Outside Lands is a big, 3-day music festival in Golden Gate Park, in San Francisco. I caved and bought a ticket for Friday night in spite of the following reasons. My reasons were only reaffirmed when I was there and I’m thankful I didn’t shell out the money for the full 3 days.
Long lines for food
Long lines to get an alcohol bracelet
Long lines to get alcohol
Long lines to pee
Burn out and exhaustion
$$$ Tickets
VIP Areas
Half-assed fans
Having to pick between 2 good bands
Corporate sponsorships
Don’t get me wrong; I liked the line-up and I liked all the performances. Radiohead put on a fantastic show even if I only could watch them on the screen. And #9 wasn’t a problem because no one else played at the same time as the headliner. But I still feel like I paid $100 to go to a crowded Radiohead show.
Last night I saw my friend’s band, Balmorhea, play at Cafe du Nord. I was surprised to find that they were the opening act because in Austin—their home town—they’ve played sold out shows at much larger venues. They had just as many, if not more, viewers than the acts that followed—or perhaps they just knew more people in San Francisco.
Their instruments consist of acoustic/electric guitar, stand-up bass, fiddle, (something that looks like a larger fiddle—not sure what instrument it is), keyboard, melodian, and drums, which my friend plays. The melodies are entrancing and the listener is never quite sure what to expect next. With no vocals or repeating chorus, the songs don’t have the predictable repetition that prevails in most pop songs. Each song feels like you’re on a ship at sea waiting to see what weather Neptune is going to send you next.
You can still catch them in the western states in the next few weeks. Check out below for a sample, “San Solomon”
I’ve already told you how File2HD.com will help you download any mp3 that’s playing on as site, but if you’re searching for a particular song, you’re better off using G2P.org, or Google 2 Peer.
When a webmaster inadvertently leaves the permissions on directories open, Google indexes them like regular pages. With some crafty code that utilizes some of Google’s advanced search features, you can find these music directories and download the mp3 files. Here’s the query:
G2P basically does the same type of thing but with an easier interface—you don’t have edit this long cryptic string, just input the song for which you’re searching.
Warning: watch out for fake open directories like listen77.com, which will redirect you to a page where you can buy music. You can usually tell the fake ones because they have advertisements.
I’m going to start posting funny messages my friends leave me while they’re drunk. I’ve got some saved in my archives that I’ll bring out periodically, but here is one from this last weekend:
Artsy music and video sites Muxtape and Vimeo have their logos as ASCII Art in HTML comments at the top of all their pages; a nice surprise for anyone poking around there.
I noticed this “graffiti” mural by the Larkin Street entrance of the Broadway tunnel the other day.
The technique is known as “reverse grafitti,” which is created by selectively cleaning dirty surfaces. Since tunnels are usually filthy from exhaust, they are usual targets for this type of work. A year ago, artist Alexandre Orion used the technique on a tunnel in Sao Paulo.
After some researching online I found out the graffiti is actually a condoned advertisement for Clorox’s new environmentally friendly line of cleaning products, Green Works. It’s kind of lame that it’s an fake guerrilla marketing advertisement, but at least it’s for a green product. Still, how is this legal and other graffiti isn’t? I guess you can do anything if you pay someone enough.
This post is to call out an artist whose work I appreciate. Most of the subject matter in the artist’s sketches consists of nitty-gritty NYC debaucheries: cheap beer, pills, sex, cigarettes and rock n’ roll. This is why I had always assumed the artist was a male; but no, Hope Gangloff is female. (I first noticed her work featured in the header of myopenbar.com)
The medium, too, looks cheap: drawn with blue, red and black pens. But the—art and humanity within it—is rich.
I’ve invented a new HTML tag called the <ispan>. It behaves exactly like a <span>, it just won’t inherit any CSS that’s applied to a span.
At my job, our interactive advertising formats dynamically manipulate our publishers’ pages and add content. The trouble with this is that we have no idea the CSS that the publisher uses and our content can erroneously inherit some of the publishers’ styles. Moreover we can’t edit their CSS. The worse CSS rule I’ve come across is this: img {height:50px; width:50px;}
There’s two strategies to avoid this. 1) On every single tag you add to the document, you must set an inline style to override any possible inheritance. (There are at least 10+ common styles to account for.) 2) Make every element (except for images and iframes) an ispan element and odds are the publisher has no styles set for an ispan.
There are two catches: 1) You must create the <ispan> with the createElement method (you cannot use innerHTML or document.write). 2) I thought this was invincible to any CSS a crappy coder could create, but it’s still suceptible to any styles applied to the selector ‘*’.
So, if you’re dealing with javascript and unknown CSS, simply create your own tag. You can call it whatever you want: <whateveryouwant>
I just got a spam promoting Apple’s Black Friday specials. I was surprised that the creative wasn’t Apple’s usual black-and-chrome motif; this one looks more like a target ad. Cool nonetheless:
