Author: Aaron Weber

Rather alarming PCWorld article on Adware. Sample:

How do VCs explain giving money to companies who monitor users’ Web browsing habits? “Adware is here to stay,” says Venetia Kontogouris, a managing director at Trident Capital. “Privacy for the [Internet] consumer is a lost war.”

Outfits like SiteAdvisor are trying to fight back, but it’s an uphill battle: prevention requires effort, and people won’t even expend any effort to prevent tooth decay or type II diabetes . I’m not sure it’s a lost battle, but it’s not one I’m particularly confident about.

One more thing I learned from the article: If I want to start an ethically dubious software company (and the privacy statement at WhenU doesn’t reassure me any more than the logo-and-nothing-more at “next-generation online advertising network” Turn does), I know where to look for funding.

Cat Power’s new album, “The Greatest”, was first recommended to me as similar to singer-songwriter Kristin Hersh. The comparison is pretty valid — emotionally damaged tone, a variety of instrumentation centered on guitar and vocals — but Cat Power’s vocals are smoother and have greater range. And Cat Power has awesome cover art, too.

An earlier album from Cat Power is entirely composed of cover songs, and has a really haunting, mopey cover of “(I can’t get no) Satisfaction” which I don’t think has the words “I,” “Can’t,” “Get,” “no,” or “Satisfaction” in it at all. What it does have is this soft, loping minor key and and quiet lyrics in a sad, sad voice. Really, it’s the opposite of the Rolling Stones’ version, and is not only a good song in itself, but brings new layers of meaning to the original.

Her songs have more instrumentation, accompaniment, and range, but “Satisfaction” from “The Covers Record,” and the song “Hate,” from the new album, have an ultra-spare style which just grabs me.

I tried to look up the lyrics for “Hate” online, but the various lyrics sites don’t have it yet, so I had to go and listen to 5-10 second bits of it again and again until I got the lyrics right.

And it’s not a happy song at all. My transcribed lyrics in the extended entry. They look a little melodramatic written down, but trust me: major weepiness could ensue if you listen to her singing them.
Continue reading “Review: Cat Power, “The Greatest””

M. not being much of a fish eater, I have try to take advantage of her absence to experiment with fish dishes in the hope that once I perfect them, I can get her to eat them.

Tonight she’s out at the West Side Lounge with the ladies, and I’m making brook trout steamed with ginger, scallions, red peppers, and shiitake mushrooms. I made two sauces: one a sort of dipping sauce made of local cider vinegar, ginger, hot peppers, and soy sauce, and the other a thicker Chinese-black-bean-paste style sauce: garlic, Chinese black bean paste, sriracha, hot peppers, sesame oil, olive oil, and miso to sweeten and thicken.

I plated it all Iron-Chef style.

The faults are as follows:

• Steaming robbed the peppers and scallions of their color; I should have sauteed the peppers separately, and reserved more of the green part of the scallions as a garnish.
• It didn’t need two sauces. The thicker sauce is probably the one to keep. It would have been improved by using about a cup of white wine or sake, and by remembering to sautee the garlic before adding everything else.
• Trout is probably not the best fish for this. Flounder or tilapia might be safer; cod, skate, or grouper might be more interesting.
  

I finally went to Cingular today to get a new phone– I suppose I could have just gotten a new battery, but for some reason the quality of service had declined dramatically as well. The phone would work for 12 or 24 or 36 hours, then would require a hard reset. Even a hard reset didn’t correct the bug which told me I had voicemail all the time, regardless of whether I had any. Obviously, the solution to a decline in service quality was the purchase of new hardware.

After I selected a phone, it took me almost an hour to get out of the store. First, I was informed that I could not buy just one new phone: I had to buy two. See, I was an AT&T customer before Cingular bought AT&T, and my girlfriend and I have a joint account. Because the AT&T/Cingular billing systems are still separate, you can’t have an AT&T phone and a Cingular phone on the same account. So, both phones had to be upgraded because one was misbehaving.

Of course, now that I’m renewing my contract, I no longer get the discount I did when I worked for Novell. Total cost to address poor service on the part of Cingular: $126, plus locking myself into a new contract for two years– a contract which is now more expensive every month. And of course, since we’re switching from AT&T to Cingular, we get new SIM cards, meaning we have to re-enter all the data in our address books. Joy.

After forty-five minutes or so in the store, just as escape seemed imminent, the billing system refused to accept my address, and demanded a new one. The cashier called the internal Cingular helpdesk, and left the speakerphone on while she battled through the prompt system and spent a few minutes on hold. Then, just as the helpdesk answered, the system myseriously worked.

By this point, we were both laughing. She said “Gawd, this billing system sucks… but it’s not as bad as the one we had when we were AT&T: Siebel. That was terrible.”

I was glad to see that I was not the only person in the world who thinks that Siebel is a punchline, rather than a legitimate product. Not glad enough to make me stop resenting my phone company, but I smiled a little.