adrian is rad

maybe you believe in coincidences. maybe you don’t. maybe you ascribe them to fate or God or something.

I like coincidences. They make me like life.

Friday night I went up to the City to go to the m.ward show with Gums and Dasha. We met up for a drink beforehand at Toronado. We walked down to the Fillmore and when we got to the fillmore, I discovered m.ward had sold out the place (a place larger than Slim’s, which he half-filled last time through SF). Scalper’s wanted more than 2.5 times the face for a ticket, so I said screw that and started walking back to my car. On the way, I decided to see what people were up to in SF, since I was there anyway. I called dug, who was at the (birthday) party a girl I’d met once (at a dinner jwerberg threw when he was out here—she was the then roommate of one of jon’s former housemates, an acquaintance of mine) and he invited me. I was a bit reluctant to go, though the party was pretty close to where I’d parked. I was considering it though; after all, I had met her and, actually, another person I had randomly evited me to this party earlier in the week.

I was on the fence until about 3 minutes later when I got a call from yet another guy at the party that I knew and he handed the phone to none other than Zach Anderson, USC HS class of ‘00. Yeah, a guy I went to high school had heard dug mention me (first name and last, probably due to my relative unfamiliarity to the hostess of the party) and said that he knew me from high school. Turns out he was friends with the hostess due to them both currently being at Berkeley. That pushed me over the fence and I went to the party.

I’m glad I ran into him. It was cool catching up with him.

I’d run into another guy I knew from high school, Balaji, after a Giants-Pirates game, but that’s really not much of a coincidence, because after all both of us had a greatly increased likelihood to go to said game.

I’d say that was the second most coincidental happening in my life.

The first was as follows:

My brother and I were newspaper delivery boys back in middle school and junior high. One time my family was going on vacation so asked my friend John to deliver ours for us for that week, as he was also a delivery boy. I also happened to take piano lessons from John’s mom. Part of the piano education were these group lessons once a month or two months in which you had a lesson with people of a similar skill level and basically practiced playing in front of people. These lessons were at a different time and day from my normal lessons. So I was at John’s house at a different day and time from my normal lessons and the phone ringed. John’s mom didn’t normally pick up the phone during lessons, I think, but she did that time. Next thing I know she was handing the phone to me. It turns out that one of the people we delivered newspapers to wanted to stop her newspaper for a week while she was on vacation, so she found the flyer we sent out when John was going to be taking over for a week, with his phone number on it and had called thinking it was our number during the one hour that I was at John’s house on a different day and time than I normally was there and asked for me.

That was more of a cut and dry weird coincidence.

I was on the ray ray radio.

New show assignments go out next Tuesday. I’ll let you know if my show changes times. Big changes may be in the future. Stay tuned!

The A’s clinched the division last night after a few days of sitting at a magic number of 2, so my tickets will now be useful.

The four AL teams that are in the playoffs are the Yankees (booh!), Tigers, Twins and A’s. As I believe is the case, the A’s will have to play a Central team because they can’t play each other, so that gives us either the Tigers or the Twins. The Yankees and Tigers are tied for the best record, but we know that the Tigers can’t play the Twins, so unless something dramatically changes, I think it’s going to be Yankees-Twins, Tigers-A’s for the ALDS’s. Oakland is 4-5 for the year versus the Tigers and 4-6 against the Twins for the year, so it might actually be slightly better to get the Tigers.

Parents of Covington Elementary School students had reason to rejoice Tuesday when their prayers were answered in the form of the Los Altos City Council’s rejection of plans for a cell phone tower [inside a to-be-constructed 10ft cross] atop a church near the school.

“Their prayers were answered”? Really?

These people who are objecting to a 10ft cross and mobile phone transmitter for aesthetics and health reasons were praying that the Los Altos city council not allow it? I find that unlikely.

Lesson of the day: language is made up of words; words have meaning.

