adrian is rad

I have a new blog. It’s called Secret Cape Town. Check it out if you’d like. I’m hoping it’ll help me learn even more cool places to go in the city.

I also have a twitter channel if you’re into such things.

Maybe I’m the only one with this problem but I thought I’d share if there are others.

I have a few email addresses that are all forwarded to my gmail address. I have a blog that produces a lot of email with a fair amount of it being bcc-ed to the blog email address. I want to filter all emails to that address to be filtered into their own folder. It took me a while to figure out how to do it, but here it is. It’s definitely a bit of a work-around, but it can be done.

So for this example, I have these email addresses:
gmailaddress@gmail.com
otheremailaddress@somethingerother.com (currently forwards to gmailaddress)
secondarygmailaddress@gmail.com (secret gmail account currently not used)

We want everything that goes to otheremailaddress@somethingerother.com to be filtered whether it’s bcc-ed or not.

Here’s what you do:

1. Change your forwarding address for otheremailaddress@somethingerother.com from gmailaddress@gmail.com to secondarygmailaddress@gmail.com.
2. Log in to secondarygmailaddress and go to Settings->forwarding and set it to forward all your mail to gmailaddress+something@gmail.com (’something’ can be anything, but it should be unique).
3. Go back to your gmailaddress account. Go to settings->filters and create a new filter. In “has the words” section put in “deliveredto:gmailaddress+something@gmail.com” (without the quotes) and set it filter that mail into a new label. Have it skip the inbox if you’d like (that’s what I wanted in my case).

If you want it to filter only bcc-ed email (but not email to the address or cc-ed to it), change the last bit to “deliveredto:gmailaddress+something@gmail.com -to:otheremailaddress@somethingerother.com -cc:otheremailaddress@somethingerother.com” (without the quotes).

Don’t use secondarygmailaddress for anything else. If you have mail sent there, you’ll start getting those in your filtered mailbox, too.

I forgot a couple music related things.

My music blog recently hit two milestones: two year anniversary (some of my favorite posts and comments; remember when it all started?) and 1000th post (10 desert island albums x 100 desert island songs).

I’ve been reading the Africa is a Country blog recently. Honestly, it’s too frequently updated to really read most of it and some of the stuff is not particularly engaging, but there have been some interesting things on there as well.

The most recent thing of interest is this Guardian travelog across the Karoo, a pretty sparsely inhabited dry region of South Africa. Having heard descriptions from family friends and a book I read once, I’d already wanted to go there, but the article’s description is even more alluring:

We pulled up beside the church and the owner of the Die Rooi Granaat cafe, a smiling matronly Afrikaner, looked astonished that we might want food, but quickly prepared a delicious lunch of boerewors, literally “farm sausage”, and pumpkin cakes topped with brown sugar. Children circled the church on bright yellow bicycles. Loxton had almost died out before people in search of solitude turned up and remade it, apparently casting off the stresses that trouble other parts of the country. It was lovely.

We headed north to Carnavon, the very heart of the Karoo. Chris was driving, enjoying this last trip in a car he loves, while I gazed over plains of sweet thorn trees and aloe, spiny shrubs and fleshy succulents. Dassies – ground squirrels – bolted across the road and I searched for the heads of meerkats as the blades of the water pumps glinted under a sky awash with the colours of the dissipating storm.

It sounds almost mythical. Can it possibly live up to the description? I’d say it can’t, but my time in Blyde River Canyon, another mythical-sounding area of SA, proved that such areas can live up to promises.

Who knows? Maybe I’ll have to go see for myself.

My old friend* Christine has a new blog about quitting her job (in Mexico), driving back to Pittsburgh, then taking a one way ticket to Sweden.

It’s one of the best written blogs that I’ve read recently. Flowing prose and narrative arcs guide one through each long and detailed entry. I also love her footnote flashbacks that she sticks at the end of each entry.

Here’s a quick quote from the most recent entry:

Before we go anywhere, however, I have an appointment with Al Garcia. He’s the body shop manager at Varsity Ford on Highway 6, and he’s promised to jerry-rig the driver side door of my car – the one that’d been broken into just a few days before in Austin. If done properly, the job should take four to five business days, but I’ve got a plane to catch in Pittsburgh, so there’s no time for a proper repair.

