May 10, 2008

Mugi

Last year for my birthday we drove all the way into Hillsboro to eat at Syun Izakaya. This year I decided to stick closer to home, so we ate at Mugi. Sushi again! Boy is that a fun restaurant. Renee and Jean both had cooked meals, but I had the raw fish, and of course, yamaimo. Yum, yum!

Posted by dpwakefield at 08:35 PM | Comments (0)

April 22, 2008

New Music

Just had a hankering for new, and I mean new music. Straying outside my familiar territory, as it were. Three from eMusic:

Posted by dpwakefield at 07:43 PM | Comments (0)

April 13, 2008

Maid Cookies

The banner photo this time around is one of a selection of photos of my souvenir from Tom and Alan's trip to Japan. Click through to my Flickr account for the rest of the snaps, it's a really cute -- and yummy -- gift.

Yes, I was at Tom's place last night, where we had okonomiyaki (thanks to Tom for the raw ingredients, and to Lisa for the chef-ly duties). Tom and Alan had pooled their photos, and pared them down to a hundred or two. They could have had many more, I enjoyed them enough. Definitely makes me wish that I could afford to do a trip to Japan myself.

Posted by dpwakefield at 08:41 PM | Comments (0)

April 04, 2008

Let It Bleed

Things truly seem to be changing in the music world. eMusic now has every album by the Rolling Stones from 1964-1970. Dunno how that happened. And I'm a bit peeved at that cutoff date, as Sticky Fingers, one of my all time faves from their ouvre, came out in 1971.

Still, there are a lot of good albums in the given interval, and I picked up Let It Bleed, to which I'm listening now. Good stuff.

Posted by dpwakefield at 08:34 PM | Comments (0)

March 25, 2008

Rounding Out the Month

An album from 1980, Movies by Holger Czukay.

Three more songs from Rodrigo y Gabriela: Diablo Rojo, Vikingman, Satori.

Posted by dpwakefield at 08:39 PM | Comments (0)

March 23, 2008

Easter 2008

In addition to the banner photo of extreeeeeeme closeup action (okay, maybe not that extreme, but Renee was suitably annoyed), you can go to my Flickr account and view the photo set. Note that Renee is carrying a Halloween pumpkin bucket for collecting eggs. This is particularly ironic as she bowed out of trick-or-treating this year by virtue of being too old for that kid stuff. Yet Easter egg hunting took place some four to five months later. This may be the last egg hunt though, as it was somewhat perfunctory. How the little ones grow!

While there are some strange lighting artifacts in a few of the pictures I took, you can nevertheless still get an impression of our new wood floors. I think they're pretty nice.

Posted by dpwakefield at 04:52 PM | Comments (0)

March 21, 2008

Passel O' Jazz (and more)

Creepin' up on the end of the month again, and I have a hankering for some new music to accompany my solo coding at work. So I spent an hour or so in a feverish haze (mild cold at the end of a long week) listening to eMusic samples, and settled on:

As if that weren't enough, I've been looping over another mash-up album by dj BC, who made the excellent mash-up of Wu Tang Clan and New Orleans Dixieland jazz, Wu Orleans. The new album is actually a few years old, but given my recent kick on minimalist classical composers, it seems appropriate. The album is a mash-up of Philip Glass and various rappers, called Glassbreaks.

And finally, I've been listening to the free first volume of Trent Reznor's Ghosts I-IV. And while I haven't gotten the remaining three volumes yet, I'm pretty sure I'll be grabbing them, at the low, LOW price of $5. Sweet deal if the others are as good as the first. In fact, the first was worth $5 by itself.

Posted by dpwakefield at 09:00 PM | Comments (0)

March 16, 2008

Still Alive

Just rather busy...

Anyway, I made time to go to Tom's this weekend, and had much fun as usual. He showed a HD (Blu-ray) screening of Appleseed Ex Machina. I'm not fanatical about the world, but have been following it casually since I first started reading the imported manga in Ohio some twenty-odd years ago, when it was published by Eclipse. So it's nice to know I'll be able to watch/read stories from this universe when I'm confined to a wheelchair.

Posted by dpwakefield at 09:18 PM | Comments (0)

March 02, 2008

Neutral Milk Hotel

Rafe Colburn linked to two articles celebrating the fact that In The Aeroplane, Over The Sea is now ten years old. I once listened to several samples from the album and decided that though it had a unique voice, it was a little too intense and idiosyncratic even for me, so I gave it a pass.

Based on these two remembrances, though I've decided to use the fact that the entire album is available on eMusic to take the plunge, at relatively low cost. Who knows? Perhaps I will come to consider it one of my favorite albums.

Posted by dpwakefield at 02:43 PM | Comments (0)

February 23, 2008

Silly Music Mensch

I was just downloading some new albums from eMusic, and I realized that I hadn't noted a few from earlier this month. They are:

Now for the 'new' albums I've just picked up.

Posted by dpwakefield at 06:34 PM | Comments (0)

February 20, 2008

Werewolves of Portland

Yes, we saw the lunar eclipse tonight, Renee and I. Got there a few minutes before the last bright wedge disappeared behind the umbra, and then walked around the neighborhood for a while looking for darker blocks.

Unfortunately, I don't possess camera equipment sensitive enough to capture this in city lights, so memories will have to do.

