I don't latch on to pop music that often and finding his was such magic at the time. He was similar to Wilco, and yet Linkous used the studio to create a sound-world reminiscent of Pink Floyd's early, creative experiments and that had less of the alt-country, awshucks quality. A good example is his song "Chaos of the Galaxy/Happy Man" from his second album. The use of distortion throughout seemed to express a feeling of impotence regarding free will. In one sense, the radio distortion that drowns the song foils his attempts at expression; in another, it's his hand that controls the distortion and chooses to detune the radio station that is his voice. I still feel it is the pinnacle of his music making (see also Luke Lewis's praise of that song over at NME).

We went to see him twice. First at the now-defunct Music Midtown back in '95 or '96 when he was in a wheelchair. Then, a year or two later, we saw him standing tall and rhinestone-cowboy-hatted at the also-now-defunct Echo Lounge. Packed house and beautifully performed.

As with DFW, I hate seeing him go and hate that they both had such difficulties to force them to leave in such a manner.

I'd first found his artwork from his uniquely NSFW Livejournal page left in a random Reddit comment. His animation style uses video game left-to-right traveling as the primary framework. Interesting. Pirate Baby and Kings will give you epileptic seizures if you're not careful. Devil Eyes is a completely different mood.

Also from a Reddit comment, pictures from the Hyssop Lounge blog. Post are mostly YouTube videos, but several contain a wealth of great photos of musicians and stuff. See 2day pitures: 29 and 2day pictures: 30 for awesomeness. All, however, are frustratingly unlabeled.

A year or so ago I found my copy of Meco's Star Wars and Other Galactic Funk album in my parents' basement and swore I was going to have it framed. Hasn't been done yet, but now I think I'm going to frame several others and we'll fill a wall with awesomeness. I have quite a few albums that were included in the show. I recently went looking for a print of Tales from Topographic Oceans and found a screenprint from the artist for $2,500. Framing my copy of the album will be considerably less expensive.

In a small back room in the gallery, they also looped three videos related to album covers. One was a scene from Spinal Tap when the band got the first copies of their album Smell the Glove (It's like, how much more black could this be? and the answer is none. None more black.). Another with Pink Floyd discussing when Storm Thorgerson first presented his design for DSotM to them. The third was a short documentary on the owner of Record-Rama: at 3 million records, the largest single collection in the world. Though a nice enough guy, the owner brought up the debatable idea that analog vinyl sounds better than digital CDs because it preserves the high- and low-end frequencies. His comment brought fervent nods from an older couple watching with us (though I fear they weren't that much older...) who had never heard of the loudness war. I'd learned about this from a now-un-find-able Slashdot thread back in July of last year. This video is the tl;dr version of the Wikipedia article:

• Last night at Serpas for Fat Tuesday dinner. Cold cold cold out with a second line leading us to our table. The fried oysters are even better than when Scott Serpas was the chef at Mitra in Midtown.
• Sunday the 14th - Valentine's dinner at Anis in Buckhead. I'd been wanting to go back to Basil's across the street from Anis (we'd been once, probably 10?!? years ago), but we decided to try something new. Paid off. Anis is a cozy little French bistro with suprisingly good dishes. I had the Escolar and Lisa the steak.
• Saturday the 13th - house party at Jennifer and Snehal's. Beautiful house with rotating art collection (my plan for our place since we're just about maxed out on the art : wall ratio). Hundreds of candles leading up the walkway and driveway. Talks with old friends and new acquaintances (whose names I will never remember).
• Friday was the snowpocalypse in Atlanta!!

  

• Thursday was District 13: Ultimatum at Landmark [ 3/5 | IMDB | Rotten Tomatoes ]. Watched the first one last June on a whim and loved it. This was more light-hearted but just as much fun.
• Previous Saturday the 6th - Long day with Mickey at The High for da Vinci then lunch at Table 1280 (finally trying the menu there). Excellent. Evening was Bacchanalia Mickey+Mason+Danice. This was another place I hadn't been for prolly 10 years and it far surpassed my fond memories. Every. Single. Item. Was perfect. Flavor!!

  

  

• Friday was Elevation Chophouse OTP with all (Lisa and Mickey had lunch at Flip w/out me). Met M&D's cute new puppy Dooley beforehand.
• Previous previous Sunday, January 31st - Lazy day (natch) with dinner at Baraonda.
• Saturday I picked up a top hat of sorts from the costume shop and that became my admittedly lame 20s outfit for Stacie's b-day party at the top floor of The Park Tavern at Midtown. Shenanigans and dancing till late.

