randomWalks

Unbelievable Moroccan Trance this week at Coco’s thing.

originally posted by xowie

MacSlash and Rael Dornfest offer notes from the O’Reilly OS X Conference on a digital home session.

Remotion by Stuart Cormie.

I recount that last part to her -- Delicate and clean, she sits sipping coffee from a chintzy cup -- After an age, the hand holding it starts to shake and I watch tears form at the corners of her brown alive eyes -- "How the hell did you find out?" Ma whispers and before I even start to try to explain she tells me that it is true I am indeed Kerouac's son (she being 'Kathleen' but in reality Catherine) and that (to complete the tale) as soon as Jack discovers she is with-child he disappears never (by her) to be seen again -- And Ma is left alone to raise me eventually meeting Karl whom I always assumed was my real dad but who clearly isn't (and he's no longer around either).

I wonder then what Jack would have made of a son like me -- a boy so ... straight -- and the man he became, so responsible (until now that is) -- his very antithesis -- Shamed, probably, by my lack of resolve.

"Please Don't Kill The Freshman: A Memoir," by Zoe Trope excerpted at Salon.com.

Camped out in front of my locker like a homeless person. Waiting for a security guard to yell at me. They pass by numerous times and do not even look at me. I should be in class. Instead, I open Bukowski's "Tales of Ordinary Madness" and read with a look of confusion on my face. I find this beautiful. No. one. notices ... Cherry Bitch lets me wear her cat-eyed glasses. I feel silly and vain and I like it. I walk home and eventually kiss the Wonka Boy (supposed to be gay). He shoves his tongue in my mouth anxiously, awkwardly. Too much like a child ripping open a shiny Christmas present only to be disappointed. Curry wore a candy necklace today and I tried to bite off some candy and ended up making his neck bleed. What a tragedy. My hands are cold. My feet hurt. Career week only gets worse, I think. Tomorrow we have to write notes to the presenters we saw today (like the woman from State Farm who tried to convince us that selling insurance was a fun, interesting career field ... LYING WHORE). That could take at least two hours ... Vivarin. I believe this calls for Vivarin.

misbehaving.net “is a weblog about women and technology. It’s a celebration of women’s contributions to computing; a place to spotlight women’s contributions as well point out new opportunities and challenges for women in the computing field.”

Parents, children, and other humans should check out Dru Blood's fantastic posts on breastfeeding and vaccinations.

We'll be driving along, and all of a sudden, I'll say: ''Did you hear that? That was a funny lyric.'' And he'll say: ''No, I didn't hear that. I was listening to the groove.''

The New York Times Magazine: Doing It Her Way, questions for Edie Brickell.

Zebrahead—all original members intact—are about to release their third album, MFZB (it stands for Motherfucking Zebrahead, they tell us), and it’s their best one yet, which is just unfucking believable, but no less unfucking believable than the fact they’re still on a major label. This band is invincible! I think they’re stalking you!

originally posted by xowie

"The Bells of Balangiga have as much significance to the Filipino people as the Liberty Bell does to the American people," said Rodel Rodis, San Francisco Community College trustee and organizer of the event, to the gathering of about 50 in the church.

originally posted by xowie

I have always believed that what is now widely considered one of slavery's worst legacies — the Southern "one-drop" rule that indicted anyone with black blood as a nigger and cleaved American society into black and white with a single stroke — was also slavery's only upside. Of course I deplore the motive behind the law, which was rooted not only in white paranoia about miscegenation, but in a more practical need to maintain social order by keeping privilege and property in the hands of whites. But by forcing blacks of all complexions and blood percentages into the same boat, the law ironically laid a foundation of black unity that remains in place today. It's a foundation that allows us to talk abstractly about a "black community" as concretely as we talk about a black community in Harlem or Chicago or South-Central (a liberty that's often abused or lazily applied in modern discussions of race). And it gives the lightest-skinned among us the assurance of identity that everybody needs to feel grounded and psychologically whole — even whites, whose public non-ethnicity is really ethnicity writ so large and influential it needs no name.

LA Weekly: Columns: CakeWalk: Black Like I Thought I Was

Tristan Louis says yesterday's big news is about Apple's cross-platform DRM and some logical progressions.

As predicted, Apple introduced a version of Itunes for windows today. A lot will be written about how this solidifies Apple's lead in the digital music player market but what many may be overlooking is how Apple is pushing its own version of Digital Rights Management into a wider market. I suspect this is a strategy similar to the one they used in the early 1990s to make quicktime a strong contender for digital video.

