Feist - My Moon My Man (Boys Noize Remix)
[See post to hear audio]

Boys Noize is a mystery to me — this is the one that grabbed me off his album Oi Oi Oi, and there’s not much to read about him online. I was hoping he’d make his way to Austin sometime for a show, but no luck yet.

Feist’s “My Moon My Man” is a pretty good track, but this is heads and shoulders above the original. Any fans of hers whose tastes meander toward the electronic will agree.

The computerized vocals give it a nice techno vibe from the beginning. Her voice is given space to shine through, and enough original instrumentation is used that you respect this as a carefully crafted remix rather than the latest from The Hood Internet (though I love ‘em). Perfectly executed rises and falls too.

It’s a shame the fluff that populated the remix album based on her major label debut, Let It Die, wasn’t of this caliber.

You can find the original on Feist’s The Reminder.

Download: Feist - My Moon My Man (Boys Noize Remix)

It’s called Gotham.

Gotham’s designer, Tobias Frere-Jones, has long collected typography specimens from around New York City. The bold, majestic faces leftover from over half a century of announcing places and things have a nostalgic charm that hadn’t been dusted off until Gotham made its debut in 2000.

Back when graphic designers were less common (the whole profession probably sounded pretty wishy-washy in the ’40s), the architects and engineers who constructed a building often ended up designing its signage.

As a result Gotham is a geometric font, but Frere-Jones allowed it to “escape the grid wherever necessary, giving the design an affability usually missing from ‘geometric’ faces,” according to the H&FJ website. Frere-Jones often cites the lettering above the Port Authority Bus Terminal as inspiration.

Gotham is wider than average text, lending it gravity and solidity. It says, “What I’m saying is special enough to warrant the extra room I require.” Increased legibility comes from this and the large x-height (the height of the lower part of the letter, usually compared to the ascender).

You might be surprised to hear it arose from a commission for GQ Magazine. It’s been used by pretty much everyone before the Obama campaign got their hands on it.

A few days ago I saw a foreign model surprised that Obama uses the same font that advertises an underwear brand back home. I even used the ultra caps for the logo of my file-delivery service, Sendshack.

You can also see it on the cornerstone of the Freedom Tower being built where the World Trade Center once stood. Quite the honor for a typeface designed to reflect the spirit of New York City.

H&FJ also point out that McCain’s using a font most would recognize from the supermarket cosmetic aisle.

Where have you noticed Gotham?

Just down the alley from Vegan Healing Cafe, there’s a huge MontBell filled with all sorts of outdoor gear. You don’t hear much about them stateside unless you read Mark Verber’s excellent rundown on outdoor clothing and footwear, but in Japan they’re the most popular outfitter.

One evening the skies opened up during dinner, so I stopped in to pick up some pants. Preferring to keep weight and space to a minimum, I asked if they had any pants made of Gore-Tex Paclite.

Gore-Tex is available in a few different weights, Paclite being at the minimal end of the spectrum. The salesman told me all they had was XCR, designed for extreme and prolonged water exposure. That’s all well and good, but it’s much heavier and much less breathable than Paclite.

The price of the XCR pants was very good, so I asked if it’d be possible to order Paclite. It wasn’t, and the salesman explained that XCR was much more durable. That wasn’t news to me, and everyone loves Paclite, so why not offer it?

“Japanese will not buy it if it won’t last forever.”

That’s why I have ridiculous neon blue XCR rain pants.

Most people would never guess I like Japanese pop. Western pop is bad enough, so jacking the cuteness up to 11 couldn’t possibly help. But there are some great electronic beats, and it’s come to be a symbol of my love for Tokyo.

During Hanami, Yoyogi Park is packed with people sitting on tarps under the cherry blossoms. Friends and family hang out over food and drinks — usually alcoholic and in quantity. Ty, Toby, and I were in the mix.

Two girls and a guy approached, all dressed alike, a woman carrying a boombox bringing up the rear. The guy looked like a gay wizard with his short shorts and long grey beard. They asked if they could perform for us.

The boombox started and they began to dance and lip sync.

I got it on video but didn’t know the name of the original group until Ty saw them on the big screen at Shibuya station.

By then I’d been watching the hilarious video and the song had been growing on me. I downloaded the album and haven’t listened to much else since. Perfume’s GAME was very successful, and they just hit the top of the charts with their new single, “love the world.”

