From the Mind of Trevor Stone

Google has several mailing lists where a very specific type of humor is considered on-topic. One of my favorite is dedicated to filk, parody lyrics to popular songs. I've archived my humorous songwriting and poetry, some of which has appeared previously on this blog. And of course I had to write a song about my own departure.

Ain't found a way to kill me yet
Spicy food still makes me sweat
Every weekend I just go nowhere
Safe at home with my new pet
Hydroxychloroquine was no safe bet
Spike proteins assail me from somewhere

Here they come to give the booster
Yeah, here come the booster
You know I ain't gonna die
No, no, no, you know I ain't gonna die

Here they come to stab the booster, ah yeah
Yeah, here come the booster, yeah
You know I ain't gonna die
No, no, no, you know I ain't gonna die

Feelin' fine, glad you asked
They spit on me, I wear a mask
Doctor sent me results from my swab
Got my shots 'gainst covid death
My buddy's breathin' his dyin' breath
Oh RNA, please won't you help me make it through?

Here they come to give the booster
Yeah, here come the booster, yeah
You know I ain't gonna die
No, no, no you know I ain't gonna die


Original (content warning: Vietnam war, violence, guns, knives, blood): Alice in Chains - Rooster

This song is called “Alice’s Algorithm”
It’s about Alice, and the algorithm
But “Alice’s Algorithm” is not the name of the algorithm
That’s just the name of the song
That’s why I call the song “Alice’s Algorithm”

You can send anything you want with Alice’s algorithm
You can send anything you want with Alice’s algorithm
Send a syn, you’ll get an ack
Two prime numbers are hard to hack
You can send anything you want with Alice’s algorithm

Now it all started two Thanksgivings ago, two years ago, on Thanksgiving
When my friend and I wanted to send a message to Alice with an algorithm
But Alice doesn’t get mail through the algorithm,
She gets mail on a server running the algorithm,
In the home directory, with her copy of RSA and Carol the sysadmin
And livin’ in the home directory like that, they’ve got a lot of room in /var where the spool used to been
Havin’ all that room (seein’ as how they deleted all the spools)
They decided that they didn’t have to take out their garbage for a long time
( Read more... )

Context for non-computing folks: computer messaging protocols are often described with Alice, Bob, and Carol sending messages and Eve trying to eavesdrop. There's also a lot of Unix references in there.
Context for non-American-folk-music folks: Alice's Restaurant by Arlo Guthrie is one of the greatest satirical songs ever performed. Listen to it first to get the guitar portion rolling around your head while you read these filk lyrics.

Being raised by a bibliophibian from a family of teachers and a recording engineer/radio DJ, books and music were ubiquitous in my household. I became an adult around the time that the Internet was hitting its stride as an endless repository of digital media, but I've still got an emotional attachment to physical media and the "save everything" instincts of a would-be librarian.

When we bought a house early last year I recognized that bookshelf-appropriate wall space was at a premium. I also had a jumble of cheap Target bookshelves I'd carted through seven moves. "Great," I said, "Now that I don't have to move for a couple decades I can invest in nice, solid bookshelves to cover this long living room wall." We made a couple forays into furniture shopping over the next 18 months but discovered that most bookshelves seem to prioritize "look nice with a few objects" over "conveniently hold hundreds of pounds of books."

About a month ago we lucked out and found two tall and stout oak book cases with plenty of shelving. Bonus: they were only about $100 each! So I spent several hours packing the books from the crapy shelves back into their boxes and onto the sun porch and moved the shelves with redeeming qualities into the guest bedroom. The next weekend I got to experience the great joy of unpacking a bunch of boxes of books, like a present I'd wrapped for myself full of great books that I'll surely get around to reading in this house. I also got to play the fun game of inventing a classification system while simultaneously satisfying shelf width constraints and adjusting for height. So in this library "Dusty hardcover fiction," "Fiction compilations and tall novels," and "Mass-market paperback novels" are separate categories on separate parts of the wall.

I then unpacked a dozen or so boxes of National Geographic Magazine, my favorite periodical. Those get to live in the guest room, along with art books and a few others that are good random-access reading. This in turn meant that the garage had enough space to set up shelving units and a full-height freezer, for a different sort of archival material.