The other day, I was thinking it’d be cool to have sms alerts sent to my phone whenever the score changes in the Steelers game. I noticed that the NFL scores page has some peculiarities in their structure that would make it somewhat easy to pick out the scores.

There are people who you can pay to do this. (Or, I discovered today, there are sort of sketchy places that will do it for “free.”) But let’s say you don’t want to pay. And let’s say that you, like me:

• have unlimited (or plenty of) sms’s
• have a server or access to a server
• are slightly obessive your team
• love being a geek

So I wrote a perl script to do it (with some help from jesse and a lot of help from andyl). I’ve put it online here. Grab it if you want it. I ran it with a cron job which checked the score every two minutes during today’s Atlanta-New Orleans game:

[insert crappy picture of sms]

What you’ll need to do to make it work:

1. download the file
2. get WWW:Mechanize and HTML::Tree::Builder perl modules. if you’re running debian, you can type ‘apt-get install libwww-mechanize-perl’ and ‘apt-get install libhtml-tree-perl’ respectively.
3. open Score:
   1. find ‘mail 0123456789\@yoursmsgateway.net’ and replace it with your phone number and email gateway. (here are two lists of email gateways. So if you have sprint and your phone number is 987-654-3210 then your put ‘mail 9876543210\@messaging.sprintpcs.com’. It’s important you \@ your @ sign or it won’t work.
   2. if you want the scores of a different team than the Steelers, find the two instances of ‘Pittsburgh’ in the file and replace them with your town’s name. (Check nfl.com/scores to check how they write it).
4. save the file
5. open your crontab file (in /etc/crontab) and add the following line:
   */2 9-21 * * 00 root perl /home/directorypath/Score >& /dev/null
   where /home/directorypath is whereever you’ve put the Score file. This will check the score every 2 minutes (*/2) between 9am and 9pm (9-21) on sundays (00). You can adjust these parameters if you’re on the east coast (adjust the times) or if your team is playing on a non-Sunday. 1 would be a Monday, etc.

It emails you the team names, their scores and the time (2nd Qtr, 2:54, for example).

It worked very nearly flawless during tonight’s game. I made one change so that when the game ends it’ll sms you the score and say it’s “Final” as well as smsing all the score changes. It does send one unnecessary sms when things are resetting the first time the cron job runs. You could probably figure out how to make it not do that.

I’m just putting this code out there. Use it if you like. I’m not really in a position to offer any warranties or support on it. I’m putting this out there under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 License.

Pittsburgh friends, I can add you to my script if you want to get Steelers alerts too. Just let me know.

I did Page Mill Rd, one of the hardest hills around here, for the first time on Saturday (coincidentally so did Palo Alto Cyclist). The sort of triumvarite of hills around here are Page Mill, Old la Honda and King’s Mountain.

The hill part of Page Mill is 7.2 miles long and 2400 feet of elevation. It starts out fairly shallow, like the lower part of King’s Mountain (for about three miles). Then it hits some steep sections:
Page Mill Road (at Los Trancos parking lot 19.25%
Page Mill Road (at Moody Road) 14%
Page Mill Road (lower view area) 15.50%
Page Mill Road (long, steep section) 15.5 - 17

The long, steep section they’re talking about hits right around Gate 3 of the Foothill Park and is about half a mile of steep. It hurts a lot. Then it levels out and even goes down a little bit before the 100 or 200 yard section right before the Los Trancos parking lot. By this point my legs were pretty tired so even though it leveled out a bunch, it was still fairly strenuous.

I’ve had a pretty good riding season. I started out never having gone up Old la Honda or King’s Mountain non-stop. I set some cycling goals through the summer and I did pretty well:

• Old la Honda non-stop
• King’s Mountain non-stop
• Old la Honda in under 30 minutes (and under 29 minutes)
• Old la Honda and King’s Mountain back to back
• Tahoe Century
• biking to SF
• coast ride
• Page Mill

My total mileage for this year (from January through now) is something like 1400 miles.

