.blindness.

me: (talking about an overseas colleague) "He's cool, he's really tall." coworker: "Oh I'd like him then, I like tall people." me: "Do you like Michael Jordan??"

(long pause)

coworker: "I've never met him."

I have to write a 3,000 word article about something I don't really understand for no particular audience - we don't know what journal we are going to submit this to, so that means I have to write it ultra-generically. Ugh.

apart from a couple american distros i've already agreed on deals with, i'm probably gonna not bother pushing the record in the US. it costs an average of $10 to ship an LP to the US - and it doesn't really get much cheaper for multiple copies. so if a distro orders 10 copies from me, it costs me £52.99 to send it. that's $104 in shipping + $100 for the wholesale price of the records - so they're looking at a $20 wholesale price, which will make it $35-40 in stores. which is absolutely insane. i'm not trying to make a ton of money but i'd like to break even. i don't really see how anyone in the US can afford records on British labels because the freight charges are so high right now. the exceptions will be distros that will take 100 copies at a time, but even still, are there 100 people in the US who can pay those prices?

even my direct paypal sales will be £10 for the record + £5 shipping (it costs £5.11 to ship 1 LP to the US) which will be $30.

ugh....

early morning peanut slaw preparation; my coworker gave birth to a baby boy. philip k dick selected essays and nonfiction on the (mostly empty) bus. strange loops of guitar and wordless vocals stuck in my head which i think might be something from red house painters. hair in front getting so long it's annoying on my forehead.

I've spent the day working on a new CMS for icewhistle.com in rails - something simple but customised to my needs. i then decided to integrate my CV into it, so i'm making database tables for different sections of the CV and cutting and pasting data from my old word CV. so far so good - there will just be a lot of tweaking around with the way it looks after this.

I can't decide between Holcomb or Mitchell. today Holcomb is winning but last week I listened to Sound last week while doing the washing up and it was even better than i remembered....

i went back today for the goat's cheese, artichoke, rocket and pesto sandwich. mmmmmmm.

i Heart buchanan, on byres road, which i've never previously visited because i thought it was too posh, has a nice artichoke/mozarella salad w/pine nuts and sultanas. i got a scoop for lunch and it was quite pleasing - it's in some mint vinaigrette.

It's not that easy to get my brand new MacBook into a good development environment. I want to use it to develop two projects side by side, one in PHP and one in Rails - the rails stuff will be fine, but to just get a quick apache/mysql/php setup running isn't.

I went with fink over darwinports, cause i've used it before and it's the most like Debian - but "apt-get install libapache2-mod-php5" doesn't work at all - there aren't binary packages yet for most fink/Leopard ports so it spent hours compiling but the php5 package fails to build because of some sort of Zend dependency problem. Seriously, they don't have a binary package for php5?? Did I stop paying attention and find that everyone's stopped using fink or something??

as in JWF actually listens to it before posting ...

or at least half of it. first impression: this is a big step above the last one. but like the last two, it's missing the lackadaisical quality that makes his classic albums so fucking... classic.

will the 'natural bridge' sessions w/malkmus and nastanovich ever see the light of day? it's hard for me to think they will be better than the released album but i'd still like to hear them.

i could start a whole tumblelog of favorite berman lyrics but i'll start with this one: "guard my bed / while the rain turns the ditches to mirrors"...

i'm dreading hearing the new silver jews because i love their old record so much and i'm afraid of another turd.

Nickname: Shaq Shaq Daddy Superman The Big Aristotle The Diesel The Shaq Attack The Man of Steel The Showman of Big Men