The one remaining shelving issue was games. Two cheap Target bookcases had almost every cubic inch used up by board, card, and tile game boxes. Two weeks ago I managed to score again at the used furniture store and found an open-backed bookshelf that doesn't block the power outlet and fits precisely between the stately oak bookshelves and the mass market paperback shelf (which itself has lived on, despite being a rickety cheap Target shelf, because it's short enough to stay out of the way of the thermostat on the wall). This shelf makes the game day browsing experience much better, and nicely rounds out the library media setup.

Meanwhile, my digital media life was in need of some shelf care of its own.

When I got back from Iceland I noticed that my external hard drive, on which I store 1.3 terabytes of music (plus photo and document backups), was showing signs of failure. Fortunately I had (1) a hard drive of twice the size which I bought earlier this year when backing up a bunch of data that was about to be deleted from the web and (2) an old hard drive of half the size containing 1.1 or so terabytes of music. I was able to copy all the pre-2013 music to the new hard drive to cover most of the gap. I then used find, diff, and rsync Unix utilities to identify all the tracks I added in to iTunes the last six years. This managed to save perhaps two thirds of the music. Fortunately for my emotional attachment to media data, I haven't spent much effort downloading mp3s in the last decade; they mostly came from CDs I bought recently or that my family owns, so I can recover most of the music library by re-ripping, though it means I need to develop a shelving plan for the boxes of CDs in the garage :-/

On the other hand, in the last six years I've downloaded thousands of podcast episodes. And given my instincts for media preservation I don't delete podcasts after listening, and I feel oddly awkward knowing they're missing. So I whipped up a couple ruby programs to parse my iTunes library XML and the podcast RSS feeds, download the mp3s, and save them to the right filename. This was particularly complicated for a few podcasts that only provide a month or two of episodes in their RSS feed, so I crawled a few websites to get historic episodes. This felt a little obsessive, but I'm about eleven months behind on podcasts and not listening to regulars seemed like it would be disappointing.

A couple weeks after finishing resurrecting my pile of podcasts I got a surprise system error on my Mac. It's sort of the Apple version of the famous Blue Screen of Death: stylishly designed with a semi-transparent gray color scheme and rounded corners. I've seen this three or four times in the last two decades of using MacOS X, and two of those were in the last couple weeks. Worried that my system had a hardware issue or major configuration problem I hit the "Upgrade to macOS Catalina" button late that night.

After the new OS version installed the next day I immediately regretted the decision. In my tired and minor panic I hadn't thought to read the full "What's new in Catalina" story before upgrading. The two big changes are that 32-bit apps are no longer supported (I have a few installed, but don't recall using them for years) and iTunes was replaced by separate Music, Podcasts, and (audio) Books apps, following the UIs of those apps on iOS. The Music app looks okay, but I panicked when I realized that the Podcast app has almost none of the iTunes features I'd come to depend on. It imported my old podcast subscriptions, but only showed the episodes currently present in the RSS feeds, not my decade worth of saved episodes. Crap, that's going to disrupt my 11-month-behind listening sequence I said. More importantly, the new Podcast app doesn't have any real episode organizing tools. I listen to podcasts on an iPod Shuffle, which has two excellent features for listening to podcasts while riding a bicycle: it clips to the outside of my clothing and it can be fully controlled with a single gloved hand without looking at it. I load the iPod Shuffle by building a playlist of episodes I want to listen to (in chronological order, skipping lots of reruns and uninteresting TED talks) and adding the next chunk from that podcast once a week when I charge the iPod. The Podcast app no longer knows anything about connected devices, but the Finder window for an iPod Shuffle will let you pick podcasts or specific episodes to sync. Unfortunately, that sync interface doesn't show any date or play count information, and scrolling through 1,000 episodes of a daily series is not worth my frustration.

