So, we saw WALL•E and now every other movie I’ve seen subsequently has paled in comparison. But not really. We’ve seen about 4 other movies in the meantime, and I can’t remember the last time I had this large of a list of movies I want to see, even in the summertime. Since WALL•E, we’ve also seen Full Battle Rattle, The Wackness and Hancock. I still need to see Hellboy 2, Dark Knight, and for some reason, I really want to see Journey to the Center of the Earth, but only if it’s in 3-D!

But where will I get all the time to do these things? We’re headed to Cooperstown to go see Dave Niehaus get inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, then we’ll be in Seattle a couple of weeks later. I’ve been trying to find the time and inclination to finish music projects that I’ve had, and B-Dogg and I have a couple of songs up our sleeve that we want to cover for the end of the year. End of the year, you say? Yeah, it’s already past the half-way point, and before you know it, I’ll be making a call for new songs in October/November for the year end IRCMT2008.

But really, the hard thing here is actually getting anything done in this room because it’s always blazing hot in the summer and you can’t well have the air conditioner AND fan running while you’re doing recording. It’s a dilemma.

I’ve gone ahead and updated the back-end for Wordpress around here, and was thinking about re-designing the front to get motivated to start posting again, but that’s obviously just another distraction to getting writing again. Jonas and I have plans to do just that, but I figured the easiest thing to do is to Just Write. So there you are.

I’ve got a boatload of songs cued up for this week and next to make up for my absence — I’m sitting here on a sunny Memorial Day afternoon and have uploaded a lot of songs that I’ve been listening to that maybe some have been missing out on. Enjoy!

Guess what? I never got around to uploading and writing about all these songs, and now this song just sat in the draft queue for forever, so I’m just going with what I got. Upon closer inspection, I think this album is better than Let Go. That’s saying something. We listened to bits and pieces of it back and forth from Baltimore and Boston the past two weekends traveling with B-dogg and Owl. I’m overly excited about it, and oddly enough, I’ve had more than one half-hour conversation about the new Death Cab album. It’s like 2003 all over again!

I Like What You Say.mp3

The songs on Lucky are listenable through and through, and the harmonies and doubled vocals are smooth and consistently hummable. When I turned this song on just now, I was surprised because the song came out of my laptop and the stereo speakers in the living room, and I just got this unexpected rush of Nada Surf. It was great. Too bad I can’t get my airtunes to consistently deliver the music without crapping out.

I’d say this absence was about the end of the semester, which, to a certain extent, it is, but that’s just this week and last week, not the whole month. Fact of the matter is, I’ve been working full-time, at two different places (not simultaneously) and generally been very, very busy. But what else is new? I was thinking about doing this feature, which will probably die along with all my other “features” that helps me share, and more importantly, helps everyone else out there I know share with me, what they learned today. I want to call it TILT: Things I Learned Today, and really only think it’s so great because I think it’s a great acronym.

So, TILT (may be boring):

• SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) is a Belgium-based company that created its own network for secure financial transactions (rather than send on open internet).
• Sarbanes-Oxley Act is a gov’t regulation established in 2002 established to protect against Enron-type investment disasters.
• Eye-tracking studies (Jakob Neilsen) show that users scan lists and left-side navs, so left-aligning text should be done to facilitate this behavior.

Perhaps someday you may be interested in something I learned. Anyone else?

Leap Day was actually yesterday, and Jams told me how to say it in Dutch. I had no idea how to pronounce it, so here’s his email to me with an explanation attempt:

g e l u kk i g e s ch r i kk e l d a g
x E l u k E x E s x r i k E l d a x

- x is something like the “j” in spanish; it’s what people sometimes call a guttural or hacking-cough kind of sound. as you can see it’s really common in
dutch.
- E is a schwa. It normally written like an upside-down “e”. it’s a very unstressed vowel - in english “the apple” would be transcribed something like “thE appEl”
- l = l
- k=k
- s=s
- d=d
- r is something like a lightly rolled r.
- u is similar to “oo” in the english word “boot” (it’s actually more like the umlaut u in german but nevermind)
- a is like the “a” in “‘father”

info you didn’t ask for:

- “gelukkig” is used like “happy” as in “happy leapday” or “happy new year”. (the english world “luck” was actually borrowed from a related dutch word about 500 or 600 years ago.)
- “schrikkel” is the dutch equivelent of “leap” as in “leapyear” or “leapday”. it comes form a verb that means “to be scared” and by extension “‘jump” or “leap”
- “dag” means “day”

so it kind of means “lucky scary day”. but not really.

I walked into the bathroom the other day at school and saw my hair, and my initial reaction was to say to myself, aloud, “Lookin’ good.” Delivery so dry, that when I realized that the person sitting in the stall probably heard me, he probably thought I was being serious. I laughed.

I will miss this job.

kid: These computers are so slow.
me: Well, sometimes you just gotta live with it. Life is a disappointment.
kid: (walks away, humming mission impossible theme).

If I wasn’t going to see the Lucksmiths (twice) this weekend, I’d be going to see Darjeeling Limited (twice). All around, not a bad set of options. When’s the last time this happened to you in your po-dunk town?

Naw, I’m just kidding, your town’s great.

</newyorksnottiness>

San Francisco was fantastic, and I even forced everyone to go to Barney’s in SF with me to test out some burgers, so that’ll be coming soon. We played some great games of petanque, ate way too much food, and probably didn’t drink enough, but that’s probably because we ate too much food.

Here’s a Feist oldie for you:
Feist - Inside and out

[audio:09 Inside and Out.mp3]

Minor .htaccess problems there for a while, had to revert to ugly permalinks. Should be fixed now, so you can leave all your happy birthday comments — I know you were going to!

Got to San Francisco late last night, spent most of our time eating. Got some rad presents from Owl, will go to the batting cage now!

One and that’s it.

Several things, right. I’m headed to San Francisco for the weekend, and I know that everything has been quiet here for a while, but here’s some stuff for you:

• I’m taking Usability Leadership, and started blogging my homework. It’s over here: op_log / usability. That’s why there are drawings in my Flickr page, which, incidentally, had an unusually high number of views, which leads me to believe that people would rather see my drawings than my pictures. Makes sense, though, since everyone on earth has a digital camera and shoots everything on earth.
• I finally started working on/finishing up several other projects, including my portfolio and my project for the class I took for London. The latter isn’t done, but it’s going to take a while to get done; I’m working on developing a new website/interface for libraries. Big project, I know.
• James is in the Netherlands now. Somehow, he ended up with a bike that has a drum brake, which I’ve never even seen before. James, how about you take a picture and send it over, huh?
• Shows are coming up, including The Lucksmiths, The Mountain Goats and Architecture in Helsinki. I’m sad I missed M. Ward the other night, but will be following up on these other shows soon. Want to go? Let me know. Also: Sufjan Stevens, coming up with the BQE in November.
• I wrote up 10 or so haiku about London for our school paper. I thought they were pretty funny, but I’m sure some people will not think so.
• Shane recently sent me an article about a fixed gear rider that was struck by a car and died in Seattle. That’s some pretty scary shit right there. The next day I wore my helmet to ride my five minutes to school, and subsequently almost got hit on my way home by a driver that just wasn’t paying any attention. I’m lucky I was. In any case, it’s an issue, so stay safe on your bike, please.

Hey, we’ve been in Brooklyn for a year now! Happy anniversary, New York. It’s been great.