So I’m watching the 2003 movie reboot of S.W.A.T. featuring Colin Ferrell, Samuel L. Jackson, Jeremy Renner, and Michelle Rodriguez, among others. The ultra-rich villain, in S.W.A.T. custody, is being escorted into a holding facility. But along the way he spots some TV cameras and pronounces that he’ll pay One Hundred Million Dollars (cue bad French accent) if anyone gets him out of jail. The director promptly uses all the cheapest ethnic criminal stereotypes to indicate the forthcoming mayhem.

Immediately I thought if that video went viral on YouTube, they’d have scum coming from across the world to cut this guy loose.

Except there wasn’t any YouTube in 2003. Didn’t get here until 2005.

Like I said Internet Time.

American McCarver is a new sports Tumblr. I find that the starting lineup has a lot of potential. I’m into Famed Web Presences (TM) linkblogging sports. But their choice of patron saint?

That’s a bit, ahem, questionable.

Hey! I actually managed to finish another book on my Kindle. Actually I’ve completed a handful more since I got the device as a Christmas gift. But this is the first book I’ve felt inclined to write about.

Ex-KOP is a sequel to KOP. Going back to the destitute jungle planet Lagarto, we find our favorite dirty cop Juno Mozambe a broken shell of himself after the events of KOP. Events lead to a severe downward spiral led by a procession of depressing characters alternatively cynical, scummy, evil, naive, or a combination of all four. Finally, about two-thirds of the way through the book, Juno starts getting his mojo back, and the mystery gets interesting.

Of course, he has to euthanize his wife to get the ball rolling, but that’s Ex-KOP for you.

Again, not great, not awful, but satisfying. If you’re a fan of a fabulous turn of language, or a tightly efficient plot, look elsewhere. If you’re into an easy read dark noir, give Ex-KOP a whirl.

One of these days, I’ll have to do a Guilty Pleasure for McG’s Charlie’s Angels. However insulting of the viewer’s intelligence it is, I still vastly enjoy most of the movie.

A thing that’s been bugging me in the 11 years since the film’s release is the id on one song on the soundtrack. Near the end, after Sam Rockwell’s character has been revealed as the villain, he’s shown in his lair grooving out to some hard hitting’ hip hop track. Damn!!

But I never got around to seriously tracking it down. Until on a lark today, I went to IMDB, and started looking at the Charlie’s Angels soundtrack listing. Eyeballed a couple of likely candidates by title and started googling. Took a couple of wrong turns, but finally hit on Pharoahe Monch’s Simon Says.

Like Head Rush’s Underground, mystery solved.

I mentioned HBO Go a few posts ago, but I’ve been kicking the tires a little bit more recently. The service is surprisingly better than I thought it was going to be. The desktop browser version is an amazingly overdone Flash app, but it gets the job done. For some reason, it occasionally just takes a long to time to connect.

The HBO Go iPhone app is actually good! At least using Wi-Fi on my fast Verizon FiOS network. No stutters or buffering pauses on the movies I’ve sampled. The movie scrubber isn’t particularly precise, but that’s a nit. And I have to admit that I haven’t tried to watch a full movie end-to-end.

Next up is to try it over 3G and see how much of a dropoff there is.

Of course the key point is the content selection, and it’s pretty impressive. HBO Go seems to have a wider and more varied movie selection than the HBO On Demand provided through my Verizon FiOS subscription. The HBO Series collection is amazingly impressive with access to all episodes from recent top flight products including: The Sopranos, The Wire, Sex and the City, Six Feet Under, Treme, Entourage, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and True Blood. That’s right gorge on each of those series from start to finish and stone your friends with deep pop culture criticism.

Just the above buffet alone is worth the price of admission, which is free for me. The movies and other stuff is just a bonus. The only areas that look thin are Sports and Documentaries.

If this is the future, I’ll take it.

I’m pretty much on the “big data”, “data science” bandwagon as an important emerging trend in computing. An essential element is the application of machine learning approaches to massive data sets. Never really got into machine learning while doing my graduate work. Since my day job isn’t particularly big on developing engineer’s personal technical skills, I’m exploring an autodidactic approach.

Hilary Mason’s An Introduction to Machine Learning with Web Data looks like a promising starting point. I have to say though I found her PyCon keynote and Strange Loop presentations to not have the depth I was anticipating. High on humor and rah, rah. Low on real technical insights.

But for the $29.99 O’Reilly is charging it better at least have good production values. And I hadn’t actually noticed that O’Reilly had seriously expanded into downloadable video courses.

I’ve been using NetNewsWire since just about forever and loved it all that time. I haven’t even seriously flirted with another desktop reader on the Mac, despite a number of emerging alternatives during the heydays of RSS. The only real threat was Google Reader thanks to its cross-platform nature. But I’ve always enjoyed a well executed desktop app.

An implicit, but key, selling point was always Brent Simmons, NetNewsWire’s politely outspoken and opinionated creator and developer. Brent’s been blogging since just about forever, and I’ve been following him since the Userland Software days. He built brand loyalty through the openness he brought to his development process.

Nothing lasts forever though, and Brent recently engineered the sale of NetNewsWire to Black Pixel, a Seattle Mac indie developer house. I’m hopeful they can uphold, and surpass, the standard Brent set, in the same way MarsEdit has managed to continue on after Brent moved it to RedSweater software.

As usual, Brent was quite eloquent himself on the big news. Here’s another bravo from a user who loves the product and appreciates the author.

Thanks to SportsGrid I chanced upon Stathead, brought to the world by the fine folks at SportsReference. Statheads tagline is: Mission: Compile all the sports research you need to know. It’s a good old-fashioned linkblog devoted to quantitative research across all sports. So I threw it in the feedreader.

Not sure it was a good idea, given my recent trimming of fire-hose feeds. Stathead definitely pours out the links on a daily basis and these days I’d rather do more reading and less filtering. But I’ll continue the test drive, since there’ve already been a couple of choice links, and I really want to sink deeper into this area.

Bear with me, I’m easily amused.

My personal laptop has been parked on a desk for quite a while now. So since it has my full iTunes collection, I thought I’d jack in some speakers and use it as a flexible stereo. Plugging some old Dell PC castoffs into the line-out socket didn’t quite work out as well as I thought it would. The audio was just plain crappy and the wires made a mess.

Biding my time I finally bit the bullet and bought a Creative D100 Bluetooth wireless speaker. ($65 cheap, on Amazon). At first I was simply stoked to have a convenient way to go from headphones to speaker in the middle of a DJ mix when I got home from work. But things got better when I paired the speaker with my MacBook and used the iTunes Remote on my iPhone to control iTunes on the laptop. For some reason, I get a lot of pleasure out of using a $500 phone as a glorified remote to have a $1000 laptop (at least it’s 3 years old) wirelessly feed a $65 pair of speakers.

Like I said, easily amused.

Michael Rapaport was always good in my book, basically riding long on his appearance in True Romance (God that movie had a stacked cast), as Floyd’s roommate.

But he just got +10, as I found out Rapaport’s directed a documentary on the hip-hop pioneers A Tribe Called Quest. Entitled Beats, Rhymes, & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest, it apparently did well at Sundance and the Tribeca Film Festival.

For those of us who grew up on 80’s to 90’s hip-hop, Tribe’s oeuvre is seminal at the same level as Public Enemy and KRS-One. Hope the documentary lives up to their contributions.

Looks like the film gets a limited release starting in July. This might be the only movie I see in the theater all year.

Via Unclouded by Ambition. Bonus points if you know who played Floyd without hitting IMDb.

With some much valued quiet time over the Memorial Day weekend, I decided to stock up my Kindle with a few new e-books. On my laptop, I tooled over to the Kindle books site, and started rooting around for some candidates. Took a peek at the top sellers, checked in with the Science Fiction and Fantasy list, looked to a couple of old familiar authors, and finally settled on some fresh faces. Kameron Hurley and Ian Hocking if you must know.

All in all, I probably spent about an hour on a full-featured computer, researching and selecting three items. Just for grins I decided to see if the iBookstore had my titles, maybe at a reduced price. They’ve gotta have a site on the Web right?

Wrong!

Straight from the official Apple iBooks FAQ (as of May 30, 2011):

Can I purchase a book from the iBookstore using my computer?

“No, the iBookstore is only available through iBooks on a compatible iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch at this time.”

Criminy! You can’t even use the execrable iTunes on the desktop to buy iBooks.

I’m pretty much convinced that the type of background work I did is not really feasible on a current mobile device. And I think this effort may be typical of serious book purchasers. Ergo, Apple is severely limiting the market of iBooks customers. About the only reason I could see buying a book in the iBookstore is as an impulse purchase, where I just want to get an author or title fast. I couldn’t really imagine building a collection through my iPhone, even with such a nice reader interface.

Game, set, match, Amazon.

Apropos Elle Driver. I’ve always liked that word… “execrable”… so rarely have an opportunity to use it in a sentence.

A grouchy NCAA football fan said earlier this year:

Guessing Tressel didn’t get a fine.

Well, today the floor fell out from under Jim Tressel as he had to resign from his head coaching position at The Ohio State University. Half shoved, half jumped. An impending front page story in Sports Illustrated seems to have triggered the event.

While I’m definitely not in the The Cult of Coach, Jalen Rose, of all people put a little nuance on this story. Tressel might have been covering up to protect his players, who could have been struggling financially. Although trading goods for tats doesn’t strike me as indicative of severe economic hardship, I might buy Rose’s thrust as consistent with the devotion Tressel seemed to generate from his players. A coach who averts his gaze when guys are in a tight spot and really need to make a fast buck seems completely plausible. This time the guys pushed the envelope and things blew up fast.

Still, the massive (and increasing) financial asymmetry between the schools/NCAA and the players will continue to expose the intense hypocrisy of the whole enterprise. I’m not saying we’ll see an increase in eruptions like this, but the NCAA does seem to be taking on a little water these days.

Yesterday was a random confluence of having an evening mostly to myself and all major North American sports, other than baseball, on hiatus. So I did something I’ve infrequently had opportunity for over the past few years. I rented a movie.

Actually, it wasn’t much of a rental. Since I’m an Amazon Prime subscriber, Amazon graced me with a free streaming access to a number of videos through its Instant Video service. So I gave it a test drive with Guy Ritchie’s movie, Revolver, a surprisingly psychological gangster film.

Overall, the experience was pretty good, although not great. I watched it on my laptop over Wi-Fi, with Verizon Fios as the backhaul. There were only the occasional drop outs and stutters. And I paused and resumed with no ill effect multiple times.

This brought to mind the slew of options I now have to get digital content including:

• The aforementioned Amazon Instant Video
• HBOGo, which is offered through Verizon. Had a few glitches the couple of times I’ve tried it, but where else am I gonna get every episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm for free?
• The iTunes Store, which I’ve used to good effect for nomadic content fixes
• And Netflix, who seems to hit me with a new promotion every other month or so since I’m a former subscriber

Not to mention other services like Hulu which I haven’t even bothered to stay informed about.

There’s a burgeoning groundswell of “cordcutting” to get rid of cable/dish through such Internet services. For me, they’re not quite easy enough to deal with (or more accurately train up my wife), and I’m a serious sports junkie. It’s just easier to pay the monopolists and graze the live broadcast sports buffet.

Evol Intent’s Us Against The World has been rocking my iPhone the past couple of weeks. Didn’t think it was possible, but there’s a worthy challenger to The Human Resource, which was pretty high on my list. While the last half of The Human Resource is still the height of brilliance, Us Against the World is a great ride.

Of course this makes complete sense. While The Human Resource is credited to Dieselboy, a close read of the cover reveals it’s “Dieselboy presents…”. One CD is remixes of various DnB tracks. The other, a continuous play mix, is entitled Assemble The Monster,…

… by Evol Intent.

Now if they’d only drop a few more DJ mixes.

Link parkin’: Thought this Wired backgrounder on near field communications (nfc) was pretty well written and informative.

Ob whine: Jeez what’s with the cruft on links in newsfeeds these days? makes linking using feed items painful.

Okay, so the Eastern Conference Finals are looking pretty grim for my Chicago Bulls. They’re down three games to one against a Miami Heat with LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, and a host of sequentially resusscitated role players ala Udonis Haslem and Mike Miller. What next? Eric Dampier goes for 20?

I had been telling people around Christmas that this might be the year LeBron embraces his inner villain and gets mean enough to grab a ring. They were playing that sick D that led to the Lakers getting hammered on Christmas day.

Somewhere along the season, that level of defense started to brown-out against the other elite teams in the league at the worst possible time. But, as The Sports Grid noticed, the D is back with a vengeance:

Obviously the Heat are more than one guy on defense. They are more than two guys. They’re a whole team of guys with long arms who are committed to shutting down the other team, plus Mike Bibby. However, having LeBron James at their disposal certainly makes things easier.

Got a pretty good laugh out of that Mike Bibby dig.

So Da Young Bulls will probably exit stage left after a great season. Even as currently configured, they’re challenging the Heat. If D Rose drains one of those last minute shots, we’re talking a three game series with home court advantage. This could be the beginning of a great rivalry. I figure one more top notch (not elite) scorer for Chicago could make the difference. Then again, the Heat will have some cap flexibility next year and can upgrade too.

Link parkin’: The Most Human Human

Based upon Peter Merholz’s recommendation this book looks really interesting. To wit:

It’s a delightful and discursive book, wending its way through cognitive science, philosophy, poetry, artificial intelligence, embodied experience, and more. The author, Brian Christian, writes with a deft touch, in an episodic and occasionally meandering style that feels like you’re taking part in a good conversation.

Which makes sense, considering the book’s supposed raison d’etre is the author’s preparation for being a confederate (a human participant) for the Loebner Prize, in which judges of a Turing test have conversations with computers and humans, to determine both The Most Human Computer and The Most Human Human.

Available on The Kindle to boot.

As a proud graduate (1989 6-3) of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that the Institute is winding down the celebration of its 150th year. And that was a pretty productive 150 years for one institution.

There’s plenty of stuff kicking around on the Interwebs about what a great place it can be, but I really liked Ed Pilkington’s take on MIT in the UK Guardian. Over and above the outstanding engineering performance, Pilkington gets into the openness to excellence simultaneously nurturing the wackiness of the Media Lab and the seriousness of Noam Chomsky.

And as a true blue 6-3, who UROPed at the LCS, it pains me to say something nice about the Media Lab. Ha, ha. Only serious.

IHTFP!

I’m not sure that data science isn’t just the tech world buzzword du jour, but I’ve got a gut that there’s something important going on. David Smith’s summary of the 2011 Data Science Summit would seem to support my hunch. Looked like an interesting mix of tech, biz, and art.

Also, Joe Hellerstein seems to be working this circuit and he has good taste.

With Dick Ebersol leaving NBC and the network begin sold to Comcast, it feels like there’s an opening for the rights on a couple of major sporting events. NBC clearly has overpaid for the Olympics in the past. Can Comcast afford to do so? Does it make sense to re-up on a big contract with Notre Dame football? What’s the commitment to Wimbledon, the French Open, and PGA Golf?

The only untouchable I could see is Sunday Night Football.

With any of these opportunities ESPN is an obvious candidate to swoop in and expand their hegemony. Attributed to Ebersol is the following:

“ESPN basically has to have one of their talent talk about Hitler or put a picture of their dick on a phone — which is what that Salisbury guy did — before they’ll do anything about any of these various crazies because they don’t have to. Nobody can touch them.”

And as a disciple of Roon Arledge, along with being a legend in his own right, Ebersol should know what he’s talking about.

Which got me to thinking, what would it take for ESPN’s dominance to unravel? You might say the Internet, or mobile, but they’ve been pretty savvy on both fronts. The talent going Animal House? Who cares, they’re just a bunch of replaceable talking heads. Overpaying for rights? They can always jack up the cable operators.

Obviously this is mostly a thought exercise, but a fun one. Have to say ESPN’s management is on top of it’s game at this point. Here’s a few that feel plausible:

• Anti-trust regulation due to some underhanded collusion.
• Overreaching by attempting to expand into foreign markets. I have an intuition that ESPN might like to take on Fox in soccer. There’s a lot of money and a lot of programming in that sport.
• Some wacky legal or technology loophole, similar to how satellites enabled ESPN, that allows a disruptor to sneak in.
• I dismissed overpaying for some rights, but the Olympics could be expensive enough to put a dent in profitability if not capitalized on correctly.
• Actually, if Comcast went all-in they have a bunch of regional networks that could provide a foundation. But that doesn’t seem likely with Ebersol leaving.
• And speaking of Ebersol, maybe he winds up at Fox and architects something.