Since this iPod Shuffle setup has become a remarkably crucial part of my informational life in the last decade I decided that I needed to downgrade from Catalina to Mojave, the previous macOS version. (I tried just copying iTunes from a non-upgraded computer, but leave it to Apple to prevent a perfectly good application from working when you upgrade the OS.) Internet documentation intimated that downgrading the OS would erase all data on the drive, so I spent another week with find and rsync to identify and back up all the important files on my internal drive. But hey, I hadn't yet backed up my photos after the previous external drive crashed with its backup set. Last Friday my iPod Shuffle ran out of batteries and on Saturday I had completed all the backups I'd identified, so I downloaded and reinstalled Mojave. After the reinstall I noticed my drive's free space was suspiciously low, so I poked around and discovered that, in fact, all my old files were still around in /Previous Content/, so the restoration process was quick with moves instead of copies. By carefully copying folders from my Library directory I was delighted to find that Chrome launched with all my old open tabs (another piece of my digital hoarder profile) and my Google Drive database didn't think anything was different about my local folder, averting a large download from the cloud. And, blessedly, my iTunes is back, with the same information-dense list view I've come to love since I first downloaded it in 2001.

phew that's enough archivist labor for the year. I'll put off thinking about what I'll do if Apple stops providing security patches for Mojave before my iPod Shuffle stops working. It's more than ten years old, having outlived every mobile computing device I've possessed. It's one tough cookie.

Somehow July turned into my month for being in the audience.

Dead and Company were at Folsom Field in Boulder for two nights. The first set of the Friday night show was a little underwhelming, but the second set was amazing, with highlights including Terrapin Station, Saint Stephen into The Eleven, All Along the Watchtower, and Throwing Stones: every song was played exceptionally well. The Saturday night show was stellar from beginning to end, including a great The Other One into Drums and Space back into The Other One. It's a lot of fun to be with a football stadium full of people who know every song well and reflect a lot of energy back to the band. I may have spent too much money on tie dye on Shakedown Street.

I saw The Colorado Shakespeare Festival's productions of Love's Labours Lost and Richard III. Somehow I'd never seen or read the former, and it's a really good play (rising above some Shakespearian tropes) and the CSF cast did a great job playing up the comedy. The Richard III production was also well done, with some really neat witchy action from ex-queen Margaret. After watching three or four times productions in the last ten years, I think I finally understand everything that's going on in that play.

As a birthday present for Kelly's inner child we saw Disney's Little Mermaid at BDT Stage neé Boulder Dinner Theater. The costuming was pretty fun, and they had a good fluidity of "imagine that we're underwater." I think I ended up eating some dairy at the show (maybe the bread), so I felt lousy the next day :-/

This week I saw Bombino, a fantastic Tuareg guitar player in the tradition of Tinariwen and Ali Farka Touré, at the Boulder Theater. The performance was fantastic, and they had a fun humble and thankful energy, with the bass player apologizing that they don't know much English (having been colonized by the French). Local Afrobeat band Atomga opened. I saw them a few years ago; they seemed to have upped their game and their set totally rocked; on par with the main act. Lots of good dancing opportunity, particularly since the theater wasn't very crowded. I guess the rest of Boulder didn't realize how fun this show would be.

I also managed to fit in two trips to the Monday evening Bandshell Boogie. And I skipped the Buckethead concert at the beginning of the month because I was too.damn.exhausted.

There's an old computing proverb (emphasis on the old): Never underestimate the bandwidth of a hurtling station wagon full of 8-track tapes.

In the process of moving[1], I put all 600 or so of my CDs in my Subaru and took them to the other side of Boulder. Assuming an average length of 40 minutes (350 megabytes) and a 20-minute transit time (Foothills Parkway is the only part of the trip where I was really hurtling), the bandwidth was 1.4 gigabits per second, which is faster than most Ethernet. And my station wagon was only half full.

Of course, I spent about two hours putting the data into cardboard-protocol packets. And my back was sore after moving them all up stairs, through the house, and to the car. So maybe there's something to all this copper wire.

This is also the sixth time I have carried over three decades of National Geographic, a very dense publication, to a new location. Reading material relocation is my primary form of upper-body exercise.


[1] More about this move later. The destination is a wonderful house in northwest Boulder we're calling Lucky Gin.

Last week, some of the old Captain Beefheart fans at KGNU put together a three-hour Captain Beefheart special. You can listen at that link for the next week or so, so if my post eulogizing him last month piqued your interest, check it out. It's got a bunch of tunes I hadn't heard before.

Captain Beefheart, lesser known as Don Van Vliet, died yesterday at age 69.