Oakland’s ALDS tickets go on sale at 9am PST on Monday (later today). I’m going to grab a few bleacher tickets for an early game and a couple nice tickets for a late series game.

They failed to clinch the division with opportunities on both Saturday and Sunday. I think they’ll pull it out in the next couple days.

[Update:] I ended up getting 4 bleacher seats in 136 for Game 1 or 3 and 2 Field Levels in section 106 for Game 5 (if necessary. Yeah, the links suck.

The steelers alternated being dominant and sucking badly in today’s 28-20 loss against the Bengals. When dug came over at the end of the first quarter, I told him the Steelers were dominating, at which point they started sucking. In the 3rd quarter they were dominating again, and then sucking in the 4th until it was do or die and they almost did.

The AP write up and the post-game quotes.

There was some stat that all x points were scored with the wind. Heinz Field is basically a nasty wind funnel on some days. I don’t know if the stat held all the way through the game, but at least the first 34 points were scored with the wind.

Willie Parker and the offensive line played really well all day and that made me pretty happy because they didn’t play great in either previous game.

It’s time for another online mix tape. This one was a bit later than I’d intended, but here it is.

You can download the zip file with the following:
1. mp3s of the songs
2. liner notes
3. playlist files (iTunes txt file and an mpu file)

(for the iTunes file, simply import all the songs to your library and then go to file->import and then select the song list. you should now have the 2006sept playlist in your iTunes with all the songs in the correct order).

If you want to read the liner notes before downloading the whole thing, they’re here. This one has a bunch of songs by unknown bands and a few by known great bands like Sigur Ros, Notwist and a time-appropriate one from the Mountain Goats.

Adrian’s September 2006 mix tape [zip file moved to password protected folder]

This’ll be up for a limited time (~1 week) before being moved to a password protected folder.

If you like the artists or songs, I suggest supporting them by buying their music, going to a show, buying merchandise from them or at least telling other people about them.

[Update] The mpu file above doesn’t work. Jesse sent a correct and working m3u file for everyone. Right click and save as.

Beck and Devendra are Friends

I wanted to make a list of my overseas/ abroad trips. We always traveled a lot because my parents are from South Africa and Germany and we have relatives in five or six countries (more now) so we were always visiting and whatnot. With my dad’s help, here it is:

• 1982 March-April: South Africa, Holland and Germany, Düsseldorf for my Opa’s 70th
• 1984-85 Dec/Jan: England, Gloucestershire, South Africa (the never-ending Christmas presents in 3 countries)
• 1985 July: South Africa, surprise trip for my Grandpa’s 75 birthday (the last time I saw him)
• 1987 April: Germany, my Opa’s 75th; Holland, Düsseldorf, Köln, Nürnberg, Regensburg (Bischoffshof), München (except Frauenkirche inside*)
• 1988 August: Germany, my Oma and Opa’s 50th wedding anniversary, Black Forest, Düsseldorf, London
• 1991 March-April: South Africa, Johannesburg, Kruger Park
• 1992 April: Germany, Aachen, Holland, Belgium, Düsseldorf for my Opa’s 80th
• 1994 July-August: England and Netherlands with Alex, first trip without my parents
• 1995 July & August: Germany, Solingen, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Austria briefly
• 1995 October: Germany, my Oma’s 80th in Berlin
• 1997 March: Hong Kong and China with my Mom
• 1998-99 Dec-Jan: South Africa, Vic Falls (Zimbabwe, Zambia), Kruger, Cape Town
• 2000 May: Italy, Alex’s graduation
• 2001 January: England, with Andy Chadwick
• 2001 March: South Africa, my Granny’s 90th
• 2002 Summer: living in Germany, Stuttgart, Behr Group, side trips to France and Switzerland (and America for the weekend)
• 2003 May: Greece, my graduation
• 2004 Sept-Oct: South Africa and Tanzania, my dad’s 60th
• 2005 February: Mexico, Cabo San Lucas
• 2005 April: England, London for my cousin’s wedding
• 2006 February: Mexico, Playa del Carmen
• 2007 Jan-Feb: South Africa, my mom’s “40th”
• 2007 Aug-Dec: living in Taipei, Taiwan
• 2007 September: Indonesia; Thailand
• 2007 October: Hong Kong, China, Macau; Kaohsiung (TW)
• 2007 November: Japan (Kyoto, Tokyo)
• 2007 December: Taroko, Kinmen (TW)

The counts are, I think.
Germany: 7
South Africa: 7 (8th in January) 8
England: 5
Netherlands: 4
Mexico, Hong Kong, China: 2
1 each: Hong Kong, China, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Italy, Greece, France, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, Tanzania, Indonesia, Thailand, Macau.

Averages (per year of my life):
Countries: 1.38
New countries: 0.62 (or one every 1.6 years)
South Africa: 0.27 (or once every 3.7 years) (this will lower to once every 3.3 years in January)
Germany: 0.27 (or once every 3.7 years)
England: 0.19 (or once every 5.2 years)

*The Frauenkirche Incident as I call it. We’d toured Germany and went to famous churches in every town. By Munich, I’d had enough so I said “I’ve had enough! No more churches!” and sat down outside the Frauenkirche. Much to my surprise my parents said “Fine.” and they cycled in with my brother. I still have not been inside the Frauenkirche. It is on my to-do list.

Note: updated 13 Oct 2007.

Note: Updated 22 Jan 2008

playslist from tonight.

[Update] The playlist may look a little strange; I am trying out a new radio show format: mixing indie and oldies. I traded off ~20 minute sets between sets. I’m also thinking of making the move to the morning again, particularly Friday morning. I don’t know if it’ll happen or if I’ll stay at my old slot. I’d kind of like to do a Friday AM oldie and indie rock morning show, completely with self-awaredly stupid schtick. Recorded sound effects!

As Drag City notes, Will Oldham’s Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy will be playing on Conan tonigth, September 19.

I was walking to work yesterday and passed the North Face and saw a sign up for the North Face 50 in which San Francisco resident Dean Karnazes will run 50 marathons in 50 days in 50 states. He’s an amazing athlete who has won the Badwater Ultramarathon (let’s run 135 miles out of a giant valley in 120 heat—yeah that’s a good idea!), but I think this is a pretty ambitious project. It starts tomorrow.

He also has a blog about the challenge. I’ll be interested to see his progress.

I finally scanned in some photos of Jeff and Debi’s Wedding.

I also added a few of Colin to the Pgh 2006 directory. They’re from Colin’s first of two (or three?) trips to Eat N Park that day.

Screw cars, we’ll put a fire truck on the Dome. Pretty impressive hack and an interesting memorial for September 11.

One thing that I was sad I never did while at MIT was help organize/ participate in a serious hack.

Inside of Bumbershoot 2006 was Flatstock 10 a silk-screened (indie rock) poster show from dozens of artists from around the country. It was really cool and possibly one of my favorite parts of the day at Bumbershoot.

There are a lot of artists with a variety of styles. There were two sort of camps, the ones that went for the old psychadellic poster style that’s common of posters in the late 60s—bubble lettering and bright colors—and then there’s the camp that’s more into simple graphical silk screens and more standard fonts. I personally like the second style a lot, but I saw good posters in each camp at the show. I could have easily spent hundreds of dollars there.

My local (Oakland-based) favorite, the Small Stakes was there. I love Jason’s posters. They’re simple but great. He may over-use the heart in his designs but that’s pretty appropriate for that sort of indie pop that he’s designing posters for. I picked up two from him: a Jose Gonzalez one from the Swedish American Hall show that I went to (normally I would have bought it from Jason at that show, but Jason was out of town for it) and an awesome Mates of State poster that he did:

That brings my total small stakes posters up to six (one, two, three, four, five, six). What can I say? I like his stuff and I like buying posters from shows I go to (which is the case for all but one).