  

• Friday the 29th was our 11th anniversary (observed) with a phenomenal performance of The Rite of Spring at the ASO. Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis and Osvaldo Golijov's Suite from Youth Without Youth. Both beautiful pieces. First complete Golijov I've listened to and much more tonal than I expected (for some reason). Dinner afterwards at Oceanaire. Second time there and recommended.

  

Other links:

• Several related stories by the author available to read online from Night Shade Books' web site
• The first nine chapters of The Windup Girl available to read online, along with the full ebook for purchase, available from WebScription Ebooks
• The Windup Girl tag from io9
• Monthly book club tag from io9

• How a Bookmaker and a Whiz Kid Took On a DDOS-based Online Extortion Attack by Scott Berinato from CSO Online, 1 May 2005; riveting tale of how Barrett Lyon got into cyber security
• Fighting Cybercrime, One Digital Thug At A Time from Fresh Air, 26 January 2010; interview with Lyon and author Joseph Menn, his new book is title Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords Who Are Bringing Down the Internet
• Cyber Threats, Google and the NSA from On Point, 9 February 2010; discussing Operation Aurora (the attack on Google et al. by the Chinese government) and the NSA warrantless wiretapping (leaked by AT&T tech Mark Klein when he found the splitters in Room 641A)
• Anarchy in the Everyday; The Late, Great Nation State by Barrett Brown from True/Slant, 10 February 2010; re Anonymous's raid on Australian government web sites after the government banned from porn--and I am not making this up--women with small breasts and women peeing. Their simple and honest declaration: The Australian Government will learn that one does not mess with our porn.

I had read about Barrett Lyon a few years back when his CSO story was linked around on Slashdot etc. At the time--and this is five years ago--a big enough bot net could take anyone down. Lyon built one of the first (*the* first?) DDoS firewalls to protect gambling sites from, what turned out to be Russian, extortionists. The CSO article ends wryly, noting that companies now pay around $50,000 to protect themselves from having to pay protection. Insert joke here about virus scanners slowing down your machine so that viruses can't.

The fact that Google can be attacked, and that they'd partner with the NSA, illustrates the gravity of the current threat. This time, it's not just thugs but government sanctioned thugs. I've read in Slashdot threads that Russia has the same tactics: leverage their hackers to disrupt Western corporations and governments. It's nice to know that the US doesn't stoop to such measures (insert joke that when *we* do it, it's not torture).

Lyon's company started protecting Scientology sites after Anonymous started their Project Chanology raids in January 2008. Since Anonymous employs multi-honed attacks (DDoS, black faxes, picketing, information) a firewall offers only partial protection. And, as had been shown with the Marblecake hack, sites can be subverted without being taken down. The True/Slant article references a Neuromancer quote as prediction of the decentralized, directed mob that is Anonymous. They're doing what any activists do: bring attention to an injustice. Reading the inevitable panic-stricken comments denouncing Anonymous, it's interesting to note the difference between "activist" and "terrorist".

The internet is at that awkward age of being both fragile and essential. Small groups like Anonymous are leveraging that fragility as much as are governments. Grab some popcorn; watch the show.

My primary email account has web access that I infrequently use to send from. It goes back around seven years, so even infrequent use multiplied over that much time equates to a considerable number of emails. For the sake of consolidation and control, I wanted to get them downloaded into a folder in Thunderbird. To the best of my knowledge, this is not possible without some hackery, and may not be possible at all with some accounts.

My solution:

First, in Thunderbird, I created an inbox filter to move messages (1) from the Inbox and (2) sent by me into a separate folder (created and called "Sent from the web"). Then, in my web-based email account, I went to the Sent folder and moved the contained messages to the web interface's inbox. 60 pages of messages at 20 messages per page is a lot more than I'd anticipated. Protip: disable or filter notifications on your Blackberry so those hundreds of messages don't ¡ping! your phone to death.

• The talk page for the Wikipedia article on Fiasco - Some discussion points and links to related articles.
• the Fiasco section of the official Stanislaw Lem website.
• The thread Ending of "Fiasco" from the forums - What begins with a question dismissed mockingly moves into four pages of contributions over two years. Some interesting observations.

There's a wealth of Lem criticism out there that I hadn't suspected existed.