I may not be in the majority, but I really like The Matrix Reloaded. It’s showing now on AMC (you’re a freaking cable channel! leave the curse words in) and this is the first time I’ve watched it in a while.

Oh I admit the movie’s significantly flawed. Frankly, I think if they’d never gone to Zion at all, and left it as a mystery, the whole saga would have been better off. But then adding in the primal dance club sequence just put it over the top campy for me. And the highway chase scene was completely cliched.

The draw for me is the implications and complications raised by Neo seeing Trinity’s future. Starts with the great in media res opening of the movie. The Morpheus speech sequence (This is a war. And we are soldiers. Death could come for us at any time.) and how it threads the past, present, and future of the mission is brilliant. Not to mention the bit of “random” chance (incoming!) that seemingly triggers Neo’s crisis.

And oh for The Merovingian, a quite worthwhile villain.

Lord knows though, after all the times I’ve seen The Matrix Reloaded, I can’t make any fucking sense of The Architect’s speech. I think I got the bit about choice, but I’m lost after that. May have to go to the Interwebs to solve this one.

Today I Learned (TIL), that there exists an iOS App for managing a WordPress installation. The app was recently updated to provide some new features along with a big stability boost. Will definitely have to check it out along with the JetPack plugin.

Quick posting from the iPhone could become addictive.

Late to the vent since they went to commercials back in December, but I find IFC nearly useless now as a cable channel. Nothing like a chain of 30 second spots right in the middle of Pulp Fiction or Basic Instinct.

Sad, because IFC introduced me to Matthew Vaughn’s Layer Cake which is similarly brutalized by commercials. Hard enough to get in synch with the British accents, but the cognitive interruptions just spoil the whole thing.

Alright, I’ll admit I still watched most of Basic Instict. Nothing can stop that Sharon Stone freak show.

As Trinity said in The Matrix Reloaded, “That’s a nice trick.”

There’s something sick about being able to run a C compiler in a shell within Emacs on top of Linux executing in an x86 emulator running in JavaScript embedded in my browser. And it’s not dog slow! Feels like a circa 1995 PC or logging into a UNIX box over dial-up.

Fabrice Bellard, we salute you!

The moby Hack and how it works

Repeated viewing leads to some obscure observations. Like the fact that most commercials lose content as time goes on. As an example our fine friends at ESPN have taken their most recent “It’s Not Crazy, It’s Sports” spot (It’s like a Big Papi without the cheese) and shrinrayed the bit for a new online contest at thefanwiches.com.

Which of course leads into the suckage that is Facebook.

This may be a sign that I have too much time on my hands.

I’m looking forward to how the 2011 NBA Eastern Conference Finals plays out between the Bulls and Heat. I normally just root for “good game”, but this time I’m on Derrick Rose and the Bulls’ side.

When I lived in Chicago, I got the tail end (the Last Dance 97-98 season) of the Jordan Bulls, the dark days of the Dickey Simpkins/Kornell David/John Starks era, and the unfulfilled potential of Elton Brand, Jay Williams, Tyson Chandler, Eddie Curry, et. al. I even had a partial season ticket plan during the dark days, when they picked up Jalen Rose. So I feel well within my rights to root for the Bulls, even though I live in DC and go to a lot of Wizards games.

Besides, I have to live with my wife, who’s a born and raised Chicagoan. And I really like Derrick Rose.

Definiely diggin’ TNT’s shots of Chicago in HD.

I’m sort of tempted to buy the Manning Early Access Program edition of Matthew Pearson’s Generative Art. I’ve been looking for that “processing” book that really gets into the craft of generative art. I already know how to program, I’m looking for insight into the artistic process. The following reviewer quote gives me hope:

Matt’s approach is unique in that he focuses on core concepts of genart instead of core concepts of programming. He succeeds in teaching about variables, functions, OOP and recursion without the reader realising what he’s doing.

The artwork thumbnails look beautiful as well.

On the other hand, I’ve already got a few processing books gathering dust on my bookshelf, so why should keep banging my head against this wall.

