Okay, I don’t write about much.  and I certainly don’t write about music a whole lot. But here we go.  I saw a great parody video this morning called “Take a Nerdy Picture“, which is a spoof of a Taio Cruz track called “Dirty Picture” that features Kesha on vocals.

Great video, very funny, and boobs everywhere (disclaimer and actual plot point: I like boobs).  While listening though, I thought to myself “Hey, I recognize this bassline, don’t I?”  So I took a trip down Grooveshark lane to find the original to see if it had the same thumping bassline.  Sure enough, yeah, there it was.  It took me a second, but I remembered where I had heard it before.  Never one to let a wrong go unnoticed, I dug a little deeper.  The Wikipedia article on Mr. Cruz’s “Dirty Picture” had this to say about the bassline that I recognized:

Cruz described the creation of the song in an interview: “Funnily enough, it came outta nowhere really. I basically just wanted to create a song that had a fun, electro-sounding beat. So I started producing a track with Fraser T. Smith, and it came out with this really cool, dirty bass-line.”

Really, Taio?  Just sorta, pooped popped out of a random orifice, did it?  Maybe it was more of a regurgitation than an epiphany:  the bassline is originally from a great Benny Benassi track called “Satisfaction“.

And I’m not the only one who’s noticed, either.  Check out the 5th and 6th paragraph.

Anyway, The Benny Benassi song is the clearly superior track here.  Those of you who’ve stuck with me so far, here’s the high point of this story’s plot arc:  “Satisfaction” also has some mind-boggling boobs.

Now, if only I could figure out how I managed to remember that Benny Benassi song so easily.

a while back i designed my own marquee for my MAME cabinet at home.  i really liked the design, and for my birthday this year, i had it printed up and shipped to me.  it arrived in the mail today, and it looks glorious.  i mean, wow.  i wish you could see it.  i guess i could take a picture.

oh wait, i did.

it’s a picture of the giant, sad crack in the plexiglas all the way across the corner.  i emailed this pathetic picture to the printers and i hope desperately that they’ll be able to help me out.  it’s a sad thing to have happened.  and i waited so patiently!  oh well.

at least we all can rest assured that the effectiveness of “FRAGILE: DO NOT BEND” labels hasn’t changed dramatically in the past 235 years.

edit:  the marquee image.

i’m drawing more.  i went to ICON6 this past week, and man, that was crazy.  i went on the advice of a good friend, and it was very educational.  probably in ways that the board of directors hadn’t even intended.  i drew more in those 4 days than i had in weeks.  probably longer.  i learned that i probably don’t want to do commercial illustration — i already have a job that isn’t too dissimilar.  i learned that instead, telling stories is what i want to do.  i also learned that i’m afraid of not having any.

most importantly, i accidentally let go of my fear and wound up drawing people as they talked on stage.  drawing likenesses has always been a hang-up for me.  it feels good to have overcome that.

so i’ve been using screen for a couple years now, and i really dig it. i use it to keep tabs on my ubuntu box at home, where i run irssi on top of znc, apache, and a few other services. the only thing that bugged me up until now was that any time i needed to reboot (patches or power outages), i’d have to spend extra time interactively logging in and setting up my screen session all over again. i fixed all that this morning.  i did two things:

• i did a little RTFM’ing of the screen man page so that i could write a custom .screenrc file (actually .screen.boot) that would start up exactly the way i wanted it to every time, and
• i taught myself a little bit of bash so that i could write a boot script that would test for screen sessions and if none existed, would start up my custom screen for me so that it would be ready before i even logged in.  yeah, i’m a tcsh guy by nature.  i don’t know what to tell you.

first, i made a .screenrc.boot (as opposed to a normal .screenrc) to differentiate from a normal invocation of screen, because i only want this custom setup at boot time, and not every time i invoke screen.  don’t feel that you have to, but it might be a good idea.

following are some example commands to add to the end of your ~/.screenrc.boot.  check the man page for more details, or google for ‘screenrc’, there’s a lot of info out there.  thusly:

screen -t irssi 0 /home/alice/scripts/zncirssi
screen -t shell1 1 /bin/tcsh
screen -t shell2 2 /bin/tcsh
screen -t rtorrent 3 /usr/bin/rtorrent
screen -t alpine 4 /usr/bin/alpine

to explain the syntax briefly here:
screen -t title windownum process
this lets me give each window a name, and windownum is the window number i want each process to have, with the process to start at the end.

then, once i had my .screenrc.boot set up the way i liked, i created the boot script as /etc/init.d/screen-startup.   you can give it any name, really.  i cribbed my version from /etc/screen-cleanup.  don’t forget to link the finished script to /etc/rc3.d or wherever is most appropriate for your flavor of *nix, so that it actually executes at boot time.  here’s the script minus some of the irrelevant header comments:

#!/bin/sh
# Script to start screen on boot for users.
#

set -e

SCREENDIR=/var/run/screen

if [ "$(ls -A $SCREENDIR/S-alice | grep boot)" ]; then
    echo boot screen session already running for alice
else
    # -dm runs the screen detached,
    # -S lets me define a name for the session,
    # -c lets me pick my config file.
    sudo -u tonye /usr/bin/screen -dmS alice.boot -c /home/alice/.screenrc.boot
fi

exit 0

if you have multiple users who needs screens at boot time, feel free to add additional if conditionals.  i could probably set up a foreach, but i was lazy.

additionally, zncirssi is a short script that runs znc and then irssi right afterwards. if run alone, znc will fork into the background and then close the originating screen window. this way you can make sure znc forks and then once running, lets irssi run.

contents of zncirssi:

/usr/bin/znc ; /usr/bin/irssi

that’s pretty much it. i hope you find it useful.

edit: i found that the bash script didn’t launch screen the way i thought it should.  not sure why.

so i’ve been working with sara on some ideas for a book collaboration, where she would write and i would illustrate.  i’ve turned to my folklore resources for inspiration on certain aspects (yes, i’m being deliberately vague about the project, as it is itself quite ephemeral), and in my research, i have come across some weird-ass folk tales.

and now i hear that 24-hour comic day approacheth.  this saturday, in fact.  on my way back to work from lunch today, it struck me that one tale in particular would make an amazing and humorous translation to comic form.  i won’t reveal much, but in one part, the Virgin Mary herself is stealing babies.  i don’t think it gets much better than that.

and this weekend, it could be translated to a comic in no less than twenty four hours.  mind you, i’m harboring no illusions about the quality of the work that would be produced in such a compressed time frame, but the idea of it is tantalizing.  almost palpable.

so.

i was going to brew a new batch of beer, but now i’m waffling — do i continue with my original plan, or do i knuckle down and draw?  i guess we’ll just have to see what happens.

i don’t even know what to say.  this is so awesome that it defies explanation.  Rhythm and Hues won the academy award for best visual effects!  i am … stunned.  i am also REALLY FREAKING EXCITED!

dumping links here for later reference:

• NY Times feature on Golden Compass vfx
• oscar.com transcript of the visual effects award
• vfx academy award winners photo

AND

FUCK YEAH — R&H wins the Special Visual Effects award at BAFTA 2008, for our work on The Golden Compass!

We were up against The Bourne Ultimatium, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Pirates of the Carribean: At World’s End, and Spider Man 3 :) That’s a pretty big win, if you ask me, and a nice little bell on my cap for the look development work I did on the wolves in Bolvangar.

links:

• link to the BAFTA site listing the winners
• youtube video of our awesome vfx supervisor Bill Westenhofer giving his thank-you speech at the BAFTA ceremony in london.

dear $USERNAME,

i’m taking time today to write you to ask you to please make sure to take time today to get to $POLLING_STATION near $USER_HOME, and vote! however, if you find that you’ll be voting for $NOT_MY_CANDIDATE, or that you belong to $WRONG_PARTY, please don’t worry about it. as a matter of fact, you probably should steer clear of $POLLING_STATION altogether, as i hear that some $RABID_GROUP members are picketing near there. you never know what kind of $DISASTER[rand(0,100)] could occur.

thanks,

friendOf($USERNAME).

so i’ve played with PGP in the past, and was completely overwhelmed and confused. for me, the tools were arcane, the documentation assumed much knowledge that i didn’t have, and wasn’t very helpful for the novice.

that was probably ten years ago. PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) has gone away, and in its place is GPG (GNU Privacy Guard). there are distros of GPG for pretty much every major platform, and there’s even a firefox extension to help integrate gpg into gmail, making things That Much Easier. i’ve used it a bit (though i only have three friends who use gpg at the moment), and the process isn’t as hard as i once thought, especially with the tools in the state they are today. if you’re curious, you might find it a little easier than you thought. it basically works like this:

1. install GPG for your OS.
2. with your newly installed software, use the key manager to create a key pair for a specific email address. this includes a private key that you never share with anyone, and a public key that you do share with everyone that you want to exchange mail with.
3. get your friends’ public keys. if you want to exchange mail with people, they need to be using gpg as well. that’s the drawback. import these keys with your key manager.
4. you’re now ready to encrypt things to other people! when you encode something, make sure you encode it using the public key of the person you want to send it to. that’s the mistake i made early on, and wound up encrypting a bunch of stuff with my public key that only i could unencrypt. nurrr.

fireGPG works will for firefox, and integrates some handy buttons into gmail so that you can sign, verify, encrypt, decrypt, and send — all without having to leave your browser. when i installed GPG4Win on my XPSP2 box, it dropped right in and worked like a charm. however, i also installed it on my suse 9.3 box at work. in that case, it complained of not being able to find the gpg binary, even though i pointed the extension right at it. on the fireGPG forums, this seems to be a known issue for some people (on both windows and linux) with no solid solution yet, so it may or may not bite you. the developer is working on it, so there’s still hope.

another thing i found myself wanting to do is have my private key on two different machines (home, work) so that i could send encrypted mail from both places. i found a really awesome command-line gpg cheatsheet that helps a lot when doing more of the fiddly bits, and i recommend reading it. tip for you windows users: after installing GPG4Win, running cmd.exe to get a terminal will let you do these command-line items.

so that’s been my past couple days, aside from a lot of super mario galaxy with sara. oh, and tiger woods pga tour 2008. which, while a nice game, has one of the worst interfaces in the known universe. cheers, and if i hear from you, i hope to hear from you via gpg!

here’s why: she just read 1000 picture books in 100 days.

yeah. i know! she’s crazy, what can i say?
she was set on her course this past august when a speaker at a conference that she attends suggested that in order to know how to write a good picture book, one must have read a thousand of them. she decided to do so, and moreover, she decided to do it in only a hundred days. holy crap! here’s an excerpt from her recent post about it:

“On the last day of 2007, I reached my goal of reading 1000 picture books in 100 days. It was one of the best things I’ve ever done for my writing. I have a new understanding of picture books that I’m already putting to good use and much fun.

I kept track of all the books on LibraryThing. You can sort the entries by any category, author, ratings, or, most handy of all, publisher. I’m excited about using it to see what publishing houses are publishing what sort of books. I hope you find the list useful as well.”

so if you want to help me out, i’ve submitted the story to Propeller and Digg both. please feel free to vote on them! … (propeller, digg)