Here’s one of my current favorites. It’s what I imagine would be the ultimate Kylie Minogue track, only with Japanese girls on vocals.

You can download GAME here.

Perfume-GAME.zip

Or so an email I received from my Dad would have you believe. I get a pretty constant stream of conservative-written forwards, which I actually like because it gives me the opportunity to call attention to any incorrect information.

Obama’s Global Poverty Act is proclaimed to commit the U.S. to sending 0.7% of its GNP to the U.N., equivalent to $845 billion more than current foreign aid spending. It’s likened to a global tax.

Here are some other quotes:

When you see Obama referred to as “Barack Hussein Obama,” I think it’s safe to assume what you’re reading is fairly biased.

This particular email is a rare breed. Since its content hasn’t been aired by any prominent media, you won’t find any real sources if you search for “obama global poverty act.” It isn’t until the fourth page of results that you get any perspective.

The bill does not:

• impose a tax
• recommend contributions to the U.N.
• commit any funding to fighting poverty

The bill does recommend:

• leveraging trade policy to help developing nations
• improving the effectiveness of development assistance
• coordinating poverty reduction goals with other development goals
• continued participation in U.S.-led programs related to poverty (eg. HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis prevention)
• integrating principles of sustainable development and entrepreneurship into policies and programs

The bill is pretty benign. It requires the President to submit his plan to reduce poverty within one year of passage. The goal is to promote policy that reduces the number of people worldwide who live on less than $1 a day by half. (Go inflation!)

All that’s required is a statement of the plan. The plan can be anything, whether it’s doing nothing beyond current efforts, defining poverty goals for existing programs, coordinating with other countries to lower trade barriers, or adjusting aid to be directed more toward teaching to fish instead of giving fish.

This bill is nothing like the people who authored this email would have you believe, and you won’t get the facts anywhere in the first three pages of Google results.

If you receive this email, please reply to all with a link to this post.

The full text of S. 2433: Global Poverty Act of 2007 can be found here.

Heather lived on our floor. She was pretty attractive, but there was something a little off about her… maybe “skeezy” is the right word. Enough that when she’d bounce into my room and plant herself in my 17 year-old virgin lap, I’d complain loudly instead of rejoicing in my good luck.

There was the time she ran in asking if I had a credit card. Yeah, why?

“There are some pictures of me on the Internet!”

“I’m not paying for it, but maybe we can find them anyway. What site?”

“Playboy!”

Sure enough, we found ‘em… The Girls of Spring Break.

(click for the full picture - opens in new window)

After a handful of similar instances, we were pretty sure she was pretty promiscuous. As adolescent males, sorting this out was high on the priority list.

This was about the time Arnold Schwarzenegger soundboards were super popular, so to prove our theory we came up with the ultimate test. Call her as “Tyrone,” a guy purporting to have met her at a party and try to cajole her into committing to sex.

Dan had the the best voice for Tyrone. He was my first college roommate, and undoubtedly the most hilarious guy I’ve ever met. He was crazy, uninhibited, genius, impulsive, manic… he was the kind of person you aspire to be.

We all crowded into my room and I rigged up a contraption and taped it to my cellphone. Luckily only Dan Tyrone could hear Heather’s responses through the headphones, otherwise there’s no way we would have been able to stay quiet.

Notice how many times the conversation could have derailed. What a badass!

Heather & Tyrone 1
[See post to hear audio]

Heather & Tyrone 2
[See post to hear audio]

“Says who?” pretty much settles it.

Here’s a little bonus. Dan called another time as Travis, a guy down the hall we were pretty sure was hitting it on a regular basis. Poor Travis was forced to whisper because his roommate was asleep. Heather told him coming over wasn’t a good idea at the moment. One of her friends was coming over.

Not to worry — Travis has a solution.

Heather & Travis
[See post to hear audio]

Maybe we should make a Dan/Tyrone soundboard.

Go to Digg’s front page and keep an eye on your browser’s status bar when you click a story. Before you see the messages normally associated with loading a page, did you catch “Looking up digg.112.2o7.net”?

Why wouldn’t Digg want to track users’ clicks? Collecting data on the most-read stories could be invaluable for modifying algorithms. Comparing who clicks and who doesn’t could help identify bots. Identifying and catering to the most valuable users could make Digg more valuable in turn.

