On December 13, when U.S. forces captured Saddam Hussein, President George W. Bush not only celebrated with his national security team, but also pulled out his pen and signed into law a bill that grants the FBI sweeping new powers. A White House spokesperson explained the curious timing of the signing - on a Saturday - as ?the President…

If you're not listening to Nina Simone's Wild Is The Wind/High Priestess of Soul, you should be. Thanks to Bill for opening my eyes…

Saddam Hussein, one of the most important figures in the Al-Qaeda terrorist organizations that planned the attacks of September 11th, 2001, was captured today…

You are DNA. You're a smart person, and you appearincredibly complex to people who don't knowyou. You're incomparably full of information,and most of it is useless…

It's been a long time since I did one of these. And I'm sick today, so the best I can do is hope this comes out more than just garbled nonsense. Or maybe that would be apropos…

So I got all caught up with this AD/HD thing and I missed last week's update. It's OK though, cause shit is exactly the same now as it would have been then. The Village Underground HAS in fact reopened, but I haven't been back. I've skipped the jazz open mic at Cleopatra's Needle every Sunday for weeks now. I even missed the drum circle I was…

About a year ago, the people at my place of work got together and did a pretty cool thing: they put together a CD of artists who work there, had it professionally mastered and produced, and gave them away for free by the bushload. Today, I have found out that they're doing it again…

To start off, please forgive me if the delirium of my raging fever has rendered this post incoherent or merely annoying…

Thanks to Etan for letting me know that tomorrow, September 19th, is International Talk Like A Pirate Day. So don't ye be forgettin' now, me beauties, or I'll swab the decks with all of ya. Aar…

Hmm. Interesting week. I put up an ad on Craigslist for people to play jazz with, as my piano skills have been severely waning. So far, I've gotten some promising responses, so that's pretty exciting. Strangely enough, the very same day I posted the ad, I got an e-mail from a guy I played with only once and haven't seen for months inviting me…

It has just occurred to me that summer is over, and all the drum circles that appear in the parks all over the city throughout the summer are probably done. And I didn't go to a single one. Boo…

Taskmaster (screenshot) was my attempt at creating a new kind of to-do list program. All the efforts I'd seen thus far had some major flaws that I felt needed to be addressed…

itunes.php LIVES…

For those you who read my previous entry on software licensing for my itunes.php scripts and actually cared at all, you'll be glad to know that I've made a decision…

So today I finished a couple hundreds of lines of code that allow me to do all the nifty album cover and iTunes trickery that you can see in my sidebar and over at itunes.php. I want to release them to the world so that other bloggers using Kung-Tunes can do what they will with Amazon's vast stores of info. But I can't find a license that I like…

Oops. I knew I'd forgotten to do something…

According to Belief-O-Matic, I am 100% neo-pagan. This seems strange to me, as I have often felt limited by the coupling of my strong Roman Catholic-based morality with my absolute lack of belief in Catholicism. Thinking about it some more makes me think that this has more to do with where I'm headed than where I've been. For my complete results…

So I sang at the Sidewalk Café tonight. I was number 20, so I went on at a little before 11. Tim, Murphy, and Carlos all turned out, while soce, the elemental wizard offered experienced advice and moral support over the phone…

For those of you who have clamored to hear the new version of If We Were, I'm going to hit the open mic at the Sidewalk Cafe tomorrow night (Monday, September 1st). You only get 8 minutes, so I'm only gonna do the one song (it's fucking seven minutes long). I don't really know too much about details, but I'll probably find out more by tomorrow…

I think pretty much everyone who reads this is on Friendster, so I'll skip the background info. What I want to talk about now is the usefulness of the system, how people subvert it, and how we become their hapless victims…

I'm about five lines away from finishing this goddamn song. Do I stay up until it's done, or do I punk out, go to sleep, and let it drag on forever? The pale light of morning will reveal the answer…

Entirely apart from how amazing the concept of Web Services is, and how it's allowed me to suck info off of Amazon's servers for the music I'm listening to, I love XML because it's the backbone of RSS, and I just found out today…

Down the stairs, to the left, walk all the way west to the river, and head inside…

Progress Report - same shit as last week: the song I'm working on is almost done. When I finish it, I'll work on some others. I guess I'm just that slow…

I'm sure everyone had their own crazy way of dealing when the power went out, their own stories about getting home, banding together, and roaming the streets of New York, Detroit, Ottawa, Texas, California, or wherever they might have happened to be. (Note: the very idea that the power grid has "nodes" which can knock out power in multiple cities…

Just came back from a night at the Sidewalk Café with Tim. Monday nights are the "Anti-Hoot Open Mic." We didn't go to perform this time, just to scope out the scene. But who should we run in to, but our boy from back in college, soce the elemental wizard? Unfortunately, I had to go home for sleep before he went on, but I see him a bunch anyway…

