Archive for July, 2002

Wired: “Here at the very edge of space, at an altitude four times the height of Mount Everest, he will leap from his craft to begin a six-minute descent that will see him reaching supersonic speeds between 1,200 and 1,600 kilometers per hour (between 745 and 1,000 mph).” When they say leap, they mean it — just him and a parachute at 150,000 feet. Oh, and a special suit so that he doesn’t explode.

What to do with all those extra mouse pads? Build a couch.

Here’s something that really freaks me out: face painting. I don’t understand how the quality of your average carnival or town fair is significantly raised by adding this activity to its roster. Temporary or permanent tatoos I could see being an asset, but little animals and shapes on your face? I just don’t get it…

Feeling nostalgic for the mid-1990′s, I’ve been rediscovering the indie-rock greatness of Sebadoh. If you’re wondering what they’re up to, take a look at Lou Barlow’s hand-sketched site, loobiecore.com as well as Jason Lowenstein’s jakerock.com, where I learned of his newly released solo disc on Sub Pop (check out the free “download of the week” MP3 on the Sub Pop home page).

I have just consumed what I believe to be the most dangerously sour substance in the world. Altoid’s new (curiously strong) Citrus Sours. Remember Sour Patch Kids? Mere child’s play by comparison.

Goodbye cederholm.tv, hello cederholm.org.

It’s amazing to think this site has been running in some way, shape or form for coming up on 2 years. Paying $55 for another year of .tv just didn’t seem to make sense when cederholm.org became available for $8.95. Aside from the domain name I made some minor tweaks, fixing up a couple of the the color schemes in the customize tool.

Let me know if you find any bugs. Mad props to the WestHost support people for installing the necessary Perl libraries in record time.

I just witnessed the Boston Red Sox humiliate the Tampa Bay Devil Rays at Fenway Park (many thanks to Jeff). Final score: 22-4. I’ve never seen anything quite like that before. Today is Nomar Garciaparra’s 29th birthday, and as a present to himself he hit 3 home runs today — the 3rd, a grand slam over the Green Monster. 7 home runs were scored total. It was embarrassing.

At around the 7th inning we headed down behind the plate and sat in the front row, right behind the backstop (photo shown above, click for larger view). Here’s Willie Banks throwing a fastball, from a few rows back (click for photo).

Immediately after the game, a monsoon ensued (how’s that for a 2 word combo?). The sky was most certainly ominous (click for photo). What a day…

My theory on jaguaro.org’s “One Hundred Albums You Should Remove from Your Collection Immediately” is that the site wanted to stir up some controversy and get a heck of a lot of traffic at the same time. So many of these albums are seminal classics… I guess it’s all an opinion.

For some reason, some of the best photos I’ve been taking are of flowers. It’s ok to like flowers though. I’ve decided it’s ok. It’s something colorful to focus on. Here are some flowers (daisies?) that were in a field on a previous trip to Misery Island.

Best video ever: Weezer with the Muppets (click on keep fishin’). I’m at a loss for words after viewing this. If you miss the Muppet Show, you gotta check this out. Weezer continues to dish out better videos than all the rest. (via shellen)

News.com: “… a number of those who walked away from CEO Steve Jobs’ keynote on Wednesday were also puzzled by Jobs’ pronunciation of the new version of Mac OS X, code-named Jaguar. Jobs pronounces the new version of the OS “Jag-WHY-ur.” Asked about the diction question, Jobs quipped, “Because I’m weird. Everyone tells me I pronounce it wrong.”

Amazoogle? Googazon? The Amazon API is already being tapped into.

Some really spot-on analysis of yesterday’s MacWorld keynote speech. (via scripting news)

I hate flying. I haven’t flown in a while actually, but when I do I may feel a little more at ease. I owe this to reading a few of Salon.com’s Ask the Pilot columns. A real, live pilot answers questions on everything from “will wind-shear break the wings off” to “why are takeoffs so damn freaky sometimes?” I found this by accident this morning after downloading Salon’s offerings to my Palm through AvantGo. Annoyingly, I can’t find the actual article I read this morning, and doing a search on the site led me only to older columns. There also appears to be no index page for all the “Ask the Pilot” articles. Boo.

Sent from a cathode fan in Germany:

Date: Wed, 17 Jul 2002 02:15:06 -0700

To: “Cathode” xxxxxx@yahoo.com

From: xxxxx@fh-trier.de

Subject: An MP3.com Fan has sent you an email!

The following message was sent to you from a visitor to your

page on MP3.com. MP3.com is not responsible for its content.

______________________________

Hello,

i’ve heard your four tracks at mp3.com and must say that they are

really beautiful. i think that’s the kind of instrumental music i’ve

ever waited for! so are there any more songs of you since today. i

would be very happy! here in germany it is not very easy to get in

contact with smaller bands from the usa. so how can i get releases of

you?

best regards,

xxxx xxxxxxx,

Germany

Names have been omitted to protect the innocent. You gotta love an email like that though. And I know that if I tried to write in German it would most certainly come out a lot funnier than this.

I’ve been seeing lots of talk about the recent release of Amazon.com’s Web Services API. Google released an API a few months back and lots of cool stuff came out as a result. It’ll be interesting to see what people do with these tools.

Apple releases OS X 10.2 (Jaguar), 17″ flat-panel iMac, new iPods, iTunes 3, etc. today.