The Domesticated Primate

Well, this was a nice little gem to find.


Without giving anything away...this one is definitely not the average vampire flick.

I just finished watching The Holy Mountain...my first Alejandro Jodorowsky movie. I've had his movies on my "to see" list for almost two decades now. It's just been that they've been so hard to find, or when one could find it - it wasn't on Region 1.

Turns out the library has The Holy Mountain and El Topo. I checked this one out first, and finally got around to finishing it today.

I'm not going to say I understand 100% of it, but it's a true marvel to behold. Lots of alchemical/Kabbalistic/hermetic/Rosicrucian type of stuff in there, to be certain. I was totally blown away by trying to take it all in.

And, as an American, I have to say I recoiled at all of the full frontal and some of the more violent imagery. Even so, it's not the usual run of the mill movie, and there is something to be said for that. I can see why it's a cult movie.

Now, if I could just find that soundtrack....

Finally finished watching all three parts of the documentary The Trap. Another great one from Adam Curtis, IMHO. If you haven't seen his others, specifically, the The Power of Nightmares, drop everything you're doing and watch it on Google Video ASAP.

In this one, he follows the ideas of negative liberty vs. positive liberty, and how the assumption that the first one is an inevitable worldwide outcome, and how the second one will always lead to tyranny is a "trap".

Well, that's a very simplistic version of what he covers, but that's the basic summary.

Along the way, lots of oxes get gored, specifically, the still standard economic model (but under attack for years - from more vocal folks like Adbusters and Chomsky) of every human being a perfectly rational processor in some sort of perfect multicore processor we call the "market", and that markets are somehow the ultimate expression of democracy.

If you like live music, you should sub to the NPR Live Concerts from All Songs Considered podcast.

It's always been good, but recently, they dropped tons of content on there - mostly shows from the Newport Folk Festival. Insane amounts of music showed up in the feed. It's going to be weeks before I make my way through all this.


And....if you haven't heard this already, if you consider yourself a music-lover, you simply must go over and listen to the live Dark Was The Night concert. That is such a great show...

Still making the switch to OS X...I have a favorite app for Windoze that I liked for ripping/encoding called Easy CD Extractor. I rarely buy for-fee software, and like to stick to open source, but that was good enough IMHO to spring for.

In any case...iTunes doesn't seem to give you control over the filenames of an "import".

If there IS a way to do this, I guess I can live with iTunes as my ripper/encoder, but if not...that's a non-starter, and I need a better program for ripping/encoding.

Songbird doesn't seem to have that ability (yet) and I don't see an add-on for it, either.

Any suggestions for a good open source encoder/ripper for OS X?

I finally broke down after all these years, and decided to get a MacBook Pro. The tipping point was being able to do iPhone development.

It just came Tuesday, and I'm making the switch.

Any techies out there that have suggestions on best of breed tools, definitely let me know. I'd also be interested in what sort of virtualizing others do.

Currently seeking best of breed tools for:

SFTP client.
Winamp style mp3 player. I'm using SongBird right now, but sometimes it seems bit overbearing. Why do so many apps insist on "importing" my library of songs? I just want to point at them and play them. I want to blame iTunes, but I'm not sure who kicked this off.
Best way to launch apps. Not sure what the out-of-the-box solution is to do it without using touchpad at all. I had a pretty good solution for Windows - putting stuff in start menu - and using key combos to start apps. Kludgey to set up, but nice once it's ready and once the paradigm is understood. I need something like this for OSX. I'm thinking I'm just a noob, and it provides one already.

I'm also all ears when it comes to good books for making the switch. I'm still having some issues finding the right combo of keys, and doing things the OSX way.

Finding a good way to lock the screen with a key combo was much more of a PITA than I would have expected - pretty disappointed that was so hard to figure out. Doing this in KDE or GNOME or Windows was much simpler. Apple could definitely do a better job than that - and no, the hotspot thing doesn't work for me.