I'm not sure why, but tech-heavy art seems to drive me insane. I've got an irrational hatred of Cory Arcangel, and stuff like this infuriates me (I mean, c'mon). Watch the video on this page and see if you don't feel the same sense of baffling disorientation that I do.

I'll happily admit that my knowledge of art is confined to the few scraps of ARTH 101 & 102 that haven't yet been pushed from my brain by subsequently-acquired knowledge about Tivo operation, professional wrestling and other pursuits important to the 21st century male lifestyle. But as a geek, I still have a visceral reaction against rebadging tech projects as art.

I guess my objection is similar to the stupid "I could do that!" trope. At its root, this is obviously not a particularly good criticism. But more specifically, I'm bothered by how I could do that: by starting to fuck around with a bunch of technical doodads, ultimately developing some novel hacked-together thing, then refining it into something that can be somewhat-plausibly billed as a "commentary" on something else.

I realize that directionless experimentation has led to plenty of meaningful art. And I know that divorcing authorial intent from the equation is what I'm supposed to do. But can't I at least be bothered by a complete and utter lack of intent?

I suppose it's also a question of presentation: if I didn't see quite so many of these projects billed as explorations of how we interact with technology, I'd be less dissatisfied with them. Most have nothing to do with our relationship to technology — they're just weird artifacts that take batteries. Now, I like weird, battery-powered artifacts. But I don't like being oversold on their cultural import. To my prejudiced eye this class of work is no more impressive or aesthetically important than the electronic oddities on display in the Akihabaras of the world. It seems like there are far more interesting thoughts to be taken away from Korean- and Chinese-produced USB found art than in Western geeks' stabs at willful weirdness.

But I shouldn't be completely dismissive. This piece, by the same local artist who did the above-linked fish thing, seems like it could be pretty good. And I'm officially in favor of cyborg trees (scroll down for an explanatory video). Both of these strike me as employing technology in service of an idea, rather than using ideas to justify the deployment of technology. That's all I'm really asking for.

Courtesy of Perdita and her use of a By-Attribution Creative Commons license.

I still haven't gotten around to fixing the archives or comment preview form or a bunch of other things. But I did write a semi-ridiculous script that automatically assembles the header graphic (in multiple resolutions!) very easily. All I've got to do is upload a photo to my photostream, tag it as "blogheader" and run a password-protected script. It's kind of slick, if I do say so myself (although I have to admit that, judging by the aspect ratio of this shot, I think some of my image-resizing math is probably a little screwed up).

I'd post the code, but it's a pain in the ass to install the PEAR libraries that are necessary for talking to Flickr. If anyone's willing to jump through the necessary hoops, let me know.

Tonight was tapedeck disassembly night:

I'm trying to decode some metro cards for a DCist post in the vein of the the one where I pulled apart a SmarTrip card. But decoding magstripe data is a little harder than splashing around some acetone and plagiarizing wikipedia's RFID article.

I started off trying to use this project and this reader. And it works great for most of the cards in my wallet — but not for metro cards. Strangely, this problem even occurs in raw mode, where the reader simply spits out ones and zeros. The blocks of digits occur in roughly the same places, but the sizes of these blocks aren't consistent.

I've done some googling. From what I can tell, it looks like most financial institutions use a standard encoding scheme, complete with checksums and well-known formats. The stripesnoop reader and software expect this scheme, but DC metro cards don't abide by it. In fact, they may not even be digital: apparently some older card systems are acoustic, using various overlapping frequencies to encode data (the same way that telephone touchtones do).

Anyway, I'm hopeful that this software will be up to the task of analyzing it. It's a little more bare-bones: you hook a magnetic read head up to your sound card, record the sound of the magstripe and the software analyzes the resulting wav file. This is why I made that request for breakable tape decks — big thanks to Ray for providing a suitable victim (and to Matt and Jeff for similar offers).

At the very least I've managed to get a motor out of it and a useful-looking transformer that will probably prove to be even more dangerous than I suspect. But I'd say that odds of successfully decoding a card are low. If I can just produce some weird-sounding mp3s I'll call this project a resounding success.

Wow. The past seven days have been pretty hectic — so much so that I'm a little shocked to see that it's been a week since I posted something here. Weird. Even more troubling, I haven't even been able to play with my new toy (I'm referring to the microcontroller).

Well, hopefully it'll calm down a bit. Election day is a good, decisive marking point. My subconscious thinks so, anyway: I've been having election dreams.

It's pretty unusual for me. I don't dream very often — not in a way that's coherent enough to remember, at least. But these were vivid and occurred in quicker succession than I'm used to.

The first one involved the deaths of both Charles' mom and Sommer. Although tragic, details remain fuzzy about the fate of the former. But I can say with confidence that Sommer died in a horrific rocket attack (delivered via helicopter) on a George Allen rally. What was she doing there? I'll leave it to Sommer to explain herself.

The second dream was a bit weirder. I was in an airport departure lounge, getting ready to be shipped off to Iraq with a number of friends, Starship-Troopers-style. Only we weren't going to fight enormous insectoid aliens, or even Iraqis. Instead we were being sent as media grunts, drafted against our will to report fluff pieces with a pro-America spin. More specifically, we were all divvied up to produce television segments on the different member nations in the so-called Coalition of the Willing. I got Eritrea, which is not actually a part of the aforementioned coalition. I was understandably worried about finding an angle for my reports.

Both dreams were weirdly affecting. I woke up from the first one despairing, genuinely unsure of whether the narrative's victims were alive or not. I woke up from the second one furious (although this was admittedly more because of some frustrating in-dream boarding pass problems I'd had with security than because I was being forced to sugarcoat a monstrously immoral war — that part was dandy).

Now, I'm no expert at dream interpretation. It's possible that my subconscious is actually more preocuppied with helicopters and TV news than with the election. But having any sort of political backdrop to my unwaking escapades is pretty weird, particularly given their rarity.

So, for what little it's worth: I suspect we'll only get four seats in the senate. Because the universe is unjust, and it seems likely to me that at least one race will be swung by a last-minute helicopter attack.

I'm about to head off to vote, but before I do, one additional thought on the election — and this one has almost nothing to do with helicopters.

This robocalling business? It's going to get much, much worse. Frankly, I'm a little bit surprised that the NRCC is so obviously to blame for these sleazy tactics. The technology necessary to make automated calls is now within the grasp of any hobbyist:

1. Download Asterisk (it's free). Installation is pretty simple by opensource standards, but if it's still too daunting, there are liveCDs available.
2. Set up an outbound account with a cheap bulk-termination provider — this is what lets you turn internet traffic from your installation of Asterisk into actual phone calls on the public switched telephone network. Minimum buy-in for these services is usually around $15. Credit can be purchased with a VISA giftcard or, in many cases, with PayPal. I haven't tried buying this sort of thing anonymously, but, having gone through the process legitimately several times, I don't see what would stop you. Outbound calls cost around 1.3 cents/minute and turnaround on new accounts is usually instantaneous.
3. Get some phone numbers to call. I'm sure there are databases you can buy, but you could also just randomly generate numbers with the right area code.
4. Record a disenfranchising message. Maybe you warn that back taxes or delinquent parking tickets will be collected at the polling place. Or maybe you direct voters to a new, nonexistent polling place. It's not hard — it just takes a little bit of imagination and a computer with a microphone.
5. Write a dial plan that dials a number and plays your message. Write a script to autolaunch this dialplan over and over, working through your list of numbers. This takes a little bit of know-how, but is well within the reach of anyone who can get an A or a B in CS101. It'd take 20 lines of code, tops.
6. Run your nefarious scheme. Using a purloined wifi connection might be tricky — you generally have to open up ports on the router to let the VoIP traffic go through properly. But if you drive around looking for access points named "linksys" you'll probably be able to find a few with the default administrative password unchanged. Go in, open up the ports and you're all set — you can run your robodialer from a laptop plugged into your car's cigarette lighter.

It's all pretty easy. And it's only going to get easier over the next two years.

Now, consumer bandwidth isn't up to NRCC levels of malfeasance. But you should at least be able to make a few dozen phone calls simultaneously over a broadband connection. And since these calls don't have to be very long, you could easily chew through thousands of voters over the course of the time window when your tactic is likely to be both effective and immune to press coverage. Get a few wackos doing this and you might actually be able to affect turnout. For municipal elections it would probably be very easy to have an effect without getting caught.

So am I worried about this? Maybe a little. But there's no going back, and the big boys are already misbehaving — I don't particularly mind if the process gets democratized. I suspect that it'll soon become common wisdom that you ought to ignore your phone during the week before an election. Sure, it'd be nice to see the FCC take action. But they're awfully busy with indecency complaints, broadcast flags and bungled cableCARD/HDTV transitions. I'm afraid we're going to have to muddle through this ourselves.

Well, things are winding down. The candidates have gone to bed, nobody's releasing new election results, and all that's really left is for someone to unplug the Chris Matthewsbot and drape him with his protective dust cover. I'm pretty optimistic about my home state's chances of banishing George Allen and his pathetically small lizardbrain to the wilds of the Commonwealth (or California — it's time to reconnect with your roots, George). But the senate is just barely, tantalizingly, within reach. I won't jinx it. I'm not optimistic. But I'm hopeful.

I'm just catching up with all of the election-watching now, I'm afraid. I went to go see Broken Social Scene with Catherine, so most of my election updates came via text message and anxious web browsing on my sidekick (good job on mobile accessibility, CNN.com!).

The band was pretty good, overall. When they resisted the temptation to succumb to jam-band awfulness, they were great: "Ibi Dreams Of Pavement" and a countrified version of "Major Label Debut" were both genuinely fantastic. "It's All Gonna Break" was pretty good too, although trying to make a song that's so sprawlingly enormous and of-the-moment even bigger and more spontaneous rendered it just a little silly. Still, I love horn-induced catharsis.

On the other hand, the untitled, minutes-long batch of noodling before IAGB — when a guitarist stubbornly tried to create feedback that didn't want to come and a bass player tried out his new guitar to no one's amusement but his own — that shit was simply infuriating. I was walking out when they stopped and started playing "It's All Gonna Break" — that made me turn around. But I was genuinely disgusted: $33 should buy you something better than a jam session. I've sat through a Disco Biscuits show before (it's a long story), and by god I'm not going to do it again. I wasn't disappointed with the show, but I didn't stick around for an encore.

UPDATE: I almost forgot! Also on stage was DC's own Brendan Canty, fulfilling the terms of his plea agreement (namely, that he participate in every musical project, anywhere, forever). Woooo DC!

I'm home now. Claire McCaskill is about to go on TV. Chris Matthews keeps saying "Missurrah" for some reason, as if it's a word (the Missourians speaking on TV seem to disagree with him) . I'm thinking seriously about bed. Here's hoping I wake up to a uniformly Democratic legislature. McCaskill just claimed victory; Tester's up by several points with 2/3rds reporting; and I have childlike faith in my home state. I've got a sneaking suspicion that tomorrow morning is going to be great.

Which, okay, great. I would've liked to leave open the possibility of making my wallpaper a screencap of him being led out of the pentagon in handcuffs, but I'll settle for simply getting someone competent in there.

But Spencer: please, PLEASE be wrong about this. I am slightly worried that Spencer's gone into some sort of clairvoyant fugue state, though.

UPDATE: Phew! Looks like it'll be Robert Gates instead. My expert analysis: he's not currently a U.S. senator. Good!

Atrios notes that Tradesports completely failed to predict the outcome in the senate. In some ways, it's unfair to use control of the senate to criticize the idea of non-financial futures markets. In this case, we're talking about a very small range of possible outcomes and a situation that was genuinely hard to predict. All Tradesports said was that the Republicans were 70% likely to retain control. That probability has to collapse into reality at some point, and 30% is nothing to sneeze at. It just didn't work out this time.

