FP Blogs

braiker:

well played

flavorpill:

Yes.

sigh.

I don’t think I adequately explained what I am talking about in my last post. Here are some simple examples.

• The task: I need to pay my worker’s comp insurance.
• A test: Is the date of my next payment to my insurance company > the current date?
• The push: I accomplished my task and added a new test to my list of things to ensure are correct.

--

• The task: I have to pay my mortgage.
• A test: Is the price of my mortgage still equal to X where X is the previous payment?
• The push: I have paid my mortgage and added a test to ensure payments are not consistent. (This happened to me once due to a drop in the amount and I didn’t realize I had been over paying, but not towards principal.)

--

• The task: I need to sign up for a new mobile phone and was quoted $X/month for a year.
• The test: Create a test that ensures I am not billed at more than $X.
• The push: Submit new test to my testing suite. Perhaps also a test that the cost does go up to the new amount as defined by the salesperson.

--

Think “if this then that” for the businesses I use on a recurring basis. If the banks and mobile phone companies and gas companies and insurance companies aren’t going to make APIs for us, why not make them ourselves? Hold them accountable and provide stats to ourselves about the money coming in and out of our lives.

A seven-year-old girl left this note on her parents’ computer desk. They are considering password-protecting the computer. I can laugh because this is not my child, but if it were, she’d find out what a nightmare life can really be! Link -via HuffPo

read more: http://www.neatorama.com/2012/05/17/you-shall-not-password/

Bandits are very simple to understand: they’re a rubber band with a hook. This may not seem extremely compelling at first glance, but there’s actually a lot you can do with them. They can be used to hang a water bottle on your bike, your sunglasses from your car’s rearview mirror, tools on a ladder when you need to set them somewhere, and virtually anything you can think of. More »

read more: http://lifehacker.com/5911498/bandits-are-tough-rubber-bands-with-hooks-that-secure-and-hang-just-about-anything

LaughSpin has a massive timeline of Saturday Night Live episodes, guest hosts, and cast members, so you can track who performed with who in what years, all the way back to the “Not Ready for Prime Time Players” in 1975. You can click to enlarge it, but you’ll have to scroll a lot -there’s a lot of information here, covering 37 years of SNL! Link -via Breakfast Links

read more: http://www.neatorama.com/2012/05/18/saturday-night-live-timeline/

The earth is not as round as your world globe makes it appear. It’s actually a bit potato-shaped, which, along with other anomalies, affects how gravity is measured in different parts of the world.  A German company that makes precision scales is experimenting with gravity by sending a garden gnome to various places around the world to be weighed. You can sign up as a volunteer to weigh the gnome in your area, or follow the gnome’s travels and weights. Sure, it’s viral marketing, but it could be fun, too!  Link -via the Presurfer

read more: http://www.neatorama.com/2012/05/18/the-garden-gnome-experiment/

I like Ben Valentine’s project PERFECTION PERFECTION PERFECTION PERFECTION PERFECTION PERFECTION PERFECTION PERFECTION:

Draw the largest, most accurate circle possible inside of this square.

Link

Legal experts are saying that Bill 78 tramples fundamental constitutional rights.

Somewhat buried by the massive response to Bill 78, the city’s law against masks was adopted Friday afternoon by city council.

Now that is some impressive trolling right there. Kudos, Wall Street Journal. Nicely done. 

UPDATE: They “corrected” it

CORRECTION: The story describing how Yahoo killed Flickr was written by Gizmodo’s Mat Honen. An earlier version of this article credited the wrong publication and misspelled the author’s first name. We regret the error. 

While the national average for a gallon of gas has dropped nearly 20 cents since peaking in early April, prices on the West Coast of the U.S. recently began rising again, even as prices in every other region of the country trend downwards.

For the week ending May 14, the U.S. Energy Information Administration had the national average at $3.814/gallon. But on the West Coast, that price had gone up to $4.308/gallon, up $.137/gallon from just two weeks earlier.

Even when you subtract California from the equation, the average West Coast gas price is still $4.11/gallon, an increase of $.052/gallon over the previous two weeks.

Los Angeles and San Francisco both surpass the California average of $4.414/gallon with prices of $4.489 and $4.433 per gallon, respectively.

Compare that to Cleveland ($3.697/gallon) and Houston ($3.713/gallon).

A rep for the AAA calls it a “a tale of two coasts,” but the graph above shows that the only other region whose prices haven’t matched the national average is the Rocky Mountain region, where prices have generally maintained the same level during the last several weeks.

So what’s the problem?

According to USA Today, analysts say it’s not increased demand and instead point the blame at a refinery slowdown in the western part of the country.

A rep for Western States Petroleum Association tells the paper that unexpected maintenance at refineries is partly to blame and “If they are patient… the decline in crude oil price we’re seeing … should translate to lower prices at the pump.”