I also ran into a few Pittsburgh artists, which I thought was pretty cool. Budai (Michael Budai) lives in Pittsburgh and does his work for Pittsburgh shows. It was cool seeing posters for places like the Roboto Project and Garfield Art Works. I ended up buying a cool hand silkscreened/ hand drawn little character (Monocle Man, who is saying “I really think monocles should make a comeback”) from him. Really cute. He was a really nice guy and we talked about Pittsburgh for a bit.

There was also Strawberry Luna (samples) who shares a space for Budai, but she produces show posters for Philly venues. Her stuff is good too. I ended up buying an art print (”E is for Elephant”) from her.

And finally, there was the Pittsburgh–>SF transplant Lil Tuffy (myspace, view samples). His work has a pretty big range from the surreal to the psychedelic to the simple graphics. He and I talked about SF Steelers bars and he gave me a Tuffy pin which has the US X hypercycloid (aka the Steelers logo) along with ‘Tuffy’ on it.

There were other cool poster designers there, of course. Some of the big ones and some little guys who were obviously just getting their start (one guy named Zack, in particular, was particularly fresh-faced and nervous looking). I had a fun time looking around at all the stuff that was displayed. I took particular note of the above ones but I’m sure if I’d kept more careful track, I could have written about a bunch more of the designers.

Sure we remember now, but what about in 65 years?

Yeah, I’m a few days late on this, but on Thursday I watched the Steelers win at Zack’s in Millbrae with Mike and Dug.

Charlie Batch did pretty well. Willie Parker looked great on a few runs and the handful of screen play passes he caught.

Polamalu continues to look better and better each game he plays. This guy is incredible. His interception was really skillful, as was Porter’s. Porter kissed Cowher after that and Cowher was fine with it.

Heath Miller’s 87 yard TD reception interception was sort of funny. There was this guy at the bar that had high-fived everyone before Heath had passed the 50. Cowher thought he was fast, but it took pretty long for him to get anywhere. I mean, he had time check the jumbotron to see if the defense was gaining on him.

If I were a Dolphins fan, I might be pissed about the missed challenge on the Heath Miller touchdown, but it’s sort of laughable that the coach waited that long (~1 minute) when he was obviously out and then did a dainty underhand toss right before the snap and then just sort of pointed to it when no one saw it.

Here’s a slide show from the Post Gazette and their write up.

Judit and I made a new recipe yesterday. It is a modified version of a modified version of the Consumer Reports chocolate chip cookie recipe. My brother and I modified the original recipe years ago. Those modifications are in brackets ([]). The new modifications (for the banana walnut chocolate chip cookies) are in braces ({}). So basically, this is three recipes in one!

Mix:

• 3/4 Cup white sugar
• Cup brown sugar, packed

Then cream with 2 sticks butter

Add:

• 2 eggs, beat well
• 1 tsp vanilla

Add slowly:

• 2 1/4 Cup flour {2 1/2 cups for banana walnut cookies}
• 1 tsp baking soda [1/2 tsp in modified recipe]
• 1 tsp salt

Add:

• 12 oz chocolate chips
• {2 ripe medium sized bananas}
• {1.5-2 handfuls (maybe 1/2 cup) chopped walnuts}

Bake 375 degrees for 9 minutes [8.5 in modified recipe]

They turned out really moist and slightly fluffy. They are really good hot and still good the day after.

Last weekend whilst in Seattle, I went to Bumbershoot (Day 2) with Paul.

Here’s who we saw:

Spoon Spoon’s one of those stalward indie bands that’s been around for a chunk of years and they have their fan base, but they’ll probably not break into the mainstream. I was curious to see them live. They put on a pleasant set but it wasn’t incredible. Good enough.

