Cafe Bucky

I’ve been getting back into a great band, that would be Pixies. You can trace a couple of careers back to them: Frank Black and his heavy surf/punk guitar sci-fi laced work, Kim Deal and the Breeders, and of course Kurt Cobain remarked on the Pixies influence on his own writing.

The Tech Angle is that the iTunes Music Store made it pretty easy to get a couple of old Pixies albums. The City Angle is that you should go into Bleecker Street Records if you are ever near there (West 4th Station, 1/4 of the trains in New York seem to go through there). They have a lot of music you won’t find elsewhere … lots of B-sides, concerts, and so on.

And just to tie this into a bow, I need … no, I would like … I would like to get some new earphones. I left my iPod buds in California. My Sony buds are not cutting it. The Apple ear canal buds just scare me. I don’t want anything that deep in my ears. Any suggestions?

Back to the Pixies: somehow they really remind me of California (turns out they are from Boston). Must be all of the surf guitar! Mixed with a couple of Guinness, mouse reaching for the JetBlue flight reservation web page… dreams of the coast, of sand, sun, the bike path through Santa Monica, waft of surfboard wax and tanning oil, watch out for jellyfish and riptides …

(”Hot House” as in the Dizzy Gillespie tune floating through my iPod
on this Metro North train, threatening to rain, Friday morning …)

Quick New York thought before I get started:

Guy walks into his sweltering 3rd floor flat. Sees a juvenile rat.
He chuckles to himself as 20-odd cockroaches (some of them with “Hells
Roaches” jackets) surround the rodent and beat the crap out of it.
Insect Gangs. Everything with DNA is tough here.

So Gucci is offering a $185 USD iPod case.

This is a sign of something. We don’t see Prada iPaq cases. You
don’t see designer cases for some mp3 player from Dell. It’s
impressive: there are enough iPods out there to make this worth it for
Gucci, and it doesn’t matter that it’s a somewhat limited machine with a
black & white screen. The iPod is a tech item that crosses over
very well into other worlds (fashion, in this case). There aren’t
many bits of tech that become so pervasive, so fast.

So it’s a credit to Apple. The iPod is a household word. The Treo
600 is not. (don’t get me wrong, my wife has a Treo 600, and it’s
crazysexycool, but it’s not going to hit the household vernacular in a
big way). How do you even say “Treo”? Is it “Tray-oh” or “Trio”?
Somehow it doesn’t work as a name.

Other household words: PlayStation. TiVO. AOL. All part of the
vernacular. All brilliantly implemented and marketed for their
respective, highly overlapped, target audiences. (disclaimer: I use
AOL at work, because I work for AOL, but I am not in their target
audience)

Winding around to some sort of a point, Gucci is doing a case for the
iPod, because the iPod has a really high recognition factor. Most
people who haven’t been on a desert island for the last two years have
heard of iPods. New York subways are awash in white headphone cables.
Strung end to end, they would make a mess.

It should be some sort of lesson to those in tech marketing. Nobody
is going to do a case for your clunky RX34-7 Audio Unit. Make it
clean, simple, and memorable. The iPod is all that (perhaps too
simple - I want a little more functionality). Then hire the best
packaging people on the planet to put the finishing touches (and the
first impressions) on it.

In the 90’s, I spent some time in San Mateo, CA, working on AOL.Com. What we launched then was something to be proud of. The site would later deteriorate into a pale ghost of itself.

Or should I say a flashing ghost of itself? It became an embarassing
cornucopia of in-house promos and ads. Not something I wanted to be
associated with. For the most part, I was in a semi-retirement mode
from 1998-2003, and somewhat blocked out about the whole AOL.Com
experience.

The site has recently gotten much better. We’re launching 3 channels
today (the 22nd): movies, music, and tv. And I do mean “we”, as I have been
working on this since last December. My big part has been
transforming flash and html mockups of the photo gallery module into
what you’ll see on the site: living, breathing, dynamic, usable,
data-driven, real-world … you get the point (and I’ll reach for a
pint). It’s great to see a lot of content being made easily accesible
from AOL.Com.

I had a hand in a few other modules as well, but my focus has been on
the galleries. It has meant that I have put FlexiPhoto (which is my
personal, doesn’t pay me anything project) on the shelf, but have been
able to at least keep in touch with the idea of photo galleries (and
get paid for it). It’s not an all-singing and dancing module with
keyword searching and more (like FlexiPhoto), but it’s a pretty good
first cut. It should serve pretty well for casual browsing.

I’m too close to the resulting site to give an objective opinion about
it. A weak point is that it is driven by AOLServer and Tcl, as
opposed to Apache and PHP, Perl, and others of that ilk. On the other
hand, what matters most is the user experience. If you have any
feedback on the site, I would love to hear it. There’s a lot of
functionality to explore.

Some entry points:

• movies.channel.aol.com
• music.channel.aol.com
• tv.channel.aol.com
• epg.channel.aol.com

So the New York Times did one of their 36 Hours: In Sonoma, Calif. writeups …

As a somewhat local (Petaluma, not far from Sonoma) who has lived in a few tourist towns (Sausalito being another) let me say this: If your last name has any vowels in it, try to visit during a weekday!