But a gasoline analyst at Utility Consumers’ Action Network in San Diego tells USA Today that there is a problem with lack of competition among refineries in the area: “We’re not saying there’s a conspiracy. It’s just that with this few competitors, it’s very easy to game prices by turning off capacity.”

read more: http://consumerist.com/2012/05/why-are-west-coast-gas-prices-rising-while-dropping-everywhere-else.html

read more: http://picturesforsadchildren.com/post/23287153768

James Maher had the unfortunate luck of placing his bag and prized Fujifilm X100 in a “dry” container on a fishing trip that didn’t keep its contents very dry. Maher survived his harrowing voyage on the SS Hit ‘em Hard, but his camera did not. Thankfully, the photographer didn’t let his shooter die in vain. He spent precious time dissecting it and disassembling it, piece by piece. Inside was a densely packed puzzle of 130 screws, 50 pieces of tape and over 152 individual parts. Best of all, Maher documented his adventure inside the X100 and posted it online for all of us to enjoy. It’s not the first glimpse under the hood, but it’s certainly the most thoroughly documented. So hit up the source link and take a peek at what the inside of a sophisticated digital camera looks like.

Water-damaged Fujifilm X100 torn apart for fun and education (but mostly fun) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 18 May 2012 04:26:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  James Maher  | Email this | Comments

read more: http://www.engadget.com/2012/05/18/water-damaged-fujifilm-x100-torn-apart-for-fun-and-education/

collegehumor:

The annual CollegeHumor All-Nighter is here!

Featuring:
- 12 brand new videos filmed, edited, and released in 12 hours

- A LIVE office video stream throughout the night

- Back by demand: The Chris Gethard Insult-O-Thon

- Awesome surprise guests that we’re not allowed to mention yet

- A LIVE Dinosaur Office

- Lots of free giveaways and contests for you to win

- All-new Jake & Amir

- Appearances from David Young and Sarah Schneider 

- Even more things awesome things that we just don’t remember right now 


Set every alarm in your phone. You do not wanna miss what we have in store for this year.

MAY 24 8pm (EST) - May 25 8am (EST)

RSVP HERE

Very excited to be a part of my first one of these.

The Little Prince

The BBC has a short piece on Montreal: One Square Mile of Canada – with lots of subtle mistakes and clichés, alas. It’s presented by Lyse Doucet, a longtime BBC reporter, who’s from New Brunswick.

For starters – the Main is anything but “sweeping” – that makes it sound like a grand Paris boulevard rather than the cranky one-way thoroughfare it actually is …”once the symbolic dividing line between the city’s French and English speaking communities” – again a cliché and never really true: anglos lived in Hochelaga and Rosemont, francophones in Ville Émard and Verdun and all over … “the Quartier Chinois, or Chinese quarter” – actually, we call it Chinatown, and it’s more a small shopping area now than a “quarter” where many people live.

“Maple Spring”? That translates printemps d’érable which was mostly just a pun on printemps arabe. And translating Garde-Manger as “The Larder” is just kind of weird.

And hey – Mount Royal is not a hill.

But “the mighty St. Lawrence River” – it’s always fun to spot one of those.

Nice chat with Mike Finnerty though.

(I can’t tell whether this is a piece in itself, or a teaser for a longer report. But I do know it’s part of a series on Canada that the network is doing.)

Monomyth - "Feeling"

Edmund and May were married under summer sun. Alison wasn't there, but Frank stood proud in his elastic denim outfit. Evelyn had her hair swept over one eye, but cried with both. Jen came because she wanted Tate to be there. People came to Edmund's fourth marriage the way you would attend a 14-year-old's baby shower. People thought more about their parking.

(The Edmund stories may continue at some point, at any point really, but for now, they will take a rest. I hope you've enjoyed.)

[PWYC for the delicious Monomyth EP]

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.

In his own words, here is Brian Evenson's Book Notes music playlist for his short story collection, Windeye:

Windeye is filled with vanishing sisters, transient realities, and claustrophobic spaces. There is a sense of things being ephemeral and too soon gone. Several of the stories owe a great deal to ghost stories—Windeye contains my most haunting, and haunted, writing. Even at moments where the stories turn toward philosophical problems and questions, they do so in a way that opens up to uncertainty and emptiness, trying to answer the question of how, once we begin to feel that the world around us is uncertain, do we manage to go on with our lives?

I listen obsessively to music, and often listen to music when I write. Below, I've tried to put together a soundtrack for the collection. I've skipped a few stories, but I'd be happy to take suggestions for those (or alternate suggestions for these).

1. "Windeye
" / Mark Hollis, "The Color of Spring"

This one is more about capturing a particular mood. This song has a beautiful and mournful quality to it that I find, too, in the ending of the collection's title story. Hollis's solo version of it is really marvelous.

