Category: Personal

I just finished listening to the sneak peak (note: the sneak peak is only available until tomorrow, April 20) of Bruce Springsteen’s upcoming We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions and am glad to report that I like it a whole lot better than after seeing the John Henry video a couple of weeks ago. Even the closing bonus track, Froggie Went A-Courtin’, which you probably remember best as a little kids’ tune, came off well.

The most significant reason I can put my finger on is that the band’s overall energy blasts out of the speakers from most of the songs. This isn’t another Nebraska, Devils and Dust or Ghost of Tom Joad, with stark, minimal musical arrangements underlying darkly negative lyrics; of the three only Nebraska really worked for me, mainly due to Atlantic City, State Trooper and Johnny 99. Seeger is much more of a feelgood outing though old Pete’s lyrics on tunes like John Henry can twist their tales back against the instrumental backing. Maybe it’s Greg Liszt’s banjo but I can picture this music driving people to the dance floor at an old time hoedown.

Our nephew Jake went to Florida, some beach resort on the Gulf of Mexico side, for a vacation from the tough life of an 11 month old and took his mom, dad, brothers and sister along too. His first plane rides and he had a blast. All we got were these four new photos, but we’ll see him in just a few weeks in person!

I’ve been doing fairly well again this season in the SpoFi EPL Fantasy League, standing fourth after Sunday’s matches, but screwed up last night. Easter means the teams squeeze in an extra match in the first part of the week and so a new fantasy league round covered the games played today, tomorrow and Wednesday, or at least most do. Arsenal doesn’t, since they meet Villareal of La Liga Wednesday in the first leg of their Champions League semi-final; also off are Liverpool and the teams they meet, Fulham and Manchester City.

I didn’t realize all this until after dinner last night while checking the standings. I had three Arsenal players and so I made two transfers (no way was I giving up Thierry Henry), looking to take most advantage of the remaining four rounds. This morning I saw a few scores, such as Chelsea walloping Everton, and thought to my self, “Self, you did remember to make Lampard captain, right?” Captains get their points doubled.

Of course, self did not remember to switch the captaincy from Henry to Lampard. Thereby wasting at least 11 points, and possibly 14 once bonuses are awarded. Henry will need to go on a tear the last few games to make it up to me.

Bill’s Movie Reviews :: Hotel Rwanda: thanks, Stan!

I used to read and love every new Spenser novel Robert B. Parker turned out–you remember Spenser, the characters and general mileau were the basis of the Robert Urich TV series Spenser: For Hire–but after about 20 Parker seemed to get stuck in a going through the motions rut and I stopped reading. He finally realized it himself I think and decided to create two other characters so he’d have to keep the muscles stretching.

The tactic must have worked because Bad Business (2004) is definitely a return to form. This story throws our favorite PI into the middle of an Enron/WorldCom situation when the widow of a murdered top exec comes for help clearing her name. Turns out the books aren’t the only thing cooking at Kinergy: there’s also a free love party hosted by a radio love doctor to confuse the motives.

Parker makes a couple of glaring continuity errors but they were easy to forgive since I read these novels for the wordplay, especially the clash of Spenser’s literary verbal style against expectations generated by his appearance and background. Also, his completely wonderful devotion to life partner Dr. Susan Silverman. Spenser gets the bad guy at the end, of course, but the ride there was fun.

recommended

This morning I had to stop at the bank and take out a loan so I could fill up the car’s gas tank (ba da boom).

Can you understand how the Italian police could not catch the top man in the Sicilian mafia for 40 years, until yesterday? No matter how careful Provenzano was, he was still running the biggest criminal gang in the country, actively, for the last dozen years and had to communicate and keep in touch somehow.

There is much unhappiness in the ex-Sun camp, exemplified by former VP John Shoemaker’s blast at the company. I certainly agree that the board should have done whatever was necessary to keep Ed Zander and his results since taking over Motorola are good evidence. I spoke with Ed a few times when NetDynamics was acquired; he came by to meet the troops, something Scott McNealy did not do, and showed a strong understanding of why NetD was good for Sun.

The New York Times has a decent article about how not all blogs are being written by youngsters or even the middle aged such as me though I think the phrase they coined to refer to the group, elderbloggers, is pretty terrible. I wonder if I can get my Dad to start writing because he really knows how to tell a story.

Bush, Bush, Bush. I just would like to have one week day when he and his crew don’t get headlines for yet another stupid and/or dangerous decision.

John Gruber may, like Robert X Cringely, not always be right–though he is often funny–but reading his occasional essays such as today’s analysis of why Boot Camp does not presage the availability of OS X for non-Apple hardware nor does it mean that Apple will be competing (any more directly than they already do) with Microsoft. Personally, that the new Intel-based laptops can boot into Windows or run it in a VM layer is giving me thoughts of spending some cash on one this summer, after the second wave of machines are released.

Open source project Subversion is pretty much the source control system of choice in the Rails world; TextDrive includes it in the shared hosting plan I use. From all I’ve read it meets and even exceeds the requirements for such a tool so fine by me. Never having had to use any SCM tools in the past, always having been pretty much developing off by myself, getting started isn’t simple but the time has come when it must be done.

