January 2003 – Page 2

Never

Musical events that will never happen:

Phish hook up with hHead to sing a song about Barnes and Barnes.
Uisce Beatha and Eagles chart again with their Mexican-themed Celtic hit Hotel Beatha California.
Las Ketchup (with special guest Joan Osborne) sing the Lennon/McCartney song Mean Mr. Mustard for a McDonald’s ad campaign.
Sirens cover Neil Young‘s Ambulance Blues.
A reanimated Louis Prima joins The Donnas when they open for–who else?–the Material Girl herself.
Snoop Dogg and Stray Cats release a Mickey Mouse Club tribute album.

Residents of Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, Georgia, South Carolina, and Indiana! You have a chance, sometime in the next six weeks, to see Sirens in concert. You lucky, lucky people. Along with a boatload of new songs, you’ll experience the sweetest version of Girl of the North Country that I’ve ever heard.

The rest of us–at least, those who don’t have a chance to get to The Ugly Mug Cafe on Sunday afternoon, or who haven’t been there the last two nights–will have to bide our time, but at least we can follow the tour vicariously.

(Oh, and by the way, I’m still hoping that Jessie will get in touch, partly ’cause I don’t know when Voodoo Butter is going to be playing next.)

Jessie

More to say about seeing Sirens at The Ugly Mug shortly. For now, though, if Jessie happens to read this, please post a comment here or send me an e-mail.

The same, but different

Take forty-dollar friendship and:

modify the first sentence slightly;
shift the anonymizing letter a few places;
change one artist to a group; and
rewrite everything after i drove back up the interstate

and you’ve got something very similar to my version.

Except for one detail: it was seven years earlier and a different group, but I did it twice.

(ticketstubs via Lawrence Lessig)

Non-intuitive

James Duncan Davidson probably just explained why I wasn’t chosen as a Quicken beta tester this year, after being invited back a couple of times. You see, this year, when they asked what OS I’d be testing on, I responded Windows 2000, under VMware on Red Hat Linux. James’ final words are mine too: So, I’ll be staying at the current version of Quicken Home and Business (which thankfully does run in [VMware]) for the time being and will be migrating away from Intuit’s products soon unless they fix this. Now, I just have to find some software that works as well for my needs.

Eldred v. Ashcroft in Canada?

I don’t know enough about Eldred v. Ashcroft to comment coherently on today’s U.S. Supreme Court decision. I am curious what effect, if any, that court’s ruling will have on Canadian copyright law.

Lawrence Lessig: [To] respond to the disharmony caused by the Sonny Bono Act, now Europe is calling for another increase in their term. Japan too is doing the same.

XHTML2

Not that anyone cares what I think, but I had a lot of the same thoughts as Ian Hickson and Dorothea Salo when I read the first draft XHTML 2.0 specification a few months ago. Eric Meyer is broadly sympathetic with several of its detractors (and I’ve seen even more), but points out that you can use XSLT to bridge the gap between old browsers and new ones. In fact, that’s just what Sjoerd Visscher did five months ago, after showing that current browsers can already deal with a lot of XHTML2 through stylesheets and binding technologies like HTCs or XBL.

Right now XHTML2 is a science experiment, just like publishing a weblog in RSS with embedded HTML (instead of the other way around, published as a separate page). It’s changeable, and changing; it’s been in the works already for more than two years, and will be for at least two more.

Ian points out, correctly, that [the] fact that xHTML2 won’t be widely used before the end of the decade is not a problem. For some reason, the Internet populous has this strange idea that if something isn’t adopted overnight, it must be a failure. Perhaps eventually I’ll think it’s a pain in the ass with no demonstrable benefit (NB: I realize that’s a comment on XHTML 1.1, not XHTML 2). But for now I haven’t made up my mind.

Big

Some people would have you believe Londonontario is all mixed up for the various downtown projects the city has recently undertaken, but we’ve got nothing on Soap Lake, WA (via Burningbird).

Even the Soap Lake project can’t hold a candle (ha ha) to the Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota, though. I mean, Weird Al Yankovic even wrote a song about it. There’s no higher praise.

Or terribly right

There’s something terribly wrong with a world in which kids think their elders’ culture is hip.

Cecil Adams, What the heck is leetspeek? (via kottke.org)

Who are you?

(Who who, who who)

63.195.114.133 - - [11/Jan/2003:16:32:54 -0500] "HEAD /blog/ HTTP/1.1" 200 0 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.15; Mac_PowerPC)"
63.195.114.133 - - [11/Jan/2003:16:32:54 -0500] "GET /blog/ HTTP/1.1" 200 37548 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.15; Mac_PowerPC)"
63.195.114.133 - - [11/Jan/2003:16:33:01 -0500] "GET /blog/index.rdf HTTP/1.1" 200 8298 "http://peterjanes.ca/blog/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.15; Mac_PowerPC)"
63.195.114.133 - - [11/Jan/2003:16:33:01 -0500] "GET /blog/rss2.xml HTTP/1.1" 200 5420 "http://peterjanes.ca/blog/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.15; Mac_PowerPC)"

63.195.114.133 is a PacBell dialup address, although there’s an occasional Verizon IP thrown in for good measure. You’re retrieving all three versions of the blog every time I update, and checking it via HEAD every hour.

It’s not a problem, I’m just curious–don’t know many people on the West Coast.