2. "The Second Boy" / Coil, "Driftmix" & The Rolling Stones, "Gimme Shelter"

Ideally, you'd listen to "Driftmix" (from the Snow ep) in one headphone and "Gimme Shelter" in the other as Leppin wanders through the snow, looking for shelter but turning in circles.

3. "The Process" / Gilles Fournier, "Zai Na Yao Yuan De Di Fang"

From the Pola X soundtrack, this piece starts out with dogs barking, then moves to a drone and then develops crazily to provide a serious sense of aggression. It strikes me as the kind of piece that someone might listen to who has a wall covered with teeth.

4. "A History of the Human Voice" / Faust, "Stimmen"

This track suggests how your voice might sound if your vocal chords were bee-ridden. Perfect choice for a story about the secret communication compact between bees and humans.

5. "Dapplegrim" / Thrones, "Black Blade"

This reworking of the Blue Oyster Cult song captures nicely for me what happens when a man lets himself be led into slaughter and mayhem by his horse.

6. "Angel of Death
" / Sunburned Hand of the Man, "Wishbone"
I like the patterns of repetition of this simple track, which for me flow well with the idea of a series of individuals walking through their own deaths. I still can't get enough of Sunburned Hand of the Man.

7. "The Dismal Mirror" / Johnny Cash, "Hung My Head"

I think the mood and sense of loss in this song goes well with this story of a vanished and perhaps dead sister. It strikes me too as the kind of music the main character might gravitate towards.

8. "Legion"
 / Daftpunk, "Rollin' & Scratchin'"

In a world in which machines are getting a taste of human perception, Daft Punk seems the perfect choice.

9. "The Moldau Case" / Hood, "They Removed All Trace that Anything Had Ever Happened There"

The title says it all, and serves as a kind of cold appreciation of what is likely to happen at the end of the story, after all the disappearances and the abandoned reports.

10. "The Sladen Suit" / Joy Division, "Dead Souls"

This is one of the strangest stories in a somewhat strange collection, combining as it does a ghost ship narrative with the idea of an old diving costume that seems to either open up onto another dimension or into nowhere. Alternately, a sea chanty might do…

11. "Hurlock's Law" / He Said Omala, "Post Code Orange"

A slightly eerie song by a former Wire member as a way of capturing a failed mission, another vanishing that cannot be prevented.

12. "Discrepancy" / Low, "Try to Sleep" versus The Dandy Warhols, "Sleep"

In the (imagined) film of this story, ideally one or the other of these songs would be playing as the story ends with the female protagonist in bed, all the lost sounds of betrayal rushing at her. Two extremely lovely songs that I'd be hard pressed to chose between and that provide a nice counterpoint to one another.

13. "Baby or Doll" / Holy F*ck, "Super Inuit"

Aggravated and crazed Canadian madness, with a wonderful speed to it that captures this story's main character's confusion and panic while under hypnosis.

14. "The Tunnel" / Ride, "Nowhere"

This is one of several stories in the collection that provide contrasting models of a reality, where we get a sense of different paths diverging for different characters without one being allowed to resolve itself. I like the dreamy slowness of this song combined with the whirr that backs it. Of all the Ride songs I know, it's the one that sounds most like it takes place underground.

15. "South of the Beast" / Harvey Milk, "War"

If the only Harvey Milk you know is the politician of the same name, you have a surprise waiting for you. Great slow and sludgy metal that metaphorically captures aspects of this strange story.

16. "The Absent Eye" / Nick Drake "Black Eyed Dog"

As for "Discrepancy", this is a song that I see coming at the end of the imagined film of the story. "I'm growing old and I don't want to know…"

17. "Bon Scott: The Choir Years" / The Dandy Warhols, "Hells Bells"

I went through a break-up last year and for a while seemed only to listen to the Dandy Warhols, probably because they were what were in my car CD player at the time. This is a wonderful remake of the AC/DC song, and in the spirit of my own insertion of Bon Scott into the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

18. "Tapadera" / Goatsnake, "Flower of Disease"

"Death is standing right outside the door…" Need I say more?

19. "The Other Ear" / Sunburned Hand of the Man, "The Wind Has Ears"

Slightly over fifteen minutes long, you can probably synchronize the song with a reading of this story. The title's important here, but I like the slow development as well as the very strange spaces the song gets to in the last five minutes or so.

20. "They" / The Gun Club, "Death Party"

An old classic. Nothing like a death party, particularly when the dead keep being brought back to life with their memories less than intact.

21. "The Oxygen Protocol" / Gorillaz, "Every Planet We Reach Is Dead"

There's something about this song that makes it sound deliberately decelerated to me, a weird dreamy, slow motion quality that feels like running out of air.

22. "Grottor"
 / Einsturzende Neubauten, "Sie"

There's something creepy, at least for an American listener, about disembodied voices whispering/speaking over one another in German in German. This song was important to me when I was working on Dark Property as well, but it's something I come back to every few years and it quietly captures for me the dark mood of this very dark story in which the main character has a very difficult time grasping what is actually happening, or doing anything to stop it from happening.

