mrclay.rg

Brittle Stars 2000 East Coast Tour Diary

[Hey, only 11 years late. Found this rummaging through some old files. With the title "Tour diary – achingly detailed version", you know it's gonna be riveting.]

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Today’s kids have a few things left to tinker with

[Drafts clean out. This one from January] Mark Pilgrim laments the slow eradication of Apple products to which the owner has full (and gratis) software/hardware access. Anyone can develop [for the iPad]! All you need is a Mac, XCode, an iPhone “simulator,” and $99 for an auto-expiring developer certificate. The “developer certificate” is really a

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Alex and Elliott

“Thank You Friends” was the first Big Star song I heard, hanging out with Dan Francke listening to a Time-Life cassette comp he ripped from his dad.

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Tercy and the Insufferable Incline

Kathleen and I have been lucky enough to be able to carpool until now, leaving our neglected Tercel “Tercy” (see right) to the rats and other inhabitants. The Good: runs well, good mileage, heat works. Bad: cramped driver’s seat, smells kinda like feet, back doors don’t open from outside, battery leaks out in a few

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We need a distributed social networking protocol…Could Opera Unite be a key?

(Written July 2007) The digital dark ages is already a reality for a lot of people who grew up with hosted e-mail services like Compuserve and AOL. A lot of those users had no choice but to accept the loss of all their received and sent e-mail when they unsubscribed, the service went under, or

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Hopes for 2009

In no particular order, I hope… the release of IE8 will spur organizations currently standardized on IE6 to finally bite the bullet and either upgrade their users to IE8 or move them to other browsers. Killing off IE6 (and IE7 really) will significantly decrease web development costs and reinvigorate CSS by opening up a world

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The Auto Bubble and the Apple car

In the U.S., dealership lots and ad papers swell with recent model used cars in great condition. Sometimes near-working vehicles are abandoned. People around us choose to buy new cars they can’t really afford every day, or at least they were.

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Mankind is still capable of monstrocity

If you’ve fooled yourself that this is not true, you need only to check yesterday’s New York Times to sober up. In cultures where women still have little value, for at least a dozen years some men have thrown acid on the faces of women, and are rarely punished. In a recent case, girls with

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Satchel’s Pizza before and after

A real Gainesville treasure just a few blocks from our house. Last weekend we were there with Kathleen’s mom and my parents. March 2003 2008

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Learning from the Free Market

When government regulation is completely removed from the picture, business thrives, and one industry has a particularly impressive success story. Its products are produced where costs are low and sold elsewhere with monumental margins. In fact these extraordinary profits help this industry overcome enormous hurdles of distribution; not even incredibly powerful organizations with endless supplies

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A faulty argument for policing morality

Recently the Gainesville PD conducted a prostitution sting that busted a particularly vile couple who solicited sex in front of the woman’s six year old son. In addition to the prostitution charge, the woman was rightfully charged with child abuse. I heard about this on the radio, and the report included a quote, I’m guessing

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Right thinking on Healthcare

I see this as the bravest statement made in the 2nd Obama-McCain debate: I think [healthcare] should be a right for every American. In a country as wealthy as ours, for us to have people who are going bankrupt because they can’t pay their medical bills—for my mother to die of cancer at the age

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Marriage Rock I

Yeah, we did it. I was in charge of the music and spent most hours from weeks before up until the morning of with my head stuck inside MediaMonkey. I can’t say enough good things about the “Gold” version, but these posts will shockingly not be about the boring machinations of software. Look For Me

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Why I hate upgrading computers

Last month I spent many, many hours researching the seemingly simple tasks of upgrading the RAM on two of our PCs and upgrading the CPU on one. “Compy” is our old Sony Vaio, which, after swimming through the documentation, I found requires extra-expensive and rare-ish RAMBUS RAM available from basically 0 reputable sources, so eventually

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The Late Greats

The best song will never get sung The best life never leaves your lungs So good, you won’t ever know I never hear it on the radio

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Missing a show twice

Saturday night. Josh called from Common Grounds to remind me to come to the Holopaw show. It’s a bit after 11, so I still have time to see them. When I get down there it’s some sort of free event and Neko Case is a surprise opener! She starts playing Buddy Holly’s “Baby Won’t You

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Yelp! I need somebody.

I’ve started Yelping and I’m hooked. Thanks, Heather!

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No more CC applications, please

Cost = 1 stamp. I’ll see how it goes..

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Feeling better, thanks

Wednesday morning I came down with a cold/virus/something and for three days my temperature bounced between 97 and over 100. Wed evening I had terrible abdominal pain and was paranoid it was some sort of appendicitis or something so we spent two hours at the Shands emergency clinic until I just couldn’t stand to sit

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Eveydiet

Some feats simply must be documented. For example: What our dog will try to eat (preserved in public tada list form).

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