Does this mean I am a Bacteria? A virus? Or an Amoeba? If I am going to be an insignifican microbe in Orange County, I ought to be an Amoeba, even if I am not a Kid of the Black Hole...
Thanks to Electrolite for the heads up onTruth Laid Bear's The Blogosphere Ecosystem.
I received a lovely pink cotton sweater from Julie Wanda for my birthday. I tried it it on today, early before it was too hot to wear a sweater, and found this yellow sticker stuck on the inside back:
Attention! Iron this Garment Inside Out
What is an iron?
Happy First Birthday to this blog - Black Phoebe :: Ms. Jen
Happy Birthday to Me! Today is my 12*3 or 9*4 birthday.
A big Happy Birthday to Shawna Gregory today! Twenty years ago, in 1984, I spent my 16th birthday with the Pandoras girls and the CH3 gang in Hollywood. Last night at the turn of Fri. 4/23 into Sat. 4/24, I was at a CH3 show with all of the old gang! The nice thing about hanging out with twenty-somethings when one was 16 was getting to go all sorts of forbideen places. The nice thing about hanging out with forty-somethings when one is 36, is that one is perpetually the spring chicken... ;oD
My official birthday party is tomorrow - Sun. 4/25/04 at Alex's Bar in Long Beach. The Scotch Greens, Trucker Up, and the Atomic Men will be playing starting at 8pm.
About a week before SXSW 2004 the very last vertebrae in the proverbial camel's back of Ms. Jen's patience was broken. I had since 1997 used "jenhanen@earthlink.net" as my primary email and by last summer I was getting over 150 spams per day and less than 20 real emails a day. I signed up for Knowspam and the flow trickled to a stop. Thank God.
But, and this is a big But, spammers and other nefarious sub-human cretins were using the email address and the well known Earthlink outgoing SMTP to send all manner of crap to all manner of folk. I was constantly told that I was spamming folk or sending them viruses, when Norton had professed my computer virus free and I had not sent such crap to my friends.
I knew since at least 1999 that Earthlink's mail servers did not require password authentification for outgoing mail as I had expressed my frustration to Earthlink tech folk about this in the past, but I was up to my ears in spammers posing as me. Thus, I cancelled the account after seven years. Bye. Bye. Bye.
I signed up with a new primary account and then emailed everyone I knew the week before SXSW (probably should have waited until after). Everyone: family, friends, colleagues, clients, bands, publicists, etc. Everyone. In the email, I simply detailed out my new contact info: email, snail mail, and phone number.
Funny thing that I have discovered in the six weeks since quite a few folks did not read the email or read it half way and stopped. I have received several angry phone calls about my lack of an email address from people who received my announcement email. I have had bold or sheepish confessions from friends who read a bit, did not take down the new contact info, and then deleted the email but are now mad at me for not having a working email...
I am flummoxed. What am I supposed to do? Send an email a week until over 1,000 people get it right or read the email all the way? Call everyone? Hello?
To me the irony is that I frequently think that I have too much open contact information out and about in the world. My phone number is listed in the white pages, my phone number and address is easily accessible to a Whois search, I have several listed emails and contact forms here and at Barflies.net. So, why the anger and the frustration from my contactees towards me?
The bigger question is why don't people read their email? Why do they only read a sentence or two and then delete? This is not the first time this has happened, as barflies.net writers regularly confess to me that they did not read an important email all the way and then call to ask what is going on. Has there been any studies on people's behavior when reading email?
Even bigger question: have you read this far into the post? Or did you stop after the second sentence? If you read this far, do you usually read all the way through your emails? If yes, are you a reader of blogs and books? Frustrated Jen's want to know.
Side corollary to this Email Frustration is Anil Dash's suggestion on people paying for one to promptly read their email.
A few notes about the current process of design around these parts:
1) I hope that I have fixed the Safari bug in terms on the creeping nav/links section. I found a free-range div tag with the help of the WC3 Validator. Safari users, please let me know if this has fixed the problem.
2) I realize that if the viewer/reader is coming in on a 800 x 600 resolution then the photos will be squeezing into the nav/links section. My logs tell me that most of you, over 70 some odd percent, are using 1024 x 768 or higher resolution. My apologies but I do want to use bigger photos or photos in sets of three.
That is it for now. Happy Saturday.
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On Thurs. evening, The Briefs and the Real McKenzies played a "secret" show that Toast put on. It wasn't really secret, it just couldn't be advertised due to last night's show that the bands played at a Clear Channel venue in the same market. Thus, Toast booked the bands at the El Cid, after the flamenco show, and invited everyone she knew. Mostly the show ended up being a live music social for LA area friends of Toast
(ie. punk musicians, journalists, record co. folk, and promoters) in the patio area of the El Cid.
The best part of the evening was hanging out on the patio before and between the bands catching up with LA based friends that I don't get to see too much due to their touring schedules, all of our busy lives, and/or my dislike of current gas prices.
Left to right in the pics above are friends that I have not seen in a long while and it was a delight to find them again:
1) Kim Chi - Super Kim to the Rescue! After departing the Distillers, Kim was in the Original Sinners playing bass, but is now writing her own material and doing her own thing. I am excited to hear what she puts together.
2) Sam and Craig - The last time I saw Sam was when he was also playing with the Original Sinners, now Sam has been sucked into the maelstrom of Gordy, Craig, and Lars. I am not quite sure if Sam is a Bastard now or if he is playing with Craig in the Mercy Killers, but Go Sam Go. While Craig moved to LA from SF last Sept, this was the first evening that I saw him out and about. He is happy, as the Bastards are finishing up in the studio and will be out on the road for most of the year.
3) Ms. Jen and Ms. Rachel - Ok, I did not lose myself. But, I have not seen Rachel since Bowling and it was good to catch up and see how Varla is doing. Rachel told me that this was the first show she had been out to in the 2.5 months since bowling, as she has been sucked (happily) into the "backend" of Varla.
I loved her use of the word "backend", as she used it the way computer folks would talk about the backend of a website and all the work that entails but the twist is she used it in the context of just not the Varla website and her computer, but also the production of the print magazine and her photography. Rather than talking about her website in terms of "old" media print world, she spoke of her print magazine using the terms of the "new" media internet world. Go Rachel Go!
Here are the tidbits and links for a Thursday afternoon in April. Enjoy!
1) TNH's Making Light post on "Things I believe" is wonderful. I concur with her list and thank her for the list, although I did have to look up what Burgess Shale is. Also, the comments to the post make an excellent, if not eye boggling, read.
My addtion is: "I believe in the effectiveness of Diet Coke and dark chocolate at 4pm." I believe I need some chocolate right now.
2) Danah has a good and informative rant/post on privacy.
3) My birthday party show will be on Sun. April 25th at Alex's. Come on down.
Construction Update:
Two days ago, Jay kindly emailed me to let me know that my right navigation bar / links section was not floating to the right as it should, but was instead down at the very bottom of the page. Jay uses Safari for Mac. I waited for my roommate Lauren to return home, asked her to power up her Mac and I went to look at this site via Safari... lo and behold... no navigation bar on the right, it was down at the bottom.
I have now tinkered with the CSS, so that the right nav/links bar is working in Mozilla for PC, IE 6.0 for PC, and IE 5.5 for PC. Can you please check on the various Mac browsers and other PC browsers for me and let me know if the page is working properly? Just give a heads up on what is working and what is not in the comments to this post. Thanks!
Last August I wrote a post on meeting Timmy the Real Turtle and ever since I get multiple hits to this site from folks who used the keywords "Timmy the Turtle" and wound up here. I am not sure if here is where they wanted.
But as an effort to further fuck up the search engines of the world.... I present my post on Timmy the Person Turtle.
Living on the Planet Earth are two Timmy the Turtles. One is male and human. One is female and repitillian. The band NOFX has a song about Timmy the Human who is their Tour Manager and Guy who does Stuff, and then Family Burkett got Timmy the Repitile for the office.
Now, let's talk about Tim McDuffee, aka Tim Grim, aka Timmy the Turtle. I first met Tim(my) a few years back at bowling late at night at the bar at the Gold Coast. We now run into each other about 3x year at different events even though he is out on the road most of the time, and when he is not he lives 2 counties north of me. Given that beast known as LA is in the way, I rarely get in his direction.
Here is the Tim I know: bright, on the ball, smart, good looking, always friendly, a kickass manager - be it road or band, and a hell of a lot of fun to hang out with. Besides doing "Stuff" for NOFX, Tim road manages Bad Religion, and band manages Jackass.
While Jackass is unable to play my birthday bash on the 25th of this month at Alex's, due to a band member in Europe in late April, they do have a new CD out on BYO called "Plastic Jesus." I recommend it. Keep Timmy employed, buy the Jackass cd....
This has been an odd rainy season in Southern California as most of my friends who did not grow up in the state but in a more rainy places perceived this winter rainy season as "normal." As we got one good storm a week and a half ago, many of these folks groaned about "more rain?". I was quick to state, each time, that we are actually in a drought as San Diego and Orange counties only received 50% of normal rainfall and LA county about 64%.
I wonder why people who are used to much more rain are perceiving this as a normal rain year or even a bit too much when we have had few storms? Yes, this "winter" was cooler than usual, but it was dry. This year reminded me of the seven year drough in the late 80s / early 90s - maybe 2-3 storms a month or less rather than the usual 5-6 a month during the rainy season.
Here are the numbers from today's LA Times:
The Black Iris that I received last April 24th from my mother on my birthday bloomed its first flowers today since last May. Its first blooms were the day after I planeted it last year and then it had two more blooms in late May 2003 before it was over for the year. I was not sure if I was supposed to take it out for the summer like a tulip, so I left it in and watered it throughout the last year. Yesterday, when I took the pictures below, the Iris plant was all leaves, but this afternoon two flowers have started to bud and unfold!
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Speaking of the 24th of April, it will be my 12 x 3 birthday and this blog - Black Phoebe :: Ms Jen will be one year old . My official birthday party will be the next evening, Sun. April 25th, at Alex's Bar with the Scothgreens, Trucker Up and one more band that I am awaiting confirmation on. The show starts at 8pm, ends at 11pm, and is only $3. Come join us.
A friend of my brother's bought Scruffy a velcro and felt cowboy hat. Amusing and frightening all at the same time.
As you can see, I am tweaking the design of this site, moving around some furniture, taking off a few rooms and adding a few more. Please excuse the construction dust, as I am not quite finished...
Update: 10 minutes later.... After a few CSS tweaks, I am happy for the time being. The site looks best in 1024 x 768 or larger, of which more than 60% of my readers are coming in at. If you are 800 x 600, sorry, but the Google Ad will intrude a bit into the Black Phoebe's tail.