I’m remiss. Loleatta Holloway passed away back in March. While clearly a disco icon, through the modern miracle of sampling and the 80’s to early 90’s wild west of rights clearance, she was also a huge influence on House music. At a certain point, it felt like every new Strictly Rhythm single had to have a Holloway sample.

The greatness and contribution really hit me, when I bought the Mastercuts Classic Salsoul volume 2, and first encountered the 11 minute version of Hit and Run. The track starts off with about 3-4 minutes of classic disco. Then it launches into another 7 minutes of soulful beats, jazzy riffs, and Loleatta bringin’ the pipes. But she also scatted for bits and played it low and husky for spells. Just a tour de force of soul diva vocals.

After all that, which I’m assuming was one take, the closing words of the producer just kills it, “Okay, now let’s do the album version.”

Godspeed kind lady.

N.b. If you get the Classic Salsoul volume 2, you get First Choice’s Dr. Love, another disco/house classic.

I’ve been enjoying Philip Greenspun’s oeuvre since way back when he was writing about AOLServer, Tcl, and database backed websites. I even bought the book!

Plus, he’s got a rapier wit on the order of Olin Shivers. So herewith the conclusion to his entertaining review of the BlackBerry Playbook:

Not useful as a computer; too light to serve as a doorstop.

My friend has not asked for the tablet back (he got it for free at a conference).

Touche!

I used to complain about slow posting times on my old Movable Type installation. Didn’t know if it was Movable Type, MarsEdit, or my RimuHosting virtual server. I’ve noticed the switch to WordPress and Linode has fixed that problem. In a big way. Posting is will night instantaneous. I suspect it’s the increased memory, for the same dollars, that Linode makes available for my MySQL server.

Whatever, I’m lovin’ it.

Link parkin’: Kristóf Kovács put together a little collection of UNIX tools that are either command line or console based. Complete with screenshots. Some of them I’ve known about and used for a long time (I love you curl!), but there were a few new ones to me.

Great job Chelsea, taking all the excitement of perhaps the biggest game in this Barclay’s Premier League season. When you give up a goal in the first minute, and are down two at the end of the first half, you’re not really championship material.

Meanwhile, ManU only has to claim a point against either of the two bottom feeders, Blackburn or Blackpool, to clinch the title.

What a waste of DVR space. At least there’s still the Champions League final: FC Barcelona vs Manchester United at Wembley. Can’t wait.

I’m really enjoying Marco Arment’s posts on various trends and tradeoffs between Apple’s laptops and desktops. Seeing as how my current laptop will be three years old in August (and it was bottom of the line then), I was nominally starting to consider my purchasing options for much later this year or early 2012.

First, Arment frames the tradeoffs between iMacs and MacBook Pros. I was considering an iMac to provide horsepower for personal hacking projects but he may have convinced me that the MBP is the right way to go. Then he drills down into evaluating what you want vs “need” in a laptop. Most recently he opines about the potential of a future 15” MacBook Air combined with a Thunderbolt interface. While 15 inches of display is great, Thunderbolt would let the laptop drive multiple monitors on the scale of the 27 inch iMac. At least that’s what I remember from recent blog post, although I’m having trouble digging it up at the moment.

Looking forward to more from Arment.

I’d like to think I’m immune to heavy doses of advertising, but every now and then there’s a TV commercial that really captures my fancy. Recently Heineken has been carpet bombing the NBA playoffs with one advertisement, The Entrance. For whatever reason, it’s really stuck with me.

Part of it is of course the music, The Golden Age, by The Asteroids Galaxy Tour. Like the lead singer, and the lyrics are actually interesting.

Another bit of fascination for me is the number of different versions. On TV I got hooked on the “extended” version of The Entrance, that’s about 1:32 in length. Currently on TV it’s running in a shortened 30 second version, which I find irritating since it leaves out a lot of nuance. Wait! I thought he had a flute at the end?! But digging around on the interwebs, I found the really extended 3:00 minute version, embedded above, which provides a lot of back story. If you believe a commercial can have back story. Oddly enough, at the end of the 3 minute version, he’s got the flute, but not the Heineken.

Like I said, it’s a guilty pleasure.

Neat. The venerable Lollapalooza concert festival has an API for festival data. They’re sponsoring a contest for best applications built on the API.

