Rich Seymour’s stochastic statements.

Recently on reddit there was a question of who was your favorite jazz artist. I didn’t write anything, but David S Ware’s work with Matthew Shipp really moved me when I was in NYC.

But yeah, he needs a kidney… all of this from the daily swarm.

They also have an interview with erstwhile (used that word twice today, probably wrongly) program manager of indie 103.1 here.

File under: day late dollar short.

In the category of radio station most likely to play the bands on the cover of SPIN magazine in Los Angeles, there was only one. Indie 103.1… I don’t know the who deal beyond the fact that this radio station is going to become net only. (I guess they weren’t getting enough advertising revenue) You can check it out at indie1031.com

But in my opinion, wfmu.org is the best online radio by far. Also, as a shout out to my Dad’s lifelong love of steel guitar you can check out Steel Guitar Radio

Then in terms of LA “independent” radio, it’s nearly maxxxxed out already with:
littleradio.com who had an interview with erstwhile indie 1031 program director Mark Shovel::: here (look on the left under archives 1/16/09… it starts with a wicked sharp ease track)

vivaradio.com run by the canadian/american dreamers at American Apparel.

killradio.org very independent… clark 8 (err me playing clark 8 songs acoustically) played on killradio.org a while back

dublab.com killer electronic sounds and events around LA

and finally
imradionetwork.org

All of those are LA based alt-sounds streaming on the internet…
not to mention the variety of podcasts coming out of more and more blogs… who knows, maybe this one.

So… I personally think Fox/MySpace should buy 103.1 FM. I personally see more rotation of commercially viable rock, rap, r&b, etc. on MySpace Music than anywhere else. They just cornered that market early and well.

I still mainly buy local when it comes to fresh tunes.

So, 2009, what’s in store? We have MLK day coming up, followed by inauguration, followed by my band playing a show (on a Wednesday)…

I just upgraded this site to wordpress 2.7, it’s rather snazzy.

I’ve been looking into the language Haskell a bit over break. It seems interesting.

I’ve had a nice time in Jamestown, hanging with my parents and my friends. Finally got to meet my … 8 year old niece and have pictures to prove her precocity. Her grandma is going to great lengths to give her a great childhood, too.

I suppose this sort of thing happens all the time and has been forever under the name of Artistic cycling.

I’ve come to realize that… well… I’m spoiled rotten. I spoil myself with a plethora of instruments and toys… 2 steel guitars… many electric guitars… a couple bikes… 1 car… a bunch of other junk…

Only now am I beginning to organize it into a creative mesh/mess/mash.

With the support of my employers/mentors at the Collaboratory for Advanced Computing and Simulation, I am attending the 1st ever Music and Sound Tutorial at this year’s SuperComputing conference in Austin, TX. I can’t wait to see what happens in that group. Our group has done lots of visualization work, zero sonification work, with the exception of a small test program I wrote a year or two ago using OpenAL.

I can’t wait.

It helps that we won one for once.

change.gov

Aww, he’s almost cute when he’s not so painfully censoring himself.

Also, Top 25 Iraq war profiteers, rather interesting; companies from necessary to evil got on this list.

Made it bike in to work without getting hit with a drop of Dolly. I bought a translucent coleman $10 rain suit at target yesterday just in case. Also Chevron just gave me a car… a little toy Riley Roadster, I must admit I love these things!

Riley truly enjoys being such a radical roadster: “People are always checking me out. Most folks love my style, but everybody is amazed by my power. I love the attention!”

Heheh.

[edit]
It seems that Western Civilization is crashing down in a spurt of Epic LULZ:
Gordon Brown gets loose in London:
Protester glues himself to British PM (CNN)

I caught the video on the ever present CNN news feed at my girlfriend’s mom’s house. But let’s hear it from the inimitable Harper’s Weekly:

President George W. Bush announced that he would now agree to a withdrawal inside “a general time horizon,” rescinded a 1990 ban on offshore drilling on the Outer Continental Shelf that had been imposed by his father*, and tried to give a little Kentucky girl named Emily, who had played in the White House T-ball game, a presidential baseball. The child ran away crying.

The kid literally ran completely off the field when approached by the president.

*It should be noted that G HW Bush started an offshore oil drilling company, Zapata Oil.

Tonight I was looking at the Public Knowledge Project and it’s Open Journals Initiative software platform (note see the end for the more comprehensive list at DOAJ). Besides the a bit navel gazing but well known and well written First Monday (e-journal about the internet), the best ones I found most interesting and readable of quite a few were Discrete Mathematics & Theoretical Computer Science, Culture Machine and Journal of the Chinese Institute of Engineers.

After looking through there for a specifically Materials Science journal (in English, my only real language) along the lines of Philosophical Magazine (arguably the oldest scientific publication ever… 200 years of research folks, yeah… now focusing on condensed matter… philosophize on that!!!), or Materials Science and Engineering A, I gave up. Oh well. There will be one, New Journal of Physics is open access.