Of course, this is futile, people work and kids are in school and all that.

What I am really saying is: never judge a cool tourist place by how it is on the weekends. It’s a 2-day per week warping of how the place really is.

And, by the way, you New Yorkers seeking true Mexican Food (Harry’s Burritos in the UWS is a joke): a great Mexican restaurant that helps define Sonoma (but which isn’t mentioned in the article) is La Casa

Big CD Music Collection. Binder Insanity. What do you do? The iPod has caused me to come full circle on something.
(allow me to mix past and present freely here)

In the 70’s and 80’s, I collected a couple hundred albums. Licorice Pizza. 12″ Vinyl that
you don’t easily carry around. You bring your 5 favorite albums to a party, and that’s about it.
20 is just about out of the question (unless you wanted to impress some cutie with
your musical taste - “see? it’s not just Led Zeppelin!”)

Afterwards, I started amassing lots of CDs (and yes, cassette tapes). At some point in every music collectors
life, they utter the following: “What the fuck is it with all of these jewel cases!”
One goes out and tries various strategies for shuttling their favorite 20-50 cds
around. Technology had progressed from the vinyl days. One finds access to a half dozen CD players
over the course of the day (home, car, computer at work, friends house, and so on). Rare
is the moment where every last CD is accounted for, filed away in order.

At some point, a few hundred CDs end up in a couple of big binders, because
taking a family driving trip with a little wallet of 20 isn’t cutting it anymore.
(and we all know the bit about carting those stupid jewel cases all over creation)

But hey …

Enter the iPod.

Enter laptops with a lot of disk space.

Enter some clever cables, and wonderful devices like the iTrip! (leaving aside the whole “put music up on ones server for access on the net from anywhere” bit
- just assume that life still entails going to places where broadband isn’t)

All of the sudden, it hit me. The Epiphany.

I can put my CDs back in their Jewel Cases! I can reunite them with their little booklets,
and put them up on the shelf as historical reference material! I don’t have to do this
stupid physical sorting algorithm on 100’s of pieces of shiny plastic anymore.

So I think I am done with Binders. My CDs have gone full circle. Their traveling days are through.
I will continue to buy them (I know of a really great used CD store in NYC on Bleeker Street), rip
them to my ‘puter, and file them.

Great interview with Clay Shirky in the Gothamist.

My favorite line: “New York is 45 stars and 7 million extras, but it’s a different 45 every day”

Two things happened this morning: I realized “hey, I’ve been writing this blog for a year”, and then I discovered I had inadvertantly wiped out one of my first posts.

I started this blog March 28th, 2003. Happy Belated Birthday, JavaJoint.

How did I wipe out a post? Well, I was deleting a comment spam, and somehow the comment itself (”nice site”) ended up being the main text of The Pledge. Undoubtedly some sort of Movable Type wierdness.

But that’s why I keep backups :-)

Looking back at my original pledge post, I managed to stick to my goals pretty well. There was one post (out of 150+) that I removed, to avoid ruffling feathers close to me.
I would have liked to have shown more photos, and to have evolved the template/look of this site further by now.

So a re-pledge of sorts seems like a good thing to do. Some ideas for this next year:

• I will limit my editing to corrections and updates. There’s always the chance that I could be kidnapped, drugged, and forced to write something stupid and untrue like “George Bush is a Rhodes Scholar”, in which case I will yank the post as soon as I am able.
• I’ll reach out to other bloggers, photobloggers, writers, photographers, and techie/creative types - checking their stuff out, and inviting them to drop by my site - more links to others. More social, less hermit.
• Photos will be served up by FlexiPhoto, giving me a lot more, uh, flexibility in how I present images.
• ThereThen addresses will get tied into this blog, and to FlexiPhoto. This will open up searching by location and time pairs.
• I’ll probably swear more. After all, I do live in New York City a good deal of the time. You know, Al Franken swears a lot in his wonderful book “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right”
• I have resisted the urge to split the blog between a more “professional” set of subjects, and the bits I do that are more “stuff that I observe, or that happens, or …” Psst <come here, wanna tell ya something> … it’s because I’m too lazy to maintain two or three blogs. No, it’s not laziness. It’s time. Perhaps I’ll include a “poker-faced, dead serious” type of keyword, and a “lighten up, have a beer” keyword. Some sort of virtual fork in the road or reading.

If you’ve read this from time to time over the last year, thanks!

The generation before me had John Lennon. I remember exactly where I was on the night of December 8th, 1980.

A month ago I walked by Joey Ramone place, near CBGB’s, and flashed back on a Ramones show I’d seen at The Warfield in San Francisco in the very early 80’s.

I never got to see Nirvana. Kurt was a candle that burned so brightly amongst the forest of 20 watt bland commercial pop bulbs.

They were all pivotal, John & The Beatles leading the British Invasion, the Ramones kicking off Punk (read the excellent book Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk), and Nirvana shaking up complacency.

It’s been 23 years since John passed on, 10 years for Kurt, and nearly 3 for Joey.

And I miss them all.