April 2004 Archives

I just got home from the first show of the Pixies reunion. I was somewhat surprised by just how well they played together and how good it all sounded, given the whole "Reunion!" aspect. My feeling was that it was either going to be pretty good or a tremendous letdown; it ended up being some sort of awesome. The show was very good and those people who may have paid more than $200 per ticket probably feel like it was money well spent. I thank those people for effectively paying for my ticket (and then some). I recommend seeing this tour when it comes near. I bought the double-disc recording available within minutes of the end of the show. I have ambiguous feelings about the phenomenon, but if I were 12 years older, it would probably be pretty depressing. The tour t-shirts don't say "Sellout Tour" for nothing.

Good night folks.

I spend a lot of time talking to Jon and various other characters on IRC when I should probably be working. During the course of the day, there tends to be a lot of URLs passed back and forth. Often it's a pain in the ass to cut and paste them from putty into a web browser, due to the prevalence of ludicrously long URLs and absolutely gratuitous hostnames on the modern internet. It's the ones that get broken across multiple lines that suck the most.

In the tried and true tradition of doing-work-now-so-you-can-be-lazy-later, Jon wrote a bot called curmudgeon that sucks URLs (and sometimes URL-like text) out of IRC and puts them on a web page. I convinced him to add some code so that the URLs get thrown into a database. Today, motivated by profound boredom, I wrote a front-end for that database. Here it is.

Four albums that I've been listening to quite a bit this week:
John Vanderslice - Cellar Door
Modest Mouse - Good News For People Who Love Bad News
Jem - Finally Woken
Death Cab For Cutie - Transatlanticism

James just put up his proto-blog. It looks awesome.