23. "Anskan House" / Low, "Monkey"

"Oh, my my, little while lie." Certain lines of this song really do seem like they could be written for this story, and it's probably no coincidence that I was listening to a lot of Low when I wrote this. Excellent version by Robert Plant's Band of Joy as well.

Brian Evenson and Windeye links:

the author's website

Brooklyn Rail review
Open Letters Monthly review
Publishers Weekly review
Tin House interview with the author

Largehearted Boy Book Notes essay by the author for Electric Flesh
Largehearted Boy Book Notes essay by the author for Fugue State
Largehearted Boy Book Notes essay by the author for Last Days
Largehearted Boy Book Notes essay by the author for The Open Curtain

also at Largehearted Boy:

other Book Notes playlists (authors create music playlists for their book)
my 11 favorite Book Notes playlists

100 Online Sources for Free and Legal Music Downloads
52 Books, 52 Weeks (weekly book reviews)
Antiheroines (interviews with up and coming female comics artists)
Atomic Books Comics Preview (weekly comics highlights)
Daily Downloads (free and legal daily mp3 downloads)
guest book reviews
Largehearted Word (weekly new book highlights)
musician/author interviews
Note Books (musicians discuss literature)
Shorties (daily music, literature, and pop culture links)
Soundtracked (composers and directors discuss their film's soundtracks)
Try It Before You Buy It (mp3s and full album streams from the week's CD releases)
weekly music & DVD release lists

In observance of National Bike to Work Day, I have compiled a list of tips for motorists on co-existence with cyclists: How to Not Kill a Cyclist.

All Things Considered looks back on the music career of Donna Summer.

Rolling Stone and Music Mix share playlists of her greatest hits.

The Believer interviews author Jonathan Lethem.

The Handsome Furs have broken up.

The Believer interviews author Jonathan Lethem.

The Columbus Dispatch interviews Pat Sansone of Wilco and The Autumn Defense.

I really love The Autumn Defense because it reminds me of bands I love such as Wings and Bread. Are you a fan of 1970s AM radio rock?

Pat Sansone: Of course, that's what we grew up with and it's definitely a part of our sound and a part of our influences. Both of those bands you mentioned -- we love The Beatles and Paul McCartney and those Wings albums are great. We definitely appreciate being mentioned in the same sentence with Paul McCartney.

The Middle Class Handbook lists 5 ways to kill your book club. (via)

The Guardian profiles the Maccabees.

Weeks firmly downplays any suggestion their success means his group are the last of the great indie guitar bands ("Anything like that must be taken with a huge pinch of salt"), but with big-selling guitar bands now almost as rare as the dodo, they have followed a method dating back to the Rolling Stones and the Who: forming like a gang in childhood, making gradually better records (initially on tiny labels Haircut and Promise Records) and then touring the world as mates.

The longlist for the 2012 Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel Of The Year has been named.

Congratulations to Largehearted Boy Book Notes contributor Stuart Neville.

Zeus visits World Cafe for an interview and live performance.

Morning Edition remembers author Carlos Fuentes.

Win Hilary Mantel's novels Bring Up the Bodies and Wolf Hall and a $100 Threadless gift certificate in this week's Largehearted Boy contest.

Amazon MP3 has 100 digital albums on sale for $5.

Follow me on Twitter, Google+, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Stumbleupon for links (updated throughout the day) that don't make the daily "Shorties" columns.

also at Largehearted Boy:

previous Shorties posts (daily news and links from the worlds of music, books, and pop culture)

100 Online Sources for Free and Legal Music Downloads
Atomic Books Comics Preview (the week's best new comics & graphic novels)
daily mp3 downloads
Largehearted Word (the week's best new books)
Try It Before You Buy It (mp3s and full album streams from this week's CD releases)
weekly music & DVD release lists

The FuelBand activity is over, and the devices are returned. I asked a Nike executive at the conference about what happens to the other Nike fitness properties, now that it looks like Nike is recomposing the “Fuel” concept from calories to this weighted score. He said, oh, it will take months to reorganize that stuff. I said I was worried, because the FuelBand and site do so much less than I already getting from the Nike tracking I was using, and he said he wasn’t really involved with that. Fair enough.

Today the tracking product that drew me into the Nike+ ecology announced that their site will be down for months while they get rolled into the new thing.

The tracking product I’ve shifted to is still alive and well, prominently linked directly from the new hotness as a menu item, and so, one hopes, unlikely to disappear anytime soon. It is a very different product from FuelBand, and fits well into a mix that serves all activity levels. Nike+ has turned into a confusing crowd of sites and products, and simplification is good, but the timing woke me up abruptly this morning.