But Omniture monitors a lot of sites, and content from pages they monitor can be communicated back to them with javascript. Like Google or Tacoda, the data they collect on you from across their network is extremely valuable when used to target ads and content.

Digg is sacrificing user experience, too. Instead of the click pointing you directly to the story, it first has to send a request to Omniture’s server with information on the story and wait for the response. Sometimes it’s quick, sometimes it’s slow, but they’re making you wait every time while they spy on your clicks.

If you’d rather not have Omniture tracking your Digg activity, you can always intercept requests to their URL by editing your “hosts” file and inserting this line:


127.0.0.1 digg.112.2o7.net


To find your hosts file or learn more about how you can modify it to protect your privacy, check out the Wikipedia entry: hosts file.

What about you? Do you care if your clickstream data is being recorded by a third-party vendor that could be tracking you across the internet?

When your site gets 10 visitors a day, it’s not worth your time to worry about how fast your pages load; but if you’re serving millions of people, every millisecond counts. So Yahoo created a team dedicated to improving user experience via performance.

Though more companies are getting savvy as online presence becomes increasingly essential, it’s still easy to find offenders. Notice how long it takes to load MSN vs. Yahoo. Yahoo is almost instantaneous — it’s incredible that a full-featured portal can be so responsive. Their efforts have really paid off.

In addition to guidelines for optimizing your own site, they distribute YSlow, a tool that plugs in to Firefox to automatically identify the ways you can improve your response times.

Browsers are limited to a fixed number of connections to download the text, graphics, and Javascript that make up a page, and you can direct browsers to use already-downloaded common files like logos and icons instead of downloading them again when displaying future pages.

According to YSlow, MSN.com could speed up their site by loading fewer files and directing browsers to cache this static content.

So here are some things you can do with lighttpd that will benefit pretty much any site.

1. Expire headers

   I can’t think of any reason you wouldn’t want to cache static content. To make caching problems impossible, just include revisions in your filenames (e.g. mypic_20080324.jpg). Then uncomment mod_expire in your lighttpd.conf and add these lines.
   
# Expire images, static text in 24 hours
$HTTP["url"] =~ "\.(png|js|css)$" {
expire.url = ( "" => "access 7 days" )
}


   Add or remove file types as you like. Other good ones would be jpg, gif, or truly static html.

2. Compress text files

   This includes PHP, HTML, CSS, and JS files. Every browser supports gzip compression, so USE IT!

   lighttpd 1.5 has a really cool module called mod_deflate that will take care of all this. mod_compress won’t handle dynamic content (PHP), but deflate does.

   If you can’t use 1.5, you’re stuck with mod_compress, which unfortunately can’t be used in conjunction with mod_expire in 1.4. So unfortunately you have to choose between expire and compress in 1.4.

   Anyway, add this to your configuration to use it.
   
## Deflate text content
deflate.enabled = "enable"
deflate.min-compress-size = 200
deflate.sync-flush = "enable"
deflate.output-buffer-size = 8192
deflate.work-block-size = 512
deflate.mimetypes = ( "text/html", "text/plain", "text/css", "text/javascript", "text/xml" )


I took the homepage of my file delivery site from 50 kB per request to 3 kB using both of these. That’s a 94% reduction in data transferred! Less time to transfer files, and less system resources on both the server and client sides.

Love to hear what kind of improvements you see!

She’s very talented and her album’s quite nice. Gave it a listen when it came out, but I didn’t see the special edition that includes a cover of “Venus As a Boy.”

It’s a nice song, and one of Bjork’s most accessible. Bjork’s vocal melodies tend to jump around in ways you don’t normally hear in popular music… way more interesting than the norm but no less beautiful.

Corinne Bailey Rae - Venus As a Boy

Here’s Bjork’s original.

Bjork - Venus As a Boy

Corinne grew up singing in church and got into jazz singing on slow nights at the club where she worked as a hat check girl. She’s also a big Led Zeppelin fan, releasing a cool version of “Since I’ve Been Loving You” as a B-side as well.

Corinne Bailey Rae - Since I’ve Been Loving You

Tartine Script is an understated script with personality, like a more-connected, heavier Cutiful. I’ve got the normal and heavy weights… went with normal for the logo.

Quite elegant… not something I’d want to use for body text, but as a display font it works great. Very legible, a little embellishment on the capitals lends it some flair, and great for offsetting the small contemporary fonts in the Wordpress theme I selected.

FF Tartine Script