1. Long lines for food
2. Long lines to get an alcohol bracelet
3. Long lines to get alcohol
4. Long lines to pee
5. Burn out and exhaustion
6. $$$ Tickets
7. VIP Areas
8. Half-assed fans
9. Having to pick between 2 good bands
10. 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”

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:

-inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:"index of" +"last modified" +"parent directory" +description +size +(wma|mp3) "artist|album|track|etc"

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.

Happy searching!

                               **
                              /**             ******
 **********  **   ** **   ** ******  ******  /**///**  *****
//**//**//**/**  /**//** ** ///**/  //////** /**  /** **///**
 /** /** /**/**  /** //***    /**    ******* /****** /*******
 /** /** /**/**  /**  **/**   /**   **////** /**///  /**////
 *** /** /**//****** ** //**  //** //********/**     //******
///  //  //  ////// //   //    //   //////// //       //////

 ___    ___   ___   __  __  ___    _____     ______
/   \  /_  \ /_  \ /_ \/_ \/_  \  / ___ \   /  __  \
|/\  \  /  /   | |   | / \ / \ | / /___\ \ /  /  \  \
   \  \/  /    | |   | | | | | | | ______/ |  |  |  |
    \    /     | |   | | | | | | | \    __ |  |  |  |
     \  /      | |_  | | | | | |  \ \__/ / \  \__/  /
      \/       \__/  \_\ \_\ \_\   \____/   \______/

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.

The medium, too, looks cheap: drawn with blue, red and black pens. But the—art and humanity within it—is rich.

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>

Apple:

Target: