(Hit shuffle on your music player, list the first 25 songs.)

I don't have an MP3 PLAYER so I used my laptop. I hope that's okay. I'm surprised at how representative this turned out to be given the amount of crap that lives in the corners of my hard drive. We've got primarily jazz, some rap, some blues, some rock, some comedy, some electronica-ish stuff, some... whatever 311 is.

1. Monty Alexander - Steaming Hot - Pure Imagination

What got me into Monty Alexander was hearing some tracks on KUVO in Boulder from an album of his that I still don't have — a collection of jazz covers of Bob Marley tunes. Great stuff, but every time I go to get it, it's not there (note to self, it's called Concrete Jungle, since I'm also always forgetting the title). This track, though, also good.

2. Rush - Chronicles (disk 1) - Closer To the Heart

I'm pretty sure this is the track on this list that I've had for the longest, since Rush goes all the way back to middle school. Since I had been struggling to collect all of the Rush albums so I could be cool like my older BBS friends, I was really excited when this collection came out. I could pretend like I knew all the old ones.

3. Tori Amos - Under the Pink - The Waitress

Fast forward to the end of high school. Michele got me into Tori Amos with Little Earthquakes. Few songs play less nice with your volume knob than this one. It's kind of like, if I just decided to RANDOMLY CAPITALIZE words in this POST. Katy and I went to the State Theater in Detroit to see her on this tour.

4. Astrud Gilberto - The Girl From Ipanema - Meu Piao

I obtained this as part of my exploration of the other Gilbertos. I like Bebel better — she got me through a lot of bus shifts at Vic's. This is also the part where I admit that I'm really unfamiliar with a lot of the music in my collection — downloading 50ish tracks a month from emusic for a few years has pretty much buried me, so this is probably the second time I've ever listened to this track. Dusty.

5. Jimi Hendrix - Band Of Gypsies - Who Knows

If I weren't doing this shuffle meme thing, I'd stop and listen to this whole album. It was either Al or Steve from the ACME Jam Company who told me about it — finally got me listening to something other than the Ultimate Experience, and made me realize there was a whole lot more to Hendrix. If you were a bass player and started playing Cox's line here I'm not sure why you'd ever stop.

6. Miles Davis - Steamin' With The Miles Davis Quintet - Salt Peanuts

"Salt Peanuts" is the most irritating jazz standard ever, but this version of it is as awesome as most irritating can get.

7. Eric Pierre feat. Lady Gattica - Saint-Germain des Prés Café III - Channel Zero (Shade Of Soul Remix)

I don't remember why Simone picked up this album, but I'm happy she did and that I kept a copy. I should probably get the other volumes in this series, eletronica-ish jazz hits the spot sometimes. Interesting if you want to listen to it attentively, not disruptive if you don't.

8. Outkast - The Love Below - Spread

Outkast, getting directly to the point. 0 to offensive in about 5 syllables.

9. Roy Buchanan - Deluxe Edition - Whiplash

I don't remember how I found Roy Buchanan — I think on a blues radio show in Lansing — but the two-disc set I had of his got many a listen, until that punk debate camp student of mine stole the better disc. This album is a more recent acquisition which doesn't have near the pull, but it's still a good pick for a hard-driving blues talky talky guitar craving.

10. Eddie Izzard - Unrepeatable - Bunch Of Flowers

Joe Z introduced me to Eddie Izzard. A real history major's comic.

11. The Doobie Brothers - Sounds of the Seventies - 1979 - What a Fool Believes

I love the seventies. I can hit those high notes. We bought his collection because of the infomercial. How could you not?

12. Outkast - Aquemini - Return of the "G"

Steve D and I really thought this song was hilarious. Constant snickering whenever it came on. "I thought I was your boy!" I'm glad something from Aquemini came up at least.

13. Brad Mehldau - Art of the Trio, Vol. 3 Songs 1998 - At a Loss

His music has been the soundtrack for my life since around 2000 when Al introduced me to Art of the Trio, Vol. 4, and shows no signs of losing that status. I'm such a fanboi that I even sent Mehldau the pamphlet of poems I self-published in grad school inspired by his music. He did not reply. Maybe he objected to Larry Goldings also being mentioned. To my credit I did not attempt to ask him about it when I saw him play a few months ago in Cambridge.

14. Mitch Hedberg - Do You Believe in Gosh? - The Improv Fairy Tale

I can thank Blair for the introduction to Hedberg. This album ("new" last year) is not so great. But this track is funny in that WTF are you on about Mitch kind of way. "I had a bad set here last night, and they added an E to the end of the sign." ("here" being the Improv.)

