Starting poking around more of the rss/rdf and related bits sites.
I think I see why people like it now. It is a land ripe for silly hacks.

Not exactly sure how all the tech/weblog cliches seem to
have ingrained into so many people fiddling with this stuff
though. I want to retch every time I see “smart mobs” or
“emergent networks” or “audblogs”. More than a little
fanaticism. But then, that can be a
good thing.

I decided all the web based aggregators and all
the gui readers sucked. Or at least, all the ones I tried. I really
have no urge to run a app server locally I have to talk to
via a web browser. Or fire up another large gui app to read
text.

So I found rss2email
and hacked it up to deliver to local mbox files. Seems to work.
Probabaly not actually useful, but what the heck.

Screenshot.jpg (PNG Image, 1024×768 pixels)

This is two two two posts in one!

So I started messing with webcollage. I hacked it up
(oh my is my perl rusty, to say the least…)
to do google image searches on random words and numbers
along with “OR diagram OR chart OR graph OR figure OR plot
OR map”. So I get back lots of well, graphs and charts and
maps and the like.

Just for kicks, I told google to only grab black&white and
greyscale images. Sample results at the link above.

Which brings to part two, which is LJ This!.
Which is a possibly handy litte bookmarklet for
posting a url into a lj entry. Aka, how I created this
entry.

Anyone read german?

Some german
site with a Japan Air page

Odd.

oh, while I’m thinking about it, Japan Air are playing live on
WXDU
on Mar 30.

Mostly uneventful weekend.

Went over to badger‘s saturday and played a bit. He experimented
with attacking the therimin with cables, chains, outboard motors, small children,
and a ficus. Or maybe it was just some cables, my memory is a little fuzzy
sometimes.

I took over the parker and the stick, but just played the stick. Used a pretty
standard sound for the most part (light grungy distortion, not much else…)
and spent most of the time playing vaguely metal/industrial/crimson riffs
in sync to badgers loops and theremin flagellation. ie, lots of low and
distorted root-octave-root-minor second-root crap. Then some fiddling
with badger’s moogerfooger ringmod in the feedback loop of the
moogerfooger delay.

Made the mistake of hitting some used bookstores on Sunday. Picked
up more of the typical. Interesting finds inclued a book version of
the Eames
Powers of Ten, and some various electronics for beginners books.
Been thinking about trying to build a
Common Sound pedal, and figured a electronics reference or two wouldn’t
hurt.

Spent the rest of the day in a fetal position hiding under a table. Or maybe
it was just an annoying sinus headache that made me want to do a whole
lot of nothing but quitely watch tv and eat junk food. At least till the sudafed
kicked in and the aforemention RSS idea sounded like a good use of time.

For some reason I decided it would be a good idea to have a rss feed for
the news and shows listing for Japan Air

So, if your interested, they are up at
http://www.japanairband.com/rss.

LJ feeds available at japan_air_news and japan_air_shows.

Upon doing this, I’ve discovered that rss/rdf/etc is more or less useless. And that
webbloggers are insane.

Shrug. Wanted to continue on this one and make something bigger and more
complicated, but lost interest. Seems like it needs more complexity to be
interesting to me.

Take one part Junior Brown,
one part Trey
Gunn, a Chapman Stick
and you get:

The String Station

Weird, bizarre handmade custom electric basses

And they are cheap. ($300 – $500 seems to be the average….).

And from North Carolina.

I’m tempted to draw up a design and see if he can
build it. That would make a fun toy…

And yes, I’m on a weird instrument/music kick again…

Pic from the King Crimson show

And from pretty close to where we were standing.