- An Applescript or basic widget smart enough to open a local directory at a predetermined time, mount a remote mirror, check both file creation dates and update/backup files in both places.
- Another widget that runs in the background on my Powerbook. When it senses that I’ve mounted a predetermined volume (my backup volume), it backs up the volume based on file creation date.
Yes, I have Retrospect, and No, I don’t like it. I’d like to not have the massive overhead and all that crud floating around my system- I just want a simple daemon quietly humming in the background which is smart enough to back my stuff up without hosing my machine or costing $200. Is that too much to ask?
I’ve been watching your show on the TV, Law and Order, for something like seven or eight years now. And I have to admit, I’ve been a fan of the show for a long time. Lately, though, I’ve been…unfulfilled. I feel like I need something more. Something different.
When we started out, it was heavenly…a new, exciting relationship; constantly changing locations, witty dialog. There was a crackle in the air. Your stories seduced me with their complexity; you told them with verve and urban grit. When you took off your police badge and put on your shiny lawyer’s suit, you sweet-talked me into a guilty verdict, every time. And I switched off the TV at ten, happy and complete.
Something happened along the way, though—you began to change. OK, I really didn’t care much for Paul Sorvino. He was a nice guy, but I didn’t really care to follow him around New York City all night. You had that Ken dude, who was cool, and of course Jerry Orbach, in the top five of Guys I’d Most Like To Catch A Drink With Sometime; There was that first DA dude with the buggy eyes that got booted off the show for Sam Waterston with the raspy throat and bouncy head thing. And, of course, the DA Babes—Jill Hennessey, now in that atrocious CSI ripoff show; Angie Harmon, who left to marry some football player and who hasn’t been seen since; the J. Crew model chick who married Richard Gere (Richard frickin’ Gere), and now the blonde.
The revolving door aside, the people all really sit secondary to the storylines, which, while being Ripped From The Headlines, are mostly a blur to me these days. I crack a beer at ten, and by the time I’ve hit the 3/4 mark, Sam and the DA Babe have the case and have been handed the first big plot twist. Jerry and Jesse are nowhere to be seen, and I gotta say, they are the reason I watch the show.
The point is, those exotic urban locales are looking all the same to me. The storylines blur into each other. Even though you’ve robbed pretty much every real-life true crime story for a plot, they all blend together by about the second commercial break. And don’t even get me started on the fact that you have an old episode of the show running on every major cable channel at every hour of the day.
You’re clever, though. You knew I was getting bored, so you put a new, shiny show in front of me—SVU. And I have to give you props—you didn’t create a drastically inferior spinoff with an unwatchable star. That Oz guy is cool, but his eyes are a little too psycho for me, and that Mariska chick is trying too hard to be a hardass. You did get me with the inspired pairing of Ice-T and The Belz together; if you want a great show, put them together in their own gritty cop drama. But this show is much the same in pacing and layout, with a lot more sermonizing thrown in. I almost feel like I’m at the tail end of the last M.A.S.H. season where Alan Alda got waaaay too preachy.
You then figured it would be cool to throw me another bone—you got the Criminal Intent on Sunday night going with that spooky D’Onofrio guy, and heck, I thought, I watched him blow his head off on the toilet. This might be good. But as I watched it, I realized, This guy plays an intelligent, but strangely creepy detective. And I can’t shake the fact that I think he’s intelligent and strangely creepy in real life. And that kind of spooked me out. His partner is cool, though—that’s the first woman you’ve cast who I actually believe could whup my ass. Courtney B. Vance could smooth-talk a tiger out of its stripes, which is why he makes a great lawyer and why I don’t ever believe he’d be a D.A.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m looking for alternatives to your shows these days. Wednesday is no longer a lock, although I have absolutely no idea what goes up against L&O; SVU is for when we’re home on a Friday and don’t give a shit, and Criminal Intent is at least mildly interesting while being a little creepy before bedtime. So thanks for the memories, John Dick; maybe we’ll see each other again, on Court TV, or Lifetime, or TNT, or…
So I was looking through some weblogs on my lunchbreak and stumbled over a fansite for a Canadian band I always loved back in the day, one my buddy Pat turned me on to our freshman year of college: The Pursuit Of Happiness. There’s a ton of info on there about Moe and the gals; even better, there’s an MP3 archive of live shows from the mid-90’s. Interesting trivia: right after producing the beautiful Skylarking with XTC, Todd Rundgren was paired up with TPOH to produce Love Junk—two of my favorite albums.
Salon has an article on the new Matrix sequels and the change in atmosphere since the first movie was released, back in 1999. Yeah, I’d have to say things are much different now.