Al tells us that it will be a few minutes while he and his crew perform this makeshift surgery. As we wait in the lobby entrance, I hear the body shop employees singing along with an all too familiar voice. It’s Chente, my 69-year-old Mexican Sinatra. Two workers simultaneously let out a melodious cry into the morning warmth. It’s a sad cry, like a Johnny Cash caw only more guttural. Mexicans remedy this call with a cold gulp of tequila chased by one long swallow of an icy beer. I know this music very well. It penetrates me, and once more I reach toward something familiar, toward the past four years, until Al Garcia pulls me back.

“Ms. Waller?” he leans his head and shoulders around the corner from inside the workroom. “Your car is ready.”

*She’s actually fairly young, but we’ve been friends for a while.

[Warning: American Apparel's ads, which are featured some of the links, tend to have people in moderate states of undress. Some links are somewhat NSFW.]

So my neighborhood in San Francisco is the Mission. It’s split in two parts–broadly generalizing–young, white hipsters and Latino families. The center of hipster commerce is Valencia Street, while more of the Mission Street.

American Apparel is a brand that appeals to hipsters. They make tight fitting clothing and make it in America. They wanted to put in one of their stores on Valencia Street–a perfect fit, right?

by gretchen robinette

Apparently not. People were up in arms (well some people were). People, plenty of whom were probably wearing American Apparel at the time, said they didn’t want a chain store on their Valencia Street. They wanted their unique and pricey boutiques instead.

Blogs and newspapers were abuzz with developments. There was a protest (where the above photo was from).

The Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition was against it but pointed out that the pricey boutiques were also displacing older stores. (Irony.) They also pointed out that people weren’t up in arms about the plans related to an old movie theater on Mission Street.

Eventually the San Francisco planning commission voted against allowing the store. American Apparel apologized and offered Mission residents discounts at their other SF stores.

Wow, what a strange place this is.

Here’s some stuff I found interesting in the last while or thoughts I’ve had, largely without comment.

NY Times spends 36 hours in my neighborhood (photos)–here’s the article. Not entirely unrepresentative.

I think there’s some reasons to be hopeful about what’s going on in Zimbabwe, but like pretty much everyone, I’m going to see what actually comes of it.

Here’s another NY Times piece about Palin as a stepping point to different ideas of the American West (NYtimes login required; bugmenot helps).

I’ve stopped buying Cavendish bananas, for now at least. There are other cultivars available around here.

NY Times Magazine had a piece on Bush’s last stretch and his sometimes contentious relationship with McCain.

There’s an project to find the first black African cyclists that will compete in the Tour de France.

I watched a video of two suited guys longboarding down Berkeley Hills. It’s about twice as long as it needs to be, but it’s pretty spectacular. Make sure you see the turn around 3:26-3:30.

Adam Kimmel presents: Claremont HD from adam kimmel on Vimeo.

72% of Americans apparently feel that it is important for the president to have strong religious beliefs.

Biden and other Catholic politicians have been refused communion (or its been strongly suggested they don’t present themselves for communion) regarding their abortion stance. Have their been similar suggestions or outcries for Biden (or other politicians) because of their disagreement with Catholic Church’s stance death penalty? I haven’t heard any. Maybe it’s just that evangelicals make up a louder voting block and there’s no unified position there on the death penalty.

I find adultery appalling–once I very nearly threw up when I saw a friend kiss a girl that wasn’t his girlfriend–but it’s legal and don’t think it should be illegal. I’d never thought of it (and moreso its implications) that way before.

One year ago last Friday I moved for Taiwan. Right after I returned in December, I gave you a debrief/ by the numbers sort of post so if you want to see a lot of specifics of the trip.

When Dave, my friend and coworker who was there for the first week I was, and I arrived in Taipei, it was hot and humid. Sweltering, muggy, suffocating–whatever you want to call it. We were tired and it was hot and we didn’t understand the language. We attempted a day of work and made it most of the way through, though, to be honest, I don’t think either of us were productive in the least. Dave’s luggage didn’t arrive (except, of course, his tux for a wedding he was going straight to after Taiwan) so that 6′6″ guy and I went to the store to get some clothes to tide him over. He found a shirt that fit and some socks but the largest underwear in the store, as Dave hilariously recounts, wouldn’t make it past his knees when he tried them on later.

We went to get some shabu shabu for dinner that night. The menu was entirely in Chinese and the people working there didn’t speak English at all so we ordered by pointing randomly to a line on the menu. The beef, which–as it turns out–we had ordered was pretty good. A thus I started my almost four months in the country.

