MP3 Sushi

/ music, technology

It’s getting pretty common to have all or much of your music on a hard disk. This in theory makes it possible to do all kinds of nifty things with it. One nifty thing is listen to it remotely. It seems obvious: if your computer is online, and your music is on your computer, you should be able to get at your music over the Internet. But how?

If you use a Mac, the answer is simple: MP3 Sushi. This is actually a bundle of open-source Unix tools packaged up with a nice Mac interface. It sets up a music server you can access over the web, with handy features like live downsampling of high-bitrate music, creating m3u streams, etc.

I’ve got a fixed IP number, which makes it a little easier, but there’s a solution for dynamic IP as well.

My music is online, but is hidden behind a password to limit access. Ask me if you want to listen in.

The house for nudists

/ Austin

I was at the annual Blue Genie Art Festival last week. While I felt that the 2003 edition of this had gotten a little stale, there seemed to be enough fresh blood this year to make it worth attending. It was also fun because we seemingly ran into everyone there. And Sage & Zarah put on a show, which is always a treat.

Among the many people we ran into were Wells & Lisa of Ironwood–Wells made a couple pieces of furniture for me a few years back, and does really nice work. He mentioned that some of his stuff was going to be on display at an open house over the weekend, at a house by a local modernist architect. So Gwen and I were certainly interested, and yesterday, we went to check it out.

The development in question is a pair of houses–not a duplex (they don’t share a common wall), but built right up close to one another on overlapping lots. The location is 1903 Alegria, up around Arroyo Seco. Before we even got out of the car, we saw lots of People Like Us, which kind of creeped me out.

The architects (annoying flash-based site) have some good ideas and some stinkers.

The bad idea universally commented upon by the visitors is the absence of closets. I don’t mean the houses have inadequate closet space: they have no closet space. As far as I’m concerned, the first commandment of modernist house design is thou shalt build in lots of storage. Unless you just don’t have any stuff, modernism pretty much demands that your stuff be put away…and a modernist house needs to give you some place to put it. In fact, it’s hard to see where the architects managed to hide 1400 sqft on these houses without some storage. The first floor consists of a smallish living area and a kitchen with a derisory amount of counter space and storage; a small hallway at the back leads to a powder room and utility room. One wall of the first floor is monopolized by a staircase to the second floor; this has one of the really nice touches, a translucent plastic wall that should let in a huge amount of natural light (assuming it doesn’t crack or discolor).

The staircase lands upstairs at a small common space between two bedrooms, with no doors between them. The bedrooms are separated by a pair of back-to-back bathrooms, which are pretty nice and have big walk-in showers (no bath for you!) on slatted ipe floors. The floors in the shower areas are removable modules like miniature freight palettes, but the ipe slats are screwed into the floor in the rest of the bathroom, suggesting cleaning problems.

And no closets. I assume these houses are for two unrelated adults who have no clothes, no desire for privacy, and little desire to cook at home. I guess you could fill up the place with armoires, but what’s the point?

Another aspect of these houses that I found more philosophically offensive was the entrance. You need to go through the garage (or something that looks very much like a garage–perhaps it’s supposed to be an industrial patio with a garage door?) to get to the front door. The view out the nicely glassed-in front is of the garage, with the outside world peeking in through openings at the edges. This goes beyond a snout house and makes the garage (and by inference, the car) not only the front of the house but really the centerpiece of life in the house. You look out the front, you’ve got a view of your car. Super.

There was a zigzagging path alongside each house leading to a jewelbox of a back yard (with, amusingly, an underground watering system). These paths, which have a cinderblock wall hung with big iron planters on one side, and the milky plastic wall of the house on the other, are probably the best spaces in the entire development.

I didn’t bother finding out how much the houses are going for.

Moral compromise

/ personal

One of my most vehement pet peeves is the leaf blower. They’re annoying all on their own, but they symbolize so much more: by blowing leaves into the street, you make your problem everyone else’s. They seemingly exist only for people with yards too big to rake. And of course, there’s the howling din.