15. Aesop Rock - None Shall Pass - No City

Strangely, I can also thank Blair for this one. I haven't had this album long and don't know it well at all. If Blair says it's good it probably is.

16. Tom Petty - Wildflowers - Crawling Back to You

I don't think anyone who knows me would describe my musical tastes without mentioning Tom Petty, so it's good that he's here. I'll still be listening to this album when I'm a hundred. I had a burning desire around 1999 to play this song on the piano, so I listened to it about a million times.

17. Howlin' Wolf - The Chess Box (Disc 1, 1951 -1955) - Howlin' Wolf Boogie (1951)

The bluest. This was a gift; I think I asked for it around the time when I was "serious" about learning to play the harmonica.

18. Binary Star - Masters Of The Universe - Glen Close

These guys have been a great new find for me this year. I have a half-finished review of the whole album. It's good. This isn't one of the stronger tracks though — story rap meh.

19. Led Zeppelin - Led Zeppelin III - Friends

Might be my favorite Zeppelin album. I'm sure that'll offend someone. I think it's the one I had first, courtesy of signing up for BMG, and it has "Tangerine," "Out on the Tiles"...

20. Red Hot Chili Peppers - What Hits!? - If You Want Me To Stay

Always did like this version. Kiedis is surprisingly understated. He threatens to break into the Chili Pepper "rap" mode, but never quite does. Before the Internet, this was the only version of the song I had, so it got a lot of play.

21. Jarrett, Keith - Bye Bye Blackbird - I Thought About You

I saw him play at Symphony Hall. He was grumpy, but incredible. Also known for his weird vocalizations, chronic fatigue syndrome, and wife — who invented MimicCreme, for which I started a Wikipedia article.

This, though, is one sleepy tune.

22. Thelonious Monk - Alone in San Francisco - There's Danger in Your Eyes, Cherie - take 2

One of the best things about being a jazz musician must be being able to release multiple takes of the same song on the same album, and have people be glad that you did it.

23. 311 - Grassroots - Six

It's fitting to hear this so soon after the heartbreaking Stanley Cup loss on Friday, since I first heard this album while playing NHL 95 in an MSU dorm room. This was on my short list for Jerrell's best cruising album challenge, but did not win. This song is part of the reason it didn't win.

24. Eddie Izzard - Glorious - Fill Me With the Gobi Desert

Eddie again, finding comedy where there shouldn't be any. "You can't just fall into taxidermy." Indeed.

25. Django Reinhardt - The Classic Early Recordings[disc1]1934-1935 - I've Had My Moments

Came from the CD gifted to me at Nikki and Dave's wedding. I like to think I've had my moments, too.

An article I've been working on the last couple of weeks as part of my work at the Free Software Foundation was published on TorrentFreak today:

The War on Sharing: Why the FSF cares about RIAA lawsuits

I've put up some pictures from last weekend's beautiful Ohanami along the Charles River. The weather was awesome and the cherry blossoms were gorgeous. The photos don't do it justice.

As part of this I finally got around to setting up my own Gallery 2 install, so I don't have to rely on Flickr and Facebook as the canonical locations for my photos.

If you received a message from my Yahoo account advertising some shopping thing, it's not real. My Yahoo account was cracked and a message sent to my whole addressbook.

It's not just a spoofing -- when I logged into the account to change the password, the message was actually sitting in the Sent box. I also intended to delete the addressbook so it couldn't happen as easily again, but turns out it had already been deleted. Maybe the spammer did that to make it a little harder for me to write to everyone to say the message wasn't real.

Interestingly, I know of at least one other case of a Yahoo account being compromised recently, as I was receiving spam IMs from a friend's valid Yahoo Messenger account. What's going on over there?

I haven't used that email in a long time anyway, so I'll be getting rid of the account at some point. Guess this is a sign I should get on that. Current contact info will always be on the contact page here.

I just received The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen as a gift (yay). It's 871 pages. I opened to a random page, looking to see if there might be a poem saying something about the idea of significance. The poem I opened to was "The Dilemma of the Occasion Is", on page 787.

My initial thought after not really reading the poem was that it had nothing to do with what I was looking for. So I decided I should check the Internet instead, and searched for "philip whalen significance poetry". Please don't mock my search terms; I wasn't actually trying to find anything. This search predictably led me to the empty mirror books page about Whalen, where I clicked on the link for Mark Other Place. I scrolled down the page a couple screens without actually reading anything. When I did stop to look, I was staring at the opening lines of "The Dilemma of the Occasion Is".

On reading it now, I think maybe it does have something to do with what I was looking for:

Too many shoes
Those are not the ones.

Today I wrote my first Wikipedia article, about MimicCreme, the nut-based vegan cream substitute. I haven't actually tried the stuff, but Mako pointed it out to me, and it seemed only natural (pun intended) that I write the article since I also sometimes edit the Cool Whip article. Note, however, that you cannot whip MimicCream (yet).

My favorite edit to the Cool Whip article so far has been this one, to remove:

In some countries Cool Whip will be know as '' Rat Whites'' because it is fluffy like the inside of the rat.In oldtimes in these fourign countries they really made Cool Whip with fresh rat whites, that is where they got the original name '' Rat Whites''.But no worry Rat Whites are no longer used in the making of Cool Whip. Or is it? We will never find out what is really in the recipe.

I should probably follow that with a [sic], or a [sick].

Six minutes after first saving the MimicCreme article, it was tagged for speedy deletion — despite the fact that it had an "under construction" tag at the top. This was especially amusing given that I had spent my commute this morning reading from Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky, and was somewhat inspired by this quote about the beginnings of Wikipedia:

The original asphalt article read, in full, "Asphalt is a material used for road coverings." The article was created in March 2001, at the dawn of Wikipedia, by a user named Cdani, as little more than a placeholder saying, "We should have an article on asphalt here." (118)

Things change, I guess. MimicCreme's no asphalt and my name isn't Cdani, but MimicCreme certainly is something weird that someone might want to look up, and it fits in several existing categories. However, I should also remember this quote from a few pages later:

The people most enamored of describing Wikipedia as the product of a free-form hive mind don't understand how Wikipedia actually works. It is the product not of collectivism but of unending argumentation. (139)

So I guess this is the start of the argument, about the significance or insignificance of MimicCreme in the universe, and whether Kosher should be capitalized in this context.

From the things I shouldn't admit to department: This caused me to miss a flight over the weekend. An important one. My Nokia E61 served by T-Mobile displayed the wrong time. The wrong time was also visible on a nearby Holiday Inn billboard clock.

Here's the story behind the 6:27pm Red Line alert you might have received tonight. Except not really, because I have no idea what happened. All I know is that about 5 seconds after I got off the Braintree train at Downtown Crossing, the train started to pull away at an unusually high speed and lots of people were yelling STOP.

I looked back at the train — and the doors were still open.

They were definitely still open on the last car and I'm pretty sure they were open on other cars as well. People had been still trying to get on the train when it jerked away. It went over a third of the way down the platform before it stopped again. Probably almost halfway.

I hung around for a minute, but I was trying to catch a bus and no one seemed to be hurt, so I left. I'm looking forward to the explanation for this one. I mean what, foot slipped off the brake?

That was on the way back from Central after returning the first disc of Pushing Daisies — awesome show. On the way there from work, I saw a kid squeeze through the gate behind someone else without paying. This is a common occurrence but for some reason tonight it struck a nerve. I think the next kid I see do that is going to hear about it. Yes, getting crotchety, I know.

Between Sunday night and Monday night, my power was off for 18 hours. This took my mail server offline. Nothing should have bounced, but if you sent me mail, you may have received a warning about it being delayed.

Last night around 4am, the power went off again, and it's still off. The NStar ETA for having it fixed has been pushed back 3 times already. I'm considering rerouting my mail, but in the meantime the johns at gnu.org address is still working.

Update: Power seems to be restored, email is working again.

I'm home safely in Boston again after my Iceland-Paris vacation—some stories and pictures to follow. My favorite story might actually come from the Icelandic leg, and might be titled, So You Want to See a Whale: Adventure Aboard the Icelandic Vomit Comet.

I had a similar experience to this Consumerist story. Well, not really, but I ran into it when I was booking my ticket to visit family for the holidays.

Northwest had the most convenient arrival and departure times, and for a reasonable price. I was in the process of buying a ticket, and got all the way to the stage where I should have selected a seat assignment. That's when I saw that there are now no fewer than 8 different classes of seating. They don't all necessarily cost more money -- some of them are available to "premium gold" (I'm making that up, but it's something similar) members, etc. So I closed the tab and bought my ticket on Spirit instead. No way I'm going to support that garbage. The only place they were going to let me sit for the advertised price was in a middle seat. At 6' 3"ish, the middle seat can go to hell.