It’s so hard to sum up four months in a place with so many varied experiences. Theer was the time in Jianmen, the Taiwan (Republic of China) island 2km off of mainland (People’s Republic of) China that I went to because it had a very interesting history of isolation followed by English colonial-by-way-of-Singapore influence followed by heavy military presence and bombing. It was a fascinating place. The people there also spoke very little English and even though I was near the end of my time in Taiwan and I’d had a one-on-one Chinese tutor, my language skills were not enough to get me by. I was in way over my head. At a noodle restaurant that was drying its fresh noodle on racks outside, I pointed and gestured that I wanted a bowl of whatever everyone else was having and that I was just one person to be seated.

After 15 minutes of mulling around near the entrance, I took the proprietress’ pointing at a bowl to mean that it was mine and I should follow. It was not my food and when I sat at the tableful of strangers, it was obvious I had sat in someone else’s seat. One guy, who was at the table with his friend–the other person at the table, an old woman, seemed unrelated–got me a chair. Later he offered me some of the chicken he and his friend were sharing. Pointing at the chicken and then the three of us: “together.” He also gave me tips about the hot sauce: “good”, pushing over one bottle. Later when the proprietress gave me a funny look while he was paying I didn’t make much of it–after all, as far as I could tell, I was the only white guy on that island, so I got plenty of funny looks. He came back over to the table “you no pay.” I felt ridiculous for nearly crying in the middle of the restaurant but I couldn’t help it.

There were the hoards of guys in Bangkok that tried to sell me fake tours or “massages”. There was the cab driver in Taipei that short-changed me.

I obviously stuck out, perhaps not as much as my 6′6″ tall friend when he was there, but I did. Sometimes it was fine, or even good. I’d make a faux pas or get myself in a jam and people would give me some leeway or help me out. Other times it just felt more like I was a complete outsider. In four months of taking the bus every single day, both ways, and often again in the evenings, I saw another westerner on the bus exactly once. I’m sure the women on the bus thought I was a bit odd.

It’s hard to explain what living there was like because there were so many different experiences. On an average day, my activities were mostly the same: wake up, shower, eat, work, eat, work, maybe run errands, make dinner, and go out or watch TV or write or read or play guitar or whatever. It was just what I was eating was different and the surroundings and people were completely different; the language and writing were (for the most part) not understandable.

I’ll try to give you a better taste through some photos. I’ve picked out some of my favorites because they give a feel for the place, because I like them artistically or because I think they’re quirky or funny. Feel free to ask more about any of the photos if the caption isn’t sufficient and I’ll give you more info if I remember.

You can also read some of my posts from when I was in Taiwan or otherwise traveling.

Taipei, early September

Shabu Shabu restaurant on XingAn Rd.

taxi at an intersection

Danshui Night Market, at dusk

Longdong Park along the northern coast

Scooters near Keelung

seafood market along Fuji harbor

sales/ net girl at seafood market along Fuji harbor

a mock-up (machine) shop

(many more below the break)

(more…)

I’ll be posting a lot of my trip photos–and some older photos too–up on the collective photo blog over the next week or two. Check in there for new photos. Here are a couple so far:

You Go Girl, Brooklyn

Monk outside Snake Alley, Taipei

Zante’s Indian Food and Pizzeria. I went here on Saturday. Tandoori Chicken Pizza doesn’t necessarily sound like it’ll work, but it does and really well. It’s really tasty and their drinks are cheap too. I’ll take every one of you (that I actually know) there when you visit. (Note: this is only an offer to take you there, not to pay and in fact, I think this trade seems more fair: I introduce you to a great restaurant, you pay.)

–

SFist points to a Eater SF article about and summarizing points in a NY Times article about over-legislation in SF. SF is pretty crazy it turns out. Here are some of the points:

• Business owners must offer health care, typically a rarity in the restaurant industry except for managers, to all employees.
• Employers must offer 9 days sick leave to all employees.
• Chain restaurants must post nutritional information for all menu items.
• Minimum wage is $9.36, more than $3.50 above the federal rate, and will increase next year.
• Plastic bags are banned from supermarkets, Styrofoam containers banned at all “food outlets.”
• The Board [of Supervisors] wants to fine stores and restaurants that sell items with high fructose corn syrup.
• The Board proposed to prohibit new liquor stores within 500 feet of churches or recreation centers.
• The Board proposed to require permits and insurance for events including weddings, parties, and benefits.
• The Board proposed to fine office buildings that leave their lights on overnight.
• The Board proposed to make all lobbyists wear name tags when doing business.