I am glad I’m not on the support queue that will take calls today from people who spent the last couple of weeks or months getting hooked on the website companion to a different piece of hardware they already bought. The email tells them that their data will still be there at that indeterminate point in the future, but these products are about habits and regular reinforcement. Months from now might as well be the heat death of the universe. I remember how entertained I was by rewards displays when I first found those sites, and I know I’d be pretty frustrated if I were waking up this morning to learn that I’d never get a chance to see all the levels.

The 24th night demo saw thousands of people pour into the street as the debate on Bill 78 at the National Assembly pondered heavy fines for pickets at CEGEPs and universities and for many categories of demonstration. Although big, the demo was peaceful and there were no arrests.

100,000 signatures are needed by 4 p.m. to defeat Bill 78: loi78.com.

Every day, Daily Downloads offers 10 free and legal mp3 downloads, plus free and legal live sets from around the internet.

Today's free and legal mp3 downloads:

Doe Paoro: "Born Whole" [mp3] from Slow to Love
search for more Doe Paoro posts at Largehearted Boy

Holograms: "Chasing My Mind" [mp3] from Holograms (out July 10th)
search for more Holograms posts at Largehearted Boy

Michael the Blind: "Sympathies" [mp3] from Are's & Els (out June 5th)
search for more Michael the Blind posts at Largehearted Boy

Rachael Sage: "Invisible Light" [mp3] from Haunted By You
search for more Rachael Sage posts at Largehearted Boy

Seventeen Evergreen: "Burn the Fruit" [mp3] from Steady On, Scientist! (out June 26th)
search for more Seventeen Evergreen posts at Largehearted Boy

Stagnant Pools: "Dead Sailor" [mp3] from Temporary Room (out August 7th)
search for more Stagnant Pools posts at Largehearted Boy

These United States: "Born Young" [mp3] from These United States (out June 12th)
These United States: "Dead and Gone" [mp3] from These United States (out June 12th)
search for more These United States posts at Largehearted Boy

Twin Trip: "Man on the Moon" [mp3] from Twin Trip
search for more Twin Trip posts at Largehearted Boy

Unicycle Loves You: "Bitch Eye" [mp3] from Failure
search for more Unicycle Loves You posts at Largehearted Boy

Free and legal live performances at other websites:

The Phantom Family Halo: 2012-04-30, Brooklyn [mp3]
search for more Phantom Family Halo posts at Largehearted Boy

also at Largehearted Boy:

other daily free and legal mp3 downloads
100 Online Sources for Free and Legal Music Downloads

musician/author interviews
Note Books (musicians discuss literature)
Shorties (daily music, books, and pop culture news and links)
Soundtracked (composers and directors discuss their film's soundtrack)
Try It Before You Buy It (mp3s and full album streams from the week's CD releases)
weekly music & DVD release lists

La Presse says the summer will be chilly and wet with lots of storms, based on the predictions of U.S. site AccuWeather and the recurrence of El Niño, while the Journal says it will be hot and dry, based on quotes from an Environment Canada authority.

The Montreal City Weblog summer weather prediction is that it will be a mix: sometimes the one, sometimes the other.

Discussions continue at the National Assembly over the special law, Bill 78 – OpenFile has the English of it here.

Jean-François Lisée calls it liberticide. Josée Legault points out the risks of such repression. Ariane Moffatt sings about it. Thousands are marching.

When shit needs blowing up, you don’t call a care bear. You pony up the eight hundred grand, buy yourself a ticket on Virgin Galactic or Bob’s Space Pony or the Chinatown bus and get up into the exosphere, roll down the window, get your shoulder-mounted shit nuke, and take that fucker out.

Guess what’s happened here.

I got tired of the site not working, the link code always falling apart in weird places, the idiosyncratic peccadilloes of the WordPress theme to which I had become inextricably wedded, and my inability to do the things I wanted to do with this site that I was having an increasingly hard time accomplishing.

At a certain point, you just have to say, the hell with it. So welcome to our new digs.

It’s still sparse, I know. There’s nowhere to sit, when you say something in here it echoes, the stuff we’ve brought over since the move is still in boxes, and we’ll be crashing in sleeping bags for a couple of days until we can figure out how the beds go together, and which of the safe and easy-to-remember places the allen keys are all kept. But for the moment it’s good to be in this, a spanking new empty box, with only hope in it.

Quiz stuff will come shortly. Until then, take this site in your hand, and feel its pulse. We’re alive yet.

I love this! A bath towel that pixelates your body in real life! The Censorship Towel is an art project from the Carmichael Collective, the folks who brought us Piñata Anatomy, but we can hope that this idea makes it into stores sometime. See more pictures at the project site. Link

read more: http://www.neatorama.com/2012/05/17/censorship-towel/

A bomb scare at the National Assembly has interrupted debate on Jean Charest’s special law.

