tikaro.com

The Feast of San Gandolfo and the Red Mike Festival Band

My block is a big festival block — in fact, I get the feeling that it’s the nucleus of what remains of Little Italy. Mulberry street was closed for the feast of San Gandolfo this weekend, and all the populations of my neigborhood were there. I wandered around, took pictures on my Palm Camera, and then sat down at a sidewalk table on Friday night to try and describe it.

     Read more >>

Ancestral Memories of Elevator Music

I made an astonishing discovery in a nautical-themed restaurant in Maine the other weekend. The music piped into the dining room was an odd choice for a linen-tablecloth restaurant, but it spoke to me in an oddly compelling way. Like Navin R. Johnson, I found myself oddly drawn to this deeply, er… swanky music. I had to ask what it was, and, when I found out, my new purpose in life was to buy the CD and listen to it, over and over and over again.

I’m talking, of course, about the forgotten work of Herb Alpert.

Forget all those pained post-ironic recapitulations of lounge music that you see in the hipster rack at Tower Records — this is the straight dope, the font and wellspring of American Muzak. Once I feverishly pulled the cellophane off the CD and stuffed it into the stereo, I felt like I had discovered one of the Platonic Forms in all its perfect, paradigmatic glory. An MRE scan would have shown entire lobes of my brain, unused for years, springing into frantic activity — the part that controls shag carpet, for example, and the part that controls watching “The Muppet Show” on black-and-white TV. “So that’s what that’s called!” I found myself exclaiming over and over again as “Tijuana Taxi“, “The Lonely Bull“, and “Casino Royale” resurrected the ghosts of long dead commercials, game-show jingles, and trips through the produce section in the shopping card’s kiddie seat. I feel like I’ve discovered the fabled source of the Nile.

I bought Johnny Cash’s 16 greatest hits at the same time, so now my MP3 player is juxtaposing “Folsom Prison Blues” with “Spanish Flea.” Damn, maybe I should start worrying about my wasteful consumption of irony.

Kaiju Big Battel

My friend Dan Check, who just graduated from Pomona College, just sent me this message:


…I’m thinking about going to some kind of monster cage
match wrestling. This seems like something you might like, so I’m inviting
you to come with. Might be seedy, but will probably just be fun. See
www.kaiju.com for more info. Tell me if you want a ticket.



Do I want a ticket? Aw, HELL yes! Check out the website; it’s a mix of American pro wrestling, Japanese movie monsters, and really bad Engrish. Hipsters from Boston dress up in homemade monster suits and wrestle each other in a steel cage. I cannot wait! The monster on the right is “Hell monkey.” Another, Atomic Cannon, is a giant disposable camera, prepared to “blinding enemy with special atomic-style flash for scaring a giant enemy. ”


This is gonna be great!

Kate and I went to visit my mom in Belfast, Maine last weekend. We visited Kelmscott Farm, where earnest sustainable-agriculture majors preserve biodiversity by raising COLOSSAL Old Gloustecer pigs, as well as lots of other cool-looking animals. The pigs looked and sounded like ocean liners.

I reached a programming milestone today! I wrote and compiled a COM object that interacts with my Tikaro server. It’s pretty simple; whenever someone asks for the streaming webcam window (under the webcam image above, click “popup version), the resulting .asp page sends a command to a COM object, which in turn causes the webcam server under my desk to beep. Which in turn lets me know to stop picking my nose, sit up straight, et cetera.

I took most of the information from a great tutorial on 4guysfromrolla.com. Now that I’ve started to graduate from VBScript to VB, the next step is to go back to my .asp sites and component-ize all the data calls, functions, et cetera. That should speed up their performance and prepare me to start learning EJB! After that, my life will be filled with swimming pools and movie stars.

