Archive for July 2003

This is hilarious!!  I entered my name and chose ‘sensitive songwriting’, ‘female singer’.  It didn’t ask me for an album title.  Here’s what I got:

Edith Frost
Odyssey of the Mind
1991, ***1/2

Until now, Edith Frost was principally known as a explosive live act.

Underneath her antics lies a eclectic artistic maturity that reveals how she has grown since she was a young new-waver. Imagine the aching rock of Joni Mitchell’s "Clouds" grafted, as if by a mad scientist from the bayou, to the crass hip-hop assault of the No Limit Tank Soldiers, and you haven’t come close to describing the sounds on Odyssey of the Mind. Don’t call it a comeback — Edith Frost has been here for years — but never with such Brian Eno-produced blue-eyed soul. An ambitious concept album about being a loner and the importance of brushing your teeth, the main dish of this gutsy meal is the playful "Lost Tongue."

Every chord change on "Women Notice Things Like That" will break your heart. This one’s getting a lot of rotation at the office. Edith Frost gained a reputation early on for being savvy. I will have this album on repeat mode, forever.

I just did some serious monkeying around with my htaccess file, so please let me know if anything goes wrong for you. Symptoms might include:

• you get a ‘forbidden’ message when trying to d/l an mp3 manually using a normal browser, as opposed to an offline downloader
• an image won’t show up on a page or in a popup window
• you’re blocked from doing or seeing something, but you swear you’re not a robot!
• you see a message saying ‘This image is stolen!’, blah blah blah

Please let me know ASAP if you spot any of these problems, or any others I haven’t thought of. The idea is to block robots from mass-downloading my images and MP3s, while allowing humans to see/download them from my pages. But proxy servers and other complications might screw that up, so… just please don’t be shy about reporting any weirdness, mmm-kay?

Can anybody who knows Movable Type tell me why people using grub would be trying to access my mt-tb.cgi all the time?  I have grub disallowed but I know nothing about it and I’m afraid I might have done something stupid.  What’s grub for?  Are you a good witch or a bad witch?

I just installed a sweet free cgi script called Access Log Viewer. (I took the precaution to put it in a special secret agent 007 password-protected subdirectory and changed the name so nobody but me will find it.) The reason I needed it is because I keep downloading the same frickin’ log file OVER and OVER and OVER, when all I really need to do is check the last day’s worth of traffic.  As the month goes by it gets bigger and bigger, so by the end of the month I start feeling really stupid downloading the thing for the 30th time.  This tool will only grab the section I need and not the whole file.  Anyhoo… I’m happy I found it and I feel slightly smarter than I did ten minutes ago.  :-)

Last week’s Mystery Song was a live outtake of "Are You Lonesome Tonight", attempted by Elvis Presley.  I have no idea what was going on there, but he could NOT stop laughing!!  It’s from a Swedish compilation; I got it from a member of my old Incredibly Strange Music group on Audiogalaxy.

This week’s song is ready, as usual!  Don’t spoil the surprise, now…

• Hair
• Toilet paper
• Cockroaches
• Tin foil
• Vomit
• Dust bunnies
• Laser pointers
• Shoes
• Cat turds
• Kitty food (last resort)

I finally got ahold of Dave McGurgan from Yakuza Mag and got his blessing to post an MP3 of my version of "When The Bees Are In The Hive".  I’m going to wait a day or two before I post it though, to let the traffic die down a little. There’s the song I posted yesterday, plus the Mystery Song I’ll be posting tonight, plus (::ahem::) referrers from outside that I only wish would be coming over for a better reason.  :-O

Isn’t it weird how I had a dream last night that my traffic was shooting through the roof due to unexpected exposure from people in the entertainment industry?  I think it’s weird, especially ‘cuz I hardly ever remember my dreams.  (I can’t even afford to be a stoner anymore, so I can’t blame that.)

OK, so he does remember.  I guess I just assumed ‘cuz (a) I was just a freelancer at his shop, and only ever saw him a few times, and (b) the few comments I’d posted to his blog never showed up. Or something like that.  Now he’s sending all these referrers my way, and I feel bad for being such a judgmental bitch. Why do I have such a big mouth?  Why do I name names and go linking to them so they’ll immediately know what I’ve said?  Is it some pathetic passive-aggressive cry for attention or what?

Read the rest of this entry »

I just dreamed I had a job working for TechTV’s The Screen Savers!!!!!!  And Leo was there… and Kevin was there… and Morgan was there… and Patrick was there too!  But Morgan isn’t even on TSS anymore, and Sarah and Jessica weren’t there, but whatever.  Wow, it was so cool!!  I guess I must really think of those folks as my pals after watching their show every day for so long.

Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to a brand new blog category I created, MP3s.  Guess what it’s for?  Heheh.

Debuting at number one is Edith Frost vs. Arp Destructor – "Poor Wayfaring Stranger". The song is traditional; this version was created around 1994 by Alex Morse using a home recording I’d done.  I hadn’t heard it in all these years but just noticed that he posted it on HIPTINGLE last month.  He never bothered to ask me how I’d feel about that, so I feel no shame in doing the same thing to him.  :-P

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

RSS is a format I know relatively little about.  I use it and I’m interested in its progress, but only because I’m a geek.  There’s been a lot of in-fighting going on, and over the past few months I’ve unsubscribed from a couple of feeds that were bothering me with too much whining, bickering and chest-thumping.

I just unsubscribed from the feed of my former employer Adam Curry for the same reason.  He doesn’t remember me and wouldn’t care anyway; I’m just sayin’.  IMO the people will decide like they always do, and the developers will follow to give the masses what they want. Me, I like RSS just fine the way it is, but if a new format wins the battle, so what?  As long as I can read my headlines and excerpts I’ll be happy.

Read the rest of this entry »

Get yourself over to Basic Hip to download a copy of Leona Anderson’s "Music To Suffer By". I have the LP, it’s one of my most prized possessions.  The albums at Basic Hip are only available for a week or so, and I don’t know when this was posted, so you’d better hurry!

I’m going to use this post to keep an ever-changing list of the various robots and browsers that I see crawling through my site. A lot of them are benign, but many have strange names that I’m not likely to remember the next time I look at my server logs. If you’re interested in such things, I highly recommend the forums at WebmasterWorld to learn more. One discussion that really takes the cake is this: A Close to perfect .htaccess ban list.

Note that there are zillions of robots out there and it would be pointless to try to catalog all of them. So I’m just going to list some of the ones I’ve actually seen traversing my pages. Also, I KNOW I’ve included some mistakes and misconceptions on my list. Please pipe up if you beg to differ on anything I’ve said.

Update: I’ve removed the ‘good guys / bad guys’ designations since so many of my decisions are personal ones, i.e. search engines which might be ‘good’ but don’t bring me any traffic. Hopefully my notes might give you an idea whether you want to investigate something further or not.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hope y’all are having a fun weekend.  John and I are just relaxing at home, though he did go out earlier to catch M.O.T.O.‘s show at the Record Emporium.

I’m just not feelin’ the 4th of July.  John articulated my feelings exactly when he agreed… "Just not feeling too patriotic this year!!" After everything that’s happened, I’m full of ambivalence about what it means to be an American right now.  What’s so great about being the sole superpower when we’re going around bullying our way through every situation?  I’m glad Saddam’s out of power, but the Iraqis don’t seem too happy about our occupation there. We’ve totally alienated the French, but I still love France.  I share common ancestry with our President, but his attitude and actions have really scared me and soured my attitude of what it means to hold that office.  If we’re such a great country then why aren’t we better at leading by example?  Sorry to be a downer. Maybe I’m just putting my thoughts down for this time next year, so I won’t forget what it was like.  Here’s hoping next year’s festivities see me feeling a little more positive about our place in this world.

So, I went ahead and disabled the display of all — and I mean ALL — e-mail addresses on this site.  Well, except for the ones that I want to get spammed, like webmaster@riaa.com, heheh.  If you want to comment, you need to give a name and e-mail address but the address won’t be displayed.  You can even fake if you really want to be anonymous.  And I swear on a stack of Bibles that I won’t EVER, not in a million billion years, use your address for any reason unless it’s a private message from me (and only me) to you.  I just made it required because there are times that I feel like contacting the person directly and most of the time I can’t, because of course nobody wants to post their address for fear of getting spammed.

So, comment yourself silly and have no fear!!  I’m a raging, pissed-off rabid pit-bull trained to protect you from all fucking asshole spammers.  :-)

I just installed a very sweet script called WPOISON and disguised it as a guestbook.  In reality it’s a black hole for robots that come through looking for spammable e-mail addresses.  You can look at it over here… don’t worry, it won’t fry your machine or anything.  All it does is generate a random list of bogus e-mail addresses.  It also adds a list of fake links that look different, but really just lead back to the same page all over again, with a different randomized list of addresses / links.  Go to the WPOISON homepage to find out more.  It took all of two seconds to install, and if I can choke up just one of them bots, I’ll be so happy.

Read the rest of this entry »