There are plenty of free online services that promise to host your digital life, but when you’re serious about taking control of your own data, it’s time to host it yourself. There are dozens of companies willing to take your money in exchange for server space for webapps, blogs, photos, and more—but this week we want to know which ones do you trust for uptime, flexibility, support, and features for the money. More »

read more: http://lifehacker.com/5911258/best-web-hosting-company

Mayor Tremblay declared Jeanne Mance an official co-founder of Montreal on the city’s 370th birthday Thursday. She now shares the accolade with Maisonneuve.

Now, it was mentioned last year that Tremblay was planning to make this declaration in 2017 at the city’s 375th anniversary party. Might this be a clue that Tremblay’s not expecting to still be in power by then?

There will be no charges laid against police who shot and killed itinerant Mario Hamel and passerby Patrick Limoges in the early hours of June 9, 2011.

Some student journalists covering the end of Wednesday night’s demo were rounded up for arrest when their tweets were noticed by the all-seeing eye of @SPVM and word came down to let them go.

Some other student strife-related links from today, in no particular order:

Thoughts on the need for a “special” law and what it means.

Ten points everyone should know about the student movement.

Both the Ligue des droits et libertés and Amnesty International are concerned about the sheer force used by police against students here. It’s interesting that this plays out against today’s news that police commanders at the very violent repression around the G20 protests in Toronto two years ago will be charged with various misconduct offences.

When it comes to our brains, black is white and up is down. Any time we try to achieve a desired result, we end up doing the opposite. Such is the case with trying to be smart. We like to come off as intelligent, and so we often act like we know more than we do to achieve that effect. In reality, however, saying “I don’t know” can be a whole lot smarter. More »

read more: http://lifehacker.com/5910993/i-dont-know-is-one-of-the-smartest-things-you-can-say

Following the recent news that Comcast would not count any of its own Xfinity streaming video services against Internet customers’ 250GB data cap, the folks at Kabletown have announced they is doing away with that cap — and replacing it with tiered data plans.

The good news is that the tiers will actually begin above the 250GB level, with everyone bumped up to a 300GB cap.

The bad news is that those who go over that limit won’t be throttled — as Comcast currently does to cap-busters — but will instead be hit with fees for additional blocks of GB.

(The Comcast statement gives an example of $10 for 50GB over the limit, but it’s not clear if that’s merely a possible example or an actual price to be quoted.)

Comcast isn’t exactly set on how it’s going to price those tiers, so it will begin doing trials in some select markets.

Adds the company:

In markets where we are not trialing a new data usage management approach, we will suspend enforcement of our current usage cap as we transition to a new data usage management approach, although we will continue to contact the very small number of excessive users about their usage.

So while we’re glad that Comcast is realizing that more and more people are using the Internet to view data-hogging video, we won’t be able to judge its tiered plan until we actually see the tiers and their respective overage prices.

read more: http://consumerist.com/2012/05/comcast-to-remove-250gb-data-cap-dont-celebrate-just-yet.html

>Windows/Mac/Linux: Although there are a bunch of ways to backup your Gmail, including really easy to use Windows app MailStore, cross-platform program Gmvault takes the cake for being feature-rich and highly customizable. More »

read more: http://lifehacker.com/5911193/gmvault-backs-up-your-gmail-and-restores-it-to-any-gmail-account

It can be tricky to book a hotel room if you’ve never seen the hotel, and online hotel reviews can be spotty and arguably reliable at best. Simplehoney is a new hotel booking service that promises to take the mystery out of finding a hotel you’ll love to stay in. Think of it like Pandora for hotel booking—you tell it what you like, and it only shows you the good stuff. More »

read more: http://lifehacker.com/5911063/simplehoney-makes-sure-you-never-book-a-hotel-you-wont-love

(NYT via TDV via Buzzfeed)

read more: http://cubiclebot.com/interesting/how-common-is-your-birthday-image/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Cubiclebot+%28CubicleBot%29

At REI we have been using the jQuery tablesorter plugin for a number of our tables. Most recently, we have been updating our older layout for Adobe’s CQ5 platform, and we discovered a problem where tablesorter was not properly sorting date columns.

When tablesorter was applied to our table, all the columns sorted as they should, but the date would either not sort at all, or sort incorrectly.

After some false starts we determined it was caused by our inclusion of multiple strings of text with different styles provided by spans.

So the question is, how do you parse multiple strings with a custom jQuery tablesorter parser plugin in Javascript? Apparently, you don’t. All that is required is to extract the text you wish to sort on via tablesorter’s built-in textextraction property.

Our markup looks something like this:

<td>
<span class="date">05/17/2012</span>
06:30 PM EDT
</td>

We considered adding an attribute to the table cells, but the class is so easily addressable we opted for that.

$("table.sortable").tablesorter({
 sortList: [[0, 0]],
 textExtraction: function(node) {
 return $(node).find("span.date").text();
 }
});

Once we added textextraction to the .tablesorter call and targeted the date span, the date column sorted effortlessly.

