Get naked!

It's only natural, after all, to get naked on CSS Naked Day

(There Is No Cat will be back to it's usual dapper self tomorrow. Today, we show off the glory of our semantic markup.)

Posted at 4:53 AM
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College record stores are dying

There's a very sad article from AP about how record stores in college towns are shutting down. The advent of the Internet has made it impossible for many to continue.

A couple of my favorite stores in my old stomping grounds of State College, Pennsylvania, get shout outs. Arboria is closed. I spent a lot of time and money there in my years in State College. My friend Josh, who did the blues program at the campus radio station where I worked, was the manager there. They carried mostly used stuff (all vinyl back then), but had one wall of new records. A lot of them were cheap imports of dubious quality from places like Italy. My first copy of The Soft Boys' Underwater Moonlight was one of those. I certainly couldn't afford to pay for the UK import at the time. Arboria was great.

The owner of City Lights Records is quoted in the article. I'm glad to see they're still around, even if they're hanging on by a thread. They opened up in my last year in State College, around 1985. They focused more on new merchandise than used, so they were a nice complement to Arboria. I remember buying the first Yo La Tengo single there, before anyone had heard of them. I hadn't heard of them either, but they were from Hoboken, and that was good enough for me. The single wasn't even in the racks yet; it was in a pile of a dozen or so singles sitting on the counter that the owner hadn't gotten around to filing yet, just in that day.

As a fan of obscure music, I always found that the indie stores in college towns were the best places to go. I always made an effort whenever I travelled to seek them out. I guess that's not going to be such an effective tactic any more.

I think I'm going to have to make a music run to Other Music at lunch time....

Now listening to: "Broadway" from Sandinista by The Clash.

Tags: record store arboria city lights music

Posted at 3:07 AM
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Super Tuesday

Seen on a car in south Jersey this past weekend:

Tags: election primary bumper sticker gore obama dream ticket

Posted at 8:20 PM
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New Slash Music Download

One of the podcasts I've been catching up on during my daily commute to the city has been Slash Music, a podcast done by Tom Ravenscroft for Channel 4 Radio in the U.K. I fell many episodes behind, just as I did with every other podcast I subscribed to, and am now working my way through the backlog. But there hadn't been a new podcast in several months, which kept me from feeling too guilty over the increasing number of unlistened-to shows but still made me sad for the day not too far off when I run out of Slash Music shows to listen to.

Not to worry! I went to the Channel 4 Radio site this morning and found, right there in a big banner on the home page, that Ravenscroft has returned. The show is now called New Music Download and it's only every other week instead of every week. And it's not at the same URL as Slash Music, so if you subscribed to the old Slash Music podcast, you won't automatically get the new program; you'll have to resubscribe. But hey, beggers can't be choosers. I'm just glad to have new shows from the ever-droll Mr. Ravenscroft.

Tags: new music download channel 4 radio john peel tom ravenscroft podcast music

Posted at 5:44 AM
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Random observations after four weeks of commuting

I've been commuting into the city for four weeks now (not so much this week, because I've been home sick since Wednesday, but no matter), and I've noticed a few things of no particular importance.

• iPods are ubiquitous.

  Some mornings I can look across an entire five person row on the train and every single person will be listening to an iPod. I have yet to see another kind of MP3 player. No Zunes, no iRivers, no aging Rios, nothing. They don't exist. There is nothing but iPod.

• iPhones don't exist in the wild.

  There are a lot of smartphones in use on the train. Now that I'm spending so much time on the train every day, for the first time I feel a need for one. But with all the attention paid to the iPhone, you would think I would see some on the train. Nope, they're not there. I see some Windows Mobile-based phones, but mostly I see Crackberries. They're not as dominant as iPods are, but they're the clear leader. By contrast, in the office, I was treated to the sight of four of my co-workers holding their iPhones trying to figure out why it wouldn't work with Exchange. iPhones seem to be mainly for geeks at this point and haven't penetrated business culture as far as I can tell. Or at least not commuter train culture. Maybe everyone's doing what I'm doing and waiting for an iPhone that operates on 3G networks instead of AT&T's slow EDGE network.

• It's better to be on the bottom than on the top.

  On a couple of occasions, I've had the opportunity to ride home on one of the newfangled double-decker trains that NJ Transit is starting to adopt. I think they're mainly for the Northeast Corridor line to start, but they've been used on the Jersey Coast line that I take as well, and will be increasingly so as they get more of the cars. The first time, I got a seat on the bottom level. It was interesting. When you pull into a station, your eyes are at about ankle level of the people on the platform. It's an interesting change in perspective. The second time I rode one, I got a seat on the top level. You can see more from up there, but every little bump in the tracks is magnified. If you're at all prone to motion sickness, and even if you're not, it can be difficult being on top. I'm not usually someone who suffers from motion sickness, but I found my stomach becoming a bit unsettled when I was on top. In either case, though, the double decker trains have one big advantage over the older cars that NJ Transit typically uses: there are no three-across seats. Middle seat on a three-across during a busy rush hour commute can be an unpleasant way to travel home.

Like I said, nothing important, just some observations.

