2004 Recap: Music

My top eleven favorite albums from 2004. They didn’t necessarily come out this year, but I was introduced to them this last year. In no particular order.

1. Interpol – Antics
2. Jay-Z + DJ Danger Mouse – The Grey Album
3. Fischerspooner – #1
4. Ben Folds – Sunny 16
5. Ben Folds – Super D
6. Hungry Lucy – Glo
7. Prince – Musicology
8. Puffy AmiYumi – NICE
9. Atmosphere – God Loves Ugly
10. Ratatat – Ratatat
11. Dizzee Rascal – Boy in da Corner

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December 27, 2004

It’s Official, Life’s Weird

I haven’t seen my friend, Hannah Baines, in about 18 months. We got together tonight for a drink at the Kitty Kat Club, one of my favorite places to chill when I’m back in the land of Snow and Purple Rain. I walk in and notice a couple people who graduated from my high school… Then I stopped, looked closer, and realized that 50 or 60 people from the class of 1999 were surrounding me.

As it works out, I had blundered into the fucking 1999 Minneapolis South high school reunion. Weird. Really weird. I ran into a ton of people I never expected to see again, and finally met a few people I had “known,” but never actually met.

I called my friend Owen, expecting that he’d get a kick out of it. He did, and even got a date out of it with a girl we both had a thing for back in the day. Good for him. But still profoundly weird.

I’m looking forward to mine now, rather than viewing it as a trainwreck waiting to happen. One thing it definitely reminded me of, though, is that the best thing I ever did was move to Seattle. I’m looking forward to getting back to my life on Wednesday. It should be good.

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December 27, 2004

Infinite Streams

I’ve been thinking a lot about infinite streams lately. I haven’t spent any time whatsoever on this concept since I was a freshman in college taking Structure of Computer Programs 1, aka Scheme 101, aka the badass Comp Sci weeder course from hell.

Computer Science 1901, Structure of Computer Programs 1, was hardcore. There’s no better way to describe it. 200 freshmen came in thinking they were the shit; maybe 100 — tops — came out a little more humbled. It took me six weeks of the semester before I really grokked Scheme. I’d programmed in C for a quarter, but nothing can really prepare you for functional programming.

As Edward Norton once put it, at first “your ass was a wad of cookie dough. After a few weeks, you were carved out of wood.”

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December 19, 2004

Life Happens

Today’s been one of those days best summarized by a list. Nothing very exciting or prose-worthy occurred today.

– Woke up late, slept for something on the order of 12 hours. I’m finally starting to feel like more than a code-hacking, UI-designing gnome. This is good; soon I may feel not-so-burned-out.
– Exchanged Jamie’s XMAS present… She’d given me a zippered fleece from Patagonia, and I exchanged it for a size bigger. It’s nice and warm, and almost painfully Seattle. ;-)
– Finished watching Man on Fire with Denzel Washington. It’s incredibly good, and nothing like I expected. It has the cinematography of Fight Club without all of the weird anarchistic undertones.
– Played with London for a while. I have visitation rights with her while Elize’s back in Wisconsin.
– Walked to Diablo.
– Ran into Asa Noriega here, not that anyone who reads this has any clue who she is… She’s one of a couple people responsible for making sure that Longhorn’s UI is kickass.
– Refactored the living fuck out of my homebrew iTunes object model that I use in iRooster. It was getting a bit decrepit and funky, and desperately needed to be revised.
– Leaving for MN in 31 hours. Not looking forward to it. Blah.

More soon, I’m sure.

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December 19, 2004

Daily Update on iRooster

I didn’t work on iRooster at all today, but I spent 30 minutes on the Update Manager I have planned. I’ve decided that it’ll be easier than trying to email all of my registered users every time a new major update comes out, and far more polite too. Plus, it seems like a decent marketing vector for me should I ever choose to come out with new Mac software (answer: I probably will someday).

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December 13, 2004

Mac OS X Debugging Magic

You want some real magic, try the debugger in Visual Studio 2005…

I’ll stop being a smartass now.

There are a lot of super-useful tips in this Apple Technote, still.

http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn2004/tn2124.html

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December 6, 2004

“Run Away, Run Away!!!”

From Tycho on Penny Arcade today: “Halo has those little grunts, and I guess I’m supposed to feel like a bad-ass when I destroy them but I actually just feel like an asshole. [They seem like they] just fell in with the wrong crowd. What they need are compelling after school activities, not death.”

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December 3, 2004

I Can’t Resist

I finally finished Neal Stephenson’s The System of the World last night. Lucky for me, Elize just gave me my Christmas present today, a signed copy of Chuck Palahniuk’s Lullabye. Cool.

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December 3, 2004

A CNN WTF Moment

This was the CNN QuickPoll thing the night of Thursday, 2 December 2004. And the only thing I can even think to say is “what the fuck!?” This is utterly bizarre, and far below what I’d expect of CNN.

The only thing I can even think of is that whatever editorial board puts this thing together decided to defer to their teenage daughters for today. Weird.

wtf.png

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December 2, 2004