Posted by dpwakefield at 07:14 PM | Comments (0)

February 14, 2008

Offline Again

Just a quick note to observe that Verizon has managed to fumble my home Internet connection again. I'm posting this from work. We lost connectivity sometime Tuesday night, and haven't got it back yet. So...

  • Major outage when they insisted that I had to be switched from Frame Relay to ATM, for "reliability"
  • Outage for several days to replace a DSL modem that I'd had for less than a year.
  • Now an outage which the tech took an hour to diagnose (ending in the winning quote "you don't have Internet access"). To be fair, I think he meant that there was a connection, just no TCP/IP stack, since he could see my DSL modem from his office, and I could see it from my computer, so theoretically there's an end-to-end connection...

Guess Kevin J. Martin is doing his job guaranteeing that the free market gives us the best possible broadband choices.

Update

The "Central Office" called yesterday to say that the problem was fixed. Of course it wasn't. Jean was home yesterday, and she called tech support again, did the hour-long diagnostic two-step, and finally got the answer, "your modem is failing." Again. After it was replaced seven months ago. Maybe if Verizon put a little more quality into their equipment, they wouldn't have to spend so much money on tech support.

Anyway, they're shipping us a replacement, which will probably arrive sometime next week. Only then will we see if the diagnosis is correct this time...

Update Two

And, we're back. Got the new DSL modem, hooked it up, configured it, and encountered the annoying redirect to Verizon portal page. This has happened each time I've had a major problem. Just when I think I'm done, I have to call Verizon tech support again to have them walk me through the secret backdoor to turn off the stupid redirect. I think I know how to do it myself now, but it's just damned annoying that they put hurdle after hurdle in your way for a product you've paid for.

Anyway, hi alls!

Posted by dpwakefield at 07:30 AM | Comments (0)

February 09, 2008

Hacker Slobs

I'm not even sure anyone will be able to read this for awhile, but I'll record it for my own amusement.

This morning I was awoken by cats, and the first thing I hear upon getting up is "my keyboard won't work." Jean has been trying to log into her computer in the dining room, but it doesn't seem to want to take input. So I wandered into the dining area, and began tapping on keys. It turns out that the 'escape' key and the caps lock key both work. So I rebooted in 'safe mode' (hold down the shift key while rebooting, to disable non-Apple extensions), and that worked, so I now knew that the shift key worked as well. But I was still unable to use the alphanumeric keys.

Now I decided to unplug every peripheral but the keyboard and the mouse (which coincidentally continued to work throughout the entire ordeal). One of the things I unplugged was Renee's graphics pad. Reboot, and magically, the keyboard began working! Jean guessed that the graphics pad was somehow interfering with the keyboard, and I'm happy to go with that for now.

Second experience, I went to my own computer and started up the web browser, which is set to go directly to www.terebi2.org. Instead it failed to find the page, and Verizon 'helpfully' stepped in with a search page saying terebi2 "does not exist or is not available!", instead of allowing the 404. I tried pinging the URL, and got "PING web2.fwd.easydns.com (66.150.2.134): 56 data bytes" with zero throughput. I did a whois, and yes, I still own the domain. I know I am paid up with the ISP who hosts the webpages, so I went to easydns to check. I can log in, and I'm paid up. But, they record that they've been under a Denial of Service (DOS) attack since yesterday.

They claim that they've mostly fixed the problem, but I know from experience that it takes awhile for the name forwarding to propagate again, hence Verizon's claim that this site doesn't exist. I only get to the article posting page because it links directly to the ISP. So I hope that this post will be visible before the weekend is out, otherwise I'll have to play hot potato with Easydns and Verizon as to who is responsible.

Hope you see me soon!

Update

As noted in the first comment to this post, Mark Jeftovic, a techie for easyDNS, actually tracked down my post (I left no help message after figuring out what was happening). He actually left me an email explaining in greater detail what had happened. When I asked how he'd spotted my post, he told me he has a buncha search tools that look for mentions of easyDNS. Pretty neat.

Adam, thanks for confirming visibility. I'll have to log onto the IRC channel soon and catch up with you.

Lisa, you use Windows, right? Interesting to see that similar peripherals can give headaches on that platform and Mac OS X. Anyway, I am back online. Good to get feedback from all of you.


Posted by dpwakefield at 08:14 AM | Comments (3)

February 03, 2008

Two Songs

Jean picked out a song specifically for me:

Then, one evening on the way home from work, I heard a song that I was intrigued with, so I hunted it down:

  • I'm All Right - Madeleine Peyroux

I've got a new queue of credits for the month at eMusic, so look for more experiments soon...

Posted by dpwakefield at 09:13 PM | Comments (0)

Completed Anime

Renee and I completed Zombie Loan. About what you'd expect, Renee and I had fun with it, and are now feeding on the trickle of Majin Tantei Nougami Neuro.

For myself, I have finished Kaze no Stigma. I'm not really sure why I stuck with it, as it was pretty pedestrian, but I did. I continue to watch Akagi and Kaiji, dabble in Denno Coil, and truck on with Dragonaut, Ghost Hound and Moyashimon. New series include Shigofumi and Persona. Latest, still pending a decision on how long I'll watch, is Hatenkou Yugi.

Posted by dpwakefield at 09:03 PM | Comments (0)