Na’Mean? (at Kokyubbq)
FINALLY (at IBM RTP 500 Campus)
March 19-20, 2015
Thursday after work I went to Wine Authorities and restocked on vermouth & amari & some sherry, because earlier this week I got this book called The Art of The Shim: Low-Alcohol Cocktails to Keep You Level, on the recommendation of one of my favorite local bartenders, Danny at Bar Virgile (formerly of Gocciolina).
I’ve made a few drinks from it already, and they really do make a nice change from what I usually drink. (straight kerosene)
Friday I had lunch with friends at Jamaica Jamaica, which is still there. Not going to say it’s totally unchanged, although it hasn’t changed much. We talked about … um … OK I have already forgotten what we talked about. I’m having trouble concentrating right now because M is in the other room listening to “Rhinestone Cowboy” and humming along, loud, and it’s adorable.
Friday night we swung by the shiny new museum at the shiny new 21c Hotel at the Hill Building in downtown. It’s pretty remarkable – it literally is a small contemporary art museum spread across 2-3 floors of the hotel. There were some rough edges – not all of the lighting is optimal, and some of the art was sans labeling – but there are some great pieces in the collection.
Most notably a gorgeous Kehinde Wiley. It’s amazing to think that one can wander in there at any time of the day or night & sit & look at that Wiley.
(And, given the paucity of docents, at least on Friday night, do god only knows what else in the place. Not that we did, mind you, but it was disconcerting to *not* be obviously watched as we wandered the maze of large & small gallery spaces.)
The inaugural exhibit is about pop culture in contemporary art, which is kind of a fraught topic – there were 2-3 pieces about Britney Spears &, you know, nobody really cares anymore. Some of it was predictable, and some of it – like a room full of large-format photo portraits of cosplay kids – is amazing.
I’ll definitely be going back regularly, because did I mention it’s free? And open either 24/7 or at least 18/7, depending on who you ask.
After that we came home & watched Primer. It was nice to feel free to let go & just kind of absorb the general milieu, without worrying too much about the timeline. The first time I saw it I actually tried to keep up, but it’s basically impossible, and I’m now fairly certain also unnecessary.
March 14-18, 2015
Saturday we trekked out to Morrisville, to [apparently] the only theater in the state showing the Glen Campbell documentary. It’s a wonderful & heartbreaking movie.
It’s not a traditional biopic – it basically starts sometime around 2011 and ends a year or two later. It’s about Glen Campbell in the immediate aftermath of his Alzheimer’s diagnosis, and the farewell tour that he did after he was diagnosed. You get bits & pieces of his history & achievements, but it’s almost entirely in the moment.
The most mindblowing part is seeing how the disease affected different parts of his memory in different ways. He could rarely remember the names of his children. He had to use a teleprompter for the song lyrics (and when it went offline, he was genuinely lost). But he could still follow the melodies perfectly, and most impressively, he could still play guitar like a motherfucker. Seriously. That ability was clearly stored in a completely different part of his brain, at least up to a point.
Towards the very end of the tour, even that started to break down, and that was probably the most heartbreaking part. But his doctors said that the constant playing had actually helped to exercise his brain & to keep him lucid & capable for much longer than he would have been otherwise – and that’s pretty obvious from the movie.
Sunday night it was obviously necessary to watch the new Wrecking Crew documentary, which was made by the son of guitarist Tommy Tedesco. It has apparently been the works for years & years – there was interview footage that had been shot specifically for the documentary that was in 4:3 TV aspect ratio, and in which everyone looked a *lot* younger. I’m told that the thing was hung up for years in negotiations over the rights to all the music that was of course absolutely critical to the telling of the story.
I read the fairly recent book last year, so it’s hard for me to gauge how well the movie did at telling the story. It seemed kind of loose & randomly organized, but there were so many amazing anecdotes that it honestly doesn’t really matter.
And even if you’re intellectually aware of how many hits the Wrecking Crew played on, it doesn’t really sink in until you start to hear them all back-to-back-to-back. My only gripe, given our Glen Campbell streak, is that Glen didn’t get more screen time.
Earlier this week my friend Laura tweeted a gripe about whistlers (talmbout how if people loved whistling there’d be more top selling whistling albums) & so I had to google “top whistling albums” which led me to this amazing website.
So, uh, have fun with that one, I guess.
All kinds of other Twitter Stuff happened, and I guess you can go read about it over there. Starbucks is going to solve race relations in America. I saw a bunch of dudes my age (or older) at work wearing hoodies and realized that I just can’t be a member of that club anymore. Stuff like that.
Design Flaw (at IBM RTP 500 Campus)
Rift (at IBM RTP 500 Campus)
March 12-13, 2015
I wrote briefly the other day about being mysteriously DDoSed on an IP address at WXDU that doesn’t even have a public website or service on it.
