February 2011 – Radios Appear

Wow, the things you don’t remember

I just ran across a mention of my name in the Changelog to memcached, from 2004. I had forgotten ever contributing anything. In fact, I was having a hard time figuring out what I would have been working on in 2004 that would have been using memcached.

Mind you, I remembered after a moment or two, but it took some serious thinking.

The interesting thing is to realize that I was apparently a fairly early adopter–the entry for my bug report is almost exactly one year after the first entry in the changelog.

Using git-annex for music storage

Julien Danjou talks about how its ability to do partial checkouts on large quantities of files makes it easy to keep a subset of music on his laptop while the majority stays on his server.

“Give it a read”:http://julien.danjou.info/blog/2011.html#Handling_my_music_collection_with_git-annex.

I really am impressed…

somehow the Wachowski Brothers succeeded in making a movie of _Speed Racer_ that was even more creepy and inexplicable than the original cartoon series.

What I don’t understand is why they thought they would ever make any money off of it.

Tsung is an open-source multi-protocol distributed load testing tool

Has the capability to test a number of systems that we use regularly. Worth remembering.

“Check it out”:http://tsung.erlang-projects.org/

Org-Mode contacts handling

An alternative to the moribund and largely unmaintained BBDB codebase, using Org-Mode files as the storage location for email contacts.

“More things from Julien”:http://julien.danjou.info/org-contacts.html

ZOMG, Wikipedia truly knows everything

“Here is a link”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsters_of_Rock#1983_2 to the Wikipedia entry for the 1983 German Monsters of Rock concert, which was my first ever concert.

I have vague memories of _Whitesnake_, but couldn’t even tell you what they played.

_Blue Oyster Cult_ was what I was there to see, though I remember it being somewhat anticlimactic–I think I knew a lot less of their music than I had thought. I would probably enjoy it more now.

I remember enjoying _Thin Lizzy_ a lot, though it’s only in retrospect that I am glad I saw them in their last show with Phil Lynott.

I remember one _Saxon_ song, but I won’t name it for fear of dying of embarrassment.

I have remember “Paradise by Dashboard Light” only because the female performer ended up very scantily clad. John Scalzi recently tweeted wondering what a collaboration between Jim Steinman and Philip Glass would be like–I can tell you it would likely make my head explode.

_Motorhead_. I am sad to realize that I have seen Lemmy in the flesh and have no memory of it. Maybe that’s appropriate, though.

I suspect that I left before _Twisted Sister_ made it on stage, and I don’t have any idea who the hell _Cheeta_ were.

Thanks to my dad for dropping us off and picking us up afterward.

Really Slow Motion

Ah, the things we can’t see. A number of silly things filmed on a ridiculously high-speed video camera, and then slowed down so we can perceive the things that normally see continuous.

Jake Shimabukuro covering Bohemian Rhapsody. On ukelele. Solo. Wow.

You know, I haven’t seen any ukelele covers that have been less than respectful of their source material. Sometimes they are obviously showing off technical acumen–there’s a couple of places in this video that might qualify–but it all seems done with a lot of affection for the original.

Strange Disclaimer

An interesting point about the thoughtlessness of some of our legal forms–the silliness of standard boilerplate suggesting that Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle wasn’t connected to actual events and persons…right after many pages detailing exactly how it was.

“Noted by Yglesias”:http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2011/01/strange-disclaimer/