I’m trying to sell my house right now, and one of the house’s weak spots is Curb Appeal. I’ve never been big on yardwork, and it shows. There are two things my property has a lot of: rocks and trees. River rocks covering the driveway, pumice rocks along the walkway to the front door (worst landscaping idea ever), and big limestone rocks lining the edges of everything, laboriously hauled in from a construction site in the hills to the west of town. Three pecan trees, a live oak, a persimmon, and overhang from a neighbor’s enormous oak. The trees are profligate leaf-droppers, and the rocks are excellent leaf-catchers, leading to an untidy yard that diminishes the curb appeal. Short of picking individual leaf-fragments out of all the rocks by hand, there’s only one way to get them out. So over the weekend, we broke down and bought one. Yes, a leaf-blower.

Actually, this thing is a combo leaf-blower and leaf-vacuum/mulcher. The mulching feature is pretty cool, as it dramatically reduces the volume of leaves. (The manufacturer claims a 10:1 ratio. I’m not sure if that’s accurate–I probably got half that). While it’s not an efficient use of time to stand around hoovering up piles of leaves so that you can dump them into fewer yard-waste bags later, and even less efficient to try to use the thing as a vacuum over the whole yard, it definitely does minimize the tawny soldiers lined up at the curb on Monday morning, and the vacuum can extract leaves stuck in rock crevices. The blower is a precision instrument in exactly the same way as a water cannon, making it hard to use and unpredictable, but it did kick a good fraction of the leaves in the driveway into a pile that could then be hoovered up.

With any luck, my next house will make the thing redundant.

More on Mueller redevelopment

/ Austin

Because some commenters asked:

  • The Austin Chronicle just published an article on Mueller
  • The city has a not-very-friendly Master Development Agreement page, linking to a lot of information about the project. There is a citizen-oriented FAQ there, but it’s in Word’s .doc format (go figure). I have taken the liberty of posting an HTML version of the Mueller FAQ (apologies in advance–probably some formatting bugs).
  • There’s also an interesting set of design guidelines linked from the city’s page, but Chapter 1 clocks in at 38 MB for just 12 pages, and each page takes forever to render on my machine. I’ve extracted a couple of maps:
  • [Later]There’s a whole website for the Mueller redevelopment

In short, the general intent apparently is to integrate Mueller into the city fabric and make it a showpiece for New Urbanism; there are a lot of encouraging-sounding noises about being pedestrian- and bike-friendly, etc. While I have no doubt that there have been a lot of dubious decisions and questionable deals made in the process, I hope the product will be a benefit to the city as a whole.

Complete this phrase

/ net stuff

So everyone is talking about Google’s new “suggest a phrase” feature, which is almost psychic. But it’s also fun for language buffs–it gives you a cheap and easy way to see fixed phrases in action. Here’s an obvious example.

sharks with...

Lubbock

/ personal, travel

Thanksgiving dinner with the in-laws in Lubbock this year. Gwen likes the town about as much as anyone with a lick of sense should, but is a dutiful daughter and didn’t feel she could shirk her filial obligations. I was along for the ride, I guess you might say.

I’d been to Lubbock with Gwen once before. We didn’t see much of the town at the time, and what little we did see reminded me a lot of Westheimer in Houston. One damn strip mall after another. This time, I wanted to see more.

We got a late start—about 6:00 PM the day before Thanksgiving—and pulled into Lubbock around 12:20 AM, so all our driving was in the dark.

The dinner itself was fine. Gwen had picked up an organic turkey from Central Markup and brined it two days in advance–we transported it in a brining pot in our ice-chest to Lubbock. It turned out pretty well, and the brining did add to the flavor, but it wasn’t the super-juicy, flavorful sensation one might hope. Not bad, but perhaps not worth the trouble. All the other traditional T-day foodstuffs in abundance–white and sweet potatoes, green beans, apple, pumpkin, and pecan pies, cranberry sauce, stuffing, etc. After dinner I dismantled the carcass, extracted the wishbone, and gave it to Gwen’s sister so she could break it with her 5yo daughter.

