Looks like someone started a Google Group about the Someday closing: Google Groups: Someday Community. I’m signing up.

It’s a relatively healthy Saturday pattern we’ve started. Wake up as late as we can on Saturday (which today was about 9), putter around and do chores until noonish, go to the gym, head to Darwin’s for a healthy lunch. Today, Terri is doing some worky work, and I am puttering with Ruby, this time for a game I’m calling Fake Palindromes (yes, after the Andrew Bird song). The Exquisite Corpse project is somewhat becalmed since March or so. I have a real prototype working, built in Ruby on Rails, and Editrix and Summervillain actually played it and gave me feedback, and I haven’t touched it since. (In my defense, I was without the computer it was on for a month and a half).

We’re off to see Pandora’s Box at the Brattle with Ms. Trix and Mr. Villain in a bit. It may or may not materialize into a double-feature with A Scanner Darkly (which is currently playing at Coolidge Corner along with Waking Life, which I never saw). If not, it will be the second time this week I will almost have seen it (Josh offered me a free ticket to a preview on Thursday, but we were booked for Camera Obscura).

On the rotation this time was Hank Williams and a new favorite, The Mountain Goats.

Terri did such a good job of giving the low-down on the Camera Obscura show at Great Scott last night (not to mention taking lots of good pictures) that I feel compelled to add very little, except for this little video that I shot of the first couple of minutes of “Hey, Lloyd, I’m Ready To Be Heartbroken”. I’m very happy with how it turned out; the sound isn’t inaudible or too blasted out, and since we were right smack up front, it looks pretty OK for being taken by a teeny digital camera. And, it includes an intro spiel where Tracyanne Cambell mentions that Lloyd Cole’s wife and kids drove 90 miles to the show, but Great Scott wouldn’t let them in because the kids were under 18 (you can hear someone audibly gasp when she says this in the video; we’re not sure if it’s Terri or not).

PS: If you’re from the band, or their label, I honestly, honestly tried to see what the band’s policy on recording/sharing is, but could find nothing. I will happily take it down at your request.

OK, I have this little Pentax camera that takes great pictures and AVI format movies. I have a couple of these movies that I want to edit together for web distribution. Seems like I should be able to edit these on the handy video-editing software that came with my Mac. I know Quicktime doesn’t really play AVI, but I figured I’d be able to find some kind of importer or converter. Nope. Or some free converter for my Windows, so that I can turn them into
.mov files there. Nope again.

Anybody know a good way to turn .avi files into .mov files? I’ll settle for .mpeg.

I can’t get anywhere with a Google search on this, because all the video software I can find is mostly hideously bad shareware that leaves some kind of watermark until you suck it up and pay $30 (which, i guess is an option, but I can’t quite bring myself to do this yet, because I’m still resentful that both Apple and Microsoft have made this so hard; especially Apple for making me think the Japanese girl would just talk to me).

It’s like “Get Your War On” but about the Red Sox:

Maybe this interests no-one but me, but these are the top terms for 2006 that people have used to come to the blog from search engines. (I’m not sure why Google Analytics can’t figure out how to decode the plus sign). I have no idea why #1 is #1, and it makes me vaguely queasy that so many people are searching for it. More disturbing is #25. But otherwise, it seems about right.

(PS: It’s an image so that the words don’t get indexed, skewing future search results)

I apologize in advance for linking to UK tabloid The Sun, but I’m not sure what’s funnier, a drunken David Hasselhoff shouting “Do you know who I am? I’m the Hoff!” or that there was an 80’s cop show in Britain called “Dempsey and Makepeace”.

Happy Independence Day! In general, it’s the patriotic holiday I feel like I can really get behind; it celebrates a revolution whose vanguard included a bunch of Massachusetts liberals with a fair bit of a libertarian streak.

Today, I have been reading that there is somewhat of a huff in conservative blogs about the “… and the American Way” dropping out of the new Superman movie. This one takes umbrage at the way Hollywood has caved to commercial pressure for foreign markets. But honestly, that’s a silly argument to make; they could and probably would have done that anyway, since the “offending” phrase could easily be modified when dubbed into Greek or French or Arabic or whatever, or edited it for Canada and the UK, and no conservative blog would have bothered to find out.

I think it’s irksome, too, but it’s irksome that the writers/directors consciously did not include it, even in the American release, because it’s antiquated. Can’t we even pretend, in a movie by us and for us, a fantasy movie about a guy from another planet who can fly, that America still stands for Truth and Justice?

If we can’t even fill our heads a bunch of capitalized abstractions like Freedom and Equality and Justice and Tolerance and Liberty and Human Rights and pretend that our country stands for them, what chance do we have of making it so?

Greetings from Darwin’s on Cambridge Street, Cambridge. It’s pleasantly and surprisingly uncrowded, and the Wi-Fi is free, so we’re having some afternoon coffees and poring through our California books to see what we want to do for our big California vacation in a few months (to celebrate 5 years of marital bliss). We had some sandwiches for lunch, I went off to get a haircut at Custom Barber Shop in Harvard Square, where I’ve been getting my hair cut for 9.5 years, picked up the car in the lot at Central Square lot, where we parked when we went to the gym, and had no trouble getting another spot right in front of Darwin’s. Good conversation in progress. Planning is going well. Of course, it helps that Terri is a great trip planner, and already has things very well thought through.

The entire city is blissfully free of both students, who are gone for the summer, and townies, who are away for the long Independence Day weekend.

On July 9, I’ll celebrate 10 years of living in the Greater Boston area.

Music on rotation here:

• Repo Man soundtrack
• some Dylan greatest hits thingie
• the recent Morrissey album
• for better or worse, Bob Marley
• some band doing a cover of The Passenger

I guess we’re starting to audition new hangouts, or getting used to there being no Someday. At least I am.

from still other blogs. And actually the most useful info I’ve seen to date is at a LiveJournal discussion…