Some of those I don’t care about: no plastic bags, fine. High minimum wage–doesn’t make any difference to me and it’s expensive to live here.

But other…I prefer products without corn syrup and sometimes go to lengths to avoid them but is it really the place of gov’t to ban them? I mean, this seems like a bit step beyond NYC. Trans fat by many accounts is very very bad for you. Fine, ban it. Corn syrup probably isn’t great but are there studies that show it to be the worst thing ever? (What I’ve read is pretty inconclusive.)

Internetworking:

involves connecting two or more distinct computer networks or network segments together to form an internetwork (often shortened to internet), using devices which operate at layer 3 of …

But don’t you think it should mean networking on the internet? Internet networking–>internetworking! You know Linked In and things like that. Makes perfect sense to me. Let’s reclaim the word for its new use.

A subset of that could be interblogworking, for blog-to-blog networking.

Past words I may or may not have coined:

• nowtro
• comfort music
• geek crush

Here’s an interesting article in the NY Times about the juxtaposition of ridiculous way the Red Sox take money from their fans and the pureness of Fenway. Pretty interesting.

Here is a list of the top 50 sketches ever. There are some funny ones on there.

Merlin Mann has a new weblog to add to the 50 other web presences he has. There’s some funny stuff on there.

I’m in Austin for SxSW. You can follow along at my other blog or my other blog’s corresponding twitter feed.

David Bazan recommended some nachos to me tonight. This is the sort of life I lead.

Both Andy and Dave were taking photos but I think this one’s by David.

It appears Dylan’s blogging again. This is good.

It’s probably not going to be as wildly popular or widely read as Tenderbutton but I expect it to be pretty good.

Comments have been broken for the last week and I just thought people didn’t care to comment on what I wrote. They’re fixed now so discuss away! (Spam Karma, my comment spam filter had hiccuped on transfering the blog from server to server. This was very useful in fixing it.)

Any comments you made in the last week appear to have disappeared into the ether. Feel free to re-comment.

Gawker has a piece about blog cliches. It’s pretty funny/ damning:

Best. [ultimate thing or experience.] Ever/Evar.
Likely originating in the reverse (”worst [x] ever”), this clich still has a deathgrip on the media, in all its sincere and sarcastic permutations. It’s usually taken to mean a state of permanent, perpetual bestness, which is of course unsustainable. Sooner or later, something will not be the best [x] ever, and this phrase is a perfect example.

[undesirable counter-example], not so much.
…

Oops. I might do that…

The other piece that’s similar but less funny/ more precise is Gothamist’s What Not to do With Your Blog from a couple years ago.

Both make me think about how I write my blog.

I switched servers. Some stuff is still a bit weird, but this should be running faster now.

Also, for now, blogh.adrianbischoff.com doesn’t work. the address is blog.adrianbischoff.com

Update: blogh.adrianbischoff.com now works in addition to blog.adrianbischoff.com.

I’m really sorry. I know my server/ blog is intermittent and slow if it’s even working. I don’t have the time to change servers right this minute.

I’ll try to take care of it this weekend.

Adrian is not(??!!!) rad.

I beg to differ. I beg to differ, my friend. Do you have shirts supporting your argument? I think not…

Do you like the part where I find the most mundane details of my life and blog about them?

Yeah, I’m about a weird as the following posts make me seem, but not as ornery.

Hi?

Extreme ironing competition. It is what it sounds like. Some great ones in there.

I’ve been doing this in stealth for a couple days, but I feel like it’s time to announce my other blog. It’s a music blog.

I’ve felt for a while that I was writing too little about music for this to be a music blog and too much about music for this to be a personal blog. In one case, outside readers see too much personal ranting and in the other, friends get alienated by the constant music talk , so I’ve split it off.

I’ll still be blogging here. I won’t be posting here about music, unless it’s related directly to me, like music I write/ record, radio playlists or if it’s a mixtape. I’ll be co-posting the last two of those.

I feel a bit weird about it—I’m always written this for myself and maybe a couple friends, but writing about any specific x is an admission that someone wants to read that. Now I have a whole blog where I pretend that people want to read my writing about music.

A pretty good evening last night.

First Uncle Frank’s BBQ in Mountain View w/ andyl and liz. This place is awesome. You walk through to the back of Francesca’s bar to get there and it’s the sort of place where there are paper towel holders at the tables. They don’t mess around. Ridiculous brisket, good links and ribs, good corn bread. I couldn’t get to the sides (baked beans and greens) due to stomach capacity issues. Hilarious waitress.

