« July 2005 | Main | July 2010 »

August 30, 2005

I spoke too soon

In the immediate aftermath of the hurricane, New Orleans appeared to have escaped the worst of it. It turns out that the worst case scenario occurred a day later. The problem is that one of the levees broke, and New Orleans is a big bowl, with Lake Pontchitrain and the Mississippi River on each side:

As a consequence, water is now flowing from the lake into New Orleans, trapping the water downtown and submerging the city:

Posted by Dean at 7:48 PM | Comments (0)

August 29, 2005

NOLA Survives Still Exists!

The city is flooded under 6 feet of water, the Superdome's roof started to come apart, and pumps and at least 1 levee failed. Nevertheless, NOLA was spared the worst.

Meanwhile, in Mississippi:

Winds, which officials estimated had climbed to 135 to 145 miles an hour range midmorning today, forced water under the door at the Harrison County emergency operations center. Officials say they have to estimate wind speed because their measuring instruments had been blown away.

Youch.

Posted by Dean at 12:50 PM | Comments (0)

I'm glad I got a chance to see New Orleans

I'm starting to worry that New Orleans might meet the fate of Port Royal. Here's hoping that everyone stays safe and the city survives Hurricane Katrina. One has to admire the attitude of New Orleans resident Tony Peterson, however:

"I was going to the Superdome and then I saw the two-mile line," the 42-year-old musician said. "I figure if I'm going to die, I'm going to die with cold beer and my best buds."

You can keep up to date with what's gone on out there with updates from the National Weather Service. You can also check out the one-hour loop of the hurricane's progress.

This might be an opportune time to donate to The Red Cross.

Posted by Dean at 1:58 AM | Comments (0)

August 27, 2005

Ack Ack Ack

Looks like my committee wants to see more work. Back to the grindstone.

Posted by Dean at 7:54 PM | Comments (0)

August 18, 2005

A Blogging Free Zone

FYI: Light-to-non-existent blogging for the next couple of weeks while I finish thesis.

Posted by Dean at 10:06 PM | Comments (4)

August 14, 2005

Pieces of Old Cambridge

Back when I was young and growing up in New Jersey, I would go to New York City to visit my uncle in Queens, and he would drive me into Manhattan. Our trips were usually to some obscure corner of Manhattan, and this would take us bumping over old cobblestone streets that hadn't get been paved over. My uncle would extol the virtues of the long-lived cobblestones, compared to the asphalt which was always littered with potholes.

Recently, there has been a lot of construction being done near me on Main Street in Cambridge-- one of the early Cambridge streets along the old horse-carriage line that connected Cambridge to Boston-- and the construction exposed some of the old cobblestones on the corner of Main and Portland:

As far as I've been able to tell in the years I've lived in Cambridge, there aren't any exposed cobblestone streets around. Regarding New York, however, there's a compilation of the old cobblestone streets courtesty of Forgotten New York.

Posted by Dean at 1:14 PM | Comments (0)

August 10, 2005

"Steal My Bicycle! Please!"

I saw this bicycle "locked" here in Cambridge-- hopefully there aren't any details in this picture that make the location identifiable:

This has got to be one of the lamest attempts at securing one's bicycle I've seen. I know that bike-rack space is scarce, but this looks pretty easy to remove. The owner of the bicycle didn't even bother to lock the wheel to the frame.

UPDATED: Here's the original picture if you want to see it unblemished by my clumsy attempt to highlight the offending area.

Posted by Dean at 10:51 PM | Comments (3)

August 7, 2005

45s that Time Forgot

In an earlier entry, I claimed that I would start recording a few select obscure 45s in my collection. So, today, we begin with... "singles that time forgot"-- our first entry being Spacemaid's "Do you Remember Rock 'N' Roll Radio"
(apologies: due to recording problems, there is a slight buzz on this mp3)

This took a while for me to track down, because I was intrigued... I was in a phase where I was looking for a lot of covers by punk bands of songs I liked, and here I discovered covers of punk songs by other bands (of which there are many good examples, including this very song by Kiss, on the We're a Happy Family Ramones tribute album), and the song was played by a female-fronted band, so there were two gimicks which immediately appealed to me. Then there's the pink vinyl-- I'm a sucker for the "color vinyl" gimick. So it would seem all good, but to give you an idea about how utterly forgetful this single is, it has become a "45 that time forgot" despite having been released only in 1996.