Cleansing, Part Two: One of the drawbacks to owning a house in the city is the hassle of parking your car two blocks away from your house. Growing up in the ‘burbs, we were always blessed with houses where the driveways were long and wide, and you could leave your car wide open with the radio on for the afternoon while you emptied the back seat of all the fast-food wrappers, gym socks, and soda cans you had been lugging around. Nowadays, by the time I get home, the last thing I want to do is pull up out in front of the house and clean out the Tortoise. Therefore, the trunk of my car has resembled the floor of a crack den. Today I backed up to the Dumpster behind my office and took ten minutes to sort through the debris:
- Fifteen bungie cords, in various conditions
- Two teal bath towels inherited from my Mom, used to clean car parts
- Two homemade speaker cabinets with 6×9 Infinity drivers pinched from a repo car in ’88 (dumped)
- Various cans of car-resuscitation fluid (starter, brake, oil, etc.)
- Several sheets of paper from the MVA warning me that my car is suspended for a broken taillight (gotta get that worked out.)
- One fire extinguisher reading “empty”; it lied, ’cause that white stuff shot about twenty feet
- One rusty, broken umbrella (dumped)
- Two Slim Jims—not the food-product kind, the Grand Theft Auto kind (hidden)
- One plastic go-cup (dumped)
- A fleece blanket from Mom, for the day when the car plunges off a snowy cliff and I am pinned in the wreckage; nevermind that it will be locked in the trunk
- The plastic safety panel from the top of my radiator
- Two ancient highway flares, dangerous and waiting to burst into flame directly over my gas tank
- A $12 set of standard Popular Mechanics ratchets (like I’m gonna leave the Snap-Ons in the trunk, are you kidding?)
Whew. Busy weekend. Saturday saw us visiting the estimable Petit Louis with Todd, Heather, Nate and Kristen for a French repast of mouthwatering proportions. Duck Leg Confit is the super-shiznit, according to half the table. Jen took a well-deserved and brief detour from the diet she’s on (and she looks fine, let me tell you) to indulge in the pot de créme for dessert—and who wouldn’t? Afterwards we visited the Spur Design gallery for a show of Luba Lukova‘s poster work, and said hello to a bunch of folks we knew there.
Sunday was spent working out back, where the dry sink finally made it on to the wall, the final sections of the deck were cut and placed, and the interior stairs were stained. Later, we took a walk through Patterson Park and enjoyed the afternoon sun as well as the newly opened boat lake. It’s good to see the city investing some money in its recreational areas.
tulips, 5.1.03
So I’ve begun compiling the scattered MP3 collection I have laying about on CD, removable disk, hard drive and laptop. Currently, with the stuff in constant rotation on the laptop (approx. 6 gigs) and the stuff from the removable drive, I have almost 12 gigs of music burned and catalogued. I’d love to have it all on OSX in iTunes, but for peace and paycheck’s sake it’s on the PC. The good news is that it looks like Apple is going to develop an iTunes client for Windows as well. That means the 100-disc CD carousel which does not remember how to play within groups will most likely go to the living room and the PC will take over as the house jukebox. Now to figure out how to wire the house from the PC.
I’ve also taken the drastic step of buying one of those CD book things they sell at the Target in the interest of throwing away all four hundred jewelbox cases that sit around the house collecting dust. Problem is, after pulling the sleeve inserts and CD’s from the cases, I can’t make the leap to throwing away the jewelboxes. It seems wrong and somehow very wasteful to just chuck all that stuff out. I’m going to check into recycling and see if the city will take them; that means, however, that i have to go back and pry the backs off of each one to get the rear insert out. Joy.
I read on Pitchfork
this morning that UNKLE is set to release a new album sometime
this year; while it won’t be a dual DJ Shadow/James Lavelle
project, Lavelle is getting some awesome people to guest on
the disc, so it should be challenging, if nothing else. The
Flaming Lips also released a companion disc to Yoshimi,
which could be good for a listen or three, if Apple adds it
to the iTunes library.
This Could Be Very Dangerous. Signing up for, and using the iTunes music service, is remarkably simple, hideously easy, and could be bad for my bank account. A few days ago there weren’t a whole lot of tunes I was interested in buying, but they’ve added a lot of stuff into the database since then. I’m impressed by the process, the seamless integration of the service into the iTunes interface, and the satisfaction level I have upon completion. This is a great way to buy music.
Now, the big problem is to try to resist the urge to fill out the catalog—the entire Rush back catalog is there, for the High School still left in me; there’s a ton of electronica to fill out; don’t even get me started on the jazz selections… this is a baaaaaaaaaad thing for me. I only bought one track from the new Massive Attack remix EP, but there’s a Jelly Roll Morton ’26-’35 compilation of about 25 songs for $10, which is a fantastic deal. Must resist….
On the PC front, Dan has helped me resurrect my old 466 Celeron back from the brink of extinction to a condition of relevance; we swapped out an old CD-ROM for a burner I had laying around, and he gave me a bunch of old components laying around the office- RAM, a 10/100 NIC card, and some other small goodies. We wiped NT4 off the drive and replaced it with Win2000, so the list of available hardware and software I can use has greatly expanded. It was sad to see old SLANN go, but it’s a much happier machine now.