Jeremy Enigk Jeremy Enigk (ee-nik) was the front man of the proto-emo-pop band Sunny Day Real Estate. Here he was doing a set under his own name and I was a bit curious to see what his current music sounds like. He put on a nice set of songs mostly on acoustic guitar, some accompanied by a band. His vocals have this sort of strange high-pitched strain to them. It was a nice set.

[Paul lent me his digicam for the day.]

Mates of State The Mates of State are so great live. This is at least my 8th time I’ve seen them and they always put on a very entertaining show live. Paul (unlike all the rest of the shows) did not seem to be completely bored. I can honestly recommend their live show without quals. Even if they’re not amazing, they’re still really good. They did a fun medly of “Like U Crazy” with Gnarles Barkley’s “Crazy.” They did a mix of new songs and older songs—in fact I was pretty pleased with the number of their “classics” they did.

Jose Gonzalez The hands-down worst scheduling of the day was having the Mates of State overlap with Jose Gonzalez. I thought I’d still be able to make some of his set after the Mates of State, but a 32 minute set (likely because he needed to go play with Zero 7 as well) meant I only saw one song by him. I’ll have to go see him at Enchanted Broccoli Forest.

Kanye West (with Lupe ) Kanye was day 2’s headliner. I’ve liked his music recently and his two albums are the two hip hop albums I own. He had a full string section and a harpist on stage with him. He put on a pretty good set—well he did the songs I like and then there was the normal hip hop fair of misogyny and marijuana—but the sound was pretty bad (vocals too low, percussion too high). The chunks of the set I liked, I liked and the parts I didn’t, I was sort of bored.

[space needle]

I was in Sealth (or Seattle, as you may call it) for the labor day weekend. It was a good time. I saw some of them old tEppers (including ppham) and saw some of the sites and some music.

Paul made us take this picture:

Recap:

• Tour of UW.
• Good dinner in Ballard
• Boeing wide-body plant tour: this turned out to be really cool. The building is the largest, by volume, in the world. It’s pretty incredible. I bought a model 747-400, the sexiest plane ever made.
• Drinks (and more drinks) with Squid
• Easy Street Records. The haul included: the new Jason Molina, the new Eric Bachmann, the new Mono, Elliott Smith’s Roman Candles, the KEXP live comp, Unwed Sailor’s Circles, an oldies comp, a soul comp and a 2-CD doo wop comp. I liked Easy Street a lot: cheap, great selection and a helpful staff.
• Bumbershoot (Day 2) [separate post later]
• Seattle Underground Tour: entertaining and informative. If you have any tolerance for puns, I think you’d enjoy it. I’d recommend it.

(I also ate a mufaletta.)

That was the weekend in short. The biggest lose of the weekend was that the Boeing Surplus Store wasn’t open on Monday. I was really hoping to go; it looks like a mech e geek’s dream.

I love walking the tarmac at airports to get to my plane. You get to do it a little bit at SJC, but most of the time I get to do is places like Mexico (CUN) or Zimbabwe (VFA). I feel like a pioneer of aviation when I’m walking across the tarmac to these great flying machines.

Here’s my playlist from last night.

Sort of a pleasant last minute addition was the Light Footwork, a local indie pop band (from Palo Alto!), who came and guest DJed the first hour and change. I’d invited them on a while ago, but they only took me up on the offer yesterday. Turns out they’re fun guys (er, guy + girl). You can check out their new video, too.

As stereogum reported yesterday and pitchfork reported today, Sufjan’s coming out with a box set of his Christmas EPs (and other Christmas stuff). I’m a little of two minds about it. It’s good because I like sufjan a lot, but I also already have three of the five EPs and I’m not sure I want to shell out $$$ for a box set to complete the set. I probably will though.

dear loyal reader,

I’m really sorry I haven’t posted in a while. I had a busy week last week and I was in Seattle for the weekend. I hope to post all about my adventures soon.

Thank you for your continued support,
Adrianisrad