End-of-the-week link explosion

Archive photo from July 22, 2007 : Today, when I picked Corina up for dinner, she asked if we were going to go get pizza, in that kind, not-really-asking tone. Why the hell not?
Archive photo from July 22, 2007 : Today, when I picked Corina up for dinner, she asked if we were going to go get pizza, in that kind, not-really-asking tone. Why the hell not?

Here’s a bunch of links I’ve found interesting this week.

Vacation photos, part one: San Antonio

Kim and I went to San Antonio last week and stayed at the Drury Inn on the Riverwalk.

I’ve just uploaded all the vacation photos, from the first day, here.

Aren't we cute?
Aren't we cute?

On another note, the world cried today because there was some kind of celebratory event at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. *Shrugs*

“Whatever, Al Sharpton – and stop hollering. There’s plenty strange about your daddy, and he ain’t even your daddy.” -Kim

Right?

Correct?

Uh huh?

What?

Meditations on Michael

Michael Jackson can no longer live outside of reality. Since he’s dead and stuff.

They were playing that scary Barbara Walters interview from 1997 tonight. Woah. The man did best staying quiet and secluded.

Everyone – even critics I respect – call his early work very influential and essential to every collection. I don’t own a lick of it. And that’s OK. (Yeah, it was one of those things I was not allowed to experience, considering his debut video was associated with the occult, he didn’t sing Christian music and he was, uh, different from what I was allowed to enjoy culturally, which really was nothing except for G.I. Joe and John Wayne movies. Don’t ask.)

Whatever. Here’s a bunch of links I’ve been meaning to share.

  • Your photos, presented in a timeline. Free to $40/month. Hmmmm.
  • New Wilco song “You Never Know” gets me all apathetic and such as if I needed help.
  • New New Yorker fiction: Should I read this? Has anybody else? Sigh. Six pages, I need some friggin’ time, people!
  • One out of 20 confirms I’m still not a geek. (Yes, I like IMing the loved one sitting next to me) Doh! Gotta work on that, I suppose.
  • Esteemed New Yorker music critic Frere Jones calls  Sonic Youth’s Eternal her favorite in a long time.
  • Trent is back! Sorry, I still don’t care.
  • Laid-off Chicago Tribune reporter calls “bullshit”  – and he doesn’t miss newspapers
  • Meanwhile, in magazines: Easy come, easy go
  • I never knew bacon could be so scary.
  • When Michael Jackson dies, the world turns to the web, and a little piece of the web dies. Meanwhile, I was driving home, thinking about rain. That never came. Sigh.

MySpace: Good riddance or good luck?

MySpace is dying.

Which is sad, because Kim found me on MySpace but now we spend all of our time on Facebook and … well, Kim only found me on MySpace because I was smart enough to use my own name and she could have also found me through www.brandonmoeller.com but, I mean, well … man! I’m a geek.

Meanwhile, Facebook is gobbling up the audience of people who want to connect to their friends on a social network. It could easily be replaced by the next big thing that also can’t figure out how to make money, but that’s not Twitter because Twitter is useless.

Jeff, over at Broken Record, argues that MySpace should concentrate on what Facebook never figured out how to do: Music and performance art.

“I’ve thought for a while now that MySpace should consider focusing primarily on entertainment – movies, music, comedians, etc. There is a real opportunity to fill a void, particularly since they have the interface and the fan base already in place. It’s doubtful they’ll follow that advice, but a site with the size and resources of MySpace could dominate online music.”

I agree with Jeff (and I commented on his blog) … but one of the reasons I dread touching MySpace is because it allows its users to do some very uncouth (rhymes with Sonic Youth) things, like installing way too many bandwidth-clogging graphics and cringe-worthy design.

MySpace: A place for music logo.
MySpace: A place for music logo.

I guess we’ll just have to see if Murdoch’s MySpace can recover from its downhill trend in a Facebook world … and what it might mean for local indie artists like Chase Hamblin, who doesn’t really have his new album online and available anywhere but MySpace and a handful of brick and mortar shops in Houston. Sigh. And it’s too bad, I’d order his new one if I could, but don’t really wanna hear it thru MySpace at this moment. And, I won’t be able to make Friday’s CD release party at the Continental Club.

Why landscape disaster reminds me of timing belts

The other day, I left a comment on bearkat110’s reader blog I Like Pretty Flowers on Chron.com, sympathizing with her “very very bad haircut.”

Bearkat110 is a novice gardener just like me and she frequently offers some great posts about her captivating work in progress in Spring, Texas.

Her post starts off:

My stomach hurts and I am sitting here ready to break into tears…..

I asked my landscaper to trim up my yard before he put mulch down.

Look at what I came home to. Every where I look, I see the hacking.

The photo she posts with her blog brought me to tears, too, and it reminded me of a recent hack job I got at a local car repair shop that I trusted.

But after my experience, and about a gazillion dollars later, I will never take my car back there. Because I no longer trust them.

Here’s why. One day, I raced a co-worker to the parking lot as we were free from another day at the factory. I let him pull out first and I was following, until my whole power failed in my prized 2003 PT Cruiser and I coasted to a nearby parking spot 20 feet from where I started.

The car was towed to this shop I had frequented for the oil change because of their cheap advertised specials. The shop is Auto Care USA, 5757 Reading Road in Rosenberg, and they haven’t been there more than three years. New building, many nice bays, always have the history channel on in there and the place is cool. I liked it.

I arranged to meet the guy there the next morning; I was there when he got there at opening time, sharp.

Twenty minutes later, he came and assessed me of the situation.

Said that there timing belt done broke and that’s why the car wouldn’t start. Said most of my cost would be in labor, taking apart a PT Cruiser to get to the belt was no easy task (hell, changing the batter on this thing ain’t no easy task – that took me more than an hour one cold, cold morning in some corporate media parking garage). Said I might as well replace parts X, Y and Z while they were in there.

Said it was going to come to some astronomical figure that I can’t even disclose here in fear that male mechanically-inclined friends and family will publicly mock me.

But I am not mechanically inclined. I am service inclined. I am a web mechanic, but I don’t get my hands dirty. I can trouble spot and manipulate and fix some pretty nasty code, though, but if my fixes are going to change the function of the website or drastically alter the design, I’m going to clear that with my client first, because there’s nothing worse than doing a bunch of coding without communicating.

And so when this clown told me I was in for quite a repair bill, I told him that there was something I wanted fixed while he was in there. Hell, add it to the bill, I said. And then, I went out to the bay and with a flashlight, I showed him a wire that connects to the starter that has been frayed for about a year now. Every now and then, whenever I have somewhere important to go in a hurry, this wire will spazz out on me and I’ll have to open my hood and reach my hand down there in a very tight spot and wiggle the damn thing. I told him to fix it. The guy next to him said, well, we could just put some electric tape … and I stopped him and I sternly told him to order the part with the other parts they had to order and install it.

The repairs took longer than estimated. The time they projected came and went, I had to call them to get appraised of the situation. I missed two days of work. And close to closing time the second day, they called and said it was ready to be picked up.

When I got there, they told me they had noticed my A/C wasn’t blowing too cold, and so they said they recharged it for me and they’re looking for the leak. I told them that it was no bother, and that I’d like to pay and go. So I paid and went.

The next day in the garage, the car wouldn’t start. Popped the hood, and there was some electric tape on that part starring at me. I gave it a wiggle. Cranked right up.

Four days later, my car was blowing hot air. And in Houston, that hurts. I was beyond pissed. I think these guys wrecked my A/C system. I think they recharged it – without my permission, and when they did, they blew a hole in my hose. Or. maybe they just exacerbated an existing problem. I don’t care. You do not mess with a closed system in my car unless it fails – that’s my motto. Perhaps it’s a silly personal superstition, but it’s my superstition and they did not communicate anything to me before doing it.

And then, six days after the very very very unpleasant expensive repair, my oil light would start binging at me after extensive driving. That never happened before, either.

And so the other day I posted this to Bearkat110’s blog, which should now make more sense, with all this long-winded background:

brandonmoeller wrote:

Fire ’em. If they want your continued business, they should have communicated with you thoroughly about what you want. I bet they’ll want to communicate when you tell them they’re fired (if you bother to communicate to them, heck – they didn’t bother to offer that favor to you by clarifying your wishes with you). If you must, you can communicate “it’s too late, pals.” I recently had a lot of work done on my car. I went in the garage and specifically told them a part I wanted replaced. They said they’d add it to the extensive repairs I was getting. They didn’t. I haven’t been back since. And I didn’t communicate why to them. They should know.

Roy’s Auto Care, 5050 Highway 36 in Rosenberg, took my car in and couldn’t find the A/C leak at first. But they were able to clean what appeared to be a oily mess that was making my oil light sensor act all haywire. So they recharged the A/C system and charged me a fair and modest fee. A week later, when the A/C system went kaput again, they did find the worn out hose and they replaced it, and after everything was back together, they noticed a little bit of fluid escaping from the A/C dryer. But, a week later, Roy basically refused to let me schedule that part to be replaced – he said, “Let’s play it by ear.” And he was right. If we’re gonna have to replace that part down the road, anyway, which requires recharging the A/C system, then let’s go ahead and wait until it all escapes out anyway.

That was about a month ago now. It’s still blowing cold. There’s nothing better than finding a mechanic you can trust, who charges a reasonable rate and who can properly communicate and listen.

P.S. In the random department, part one: It’s comforting to know we can only move at the speed of light.

P.S.S. Trent Reznor nailed it: “Idiots rule.”

P.S.S.S. New Danger Mouse out, but the music’s not in the stores. It’s here – “Danger Mouse” “Dark Night of the Soul” torrent – throw this into a Google search field, then download the torrent from The Pirate Bay. Some interesting fan commentary there, too. 209 seeds when I jumped on. 250 two minutes later when I jumped off.

Dock Ellis was number 17; we’re 33 and why this matters

Despite the amateurish misspellings, the lyrics for my new favorite Todd Snider song, “America’s Favorite Pastime,” can be found here.

They’re not up at EighteenMinutes as of this writing, and I can understand why: The record, The Excitement Plan was just released yesterday.

Hell, we couldn’t even find it at the local Best Buy, and it’s doubtful the bigger one in the bigger town down the road has it, either. Not that we would really know – the BestBuy.com store locator is broken at the moment.

So, yesterday, after going to the local Best Buy and being turned away – but obligatorily buying my new Sonic Youth The Eternal record for me (HEY! I was cooking dinner) – Kim came home empty-handed. But then she ate pork chops and this really lousy vegetable dish I threw together and it was really good, she said, because she didn’t have to cook it.

We celebrated 33 months together last night. That’s a long time, I said. It was 33 months ago we went on our first date, which – coincidentally – was a concert by Todd Snider at the Mucky Duck when he was touring on The Devil You Know, two to three records ago (depending on how you count ’em).

And when she wasn’t looking, I slipped in the new Snider record into the stereo and hit play. I secretively snagged it via bit torrent last night – because that’s the kinda man I am. We did try to legitimately buy the damn thing, but, sometimes it’s just not meant to be when you live in suburbia and you have a penchant for indie music.

Anyway, America’s Favorite Pastime is a great song.

“His sinker looked like it was falling off a table / but nobody was hallucinating that.”

Dock, you’re my hero. And you can’t judge a book.

Link-o-rama

HYPER-LOCAL
Respect for Craig Washington : http://harriscountycriminaljustice.blogspot.com/2009/07/craig-washington.html

“When the spindletop stops” : http://swamplot.com/when-the-spindletop-stops/2009-07-20/

HPD to driver: Lemme look at your weiner : http://blogs.houstonpress.com/hairballs/2009/07/weinermobile_cops_houston.php

Hand it over: Texas Watchdog wins fight for Houston open records : http://www.texaswatchdog.org/2009/07/texas-watchdog-wins-another-open-records-battle-with-the-city-of-houston/

Tony Diaz vs. Houston Press, concerning “Ask a Mexican” : http://blogs.houstonpress.com/hairballs/2009/07/ask_a_mexican_column.php

I’m so glad we have lawyers, the be-all, end-all solution to any problem : http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/casey/6540583.html

Downtown Rosenberg photo planned : http://www.fbherald.com/articles/2009/07/22/news/doc4a67849c12e81383824996.txt

Texas Watchdog reviews what happened to bill in the Texas Lege that they had an interest in : http://www.texaswatchdog.org/2009/07/confidential-sources-beer-ethics-forms-heres-a-wrap-on-how-the-bills-texas-watchdog-highlighted-fared-in-the-legislature/

Food not bombs and the Houston Public Library : http://blogs.houstonpress.com/hairballs/2009/07/food_not_bombs.php

Grapes on the Brazos returns : http://www.fbherald.com/articles/2009/07/18/news/doc4a60b8d29a7df005288327.txt

MEDIA
Google to newspapers: “Don’t want us to index your work? Fine. It’s easy. Here’s how.” : http://www.internetevolution.com/author.asp?section_id=697&doc_id=179357

Why Wikipedia photos suck : http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/07/20/0044240/Why-the-Photos-On-Wikipedia-Are-So-Bad

A cable TV employee trolls and tells Jeff Jarvis he is “not a VIP … (or) a good customer” and that he should “wait for (his) turn to get help like everyone else.” : http://www.buzzmachine.com/2009/07/19/cablevision-sucks-2/#comment-398310

Leaving journalism is healthy : http://www.johntemple.net/2009/07/pulitzers-lost-what-cost-third-in.html

Evan Smith to leave Texas Monthly : http://uhjournalism.wordpress.com/2009/07/18/a-texas-version-of-politico/

MUSIC
Free MP3 “Say Please” – Monsters of Folk : http://monstersoffolk.com/

Animal Collective samples The Grateful Dead : http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2009/07/animal-collective-1.html

Kings of Convenience MP3 : http://stereogum.com/archives/mp3/new-kings-of-convenience-mrs-cold_079891.html

Something to do July 31 : http://www.fortbendnow.com/2009/07/23/39155

Elaine Greer at Sugar Hill : http://indiehouston.org/houston-music-concerts/elaine-greer-and-the-tontons-on-sugar-hill-live/

Neko on LexGo : http://www.kentucky.com/lexgo/music/story/866961.html

Goodbye, DRM : http://torrentfreak.com/drm-is-dead-riaa-says-090719/

ART
Is art still art if it’s broken into several pieces : http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ent/arts/theater/6534250.html

GEEK + TECH
More CSS tricks : http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/07/20/50-new-css-techniques-for-your-next-web-design/

A List Apart: The Inclusion Principle : http://www.alistapart.com/articles/the-inclusion-principle/

Web Accessibility in Mind’s Quick Reference guide : http://webaim.org/resources/quickref/

What’s not to like about liking : http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/20/people-are-using-google-reader-likes-but-some-hate-it-and-its-flawed/

Can’t use the web? Could it be your phone? : http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_usable_is_the_mobile_web.php

Dear Digg: if the ad looks like the content, people will stop coming back to look for the content : http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/20/digg-user-voted-ads-in-the-wild-mmmmm-ihop/

Free alternatives to Photoshop : http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/free_alternatives_to_photoshop_with_all_the_bells.php

Web standards open curriculum : http://interact.webstandards.org/

Yahoo can now serve as a basic site aggregator : http://lifehacker.com/5319388/yahoo-tweaks-its-homepage-allows-content-from-all-over-the-web

The latest Google Wave hype : http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/21/google-wave-begins-to-swell-with-developers-wider-release-this-september/

R.I.P. iPod? : http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/21/the-ipod-as-we-know-it-is-dying/

Unless Google buys this, it will never catch on : http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/this_message_will_self-destruct_new_tool_makes_online_postings_vanish.php

Blog eye candy : http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/07/22/50-new-beautiful-blog-designs/

The Facebookization of Yahoo! : http://www.allfacebook.com/2009/07/facebookization-of-yahoo/

Upload photos to Facebook via e-mail : http://lifehacker.com/5321149/quickly-upload-photos-and-video-to-facebook-via-email

Remember the Task is an AdobeAIR ware for Remember The Milk : http://www.jashsayani.com/my-softwares/remember-the-task/

RECREATIONAL READING
Help this dude collect One. Million. Giraffes. : http://olahelland.net/giraffes/

The mystery of grave 449 : http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/07/21/arlington_secrets/index.html

Just because the Baptists do not believe the same as I do doesn’t mean they should be condemned; Christ warned about such stone throwing in Scripture. : http://trueslant.com/loucarlozo/2009/07/21/jimmy-carter-leaving-the-southern-baptists-yes-and-this-ones-for-the-ladies/

Sacha Baron Cohen is Sarah : http://www.salon.com/comics/boll/2009/07/23/boll/index.html

“Many companies miss the garbled, unpunctuated non-English market segment …” : http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Support-Should-Never-Be-Necessary.aspx

Finally! A cat lady documentary : http://laughingsquid.com/cat-ladies-a-documentary-that-explores-the-real-story-behind-crazy-cat-ladies/

BuckyBalls! : http://laughingsquid.com/zoomdoggle-buckyballs-a-highly-addictive-toy-made-of-super-magnetic-tiny-metal-balls/

Resentment (and vodka) : http://locacrazywriter.blogspot.com/2009/07/part-1-vodka-is-only-thing-that-gets.html

GARDENING
Attract hummingbirds : http://www.chron.com/commons/persona.html?newspaperUserId=plantwoman&plckPersonaPage=BlogViewPost&plckUserId=plantwoman&plckPostId=Blog%3aplantwomanPost%3a63fa497e-e6d9-4a00-bf93-a1327130d2c4&plckController=PersonaBlog&plckScript=personaScript&plckElementId=personaDest

GWI Annual Honor Roll : http://martagon.blogspot.com/2009/07/annuals-gwi-honor-roll.html

How to grow tomatoes : http://planetgreen.discovery.com/home-garden/comprehensive-guide-growing-tomatoes.html

Fight leaf spot and mildew on my zinnias, already : http://forums2.gardenweb.com/forums/load/organic/msg0505002713722.html

Compost made easy : http://www.motherearthnews.com/Organic-Gardening/2006-10-01/Compost-Made-Easy.aspx

Herb organizer/herb garden, my frog would love this : http://lifehacker.com/5311492/turn-a-shoe-organizer-into-a-vertical-herb-garden

NEWS
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Police Report : http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2009/0723092gates1.html