June 2009 Archives

Sadly, he also has Daddy's Teeth.

Had a lovely Father's Day. Tennis in the morning, Alexandria Waterfront Festival with the kids afterward, a movie that night. By the end of it, I was worn out—and limping. The joint of my big toe hurt. I figured I'd sprained the toe playing tennis or something.

The next morning I could barely walk. I got a ride to Metro with Sarah and then hobbled to the walk-in clinic near my work later in the morning. The nurse took my temperature, listened to my story, and said, "Hmmm...could be gout. The doctor will be here in a few minutes."

Gout? I thought. Never. I'm too young, too skinny, don't eat much meat or fish or drink much alcohol. It's not in my family. And if it's truly the "rich man's disease," they've got the wrong guy.

"Yep, it's gout," said the doctor, doling out prescriptions.

I limped back to work, feeling newfound sympathy for the elderly and disabled as the long blocks seemed to stretch forever in front of me. Last night at the pharmacy I tried out a few canes. They were all too short. I am so not the gout guy. 

I read the Washington Post's free commuter daily, Express. On Thursdays they have a lengthy entertainment section, with lots of recommendations of stuff for young people to do over the weekend. Since I have two little kids at home, I never actually go anywhere, but it's fun to live vicariously and see what my town has to offer. My one gripe with their coverage is their over-emphasis on indie rock and other music styles played and enjoyed primarily by young white people. This is an interesting editorial decision in a city whose African-American population is greater than 50%.

Now, in the interests of full disclosure, I am a white male, not quite young anymore, who has been known to listen to a lot of indie rock. I also played in an indie-rock band and worked for two alternative newspapers that were probably just as guilty of ignoring hip-hop and other genres. BUT THAT WAS OVER TEN YEARS AGO. Surely indie rock has run its course by now and more interesting things are going on in popular music today.

Just to be sure I wasn't projecting my own PC sensitivities onto Express, here is a rundown of the musical acts given prominence in today's issue:

Cover: "Funky French. Phoenix Rises." A French indie rock band called Phoenix.

E5, full page: "Cheeky French band Phoenix is on the verge of becoming an indie-rock highflyer."

E6: "NoVa new-wavers 4 out of 5 Doctors re-team for a fresh take on shiny pop." At least it's a local story, but another all-white act in a mostly white genre.

E6: "D.C.'s Nihilitia calls its brand of psychedelic sludge rock 'stonerglam.'" Again, glad its local, but do we need more "stonerglam"?

E8: "Venezuelan party people Los Amigos Invisibles never fail to bring the funk." A stab at diversity, but of course they have to cover this band because they came all the way from Venezuela.

E8: "Sebastien Grainger has given up punk for happy, shiny music." In other words, indie rock.

E9: "D.C.'s Mary Timony is making music again, this time with a new band and epic sound." Another local indie rocker (remember Helium?)

E12: "Dirty, glammy, gorgeous things the New York Dolls have never cared whether or not people like them—they want to be worshiped..." I guess you kinda gotta mention the New York Dolls' reunion tour, but is there nothing else going on, maybe in some SE neighborhood I fear to tread? Remember, I'm living vicariously here.

E13: "Czech Rock: Let there be accordion!" International white-people music from a band called Czechomor. I might actually enjoy this, of course.

E15: "After leaving the popular indie-rock band Page France, Michael Nau is back with a new  outfit he's calling Cotton Jones." No comment.

E19: "...Yanick Noah has stayed in the spotlight for his sweet voice, danceable melodies and rebound-grabbing basketball star son." I think he might be black! Oh, wait...he's also French. 

E24: "L.A.'s the Aggrolites make some music you can bake out to... The funky rhythms and twangy melodies of the reggae/ska mixture..." (White) people really still play ska?

E27: Aerosmith. Um...

E28: "D.C.'s music history would be lacking without an entry on '90s post-hardcore rockers Frodus." Maybe so, but I'm sick of "post-hardcore" too (whatever that is).

E30: "Gleaming Alt-Pop: Camera Obscura." In other words, indie rock.

Put in more graphic terms:

 
Hip Hop = 0.




 

Just installed a "ShareThis" widget on pretty much every page of this site, so now the masses can begin spreading my message like Country Crock.

Also, Jimmy Legs pointed out that my captcha images were missing from comments, which explains why I have yet to receive a single comment. That and the fact that I have like four visitors, most of whom came here after clicking one of my misleading blog-post titles in Google. Anyway, I believe I have diagnosed the captcha problem as an incompatibility with my host's Apache server. From a post on MT's message board:

...the trouble is that apache doesn't seem to parse URLs of this form correctly - basically it doesn't realise that everything after the .cgi is the query string.

