Rage Against The Mac

I was looking for a way to “listen” to the MWSF keynote coverage. There’s at least one group that will be covering it via IRC. I worked up a quick applescript plugin for Colloquy; it’s available here. Unpack the archive in your home directory (tar -xzf colloquy_speech.tar.gz -C ~/), start Colloquy, and subscribe to #mercworld. Then, in a terminal window, do:

tail -f ~/Desktop/colloquy transcript.txt | awk -F'|' -f ~/Library/Application Support/Colloquy/PlugIns/say.awk

The awk script calls “say” to speak the transcript.

An article on the IndyStar site features this insightful from the stoner owner of Matrix Imaging who apparently caught sight of a manhole cover farting in downtown Indy this morning:

“It was like, wow!” said Brian Freije, owner of Matrix Imaging, a business at 118 W. North Street. Freije said, “You saw this yellow, toxic stuff coming out.”

Freije said as many as eight explosions erupted from a manhole cover in front of his graphics business, shaking the building. The manhole cover flew 4 feet into the air as the blast threw off a bright yellow light and acrid yellow smoke.

I love it when the media tries to report on things still happening…

I know it’s silly—petty, even—but I feel a little dirty knowing Microsoft’s crawling my sites. I’ve been meaning to rid my access_log of requests to /robots.txt, so I decided to kill two birds with one stone.

User-agent: msnbot
Disallow: /

This will be a good test to see if our slimy little friend really supports robots.txt like they claim.

Got some cool CDs and books from the fam for Christmas:

• Ultra-Lounge Christmas Cocktails, Pt. 2—Some Christmas favorites, but without all that family-friendliness.


• It’s Christmas Man (Brave Combo)—Polka Christmas tunes; need I say more?


• DJ Logic presents Project Logic


• The Mirror Conspiracy (Thievery Corporation)


• Tear the Roof Off 1974-1980 (Parliament)


• Quality Control (Jurassic 5)—excellent. Power in Numbers is better, tho.


• Ether-Electrified Porch Music (Carbon Leaf)


• American Bungalow Style—some insight into our new house.


• How We Invented the Airplane: An Illustrated History—just over 101 years ago; amazing.


• Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation


• Children of Apollo—great concept, but the author needs a copy of the previous book…


• KitchenAid A-9 coffee mill (Empire red!)—Finally, a good coffee grinder!


• Oregon Scientific WR102 weather radio—now I’ll know when to go to the basement.

I think my favorites so far are the J5 and Carbon Leaf CDs and the coffee grinder. I think I’ll be reading “Eats, Shoots & Leaves” and “Children of Apollo” together.