Also, it seems to me that this is racist and ageist. There are a number of requirements for sitting in the exit row. This used to be fine, because ostensibly there were responsibilities associated with sitting there, and fulfilling those responsibilities required the ability to communicate with the majority of people who are sitting on the plane and the physical strength to do something or other. (Anybody know what language you have to speak to sit in the exit row on a flight from Boston to Brazil with continuing service to Argentina? I don't remember.)

But now, the extra charge is much more conducive to the view that the exit row is just another seat with more leg room. And only people who meet the above qualifications are allowed to sit in it. I guess I'm being a little ridiculous, but still -- if it's a responsibility, have the requirements and let people willing and able to assume it sit there. If it's just about the legroom, then charge more but let anyone sit there, regardless of their native language.

So, I'll be in Michigan from December 17th to December 27th. Let me know if you're one of my invisible Michigan friends reading this and want to make plans.

I am currently torrenting the 650MBish gNewSense LiveCD/Installation ISO from my phone (a Nokia E61), via SymTorrent, a GPL bittorrent client for Symbian phones.

Mostly useless, but why not. The client seems to work very well. T-Mobile will undoubtedly get unhappy with me if I keep this up.

gNewSense is a new GNU/Linux distribution derived from Ubuntu, but with special care to make sure that everything is actually free software — no binary blobs with funny licenses stinkin' up the joint.

I watched the Pats lose to the Colts at Joe Sent Me last night. They weren't actually playing in the bar -- but it felt a little like it, since, as someone commented, the big line of broken pixels splitting the TV screen down the middle conveyed the feeling of actually being at the park stuck behind a pole.

Some highlights:

I don't usually revel in the failures of others, but I did cheer loudly to see Vinatieri choke not once, but twice. The iceman melteth.

Worst. Officiated. Game. Ever. My evidence: They flagged TROY BROWN for "taunting". This was comical enough, flagging one of the most understated and mature players in the game for an attitude problem. It's sort of like flagging Mother Teresa (born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu) for "unnecessary roughness". Turns out that was also the catch that tied Brown with Stanley Morgan's record for career receptions. Here's what Troy Brown said about it after the game:

I still don't know what happened. He apologized to me. I told him that the ball boy was standing right next to him, and I usually toss the ball to the ball boy after I get up off the ground. It's what I've done my whole career. Later on at the end of the first quarter, he apologized to me. He said, 'if I made a mistake, then I apologize,' and I said, 'You did.' I don't know the reason for it. For me to get up and throw a ball at somebody...common sense would tell you that a player's not going to just stand up, look at the ref and throw the ball right at the player's head. He called it, but we overcame it. We had that big play down the sideline to get us out of that jam. It wasn't a good call, but I guess he was just doing his job.

One of the problems with football as a game is the way highly dissimilar actions are penalized at the same level. So Brown flipping the ball over his shoulder is penalized to the same degree as T. O. laying down in the end zone, using the ball as a pillow and pretending to go to sleep. Brown was in good company though, as MARVIN HARRISON also received an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty.

My next favorite play was when they flagged Colvin for a late hit, when: a) there was no hit at all, b) the runner was still on his feet, c) the play / forward progress had not been whistled dead, d) Colvin was talking to the official while he (Colvin) leaned on the scrum.

For an egregious missed call, you can just look to Rodney Harrison's facemask on Marvin Harrison. He hung on all the way down. I love Rodney, but that should have been called. Also, yeah, don't worry about flagging the PUNCH that was thrown by the Colt — just keep an eye on Troy Brown and Marvin Harrison, those guys are troublemakers.

I don't understand why the Pats didn't keep the ball on the ground more. Indianapolis wasn't able to stop any of the three backs -- though they did probably stop Brady on a 4th down sneak, highly questionable spot by the refs to the contrary. But I think the Pats will still win a playoff confrontation. They won't make this number of mistakes again, and even with 5 turnovers and 88 yards in penalties, the point differential was only 7, and they were in position to tie with 1:30 left.

Nevermind about the Dillon "fumble". Whatever.

Come home from a hard day of battling spam at the office. The war is not going well. Every time I open a spam message instead of instantly discarding it, another brain cell dies. I feel like I'm playing my own reality show — Last Neuron Standing. It's not funny.

But there is no way for me to avoid opening messages with subject lines like, "Here are the configuration details" when they come to an address we ask people to write to with their hardware configuration details.

This is a recent phenomenon — spam subject lines are no longer all stupid or m1sspelled. They are now somehow context-sensitive based on the address they are targeting.

I tighten the filter down from 4.0 to 3.0 and hope for a better day tomorrow.

Head home, get the mail out of the box, look at the first noncatalog piece. No company name or logo on the envelope. In big print, Important Message Notice....

Let's see. No identifying marks, and large print claiming to be important. Also, bad grammar — wtf is a "Message Notice"? And dots. My internalized Bayesian tests tell me that this must be junk mail. E-mail spammers may be getting smarter, but junk mail spammers are still ordering extra noobsauce.

However, it's on the threshold, because junk mail tends to repeat, and I've never seen this one before. Granted, my system for handling postal mail — in total contrast with email, which I sort and score neurotically — is to pile it all on my bench, and to blindly reach into the pile occasionally and pull something out (bobbing for bills?) whenever I intuit that something important is coming due.

No advice please, the system works fine.

Though ever since my shredder exploded, thunderously (you think I jest), the junk mail situation has been difficult.

So I open it up. It's my bank card.

Accompanying the card is a letter. According to the letter, I was notified on October 13th about a "card compromise incident". Say what?

Here is my new card. I have to call to activate it. If I don't call to activate it, one will be appointed for me. Er, the old card will be cancelled. On November 15.

So if I hadn't opened this junk mail, my ATM card would have stopped working. I would have had no idea why. Undoubtedly, I would have first learned of the matter while stranded somewhere after T o'clock trying to withdraw the 2 billion dollars it takes to fund a taxi in Boston.

I understand the concept. Make the envelope appear nondescript to avoid future card compromise incidents. However, I also understand the concept of a bank card, which is that it gives me back my money when I want it.

I wonder what else I might have missed. Time to tie the hair back and go bobbing.

Well, that was kind of a wild weekend.

It started Friday night at Tanjore in Harvard Square scarfing samosa and masala dosa. I think that's my current favorite for Indian food in the Boston area. Is there better?

I guess by some definitions it started Thursday night at trivia at the Six House, but that ended early. And oops, the Thursday leftovers are still in the fridge.

Then there was a drink at Charlie's Kitchen, home to surely the most beautiful bartender in the greater Boston area. It was my first time there, and I think sometime I'll go back and see if she might smile at me again.

It would be good if I do go back to not converse with the 6' 6" 325 LB biker dude bearing the breath of a million dead things. I didn't take the brunt of the breeze, but the periphery was dangerous enough. I also thought the man was going to erupt — he started wobbling, eyes closed, hand over mouth — I would not want to be around for that explosion.

Contemplating the number of beers it must have taken to put him in that state is an exercise in BIGNUM for sure.

Next was some waiting for a bus that never showed (what up 66?), then an ill-conceived cab ride into Brighton to Tonic. Did you know it takes like 40 minutes to get from Harvard Square to Brighton? At least that's how long it takes if Iron Maiden is in town. That's right. Iron Maiden traffic brought Comm Ave to its knees. I can't remember the last time I saw so many dudes in Iron Maiden t-shirts. Wait, I can — my last high school dance.

Nothing wrong with Iron Maiden though. We'd actually discussed them earlier with the biker, reminiscing about Powerslave and Eddie. The whole conversation had started with me playing memory aid to the big man by naming Sturgess, which made me remember Kendall (Kyndal?) at Vic's, a biker customer who brought his baristas (me included) each a Sturgess t-shirt, which I wore quite a lot until its relatively recent rebirth as a rag. Some karma.

I don't know if the cab driver was trying to scam us or not. He was a Boston native, wearing a beige sport jacket and keeping up with %'s witty repartee blow for blow. Apparently he's a Belmont bookie, and was headed out to "run the games". If he would have gone the best way, we would have not been trapped in the Maiden. I gave him the address and the cross-streets. What more can you do. We tipped him too much and paid the cover to enter Tonic, where we were made by the hostess, probably because last time we were there, % asked our waitress to marry him.

We'd taken so long to get there that the people we were meeting were on their way out. There was a brief movement to dance downstairs, but that petered out, which was fine by me given that I'm a lover not a dancer and also I was still sporting my equipment (I'm talking about my laptop dude). So instead we put quarters up on the pool table and lost a few games of doubles to some guys who were decent but whom I should be able to beat if I could retrieve my peak. I really need to get my game back; I hate shooting badly.

Tonic inexplicably closes at 1am, so we took YANC around the corner to the White Horse, where we proceeded to do more of what RQ always called "makin' friends". After the White Horse, it was back to Cambridge to wind down.

Tires me out recounting it, better wait till later to log Saturday.

P.S. To the server at Tonic: That was some petty larceny. When someone likely intoxicated hands you obviously the wrong bills, resulting in a $15+ tip on a single round of 4 drinks, don't you think you ought to say something? (We did catch the error before she walked away.)