Urban Puddle

Journalism is a profession. The Press has been sometimes referred to as the 4th branch of government due to the amazing influence they have over the political process. Recently, the press used this power on two occasions. First, by ignoring Marie Johns' campaign completely instead choosing to name only Fenty, Cropp, and 'other candidates'. (Do they think Americans can't process more than 2 choices? Can we?)

Then yesterday, Marketplace conducted an 'interview' with Joseph Vranich about a new Amtrak CEO being hired. Coincidentally Mr. Vranich has a new book out calling for the dismantling of Amtrak. Again, coincidentally he is pushing his own private rail initiative.

Sufjan Stevens started a US tour today and, in honor of that, here's a free music download called "The Lord God Bird". It was originally featured on NPR's All Songs Considered.

Live for the Touch is the 5th track from Elysian Fields' 2004 CD Dreams That Breathe Your Name. If you haven't heard this band you owe it to yourself to check them out. I actually have a few songs from them. Baby Get Lost is one of my favorites but unfortunately I can't find that as a free download anywhere. However, you can grab Shooting Stars from Better Propaganda.

As a special treat, I've put together an album's worth of free downloads. Here are 10 tracks I think go well together. Feel free to download them and put them on your MP3 player. I'm calling this an End of Summer Mix but you can call it whatever you want. If you enjoyed this mix be sure to Digg it or add it to your Del.icio.us bookmarks!

Forget Cassettes is a trio out of Nashville Tennessee. Now, before you jump to conclusions as to what a band from Nashville must sound like, do yourself a favor and at least grab this track called Quiero Quieres first (from the album 'Salt'). This download is courtesy of InSound, but unfortunately they are sold old at the moment so consider iTunes instead. Else, you can always go direct to the label.

Dec 02/2006 Update: See this article for a ready to go preference file!

I've been using Mac OSX for most of my development these days. A while back I wrote about this nifty little application called Visor. It drops down a terminal from the top of your screen offering you a shell in seconds with any user-defined keystroke. I love this little app, but something strange has been happening. The more I use it the bigger and bigger it gets. Yesterday, the Visor had grown from taking up about 1/3 of my screen to now using the entire thing. Was I going insane? Turns out that it's a known bug in 1.2.1. Great, so what to do?

As mentioned yesterday, I moved my server from Typo 2.6 over to 4.0.3. That, however, wasn't the only change under the hood because there is now also a mobile version of the Puddle at m.urbanpuddle.com! It was so very very generously set up for me by Mobits, the same people that power Digg Mobile. I'm hoping one day that the mobile phone browsers here in the US will have improved somewhat allowing those Free Music Downloads directly to your music library. I know that my Nokia N73 won't play/download the links but maybe eventually. If anyone's phone actually allows the MP3 download directly to your memory card, I'd appreciate a comment indicating your success (or confirming you failure). Thanks!

Local DC band Supercade is self described as "a high-energy rock band that sings poppy, catchy songs about unfortunate things" . They have graciously provided this song called By Now You Know for you to download and listen to. Be sure to check out their CD Release Party at the Velvet Lounge if you like it!

Definitely one for the permanent iTunes collection.

I've been having some strange issue where lightty just fails for no apparent reason. The logs have been no help. The only thing I can think of is that typo 2.6 uses a frozen version of rails which was vulnerable to things like this happening. Although rails has been updated on my server, typo still happily uses the older version.

As a test, I've moved urbanpuddle over to Typo4 on a different server. So if you are wonder why the theme is different, now you know. I'll have to dig around the new typo themes and find something I like. Until then, please be patient!

Update: Ok, I found my old theme again.. it now works with the updated Typo. Only thing missing is my lovely adsense block which seems to throw up in a Jumbo/large way. Anyone know how to get that working again?

When I first heard this song it reminded me of Elliott Smith. What do you all think? It's called "Obey Me" and is by Ryan Lee Crosby. If you happen to be an Elliott Smith fan then this is a must-have for you.