2003 September
I was lucky enough to attend the Coors Amphitheatre show in Chula Vista, CA on Sunday. As usual, Radiohead was awesome (I first saw them in 2001 at Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View). They’ve switched up their show a lot and I liked the new changes. My favorite was the introduction of a camera on Thom’s piano that zooms in really close to his face. They used this for “You and Whose Army?”. During the song, when Thom sang, “Come on…,” the camera would zoom in almost right up to his eyeball and he would wink at the crowd. It was hilarious. Another cool introduction was the video screen they used for “The National Anthem.” The video had a red backdrop and a distorted orange image of Thom with a ticker in the bottom right that showed the current time down to seconds. It was very apocalyptic.
Supergrass opened for Radiohead and they were all right but not as great as the Beta Band, who opened for Radiohead back in 2001. However, I hadn’t really listened to any of Supergrass’ songs prior to the show so I really don’t know enough about the band to judge them. They didn’t floor me at the show though.
At Ease has an excellent recap of the show as well.
The New York Times ran a feature entitled “The Role of the Delete Key in Blog.” (on a side note, isn’t the grammar strange in the title of the article?) Apparently, newspapers such as the Sacramento Bee are starting to screen posts on its contributors’ web sites. Daniel Weintraub, one of the Bee’s best columnists, is such a victim.
I’m against the screening of weblogs by editors. Weblogs are the heart of the grassroots newsmedia. Let’s keep it that way. I’m also against “corporate blogs,” such as the Sacramento Bee’s tactic of making columnist blogs. Weblogs should be free of corporate sponsorship and corporate control. I’m not against blog text ads (e.g. Dive Into Mark, Daring Fireball). However, I am against corporate blog sponsorship and hosting. Once you have an editor looking over your shoulder, you can’t write your full opinion. Instead, you have to cater to your readers and your editor. This to me sounds much like a newspaper or magazine. That’s not a blog. Blogs aren’t limited by censorship.
Frankly, I’m pissed off at the trend blogging is following. The majority of blog users are signing up for subscription services. These services will inevitably put restrictions on what you can and cannot post, though I doubt they will ever be very strict. However, these inevitable restrictions will be censorship, be it miniscule. I have mixed feeling about AOL’s introduction of blogging for its subscribers. I’m partly for the move because it will greatly expand the weblogging community but then again, these blogs will be hosted on AOL servers and subject to AOL’s regulations. Such is the case with LiveJournal and Xanga.
Another disturbing trend among weblogs is that many people publish nothing but stream of consciousness articles. I’m all for speaking your mind and laying down your thoughts but weblogs are never going to be perceived by the public at large as a reputable news service if most of the bloggers out there write an entire article using one period. I can understand occasional spelling and grammar errors — I make them all the time here on my site. However, write something that is legible to others. Otherwise, what’s the point? Nobody’s going to end up reading nonsensical drivel.
It pains me to see corporate America trying to make money off the blog. I’m really not sure what to think of Weblogs, Inc., the new service that allows freelance journalists to connect and partner up. Essentially this service aims to create blog networks that will generate revenue. I don’t agree with the site that traditional journalism is “broken.” Journalism isn’t broken at all! Magazine subscriptions aren’t in the decline; the majority of people still get their news from television and print media conglomerates. No, weblogs are just different from traditional journalism. They’re different because it’s an underground movement that isn’t about making money. Weblogging is about letting out your opinion, unabashed, free of censorship.
Weblogs, Inc. is traditional journalism in digital format with contributing freelance authors. A real example of collaborative, new wave journalism is The Morning News. This site follows the ideals of Weblogs, Inc. in that it is a site driven by freelance journalists. However, it doesn’t seek to make a profit. Instead, it’s just there to report the news. All The Morning News asks for in return is an appreciative donation. That’s real blogging, not corporate blogging.
Made a road trip to Arizona starting on Friday with the gang to see the Cardinals play the Diamondbacks. The drive was about six hours each way but it seemed short, probably because we were joking around in the car on the way and I didn’t have to do the driving. We stayed overnight in a $50 hotel five miles from the stadium and it was a really nice hotel for the money. Saturday we went to Bank One Ballpark and took in Cardinal batting practice. I didn’t catch any homers but one came pretty close to me — the row in front of me, but a guy was in the perfect position to catch the ball and it came right to him. Maybe next time. Too bad too, since Pujols was the guy that hit the ball. He’s probably going to win the batting title this year.
