A few beers, boredom, and frustration with the lack of a mobile site for this weekend’s Pitchfork Music Festival led me to hack up a quick mobile-friendly version of the schedule. It works for all iPhones and Android-based phones. If you save it to your iPhone home screen, you can use it offline (a bonus considering how over-taxed the AT&T network is during the festival).
See the mobile-friendly schedule – http://d-struct.org/projects/p4k2k10/
While digging through some boxes full of old papers, I found this leaflet from a Godspeed You! Black Emperor show in Detroit, circa 2001.
The reverse side:
Senior year of high school my friends and I recreated this video for our final project in Spanish class. We weren’t quite sure what was going on in the video then, and to this day I’m still not very certain. In our low-budget remake, we jumped out of a cardboard box and sprayed milk all over my parents’ backyard. The neighbors, I can only imagine, were dumbfounded.
I present to you, as a service to Google and befuddled viewers, a transcription of the video, unedited:
Bonjour, Good Morning
Is now for the first time
Dalí born
with any kind of traumatism
A little blood,
symbolic blood
And milk,
again milk of today born
and some symbolic fish
of Mediterranean people
This is the blood of Gala …
…and the blood of the Divine Dalí
[scene]
The scene went down recently here in Pilsen.
Wear silly vests and hard hats, and film it all on fancy DSLRs.
Have one person do all the work, and everyone else mill about and record the momentous event. Not suspicious at all.
Oh, no! The fuzz! How did they find us?
Oh, man, our progressive culture jamming is SHUT DOWN by the police!
Be certain, however, to record the heartbreaking takedown of the sign from multiple angles. This will play great on YouTube later.
The sign that could have changed the world: "Danger: You are 0.5 miles from the Fisk coal fired power plant."
Despite looking really silly trying to hang a fake sign, these folks do have a good cause. The Fisk Generating Station is a coal-fired power plant on Cermak Road, here in Pilsen. It’s a relic of a bygone era of power generation, and is a public health nightmare. Community groups have been trying for the past decade to shut down Fisk, to almost no success. The 25th alderman, Danny Solis, doesn’t appear to be championing the cause, and is in the pocket of Midwest Generation, the owners of the station.
The Chicago Reader has a number of good articles on the subject, including recent efforts by the Chicago Clean Power Coalition to push ordinances through Chicago City Council to regulate and shut down the plants.
ChicagoBusiness.com reports that, as of April, there’s a new ordinance being pushed by a coalition of aldermen and civic organizations. Let’s hope that Chicago politics don’t get in the way of public health.
This post is as much for my reference as it is frustrated folks trying to find non-1.9 versions for old Rails apps.
Ruby 1.8.6 p399: ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.8/ruby-1.8.6-p399.tar.gz (and in zip and bz2)
Ruby 1.8.7 p249: ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.8/ruby-1.8.7-p249.tar.gz (and in zip and bz2)
And of course, browse the entire FTP archive for everything going back to 1.8.0.
There was a day, once upon a time, when 4 megabytes or RAM was enough to get by, and 8 megabytes made Wolfenstein 3d just scream.
Now I max out 4 gigabytes and dream of 8. Same story, different order of magnitude.
He’s just too ridiculous at times.
One year ago I was alone, saddled with bags, inside Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyetta airport, watching the last of the travelers filter out as the airport closed for the night. I had just missed my connection to Mombasa, where I was supposed to meet my friend Mary. She wasn’t answering her cell phone. As the luggage carousel sputtered to a halt, the touts and taxi drivers sprung on me like jackals on a carcass. No, I didn’t need a safari. No, I don’t want to ride an elephant. Just get me to a hotel, please, somewhere I can sleep. I was wrecked after ~20 hours of travel, and I (stupidly) hadn’t planned for the occasion in which I missed my connection. The last flight out.
I zeroed in on my guy, one of the better dressed of the lot. He explained that he ran a tour company, and that he could show me some rooms. Wouldn’t I look at some pamphlets in his office? Dubious, and only marginally reassured by the fact that his office was in the terminal itself, I followed. I have a place, my friend told me to go there, I said, can you just help me get there? No, he said, that is too far and they have no room. Please, look at these nice places. Very nice, and not too much. This one, I said, looks fine. How much? Two hundred dollars, that’s a good price (no, it’s not). Somehow I got him to go for half of that and pick me up in the morning. The room was dirtier than a dorm room, and about the same size. Whatever, there was a bed with a net on it. And a prayer rug, just in case.
That’s how I started a five week trip to Tanzania as part of IBM’s Corporate Service Corps program, a trip that a year later I still think of often, if not daily. It was an incredible experience, and I’m incredibly grateful that I had a chance to participate. I long to go back to Tanzania, who knows what the future holds.
Photos:
Melissa this past week started an awesome blog and an Etsy shop. You should totally check them out, subscribe to her updates, buy nifty knit stuff, and generally support her quest to out-nerd me.