Second, my friends the Light Footwork played at Make Out Room. They have cheap beers. When’s the last time you got two pints (Anchor Steam and PBR) for $6? (Answer only if you live in an overpriced city.) The Light Footwork put on a fun show, as always. I also ran into KZSU alum Nick Mirov again. We chatted about SXSW and various bands.

Really, I can’t complain. Good times.

I should have all my posts written for me like this:

From: Randy X <x@x.com>
To: Dave X <x@x.com>,
Adrian X <a@ab.com>,
Andrew X <x@x.com>
date: Mar 21, 2007 2:35 PM
subject: Three things that if I were Adrian I would post to my blog….

… but I’m not Adrian and I don’t have a blog, so I’m just emailing them. And really, you 3 are the only ones who would care. It also constitutes a majority of the readership of Adrian’s blog.

Funny story about how kids see things (as seen from Daring Fireball)
http://www.newyorker.com/humor/2007/03
/26/070326sh_shouts_rich

Andy, you could do this!
http://www.coudal.com/pinsetter/
(also seen on DF – I’m bored, still at work, waiting for a friend for
coffee, and determined not to do work anymore because its after 5.)

And
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SO5JY1KKYZo
for the impatient, skip to around 1:20.
Again, reminded me of Andy, and his Wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii.

Thanks, Randy!

holy crap. I think this is the best blog post I’ve seen, possibly ever. Well, done, Wax.

I’m leaving for South Africa (and possibly Swaziland) on Wednesday for a few weeks. I then get back and go to Mexico for five days. I’ll be back in the States ‘full time’ the third week in February. I won’t be blogging much during that period, though I’ll try to write some periodic updates (and also update my lifestats).

It’s a duel-activity trip. Road trip with friends (Jon, Helene and Dug) and family stuff in Cape Town. I’m flying into Jo’burg and spending a couple days there before the rest arrive. From there we go to Blyde River Canyon (including God’s Window). We may stop in the Kruger Park before driving through Swaziland to Ingwavuma. From there we drive to Durban for a couple days before flying to Cape Town. I’ll be in Cape town a little bit less than a week this time. (I was in Cape Town two weeks last time.)

After being home for less than a day, I’ll be heading to Playa del Carmen for a long weekend.

If you need to contact me, email will probably be best, just the same email address as always. If it’s urgent, my parents will have my full itinerary.

Notice anything new about the page?

Look to the right over there…

After Randy’s comment on my post about being inspired to keep track of some life stats for 2007, I was further inspired to put up some of the stats in more or less real time. So there they are. Are there any other stats you want to see? The full list of stats that I’m tracking:

• emails sent (home/ work)
• miles travelled
• wikipedia pages read
• beers consumed
• work days
• photos taken (digital/ film)
• albums purchased
• concerts attended
• books read
• movies seen (theater/ netflix)
• hours of TV
• haircuts
• shaves
• miles biked
• miles ran
• miles swam

Originally I was going to do this literally updating every time you loaded the page, but that made the page really slowly (even slower than it loads already), so I decided to write up a caching system where it only loads the new data every six hours. I might adjust this if it makes sense to.

The script checks to see if the cache is older than 6 hours old and if so pulls some data from a google spreadsheet. Otherwise, it writes the old data into the html that you see on the right. I’ll probably write up a full post or a instructable of how I did all this sometime when I have more time.

I’m going Web2.0 all over this place!@

There are a few links I’ve been meaning to put up. Things I find interesting but I don’t want to add to the sidebar on the right.

Random links:

• designverb: a blog about design related topics, largely product design and the like. fairly interesting stuff.
• rbally has a nice Cat Power show from Berlin for download [update: rbally seems to have taken this down/ broken]
• youtube has a great chemistry lab safety video explosion. (dylan, are you seeing this?)
• bitsandpieces silly college humor, but sometimes entertaining
• wikipedia has a list of African countries by GDP (adjusted for purchasing power parity) per capita. South Africa’s on top, but barely. For reference, the US is 3rd in the world for GDP (PPP) per capita at about $42,000.
• oregon trail is it possible you haven’t played this game? there are even shirts about it. And you can download an emulated version
• Tom Wilson I feel like I should add him to my list of best producers. He did Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, Velvet Underground and more

[This was going to be one post with the above part 1 and below part 3, but it was too much, so I split them up]
There was recently the kottke best links of 2006. Here are some of my favorites from that list (including some I’ve seen/ linked to before):