Saturday afternoon we drove back down the 10 to Westwood. We probably won’t be able to do such a trip again this year since we’ll be bogged down with homework but it was nice to take advantage of UCLA’s Week 0, which takes it easy on the students by not assigning much homework.
I haven’t been able to post for the last couple of days because I’ve been so darn busy.
Monday
I went into San Francisco with my dad down to Union Square. We hit up the Cheesecake Factory, which oddly enough has excellent Pad Thai. I also tried the new “limited edition” Godiva cheesecake, which was also superb. Definitely go try that before they stop selling it. I doubt they will discontinue it, however, since it’s selling very well at the moment. Afterwards, we went to the Virgin Megastore where I bought some Brazilian dance music and a couple lounge CDs. Take a look at my music page to see what I bought. Then we popped into the Rockport store where they were having a sale and I managed to snag a pair of shoes for only $40.
Tuesday
The A’s played the Texas Rangers and I went to the game with Takeshi and Irene. Josh wasn’t able to come, unfortunately. The game was one of the best I’ve attended. The Rangers were leading in the 9th by one run and the A’s tied it up in the bottom of the 9th with two outs. Then they won it in extra innings. Since the Mariners lost to the Angels that night, the A’s clinched the AL West Division.
Wednesday
I drove down the 5 with Takeshi and made it in five hours. That’s a new personal best. Afterwards I went flyering on campus to get the word out on Alphia Phi Omega.
Thursday
School started up again at UCLA and my classes are looking good for the upcoming quarter. I had Chemistry 153C and Spanish 119A; both of the professors seem good to me.
Friday
I have Life Science 4 today with Dr. Jacobsen. I worked in his lab over the summer and he’s a really nice guy. I bet he’ll be an excellent LS professor. Here’s hoping.
I’m getting really sick of PayPal selling my account’s e-mail address to vendors. According to their privacy policy, they don’t solicit your e-mail “except in the limited circumstances described” in their policy. They sure have been disclosing my e-mail address to third parties. I subscribed to PayPal using a unique e-mail address for the service and over fifty percent of the spam I get comes from that address.
If you read the privacy policy carefully, you’ll see that PayPal does actually give out your “personal information,” which probably includes your e-mail address, “to companies that perform marketing services on our behalf or to other financial institutions with whom we have joint marketing agreements.” PayPal also solicits your credit card number to lost credit card tracking agencies. However, they explicitly state that your credit card information is not disclosed anywhere else. If you need a PayPal account, don’t use your master e-mail address. Make a PayPal address like I did and create a filter rule to delete all incoming e-mail from that account.
You have to love California’s wacky weather. The East Coast gets hammered by hurricane Isabel, doing major damage to South Carolina and Virginia with its heavy rains. Meanwhile, I’m sweating it out in California since my house doesn’t have any air conditioning. The state is the polar opposite of New York, I swear.
To cope, I had a takeout dinner tonight in the cool atmosphere down at Old Mill Park. It was delicious and the mosquitoes weren’t out, making it even more pleasant.
I decided today that I was going to redesign my fraternity’s web site from scratch. It turned out to be quite a task, as I expected. Members of the fraternity refer to the site as “the beast” because it is full of tons and tons of legacy code. I plowed through the code today in trusty Notepad and I now have the site coded in XHTML 1.1 and CSS 2.
I’m going to be updating the site a lot in the next couple of days, so check it often for new modifications.
Sofia Coppola’s wonderful film, Lost in Translation,” opened today down at the Sequoia Theater in Mill Valley. I went with my mom and dad to the film and enjoyed it very much. It is a very visceral film that heavily incorporates the soundtrack into the film for emotional impact. Bill Murray is Bob Harris, an American movie star that is making a quick buck in Japan by filming whiskey commercials. Scarlett Johansson is Charlotte, newlywed to John (Giovanni Ribisi).
Bill Murray makes this film. He is hilarious because he doesn’t try too hard to make the audience laugh. Instead, he masters the art of playing the down and out broken married man trying to get back on his feet. He meets up with Charlotte in his hotel and the two become friends — a strong romance never really develops between them. I think the lack of an emotional romantic ending was fitting. Charlotte is simply too young for Murray and both of them recognize this fact. Instead, they’re content to being just friends. They find a connection in their loathing of Japan and their disdain for their spouses.
The film has a lot of funny moments, many of which I’ve already forgotten. I’ll have to watch the film again. My favorite scene is when Bob Harris films a whiskey commercial and the director speaks only in Japanese to him. The impressions of the Rat Pack, James Bond, etc. are priceless.
Coppola adds some very subtle but clever elements to the film as well. One of which I noted was the opening title. The title appears at the bottom of the screen much like a subtitle in a foreign language film. Recall that the name of the film is “Lost in Translation.” Also, I wasn’t sure if Sofia was making fun of her brother Roman Coppola through Ribisi’s character, but it is very possible. He is a music video director who makes videos for alternative rock/punk bands such as the Strokes and the Vines. Ribisi had that indie music industry look going.
Overall, I really enjoyed the film. It’s been one of my favorites so far this year.
I went over to Tam today and had a chat with Mr. Andres, my AP History teacher, which was a lot of fun. He took the year off last year and went on a five month trip through North Africa, Europe, Mexico, and Guatemala. During the year he wrote some travel pieces, and some of them are even published online. Here are the articles I found:
He told me that when he finishes teaching, he wants to continue his writing, which will likely focus on travel. Mr. Andres is an excellent writer; his letters to the Tam News were always thoughtful and well composed. I read through the freelance articles he submitted to the web and they are equally good. He is an AP History teacher after all, and that class involves a ton of writing. Good for him. I told him he should shoot for National Geographic. That way they’ll pay for the travelling he wants to do.
I’m glad to see he’s doing well back at Tam. He told me it’s scary seeing the graduates come back and visit during their summer breaks because it makes him feel old. The funny thing is, he really hasn’t aged at all! He looks the same to me as when I had him for history back in 1999.
In the latest issue of PC Magazine, Jamie M. Bsales reviews the latest midrange “windowpane” scanner from HP, and it’s a beauty. I think I’m going to have to buy it. I have a scanner at home but not one at the apartment. I’ve always wanted to get a new one but haven’t been impressed with any of the designs for the latest models. The HP ScanJet 4670 is an exception. It is a vertical feed scanner with a transparent window pane. It looks sharp. The other plus is that it is listing for under $200 on Amazon. The scanner will be available November 1st is now available for purchase.
I’m not really doing much at the moment — just hanging out at the house. I had an awesome carnitas burrito today from Lucinda’s. I’ll miss that place when I have to go back down to LA next week. There’s not a whole lot going on so I don’t have much to say. Maybe I’ll go do something in San Francisco with Takeshi and Josh, if they’re free. I haven’t been to see my high school teachers in a while. It might be a good idea to pay them a visit.
Oh yes, I almost forgot. The family home page has gotten a little makeover and it now sports a weblog…that my mom updates. Seriously.
I found that using mod_rewrite to send an error 403 Forbidden code to web sites that attempt to link to my images isn’t that effective. The image will appear is a blank box in Internet Explorer which the casual surfer can right click on, copy the image location, paste it into their address bar and see the final image.
My new method for preventing hotlinking that I’ve installed on Webspiffy is much more effective because instead of serving up no image at all, it serves up a replacement image that draws attention to itself. This is good because the webmaster of an infringing site will remove the hotlinked image just to get rid of my replacement image. Of course, you can be as creative as you want with a replacement image, such as using a gigantic porn picture, but I like to keep it low key. I just serve up an image that says, This image is stolen!. Simple and effective.
My anti-hotlinking code now looks like this:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !stolen\.gif$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?yourdomain\.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg)$ http://yourdomain\.com/images/stolen\.gif [R,L]
The replacement image should be saved to /images/stolen.gif relative to the web root. Feel free to use any image you want for the replacement image! If you use this code, please post a comment with an example. I love to see what people come up with. Enjoy!
Take a look at the new Power Mac G5 performance page and scroll down to the bottom. There’s a little section entitled “Science and technology genius.” This section is extremely relevant to modern science. I’ve used BLAST here at UCLA on occasion and the new G5 supposedly can do BLAST sequence match searches faster than any other machine. The same goes for HMMer. This is very good to know if you are in the Bioinformatics industry.
