November, 21, 2003 archives

this article about tom gilmore and the old bank district provides more background on where i live. related: rss feed for la downtown news.

the shockwave rider by john brunner is yet another amazingly forward-thinking science fiction book from 1975 that almost reads like current events. by the end of the book, i found myself thinking that this was the sort of libertarian science fiction that i had expected when picking up the books by l. neil smith.

southern california linux expo 2003 (aka scale2x) is tomorrow. i’ll be there for at least part of the show. there’s also a showing of revolution os, a documentary about open source, in the evening. but it’s also playing on the sundance channel, so i may skip out on that.

as suspected, some misguided folks oppose mandatory voting receipts as wisely required by california secretary of state kevin shelley. people like mischelle townsend, voter registrar of riverside county, should be bounced from office for not recognizing the very real problem demonstrated by the likes of the diebold voting machine shenanigans.

another book on my recently-read pile is a collection of the big sleep, farewell, my lovely, and the high window by raymond chandler. these are the first three of his novels, all featuring philip marlowe, and they are all fantastic.

one of the handouts at apachecon was a mouse from the java community process people. it’s a pretty cool mouse, with a good weight to it because it has an embedded floating duke. unfortunately, it’s not an optical mouse. so i’m going to stick with my old microsoft optical mouse (with the microsoft logo scratched off).

there’s probably a certain lopsidedness in thinking that today would be an excellent day to go to amoeba records because riding the red line would be free. save $2 to go spend what would most likely be way more than that.

better yet, béla fleck and the flecktones will be playing a free acoustic set there tomorrow.

the song in the ipod ad that duncan likes so much appears to be from the blue crush soundtrack. (it’s also available as a single.)

you can download a club mix and a radio mix of elvis presley’s rubberneckin by jason levins, who did the remix of n.e.r.d.’s rock star (the song from the ipod ad). they’re both excellent, but the radio edit is tighter. paul oakenfeld also did a remix of the elvis song, which originally appeared in a change of habit.