Matt Ulman

Montana’s experience, and experience elsewhere since this court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, make it exceedingly difficult to maintain that independent expenditures by corporations ‘do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.’

Two dissents.  Two.

I don’t want to be melodramatic about this, but it could seriously be the most important idea of the last few decades.  It’s bigger in scope than the Move to Amend plan, and it’ll take time to see which is more achievable.

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.  – Henry David Thoreau

My reader will certainly agree that this site is a close second behind Pitchfork when it comes to eagerly anticipated best of lists.  So without further ado, here we go:

1. Wild Flag:  What can one say that hasn’t been said.  Maybe supergroups shouldn’t be eligible.
2. PJ Harvey:  A return to form, and I know everyone agrees.
3. Wye Oak:  Solid growth and a shock to me from a band that I thought would always be an opener last year.
4. Fucked Up:  I’ve already said this is the world I want to live in.  The fact that this is 4th says something about those in 1-3.
5. The Pains of Being Pure At Heart:  Upped the shoegaze and won my heart.  That won’t shock anyone who’s been around me for the last 20 years.
6. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah:  Nostalgia?  Maybe, but there are some really catchy tunes here.
7. Deer Tick:  People will groan when I say (again) that this is the best new Replacements album in the last 20 years
8. We Were Promised Jetpacks:  I like as much as the debut, maybe more because I find it a little more mature / accessible.  Probably why others hate it.
9. We Are Augustines: Pela’s gone, and those days are, too, but this will do for now.
10. Yuck: Surprising addition to me, I suspect this might not stand, but there are some really good songs on this album.  They should be looking over their collective shoulders for Youth Lagoon.

There are some that I suspect are missing and so I’m going to try to do a top 20 next month.  Let’s see how close I got.

Also, I’m hoping I’ll do a ‘surprisingly disappointing’ list.  *glances towards The Antlers*.

I’ve had this band in my head all year, ever since the night that we wandered into Bruar Falls (rip) during Northside.

We’d spent the night hopping between venues not knowing who was playing or what to expect. We’d seen some interesting stuff (good and bad), but when we saw Milk Music I knew that we’d seen it.  It was crowded, oven-hot, and WAY too late…  and yet there’s nothing better than realizing you’re watching one of your new favorite bands – and it’s a band that you didn’t know existed before they started playing.

Finding their album is a challenge, and I haven’t seen them back in town since then, but there’s a lot of buzz – this could be their year if they ever leave the west coast again.  Over the summer I would have said the vocals were mixed too low and the music was too far from the mainstream to be popular, but in a world where David Comes to Life is the album of the year anything’s possible.  And that’s the world I want to live in.

Given that I use a lot of knock-off Chinese batteries and have tweaked a lot of things, I thought the wildly inaccurate battery readings I was getting on my Atrix probably wouldn’t get fixed.  Rebooting was a temporary fix, and I’d often get back 60-80% battery by restarting after going down to 15% in just a few hours, only to have to reboot again.  xda-developers, as always, to the rescue.  Completely fixed my problem, all hail open source and the community.  Motorola Atrix battery level fix.

We’re buying appliances for the new apartment from the Home Depot, and who doesn’t like to save money?  So I purchased quite a few giftcards from Cardpool thinking I could save 8%.  I would like to point out that this was against the Wife’s better judgement.

The sale we trying to catch only lasted two more days, so I needed them to stick to their ‘delivery within one business day’ promise.  After 36 hours passed without hearing anything, even after email support requests, I started  to get nervous.  They have no phone number listed on their site and the number they used in the past as a CS number is just a recording now.  I realize this doesn’t exactly make me look like a super smart guy.  Another support request went unanswered until the 48 hours was nearly up and I received an email saying that because of an ‘inventory problem’, they were refunding my money.

Luckily we can still get to the sale and so I’m just a fool, I’m not a moron.  Is it a scam?  I can’t say.  Here’s hoping that the next person has better luck, but also maybe that they know what to expect.

I’ve been pretty vocal about my hatred of the new Garden ‘experience’ this year and last.

As I see it there are really three issues:

1. The renovations’ goal was to make the Garden more attractive to corporate clients, including moving the luxury boxes down from the ceiling and adding more ‘high class’ vendors.  The average fan doesn’t see any real improvement.
2. To offset the extra non-arena space the aisles were reduced or removed and navigating to and from seats is dramatically more difficult in a very crowded space.   What used to be tunnel entrances to the bowl were reduced to hallways, and the circumnavigational aisles were removed completely.
3. To pay for the renovations they raised ticket prices, and because of this they shuffled everyone to seats that are less attractive than the seats they’d had before.

So we have a process from which most people see no benefit, and in fact their experience is worse.  To add insult to injury we’re paying more for less.

We suffered through last year when most facilities were taken out of service at one point or another, dealt with huge lines for everything with the promise that “things would improve”, but this year the same thing is happening and last night I made it back to my seat with 2 seconds left in the period break after doing nothing more than buying a hotdog and quickly going to the restroom.

MSG should be upset that I didn’t have any time to shop, even if I wasn’t planning on it.

Looking around online I’m surprised I haven’t seen more reviews, positive or negative, of the renovations.   I did find this piece, which was written before the launch and sums things up quite nicely:

The third-party gentleman that they brought in to conduct the [focus] group asked a battery of questions, all along the line of ‘what would make it alright for them to take your seat away and give you a worse one?’ The answer, unanimously, was nothing. The fellow recommended an exclusive entrance to the building, some exclusive concession stands or minor discounts on said concessions. He was completely unable to grasp the concept that hardcore Ranger fans don’t care about the accommodations or intermission entertainment options, they care about watching the game.

They don’t get it, but what’s worse they don’t care because we’re not the market they’re after.  I just sold my Saturday night Habs tickets online, something that I never would have dreamed of doing even last year.

Six gigs later I find that 32bit ubuntu has no himem support and have to upgrade.

I run the antique nvidia-173 driver because one of the two video cards is a 5200.  My problem after install was a string of errors (EE) No devices detected errors which, as it does, drove me to xorg.conf.  What I realised was that the nvidia-settings thingy had left out the Bus IDs for the cards inserting instead lines like BusID “?@?:?:?”.

lspci to the rescue, and after I inserted the proper IDs (make sure to replace the XX:XX.X format returned by lspci with the XX:XX:X format needed by X), everything’s fine.

Just some keywords in case someone else runs into the same thing.  And it made today’s XKCD that much more enjoyable, finding it as I did after everything was fixed.  I think he has the slope inverted, because I definitely felt pretty good immediately after I got it working.  It’s all downhill from here: every moment brings me closer to the next time I’ll have to muck about with it.

I need to mention that the most common way people get to this site, by far, is to google big nuts.

Thank you, internet.  And you’re welcome, disappointed new visitors.

Now back to our apparently blogging-free summer.