• How to Care for your Introvert (from 2003; describes a lot of people I know and, well, me) and a current interview with the author
• David Copperfield gets mugged but doesn’t lose any property because of…slight of hand!
• old timey (WWII-era) color photographs of America
• the JFK assassination Zapruder film, stabilized even stranger and freakier
• songtapper tap a rhythm, it tells you the song. didn’t work as well as I wanted, but still interesting
• shiny mud balls only from Japan…and a how-to!
• Amateur a non-piano player or drummer makes a music video with himself playing those two instruments with clever editting
• a photo essay of female soldier in Iraq
• free historical sounds (as mp3s) “I Have a Dream”(MLK) to “Luckiest Man on the face of the Earth” (Lou Gehrig)
• Sheep Market 10,000 sheep drawn by online workers via Amazon’s odd Mechanical Turk service
• crazy aerial photos that look like tiny model cities
• Lake Peigneur disappears a 14″ drill bit made a lake and much of an island disappear
• 1964 New Yorker article on Dylan
• hilariously bad movie pitches
  

  Idea #1:
  What if the Internet Turned into a Were-Wolf

• Photos of European football (soccer) fields very diverse and often in gorgeous settings

There were a number of the links on that kottke best links of 2006 list that I had already seen, but I’d enjoyed.

• Simpson’s beginning, in live action (British made)
• when indie yuppie took off (a term/ concept created by Vice records honcho Adam Shore and pushed by stereogum
• Wes Andersen’s odd AmEx add don’t leave home without it
• how to get a human customer service representative at a lot of companies
• a Henri Cartier-Bresson photo gets trashed on flickr
• a picture of eyes above an honor-system drink payment box makes people more honest
• easily mispronounced domain names whorepresents.com? still hilarious
• Jimmy Kimmel’s hilarious ‘Unnecessary Censorship’ video put bleeps where there weren’t any before and it makes things very funny
• devastating photo of a homeless heroin addict in the Tenderloin (where I often go to the Great American
• Aries Spears rap impressions
• Noah takes a self-portrait everyday for 6 years and makes a video of it interesting, haunting eyes

I just posted five times. You weren’t ready for it, I know. You have got to steel yourself for stuff like that! Steel yourself!.

Also, I cut the palm of my hand today scaling a fence (legally!). The skin is really thick there. Now, lacerated. It’s fine, just a bit strange.

I started this thing two years ago today.

The blog stats: 691 posts (0.945 posts/ day on average) and 1,056 comments (1.53 comments/ post; 1.44 comments/ day on average) in 32 categories (21.59 posts/ category on average). At last count, the comment leaders (besides me) were Jesse (130 comments) and Milkshake (125 coments). If you don’t count general (613 posts) or the overall music category (278 posts), the most posts are in music (recorded) (114 posts), sports (97 posts) and music (radio) (84 posts). The fewest posts are in music (photography) (2 posts, a new category) and arts (3 posts).

There are 691 posts and I don’t remember them all, but I think some of my favorite posts are in the list category. Lists like

• 4 things I will be pissed off if my mom throws out
• 2 ways I use senses in interesting ways for personal interaction
• 3 habits I have that probably annoy my friends
• 4 songs that Jesse and I played repeatedly in room 42 and are therefore candidates for the room 42 mix tape
• how to celebrate valentines day right

(that’s right, a list of lists! METALIST!)

I also like posts like how to wash and dry your socks and underwear if your crap airline strands you in Las Vegas when you’re trying to get home for Christmas and a couple of the posts where I wrote about my adolescent or past expieriences, like this one about Roald Dahl’s Omnibus and my fifth trip to Germany. The covers contest has come and gone, but now I have online mixtapes to impose on you.

It’s been an interesting experience. Sometimes I’ll start talking to someone (this happens particularly with dug) about something that happened and he’ll just say “I know, I read it on your blog”. I don’t think I’m a particularly good writer, but I enjoy writing here to some extent and I think my writing’s probably gotten better. I try not to take this place too seriously. After all, it’s just me writing about some crap on the web. There are probably a couple people who read this that I don’t know, but I don’t get an delusions of grandeur here.

So, any thoughts? Any of your favorite posts that I missed? Any particularly good or embarrassingly bad adrianisrad moments?

Do you guys still read this thing?

Everyone:

do I write too much about music? have I alienated you with my incessant talk about music?

do you have favorite types of posts on the old ab.com?

I am here to egotistically proclaim my greatness, but if I can do that while also providing something interesting to read, maybe I can tweak the formula.

