Just came across this supremely weird story about photos that used to be taken of freshmen at Ivy League and Seven Sisters schools. As recently as forty years ago, freshmen were told to strip naked and allow themselves to be photographed with metal pins affixed along their spines to indicate their posture. This was supposedly part of some now-debunked, Nazi-tinged scientific theory. Many of the photos were destroyed, but the surviving ones (27,000 of them) are now in a restricted archive at the Smithsonian. Many now-prominent people were photographed, including George W. Bush, Hillary Rodham, Meryl Streep, Diane Sawyer, Judith Martin, Bob Woodward, and Nora Ephron.
I have, in my hot little virtual hands, all the tracks from Rough Draft, the album that my former band, Ryan, recorded back in high school, freshly digitized by Michael. I put them up on a file hosting site to spare my poor home connection. I posted one of these tracks last month. They're here, or if you're reading this on my blog instead of Facebook, you can listen to them below.
The previous post still has a smokin' live version of What Price Love.
We lost our cat Crumb today. He lived a good cat life with his brothers and sisters. He was happiest when we left him alone, but he always made our day when he decided to visit us.
We'll miss you, buddy. You'll always have a place behind the books on the highest shelf of our house.
My home Internet connection has been dropping out every day for nearly a week. It always goes down between 10:30 and 11:00, and doesn't come back up until the evening, sometimes as late as 9:00. Since I host my websites from home, this means the sites go dark during this period as well. Frankly, you're lucky to be reading this at all.
Comcast is sending someone over to look at it today, so hopefully it will be resolved soon.
I've been doing line monitoring through broadbandreports.com - they'll check every ten minutes from three different cities to see if your connection is up, and keep track of it for you. They even provide some nice graphs, which geeks love.
Here's a graph of my connection for the past two days:
See the green bits? Those are the happy places. They're like vast tropical seas of lime Jello Mountain Dew margaritas that you can swim in to your heart's content.
You'll also have noticed the blue bits. Those are evil mountains of fear and despair amongst the tranquil green seas. They're blue because they're actually giant piles of dead Smurfs.
It's very disconcerting when you have no Internet access. It feels a lot like that scene in Apollo 13 when they go around the moon and are out of radio contact for a while. There's no telling what could happen during that time - you can't get email, you can't Google anything, there's no Wikipedia, no Facebook, no Flickr, no YouTube… seriously, it's like 1996, it's fucking medieval.