But I'm glad to crow about this failure, because I've been seeing more and more references to Tradesports on sites I read, and they're almost always unilluminating — or they're at least frustrating, since I have no idea who and how many participate in these markets. Apologies to my journalist friends — I realize that graphs from online futures markets are one of the greatest labor-saving devices to hit your profession since the invention of Lexis Nexis or Larry Sabato. But they're still sort of boring-slash-infuriating.

As far as I can see, all that these markets get you is an honest effort on the part of their participants. Homerism and marketing within such systems become dramatically more expensive than such practices are elsewhere, which discourages dishonest behavior. That could certainly be useful when it comes to predicting sports outcomes or box office grosses or any number of other endeavors where prognosticators could have a motivation to deceive or insufficient motivation to carefully evaluate the problem.

But when it comes to things like terrorism or hurricanes, the futures market idea seems incoherent to me — unless you believe in its particular brand of magic (many open source enthusiasts are guilty of this, I should note, but they're no less wrong to do so). Experts in these rarified fields are presumably already doing their best to make objective predictions based upon all the data they can find: there are career-related mechanisms in place to encourage them to do so. Adding more voices and weighting them by cash on hand seems unlikely to be as useful as listening to and evaluating the justifications behind each voice's prediction.

Basically, I don't see how you can divorce the qualifications of the contributor from the valuation placed upon his or her opinion. A desire to make money may be enough to qualify someone to predict how the Wizards are going to do, but I don't really see how it could help me figure out when a hurricane is going to make landfall.

Admittedly, political outcomes seem more suited to the idea... but not in this case! So yeah: get bent, futures markets. Arguments make for more interesting reading than market graphs ever will.

I somehow missed it on Monday, but this week's Late Night Shots roundup is just as good as I would've expected. Callow, mean and dumb: these are the worst people on earth that aren't eligible for trial at the Hague.

I'm a little worried, though — Rusty's resolve seems to be faltering. Be strong, comrade! And realize that these people were probably expecting you, and almost certainly said nasty things about you after you left. The devil will be pleasing in his appearance (the picture to the right notwithstanding).

Anyway, I'm sure that the LNS crowd has a full Wonkette crisis response initiated. I've no doubt that they're superficially peeved, but secretly deeply, deeply satisfied. First: people paying attention! The board's denizens must be glamorous and interesting after all. Second: the obvious response is to hatch secret conspiracies. This incursion by the outside world represents a chance to set up new, more exclusive inner circles, in a flurry of private-messaging between the idiot children of the American aristocracy. It's an opportunity to purge the undesirables from the LNS boards — and you've gotta love a good purge. Let a thousand electronic Skull and Bones bloom!

Last weekend Sommer came up to Philadelphia to hang out with Emily and myself (okay, mostly Emily). That weekend remains undocumented, although I do have a blockbuster post about brains in jars planned (it was a good weekend).

This weekend it was Kriston and Kate's turn, and we had a grand ol' time, with lots drinking, eating, a competitive pie-off, and a visit to the Pabstiest Place On Earth (with special guests The Oldest Jazz Band Ever). It was great.

The weekend also featured the completion of a Philadelphian obligation that I had somehow, until now, escaped: cheesesteaks. Kate was attending the Mütter Museum with a friend, but on Saturday Emily, Kriston and I wended our way through the Italian market and on to the center of cheesesteak culture in Philadelphia (and therefore the universe).

Pat's and Geno's Steaks sit across the street from one another, and are by far the most famous purveyors of gristle and cheese in the city. Native Philadelphians don't seem to like to admit loyalty to either — doing so would betray a lack of nuance, revealing the speaker as an unserious person who hadn't considered the science and philosophy of cheesesteaks in a careful and dispassionate way. Needless to say, this quest for knowledge is deeply personal — tourists are not invited — so instead of giving you a straight answer they'll generally just pick a family member's name at random and pretend that it's an actual steak-purveyor ("Yeah, those places are okay, but you've really got to have a steak from Uncle Joe's").

But Pat's and Geno's were the obvious entry points for cheesesteak philistines like ourselves. Besides, they were nearby. So that's where we headed.

John Hodgman and his dizzying psychedelic forest have come and gone, but the F.W. Thomas Performances continue on: tonight's the sixth installment. I won't be able to make it — I'm headed to Charlottesville for my mom's birthday — but you should go. Unless you're a member of my immediate family, of course, in which case: see you tonight.

Well, I've been trying. My attempts to find new music usually come in fits and starts — Pitchfork's best new music section is generally pretty reliable, but sometimes they spend months and months in genres that I'm not interested in (or my RSS subscription to the section breaks which l, uh, just discovered it had). When that happens it's time to hit up the music blogs and take some shots in the dark.

I did that, and I grabbed the new Decemberists, too. Unfortunately, the results were kind of disappointing. It could be that I just need to give these albums a few more listens. Or my unfavorable impression may have been due to my fancy-pants earphones being in the shop for service yet again (yes, I'm a snob), leaving me to listen through muddy $10 wraparounds that I bought at CVS out of desperation. Whatever the reason, the following failed to adequately whelm me:

Pony Up! - Make Love To The Judges With Your Eyes

Inspired by this cliptip post, I gave this band a try. They've got the songs but not the production. The album sounds like a well-made demo tape — there's a lot of potential, but the execution is uninspired. All they really need is a pro in the studio, forcing them to play through each composition like it's going to be the last pop song before the world ends. I'll check in next album (or maybe next tour).

The Decemberists - The Crane Wife

Colin Meloy's epic ornithophiliac triptych gets off to a rockin' start. But it drags, it's pretentiously out-of-order (and that's in addition to the Decemberists' normal baseline of pretension), and what's up with combining parts one and two into a single track? Do the Decemberists really think they're going to single-handedly turn the tide against the ipodification of their industry? Cause, uh, they won't, regardless of how many Japanese birdfucking myths they reference. And given that, I'd prefer that they stop screwing up my meticulous playlist management.

Cold War Kids - Robbers and Cowards

To my ears these guys sort of sound like the Arctic Monkeys, except tired. Given that I'm not a big Arctic Monkeys fan, that's enough to consign them to my ipod harddrive reclamation efforts. Also, I'm bothered by the fact that the first thing I ever read about this band was in the context of complaints that they were getting too much blog-buzz. Same thing with this meme. I think internet fads now occur at such a speed that they can only be observed as they destructively collide with boredom, sending particles of ennui and ascii skittering across a bubble chamber BoingBoing.

So that's the current, sad state of my attempts at musical exploration. I can legitimately recommend the Annuals album, though (as Caralyn noted here). And hey, you haven't worked all the way through this list yet, have you?

ALSO MUSICALLY RELATED!: Is that Rhett Miller singing the latest Chili's commercial? A: Yes, yes it is.

First, my blogging performance. Work is taking nearly every waking moment, and will continue to do so through Monday. It stinks.

Second: Glenn Beck, as noted by Mike Boyer via Cyrus. I happened to catch Beck's exchange with representative-elect Keith Ellison while I was at the gym the other day, and it was pretty disgusting. As quoted by Boyer, here's how Beck started off the interview with Ellison, who is our country's first Muslim congressman:

OK. No offense, and I know Muslims. I like Muslims. I've been to mosques. I really don't believe that Islam is a religion of evil.... With that being said, you are a Democrat ... what I feel like saying is, 'Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies.' And I know you're not. I'm not accusing you of being an enemy, but that's the way I feel, and I think a lot of Americans will feel that way.

If my memory's right, Boyer's ellipses are a little unfair. Beck prefaced his comments by pointing out that Ellison favors a "cut and run" strategy in Iraq. So this ridiculousness was at least in part motivated by Ellison daring to have opinions about foreign policy that differ from those of a learned cable news anchor — it wasn't entirely about Ellison's religion. Still, there's no denying that Beck was saying to a democratically-elected representative: the burden of proof is upon you to prove that you're not a traitor. Go! It was kind of astounding.

I was really hoping to have an embarrassing flash video for you. It was going to be of Charles and me, gesticulating wildly in front of the TV as we gleefully played with his new Nintendo Wii.

