Monkinetic Weblog

Eric Meyer went and saw Weird Al Yankovic...

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quoteIt's crazy what you could had, crazy what you could have had...
I need this, I need thisendquote

Country Feedback is one of my all-time favorite R.E.M. songs, from the album Out Of Time.

Of the 5 versions I have, the best one I think is a live recording from Atlanta, August 31, 1999. Michael Stipe's vocals are ragged and haunting, the live, loose, setting lends an even more desperate tone to an already impassioned lyric.

Peter Buck's guitar work goes on and on, with a lot more distortion, reverb, and yes, feedback than the (now seemingly) anemic album version. He plays all around the melody, lurching through his signature arpeggios, and even getting a decent solo feel to it, which was never his strong point.

One of the things I love about this song is it's determinedly languid pace. It flows and flows, Stipe's extra lyrics and vocalizations toward the end slide along on top of the music, drawing you in.

In my mind's eye I see the wooden shack above the bank slide by as the river carries me past - slow, green, and cyprus-choked...

No time to blog this properly, but Bill blogs an IM conversation we had about Mark Pilgrim's "Winer Watch". See Bill's site for links.

Scoble says: "I'm glad I'm not in Silicon Valley right now, though. I heard it was 107 in my dad's car in San Jose yesterday. Whew."

Dave Hyatt, beloved of Safari-using geeks everywhere, has had his two blogs redesigned. Very nice!!

Dave Hyatt:quoteIf my geek receptors aren't burned out by X-Men 2, they are guaranteed to be overloaded by the righteousness of The Matrix Reloaded.endquote MMmmmmm, Matrix.

I recently found a solution to a problem that had been bugging me for some time.

Conversant has this really cool email gateway - all posts to this site go out to anyone who is subscribed to the site and has the list feature turned on.

So, when I write a post like this one, the post goes out over email, and the <blockquote> tags are stripped. How do my subscribers know where the quote is?

To the rescue: Conversant&#39;s text resources. A resource is like a Manila/Radio shortcut: it&#39;s a defined piece of text that gets replaced with something else when the content gets rendered. Resources are most often used for links and images, but Conversant has a powerful resource type called a Text Resource.

A text resource can have anything in it - html, text, and Conversant template macros. So I essentially write my own no-arg macro called&#39;quote&#39;:

<-#if condition="ioInterface&#39;email&#39;"-->
----- quote --<-#else--><blockquote><-#endif-->

If the post is being rendered for email, it inserts the "----quote----" text, otherwise it renders the blockquote tag. A partner resource called&#39;endquote&#39; inserts "------" or the closing blockquote tag.

Now, when excerpting text, I start the excerpt with |quote| and close it with |endquote|, and it gets rendered legibly both on the site and in the list email.

Dave points to this Ed Cone entry and hilites Ed's remark about running for office.

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D I G I T A L L Y - I M P O R T E D - European Trance, Techno, Hi-NRG: This is one of my favorite net radio stations. if you have iTunes, you can find it under Radio > Electronica, though it&#39;s really Trance Techno. Lots of beats, grinds, and other trancey stuff to get your groove on.

Bill Bumgarner, who was recently looking for a new weblogging tool, talks about the spate of suggestions he got.

Random Stuff:

• Thanks to Scoble linking to this post, I'm now #41 on Popdex. I'll be gone in a couple days, but it's been fun!
• TidBITS is looking for a CMS, Zope/Plone mentioned as a possibility.
• I rode 16 miles yesterday, in 1 hour, 20 minutes. My longest ride this year.

Dori responds to my earlier post with some good points.

Of course, no journey would be complete without a few choice temptations along the way.

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It looks like Apple may be announcing shortly a new music service for Mac/iPod owners, using label-approved music and non-mp3 format. Argh.

Apple had so much going for it - the whole digital hub thing, iTunes, iPod. Do they know it was MP3 support that made iTunes so frikkin popular? I wonder if they will continue to support MP3? I guess we&#39;ll see what happens.

More links: San Jose Mercury, Mac Observer, Slashdot.

[via Chris]

Cory Doctorow over at BoingBoing linked to Sean McMains' oh-so-cool Arcade game PC. Awesome stuff!

Mark put up a nifty fridge magnet poetry page and contest. Here's my entry, titled "tablet Haiku" in honor of NEC's new toy.

Robert Scoble responds to my last post:

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Migraine Awareness Group: a National Understanding for Migraineurs (MAGNUM). Good informative site for migraine sufferers ("migraineurs").

Jodi gets 3 or 4 multi-day migraines each month, and we&#39;re looking for treatments more effective and less expensive than Maxalt.

My good friend Jim recently released a Mac OS X installer for Plone, a Zope-based CMS.

Cool, David (Rys) McCusker got himself hooked up with voice recog. software, so he's dictating his blog now.