Installing is brain dead, just unzip the Windows binaries, install the highly recommended TortoiseSVN client, reboot. Create repository. Import a special trio of directories (trunk, branches, tag). Import the existing Rails project into trunk. Rename the existing project directory. Check out the project. Ooh, look at all the shiny icons in Windows Explorer!

I also installed Eclipse this morning, finally removed the redundant standalone Ruby and Apache web server installs (Instant Rails is better for me, I think) and just need the RadRails boys to get 0.6.2 out the door with Rails 1.1.1 support and I’m good to go.

Sure, I actually need to write the code but with all these swell, free tools how hard can that be?

p.s. I just checked the news at Instant Rails and see they’ve got an update which, since it includes the very cool Mongrel, I probably need to pull down.

The library had Nick Hornby’s latest, A Long Way Down, so I grabbed it off the new releases shelf to see what the male chick flick author had to say on the subject of suicide and if he could make it funny. Fortunately for me, himself and the rest of you lot, he did. Lots of folks, including Johnny Depp, agree and Depp and partners have bought the film rights.

Hornby has definitely increased the sophistication of his writing with each book, there’s a real progression from Fever Pitch (which is now classified as a memoir, though I thought it was a novel) to High Fidelity (book or movie) to About a Boy (who makes the best screen Nick, Colin Firth, John Cusack or Hugh Grant?) to How to Be Good (apparently being brought to the screen with Emma Thompson, mmmm!) to this one. Autobiographical, fantasy biography, protagonist with some basic similarities to himself but in most respects very different, a female lead working out problems with which very few men would really have to deal, and finally four main characters, all very different from Mr. H., alternating point of view control like a relay marathon.

Still, Hornby has a certain style and Down sticks with it; also, the tales always take place in London. No matter which of the gang of four is up front, the prose is stream of consciousness, as if the character were sitting in the Big Brother confession room or a church confessional recanting events as best they remember (or want to), no holds barred. The quartet are:

• Maureen, 51, single mother of a 20-something son born in a vegetative state
• Martin, 40-something divorced, disgraced former TV breakfast show presenter
• JJ, 29, American expat small time rock and roller
• Jess, 18, total brat daughter of a junior Cabinet minister

They meet on New Year’s Eve on the roof of Topper’s House, a gone to seed apartment tower
known as a good place to jump from if you prefer to not awake at the bottom.
Other than JJ, each has gone with precisely that intention and even he is scouting the possibility. The story covers the three months which follow since none has really sunk to the requisite level of despair.

Hornby really achieves something with this book. Each of the four is truly a different character, fleshed out and not particularly likeable. Except, of course, for the common inability, imposed by the confessional writing style, to hold anything back during turns at the camera. Perhaps Martin could have been a bit darker but how deep is a disgraced former TV breakfast show presenter anyway? Frankly, I had trouble putting the book down.

definitely recommended

FYI: According to the website, Johnny Depp bought the film rights; it only mentions that he plans to produce it, no word if he’d play Martin.

Amazon has the first video from Bruce Springsteen’s new release, We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, available for the viewing. The DualDisc–who knows what to call things these days–comes out in three weeks but if the rest is more or less like John Henry, the video track, I won’t be leaping out of my chair to buy it. Sorry Bruce, I’m happy that you’ve made music that means so much to you, but it just ain’t my thing.

DeLay Is Quitting Race and House

Ghana coach Ratomir Dujkovic says teen sensation Freddy Adu should play for Ghana at World Cup 2006 this summer. Seriously dude, put the has brownies down. The DC United star has already played for the US National Team, coming on as a sub in the last CONCACAF qualifier against Jamaica, so I’m pretty sure he can’t play for any other country’s side. Besides, why would he want to play for the country his parents had to flee when he was a little child? Is that how people where Dujkovic comes from say thank you?

My good friend Pam has finally released her first CD through CD Baby, Roses and Bone, and I can tell you that if you enjoy heartfelt, emotional singer-songwriters like Shawn Colvin or Stephen Bishop you’ll probably enjoy Pam’s music. Since Pam plays piano that’s the featured instrument rather than guitar, though she does have pedal steel support from Bobby Black (Commander Cody, Asleep at the Wheel, New Riders of the Purple Sage). You can listen to the songs online and the $12.95 is money well spent. She was back in the studio this afternoon to kickstart her next recording.

Being humor-deficient (you’ve read my movie reviews, right?) April Fools is laways a bit of bother for me. Unless the goofs are as obvious as Scoble or WordPattern, I have a much tougher time deciding if an announcement is a joke or not.

[Cross-posted from Bill Grosso’s blog]

SDForum is putting on a Ruby conference on April 22-23. It’s currently priced at $199 (for both days), and for that you get:

• An overview of Rails 1.1 from one of the people at 37Signals.
• A talk on scalability from the CTO of Joyent (who run, among other things, TextDrive, the official hosting site of Ruby on Rails).
• 10 other insanely great talks
• Two breakfasts
• Two lunches
• A t-shirt (if you sign up before we order them)

When you consider that other Ruby events are going for $500 or more, we’re quite the bargain. So, sign up already. And get the free t-shirt.