I just passed 1000 comments on the old blog here and number one thousand was one of those stupid trackback comments on one of my previous posts. I was hoping it’d be some lucky blogfan who I could give some useless prize to!

Oh well.

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 was able to make a theme (wordpress 1.5) out of my old style (wordpress 1.2). So this is what the ol’ blog looked in ‘04. I don’t think all of the bugs are worked out, but it mostly works.

I don’t know if I’ll stick with this permanently, but otherwise this’ll be the “throwback theme” week here at adrianisrad.

[Update:] Yeah, comments are broken. I’m not sure what’s up…

[Update2:] Comments are fixed. Heroic!

So not only does Ken Jennings have a blog (which is hilarious), but he likes the Mountain Goats and he writes about it. How cool is that!

Order of business 1: I installed the custom query string plugin. It has enabled me to change something that has been bugging me for a while: when you go into a month archive, or a category, or submit a search, it’ll show you all things that fit that instead of just the first 10.

It’ll make older posts easier to find. I’m not sure if anyone but me actually tries to find old posts, but there it is.

Order of business 2: I’m more or less sick of this theme. I like bit on the left side and the dates but the top is bad and most of the text formatting is bad. I’m going to look for new Wordpress themes and see what I can find.

Order of business 3: I think I also need to update to Wordpress 2.0 on this bad boy.

I’m on the east coast for a couple weddings so I probably won’t be posting much until next Sunday.

Have a nice center-of-the-summer week.

colin arthur ashe!

no, it’s not arthur (though colin “arthur ashe” would be good). hmm… Alasdair?

the blogging family, that is.

You may have noticed that this site was down earlier today. That’s because the registration on adrianbischoff.com expired and I’d forgotten to renew it. OOPS!

All taken care of now, though.

But seriously, did you miss me?

My friend Andy emailed me today:

You probably already knew this, but Ken Jennings blogs? And he’s a good writer!@

I know that you’re obsessively weird about him, but I thought I’d let
you know, in the off-chance you didn’t.

[links added by me]

Thanks, I didn’t know, Andy! Agreed on the good writing part. I like the post about the giant foam version of his head that he got. Good stuff.

A couple weeks ago, Dylan IMs me:

Dylan: what’s the girl that plays harp and sings like a cat in a blender?
Me: Joanna Newsom?
Dylan: yeah, that’s the one.

Today, there was a pretty well-wrtten post by Long Winters front man John Roderick covers Bonnaroo for CMJ. In part he talks about Cat Power:

I thought, “Great. I’ve been suckered in. Chan Marshall is backstage having kittens and we’re going to sit out here with building anticipation only to have her never leave her trailer.”

Dave Eggers writes about the World Cup. Very entertaining as alwasy.

The Baseball Card Blog for those of us who spent too much time and money on baseball cards as a kid. They’re currently on #5 on their best baseball card sets ever. I have a few packs of #5: 1989 Upper Deck. It was the year my family went on a New England road trip and we went through Cooperstown and saw the Baseball Hall of Fame. I picked up some of the new Upper Deck cards there. I hope #1 is 1987 Topps, the one with the wood grain. I loved those cards.

A collective photoblog!

Initially, it’ll be Andy, Dave, Randy and I posting pictures.

Some tweaks to be done to the site, but I’m liking how it’s looking.

so I’m trying out a new host over here. It should look the same, but hopefully it’ll be faster.

Again:
new
old

I think my comment posting’s a little bit broken. I’m not sure why. They post fine, but it doesn’t bring you to the updated post page with your comment.

I made a static version of my page to see what’s making things so slow.

Tell me which is faster to load:

• static
• dynamic

Or if neither load faster.

Thanks.

I’ve upgraded the RAM on my virtual server. Let me know if you notice it being faster. Otherwise, I’ll probably downgrade.

This is probably only a somewhat temporary solution. I’m thinking about changing my server host entirely.

So I changed the theme around a bit so now it has a picture I took and says “adrian is rad” now.

I’m going to change the stuff around on the left side to be more user-friendly and sometime when I have time I might make it so that the “polaroid” is different every time you load the page.

Yeah, so I upgraded to wordpress version 1.5.x today. Turns out that my nice fence stylesheet thing doesn’t immediately work with the new ‘theme’ thing WP has and my attempts to convert it have thusfar failed.

So I have this theme that I like in general but of course the specifics won’t work at all. I’ll probably be changing and redoing it over the next few days. Does it totally suck?

