Barely Legal Substance

Barely Moved

I've moved to new digs over at noel.weichbrodt.org. Update your subscription with my new Atom and RSS feeds, and please join me there!

Barely Moved

I've moved to new digs over at noel.weichbrodt.org. Update your subscription with my new Atom and RSS feeds, and please join me there!

Dos a Cero!

�Dos a C�ro! The 2007 Edition.

Constipated

Every day, 65 unfinished draft posts taunt me from their digital castle. "Thpppppt! Thppt! Thppt!"

Also, I'm renaming, redesigning & moving the blog soon. "Fiends! I'll tear them apart!" Probably to here.

"Right! Charge!"

...

"Run away!"

...

"Oh, haw haw haw haw! Haw! Haw haw heh..."

One Long Argument by Ernst Mayr

Initial Rating: **
Final Rating:

The Pleasures of Place

Moving to a new place means finding the endearing little things about your new alt weekly. Mine is the St. Louis Riverfront Times .

The Randall Roberts has been supplying a steady stream of contributions to an emerging academic discipline of Wu-Tang Clan critical literary analysis. Currently midway through a song-by-song translation and annotation of Ghostface Killah 's The Fishscale.

Their amateur food critic, Malcom Gay, mixes unholy foodstuffs and Philosophy 101 lesson plans like a Fear Factor hosted by Will Durant.

How Soccer Explains the World by Franklin Foer

Initial Rating: ***
Final Rating:

Take Your Money and Run

Good news everyone. I soon spring into part-time graduate studies of computer science at Washington University in St. Louis.

You may recognize the name; my wife attends the same institution of higher learning. A complete coincidence. Contemporary art historians have no influence in matters of science. WashU was just the closest train stop.

I've enjoyed the last two and a half years of earning money, reading whatever the heck I want, not taking tests, puttering around in the evenings, and in general flaunting the non-academic life. At least I get to keep the money.

Dear Friends: The Answer Is Beer.

Dear friends. Without a hearty account of the nature of man , you may find yourself on occasion lapsing into a particular despair. "Who am I?" you ask dejectedly. "Why are the first two sips of Diet Coke always the best?" you wistfully ponder. "What makes me different than the lazy housecat, content to sleep, eat, and poop without a metathought?"

These difficult questions born of malaise endure no facile answer. But I feel you. I grok you. I dig you, see. And, I have an answer.

Beer. What separates man from the animals is beer.

This Is Not About Thanksgiving

"Turtle blood has amazing healing powers. Mix with white wine when you are recovering."

--Lunch guest today

The Specifications for the Ultimate WMD Are Now Revealed

Apropos of my last post, Casselberry brought up the next step in my Weichbrodt Media Display master plan: buying and building a Home Theatre PC running MythTV on Ubuntu with a couple of cable/antenna TV tuners. This option, while not cheap, is the most flexible and DRM-free media collection & display option currently available. Thus I present to you this evening the specifications for building the ultimate WMD. You will note that I actually provided specifications for two complete systems. The first is the Ultimate Machine of Power and Resources. The second is the Pentultimate Machine of Great Value and Capability. These aren't the most expensive machines, but rather the most complete, powerful, quiet, and useful boxes for doing a complete MythTV frontend and backend in a single case. They are doin' it, and doin' it, and doin' it well, like LL. If you're a byo pc guru, I welcome your feedback.

Building a WMD

The WMD, aka Weichbrodt Media Display, aka Weapon of Mass Distraction.

In moving to St. Louis, we've somehow marched backwards in time in regard to Cable TV technology. Whereas Comcast , for all that I hated it , did in fact offer an HD DVR that I could rent for $10/mo, the otherwise enlightened Charter offers no DVR at all. This has caused great wailing and gnashing of teeth in the Weichbrodt house. As is my custom, I've examined the issue and offer the following analysis.

Fundamentally, there are three models for distributing media content out right now.

Old Media: Get your shows through a provider. Cable, Satellite, Over-the-air. This is the traditional model.
New Media: Purchase your shows through an internet distributor. iTunes, Amazon, Real, etc. Tech companies trying to bridge the gap between where consumers are and where pop content is currently published.
Free Media: Share your shows via the internet. RSS, Bittorrent. Pay for bandwidth, share what you will.

Unfortunately, the content is different across the three models. Watching the Champions League match between Barcelona and Chelsea live can only be done using Old Media, while watching House can be done with all three, and watching Rocketboom can only be done with New Media & Free Media.

These models are leaky--there is overlap between what iTunes and what RSS cover, for example. Just rough models, then.

The second background item is timeshifting. The ability to watch a show despite when/where it was first released. Tivo is a popular way to do this to content from Old Media. RSS may be timeshifted due to its very definition. The trick is, some ways of timeshifting lag. Tivo doesn't lag--as soon as the show starts, Tivo lets you timeshift. Bittorrent has a (comparitely) huge lag: a show must be broadcast, captured, encoded, and fully shared before viewing may begin.

I've built a spreadsheet of my options. Comment back with what you think I should do.

"Make it work."

I am so justified for the hour on Wednesday of every week this fall spent watching Project Runway.

Cultural Learnings of St. Louis for Make Benefit Glorious City of Chattanooga

Jagshemash!

I like you. Do you like me? I want to be your friend, visit very nice Chattanooga this weekend and tell you of my learnings in glorious Louis. Meet me at the Lamars place for Friday vodka drink. You see me as I wear blue hat. My wife, she be there too. Sexy time 423-834-1745!

The Foremost Observer of American Society

Craig Finn is the new Tom Wolfe.

Related: The new Hold Steady disc confirms my pet theory that a truly American rock band must have an organ. Not keys, not synths, but an organ. Think of any song you consider American rock par excellence. It has an organ in it. Absolutely required. J. S. Bach smiles from above.