[I’ll be one of the gray-shirted volunteers.]

Paul Simon will celebrate his 50th year of making records with a huge surprise. Actually, with SURPRISE, a new record several years in the making out May 9th. Why is it a huge surprise? Because his producer is Brian Eno. I’ve loved both men’s music for years but they’re just so different that I’m having a hard time imagining what the collaboration will sound like.

In an AP interview, Simon says he has admired the British experimentalist for years and after meeting at a dinner party they agreed to try see what working together would generate. “We’re both ‘sounds’ people,” Simon explained. “We’re both about soundscapes. I thought he would bring an element that I hadn’t ever encountered before, electronics, into a guitar record. Theoretically, it seemed to be a good idea. And when we actually did it, you could tell right away it was a good idea.”

The closest to this I can think of is way back in the late ’70s when frequent Eno collaborator Robert Fripp produced Daryl Hall’s first solo record. I quite liked Sacred Songs but this was a very minority view; compared to all the other Hall & Oates releases in those days it sold almost nothing, not even as much as you’d expect just from core fans going to the store on the day of release. While Eno has had some great successes as a producer, they’ve come with artists very different than Paul Simon: Talking Heads, some late ’70s David Bowie, Devo and, most prominently, U2.

Surprising? Sure. But Simon has got my attention in a way I don’t remember since 1986 and Graceland.

Despite it being one of my favorite movies of recent years, and despite having enjoyed the other books I’ve read by Nick Hornby, for some reason I never got around to reading High Fidelity until this past week. You know, the original where Rob Gordon is the same devestated mid-30s guy not sure if he’s coming or going with a strange collector’s record store but set in London rather than the Americanized movie.

I watched the movie again last night to see how it compares directly with this novel and I have to tell you, most of the great lines come straight from the pages into John Cusack’s mouth. Jack Black’s Barry is much more entertaining than his print counterpart though, probably because his body language and tone of voice add so much to the sarcasm.

Hornby, who wasn’t involved with the screenplay even though he wrote the Fever Pitch adaption before (the Colin Firth original was not the Jimmy Fallon crap released in 2004, okay?) and the About a Boy adapation after, gives much more depth to Rob’s soulsearching than can really be shown in 100 minutes on screen. And more detail on the five former girlfriends as well. Fortunately, the movie doesn’t go too far off except in the skater punk record subplot though that’s understandable because a movie needs visuals and action in a way that novels don’t.

Probably the biggest reason I enjoyed both versions so well is that I identify so well with the story and see Rob as a somewhat idealized version of myself. Except for the flunking out of college because, after two years of dating and living together, Catherine Zeta-Jones dumped me for someone in her art class. That would be the idealized part, along with Cusack being tall and actually funny. Sigh…

Anyway, there is no bad Nick Hornby book. You might think of High Fidelity as a male chick flick in that it’s all about how a guy deals with his feelings about love and relationships. That would be accurate but missing the good bits about records and, well, living with Catherine Zeta-Jones.

recommended

I’ve been using Alessandro Fulciniti’s terrific JavaScript library since redesigning this site last Summer. Now he’s released Nifty Corners Cube, an even better implementation of his ideas, and I’ve upgraded the site to it. Unfortunately, at least for me, there seems to be a problem with one bit which breaks it on Internet Explorer–of course all of you are using Firefox, Safari, Camino or Opera and can’t see the problem, right? Or reading via RSS, also no problem. Hopefully I’ll get a resolution soon or drop back to the old version but if you know the fix or workaround, please do let me know.

Had a beer with the three developers of the very cool RadRails Ruby on Rails IDE tonight (along with Dan Kohn) and, let me tell you, these guys are all just barely 21 and able to buy a beer but they have more than enough smarts to pull off a project like this in less than a year (from starting work to the expected 1.0 at or just before RailsConf in June).

Coming to an event like EclipseCon, which is what brings the three juniors to the valley from the Rochester Institute of Technology, could have been overwhelming. Heck they’re the youngest people at this expensive conference, had jobs offers and more all day, party invites from Microsoft, and yesterday won the Eclipse Best Developer Tool Award! But Kyle, Marc and Matt are really cool and will be going places, though the places will have to wait the 15 months remaining until college graduation.

The Reds went to Birmingham for the FA Cup quarterfinal match and–no kidding–scored seven goals. A clean sheet is one thing but Liverpool simply humiliated the brummy bandits. First goal came after 54 seconds and the second after four minutes, headers by Hyypia and Crouch, then Crouch kicked in a second at 38 minutes on a sweet pass from Gerrard (who else?) before going off at 55. His replacement, Morientes, scored the fourth a couple of minutes later and John Arne Riise unleashed a trademark left foot blast from 25 yeards at the left side of the box. To make misery complete one of the defenders let in an own goal for the sixth and Djibrille Cisse, determined to get in on the action, splashed the seventh just before the death. Another bit of good news was the return of Momo Sissoko from nearly losing his eye last month in Portugal. After hardly being able to score for months the team has now scored 15 in their last three matches. On to the derby with Everton Saturday, the featured early show on FSC!