In LA

I’m a little behind the times –you’ve all probably seen this already, but I really appreciated this music video. Please note before clicking: as far as music videos go, this one’s on the more violent and disturbing end of the spectrum. And if the imagery doesn’t disturb, you may not find the music easy on the ears, especially if you’re not already keen on the less accessible tracks from France’s Ed Banger Records.

The iconic jackets, the pseudo-documentary feel, the match between the relentless nature of the music and imagery, and the Clockwork-Orange-esque synth notes at the end that may have been the inspiration for the entire video –all resonate for me. It reminds me of the film Man Bites Dog but with no attempt at intelligence, irony, or a point. Just a straightforward and effective cinematic and emotional experience.

There’s a pretty amusing parody of the video available here.

Aesthetically, this clone of an Apple iPod Touch, advertised on Facebook’s China network, looks like the closest match yet, though its dimensions are not listed so it’d be tough to say for sure.

Other notable iPod Touch clones are the Optimus Touch, the Tsinghua Tongfang PMC-V560 (apparently only costs $52), the Portronics/Onda VX858, and the Meizu M7.

Of course, these are all just lookalikes, I’d expect they lack the features that make the iPod Touch so appealing –great multitouch interface, high resolution, robust Unix OS, great email application, great web browser, etc. But it’s amusing to me to watch the number of Chinese iPod Touch clones increase.

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPod, OS X

Until today I hadn’t heard this song for years and it’s just as well. Wow. The super-white band attempts to rock out and do frat-barbecue-ready funky hip-hop, with a guest rapper making annoying interjections and then taking over at the end to jam awkwardly with the sounds of a cheesy organ. Yeeuck.

I’ve been hard at work lately on several projects: A website, some film-related I.T. work, and have started preproduction planning on a music video I’ll be directing. As often happens when I’m engaged in other pursuits, musical themes intrude into my head and I have to go buy them and listen repeatedly . This time it’s the nihilist pop of Ladytron, with a track by Martin Gore on heavy rotation as well:

Song	Album	Artist
Evil	Light & Magic	Ladytron
Seventeen	Light & Magic	Ladytron
Destroy Everything You Touch	Witching Hour	Ladytron
Playgirl	Commodore Rock	Ladytron
The Reason Why	Light & Magic	Ladytron
Discotraxx	604	Ladytron
Compulsion	Counterfeit [EP]	Martin Gore

If you think these tracks are easy to find in Beijing, you should by rights be wrong. However, almost as quickly as the songs popped into my head, I ran into people who had all of these albums.

This playlist could be entitled “music for not smiling”. Despite the inhumanly mechanical musical textures, this kind of music often broadcasts more emotional content to me than songs with more inflected and showy vocal and instrumental stylings. These and other musical artists of today should be commended for confusing the historian bots of the future, who will likely one day uncover these albums and have huge debates lasting milliseconds over whether or not the tracks were released before or after all humans died out and were replaced by robots.

Some guy actually listened to the early 90’s song Informer, by Snow, for six hours non-stop. I know I’m a year late in passing along my appreciation, but wow. This man’s one act undoubtedly caused a rupture in the space-time continuum.

For those of you who don’t remember the song, it’s a sort of gangland anthem sung in an impenetrable and speedy Jamaican patois by a Canadian white guy whose name is not really Snow. I think the only word I can understand in the entire song is “Informer”, everything else is an interestingly syncopated blur. The song was pretty catchy back in the day, and was #1 for a while on some chart, but now people remember it as an oddity if at all.

There’s a reason I just now remembered the existence of this song and did the net searching that led to discovery of the 2005 Snow marathon, and it’s not that I’m just trying to distract myself from thinking about the fun I’m going to have going through airport security on Monday for my trip to the U.S. The real reason is that a good friend stopped by Beijing for a visit. He hooked his iPod up to my stereo, and in rotation along with a bunch of forgotten songs from the 80s and 90s was Informer. We listened to it once, which was pleasant, but I can’t imagine what 6 hours of Informer could do to a person. (Don’t remember the song? You can hear a clip at iTunes, or Amazon)

If you’re a policy wonk, these C-span podcasts are going to rock your world.

I’m going to subscribe to a couple and see if I become a policy wonk.

My brother-in-law sent me a link to an amazing open-source project that promises to change the way we answer the phone, when telemarketers call The Telecrapper 2000!

“The Telecrapper 2000 (TC2K) is a computerized system designed to both intercept incoming Telemarketing calls on the first ring, and then carry on a virtual conversation with the telemarketer.”

It also records the conversations so you can listen to them later and laugh… Here’s a great one someone worked into a flash animation.

There are other example recordings on the Telecrapper 2000 web page, example 3 is pretty funny, reminds me of that wassup beer commercial (it is also an mp3 file named with ‘.wav’ at the end — why would anyone do that?).

Clutter is an auxiliary app that can control itunes, and presents an interface based on album cover art rather than text. Picture a floor strewn with albums that you dig through to find the album you want. It’s pretty amusing. And free, open-source, etc.

A friend of mine back in High School, Phyllis Fletcher, is now apparently a radio reporter/producer/host for NPR. Her bittersweet autobiographical piece about her and the rest of her family’s relationship with her dad, entitled Sweet Phil from Sugar Hill, is a great and emotional listen. What a way to start a career. You can hear the piece via that link.

I’ve been checking out the other pieces available for download from her homepage, it’s all good. In her other pieces, she sports a good NPR-style serious-news voice which is always a funny thing to hear emanating from someone you’ve only heard speaking conversationally.

Earlier today I tried to quit iPhoto, only to have it inform me that there was a user browsing my shared photos and would I really want to cut off their access by quitting. I was intrigued, as I had no idea that anyone would bother accessing my shared photos (excellent as they are).

The best way to deal with a voyeur is to voyeur back, so I decided to try and figure out who was looking at my share.

Benjamin Han, at his Unix Tips for Mac OS X page, kindly points out a way to see who is listening to one’s iTunes share:

lsof -r 2 -n -P -F n -c iTunes -a -i TCP@`hostname`:3689

So I modified that line to instead check for iPhoto (8770 is the port iPhoto uses for sharing):

lsof -r 2 -n -P -F n -c iPhoto -a -i TCP@`hostname`:8770

And that gave me the IP address of the person browsing my photos. Once I had this IP address, I did not seek out the user behind the address, but instead promptly lost enthusiasm for the whole enterprise. Ah well, I hope they enjoyed the photos.