But no dice. We tried Toys R Us, we browsed Best Buy, we searched Circuit City and we trolled Target. Oh, and Charles called Costco. It's sold out everywhere. If I hadn't had quite such an exciting Saturday night — writing CSS till 3amWOOOO! — I might've gotten up early and stood in line with the other dorks and managed to get my hands on one of the just-released consoles. But I did, so I didn't, and I couldn't.

But it'll be okay. Word on the interstreet is that most stores will be getting another shipment by Tuesday (if not earlier). And although the online options are also sold out, the situation is well in hand. Thanksgiving! I think that's a reasonable goal.

Here's what I found when I walked into the office this morning:

There's no explanation or attribution, although we're all pretty sure that Nicco is responsible. This is a pretty great place to work.

Speaking of which, our incredibly awesome sysadmin Justin has recently left us to go revolutionize the world of Mac software. Consequently, we're looking for a new director of systems & network administration. Candidates will have to be experts at maintaining Apple computers, administering an SVN repository, maintaining a LAMP stack across a farm of servers, and generally outgeeking the rest of us. A sense of excitement about Drupal, Wordpress and progressive politics would also be welcome. You can find the official job description here. Alternately, here's the visual job description that JP, our CTO, sent around last week:

There's a bounty attached, so even if your own bash/vi/D&D skills are rusty, you should still send along anybody who you think might fit the bill.

Via Michael, check out this article about a high school kid who built a machine capable of producing nuclear fusion. Pretty cool stuff. And pretty abysmal reporting:

Thiago Olson, 17, stands near his nuclear fusion reactor, which he calls "the Fusor," at home in Oakland Township on Friday.

That's, um, because it is a Fusor. It's not like he just made a stencil and spray-painted a cool-sounding name onto his soapbox racer.

Thiago's mom, Natalice Olson, initially was leery of the project, even though the only real danger from the fusion machine is the high voltage and small amount of X-rays emitted through a glass window in the vacuum chamber -- through which Olson videotapes the fusion in action..

Mrs. Olson probably should've stuck with her first instinct. From what I've read, the voltages and x-rays involved are both excellent ways to kill yourself and your family (I think there's some danger from neutron radiation, too). But presumably (and hopefully) Thiago learned how to build shielding for the gadget sometime during its construction.

"Originally, he wanted to build a hyperbolic chamber," she said, adding that she promptly said no. But, when he came asking about the nuclear fusion machine, she relented.

Is that the right quote? Really? Because all I'm turning up on the internet for "hyperbolic chamber" are references to the Hyperbolic Time Chamber from the awesome yet completely uneventful anime Dragonball Z. Honestly, if it was between one of those and a Fusor, I'd have pushed the kid toward the time machine.

I guess it's a little silly to nitpick. This is a human interest story, not real science reporting, so it's not that important that Ms. Damron get things right. Still, I don't really understand why reporters don't bother to run things by experts — or at least wikipedia — when they're writing about technical areas in which they're not conversant. The likelihood of embarrassing errors seems high. So why not call up a physics professor from the local community college and read him or her the piece over the phone? I bet she'd be happy to do it so long as you used a quote from her.

Anyway, questionable coverage aside, this kid is clearly pretty awesome, and he has now officially replaced David Hahn as my all-time favorite teenage nuclear hacker. These kids' willingness to leapfrog straight into playing with lethal radioactivity is awe-inspiring. I'm still working up toward accidentally killing myself with mains power, for pete's sake.

As far as I can recall, there is no candy bar on the national market that contains raisins. None of even moderate prominence, anyway. The closest you can come is Nestle's generally-underrated Chunky product, but its length:(width+height) ratio is all off — it's some sort of ill-conceived candy chimera. Deliciousness aside, it's clearly not fit to take its place in the American pantheon of bar-shaped food products.

Now, I'm not noting this to argue for raisins as a primary candy bar component — I know that proposition would be controversial. Still, you have to admit that raisins are a classic confection ingredient; a solid, dependable utility player. Yet the candy bar industry systematically ignores them. Meanwhile, various other ingredients — the poorly-defined "nougat" in particular — seem to me to be consistently over-represented. I don't know exactly what's going on, but it's virtually guaranteed to be sinister.

