…and all the regular boneheads

There’s all kinds of great news about… The Boneyard Man (mu-hu-hu-hu-ha-ha-haaaaaaa). The Boneheads (and I mean that lovingly, of course) are about to premiere special editions of their radio noir series on Rogers Television (Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays at 10:30pm, Fridays at 4:00pm, and Sundays at 9:30pm), and they’re going to start the sixth season of the live theatre show on September 26th and 27th at the Spriet Theatre in Covent Garden Market. And not least, they have a new website. (I’m probably jumping the gun posting that last bit, because it seems in a bit of disarray at the moment, but what the heck… it’s still great news.) Now all they need is to get that mailing list working a little more reliably….

Chef Boyardee

Sometimes I worry that I go on too much about how much I enjoy Lenni Jabour‘s music. Then I read something like Scott Andrew LePera’s post about Edie Carey and realize I’m not the only one who gets really into this stuff called music: Here’s a sure danger sign: more than once I found myself complaining and then what happened? as the two-minute MP3 sample tracks ended abruptly in mid-verse. And then I played the samples again and again and again, until I finally stopped torturing myself and bought the record…. This is like finding a four-leaf clover pressed inside the child’s book you picked up at a yard sale on a gorgeous Sunday afternoon.

Don’t miss the misses

Miss Lenni Jabour — and Miss Claire Jenkins — will be at C’est What this Friday. It’s Lenni’s first solo show in three years (in Toronto, anyway) and Claire’s second time opening for her. Lenni’s performances are just the thing to relieve stress and promote happiness.

My equally-addicted Lenni-friend Sara is somewhere out of the country on her own world tour these days, and I know she’ll be very disappointed to miss the festivities; I’m not sure if Greg (who discovered Lenni and Claire at the last gig) will be able to make it due to other recent events. So you folks who haven’t yet had the experience — recently-linked Scott and Donna (who need to get their Sirens CDs from me, hint hint), Dave, Amber, Sami and Laurie, Margaret, and the whole lot of the rest of you — need to get on your bikes and go to Toronto.

What are you doing still sitting there staring at your monitor? Get a move on!

Oops, I forgot Amber’s gig in Little Shop of Horrors at the Grand. Next time, maybe.

Subtleties of robots.txt

I recently discovered a subtlety of the /robots.txt file. (For those who don’t know, /robots.txt is a configuration file for web spiders that tells them what URLs not to retrieve from a website.) The issue is this: parsers will not fall back to a more general User-Agent setting if they’ve already matched a specific one. This is actually spelled out in A Standard for Robot Exclusion — If the [User-Agent] value is ‘*’, the record describes the default access policy for any robot that has not matched any of the other records — but I’d forgotten it when I updated my /robots.txt recently to exclude certain additional URIs (removed from my site due to abuse) that Google seems to have such a fondness for that it won’t drop them from its index.

Here’s an excerpt from /robots.txt that shows the error:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /CBP/

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /personal/

Imagine my surprise when Googlebot started spidering /cgi-bin/show?user=Webmaster, my address-obfuscating contact form, and pages under /personal/ which poison the lists of e-mail addresses and URIs that address harvesters collect.

I’ve updated /robots.txt to include both sets of URIs for the Googlebot, but (unlike Inktomi’s Slurp) Google doesn’t retrieve /robots.txt after it’s started spidering a site. I may have to extend my .htaccess blocking for the current dance to prevent the big G from grabbing a bunch of (more) useless garbage from my site.

Moral of the story: even if you’ve read the documentation, read it again before making assumptions. As my friend John is fond of saying, when you assume you make an ass of u and Dave.

All hits all the time

More than half a century ago the debut of vinyl LPs was a revelation for music fans. By the early ’70s, albums were being stuffed with up to a dozen hit tracks and sometimes ran close to 40 minutes.

Flash forward to today, when CDs max out north of 70 minutes… The days of releasing an album with 17 or 18 cuts are over….

MTV.com, via The Shifted Librarian

Um, excuse me? The only CD I’ve bought in recent memory that comes close to 70 minutes or 18 tracks is Darlene‘s, and I considered it unique enough to blog about. The 12-track CD is most common in my collection by far, and few are longer than 48 to 50 minutes; I often compile the contents of three discs to two CD-RWs to take with me in the car.

Which isn’t to say I prefer quantity to quality or musical preference: just the opposite, in fact. Given the choice between a 70-minute 20-track Christina Aguilera disc and a 12-track release from Spirit of the West, I’ll pick the latter every time.

Really Short Item

Finding it difficult to type due to my wrist, so just a link: Blogistan Pie. Classic.

Oh, and the London Fringe Festival rocks! The Fringe no longer rocks. The first four shows I attended were great, but the last three have been pretty bad, with the most recent (on the history of blues/jazz/rock) the worst yet. This, to me, is not a good trend. All in all, the Fringe rocked. I saw three more shows and they were uniformly excellent, for an overall success rate of 70%. That ain’t half bad.