What to say? With Avatar cf. The Hurt Locker, I was looking for any simple manifestation of masculine and feminine themes. What we first get is a reversal: with Mr. Cameron's Gaia-heavy world contrasting Ms. Bigelow's bomb-laden Iraq; and then a deeper alignment: Avatar is actually not a movie but a high-tech gadget fetishized by geeks and Hurt Locker an elegy to the debasement of the human spirit when confronted by an endless war. Yet ultimately it's simple-minded to play gender games with these flicks, as comparisons become forced when so simplified.

I continue to be shocked at the celluloidoclasm that Avatar is wreaking on cinema history, and it continues to be difficult not to hate it for others' overblown praise. The best comparison is to look at Avatar like the iPhone (or iPad) or Lady Gaga: the fanatics tend to create anti-fanatics, when all that's needed is simple criticism.

The Wikipedia entry for Hillary Rodham Clinton is on my watch list (from edits made years back) and this little 5k rollback on the talk page showed up today. A beautiful, schizophrenic rant that starts with:

Hillary Clinton may be in danger over ANNE MARIE SLAUGHTER,. this is RELATED to Rhys Paul Hovey, and the high tech organized crime. Her name is MIND READER BAIT,. please see the RADIO CONTROLLED MEGA PIRATE story and FOREST HILL ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, district 18, and MR CASE. This involves "mind control" technology, which is computer controlled psychological abuse AI and wireless long range subvocal speech recognition (see charles jourgensen NASA), and satalite sound "weapons" which are also used for ADVERTISING (see joseph Pompeii and AUDIO SPOTLIGHT).

Et cetera.

The author may be the referenced Rhys Paul Hovey [ Google Sites | Blogspot ] who has another entry on Wikipedia for his as-yet-unrealeased, surrealist video game Synth. Similar rants found elsewhere in comments at Stay Free! Daily:

I was a big Hillary Clinton fan at one time, until this fiasco started on me with the ultrasound weapons, being used on me, at my home. Not only do I have recordings for you to download at (Yahoo video) and youtube. But now people in my building are starting to talk about the "advertising mind control computer" that they can hear in the streets (Hastings street in Vancouver) they recognize that the actual sounds of the cars and such can be used as a carrier signal as well.

Resemblance to Robby Todino's time travel obsession. Both evocative and unsettling.

Michael Gordon concert at Woodruff Arts Center:

Completely worn out (and will probably regret missing) or I'd go. Postminimalist composer from Bang on a Can fame and of the group Kyle Gann often proselytizes on his PostClassic blog. Pieces I'll be missing (along with links to their MP3s on Amazon where available):

• Weather One
• Light Is Calling
• Tinge
• Idle
• I Buried Paul
• ac dc

Profiling by Schneier from July 22, 2005:

This is relevant to your interests. In the article, he argues that the wide net of ethnic profiling is so wide as to be useless in catching anyone, and so unwarranted as to be harmful w/r/t ethnic relations. Imagine noting that most terrorists are male and deciding to profile males, only to realize that you can only randomly search an insignificant percentage. Then imagine the resentment you've instilled in the 99.999% of innocent males. You've irritated a large chunk of citizens with arguably no increase in safety. Profiling is pattern recognition and is useful. Wasting time on imprecise patterns is not.

I know a lot of otherwise-savvy consumers and hackers who are already drooling over the iPad and putting in their orders. They hate the idea of a restricted device, but they love the shiny-shiny. I'm not saying that they should deprive themselves of this pretty new toy. What I am saying is that this toy represents a crappy, pathetic future. It is no more revolutionary than those expensive, hot boots I bought at Fluevog, and only slightly more useful.

Mashable was more explicit:

You won't be able to drag and drop or share files with other computers like you can with your laptop on your home network. You won't be able to download a program or music file from the web and play it on the spot. You won't be able to use any application that doesn't meet Apple's strict approval guidelines.

And really, if consumers want a deficient-yet-wish-fulfilling device, tech pundits aren't going to stop them. Still, when someone asks you (oh, tech pundit) what specs they should look for in a new home computer or printer, what do you say? First of all, you steer them away from throwing their money away on inkjets. They may not listen and may only think of the $$$s they'll save buying a sleek looking HP DeskJet, but you would at least pass the knowledge along. As before, this necessary-yet-unheeded advice will be the same with the iPad, if a bit more philosophical. User control on the iPad, when included at all, is almost an afterthought. An appendix ready to be excised for it's absence of utility. Home computers gave us power through their mutability; Apple's new devices tell us we aren't responsible enough to install any applications we want. This may be the future of internet appliances, but it should not replace home computers.