Enough bitching. Here's an album I can genuinely recommend: the Malajube CD. It's far from perfect — the band lapses into M83/Muse-style ridiculousness on a fairly regular basis during the album's middle. But, as the Pitchfork review attests, it's a nice bookend to (or, more hopefully, just a recapitulation of) the recent era of Canadian indie rock dominance. This track (heavily influenced by my beloved Unicorns) is one of the best songs I've heard all year:

Malajube – Montreal -40°C

You can find the video here, if you're so inclined.

There is something about this band that we should discuss, though. They're French-Canadian, and so are their lyrics. I never took any French (those years of Latin should be paying off any day now), so it's all gibberish to me. That's fine — vocals are mostly a melodic and rhythmic element to me, not something to actually be parsed and comprehended. And it's fun to let your brain misinterpret the sounds as English.

Still, the consensus in America (and much of Canada) seems to be that French-Canadians are a major pain in the ass, and that this sort of behavior shouldn't be encouraged. But I say go ahead; let your hair down. We've got control of both chambers — it's time to live a little. Snort at organized religion! Re-join the ACLU! Attend a gay marriage or two! And, yes, listen to some indie rock in French. Morality is just a construct anyway, man.

ALSO: the new Shins seems to be pretty okay, as most of you already know. But does anyone really get worked up about a new Shins release? The band never sounds particularly excited, so I have a hard time feeling that way myself. Like Death Cab, it's music you can put on in the car while riding with strangers from our demographic and know that a) they won't object to it and b) it won't overwhelm the conversation. That sort of shared touchstone is a good and worthwhile thing to have, but the songs themselves rarely move or inspire me. Maybe this is just my embarrassing affection for musical melodrama talking, though.

I'm embarrassed to admit that I initially clicked through to this story with interest rather than incredulity. In short: some guy claimed he had come up with a means of storing 450 gigabytes of data on a single sheet of paper through a special encoding system involving colored geometric shapes. Some of the tech press ran with it.

Well, it's bullshit, but that link doesn't really adequately explain why. It gets close, though. Here's my stab at an explanation, just for fun.

Well, I hate to be a downer. But I have to disagree: I thought the Hold Steady were merely Pretty Good on Saturday. As great as the new album is, as raucous as the guitars sounded, as joyous as the band was, there were some problems.

First, and predictably, the Black Cat sound: it was lousy, as usual. The keyboards on this last record are more important than they have been before, but they were nearly inaudible whenever the guitars were going. Sucky, sucky, sucky.

Second and more importantly, by the end of the show Craig Finn seemed more than a little drunk. That can be fine and charming, but this time, and to this curmudgeon, it wasn't. His tossed-off alternate phrasings got grating, particularly during a downright Shatnerian performance of "Hot Soft Light". I'm all for changing up arrangements during a live show, but this was closer to Duritz than Dylan.

But I don't mean to complain too much. It may not have been as enjoyable as last February's concert, but it was still a good show by a great band. I'm glad I went, but I would've been pretty pissed off if I'd been one of the people who got beer sprayed on them. But then, I am approximately a million years old. Consarnit.

Remember this the next time you hear a WTO protester complain about not being taken seriously.

Matt, Susan: don't worry so much. Russia and the U.S. have plenty of common ground. Should Iran have the bomb? Well, it's hard to say. But should consumers have cheap mp3s? That's a much easier question to answer.

(Okay — clearly consumers shouldn't actually have these mp3s. Still, it's a little disappointing to see AllOfMP3 being shut down. Countries being jerks to one another is one of the best avenues we have left for preserving the freewheeling exchange of online information that we all like so much.)

Two recent blog posts that caught my eye:

• Dave Winer says that a plummeting Google stock price will be the surest sign that the web 2.0 bubble has collapsed. Seems plausible to me — nothing lasts forever, right? But it's not all going away. Sure, there are people who think that learning to use the Google Maps API constitutes a meaningful contribution to society, and they are in for a rude awakening. But Google will still be around, as will Yahoo, as will well-developed Javascript technologies and the open-API concept that have powered Web 2.0.