Lollapalooza is offering over $5,000 worth of prizes and tons of promotional exposure for the best mobile, web and desktop apps created using their API. Developers can access data on artists, events, stages/venues and updates for Lollapalooza 2011. Prizes will be awarded for apps that help fans get the most from their Lollapalooza experience before, during and after the Festival. Winners will be promoted on the official Lollapalooza website and to fans via email, Facebook, Twitter, and the jumbotron screens at the Festival.

Lollapalooza is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year with a line-up of 130 of the most notable and buzzworthy bands from across the globe, including Eminem, Foo Fighters, Coldplay, Muse, and many others. The Festival is August 5-7 in Grant Park, Chicago.

About six and a half months ago, I recalibrated my feed reading. It worked out pretty well, but I was still winding up with piles of unread items on my iPhone. And I was getting overwhelmed on the desktop side.

So recently I bit the bullet and coalesced all my non-work feeds into one Google Reader account. I used NetNewsWire to merge my desktop feedroll into the Google Reader feeds. In addition, I did some gardening and weeding, eliminating some firehose/light read sources (e.g. io9, Gizmodo, Engadet) and adding in some infrequently posting must reads (e.g. Greg Linden’s shared items . NetNewsWire tells me I’m “down” to 150 feeds.

This scheme feels like it’s working a lot better though, since I usually hit at least one short window during the day when I can spend some time info grazing. When I get home, processing the remaining new items is short work.

Lastly, flagging items in NetNewsWire integrates really nicely with Google Reader, where the marked content winds up in the starred items feed. Works just like I’d expect it to. Now I have to revisit the unofficial Google Reader API Python module to slurp down my starred items for local searching.

Well that sucked! The hometown Caps looked pretty good after brushing aside the Rangers in five games. Bad enough they got eliminated last night, but they got swept by the Tampa Bay Lightning. Frankly, I thought they mailed it in for game 4, which could be indicative of team character flaws.

And the Red Wings are in deep doo as well, down 3-0 to the Sharks. If you’re in the NHL playoffs and your team color incorporates a heave dose of red, this doesn’t look like your year.

At work, I was finally privileged to receive a MacBook Pro back in November. Man do I love it!

One of the nice things about using the same OS at work and at home is that I exploit some of the hidden power features more consistently. One such feature on OS X is Apple’s Spotlight, the built-in desktop search service. Even better, Spotlight is easily accessible through LaunchBar, so I don’t even have to remember another key combination for search. Command-Space plus a few keystrokes gets me to web search or desktop search.

Once upon a time at work, they allowed us to have Google Desktop on Windows, which is the best desktop search I’ve ever experienced. Spotlight isn’t nearly as nice, but it works sufficiently, especially on indexing my Thunderbird e-mail. That’s where every other desktop search tool I tried, Mac or Windows, failed miserably. Indexing and searching my e-mail is pretty important, since I like to use mail for information trapping.

When migrating this blog, I decided to go casting about for a new favicon. While I probably haven’t been officially anointed a hacker, I definitely advocate the old time hacker ethic, and appreciate Eric Raymond’s use of The Glider cellular automata as “the” hacker emblem. So I’ve adopted for Mass Programming Resistance.

Besides I figure I have enough hacker cred from providing a patch for g++ 1.9, using Linux since 0.94 (a.out vs ELF binaries, fun!), and living in Emacs for 30+ years.

Recently got a chance to purchase some new music through the iTunes Music Store and Amazon MP3s.

• Evol Intent Us Against the World
• Counterstrike Back From the Grave
• Derrick Carter Fabric 56

The first two are straight up Drum ‘N Bass DJ mix efforts. 70+ minutes of hardcore riddims and tweakin acid. There’s no point looking at the track list. You just get on the train and ride the beat.

Derrick Carter’s Fabric effort is straight up Chicago House, featuring tracks from venerable names such as DJ Sneak, Cajmere/Green Velvet, and Roger Sanchez. I was surprised how well Sanchez’s My Organ held up, although I’ll always remember it as part of Little Louie Vega’s United DJ’s of America mix from way back in ‘94.

At $10 a pop for the electronic download version of each, I can recommend them all, if you’re into this style of music.

I’ve got to give a lot of credit to Discogs.com for now clearly highlighting DJ mixes. Makes my music hunting life a bit easier.