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    where i've been and what i've been up to

    Busy week.

    Spent the last three or four days down in Houston, with K., holed up in a Sheraton near the airport. Got out for a bit and walked around, taking photos of the concrete drainage systems and ruined parking lots surrounding the airport. Think of it as a way to renew my FOVICKS membership (that's Friends Of Vast Industrial Concrete Kafkaesque Structures, for those of you following along at home).

    There's a whole Ballard-esque novel waiting to be written about the rings of strange infrastructure that airports extrude, and perhaps another one about Houston infrastructure more generally. It is a city (like LA perhaps) which is designed to be nagivable only by automobile: it is almost incomprehensible when on foot. If we really have moved into the downslope of the peak oil bell curve, then Houston will one day be nothing more than a cryptic artifact. You heard it here first!

    When I wasn't wandering around making doomsday prophecies, I was mostly surfing the Internet. It was costing me $9.95 a day at the Sheraton (bastards), so I decided to make it Worth My While, which included making a Facebook page (which you may or may not be able to see through that link) and setting up a Last.fm / Audioscrobbler account. Whoa, Last.fm is very cool, by the way, I did not know it. It is not exactly del.icio.us for iTunes, but that is the way I would begin explaining it to someone:



    I like it more than the music-criticism aggregator Critical Metrics. I've found some good music through Critical Metrics, but aggregating criticism in that way leads one towards the "predictable imbalance" inherent in power law distributions (link for math / stat geeks only). There are various ways to avoid this problem in Critical Metrics, but it's a lot easier to avoid via Last.fm. That is all!

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    Tuesday, September 04, 2007
    11:31 AM

     

    Comments:
    Hey, thanks for reminding me about last.fm - my username is "oogenesis"... can I add you as a friend?

    Nancy P.
     
    Ah! I didn't realize that that was you until just this second.
     
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