I was in Australia for a month, and spent much of my time flying around, listening to my iPod. When I’d come across a song that sucked, I’d rate it one star, thinking when I got home, I’d cull those songs from the library. No such luck: on update, iTunes updated all the ratings with the ratings from the library, so I lost all the information I’d put in over a month.

Why even offer the ability to rate a song on the iPod then if it’s only going to be over-written? What possible reason would that functionality exist for? Even if you want to stick with the library if the rating on the iPod changes, shouldn’t any rating be better than no rating?

And if it’s not supposed to work this way, how hard of a test case is that?
1) Take unrated song
2) Rate it on iPod
3) Hook up iPod to computer for update

Did song get updated with new rating in library? Y/N

Why does Apple have this reputation for amazing quality of product and design when they can’t figure out simple crap like this for their most-prominent, supposedly most-usable product?

William Burroughs used juxtaposition as an element of some of his works. He’d sometimes take random sections of text and paste them up next to other random sections, looking for interesting or jarring word or phrase combinations.

Today, this is done by computers for purpose of being ranked by Google. I was looking for an old radio program using the ID phrase of a fictional station in the program and hit on this (DO NOT FOLLOW LINKS):

Vinyl sheet flooring

The listing, of course, is fake, and quickly redirects to a porn site (registered to a guy in China, with some really strange hosting and nameserving, but that’s beside the point) where it attempts to launch all kind of crazy stuff and get you to view HOT! TEEN! PORN! and like stuff. But that’s not what I’m interested in. Look at what the site generated for the Google spider: it’s some kind of story with a key phrase, run in both the page title and the URL, though it’s entirely unrelated and easily spottable by a human. You can find these for almost any consumer item and random word. For instance, “fiberglass insulation” galaxy turned up a whole bunch of Polish websites.

PORN DIRECTORY – ak.tgory.pl – porn directory

BOSE – hu.zgora.pl – bose

TROPICAL ISLAND3D – ak.tgory.pl – tropical island3d

PIERCING GENITAL – ak.tgory.pl – piercing genital

WALPAPPER PORNO – ak.tgory.pl – walpapper porno

tgory.pl, FWIW, redirects to http://www.agnat.pl/ which is a hosting company. A google search for tgory.pl turns up a page of similarly randomly generated pages, which is kind of eerie.

William Burroughs is 8 years dead. Across the world, servers work every second creating pages of randomly cut and pasted text for the purpose of fooling other automated servers looking for meaningful information to show to humans. And sometimes through chance, one of those chopped pieces of text is close enough to actual writing that it fools the robot spider and is displayed to me, searching for an obscure radio show I listened to in the dark fifteen years ago, while the sum of the world’s knowledge is hashed, mangled, written randomly, and rearranged, unread, and published to wait for another chance at discovery.

First: check out the Blue Scholars. Seattle rap, and it’s outstanding. I think they’ll be huge.

I’m reminded of descriptions of life as a miner during the gold and silver rushes this week: you find a vein of precious ore, pull it out, take it to a mill, where it’s in turn separated into gold, silver, and the chaff.

I’m thinking about this because I’ve been back into music mining lately. There was a period of time (the original Napster era) when I spent amazing amounts of money on music because it became so easy to find music I liked. I found Neko Case that way, and bought circles around her, for instance, tracing equally good paths out from something I loved. This happened over and over: given a lead on a song or a band I might like, I’d hit Napster, download it, listen, and if I liked it, I’d soon buy $100 in CDs. If I didn’t, I deleted it. No song seemed too obscure for someone not to be sharing it, even if it was on some awful connection out of Guam, and I’d thank them where I could.

I spent more on music while Napster was up than I ever have or since.

Recently, though, I’ve been going back over old claims and finding they seem to have renewed. I loved some punk music a long time ago, and now Jeff Shaw told me to check out Jawbreaker, and I ended up buying all of those and looking for Jets to Brazil. In the meantime, I’m buying up all kinds of stuff I missed at the time, sifting through bands to find good stuff, and listening to more KEXP (and following up on songs they play, made easy through their excellent play list and charts)… and I’m spending crazy money again.

It feels weird at once to be supporting the RIAA in any way, since they shut down the richest vein I think they’ll ever tap, but there are two problems:
– while I think it was stupid of them to pursue Napster as they did, they were well within their rights to do so, and since the day’s never going to come when the legal system recognizes a Napster-type system as the electronic version of tape-swapping of my younger days (certainly not as long as the RIAA opposes it), if they want to shoot themselves, I’ve got no love for them
– I can try to patronize indy labels and steer my dollars as much as I can, but sometimes supporting artists I can’t see on tour means buying their stuff and supporting their label, which is okay, but which may in turn support the RIAA’s efforts. I don’t know if there’s much to be done about this

What amazes me is the desire to bring the sky down on those at the ground level. Say someone wants to share a great band they found, and they share the album on some spyware-infested P2P application. For $0 to the label, they give the band life and distribution to a huge audience, so on, so forth.

The penalties they face, civil and otherwise, are immense. Someone’s better off shoplifting a CD rather than download it, and it’s not even close. Or even beating someone up on the street. What happened to reasonableness as a standard?

But back to my point. There’s also a similar thrill to finding a rich, unknown vein to dig into. I remember the first time I heard a Sonic Youth CD (Dirty) and I can trace the music that led me to. There were a few bands — a few albums — that destroyed almost everything that had come before them, and my musical taste was built up from there. Two were 1992 releases: Dirty and Slanted and Enchanted. Beyond that, I grew up weaned on suburban Seattle radio. What did I know? The biggest musical sensation before that was when people started passing tapes of N.W.A. and Eazy-E (nooooooooot what you wanted your parents to overhear).

That jolt of discovery is part of what drives the perverse dynamics of jealousy that drive fans to embrace the fresh and obscure and then mock it when it finds a wider audience. But that’s a whole different post.

—

This week’s claims, if you’re curious:
Jawbreaker
Victor Vaughn
Go! Go! 7188
Mogwai
Blue Scholars

The New Pornographers have a new CD out now too, I like that a lot, but that’s an old mine I’ve been working for a long time.

I am over my contractually obligated minimum word count. Now… I don’t know what happens now. Gotta talk to the Powers that Be.

Still, kinda happy milestone, right?

Got to 95% today.

Book’s 90% in the bag.

Now of course that’s pre-revision and everything, but I feel really, really good for it being 1 in the morning and being exhausted.

The most interesting thing about writing the book is that doing in-depth historical research often leads me to conclude that people who write history are lazy and inaccurate. It’s turning me off non-fiction a little, honestly.

There’s an amusing anecdote I wanted to include in the book. The problem is that it’s claimed by many different people as being something they did, probably because it’s a funny story.

There are things that did not happen and are reported as casual facts. Someone will toss off a column that claims that some incident happened and be largely right (a pitcher got ejected) but then make numerous errors on what specifically occurred.

Errors in fact can often be traced back. When I find a particularly interesting thread, I often go through three, four sources as I go back in time to find the original’s an exaggeration or even a joke, turned into fact because it seems right and then gets repeated over and over. For a non-book related example, you can find out that a lot of the funny Rickey Henderson stories are jokes someone told once, or entirely made up.

Anyway, back to the book.

On the common occurance of walking into an office or other shared restroom to be hit with nauseating stench:

How hard would it be to make bathroom fans variable speed and hook them up to an odor detector? Serious funk would cause the fans to crank up, while most of the time they could almost idle, or totter along at their regular there’s-someone-in-here speed. What do I have to do to make this happen?

The August 5 memo recommends reducing patdowns by giving screeners the discretion not to search those wearing tight-fitting clothes. It also suggests exempting several categories of passengers from screening, including federal judges, members of Congress, Cabinet members, state governors, high-ranking military officers and those with high-level security clearances.