I went for my very first grown-up physical today. After finding that a recommended physician doesn’t accept [My employer] insurance, I found the office by doing a location-based search; the closest medical practice to me is 0.1 mile from my cube. Walking around the corner to “Boro Medical Practice PC” this morning, my nerves were somewhat on edge, due to Rubber Glove Prostate Anxiety. My concern was only increased when I noticed that the medical office is located right above the headquarters of Local 223, the Toy and Novelty Workers Union. As I took the elevator up, I was envisioning all sorts of unfortunate accidents involving the accidental juxtaposition of latex exam gloves and giant plastic clown shoes. But everything turned out fine. In fact, there was no prostate-poking involved at all, which kind of turned out to be an anticlimax after all the anticipatory embarassment I’ve been saving up for months. I didn’t want to say anything to Doctor Bharara, however, who turned out to be a matter-of-fact young woman with a precise Indian accent. I’ll just start my anticipatory embarrasment for next time.

I bought a GPS unit for my Palm Pilot this week, and it’s really, really really cool. It takes the unit about a minute to figure out where it is (and it doesn’t work at all in New York, too many buildings), but once it’s warmed up it only lags behind your position and direction by a couple of seconds in the car. What’s more, I can use my OmniSky modem to download maps for the area in which the GPS puts me. So now, I’ll never, ever get lost again!^*

^*(As long as my Palm is charged, my OmniSky has power, I have fresh batteries in my GPS unit, I have line-of-sight on at least six geostationary satellites, and I’m within a cellular CDPD network.)

I launched two new sites today!

I do freelance work in the evenings for Bauer Publishing, a publisher of (mostly) women’s service magazines. The work for the sites, to a large extent, is done by myself and graphic designer Jeff Eades — he designs, I code. So far, we’ve made the teen celebrity site J14, and a similar site targeting slightly older teens called Twist Magazine.

With lots of help from system administrator extraordinaire Claudia Lacopo and programmer Jonathan Clement, we launched two new magazines today — ABC Soaps In Depth and CBS Soaps In Depth. I’m really proud of the functionality of these sites — they are actually one dynamic site that formats itself depending on whether it sees “abc” or “cbs” in the location. It’s also extremely updateable; 90% of the content is pulled on the fly from a database. I’ve written a custom content management system so that magazine editors can update stories, previews, and other site content using a web browser. There’s chat, polls, all kinds of good stuff!

So thanks Jeff, thanks Claudia, and thanks Jonathan! I’m psyched! I’m gonna go update my resume right now.

Caveat Emptor, Cave Canem, et Caveat Pontifex!

Kate took me to the Christies’ Evening Sale of contemporary art last night, at which Maurizio Cattelan’s Pope-felled-by-a-meteorite installation La Nona Ora was sold for just about $900,000.00. A Bruce Nauman cast entitled Henry Moore, Bound to Fail went for three times its estimate, at nine million dollars. The room was filled with:

• Lean middle-aged men with expensive glasses and non-traditional suit jackets,
  
• Lean younger men with longish euro-hair and tight blue suits,
  
• Lean middle-aged women in expensive dark gray power suits,
  
• Lean younger women in expensive sweaters and designer jeans,
  
• One million cellphones, and
  
• The superlatively urbane and animated presence of the auctioneer, Christopher Burge.
  

The whole thing was a mannered temple of Big Art and Big Money, which made it seem completely normal that, during the evening, Cattelan’s taxidermied dog (“Untitled“) was sold for $80,000.00. “Last bid? Against you, sir… (crack!) For you, ma’am. Lot 314, at eighty-two thousand dollars.” That last in a suave English accent, delivered by Christopher Burge atop a polished wooden podium. In a charcoal-grey suit. While selling a stuffed dog.

You can read the NY Times article about the sale here.

Damn!

Someone just used JustATip.com to notify me that I have poor computer skills. This is dismaying, and I am shamed. Now, if I could just find out who that person is, so that I can notify them of their “poor crotch hygeine”, or perhaps their “frequent flatulence…”

John@Tikaro.com, You Have Poor Computer Skills

“…For some reason, you always do not grasp the concept of copying and pasting, make ill-advised changes to the registry, follow improper procedures while upgrading the Linux kernel, and use single quotes when variable interpolation is desired…”

more about my poor computer skills…