i received boards of canada – ‘in a beautiful place out in the country’ today in the mail from amazon..! I have no idea who sent it. Seems these amazon wishlists work better than i ever expected ;).

Thank you very much whoever sent it, i’m listening to it right now and so far it’s great. (Thanks anna!)

one more for the evening.. this article on p2p freeloading on the o’reilly p2p site lead to a number of interesting texts. xerox apparently did a study analyzing this phenomenon with gnutella. Furthermore, all of the essays refer to an old paper titled ‘The Tragedy of the Commons‘, an extremely well written essay on how common technological competition and development can escape control of all of the developers with a potentially negative net result.

the state of ecstacy is an upcoming academic conference on mdma: “The goal of the conference is to formulate pragmatic recommendations for advancing the state of knowledge and health policy about MDMA”. The cool thing is that it’s being webcast on Feb. 2nd. I’m excited to hear some of the individuals speak. Alexander Shulgin, Ph.D. and Ann Shulgin, (pioneer in researching the field, author of pihkal and tihkal.) Emanuel Sferios, founder and director of dancesafe. Many more researchers and doctors presenting and discussing the latest findings..

meta data.. sweet meta data.

(what data dreams of..)

this is what i’m working towards for a nice portal.. there are a number of them out there.. i suppose i should just use one of them. i probably will, but i’ll keep mine up there since it still provides a nice set which aren’t on the others.. i’ll keep tweaking it.

bonus points for the tal links at the very top.

irc may die? impossible.

i’m definitely going to be keeping this service handy for any future encounters.. wait that could by hypothetical.. for the many future encounters with clueless individuals on internet mailing lists. great idea.

i know i’ve mentioned it before.. but this set from 07/27/00 at Eklektic in SF on betalounge is *still* a regular listen. there are definitely some areas which are better than others, but it is hard to argue with a 5 hour stream with some damn fine drum and bass throughout the entire set.

know any other particularly good ones? .. there are two older ones from richie hawtin, both good. plenty of great stuff on that site.. just needs some digging.

well.. i added quite a few things. links on the left directly to the live music info and reviews and radio show playlists and info. links on the right to the archives, since the old page was pretty bad. a few new links on the portal to some useability sites and audio streams. check out goodexperience.com for useability and scriptingnews for everything else.. ;). well, almost.

i’m pretty happy with how things are going with the site. things are relatively easy to chage and update. i’m starting to get more comforatable with what and how i want to add material. it is still primarily a source for myself to help with moving between many computers, but it’s exponentially better than the old caucus conf.

i’m particularly excited about finally archiving a few playlists for the radio show. i do have a few old tapes… but it’ll be great to look back at what we were all into at different points. speaking of which, i also added a few streams to the portal. dack.com is a nice site based here in minneapolis and he’s got a weekly ‘chill out’ radio show which is streamed. it has the power, at times, to fill that difficult gap between full out ambient or weird music, which may be too far or depressing, and ‘normal’ music, which mcan be a bit too intrusive. the older show isn’t bad. the other stream i added, aquafm, is an ambient stream home base… you may become sleepy. ;)

on top of all that. the green leaves actually give the *impression* of warmth. heh..

got the playlist up.. it should be fun to watch, i wish i had some from a few years back.

i just heard on krlx that reel big fish might be playing spring concert!.. i reely reely hope so.

had my first radio show of the term last night on krlx. i’ll post the playlist later today, just in case anyone really was looking for that. ;)

well.. if you haven’t heard about the crackhouse attack on raves this week, you should. mark sent me a copy of the new dancesafe newsletter which i wasn’t aware of yet, thanks ;). they’ve got some good info on a number of topics in there, check it out.

also, mnvibe.com got their new forum system up and running today.. they’re using vbulletin, and it *rocks*. watch that board for local info.

in the meantime.. a large group of anonymous carleton students are carrying on a mass conversation through *email*. -sigh- . someday. someday, they’ll learn of this thing called ‘web’.. until then.. we can only endure. ;).

as the us is returning to the past in dealing with embriotic ‘human rights’, the uk is simultaneously legalizing the use of human embryos to find cures to disease. while the uk’s decision is, of course, controversial.. it is in stark contrast to the direction we’re headed in. [ reuters ]

i updated a few more things on the events page. let me know if you know anything more…

a dancesafe oriented links page for europe based groups.

check out this *sweet* picture of the earth’s lights from space. I believe it was taken last november. ( or a smaller version for the bandwidth impaired.. but you really should wait for the big one. it’s worth it ;).

i just bought two GA tickets for the u2 concert may 1st at the target center in Minneapolis. I can’t believe it.

I am in absolute awe of the amount of manpower put into attempting to buy and correctly selling more than 200,000 tickets in one morning (14 shows).. I got incredibly lucky and ended up with the first random draw number at the ticketmaster outlet i was at.. even that didn’t guarantee GA tickets (!). I suppse sales of this sort have been going on for some time now.. but i’ve never had to deal with trying to get tickets for a show of this magnitude and popularity before. unreal.

I bought my tickets and drove home approx. 15 minutes away and immediately checked ticketmaster.com to see how the sale was going. First incredible event: the website worked. I would love to see a usage graph for ticketmaster.com on mornings like this.. i cannot believe it was working, and even relatively quickly. Second incredible event: basically everything was gone! Sure, you could get a few remaining seat pairs at the opposite end of the arena (more than a half mile away i believe).. or you could get a few single seats.. but these will all be sold momentarily as well. I figure tickets were being sold at somewhere around 500-700+ tickets per minute.. possibly more. Third incredible event: this show sold *slowly*. Since this was pretty cool to watch I read about a few other dates/venues where people had done everything within their power to get *any* ticket with no luck.

and finally. the prices. $46 ($50 something after ticketmaster) for my floor without chair ticket, already listed on ticketsplus (some sort of organized scalping?) at $199. Thats the cheap one. Almost the entire lower circle in the arena is $130 per seat!.. ! Almost the entire upper circle (we’re talking a long ways away here..) excluding seats behind the stage ($46) is $85! They are making bank.

Karma did me good today.. thank you thank you thank you.

and by the way.. liquid grand opening was great fun ;).

no no.

‘open in new window’.

that’ll be it for tomorrow. the single most important feature of a web browser.. and the obvious analogy to 42 & everything after.

(did you catch the two binary days a few ago?.. so where are we having the party for 01/01/10 –> 42 day. (!).. [ you be the judge.. ;) ] )

… (thanks for the letter busdrivr ;).. you rock.. talk soon.)