Sonny and the Sunsets - "Pretend You Love Me". A great one, cool and hot. That's how sand works: gets cold quickly, heats up fast. But "Pretend You Love Me" isn't sand, isn't desert, despite all that lap steel. Instead it's flowering, sprouting, ivy curls. It's buds, spuds, beet greens, gladiolas. There is flute, reverb and bassline groove. Sonny and the Sunsets are planting a garden overtop all that strife and spite, the passive-aggressive drama. Rakes and hoes, bags of seed, microphones and electric guitars. [Longtime Companion is released on 26 June / pre-order / I wrote about another song by Sonny Smith last month]

Lakes of Canada - "Born Again". Love the chorus here, the overearnestness smoothed out into something soft-lit, dreamy, easy as Spanish moss. It's an elusive aesthetic - part sandbank bonfire, part spinning vinyl record, the sleeve propped up against a potted plant. If only the verses had the same warm sound, hi-fi MOR instead of lo-fi strum. [Lakes of Canada launch Toll the Bell at Montreal's Il Motore on Saturday / website]

(photo source)

It taces so gud. (Taken with instagram)

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.

In his own words, here is Isaac Adamson's Book Notes music playlist for his novel, Complication:

Music plays a role in all my books, and as Complication was darker than anything I've written previously, I guess it only makes sense that in reading about the tracks below you're going to encounter words like "creepy" and "spooky" and "atmospheric" a lot.

Various music influences my work, be it through lyrical fragments or just the mood certain songs evoke, but when I'm actually sitting at my keyboard, I tend toward instrumental tracks since lyrics often distract me. Accordingly, I've split the playlist into two parts.

MUSIC WITH WORDS

"Half a Person" by The Smiths

"In the days when you were hopelessly poor," sings Morrissey in one of his countless lyrical bon mots, "I just liked you more." One of my characters references this line as I feel it kind of sums up the way many long-term expats (or even frequent visitors) feel about Prague. Perhaps when people of a certain age talk nostalgically about the energetic buzz and feelings of unlimited possibility brewing the city following the so-called Velvet Revolution of 1989, they're also talking largely about their own spent youth, but its also true that the post-Communist glow has started to fade over the last 20 years in some ways. It's no longer a super cheap place to live, beer doesn't cost a quarter anymore, and those English-teaching jobs are a little harder to come by. I've visited three times over the last decade, and each time Old Town is a little more touristy, there are more global brands dominating Wenceslas Square, and the city generally looks more clean-scrubbed, less timeworn and gritty. All of which is no doubt a good thing for Prague – Morrissey's line carries a heavy whiff of condescension, after all – but still.

"Three Red Birds" by Mr. Gnome


Mr. Gnome are a two person outfit from Cleveland who pen some wonderfully dark tunes built on percussive drumming and guitar work that goes from chiming melodies to crunching blasts of heavy riffage at times worthy of Zeppelin (check out the chorus riff on "Plastic Shadow" if you don't believe me). I discovered them during the period I was working on Complication and had them on heavy rotation throughout. My favorite Mr. Gnome album is Heave Yer Skeleton, but the song I picked to highlight is from Tastes Like Magic, a collection of B-sides. Lyrically, I have no idea what this creepy song is about, but I love heavy ascending riff and the build and release of tension throughout.

"Captain" by Ween

Though they long ago shed their helium-voiced, pantyhose-on-the-head image and are now known more for their virtuoso musicianship and amazing live shows, they're still not a band I spend much time listening to while working on anything requiring concentration (and a straight face). Except this track. It makes me imagine standing on the deck of a boat in the middle of the ocean on some lonely moonlit night and seeing a tattered ghost ship suddenly emerge through a heavy fog only to disappear one long, hair-raising moment later. "Captain," beseeches the disembodied sounding voice on this song over and over, "turn around and take me home." It's a sentiment I can well imagine Lee Holloway would share as he finds himself increasingly in over his head when trying to discover what really happened to his brother. Then there's that weird "demon voice" interlude toward the end of the track, which…well, I should shut up now so I don't give anything away.

"Dear Darkness" by PJ Harvey

PJ Harvey might be my favorite musical artist over the last 20 years, but I was a little bemused to see all the accolades given Let England Shake, because for me White Chalk was the better record. True, it's a more sparse, gothick-y kind of album, morose at times and shrill at others, chock full of ghosts and demons and violence, but it boasts some of Harvey's best lyrics. The haunting "Dear Darkness" seems written from the perspective of someone who has seen a lot of bad luck and is begging the darkness itself to return some of what is has taken over the years. I thought about this song a lot in relation to my character Vera, a troubled woman at the heart of the mystery in Complication.