• On the other hand, this Mark Cuban post is dead wrong. Cuban argues that the growth of HDTV and simultaneous lack of hi-def outputs on PCs means that downloadable video will be unable to power our home entertainment centers, preserving the status quo distribution system. This is really dumb.
  
  Apple's iTV isn't yet released, but it's aimed at solving exactly the problem Cuban describes — and, like so many Apple products, will get us all used to a new way of interacting with technology (just in time for cheaper competitors to swoop in). Soon enough we'll all get cheap(ish) network appliances with HD outputs that can stream video wirelessly from our PCs — either from shared drives, or from DRM-preserving server applications that we'll leave running on our desktops.
  
  Initially these boxes will be standalone devices, but soon enough the functionality will be integrated into DVD players or cable boxes or stereo receivers — just like Tivo's revolutionary DVR functionality has been. In fact, you don't have to wait for the iTV to see this happen: you can already see the low-end version on on the Xbox 360, the high end in devices like this, and the midrange option here.
  
  Sure, we might have to wait for 802.11n to reliably stream 1080p HD content. And I have no idea whether the tech will end up residing in your DVD player, cable box, TV or receiver — at the moment I'd say the DVD player, since it's mostly cheap DVD players from Asia that have brought DivX playback to the living room. But then, that's what I said the last time, and I was dead wrong (Dolby decoding chipsets are now expected to live in the receiver). Plus, the need to preserve DRM makes partnerships between large online media vendors like Apple, Microsoft and (soon) Walmart and players like Comcast seem pretty likely. So maybe it'll be your cable box that does the streaming. Beats me.
  
  But although the specifics are a little hazy, I am completely sure that Cuban is wrong about this. Downloadable video is going to be coming to the living room — and in hi-def — a lot sooner than he thinks. Thanks to Xbox Media Center it's already present in mine. I just don't have a TV that can display it.

And have been since Sunday. I should've known something was up when the smoke at the Black Cat and Sommer's party started to bother me. I'm usually of at least average hardiness when it comes to friends' cigarette fumes, but this time I was dying.

For once, I recognized my symptoms for what they were and immediately took countermeasures. My mom favors echinacea, but the male side of my family demands rigorous pseudo-scientific analyses that have been published in a respected journal, or at least on the back of an authoritative-looking cardboard box. So I started consuming zinc lozenges at a prodigious rate.

If you start taking it quickly enough, zinc gluconate is supposed to decrease the length of colds by, I don't know, ramping up your white blood cell production, or galvanizing them or something. They say they've got studies proving it works, but of course it's hard to judge from first-hand experience.

The initial results weren't promising. I was laid pretty low; my body shut down all non-essential processes — alertness, cleverness, interest in the Britney Spears divorce — leaving only those biological systems necessary for maintaining a steady stream of whining. But I think I'm getting better, or at least trading old symptoms for new ones — and by my standards it's happening relatively quickly, too. I don't think this is going to become my annual epic month-long illness (tentative arrival date: February).

Anyway, I'll heartily recommend the zinc drops, if only because they let you feel like you're doing something to improve things, instead of just wallowing in phlegm and misery. But there is a downside: you're supposed to suck on them, not swallow them. They don't taste particularly great, but they're bearable, particularly if you buy the brand-name version. But that's just priming you for the real unpleasantness, which comes when you eat anything else.

It's a little hard to describe the taste that results. The best I've been able to come up with is "hollandaise sauce made with rotten eggs and 9-volt batteries". It's like the experience a vulture must have when eating a cyborg's carcass.

Why the sudden, food-triggered onset? I have no idea. Maybe the change in flavor wakes up neurons that have grown inured to the original zinc drop. Maybe the acid in the food makes the zinc rust out of solution, producing a different and worse-tasting compound (chemistry nerds, help me out here). Whatever it is, it seems to be unavoidable, regardless of how much water and time you place between the lozenge and the food. It's the taste of wellness, and it's terrible.