July 2003

Shannon and I are going to The Commonwealth Shakespeare Company’s performance of Macbeth on Tuesday, August 5th. You’re invited, too! It’s hard to pass this up. It’s free and the weather might even cooperate. The meeting spot is the fountain near the Park Street MBTA Station across the street from Finagle A Bagle.

Matte sent out an email to friends asking for feedback about his possible run for Governor of California. Apparently you just need one more vote than the next candidate, some cash and sixty signatures.

I live 2-1/2 blocks from the state Capitol. I could be at work in 10 minutes, even in 100+ degree heat. I could run the Govenor’s Blog. I could become the first bleached blond politican (or did that freaky politician from Ohio who got kicked out of Congress ever have bleached hair?). » more

Mistle Thrush’s 10th anniversary show was a lot of fun on Friday night and so was the Rock & Roll Library’s benefit at 33 Restaurant Saturday night.

Other interesting things:

WashPo embarasses itself with hysterical WiFi FUD article

A sip from the cup of paradise

Dean Team vs. Bush-Cheney Update

Boston World Explorers Foundation

The Rock & Roll Library’s Summer Party is coming up this Saturday at 7pm. The event takes place downstairs in the private lounge at 33 Restaurant in Boston’s Back Bay. It’s a great opportunity to support a super cool non-profit organization that is based in Boston. And it will be a fun night with good food and beverages, too. Tickets are available online or you can let me know you’d like to be on the list so you can pay at the door. See you there? (My other entry about this event.)

One of my favorite Boston bands, Splashdown, broke up a couple years ago after Capitol Records decided not to release their Blueshift album. All three of the band members moved on to other interesting projects. Melissa Kaplan (vocals/lyrics for Splashdown) started her own band called Universal Hall Pass, a project featuring her vocals and lyrics plus guest contributors. She was in North Carolina recently recording music for a forthcoming album. Maybe she’ll be lucky and the record label who picks her up will actually release it. In the meantime, she’s made a few songs available on her website. The latest MP3 is a cover of Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire.” When most bands cover a song it’s hard to really even tell them apart; but Melissa does a great job adding her own style to this song including middle eastern influences and stunning vocals. The song was a joint collaboration with the electronic duo Mugat. (Universal Hall Pass : Ring of Fire)

My favorite Norwegian pop guy Sondre Lerche is working on a EP for the U.S. with an anticipated September release. Much to my delight it will most likely include a live version of Sleep on Needles which was the highlight of his show last month at TT The Bear’s Place.

» Sondre talks about his album “Faces Down” (first video on the page)

Last Fall when I started to tinker with the sometime-soon-it-will-officially-launch Exploit Boston! website, I wanted to try to use Movable Type for more of a content management system than just a weblog publishing tool. Brad Choate was a big help whipping up Perl code to make things like the five-day calendar work. Brad wrote an article about how he uses MT to publish both his weblog entries and static content on his website (which I implemented a few minutes ago) and Matt Haughey has shared an essay on the subject, too.

I was interested in politics the most from the ages of 12-17. In 7th grade I decided that someday I would run for president and Jesse Jackson would be my vice president. Then I went to college and started to care a lot less. It wasn’t until learning about the Green Party during the last presidential election that I became less appathetic and I finally voted for the first time at the age of 27.

Several months ago David Drucker asked me if I had heard of Howard Dean, the Democratic presidential candidate he was supporting. I wasn’t impressed with any of the Democrats from the last election and I assumed that theme would continue into the 2004 election. David insisted that Dean is a great guy so I figured I should investigate further. But laziness set in and I never got around to checking out the Dean website or even doing a search on Google. in April I stumbled across the Howard Dean in 2004 Meetup. I finally spent some time on the campaign website and discovered that David had good reason for having such enthusiasm amidst an otherwise uninteresting cast of characters. I’m doing freelance/contract work and don’t have health insurance right now so I was pleased to read about Dean’s support of Universal Health Care.

His team’s brilliant use of the Internet as a grassroots platform has been spectacular to watch and participate in, too. On the last day of the 2003 Q3 fundraising, I was glued to my computer monitor hitting refresh every 30 minutes watching the bat graphic on Dean’s Blog for America website change as the money kept coming in. This week Dean is even a guest blogger on Stanford Professor of Law Lawrence Lessig’s weblog.

I haven’t had a chance to attend a Dean Meetup yet but I’m looking forward to making it to the upcoming August 6th gathering in Boston.

I’ve read that Ralph Nader might join the race under the Green Party. I voted for Nader in the last election and don’t regret that vote at all (it helped the Green Party get established in Massachusetts on a local/state level). It would be such a stupid move this time around. Nader (and the rest of us) would be better off showing support for Dean. Another four years of George Bush? I’ll pass.

Shannon stopped by for a visit last night to see if her new PowerBook computer and my new Wi-Fi network could play nice together. A few seconds later and she was zooming online with no problems.

Prior to last night I had not seen the oh-so-cute-stylish-and-yet-so-functional 12″ PowerBook in person. I would happily trade in Zippy (a Dell Inspiron 5000e purchased around September 2000) for one of these. Too bad there’s a rather significant price difference. The thing that impressed me the most was the speaker quality. Music didn’t sound like it was being played from a notebook computer at all.

Kevin Smokler’s Virtual Book Tour is in Boston today at Media Diet, the website of Heath Row. Mary Roach (author of the tour’s featured book: Stiff) is contributing to Media Diet today: sharing links, tidbits and commentary about websites that relate to her book about the lives our bodies lead postmortem. As of 4pm she’s shared two interesting posts including websites she collected while writing Stiff.