For some background, Spacemaid was an early 90s grunge band who went the pop-route. They have an album "Supercool" which you can still get as an import on which this song appears. Apparently in 1997, they had a top 20 single, "Baby Come On." Spacemaid was never heard from again.

Somehow, they got Joey Ramone to do a voice introduction, intoning "Hey kids, do you remember rock and roll radio?" at the start of the song (maybe he figured it would be great to give some aspiring rockers a hand), and it goes downhill from there. First, they decided to play with the original lyrics, which at first might be interesting, I thought, except that it gets botched. The first set of lines "Rock'n, rock'n'roll radio Let's go" gets replaced with "I hear rock'n'roll radio, let's go" which is irritating not just because the "I hear" part is implied in the original, and thus redundant, but also because the line is (as in the original) repeated 4 times, compounding the irritation. Also, as you might remember, the original single came out in 1979, and the original lyrics contain the lines "It's the end, the end of the 70's / It's the end, the end of the century," and I wondered how Spacemaid would handle these lines, seeing as how it came out in 1996, which was not only no longer the 70's, but also much closer to the end of the century. What did we end up with? The anticlimactic cop-out of "It's the end, the end of the century / It's the end, the end of the century." Yes, the band just decided to repeat the same line twice.

Finally, the cover itself adds nothing. There's nothing interesting here. At least the Kiss cover of the song is surprising. Spacemaid, by contrast, "plays it straight" when doing this cover, and I found no compelling reason to listen to this version as opposed to the original.

Wait... I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "Dean, what about the B Side? Couldn't this single just have been a 'loss leader' to suck people in and get them exposed to Spacemaid's original work?" Well, it turns out that both sides of the single are the same. There is no "B-Side."

It's an interesting looking 45 with an intriguing premise, but all that hunting around for it resulted only in snark fodder.

Posted by Dean at 2:10 PM | Comments (1)

August 6, 2005

Amusing Moment in the Annals of Comics

One of the comics I enjoyed reading was the What If series, which told stories of alternate storylines and how the Marvel Universe would have differed if characters had made different decisions.

Several months ago, Metrokitty posted about an interesting What If issue, and I commented that I remembered an old short vignette in the back of a What If issue, "What if Galactus had been raised by Aunt May and Uncle Ben?" After digging through my old comics at my parents' house in NJ, I tracked it down... It appears in What If No. 3 of the second series back in 1989. The main storyline is "What If Steve Rogers had Refused to Give Up Being Captain America?" based on a brief period in which Captain America resigned due to political pressue. This What If issue is a good story in and of itself, but the humorous vignette in the back is pretty funny, entitled "What If Ben Parker's Nephew Was Galactus?" I present that vignette here after the jump...

Continue reading "Amusing Moment in the Annals of Comics"

Posted by Dean at 6:06 PM | Comments (5)

August 5, 2005

"Incompetence is a Sin"

Fred Clark of Slacktivist has an ongoing series of excellent blog posts on Left Behind series of books. His latest entry on bad attitudes to writing and work is excellent. Plus, he uses this term "Aquinastotelian."

Posted by Dean at 8:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 3, 2005

Next time you're at a concert...

or hanging out at the local coffee shop, play Hipster Bingo!

Posted by Dean at 1:19 AM | Comments (0)

August 2, 2005

A Tribute to the Greatest Lab Notebook

This is a tribute to my Ampad Computation Book. At almost $13, it might seem overpriced, but this lab notebook make it through graduate school with me, surviving water spills and coffee spills along the way, along with other sorts of abuse. It was super-durable and never let me down-- it's still intact. Pages never fell out, and it recovered from all of the spills without any problems. I've finished the entire book, so it's time to get a new one, and I just wanted to memorialize the trusty guy who stuck with me all of these years. Here's to you.

Posted by Dean at 4:21 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

August 1, 2005

Great Architectural Integration of a Mac Mini

Here we have a great use for a Mac Mini, integrated into the user's bathroom. It's in French, but the pictures explain well enough how it works, though there's a babelfish translation if you want to see it in "English."

Posted by Dean at 9:12 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack