Crisis Links 2/10/03

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I forgot to post last week’s links from Crisis Century class. Here, then, is a day’s dose of contemporary media and culture:

Ce Qui Arrive / Unknown Quantity. An exhibit of culture of accidents as art, exploring tragic and catastrophic accidents as the natural offshoot of technological progress; an invention of the invention. Unfavorably reviewed in NYArts Magazine, partly for its callous portrayal of 9-11 as an “accident.”

V2 Organisation: Institute for the Unstable Media. An art center for new media in Rotterdam, themed around instability and entropy as creative forces.

Surveillance Dust. Nanotech espionage device, deployable as tiny grains with sensors and miniature parachutes, and smart dust networking.

ZDE on OS X – fixed!

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Zend Support sent me a fix for my unsaved-preferences problem with ZDE for OS X: Create a folder “~/ZendIDE” (that’s a “ZendIDE” folder in your User Home directory) and put two empty files named “ide2.conf” and “properties2.prp” in it. CHMOD them all 777 and start up ZDE. It worked; ZDE is now saving my preferences and key bindings.

Hotdogs With Too Much Rice

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Don’t you hate it when you cook only one hotdog but you have enough rice for two, and the broccoli on the side just isn’t enough to stretch it? At least I didn’t accidentally over-salt it this time around.

Baked Apple

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Who wants some Baked Apple?

Anyway, on a complete whim, I just called Sara for a quick chat about layouts and polar bears. I really should add asterisks to my blog menu to mark whom I’ve met in person or by phone. Maybe the next time I recode.

Scrambled Boiled Egg. Not.

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When boiling an egg, don’t bother shaking it to see if it turns into a scrambled hard boiled egg. Nothing really happens. The yolk just gets dislocated off to the side and makes the whole thing harder to shell.

Prokofiev and OS X 10.0.4

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Went to Meyerhoff Symphony Hall with a friend* tonight to watch the Baltimore Symphony (under conductor Yuri Temirkanov with solo violinist Boris Belkin) play Prokofiev’s “Classical” Symphony and Violin Concerto No. 2, Debussy’s “Iberia”, and De Falla’s “Ritual Fire Music.” I enjoyed Prokofiev’s “Classical” Symphony the most, probably for its having been composed after the style of Josef Haydn — with its melodic neo-classical structure, it was a refreshing departure from the sea of romantic and modern era atonality and dissonance.

Afterwards, I visited aforementioned friend’s apartment to struggle with a rather vile installation of OS X 10.0.4: a beastly little piece of recalcritant software which should never have been released before Jaguar. Grrr.

Instant Lunch Replay

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Just had lunch with Salim. We talked international affairs over shawarma and tabbouleh. Yum.