- These tests haven’t been confirmed by any major agencies, such as PC Labs. Therefore, it is unknown how credible the results are, but I’m sure they’re pretty accurate. Regardless, the G5 is a fast little machine and undoubtedly will help the emerging Proteomics industry.
I’m appauled by this new tactic by VeriSign to sign up new customers. Now when you try to access an unregistered domain name, you don’t get an error message. Rather, you get redirected to VeriSign’s domain registration page. Doug Bowman pointed this out today and is also very pissed off about SiteFinder. I totally agree with him that this is a ploy to take total control of future domain name registrations.
Casual surfers that wish to register a domain may not know that there are other alternatives, like my current favorite, Hostway. The funny thing is that VeriSign’s competitors often charge less than a fourth of the price that VeriSign does for the very same service.
Thankfully, ISPs are reacting to this move by VeriSign and are blocking the request redirects to the SiteFinder page by banning SiteFinder’s IP address. Within a few days, there should be no more SiteFinder and the web should go back to normal. However, this kind of behavior should not be tolerated from VeriSign.
I’m done with LS3 after having taken my final today at 10:00. I’m glad it’s over with. I’m head back to San Francisco this weekend — don’t know when exactly, but probably Sunday depending on whether or not I can find something to do tomorrow here in L.A. Not much else to say at the moment. Good night.
My final is tomorrow. Wish me luck.
Today is also the two year anniversary of September 11. Say a prayer for the families of the victims and take a moment of silence out of respect for the dead. Let’s hope nothing like this happens again in America.
It’s also my cousin’s birthday today. Happy birthday, Nick!
I met with Dr. Ken Bradley about doing SRP or a 199 project. He’s currently studying anthrax toxin receptors and trying to figure out a way to develop a drug that will block anthrax uptake. It’s very, very cool research. He took me through the lab today and showed me where they grow human tissue cultures.
I’m really looking forward to working with him this fall. It will be very exciting indeed. Tentatively I’m going to study the promoter region of the genome that codes for the anthrax toxin receptor and how it is transcribed — specifically, what activates transcription.
E-Icons lets you modify a number of the Windows shell icons. I’ve been trying to replace the default Windows folder icon for a while and I finally managed to do it with this program. I’m not big into theming Windows because it is resource intensive and tends to slow my computer down a little. Yes, WindowBlinds is a resource hog, even though they have improved it in recent years. StyleXP is a “hack” program that lets you run unauthorized themes in the Windows Themes panel. I’ve never been a big fan of that program because a lot of the themes are buggy.
No, I’ve always been happy with just changing my icons around. E-Icons lets me do that quickly and easily — I can even save my themes in the program. This is a must have for Windows users. I recommend downloading World of Aqua: CandyBar and using that for default Windows icons. There are some other great packs at The Iconfactory although it caters to Mac users. Many of the sets come with Windows XP icons.
Today marks the final week of Summer session for me. My test for LS3 is this Friday and afterwards I’m driving home. Until then, I have to study my butt off an attempt to get an A in the class, which has an extremely skewed curve. However, I’ve gotten A’s on all the tests (quizzes and midterms), and the final doesn’t sound like it will be terrible. However, I must prepare.
Good night for now — I’m off to hit the books.
I’m now officially hooked on news aggregators. I figured out how to get comics to display in FeedDemon. Yes, this has been around for a couple of months, but it’s new to me and I’m sure to many others out there. Tapestry is a site that specializes in comic RSS feeds. I don’t currently have a newspaper subscription at the apartment except for The Wall Street Journal, which doesn’t have comics in it. I’ve been in withdrawal. My roommate Adam asked me today if it is possible to syndicate comic strips in a newsreader. I told him about half an hour ago that I wasn’t sure, but I did a little Google hunting and sure enough, Tapestry came to my aid.
Another thing I’m loving right now is Chris Pirillo’s Amazon Feeds (link is in OPML format and requires a newsreader to open). You can bargain hunt on Amazon with your newsreader now. I subscribed to the DVD and Music feeds along with the top selling electronics.
God bless you RSS. This is going to catch on like wildfire. Just wait for AOL users to jump on the bandwagon, just like they are doing now with blogging.
Tapestry also has an OPML file which can be used to add all of the available comics in one easy click.