And here’s where the story gets funny. A couple of years ago, Nature (the big British weekly science rag err ahem Journal, younger than Phil Mag though *smirk*), started making mini Natures. Science (the journal) did the same thing. Many of the major publishers grew and/or merged and becoming part of multinational publishing houses (like Reed-Elsevier, Nature Publishing Group (owned by Macmillan, in turn owned by a German Company), etc. etc.) So, now we have many of the world’s most well known journals owned by for profit publishing houses. Sure, they are for profit when they publish Hemmingway or science articles, but the whole profit model of magazine subscriptions in Science is… absurd.

Take for example the every other monthly publication TapeOp. In the United States, a subscription to TapeOp is free because it is supported by advertisers. The authors, publisher, editors, everyone involved do it for little to no profit. It’s not a charity, but it’s a labor of love.

Now take for example the aforementioned Nature Materials. A one year subscription costs: $199. A little over $10 an issue… with ads. They haven’t figured out the economics of it. Something is off. Who knows, perhaps they spend too much on glue, or the mathematical typesetting is too hard, the color printing too difficult. I don’t know, and I’m beginning not to care. I must admit one great reason for an inquisitive mind to stay in the .edu or large .com world is that those organizations have journal subscriptions (which cost 10x the personal rate), so you can read what you want, whenever.

So, I grew up in a bookstore that my parents owned, named the Bookshop in Jamestown, NY. I could read any book I could reach and I grew to be pretty tall, even before they went out of business in the mid-nineties. Around that time I got an epix.net account and finally got access to the computer nets beyond the one between two 8086s in my parents store, the BBS’s, AOL, and Prodigy. I got to see what the heck the internet was. lynx? Mosaic? ZOMG!

And now, I have to laugh when I hit an article I can’t read at the start of Nature Materials July 2008 issue, some approx 15 years later:

Nature Materials 7, 512 - 514 (2008)
doi:10.1038/nmat2215

Print and perish?

Joerg Heber1

1. Joerg Heber is at Nature Materials, 4 Crinan Street, London N1 9XW, UK.
e-mail: j.heber@nature.com

Abstract

Although the Internet has fundamentally changed the way we communicate, science publishing is remarkably hesitant in making full use of the potential offered by new technology.

You could read the article for $18, if you don’t have a subscription. Chances are if you want to read about Zeolite characterisation or Nanoparticle assembly you are associated with some institution with a subscription like I am. But… you know, if you’re in your teens, and maybe you’re growing up in a small town without any big-name resources in it, know that there are a lot of great science journals online that you can read and try to grasp for free. Right Now.

Start your journey here:
Directory of Open Access Journals (currently over 3000 journals in the directory)

File under comic relief.

Background: I have perhaps bought 2 or 3 pairs of shoes for myself from the 70% off section of Designer Shoe Warehouse in my life. They at some point cajoled me to sign up with an email address. I signed up with myemailaddress+dsw@gmail.com. Specifically so I could filter them out, with the +dsw appended, legally, to my email. It’s something you can do to email, try emailing yourself at youremail+SeeIToldYouSo@example.com and you will get the email. This is generally speaking, some use a minus sign, it’s all explained on Wikipedia’s Email entry. So… fast forward to today. I just can’t stand that they still email me… but when I click unsubscribe at the bottom of the email, I get the following from DSW.com:

Could not match subscriber ID to the e-mail.

Kudos on supporting plus addressing DSW, but quintuple anti-kudos for not supporting unsubscribing with plus addressing. Classic web/db design pitfalls, but since I worked in teh interweb business in ‘99-’03, I feel I can vent about this with some authority. Written in all-caps into DSW’s woefully ill-designed web form:

PLEASE UNSUBSCRIBE [redacted]+DSW@GMAIL.COM FROM YOUR EMAIL LIST. WHATEVER ILL EDUCATED WEB PROGRAMMER YOU HAVE CAN’T SEEM TO RECOGNIZE THAT BLAH+BLAH@EXAMPLE.COM EMAIL ADDRESSES ARE VALID PER THE RESPECTIVE IEEE RFCS. UNSUBSCRIBE IT NOW. YOU’VE NEVER EVEN GOT THE FACT THAT I’M A MALE AND NOT INTERESTED IN WOMEN’S SHOE OFFERINGS. MY GIRLFRIEND TELLS ME ENOUGH ABOUT WOMEN’S SHOES. I DO NOT NEED YOUR EMAIL. BEST, RICH

This is how I blow off steam on occasion. Now back to figure out how to do data pumping(TM) in this multi-threaded application I’m working on.

PS Obviously, I can just filter the emails from them to Trash based on this, but… yeah… I just find the whole conundrum hilarious. Me and no doubt… one to two other people.

Well, in 1999 or so, I was probably trying to get PGP working with Gnus in Emacs. In 2000/2001 I was probably trying to get gnupg (GPG) working with Mutt. Somewhere between then and now I probably had it working with Thunderbird. Now I’ve got it working with Gmail, GnuPG, FireGPG and Firefox. Yay for progress?

(I will link this up later so it makes some sense to non-techies) For now, check out this tutorial:
GMail email encryption supported in Firefox via FireGPG

Note that this was inspired by seeing a baby pic from a Linux ubernerd in Germany with a GPG-generated PGP key at the end of it. Yay for babies!!!

More info here Public-key cryptography.