Tags: iPod iPhone trains commuting

Posted at 3:01 PM
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New job

The past few days have flown by at a dizzying pace. I'd been looking forward to moving on to the next phase. I just didn't know it would happen so quickly.

Last Friday marked eight weeks since I was laid off from my previous job. The job search was active, certainly much more so than when I was out of work in 2002 and 2003, and I had a number of interviews, but nothing was coming through.

That changed.

Friday morning at 11, I had an interview for a Front End Web Developer position at Magnani Caruso Dutton, a medium-sized creative agency in Manhattan. They've been around for several years. One of the recruiters I was working with told me in the course of prepping me for the interview that their interviews often went quickly and that I shouldn't be alarmed if it was over in a half hour. And so it was; by 11:30 I was back on the street and headed for home.

I hadn't even made it on to the train before I got the call. I was sitting in Penn Station when my cell phone rang. It was the recruiter with some good news; they had made an offer. That totally floored me; for one thing, I had been told that they had a couple of other candidates to talk to. I guess I made a good impression. :-) Also, I gathered that they had the impression that I had some other things going on, which was true, although they were things I wasn't truly interested in (for example, if the publishing company I interviewed at a couple of weeks earlier had called with an offer, I would have been presented with a difficult decision, as the job was with some very impressive people working in a way I like to work, but the corporate culture was one I didn't consider a good fit). Maybe they felt they had to strike while the iron was hot. And so they did; I got that phone call 45 minutes after the interview ended. I didn't want to discuss money and stuff while I was sitting in a train station, so we waited until I got home, but I think it took all of 60 seconds once I got the details to accept the offer. I was positively giddy on the train home.

The position is what they call freelance for now. Where I come from, it would be called a contract position. To me, freelance is where you work on various projects with unstable hours and pay your own taxes. Contract is where you work through a contract house and they take care of the taxes and stuff and send you a W2 at the end of the year. But as long as the money is green, I'll call it whatever they want. As another indication of how quickly they make decisions and things change, I started there on Monday. There's a possibility the job may become permanent/direct at some point, but it's not clear to me after two days when that might happen.

One of my biggest frustrations in my old job (the web part, not the running payroll part) was the tendency marketing and communications had to go to outside agencies for much of the fun stuff, leaving mostly the drudge work for us. We got a few bones, but most of the stuff you could sink your teeth into went elsewhere. I've largely been aiming my job search at small companies, and in particular at creative agencies and startups. So I got exactly what I was looking for, and now I'll be on the side that gets to do the fun stuff.

The other really good aspect of this new job as opposed to the old one is that they seemed to be particularly interested in my knowledge of web standards, semantic markup, and CSS (plus DOM-based Javascripting and Ajax). Those things don't seem to be on the radar at all in New Jersey, where most web development is firmly mired in 1997, but in New York City, they're becoming almost essential and appear to be in demand at the moment. Not everyone, not even most places, but enough places that there's finally a market for my approach to building sites. Finally, all those years in the wilderness trying to spread the good word are paying off. You're not going to find many people out there who have been using that approach for as long as I have. I was determined that on my next job, I would be able to take advantage of all the stuff I've learned over the years and wouldn't be trapped in the muck of table-infested legacy code. It appears that I've succeeded.

The one sad part about this is that I'm not sure how much time I'll have available for blogging and other hobbies in the future. The one good thing about my old job, the one thing that kept me there for so long, was that they were local at first, and then when they moved out of the area, they let me work from home. So work only consumed the hours between 9 and 5, which left me time for the stuff that kept me sane. Now that I'm working in the city, the commute alone has largely wiped out what used to be my leisure time.

Tags: employment job

Posted at 1:48 AM
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Anita Rowland

I was very sorry to read this evening that Anita Rowland passed away Monday afternoon after a long battle with cancer. I never met Anita in person, but have been reading her weblog since approximately forever, swapping comments both there and here. She had a way of making people feel welcome on her site, a real generosity of spirit. I know I don't blog much any more, but Anita remembered; just a few weeks ago, she found me on Flickr and added me to her (surprisingly short) list of contacts there.

My condolences to her widow, Jack William Bell, grandson R, and the rest of her family.

Tags: anitarowland

Posted at 12:36 AM
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161

Susan Kitchens tagged me with a meme that's going around where you're supposed to open the book that you're currently reading to page 161 and write down the sixth sentence and post it to your blog for the whole world to see.

There's one problem with this: unusually for me, I'm not actually reading anything at the moment.

Normally, I would have two or three books going in various states of being read. But despite the fact that I nominally have nothing but time on my hands lately, I seem to be too busy to do much reading.

There's a couple of reference books I purchased recently, but they're not exactly barn-burners, not the kind of thing you read from cover to cover. I find the list of shortwave broadcasts in Passport to World Band Radio very useful, but as a narrative it lacks something.

So this is more for the most recent book I read, It's All Too Much — An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff by Peter Walsh. I used to watch him on TLC's Clean Sweep all the time back when I was hooked on home improvement shows.

Page 161, sentence 6:

Here is a tried and true way to find out.

You'll have to get the book to find out what you're trying to find out. I see on Peter's site that the paperback version just came out.

I'll do my friends a favor and spare them from passing this on.

Tags: meme 161 books clutter

Posted at 6:05 PM
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