My old pal BT passed me this musical-meme baton a while back, but I not only managed to let the damned thing drop, I kinda stopped in my tracks, hands on hips, staring at it, thinking “whaddaya want me to do with that?”

Not really.  But I have hitherto failed to pick up the baton for two key reasons:  first, a deep resistance to internet memes, one that much mirrors my hatred of those “send this email to everyone you know” messages, no matter how well-intended the point it’s trying to make.  I often find other folks’s responses to said memes interesting, or revealing, or amusing, but have never really been sufficiently engaged by the questions to take it up myself.

That’s one.  Two is this line, in BT’s baton-passing:

Kathleen, because I know I’ll buy something she names…

Now, I know his intent was nothing but complimentary, and I’m indeed gratified that he has such faith in my musical taste.  But I’m a bit unnerved, too—what if my answers don’t measure up to the lead-in?  What if I finally reveal my true tastes to be pedestrian and—good lord—even popular?  What if I have to admit that I’m usually a year behind the cool kids, and that I find the stuff I like through “people who bought this also bought” links at Amazon.com and references to bands on my students’ LiveJournals?

[Incidentally, watch my students squirm now:  Whose LJs am I reading?  What embarassing things have they unknowingly revealed?  Rest assured, if I’m reading your LJ, and I know who you are, I like you and your writing, or I wouldn’t bother.]

Anyhow, while I’m killing time in the Houston airport, I’m putting all such anxiety aside, sucking it up, and entering the meme:

1.  The person (or persons) who passed the baton to you:

Just in case you weren’t paying attention, that’d be BT.

2.  Total volume of music files on your computer:

2831 songs, 8.2 days, 13.65 GB.

3.  The title and artist of the last CD you bought:

CD?  As in actual music-on-disc?  That would be We Are Scientists’ EP, The Wolf’s Hour, and Bishop Allen’s Charm School.  (Am I reading that right?  Used and new from $98.98?  Good grief.  If you can’t find it from a more reputable source, drop me a line.  Not that I’d ever burn you a copy or anything.)

If, however, this includes the purchase of music in non-tangible forms, add in Calexico’s Feast of Wire, Neko Case’s Blacklisted, The Zutons’ Who Killed the Zutons?, and Belle and Sebastian’s Push Barman to Open Old Wounds.

4.  Song playing at the moment of writing:

Right this very second:  Ben Folds, “Trusted,” off of Songs For Silverman.

5.  Five songs you have been listening to of late (or all-time favorites, or particularly personally meaningful songs):

According to iTunes, my most-played songs are a bunch of Fountains of Wayne (off of Utopia Parkway), followed by Bach’s Goldberg Variations.  Go figure.  This only includes the stuff actually played off the computer, though; if I could get a count off the iPod, Fountains of Wayne would no doubt remain high (it’s great running music), and Franz Ferdinand, Ben Folds, Cake, and Barenaked Ladies would join them up there (same reason).

That’s just frequency, though.  If I were to go for things that capture my particular obsessions, right at the moment…

(a) Barenaked Ladies, “Go Home.” Okay, yeah, it’s the cotton candy of music—sickly sweet melt-in-your-mouth fluff.  But it’s a good running mood-booster, and frankly I’d email R. this song on a weekly basis, if it’d get him on a plane.

(b) Bishop Allen, “Things Are What You Make of Them.” This is one catchy damn song, but its catchiness is belied by its getting-left melancholy.

(c) Joni Mitchell, “The Last Time I Saw Richard.” How romanticism passes into jadedness, which is its own special kind of romanticism.

(d) Pete Yorn, “Life on a Chain.” Something about the bleed between the opening phone-call sound and the polished, up close, studio sound still has me.

(e) The Postal Service, “The District Sleeps Alone Tonight.” Ahem.

I’m going to refrain from passing the baton on to anyone else, as I’m so utterly belated with this, but would love to hear responses from you—what should I be listening to that I’m not?

Just heard a story on Morning Edition reporting on a push by federal officials to force domain-name owners to identify themselves accurately in the WHOIS database, a database which is, of course, publicly available.  The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) moved earlier this month to make such public identification mandatory for .us domain names, not only making it illegal to provide false information but also eliminating private registrations; they now seem to be on the march to expand this policy across the net.

I’ve seen very little response to this thus far; the folks at GoDaddy.com have launched a petition site urging the NTIA to reestablish private registrations, arguing that placing personal registration information in a public database exposes innocent people to internet predators.  In so doing, though, they make a curious distinction between “privacy” and “anonymity,” suggesting both on this petition site and in an article published on CircleID, that only bad guys really want to be anonymous, but that everyone should have the right to privacy.

I’m entirely with them on the privacy issue; my domain is publicly registered (only because I honestly didn’t know any better back when I registered it), and it creeps me out a bit that that information is so easily searchable.  But is the distinction that GoDaddy is drawing between the privacy of private registrations and the anonymity of falsified public information really the key to this issue?  Are there no other calls for anonymity than criminal activity?  What about political dissent, whistle-blowing, even anonymous blogging?  Is “privacy” rather than “anonymity” a sufficient protection for those who need it?

“The Internet is often a lawless place,” the GoDaddy folks claim.  That frontier metaphor has been around since the public net’s earliest days, so it should come as no surprise that, as in the case of Deadwood, the government cocksuckers* are apparently rolling in to clean it up without any understanding of the situation.  And as Cy Tolliver has it, “If we’re going to be surprised by that, boys—government being government—will we next be shocked by the rivers running and the trees casting fucking shade?”

—

*If you watch Deadwood, you won’t have blinked at that.  If you don’t, you ought to.

Here’s a sign of how spoiled I’ve become:  I’m sitting in the President’s Club in the Houston airport, using the free wi-fi, and bitching and moaning because the coverage in the lounge is a little spotty, and for a while my connection kept dropping.

I’m complaining about the quality of free wi-fi.  When, if you’d asked me about such a thing as recently as three years ago, I’d have said “wi-what?”

Next up:  complaints about not getting upgraded to first class!

On the way home tonight, I heard a DJ on KCRW refer to a new film that’s out as “a story replete with sex and cultural theory.”

And after I stopped laughing, the first thing I thought was “sounds like grad school.”

The second thing was “except with sex.”

The leak in my garage continues unabated, through three plumbers who can’t seem to figure out what the problem is, when I keep telling them that the leak isn’t coming from my condo, it’s only ending up in my condo.  They run my showers and flush my toilets, and say, nope, no leak here.  And leave.

If that were the only leakage, though, it might be more bearable.  I think we’re moving up on the forty-days-and-forty-nights mark here in SoCal, or maybe it just seems like it’s got to be divine wrath falling from the sky.  What’s clear is that I don’t think I’ve actually been fully dry in over a week.  The basement of our office building has flooded repeatedly, and my classroom—in that basement—is now dank and cold.  Enough.  Or, in case English just isn’t carrying enough weight with the divine these days:  Basta.  Ca suffit.

On a happier note, though, I’ve gotten my wi-fi all wi’d and fi’d, and so am able to work from my second-floor-landing office nook now.  I’m still having to negotiate the security issue, though; my after-market original Airport card and my new router simply can’t get together on either WEP or WPA.  So right now I’m using MAC address control to prevent random folks from glomming onto my bandwidth, but my packets are nonetheless still leaking out all over the neighborhood.  Of course, my packets are largely dull, so it’s probably not an issue, but I’m just saying.

So now that I’m back in the land of connectivity –

– well, I have to qualify that. Not long ago, we moved office, and when we arrived in our newly-refurbished, fabulously modern and yet not characterless renovated building, there was a small hitch. You’ll best grasp this through a bit of illustration, I think. Here’s a lovely picture of my office, from the vantage point of my door:

And here’s a reverse shot, from the vantage point of my desk. You’ll notice something a bit odd at the extreme right of the image:

That odd little protrusion in the wall behind my filing cabinet is the phone/ethernet jack for my office. Which, as you may have gathered, is nowhere near my desk. I’ve spent the last three months with cables trailing across the office, which were only really an issue when I wanted to access the built-in shelves behind and to the left of my desk. As I was pretty convinced that I was one day going to trip and kill myself, and as I frankly just found the exposed wires ugly, I asked campus maintenance if they could do something about it.

