Abraham Wonderful

Using the radio

Abe — Fri, 30 May 2008 13:03:35 +0000

There’s this guy working at the front desk who’s really bad at using the radio. He’ll say things like “Housekeeping to Todd,” when he’s Todd*, and he’s trying to get a hold of Housekeeping. It makes it sound like he’s commanding them to answer.

Then he says stuff like “Can someone help the customer in the computer center with the printer?” or “Can someone open the door to the Princeton room?” Which is ridiculous, because it’s not like just anyone will do these things, there are specific responsibilities for specific people. So on the one hand, it sounds passive aggressive, like “Can someone fix the printer?” is really intended for Joe from engineering. On the other hand, if that specific person isn’t listening, everyone else just ignores it, and the customer gets screwed. The other day I found this guy standing in the hall, and I realized about 15 minutes before, Todd had radioed for someone to open the door to a meeting room. Now you know… the rest of the story.**

*He’s not really named Todd.

** rest of the pointless story

Coming to a town near you

Abe — Tue, 20 May 2008 02:54:45 +0000

Hopefully late tomorrow I’m going to post a song that Kelly and I wrote. It’s not entirely sensical. We wrote the lyrics for one of the titles on songfight.org, but then we didn’t start recording until today. So it wasn’t ready for the songfight, but it also wasn’t ready today, which you’ll remember is my not kept deadline for creating something each week.

Update: here’s the song!
States That Mate – “Robot Candidate”

Belle & Sebastian

Abe — Wed, 07 May 2008 23:15:48 +0000

Hey guys, I was just listening to the album “If you’re feeling sinister” by a band called Belle & Sebastian. It’s really good! I think these guys could be big!!

Dear Flickr, thank you for existing

Abe — Wed, 07 May 2008 02:12:26 +0000

A couple (few?) months ago my hard drive died. Being retarded I hadn’t backed up in a really long time. I lost a bunch of source files from recordings, email, pictures and a variety of documents. But, I just downloaded a bunch of pictures that I had previously uploaded to Flickr. I’m really happy about that because although I still lost a bunch of pictures, in a sense the “essential” pictures were the ones I had uploaded to Flickr, so I still have them. If I upgrade to a Pro account I could actually get the original files. So thanks Flickr, for existing.

P.S. If you want to send me any pictures from time we spent together, or recordings you made of me interviewing my grandparents about their childhood, please do.

John Cusack’s Song

Abe — Mon, 05 May 2008 22:36:07 +0000

I put up a new song on myspace and the website. You can go here to listen to it. (I also put up the other songs I’ve been doing for songfight) The new plan is to create something every week. We’ll see how that goes. I’ll do songs, but I was thinking about messing around with making videos or doing cartoons or whatever.

Music Industry

Abe — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 16:02:44 +0000

I saw this interesting article about big record labels being unfair. I am shocked. Seriously though, it’s interesting to read if you’re a music fan.

Link / pingback spam?

Abe — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 23:00:52 +0000

I haven’t been keeping good track of my website, but recently I’ve been looking around because I’m going to put up a re-design. When I was looking at my web stats, I noticed that I have ~80 “links from an external page,” where the supposed page is actually an mp3.

I don’t really know much about pingbacks, but my basic understanding of them is this: Person A writes a blog post. Person B links to it in one of their blog posts. Their two sites talk, and Person A’s blog puts up a pingback link which notes that Person B is mentioning them.

What I’m wondering is this: Could someone be trying to use my site for a kind of pingback link scam? Like sending a false indication that I’m linked somewhere, so that a link to their page will appear here?

I don’t have any kind of regular readers who could answer this, but maybe someone will magically wander in and help me out. In this case there are two MP3s, one address is listed as “http://www.angrygwn.mu.nu/archives/Dec_21_2005.mp3” but it re-directs to “http://stevejanke.com/archives/Dec_21_2005.mp3.” You can see it’s referring to stevejanke.com, Steve Janke is mentioned in the mp3. The other link is to “http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~wang/Stuff/empty.mp3” where you can’t load the mp3 because they disabled hotlinking. The domain for that is Trinity College Dublin School of Mathematics.

ReverbNation?

Abe — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 17:03:30 +0000

So I’m trying out ReverbNation. Just seeing how I like it. They make banners and music playing widgets for you. Kind of nifty.

Superlative

Abe — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 21:15:25 +0000

Sometimes when I’m bored and mindless I’ll type the first thing that comes to mind into my web browser, and see if it exists. Today I visited fightforyourrighttoparty.com. At first I thought it was just a stupid place holder website with random links on it. But then I read the title at the top of the browser, and saw I was in fact visiting “The Leading Legal Rights Site on the Net.” Awesome.

Boggled

Abe — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 19:09:57 +0000

I call clients to check if they need AV. This guy I was just talking to seemed friendly enough, but he said we were too expensive.

Me: “Well what did you need?”
Customer: “We need a screen.”
M: “Oh, what price did they quote you?”
C: “I didn’t even find out. They just said we’d have to pay for it.”
M: “Well that’s true, it’s $35 to rent a screen.”
C: “$35! No, thanks! I’ll bring my own.”
M: “Oh well, ok…”
C: “Ha ha… $35! ...Yeah, right!...”

This really confuses me, because I don’t know where he’d get the idea that screens are free? Or where he could get them cheaper? ????????????