"Knives Out" by Radiohead


"I want you to know," sings Yorke, "he's not coming back." It's a line echoed in various forms throughout Complication in relation to Lee Holloway's dead brother and the protagonist's drive to figure out why he disappeared. In interviews Thomas Yorke has said this cheery little number is partly about cannibalism, and partly about "when you look at someone close to you and know they're going to die. It's like a shadow over them or the way they stare right through you." It's a stare various characters in Complication would no doubt be familiar with. I also like the Christopher O'Reilly cover of this on classical piano, which I listened to probably more than the Radiohead original when writing the book.


"Turpentine" by Ocean Versus Daughter


When a filmmaker friend and I went to Prague last year to shoot a book trailer, we were fortunate enough to get some help from Flanna Sheridan, leader of the Prague-based, piano driven quintet Ocean Versus Daughter (she's the one running down the hill screaming in the video). I've listened to the band's album a lot in the months since and it's a layered, moody gem of a record. And when Sheridan confesses "I ate all your cake while you were away," during "Turpentine," I can't help but think of certain passage in the novel having to do with the unwelcome discovery of a half-eaten sponge cake.

"At Night" by The Cure

Downbeat, repetitive, keyboard heavy minimalism perfect for walking around an unpeopled Prague on a cold winter morning at 4 a.m. because your jetlag won't let you do anything else.

"Bohemian Rhapsody" by Queen

I don't know why, maybe it's the ‘Bohemian' thing, but this song seemed like it was everywhere when I visited Prague for the first time in 2002. Same goes for Madonna. Now I can't hear Bohemian Rhapsody without thinking about Prague --well, Prague and Wayne's World.

MUSIC WITHOUT WORDS

"Dwarfland/Love Theme" by Angelo Badalamenti and David Lynch

I listened to the Mulholland Drive soundtrack incessantly while working on my previous book Kinki Lullaby, and that habit spilled over a bit into this one as well. For me, Badalamenti ranks with giants like Henry Mancini, Ennio Morricone, and Bernard Herrmann, and Mulholland Drive is his darkest, most ominous work, truly the stuff of nightmares. And from a writing perspective, the fact that this track clocks in at over 12 minutes is a bonus as well. Put it on repeat 20 times, you've done a days' work! (Incidentally, Badalamenti's first soundtrack experience was for Czech director Ivan Passer, and Badalamenti chose the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra to record the Mulholland Drive score, so maybe there's more than a little of the Czech Republic in his work as well).

"Thirty Cases of Major Zeman" - Zdeněk Liška


This is the brassy theme song to a popular 1980s Czechoslovak detective series following the rise of handsome policeman Major Jan Zeman. The show was hugely popular if heavily propagandized, its most famous episode featuring a thinly veiled version of the true-life underground Czech rock band Plastic People of the Universe portrayed as drug-crazed, child-abusing, murderous hijackers. During the section of Complication that takes place in 1984, a character references hearing the theme song blasting from a television on the floor above in the cheap housing complex where she lives.

String Quartet No.2 – Gyorgi Ligeti

Hungarian composer Gyorgi Ligeti is not a household name by a long shot, but you've almost certainly heard his unnerving soundscapes at the movies. Lontano was featured in both Kubrick's The Shining and Scorsese's Shutter Island, and Kubrick used other Ligeti compositions in 2001 and Eyes Wide Shut. The Ligeti piece I listened to most often though was String Quartet No. 2. I'm pretty ignorant about classical music, but read somewhere that Ligeti spoke about his work being the metaphorical fusion of clocks and clouds. That's an apt enough description for me – and, of course, clocks play a big part in Complication.

"Als Jakob Erwachte" - Krystof Penderecki
Penderecki is another favorite whenever dark films go shopping for dark sounds. As with Ligeti, Penderecki's songs were used in both The Shining and Shutter Island, as well as featuring in The Exorcist and David Lynch's Inland Empire. In the 50s and 60s, Penderecki wrote compositions that called for musicians to scratch their stringed instruments or bang on them like drums and he claims some musicians refused to play his pieces as a result. This one dates from 1974. See also "Polymorphia" if your idea of a good time involves paranoia.

Isaac Adamson and Complication links:

the author's website
video trailer for the book

Kirkus Reviews review
Publishers Weekly review

also at Largehearted Boy:

other Book Notes playlists (authors create music playlists for their book)
my 11 favorite Book Notes playlists

100 Online Sources for Free and Legal Music Downloads
52 Books, 52 Weeks (weekly book reviews)
Antiheroines (interviews with up and coming female comics artists)
Atomic Books Comics Preview (weekly comics highlights)
Daily Downloads (free and legal daily mp3 downloads)
guest book reviews
Largehearted Word (weekly new book highlights)
musician/author interviews
Note Books (musicians discuss literature)
Shorties (daily music, literature, and pop culture links)
Soundtracked (composers and directors discuss their film's soundtracks)
Try It Before You Buy It (mp3s and full album streams from the week's CD releases)
weekly music & DVD release lists

Montreal is included in this transit geek exercise in showing how far you can get on public transit in half an hour in various cities. The maps are in scale and Montreal shows up rather well.