While companies from Intel to Microsoft are talking about how they plan to implement digital rights in the future and are taking tentative steps in that direction, Apple is working on a strategy that covers multiple platforms beginning today. The ITunes music store may be an interesting story in terms of the consumer market but it seems to me that there is also an interesting play at hand for a business to business model. If Apple succeeds in its implementation of the music store (and there is little doubt that they will), they could turn around and start offering a set of products and services to organizations dealing in digital goods. (...)

I am Looking for the code numbers in the yellow cap game that were to be postmarked by Dec. 31,2003. Where do I obtain a list of numbers? Can you E-mail me a list of winning codes. Thank you Jay Heath

Here is the full article, keen and insightful, for your convenience:

One afternoon in March 1983, Steve Jobs, the brash 28-year-old founder of Apple Computer, stood on a Manhattan rooftop terrace overlooking the Hudson River. He faced John Sculley, the 44-year-old president of Pepsi, whom he very much wanted to recruit and uttered a line that's become a Silicon Valley legend:

"Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?" Sculley later recalled in his autobiography.

Twenty years later, it turns out changing the world occasionally includes selling sugar water.

The very same Steve Jobs, now somewhat older and grayer, proudly announced a huge marketing deal with Pepsi on Thursday to promote Apple's newly expanded iTunes Music Store.

The irony is hard to miss.

Jobs is famously vegetarian, reportedly subsisting on a diet largely confined to fruits and nuts. He's never seen drinking anything other than bottled water during his press events -- including Thursday's rock-star-studded show at the Moscone Center West in San Francisco.

I can't say for sure, but I'd bet Jobs' personal consumption of Pepsi, Diet Pepsi and Sierra Mist -- the three soft drinks covered in the agreement with Pepsi-Cola North America -- is zero.

Well, as Apple said in its ads, sometimes you have to think different.

Pepsi will sell 300 million special bottles in February and March with distinctive yellow caps. Underneath one in three caps will be a code number winners can use to download a free song from iTunes that would otherwise cost 99 cents.

The offer doesn't include the modest 12-ounce cans of Pepsi or Sierra Mist, with a mere 150 calories and 41 grams of sugar. You have to buy either a 20-ounce bottle with 250 calories and 68 grams of sugar, or a one-liter bottle with 425 calories and 115 grams of sugar.

Soft drinks are heavily advertised to children and teenagers, also a target market for the music industry, and are a significant factor in a nationwide obesity epidemic. Diet Pepsi, of course, doesn't have sugar, but does contain caffeine and steers children away from healthier drinks such as milk and fruit juice.

The iTunes Music Store, launched in April for users of Apple's own Macintosh, is already very successful and could reshape the future of the recording industry now that it's available on Windows. It's just too bad the values of Steve Jobs in 2003 have moved so far from those of Steve Jobs in 1983.

I actually had people developing hardware to work with the Lisa. We knew that the Z8000 chip was coming out which was a 16-bit chip from Zylog. We wanted to be ahead of everybody. I had this guy who made a 16-bit compiler inside of the Apple II which is 8-bit. We got the configuration from Zylog ahead of time. So then it got released, but it got released to the Navy and they didn't have any chips to spare us. We were actually able to complete the job by getting some chips that were rejects. They worked enough for us to finish for development.

applematters interviews Herbie Hancock.

Stride and Seek: Four walks in Washington.

Salon.com Life | The Army be thuggin' it

"When I saw the Source was teaming up with the Army, I was outraged," says Bakari Kitwana, former executive editor of the Source and author of "The Hip-Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African-American Culture." "It's a betrayal of their readership. The military has historically used African-Americans, while the country has not done justice to African-Americans."

Ask Auntie Pinko

Your parents ask "If there is a minority scholarship, why isn't there a Caucasian scholarship?" and there is a simple answer: there are hundreds (heck, thousands!) of them. They are sponsored by Chambers of Commerce in majority white communities, American Legion and VFW Posts with mostly white membership, fraternal organizations comprised of white people, churches in denominations that are almost exclusively white (the neighborhood churches on Sunday morning are among the most segregated institutions in America!) and many other organizations. Their scholarships are aimed at residents of white communities, the children of overwhelmingly white memberships, high achievers in schools that are almost entirely white, etc. In addition, most American colleges and universities have a special affirmative action program that benefits white people highly disproportionately - it's called the 'legacy preference.'

