the Design Experience Weblog Archive

I picked up two new CDs today, The Matrix: Music From the Motion Picture, and Rush, Vapor Trails.

I like the variety and music overall on the Matrix disc. My favorite is Rage Against the Machine, Wake Up, which is the last song in the movie.

Now for Rush. I have been a Rush fan pretty much as long as I was interested in music. I started around 1981 or so. I don't recall exactly. What I do remember is alleged Rush fans hating every new CD they have every released since then. I have every studio album they have made, so I know a little about this topic. I can only express my opinion of the music.

I have liked songs on every one of the albums. Power Windows is probably my favorite Rush album overall. That said, the new disc is very interesting. The music is different than anything they have done before, as usual. It definitly has an edge some had thought they had lost. I am still on my first listen, but I think they still have the talent that made them great.

My personal assessment of people who complain that entire Rush discs are bad, especially every one since 1981 or so, is that they are stuck in the 70s and probably do not like most "new" music. My tastes are continuously evolving and changing. I still like music from the 60s, 70s, etc... But most important is that I am always looking for something new.

In that direction, I am extremely disappointed in radio, which plays the same crap over and over. Newer bands that I like are: Incubus, Live, Foo Fighters, and that is about it. I have alot of other CDs which are not bad, but really don't do anything special. I need to expand my listening horizons. Do you have a suggestion of where to hear new interesting music? Email dave@thedesignexperience.org. I am willing to listen to anything.

I added a new tag to my templates to advance the concept of automatic discovery for RSS readers. I found out about this from Mark Pilgrim. Bookmarklets to subscribe to a feed for several RSS readers are available.

A while back, aduni.org, before they lost funding, hosted a set of lectures for Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. These were not the aduni lectures, but a set taught by Hal Abelson and Gerry Sussman, authors of the book by the same name.

I downloaded these lectures in the anticipation that I would watch them, read the book, and learn a little. UNfortunately I burned the lectures onto some cheap CDRs that seemed to work, but unpon later inspection showed that the data was corrupted. I am missing two of the lectures, labeld 5B and 9B. If anyone has downloaded them, or knows who I could contact regarding them, it would be greatly appreciated. Email me at dave@thedesignexperience.org

I know several people who would pay for copies of these lectures. From the parts I have seen, they are very effective.

I should have setup a weblog with no titles, I can never come up with one anyway.

It looks like I am not going to Empire State College after all. They apparently do not support Computer Science degrees, at least not at the Northeast Center near where I live. So I will just be learning the stuff on my own. I finally started SICP and did the first and some of the second set of exercises in the first chapter. For me, the exercises really help the understanding of the material in the chapters.

Another project I am thinking about is fixing AOLserver to support Tcl namespaces, package require, etc... It looks like the way the Tcl interpreters are created does not quite support these things correctly.