npverni

there is a town on lake ontario (don’t let the past remind us of what we are not now)

nathanblend — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 23:50:30 +0000

can’t believe it was over 2 years ago that me and josh were at bowery watching CYHSY play some neil young, we were up in the front at that point… gotta love the ‘leave us’ at 2:34. CYHSY will probably be the last band i can appreciate on a non nyc/brooklynvegan level. who is john gait?

what’s much harder to believe is that it was 8 years ago that i got my first computer, graduated from high school and left 1960′s irondequoit for awhile, :

worst ad ever

nathanblend — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 23:11:03 +0000

weather

nathanblend — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 21:26:27 +0000

IPod Shuffle = The New Discman, 1 Album a week: week 1

nathanblend — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 05:25:26 +0000

As mentioned previously, I recently got an Ipod shuffle. I already have a 99% full 80gb ipod video thanks to the good folks at blenderbox. My commute is about 45-1 hr each way from Astoria to Williamsburg so I spend a lot of time with my IPod. For the last 2 years with the 80gb ipod I’ve had basically every song I’ve ever liked at my immediate disposal, which seemed great at first. It wasn’t until I got the shuffle that I realized that it’s nice to, in the words of 37signals, ‘embrace constraints’. The shuffle is 1GB, but the fact that it has no screen means anything more than 20 tracks or so is hard to manage. With those constraints it’s almost like having a walkman or portable cd player. I remember being late for class in college because i couldn’t decide what single cd to bring along for a whole day on campus. Or skiing in 5th grade and deciding between Use Your Illusing I or Dr. Feelgood tapes. The shuffle is the same way… you have to really commit to a single album. The album defines the mood rather than the mood defining which of the 1000 albums you choose. So, that being said, I’ve decided to do a ’1 album per week’ thing. I can’t control what we listen to at work, or what I randomly download from isohunt, but I’m goign to try to mainly focus on one single album for 90% of my listening a week. This week’s album was Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s new “Lie Down In The Light”. I’ve listened to it so much (maybe 30 times?) it almost feels like a classic already. I’ve never been that into BPB besides the songs everyones heard and what’s been played at work. The first track contains a near dead on description of our family’s summer cape cod trips (‘theres a path, there’s a beach, there’s a horseshoe crab…) which was enough to give the rest a shot. Listening to it now it’s almost impossible to picture not knowing this song last week. Anyway – the bullet point here is it feels good to carry one album around with you for a week, even if that album is contained in a tiny mp3 player with the obligatory white headphones.

Get music off IPod Shuffle on a Mac

nathanblend — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 02:29:46 +0000

I recently got an ipod shuffle to use at the gym and as a lightweight alternative to my video ipod. It turns out you can only use a shuffle with one computer… plug it into another and you have to erase all your music before itunes will allow you to add/edit songs. Also, the old standby Senuti doesn’t work with it. Here’s a quick script to transfer files off the shuffle, you can then just drag them to itunes and go from there.

Open the terminal and run:

find /Volumes/YOUR_IPOD_NAME/iPod_Control/Music -name “*.mp3″ -type f -exec cp {} /Users/npverni/Desktop/some_folder/ \;

The filenames will be cryptic, but ITunes will fix them.

I am Elvis Costello, and so can you!

nathanblend — Thu, 15 May 2008 02:29:32 +0000

Excuse the Colbert refrence, I haven’t had cable since before the Colbert Report was on but I see the subway adds for his book all the time.

Anyway, EC (the 2nd, not Eric Clapton) has a new album out this week that I downloaded for free but haven’t listened to. Instead I’ve launched back into the best 1-2-3 punch in music history, the first 3 Led Zeppelin, I mean, Elvis Costello albums. Back in 2002 I recreated the late 70′s/early 80′s by introducing myself to EC one album at a time. I had never heard anything by him before and decided to start at the beginning. The rules were, 1) no less than 2 weeks per album 2) must proceed in chronological order and 3) must listen to each new album for the first time on a walk down the beautiful ‘backway’ to the high school in Irondequoit. I went ape shit over ‘my aim is true’ and couldn’t wait for the ‘release’ of ‘this years model’. I didnt like TYM as much at first but it grew on me. Armed Forces was always on the horizon. I was teased by the Rhino bonus tracks of Green shirt. Without a doubt, Armed Forces will forever be my favorite EC album and probably my fav album of the 80′s (besides G’nR of course). Anyway… long story short, the first three EC albums are indispensable, whether or not Momofuku is named after the LIC eatery or not.

Web 2.0 NI(backwards)N Style

nathanblend — Mon, 05 May 2008 15:15:42 +0000

Good to see that even on a Nine Inch Nails website with a tiny gray/red on black color palette there is room for some nice 22px input boxes. I haven’t heard a NIN album in about 12 years, but this one is free so it’s worth a shot.

Compiling PHP with libcurl on OSX

nathanblend — Sun, 04 May 2008 23:41:21 +0000

Here’s the mammoth configure I currently have:

./configure –prefix=/Users/npverni/php –with-apxs2=/opt/local/apache2/bin/apxs –with-xsl=/usr –with-tidy=/opt/local –enable-mbstring –with-gd –with-jpeg-dir=/opt/local –with-png-dir=/opt/local –with-zlib-dir –enable-sockets –enable-exif –with-mcrypt=/opt/local –enable-soap –with-mysql=/usr/local/mysql –with-pdo-mysql=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config –with-mysql-sock=/tmp/mysql.sock –with-freetype-dir=/opt/local –with-openssl=/opt/local –without-iconv –enable-cli –with-curl=/usr/bin/curl

Twitter ditching Rails (Congratulations PHP/Java/.NET developers – you won!)

nathanblend — Thu, 01 May 2008 22:41:15 +0000

UPDATE: http://twitter.com/ev/statuses/801530348

Are you a Java/PHP/.NET developer who, over the past 3 years or so, hasn’t had time to get past the 5 minute Ruby on Rails Blog screen cast? If you are, you can officially cross learning Rails off whatever clone of ta-da list you’re using. Why’s that? Because twitter might not be using it anymore!

That’s right! Your solidarity defending your bread and butter language against Ruby/Rails and sheer refusal to see Rails as anything but a toy has paid off. Good call on that one. Everyone believed you that Rails couldn’t scale before, but now you have hard proof. So, assuming you are able to pry yourself away from that killer app you’re writing that will generate (and scale) much more traffic than twitter, feel free to pat yourself on the back.

CNN Live Developing Story: Pelican stuck in tree

nathanblend — Thu, 01 May 2008 19:56:12 +0000

CNN’s Headlines have been pretty ridiculous in the past, but this one takes the cake. It wasn’t just a headline, it was a banner across the top of the page usually reserved for critical breaking news.