Just found a paper with the brainstorming session Kris and I had when coming up with my DJ name. Here are the entries, some are from me and some are from her :
48 Crêpes, many bottles of champagne and juices, and I don’t know how many tours of the new house later I’m now 32. Thanks to everyone who made it over for the most last minute Crêpestravaganza one could imagine. Kris and I finished off the evening sitting around a fire in the fireplace with Adam and Christine while the lightning and thunder came down. Then some excellent arrabiata (as always) by Kris. And finally closed the evening with a viewing of Inception. Now i’m off to the 2010 San Mateo International Motorcycle Show with Kevin for some bike porn.
Here are artists and projects that I saw at APE that looked interesting (in no particular order). I recommend checking them out.
As some of you may know, Zembla and I cite Demian Bulwa, staff writer at the Chron, as being one of the best examples of the miserable state of affairs over at the Chron. You can read about Bulwa’s excellent journalistic work here where he explains how an 11 year old drug use conviction explains why someone shouldn’t be allowed to drive, and here where we get insight into the connection between terrorists in Lodi and truck drivers burning down freeways.
I found out today that Bulwa has been publishing top notch content for many many years now. In his 2004 article on a murder in Hillsborough he puts on his Columbo hat and finds an interesting connection between this murder in which the victims and suspects were Asian and three robberies in the prior 6 years, also involving Asians.
So it looks like Hillsborough is having an epidemic of either crimes committed by Asians or crimes against Asians. I’m beginning to see the connection. I’m not sure here if the Asians are the good guys or the bad guys but they’re clearly at fault, either for being victimized or for victimizing. I’m sure it’s unrelated to the fact that Hillsborough is 23.6% Asian.
It looks like his keen observation however didn’t make it into the revised draft of his article. It’s too bad because this kind of investigative journalism should’ve gotten him a Pulitzer.
Today Philip Kaplan, co-founder of the website Blippy responded to news that Blippy had revealed users’ credit card numbers online, which google crawled, indexed and shared with the internets. In this blog post, by Kaplan, we get some real gems.
Kaplan explains that the problem of Blippy revealing users’ credit card numbers on the internet is “a lot less bad than it looks”. He goes on to explain why it’s less bad :
Here Kaplan somehow tries to skirt around the fact that though the “raw” data typically contains harmless data, in this case it contained users’ credit card numbers and that the data was put up on the internet.
He continues, trying to somehow explain that the real problem is that Google indexed their site, not that they publicly shared users’ credit card numbers. To me this seems like a burglar telling the judge that the one to blame is the snooping neighbour who saw the burglar robbing a house and called the cops. If that damn neighbour had just minded his own business we wouldn’t be in this whole snafu.
Kaplan finishes with this winner by explaining how it’s ok that his company revealed these users’ credit card numbers to everyone on the internet because you and I share our credit card numbers with waiters, clerks and “hundreds of other people” all the time. Wow, he’s right. Blippy isn’t the bad guy here. The bad buys are google for catching them and revealing their blunder, and every merchant in the world who requires our credit card numbers in order for us to purchase goods. It’s so simple.
I’m no expert, but it seems to me that “co-founder a PR expert does not make”. I can easily imagine a companies response to a mistake like this which would at the very least not further detract from my trust in that company, but having the founder come on and clarify
is a complete fail. I’d never heard of Blippy before this. With a more reasonable response in which they took responsibility for what they’d done I can imagine using their service. I can guarantee that I will not ever use their service now though.
Tune in tonight to catch the third monthly episode of Ample Mammal (AKA The Polish Ambassador) live on my show. You can hear a kickin’ live set every third Thursday of the month at 7pm on KALX Berkeley 90.7FM. Ample Mammal will be serving up some dirty electro tune cake with mashed up hip hop frosting. If you aren’t up and dancing within the first five minutes of the set, you are entitled to a refund at the door. Tune in online or find is in the RF at 90.7FM.
I’ve had a mixed couple days here. This morning’s commute took an hour fifteen. Twenty minutes on the bike had I ridden. I can’t really complain because while picking up some high-value BART tickets today I drew the “BART favor in your error. Collect $15″ monopoly card. I handed over my two commuter checks for $45 and $60, and was given two bart tickets, I turned to walk away and checked the value on the tickets to make sure I’d gotten the right one’s only to find two $64 dollar BART tickets. I figured I’d just handed over different commuter checks than I’d thought I had but after catching my train when I looked at the stubs they were indeed $45 and $60. Anyhow, brightened my morning despite the delay
This, however, is not the real news (or related to the photo above). The real news is that next week Tuesday Feb 2, your humble Concrete Skyline will be engineering the live performance of none other than The Album Leaf, live on KALX. That’s right, I will be working with Jimmy LaValle and the band on Tuesday. For those playing the home game, The Album Leaf is one of my favorite bands. I’ll also be at their show at the great american on the 12th. So tune in Tuesday at 1pm or listen online.