Apple: Hip Hop

In conjunction with the release of the third generation of the iPod, Apple and TBWA/Chiat/Day/Los Angeles have unveiled an eye-popping new campaign for the iconic MP3 player. In both print and television executions, the effort shows figures silhouetted against brightly colored backgrounds, getting their grooves on with the help of what -- even in three colors -- is obviously the Apple iPod. For the television campaign, Chiat/Day turned to @radical.media director Dave Meyers, who is fresh off winning the Video of the Year award at this year's MTV Video Music Awards for his clip for Missy Elliott's "Work It." Meyers previously worked with Chiat/Day on the production number "Jimmy & Jenny" for former client Kmart. In the new iPod spot, titled "Hip Hop," the shadowy dancers shake it to the track "Hey Mama" by The Black Eyed Peas.

New York Times: Many Speakers at Meeting Cite Racism on S.I.

"White racism is the order of the day here," said the Rev. John Johnson, pastor of a church in the Clifton section and a longtime community activist who warned that "a riot is coming to this island." "Open society has never existed on Staten Island," he told the audience of about 50 people. "We need a federal prosecutor to come in here. Civil rights are being violated."

Here's the story Arnold doesn't want you to hear. The biggest single threat to Ken Lay and the electricity lords is a private lawsuit filed last year under California's unique Civil Code provision 17200, the "Unfair Business Practices Act." This litigation, heading to trial now in Los Angeles, would make the power companies return the $9 billion they filched from California electricity and gas customers.

It takes real cojones to bring such a suit. Who's the plaintiff taking on the bad guys? Cruz Bustamante, Lieutenant Governor and reluctant leading candidate against Schwarzenegger.

Now follow the action. One month after Cruz brings suit, Enron's Lay calls an emergency secret meeting in L.A. of his political buck-buddies, including Arnold. Their plan, to undercut Davis (according to Enron memos) and "solve" the energy crisis -- that is, make the Bustamante legal threat go away.

How can that be done? Follow the trail with me.

While Bustamante's kicking Enron butt in court, the Davis Administration is simultaneously demanding that George Bush's energy regulators order the $9 billion refund. Don't hold your breath: Bush's Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is headed by a guy proposed by … Ken Lay.

But Bush's boys on the commission have a problem. The evidence against the electricity barons is rock solid: fraudulent reporting of sales transactions, megawatt "laundering," fake power delivery scheduling and straight out conspiracy (including meetings in hotel rooms).

So the Bush commissioners cook up a terrific scheme: charge the companies with conspiracy but offer them, behind closed doors, deals in which they have to pay only two cents on each dollar they filched.

Problem: the slap-on-the-wrist refunds won't sail if the Governor of California won't play along. Solution: Re-call the Governor.

Either Greg Palast is a liar or we've all been hoodwinked.

Monterey County Herald: Dharma Dumb: How four guys stumbled about while trying to conquer the Matterhorn. Why this is in the Sports section I can not tell you, but I’m glad that it is.

... And I thought, "Boy, this is a fucking easy job — the guy gets to read magazines and write about them. That's got to be one of the greatest jobs for somebody who loves magazines."

Mediabistro interviews Peter Carlson, who writes "The Magazine Reader" for The Washington Post.

Dada represented everything horrible about mainstream music, predicting the laughable self-importance of helium-light R.E.M. ripoffs like Counting Crows, but it turns out there's a song on this record worth about as much as a fish taco: "Dim".

It's stupid, predictable college rock, the sort of easily hummed, whiny four-chord crap you can wake up hung-over and still have stuck in your head, but like those Dave Matthews hits you download because they remind you of high school, you just don't talk about it. If you don't know anyone at the store personally, wedge a dollar copy of Puzzle between the Matador promos your local music director sold back and enjoy this laughably catchy, Friends-esque pop song.

Whoever wrote Pitchfork's Castoffs and Cutouts: the top 50 most common used CDs (an unscientific study) has excellent taste in questionable music.

So, friend of mine is running pre-relese version of Mc OS X 10.3 (“Pnther”) nd is hving some inexplicble trouble with his keybord in which he cn produce cpitl ‘A’ but not the lowercse version of the populr vowel. Neither he nor I hve clue how to begin troubleshooting this isse, so ny dvice would be extremely welcome. Thnk you.

Do you think they clean those Slurpee machines?