Which they did.

I came in to the office one day week before last to discover that somebody had installed mouldings most of the way along my floorboards, intended to channel the cables “invisibly” along the wall:

However, because of this, the tripping-problem actually became worse, as my ethernet cable was simply too short to make it all the way across the room along the edge of the wall. One call to my trusty tech-support folks, and –

Well, while I was gone, she apparently brought by a longer cable, but couldn’t figure out how to get it through the moulding. So campus maintenance came back, ran the new cable through the existing moulding, and then finished running the molding the rest of the way around the side of my desk.

There’s only one problem: I had the PowerBook with me at the conference, and so the maintenance guys couldn’t conceivably have known where on the desk I usually kept the computer—except that there was ONE BIG EMPTY SPACE on the desk, where a bunch of other unplugged cables were lingering. That might have been a clue. Nonetheless, the new, longer ethernet cable remains at least three feet too short to reach any actually working spot on my desk, unless, say, one were to pry open the moulding and pull the cable out through the edge of it, stretching it toward a reasonable plug-in spot:

And that’s why I’m out of time to post any actual pictures of the condo-in-process (now with windows!) today.

That, and that I haven’t yet prepared for the class that I have to teach in ten minutes.

But more pictures, and windows, soon.

Thanks to all who have responded to my various technological pleas over the last few days.  My hosting provider’s waning is producing massive unreliability—my site’s been down more than it’s been up over the last week—and so I’ve done the poking around among the providers you recommended, and have settled on DreamHost (thanks, Andrew; I’ve attempted to be sure that you get credit for the referral).  They’re having a sale right now on their “Code Monster” package, which provides 1600 MB 2560 MB disk space, 40 GB 65 GB monthly bandwidth, hosting for up to 15 full domains and unlimited subdomains, and 75 shell accounts, for only $19.95 a month (which is half the usual price, and which price will remain in effect as long as I keep the plan).  This is far more than I really need, but I have some plans in the offing that may necessitate expansion, so better too much than not enough.  And the price is certainly right, and the ratings at webhostingratings.com are as well.

So, on tap, as soon as I finish my @$#*! grading, which I should have finished days ago, is a site migration and redesign.¹ I’m going to do some experimenting with Textpattern and WordPress as well, to decide whether I want to stick it out with MT or head in another direction.

In short: expect major wonkiness hereabouts, until the changes get sorted out.

[UPDATE 5.29.04:  I love these guys!  I’ve been with them for two weeks, and already they’ve upgraded disk space and bandwidth on my plan (in fact, on all plans) by 60%!  Plus, they’ve instituted a 20% discount for a 2-year prepayment, bringing the cost of this plan down to $15.95/month.  I’m adding a link way down in the left sidebar; if you’re in need of a hosting service, and you open an account with them, I get lovely referral discounts...]

¹Incidentally, anybody have any advice on the migration part?  Any lessons I can learn from your migration experiences?

The irony is of course that within moments of my having posted yesterday’s entry, my hosting provider’s service went down, so no one could get to the message in which I was asking for help with finding a new hosting provider.  Coincidence?  I think not.  In any event, help would still be greatly appreciated—and I’m off to make many, many backups.

Just a quick one, as I’m in the midst of enormous piles of grading that I really want done by the end of the day tomorrow:  I’ve just gotten an email message from my hosting provider saying that they’re shutting down as early as two weeks from now.  I need recommendations for a good, inexpensive hosting provider, with a solid support record.  Any advice would be appreciated; any thanks.

Why, oh why, did I decide that it was a good idea to put my computer in a different room from my television set?

Then again, if it weren’t for the running back and forth, would I find myself frantically posting like this every time I got really, really involved in an episode of The Sopranos?