It's okay if you haven't heard of him before. As a pure artist, he did everything from inspiration and intuition without letting concerns of business, money, or social expectations change his course. Insofar as he's known, he's best known for his unique music as Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band. Beefheart's vocals cut through the complex instrumentation, sometimes deep and soulful, sometimes pointed and direct. His saxophone and other blown instruments rival the greats of abstract jazz. The musical family ranges from psychedelic blues, as in his 1967 debut Safe as Milk, to poetry and rants to his brilliant but challenging avant-garde Trout Mask Replica, ranked 58th in Rolling Stone's greatest albums list (2003).

I knew I'd get along with my new college roommate one year when I played the used Trout Mask Replica CD I'd found and he said "That's pretty interesting" and didn't once ask me to turn it off. I've never heard anything else like it; it perhaps provides the best connection between a listener and raw creative impulse of any album. It's not always easy to listen to, so if you listen and it turns you off, try some of his more accessible tunes and come back to the fast and bulbous Trout Mask Replica.

Rolling Stone's 1970 article about the Captain is one of the best pieces of entertainment journalism I've seen in a long time. It gives a good sense of both Beefheart as an unconstrained artistic genius and as a difficult person for folks to work with. The description reminds me of Nikola Tesla, another inspired genius that didn't bother with playing by society's rules, to the detriment of his own fame and bank account.

Don Van Vliet wasn't just a musician. The Rolling Stone article above describes some of his prodigious output of paintings and poetry. In the early '80s, Vliet stopped performing music and focused on painting from his home in the deserts of southern California. I plan to peruse some of his visual works in the coming days. Two weeks ago, while wandering through Manhattan I stopped at a record store in Greenwich Village. The Captain Beefheart section was my first stop and to my surprise they had half a dozen albums and collections, most of which I was unfamiliar with. I snagged a collection of live tracks and "Poet Rock Musicians of the Desert: Rare phrases and poems from Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band & Jim Morrison (of The Doors) – two of the desert's greatest poet musicians," which I also intend to study soon. As I started poking through the late Bs and early Cs, a man asked if I could move over a bit, and then he looked through the Beefheart offerings. Maybe he's more popular than I thought.

Like many under-understood geniuses, Captain Beefheart was a big influence on people who became better known (and some that didn't, like me), and the Captain was all over Twitter yesterday. I've heard him mentioned along with Sonic Youth and The Velvet Underground as the foundation for the music of Generation X and he's probably got a place in the heart of more college DJs than not.

If you, dear reader, are a fan of music, a lover of art, and a friend of genius I encourage you to explore the links above, listen to his music (The Dust Blows Forward is a great and mostly-accessible anthology), track down some videos on YouTube, and learn more about this amazing and unique individual. I know I will.

Captain Beefheart, a man who didn't need drugs because he was out there already, will be sorely missed.

Follow-up to my previous post: You can listen to the radio show my dad did in Clover's honor for the next week and a half. It's well done and quite touching, even if you didn't know the man. Feel free to skip the several minutes of old news about the fire at the beginning of the show.

Long story short:
I dropped my hard drive on the floor. It stopped working. The only stuff that wasn't copied elsewhere was music. I bought a big new hard drive. I copied a metric crap load of music from my brother's computer. I copied files from a whole bunch of MP3 CDs. I copied a bunch of music from my ex (from a hard drive that used to be mine). In the end, I have a lot more music than before and still have most of my original collection.

( Long story long, a clear indication I'm not meeting my Write More Succinctly goals )

Current library stats (including a few thousand missing songs, excluding some audio books, but including others I haven't reclassified):
178,731 tracks
495 days, 17 hours, 21 minutes, 59 seconds
1,021.56 GB
8158 distinct artist names
12673 distinct album titles (lots of Some Album Disc 1/2 titles need to be fixed)
845 genres, though some are frivolous

Largest folders:

"Artist"	GB
Compilations	91.83
Various Artists	11.82
Unknown Artist	9.95
Frank Zappa	7.63
Grateful Dead	6.82
Arte Flamenco	5.8
King Crimson	3.45
Martin Simpson	2.58
Oregon	2.56
Pink Floyd	2.44
Tom Waits	2.38
Cocteau Twins	2.08
Yo-Yo Ma	2.01
Bob Dylan	1.99
Kronos Quartet	1.96
Joni Mitchell	1.96
John Hartford	1.95
Pablo Casals	1.93
Lonnie Johnson	1.92
Johnny Cash	1.84
John Fahey	1.84

Time spent on this project: Way too much.
Next project: Figuring out a genre/world music arrangement scheme so when I'm in the mood for something I have some idea what my options are.

