and I was all… omigod, you haven’t seen this?!?  If you’re a fan you’ll die laughing.  At the same time I think it’s about as accurate as you can get considering the source. I don’t think I could do much better and I’m a certified SuperFan(tm), I have all that gibberish totally memorized.

I love them so much, I think they need to keep making records and blow off the whole band-breakup thing.  My humble opinion.  :-)

Oh, what would I do without my daily dose of Fark?  Now we’re treated to Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University dress code for men.

Roasted, toasted and posted, just the way you like it.  :-)

Last week’s mystery song was "Snow Job" by the late Bruce Haack, purveyor of electronica for children. I’m amazed more people haven’t heard of him; I think his music is just magical.  There are a couple of compilations of his work out there if you check around and maybe do the mail-order thing.

Our power went out for a couple of hours this evening; it just came back on.  It was out for our whole block, and the block south of us too.  All the business owners were standing in front of their stores because they couldn’t see anything inside, or maybe it was to ward off looters.  The whole area was crawling with cops though, that was kinda reassuring.  We walked around the block a few times (nothing better to do!) but never saw any ComEd trucks.  We get power outages like this at least once a month every summer, it seems like.  It’s good times!  But at least you get to know your neighbors a little better.  Everybody gets a lot friendlier when we’re suddenly all stuck in a bad situation together.

From Fark…

Attention Ladies: When selecting your attire while at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, please view this slide show using mannequins to demonstrate what is and is not immodest.