In other news, users of WP 1.5, what are good/ necessary plug ins?

Amrys, don’t think I didn’t notice the drop in my name in your “blog roll” from second behind mole to 13th behind, among other things, Scott’s fake and infrequently updated blog.

Anyway, I hope things are good for you. Are you doing anything for halloween? Decide on a costume yet? Classes treating you alright?

Patbird just changed domains on his blog and even though he didn’t take any of my suggestions for a blog name, (what’s wrong with nastydonkeyporn.com I ask you??), he’s got a new domain name. Nevermind that I didn’t know of his blog before, but, I present to you urbansaddle.com. Patbird is really rockin’ out over there. I read just about all of the posts so far last night.

Here are my favorites:

• In this post a link to a set of two TV commercials, both in their original versions and their redone-Pittsburgh-backyard-camcorder versions. Very funny stuff.
• Andy went to the Mountain Goats at the Warhol Museum on Friday. Pat couldn’t go to his first Mountain Goats show there because it was sold out, but he went to the Uptown Theater in Little Washinton and writes about it here.
• Pat writes about running into and talking to a Pittsburgh mayoral candidate on the street.

I’ll be keeping an eye on your blog there, Pat. I’ll also put it on my blogroll over on the right side there at some point.

Another thing that I’ve been meaning to add to the links on the right is largeheartedboy.com. He writes a lot about music and books. His daily “shorties” are just links to about 10-15 articles or blog posts. I usually find a couple interesting articles in there everyday. Some of his longer articles are pretty good too.

I added a “covers contest” tag so now you may click on that on the right side (at the bottom of the list, currently) and see all the posts about the covers contest. It’s great for going back and listening to them!

I’ve noticed the slowness of the site loading.

I’m going to try to see what’s up.

Ody posted again. He’s posts really infrequently but the posts are of such high quality. He’s a master story teller.

Also, out trivializing even Jesse in the blogosphere is this guy.

1) I’ve gotten a plugin which automatically turns off comments after 10 days. This is to help crack down on comment spam. If you want to comment on something older than that, you’re weird.

2) I’ve made the comment editting box taller, by request of Andy. It is twice the height at 8 rows now.

yeah, I thought of it while half-asleep at about 6:30am this morning. I was about to go back to sleep and, for some reason, decided that I needed to remember it in order to post later in the day.

The comment preview should look pretty similar to the comment post at this point to correct the earlier problems.

It’ll say your comment is the first comment (”1. your comment”) and it won’t display the date or the time correctly, but everything else looks pretty much correct.

Thanks to Alex Bischoff’s CSS mastery for help on the correction. Who knew <div> tags could be so much fun.

I opened up one of the Wurlitzer’s last night and re-wired the power (the 206A was a student model so they were all powered from the Teacher model). It was pretty painless. I powered it up and it worked first try. This particular one sounds really good. The bass is heavy. I’ll try to record some stuff so you can hear how it sounds, but I won’t be able to get that online until after Christmas.

I’m flying to Pittsburgh tonight. I’ll arrive early tomorrow morning and I’m leaving on the 28th fairly early. I’ll probably blog some at home. We have wireless so it’s so easy!

As I will be home, I won’t be doing a radio show tomorrow night. I’ll be back on the air December 31st from 0000 to 0300.

I got some sandals made out of tires from Lauren Owens (a friend of mine that’s doing Peace Corps in Tanzania). She’s back in America for the holidays. I tried to get a pair of these sandals in South Africa but they wanted R150 for them. That’s about $25. In Tanzania they apparently go for 150 shillings, which is about 15 cents. These ones are pretty skillfully made and fit pretty well.

I’ve installed this hack for Wordpress to do comment preview.

Let’s see if it works.

[Update] It seems like it’s working. It’d be cool if it said Preview and Say It! (or Post) on the initial page, for people who don’t have the patience to preview. Anyone with some php knowledge want to check out my wp-comments.php to see if it’s an easy fix? I’ve commented the old code. It starts withform action=” etc. It’s not as simple as just copying the input name=”submit” from the old code. I tried that. It seems non-trivial because the two codes has separate form sections referencing the two php scripts for commenting [new and old].

[Double Update] I now have it working with both Preview and Post, thanks to Jesse.

oh man, this is going to be great. you can quote me on this, people.

Quick question:

On a scale from 0, completely worthless, to 9, mostly worthless, where does my blog rank?

I beat out johnston on the links on Amrys’ blog. I can’t believe I r00l this much.