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I haven’t really organized who I’m meeting up with except for transportation and housing, but here’s a list of the acts I’m going to try to catch. (argh, the Doves have pulled out)

On Saturday:

• Boom Bip, 12:30-1:20
• Evil 9
• Buck 65, 1:55-2:40 (alt: Nic Armstrong, 1:40-2:25)
• k-os, 2:35-3:20 (alt: Radio 4)
• M83, 3:40-4:30 (alt: Ambulance LTD, 3:35-4:20)
• Snow Patrol, 4:15-5:05
• Keane, 5:30-6:20 (alt: The Kills, Immortal Technique, Jean Grae)
• Wilco, 6:45-7:35
• Weezer, 8:00-8:50
• Sage Francis, 8:45-9:30
• Bloc Party, 9:30-10:15
• The Chemical Brothers, 10:20-11:50, (alt: Mercury Rev, 9:50-10:35, Amp Fiddler, 9:45-10:35)
• Spoon, 11:00-11:55

On Sunday:

• Shout Out Louds
• Sloan (alt: Gram Rabbit, Diplo)
• Autolux, 2:45-3:35 (alt: The Perceptionists)
• Matthew Dear, 3:00-4:15 (alt: Jem, 3:05-3:55)
• M.I.A., 4:10-5:00
• The Futureheads
• Beans (alt: Miss Kittins, Tegan and Sara)
• The Arcade Fire
• Aesop Rock
• New Order
• Pinback (alt: British Sea Power)
• Nine Inch Nails
• The Faint
• Bright Eyes (alt: Black Star [Talib Kweli + Mos Def], 10:40-11:40)

Hey, what do you know, here’s a Coachella Lineup Rundown (linked to the last part which has links to the earlier parts) if you’re trying to figure out what to catch.

Hostnames for my machines:

• optimus
• chrome
• brick
• deedee
• dexter
• jack
• hack
• ack
• mainframe
• hamutaro
• muffins
• moo

potentially good/clever hostnames:

• syn
• ping
• uptime
• downtime
• wintermute
• forum3000
• somad
• cube
• marvin

Some other lists:

• RFC 1178 – Choosing a name for your computer
• Hostnames! – list of hostnames and categories
• Computer Name Themes
• Top 72 Cool Server Hostnames

As of 3:58:27 today I made my last student loan payment as a big lump sum, a bit over 4 years ahead of schedule.

It wasn’t that much to begin with, but it still feels good not owing nobody nuthin’.

I watched Kung Fu Hustle this afternoon at the Bruin. It’s the best movie I’ve seen this year. It’s directed by Stephen Chow, and has the impeccable comic timing you’d expect. Yuen Wo-ping (w/ an assist by Sammo Hung) does loads of astounding action choreography (which again, isn’t unexpected).

What for me was unexpected was the sheer amount of cinematic joy in it. The visual creativity (the film-speed play is the best I’ve seen), the direction, the genre-absurd (but inspired) twists and turns, and the crazy kinetic energy of it all kept me smiling through the whole thing. It really blew my hair back.

I’ve been insanely busy and tired (hmm, are those two connected?), so I’ve been a bit behind in putting up some video from my trip (and from my T7). I’ll post some more later, but for now, here’s a 22 second (28MB!) 640x480x30fps video that shows what the quality of the video can be (this is in ‘Fine’ mode. The ‘Standard’ mode is much more reasonable).

OK, and here’s a short clip w/ Mark Allen in standard mode (11s @ 640x480x25fps, 3.9MB, 354KB/s data rate). I believe that half of the videos I’ve taken now have either VO of me talking about the video capture or of people asking me about it:

So here’s the skinny on the T7:

• Love the form factor, it’s an incredible carry-everywhere camera
• Still blown away by it’s video capability
• Screen is ginormous and insanely clear/bright, good in all but the brightest daylight
• Bootup in about a second, zero shutter lag
• Starts getting pretty noisy at 200, tops off at a very noisy 400 ISO
• Amazing that it’s a 3X optical lens, but poky @ 3.5f-4.4f
• Battery life is a bit low, a few hundred shots, or less than an hour of w/ video
• No zooming while recording. Boo-urns

Worth it for $500? You bet. Only thing that would be better is if it had wi-fi or 3G support for instant uploading.

Jason has a write-up on some recent postings on /. about The future of Spotlight and OS X. All good stuff, but one of the more interesting bits:

What’s next? We’re going to find new ways of attaching automatic metadata

I’ve been banging on the drum of capturing implicit metadata for a while now, and I’m glad that that’s on the roadmap. Ah, metadata. What fun.

I’ve been noticing an uptick of posts on peak oil recently. I’ve had an on/off interest over the past couple years.

• BoingBoing’s excellent collection on points and counterpoints
• John Scalzi’s optimistic (see related: old Atlantic Monthly writeup on Norman Borlaug)

Andy recently posted a link to MFX’s Aether, which is a good demo, but nowhere near my recent favs:

• Moppi’s Assembly 2004 Invite (the mesmerizing flower effect is also available as a Windows screen saver!)
• Binary Flow – this invite for Assembly 2005 is pretty astounding considering it’s a 64K.
• fresh! – it really is. A great 64K, and not a glow or blur in sight 😉
• 155/95 – this won Breakpoint, and is sort of a one-trick pony, but my is that some trick (HDR, baby)
• Planet Risk – a ridiculous amount of effects. Not one falls on its face
• Breakpoint 2005 Invite – it’s a bit long, but has a real old-skool feel to it and a nice party flavor that’s really hard to resist
• we cell – ahh, gotta love that fecal blur – an impressive number of organic effects
• The Popular Demo – it’s 2 years old, but still one of my favs. The production values and execution are great

If you’re looking to get into demos, some good sites to get started:

• scene.org – the world’s largest demo repository
• Orange Juice – scene info/news
• Demoo – good picks
• pouet.net – my current favorite demo review/resource
• GFXzone – for pixel pushers
• The Happy Squirrel – demo blog

A long-standing problem I’ve had w/ Mail.app was the continuing confirmation dialogs I’d get even after I thought I’d manually added the certs into my X509Anchors. Since 10.3, Apple has had an easier way [illustrated], but like for many people, doing the option-drag (or any kind of drag) would immediately lock up Mail.app.

Finally, I got a breakthrough. A comment here saying that the second server confirmation would work, but the first would cause lockups led me to experiment (since I have different self-signed certs for my IMAP and SMTP servers) a bit, and I’ve found a general solution that works w/ no lockups.

The secret to being able to successfully drag and drop is to cancel the initial (on-load) security dialog, and then to go back online. It seems that any certificates you try to drag immediately on startup will cause a lockup, but after that (after mailboxes have loaded?) it works fine.

The following is the first communique from a group calling itself Unitarian Jihad…

We are Unitarian Jihad, and our motto is: “Sincerity is not enough.” We have heard from enough sincere people to last a lifetime already. Just because you believe it’s true doesn’t make it true. Just because your motives are pure doesn’t mean you are not doing harm. Get a dog, or comfort someone in a nursing home, or just feed the birds in the park. Play basketball. Lighten up. The world is not out to get you, except in the sense that the world is out to get everyone.

See also: Unitarian Jihad Name Generator