Somehow in all my previous listenings to the Cranberries song "Wake Up And Smell The Coffee" on the album "Wake Up And Smell The Coffee," I hadn't picked up on what words come after "wake up and" in the chorus. And yet I still sing along...

At the P-Funk concert last night, three people asked if I'd "Seen Molly." Since I'd already bumped into a friend of my brother's I didn't recognize, I had to stare at the first girl who asked and think "Do I recognize this person? Why would she be asking about my friend without introducing herself?" I answered "Not here" to see if she would ask a follow-up question.

In case you're keeping track, more people asked me for drugs at George Clinton & Funkadelic than at The Chemical Brothers. I don't remember anyone asking me for drugs at Michael Franti & Spearhead or Kraftwerk (all shows at the Fillmore). I don't think anyone's ever asked me for drugs at the Boulder Theater or the Fox Theater. P-Funk is also the only show I've seen where somebody (two, in fact) tossed a joint to someone on stage who then lit up. Caveat: I've never been to Reggae on the Rocks. And in a reversal of stereotypical roles, a black guy with corn rows secretly reached over and touched my hat. Oh, and Maggot Brain is totally awesome.

One of my favorite Onion articles ever was Clinton to Parliament: It's Time To Drop DA BOMB On Iraq.

LOCATION: The music counter at Black & Read, a store selling used books, movies, CDs, vinyl, board games, and porn. Stacks of jewel cases line the counters. Several signs hang in the store advertising a 15%(?) off sale for used RPG books and board games until mid-January. The need for this sale is demonstrated by several stacks of books on the floor next to the RPG shelves. Taped to the back of the cash register screen are a Westword Best of Denver clipping and a post from an Internet review board complaining about the store's customer service.

MANAGER is in his early thirties, wearing a sport jacket, drinking a margarita (or maybe just mountain dew with ice cubes) from an imitation ornate goblet. EMPLOYEE is in his late 30s, hasn't shaved recently, and is wearing a black T-shirt with an old band logo. EMPLOYEE is digging through the CD drawers to find a customer's selection. (When customers select a stack of jewel cases, there's about a 50% chance the clerks won't be able to find one of the discs.) DUSTIN's name has been changed because I don't remember the actual name.

PHONE: *ring*
MANAGER: Black & Read...
MANAGER: Maybe, can I tell him who's speaking?
MANAGER: Do you want to speak to a Dustin?
EMPLOYEE: Not really.
MANAGER: Okay.
EMPLOYEE: He calls and asks if we have hip hop records.
MANAGER: All our employees are hung over so we don't have anyone else working on the CD side right now. Could you call back in, say, two hours?

Shortly thereafter, a CUSTOMER asks to look at a book of porn star portraits. CUSTOMER says he might buy it later when he has more money. MANAGER praises the book, saying it's great entertainment if you have drunk roommates. Several CUSTOMERS comment that the book looks interesting. MANAGER speculates that the book hasn't yet sold due to "the dick factor," theorizing that many prospective buyers don't want to own a picture of a few naked men even though they presumably watch hetero porn.

I lived in Boulder for 24 years and never saw an owl in town.

On October 31st, 2005, Tam and I saw My Morning Jacket at the Fox Theatre in Boulder. While waiting for the doors to open, we looked across the street and saw an owl on top of a building. The band was touring for their new album Z which features owls on the cover. They had a few stuffed owls on stage, too.

This year, DeVotchKa played at the Boulder Theater on Halloween and Day of the Dead. I wanted to go to the former, but tickets were sold out, so I went tonight. After the show, I stood outside the parking garage for a minute to enjoy the warm night air. Suddenly, an owl swooped down and landed on top of the building across the street. It sat for a minute or two before flying away.

WHO were you this year?

Not only is Manu Chao's "...proxima estacion... Esperanza" a great album for getting stuff done at work, it's also the best music in my collection for dancing around the kitchen naked.

If you've never done that, follow these simple steps:
* Buy the album, or queue up some YouTube videos or the MySpace page
* Take off your pants
* Prepare dinner
* Be careful with that knife, Eugene!