An excerpt from Herbert Asbury's The Barbary Coast. There's a Sandman story about this, but I always thought Neil Gaiman just made him up…

So I went to the Mob Project's Mob #6 today. I showed up at Harry's Hamburgers by myself, hung around until 7, at which point I received a little slip of paper with further instructions. The first thing I noticed was that a great majority of the people involved were white males in their 20's or 30's, button down shirt, hip glasses, with…

Yeah, yeah, I know it's not Tuesday morning yet, but the Village Underground is closed for the next four weeks, so I'm going to bed early tonight, and damned if I'm gonna try to post before going to work tomorrow…

I am disgusted…

Mmm. I slept for a long time on the D train on the way home, and when I came out, there was a very soothing gentle rain raining. It reminded me that there is more in the world than customers, computers, and late lonely nights…

More on the making money front. As graduate school can only happen at the earliest in September 2004, and that's if I pull everything together, take the GRE's, figure out where I want to apply, and get applications in by November, I still need to find some way to make more money in the next year or so…

Just had me a little scare. My recent aggravation with OS X, specifically the uselessness of the Dock, and the lack of decent window management, caused me to try to go back to Yellow Dog Linux. I was using 2.2 back in the days when I still used my Powerbook, and I've been eyeing 3.0 ever since it came out…

As many of you may know, I have recently been very restless about my current position in life. Music is moving surely but VERY VERY slowly. My apartment situation has been less than pleasing, but I am attempting to remedy this situation by throwing money at it…

Guess I missed the morning…

As I mentioned earlier, I've started using Kung-Tunes to list what I'm listening to. It has a handy feature that lets you put together a list of recent tracks. However, like Metallica and others, I believe strongly in the power of the album as a complete work of art, and that's how I do most of my listening - one album at a time. Neither Itunes…

The other day, when we were at Artbots, I mentioned to Evan that I was "obsessed with data." This was brought on by the way most "interactive" art pieces function - they transform one kind of data into another: visual to audio, movement to movement, you name it to you name it…

Microsoft researchers have come up with a way to help people remember passwords - have them base them on pseudo-Rorshach-test inkblots. Turns out everyone sees and describes them differently, so if you string enough together, the description each person comes up with will be pretty difficult to crack. Take a look at the test blobs on the MS…

OK, so tonight was interesting. Village Underground as usual. Some good friends came down with me and stuck around till 1:30 cause I got bumped to the second set. Good people, good people…

I went to see Artbots today with a couple of good friends. It's an annual robot talent show at the Eyebeam Gallery in Chelsea, for art made of robots, and robots that make art. The "guidelines" are very broad: "No firm rules exist on the types of work that can participate; if you think it's a robot and you think it's making art, then it's an art-m…

So it took some fighting with Kung-Tunes, but I've got my handy-dandy Itunes info over there on the right now. And a beautiful table of recently played songs. What a waste of time!! But fun too…

Ok, I'm gonna start a new trend as part of my new pushing forward mentality. Every Tuesday morning (or late Monday night, however you prefer to look at it), I'll put together a little progress report on what's happened musically the past week…

In this week's Newsweek, in an article entitled The War Over Gay Marriage, I found this quote…

Whew! What a night! Went to the 5$ soul/funk/R open mic at the Village Underground tonight, hosted by Grammy nominee Schon Jomel. The band there is tight. And they know like every classic soul/R song you've ever heard of, and most of the ones you haven't. So imagine my surprise tonight when I got up there tonight, all dry-mouthed and shaky…

In keeping with the previous post, I've decided to examine my own terrible eating habits and see how they can be improved. Cooking at home is the focus here. My question to all, rather, both of my loyal readers is…

So I was sitting at my desk, minding my own business, eating a plate of couscous and marinated tofu, when suddenly…

So today Apple dropped a bombshell today: the new Powermac G5…

From the Mirror…

This New York Times article describes the technique of transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS which can cause subjects to "suddenly exhibit savant intelligence -- those isolated pockets of geniuslike mental ability that most often appear in autistic people."…

Google seems to have jumped the gun by a few minutes, but their title image tells me that today is M.C. Escher's birthday! Well, it would be if he hadn't been born 105 years ago. His art has lost some of its mind-bending power through overexposure, but the stairs from Labyrinth are a great example of his lasting influence…

Guess it's been a big week for our friend Morpheus from Sandman, as I just ran across this great poster on Metafilter. P. Craig Russell was the artist on the first Sandman issue I ever had, an amzaing story about the mythical city of Baghdad and its transformation. Now he and the Sandman are promoting reading too. The only question is whether…

Which Sandman Character Are You…

Who woulda thought a poor boy like me, from the wrong side of the tracks, would eventually grow up to have his own weblog? :)…