Coachella announced the set times today
As well as the map and the lame scheduler thing (who volunteers to Web2.0ize that thing?) #
Archive for April, 2006
USC loses 270,000 social security numbers to a SQL injection attack
What is this, amateur hour? Keep making those bank vaults out of plywood, guys. #
David Malki’s “Comic Strip Doctor”
Very interesting deconstructions (and reconstructions) of the worst newspaper comic strips. #
Helvetica
I just finished Arthur Nersesian’s Dogrun, which he wrote after The Fuck-Up. I think it’s the first bad book I’ve read in a while.
Although it’s speckled with trademark Nersesian wordplay—he calls kids who work in corporate retail “the disenfranchised”—I found the story boring and didn’t really care for the protagonist.
Aside: some genius at Pocket Books decided to set the print in Helvetica. It’s pretty much unreadable. Apparently it has more attitude or something.
Anyway, this is only notable for a couple reasons. One, I consume so few books (maybe one every few weeks, compared to music: a few albums per week) that I can afford to mostly only read what’s personally recommended to me by others.
Second, The Fuck-Up is incredible. I remember finishing it in December, and I was dumbstruck. I just sat there staring for a couple hours.
It’s a story about an East Village kid who goes through one loss after another, until he loses everything, including the boundaries of his value system. As the narrator is, well, fucking up, I was jealous. I wanted to feel that raw, to sleep on the streets of New York, faced with the sum of the modern world’s production, and owning none of it. I guess that’s suicidally irrational.
As always, the problem is that we always want what we can’t have. It destroys whole civilizations as easily as relationships, and right then, it was destroying me. #
Philips pays Time Inc. magazines to put the TOC on the first page as part of their “Simplicity” campaign
DF gets it right: it’s difficult to work out a deal like this because it points out how consumer-hostile (e.g. annoying, untargeted, message unrelated to product facts, etc.) most advertising strategies are. #
AllMusic refreshes
Well, this is better than the last redesign, but still horrible compared to the quick-loading, Flash-free original site. #
IE doesn’t support setting innerHTML for lots of tags, including TBODY
Inevitably, there’s a point during any front-end project where some bug in IE6 makes me absolutely furious (and wastes lots of my employer’s money). This is like dumbing down Shakespeare so a toddler can read it. #
XM has renamed their Canadian indie station at channel 52 to “The Verge”
I’m still gonna call it Arts+Crafts Radio. #
Mongrel, a mostly-Ruby web server that works well on Win32
Apache2+FastCGI+ruby was so slow on my intranet Windows server that about 50% of requests would completely time out. Mongrel is way better—a three-line install has my Rails app up and running. And it’s fast! #
What’s up with all the horrible album names lately? The new TV on the Radio is called Return to Cookie Mountain, and from Final Fantasy we get He Poos Clouds. Yuck. Emergency & I you are not. #