However, this also strikes me as BS. The problem became evident in Movable Type almost two years ago. This MT installation is only a couple of months old. So either my diagnosis is incorrect or MT is taking way too long to fix this problem. In the meantime I have removed captcha from comments, so spam away. 

I talk to a lot of people about ideas for new businesses. In the initial brainstorm, they often start thinking about domains for their website. In the past I too have been guilty of purchasing a domain before making any other progress on the website itself. (I was once the proud owner of itaintshit.com and unseencavaliers.net. Don't ask.) This puts the cart before the horse, when all you really need is the horse to get where you're going. In other words, domains don't matter. (Much.)

Sure, you should own your identity, if at all possible. I have an uncommon first/last name combination, so it's pretty easy for me. But what about your startup? If you're thinking of starting a collectibles website devoted to all things Chewbacca, should you rush out and purchase chewbacca-collectibles.com, .net, .org, .biz, .us, etc. etc.? At $10-$35 per year for each domain, that could get expensive. And who knows, maybe by the time you're ready to launch, you'll have realized that you have a lot more to offer than Chewbacca collectibles. You may want to expand into Greedo and Jar-Jar Binks knickknacks, and now all those chewbacca-collectibles domains are a sunk cost.

I believe the domain purchase can be close to the last step in the process. Get a functioning website going, then commit to a domain. And don't bother negotiating purchase of a domain that someone else owns—it's not worth it. Find a reasonable alternative that is available from one of the registrars (I use GKG.net). There are many successful websites—including the top marketing blog—that don't even bother with catchy domains.


 

I've been looking into creative ways to raise money for a good cause and recently stumbled across the Build a Beard workshop, from Atto, a design agency in Belfast. It works like this: Photoshop a beard onto your face and they'll donate $1 to Kiva, a microlending organization that empowers entrepreneurs (mostly women, I bet) in the third world.

That's it. No catch. So I sent in my photo. I chose the "Lemmy" beard because, c'mon, it's Lemmy.

I've been trying to cobble together enough material for another page on this site dedicated to Childress, the two-man noise/rock/punk band I was in with drummer Shayne Hansen. During my search, I discovered this YouTube clip of Shayne playing drums out in Portland. I've often said he's the best drummer I've ever played with. Now you can hear for yourself.

This post by Anil Dash is so good that I want to share it here. And Anil has a unique (?) "embed" feature on his MT blog that enables me to "re-blog" his post, as one might a YouTube video. His post is below...

I added a bunch of new pages to this site last night and finally got the CSS dropdowns to work the way they are supposed to. (Although they are slow to load and slightly buggy in Internet Explorer because they rely on javascript instead of CSS.) At this point I don't have enough content to warrant dropdown menus but I wanted to prove they could work. And it was all thanks to this tutorial.

BTW, I'm taking a calculated risk when I publish some of the more personal, edgy stuff on here. I usually work places for years before I even mention that I used to be a musician, playing in dank clubs in strange cities and sleeping in vans. That I used to be a writer of sorts, banging out doggerel for alt weeklies and online lit zines. That I used to be a professional juggl—wait...that's going too far.

My life is a pretty open book to anyone who knows how to use Google, and that includes bosses, HR directors, recruiters, potential clients, landladies, parents, children, and mortgage lenders. There's no sense denying that I had a life before my professional one. What this site can do is filter out the noise. It's also teaching me a helluva lot about Movable Type, which was the whole point.  

Just added a cropped picture of Abraham Lincoln to my homepage. The original, featuring my two kids—one bewildered by Abe, the other nonplussed—is below. I snapped this photo at Union Station a couple weekends ago. Abe is positioned next to one of the bus-tour counters in the main lobby. No explanation why.

Finally got around to uploading the javascript necessary for CSS dropdown navigation to work in Internet Explorer. I also removed the Search widget because it was concealing the navigation. I can add it later once I figure out what I'm doing.

The challenge now is making all the sub-navigation choices show up. Currently only the first item in the dropdown appears, the rest presumably buried beneath the next element in the code. I'm experimenting with the "z-index" positioning property in CSS but so far to no... uh... no avail.

UPDATE: Dropdowns work now in Firefox but not IE. I feel like putting one of those "best viewed in..." messages on the homepage, next to the animated gif of the construction worker.

UPDATE 2: Working in IE now! Apparently I'm not the first to discover z-index bugs in IE. 

The Onion's editorial cartoons have long been my favorite feature of that paper, but I never thought to investigate the brains behind them—until now. Turns out they are drawn by revered cartoonist Ward Sutton (should've guessed) and are such pitch-perfect parody-of-satire that I hardly know where to begin in singing their praises. Luckily, I don't have to.

Here's a recent one, reprinted without permission, but I hope it's ok as long as I don't make a habit of it.