With netbooks now nearly as powerful as full-sized laptops and costing < $300 (cf. a $500 iPad), it may be time to replace my humble 2-year-old first generation Asus Eee.

Late flight Wednesday and check in at The Venetian with a late dinner at the Grand Lux Cafe where we got to scope out the gambling crowd. Great deal on the hotel made the four night stay cost about the same as the flight.

Thursday we rented a car and headed to Red Rock Canyon for hiking. All cars were taken except for a 15-person van, a Corvette, and a Nissan 350Z. Rental for the day cost about the same as the flight (slight exaggeration) so we decided on the 350Z. Sweet ride. RRC was around 18 miles outside of Las Vegas. Driving out of town was odd because there's no transition from city-to-non-city, but rather just an abrupt end to all buildings and you're immediately in the dessert. Once at the park, we took the scenic drive that looped through the region and stopped at several trails. There were many other visitors, but It wasn't too crowded. What I noticed most about the rock cliffs was that the viewer lost any sense of scale because of the vast patterns on the sandstone. What looked only 10s of meters away dropped much further in the distance as soon as we saw the dots of rock climbers. Brave, brave, rock climbers. Or, as soon as we saw the tiny dots of our shadow on the rocks below:

Here we are frolicking:

After the hike, we drove back into town and down to a casino in south Vegas to watch Avatar in 3D IMAX [ 3/5 | IMDB | Rotten Tomatoes ]. If you're planning on seeing this, definitely go the 3D route. It really is a beautiful film even if most of the characters, with the exception of the male lead, are lazily written, and the themes are a bit obvious. Flaws aside, it was definitely a cinema experience. I remember, however, that after the expansive beauty of Red Rock Canyon, I wasn't as wowed as many reviewers or at all "let down" by the bleakness of the real world in comparison. Although I can imagine how someone living in Detroit might feel otherwise.

Evening was dinner at Alize at the Top of the Palms. Beautiful view and a perfect meal.

Friday started with brunch at Payard Bistro at Caesar's Palace. Lisa had plans to go to the buffet at the Bellagio, but the line in was at least 100-people long (I don't think I'm exaggerating) and it looked rather kid-infested. Blech. Plan B a nice restaurant at Bellagio, but that would have been a 2 hour wait so I searched via Google Maps on my phone and found Payard's. Highly recommended! Small, very French, and the perfect quiet choice for Xmas brunch.

The bulk of the day was various shenanigans walking up and down the strip with what seemed like the entirety of the population of China, visiting the art gallery at the Bellagio, and taking the monorail to the new Las Vegas CityCenter. Along with Asians, the strip was filled with cast-off trading-card-sized leaflets of naked women on them. They stayed in Vegas. Dinner was at Enoteca San Marco back home at The Venetian. The restaurant was in the winding, two-story, indoor mall that had a faux-sky ceiling (see below) so I was expecting only average food but it was very good. They had an octopus, celery, and potato salad (weird, I know) that was outstanding.

Saturday we started with brunch at Bouchon in The Venetian. It was another French locale and an excellent meal. After, we were again in need of a rental car to get to Hoover Dam (having missed out on a group tour). The hotel Hertz Lady had, again, those same three cars and nothing else so we went online and rented one from a place at the airport. Taxi + rental fee (for a more humble Nissan Versa) was still less than what the 350Z would have cost.

It was a gray day going to see a megalithic, gray structure but still impressive. We wandered a little in the museum. Most interesting construction fact: they had to dig four tunnels through the canyon in order to divert the river while the dam was being constructed. Work on the tunnels took as much effort as constructing the dam itself!

Return and dress up for an evening show of Zumanity at New York New York. It was a burlesque version of a Cirque du Soleil show with a 50s-style couple hosting and, along with twin corpulent stippers, playfully pestering members of the audience. There wasn't a bad seat in the theater, but we were sooo happy we weren't up front! Dinner after at Serrano in ARIA at CityCenter for Spanish tapas. We also met our waiter from Payard and Lisa discovered her New Favorite Drink: a Spanish dessert wine called Don PX Pedro Ximenez.

Short day Sunday wandering around one last time looking for gifts for the nieces but we couldn't agree on items that were both Las Vegassy and non-cheesey so ended up with nothing. Rats. Lazy flight home and another week of relaxing!

The chuckwalla we were promised but did not get to see:

The Complete Symphony Collection; Alexander Glazunov [ Radio from the Ether ]

Das Lied Von der Erde; Gustav Mahler [ Radio from the Ether ]