Turns out it *did* have an unsecured forward proxy listening on it, though. It was started [by me, I hasten to add – inadvertently, but definitely by me] sometime in January & apparently it took a couple of months for seekers of open proxies to find it & start using it.
It was kind of fascinating to see the types of traffic that were moving across it.
Also kind of fascinating that at least 160 people are still trying to use it now, 2 days after I turned off the forward proxy & started sending everyone 404 errors.
Last night we watched Spike Lee’s 25th Hour, which was cited by both AO Scott and Ava Duvernay as his best film, in this interview. Spoiler: It’s not Spike Lee’s best movie. It’s his first post-9/11 film, and there are a ton of references to 9/11, particularly in the first half. So maybe one of the lessons here is that you can’t trust New Yorkers to be objective about art that references 9/11.
It’s still a damn good movie, though, with great performances by Edward Norton, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Rosario Dawson, and especially Brian Cox, as the Norton character’s father. Definitely well worth a rental.
Scar (at Mangum 506)
Flock of Seagulls (at Durham Center for Senior Life)
March 6-11, 2015
Friday night we watched North Face, the based-on-a-true-story German movie about the race to be the first to climb the north face of the Eiger. The short blurbs I had read did not prepare me for just how dire things got. It was suspenseful and great and sad, and M spent the rest of the evening reading Wikipedia articles about mountaineering in the Swiss Alps.
Saturday we attended a friend’s baby shower, which was baby showery, but with excellent brunch foods because our friends J & V are over-the-top amazing when it comes to hosting massive food-related events at their house.
Saturday evening we went to see What We Do In The Shadows, the New Zealand vampire mockumentary from Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi. It was OK. I don’t remember all that much about their previous film Eagle Vs Shark, which I suspect means that it was also OK. I loved Flight of the Conchords, but it becomes clearer & clearer that Jemaine without Bret is a less humorous entity.
Monday night I stopped by the new restaurant & bar at the new 21c Hotel downtown. The hotel itself, and its accompanying contemporary art museum, aren’t open yet, but the restaurant & bar are. The space is absolutely gorgeous, with interesting art all over the place.
It was only their second night, so I won’t go into detail, particularly since I only had a couple of cocktails and a couple of dishes. The french fries with the burger were phenomenal – easily the best in town. Like scaled-up McDonald’s fries. The burger is one of those silly tall double-patty jobs, and it just tasted like underseasoned ground beef. There are plenty of other things on the menu, though, so I’m sure I’ll be back.
This week has been pretty rough, work-wise. We’re in the thicket of making offers and waiting for students to accept, and there have been a number of declines this week, which is always a bummer. By the time someone gets to the offer stage with us, we’ve interviewed them three times, and we’re pretty darn convinced that they would do well with us (and that they would enjoy the work they’d be doing). So while I don’t take declines personally, it’s still a drag.
OK I kind of take them personally when the person waits until the very instant of their deadline (or even later) to decline. I’m sure that their mental image of how we work involves us simultaneously offering to dozens of people, and building our teams from those who accept.
That’s not how it works, though. Every offer is a potential binding contract, and we have a finite number of slots, so we have to wait until one offer is declined before we can proceed with another. And because we’re an internship, we basically have to get all of this done in a fairly narrow window during the first quarter of the year.
So every day that someone stalls unnecessarily before declining is actually pretty painful. As I said, I’m sure they don’t realize this, but still.
Today I emailed a student to see if they were still available to interview, and they said that they weren’t, but some of their classmates were still looking, and they offered to forward my note to their classmates. This is what we need more of.
Today involved a huge discussion on my Facebook page about copyright. It didn’t need to go on for as long as it did (which is true of any Facebook discussion longer than 25 comments), and it mostly just cemented my opinion that the term of copyright should be recalibrated to that of patents, i.e. 20 years. If you want more details, go look at my Facebook page, I guess.
As I write this I’m also battling a DDoS attack on one of the WXDU servers. It’s not even one of the boxes that would be in the public eye – it’s a host that has a DJ-only music database on it. It doesn’t make any sense for someone to DDoS it and not, say, our actual public website.
I don’t have a ton of experience in dealing with such attacks. This one takes the form of a flood of http requests to the IP address of the host, but requesting other random site URLs. So far I have blocked close to 2000 IP addresses. I haven’t yet gotten to the point where I’m ready to try to script & automate the process – I mean, I have the blocking automated, but I’m sanity-checking the list of IPs that I block manually, because there’s some legitimate traffic in there as well.
If it goes on for significantly longer, I’ll write something that can differentiate between legitimate traffic and this bogus stuff, and just auto-block all of it.
So yeah, that’s my week in a nutshell: pointless battles against undeserved frustrating crap.