Disquiet

• Not entirely surprised that in @songbirdteam the LyricMaster display pane doesn’t pull up the words to “u_07” off Alva Noto’s album Unitxt.
• Morning sounds: two tinkling hard drives in living room (netbook, TiVo) sound like small backyard birds; car idling a block away.
• 27: number of downloads left in my emusic account; wondering what to snag
• Not sure why Twitter Tools (for WordPress) consistently fails to post weekly set to Disquiet.com, which has current builds for plugin & WP.
• RIP, Dennis Hopper (b. 1936). Pulling out the miracle score he and Jack Nitzsche wrangled for The Hot Spot: Miles Davis vs. John Lee Hooker.
• Synchronic sonic diptych while working on the yard: a block or two over kids sing “It’s a Small World” while sirens roar by in the distance.
• 5.02: home DSL in Mb/s now that AT&T has fixed the trouble on the line
• 2.91: home DSL in Mb/s before AT&T figured out there’s trouble on the line
• Glad to hear SF’s Robotspeak gets to stay in its Lower Haight location, despite a radical change in business plan.
• 3: The number of devices currently on my person that can record sound.
• 85: combined number of tracks on the next two Oval releases (titled, respectively, Oh and O)
• ♪ Afternoon listening: industrial ambience from @pulsewidth http://is.gd/ctoUm
• Only music on the bus is the headphone leakage from a guy listening to mariachi tunes. The result sounds like a kalimba made of tinsel.
• Helped a friend build a blog, using wordpress.com. It’s about (written, but not drawn) fiction about superheroes: http://superheronovels.com
• Pulled up @evernote in @firefox and half expected a recent thought of mine to simply appear as a new document. Perhaps a future feature.
• 22: The (current) rank of the word “listening” among the top 100 terms used in people’s first @twitter posts: http://is.gd/crYIw
• Is there a petition somewhere to get @aplusk to put an apostrophe in the word “Thats” in his Twitter bio?
• 22,646: The number of tweets at Ai Weiwei’s @aiww account since he joined up barely a year ago, on May 31, 2009.
• When it rains, the Civic Center Falun Gong morning exercisers take shelter under eve of Bill Graham Auditorium, amplifying their tinny radio
• 6: The number of languages I heard on the way to work.
• Any recommendations for free cloud database challengers to http://flexlists.com/? Plenty of free text/spreadsheet/image editors, but db?
• Today’s mail: very tiny Sanyo audio recorder & copy of Steve Goodman’s book Sonic Warfare. Instructions for Sanyo are as long as the book.
• First a new Autechre, then a new Oval, then a 2nd new Oval. Now a 2nd new Autechre: http://autechre.ws
• If any single issue of a magazine this year has shown what a great print magazine can accomplish, it’s the David Choe issue of @juxtapoz_mag
• RIP, Martin Gardner (b. 1914), whose Scientific American & Asimov’s columns filled my teen years. Gotta pull Annotated Alice off the shelf.
• Some sounds from Lost that I’ll miss: smoke monster, Geronimo Jackson, Dharma-bunker alarm, Dharma-bunker clock-rewind, opening theme/drone.
• Excited the San Francisco Symphony is performing Feldman’s Rothko Chapel in 2011. In related new, I’m going to see Red on Broadway soon.
• The bacon beignets @francessf are like American takoyaki.
• Just learned from ‘It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time’ by Moira Hodgson that John Cage’s favorite whisky was Laphroaig. Good man.
• Just saw my first iPad “in the wild.” I guess the early-adopter shyness is over. Evos everywhere, thanks to the Google I/O giveaway.

By Marc Weidenbaum