We had packed our road bikes, and the day after Thanksgiving decided to go for a ride in the countryside. Gwen called a local bike shop for tips on a route, and we headed south on Slide Road to FM1585 and headed west into the stiffest, most unremitting wind I’ve faced since…I don’t know when. I was struggling to get my speed even as high as 12 mph, and Gwen was struggling to stay in my wind-shadow. The barren, flat landscape does nothing to slow the wind’s progress, and provides no visual distraction for the weary cyclist. In short, an unredeemably unpleasant cycling experience. After about six miles of slogging through this, we came to an intersection and I decided that enough was enough. We turned around and flew back. My cyclometer’s battery had crapped out, but I estimate we were doing 20 without pedaling, and I was topping 30 when I put a little muscle into it. That was fun, though brief.

We made our way into what we though was the center of town, around the Texas Tech campus. 19th Street seems to have the only fancy-looking houses in the whole town–the rest of the city is brick ranch houses, circa 1968. It’s as if the town takes all its architectural cues from the landscape–flat and desolate–and has a sort of altitudinal humility that prevents buildings from sticking up too much. Even the roofs have shallow pitches. The campus at Tech is not much of an improvement, and the buildings are inexplicably spread apart, making me wonder if the students take golf carts between classes.

We noodled around the small neighborhood just east of Tech, which seemed to be historic, judging from the cobbled streets. Eventually we found a bike shop, run by a friendly guy who commiserated with us about the wind–he told us the wind that day was as bad as he’d seen in a long time. He told us a better route back to Gwen’s parents’ place, and we followed that, taking Boston Av south to the loop. On the way, we passed what appeared to be Lubbock’s funky neighborhood–an intersection with a small grocery store, a coffee shop, and an organic food store. We made a mental note and rode on.

That night, on a suggestion from Gwen’s sister’s husband, four of us went to Hub City Brewery, Lubbock’s sole brewpub, on Buddy Holly Street (a two-block stretch that appears to be Lubbock’s entire nightlife neighborhood). Three of us had the oatmeal stout, which was OK. Gwen’s sister had a chocolate martini, which was not: it’s as if the bartender knew of chocolate martinis by reputation, but had never tried one or seen a recipe for one, so he had to fake it. Chocolate syrup and gin in a martini glass.

Saturday, Gwen and I headed back to that coffee shop we had seen during our ride, and discovered that it had the shabby atmosphere of a neighborhood coffee joint, the coffee itself was little better than the swill served at most diners. Again, it’s almost as if the coffee-shop operators knew of coffee shops by reputation, not by direct experience.

I had to do some work, but later that day, Gwen, her sister, mother, and I went to an antique mall where Gwen and I scored this weird masonic chart, apparently a sort of diploma.

Sunday morning, we got on the road pretty early. We stopped at a Krispy Kreme (which, sadly, had much better coffee than the funky neighborhood joint) to fortify ourselves for the road and were underway by 9:30 AM. As before, I marveled at the emptiness of the region. Lubbock is a very Christian town, which kind of makes sense: if you live there, you probably want to believe you’re bound for something better. Then again, it would also be the perfect place to situate a Zen monastery, because there is nothing to distract you from contemplating the void within.

Random highlights and lowlights of the trip:

  • Passing the “New Hope Cemetery”
  • Passing hundreds of dead raccoons by the side of the road. A lot of dead deer as well.
  • Observing odd place names like Fluvanna and Flat White Road. One of the towns near Lubbock is Levelland.
  • On Thanksgiving night, observing a line of 12 cars in the drive-thru lane at Whataburger.
  • Speculating what kind of beers might be at the brewpub: Our guesses: Desolation Ale, Prairie Pilsner, Level Lager. Naturally, all the beer would have to be flat.

Overglobed

/ technology

Memo to icon designers: Look. I get it. I’m on the Internet, and the whole world is all interconnected, and my computer is this global information nexus, and it’s cool. Do half my application icons need to remind me of this? My dock looks like a freaking warehouse full of UN flags.

These are all the globe-themed application icons I could find on my hard-drive in 3 minutes. There are a couple representing other planets as a bonus.

I ♥ Huckabees

/ movies

Saw I ♥ Huckabees this weekend. Fun movie. The whole existential angle seems more of a plot device than an opportunity for serious philosophical exploration, though like the director’s previous movie, Flirting with Disaster, there is a sort of existential core to the thing. But the fun, the awkward situations, the snappy dialog with people talking on top of each other, and the characters are what really make the movie. Putting Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin in a movie together is gold, I tell ya, comedy gold.

Scroll to Top