From a CNN.com story, “Airline screening hassles may be cut”

This is an awful, awful idea. If anything, the powerful should be made to go through the most stringent screenings every time. The boarding passes of any member of Congress should print out with “XXXX” under that weird barcode thing.

The powerful already avoid too much of the pain inflicted on the public. Flying in super-polluting private jets, they don’t wait around at gates, experience the bus-like commodity commercial flights have become, and often avoid the cattle-herding of the security lines.

As long as we feel that we need these kind of precautions, those in power who create and maintain the situation that demands it should experience the pain.

This isn’t only about security, either. There’s this national inability to sacrifice. Our President praises military service as a high calling, but doesn’t so much as ask his fresh-out-of-college daughters to please consider serving in the armed forces, where they might end up as the gunner on a HUMVEE getting shot at. The members of Congress who supported the war don’t have kids getting shot at. People at gas stations bitch about how high their gas prices are. Heck, here in Washington we’ve got an initiative to repeal a modest gas tax that will pay for massive transportation improvements, but those same people aren’t going after the petrol companies that used the opportunity to push prices through the roof.

It’s shameful. You think some PFC who finally gets rotated off wants to hear someone in their Escalade joke that “if we went into Iraq for oil, why is gas so goddamned expensive?” Fuck that. They probably want to know why you’ve got a “Support our troops” ribbon on that leviathan when every tankful’s supporting the Iranians and the Saudis funding the people who were shooting at her last week. Where’s the sacrifice?

Besides that, while I understand that a member of Congress is unlikely to blow up a plane, making artificial distinctions of who is and isn’t a security risk based on their position in society is, in itself, the first step on a well-paved road to hell. If anything, it provides a temptation for the powerful to stop trying to make improvements, to treat the plebians who aren’t in Congress but want a flight like they’re on the wrong side of the Stanford prison experiment.

It should be this way for every possible law. Pass something giving the government broad wiretap powers? Give the public broad wiretap powers against government officials. They’ve got nothing to hide, right? Otherwise, why would they object? Discussing classified information? Why is that any more important than my right to privacy?

One of the only reasons the TSA watchlist has undergone any kind of reform is because members of Congress have found themselves trying to fight it when they got red-flagged. That’s good. Good. Shared pain and sacrifice, even in petty crap like airport security, brings everyone together.

That anyone would even come up with this idea is horrible.

Businesses are dumb. I used to buy almost all my DVDs from DeepdiscountDVD.com because they had great prices, shipped out fast, and I never had a problem. Then they started sending me offers.

I hate spam. But whatever, right, they launch some offer newsletter to their customers, that’s bad because I didn’t consent to receive marketing emails, but there are worse things. I unsubscribe.

Kept coming. They’re garish things, awful to look at — today’s was bright yellow, and I now I’m using spam blockers against a company I did business with for years because they won’t stop sending me these things.

I’m never buying from them again.

What amazes me though is that this had to go through at least a couple of people, none of whom thought it was a bad idea and stopped it.

– Let’s start a newsletter (okay)
– We could try to sign people up on the site when they order (nah)
– We could even send a one-time announcement to people who’ve ordered with us before (nope)
– Let’s sign up everyone who ever signed up with us, knowing that some portion of them are going to get really mad (hey, that’s great, more signups = $$$)
– Let’s make sure that there’s no way for them to unsubscribe (yeah, why bother, these offer emails are great)
– Let’s make them so horribly awful to look at people’s retinas explode even if they only glance at it for a second while deleting it or sending it to their spam filter to learn (sure, people with no retinas buy lots of DVDs)

And then, presumably
– Why did all these frequent buyers stop shopping with us (huh)
– We should send out more email offers to make up for the drop in sales (yeah!)

So… good job, DeepDiscountDVD. I will go find a better place to feed my crazy movie habit.