I came across this looking at the club happenings in SF:

After college, Shayman moved to New York and began a successful career as a producer with a diverse pallette of urban sounds. He produced “Ski Mask Way” on 50 Cent’s multi-platinum The Massacre and the notorious Kevin Federline track, “Popozoa” which benefited from Shayman’s connection to the Brazilian baile funk sound (he lived in Brazil part-time) but he also continued to collaborate with underground acts such as Spank Rock and the Brazilian group, BRAZA, who record for Shayman’s Gringo Louco label. Shayman was also a perpetual business man, creating and licensing music for commercials and video games. He even oversaw the marketing for aLeda, a line of transparent rolling papers.

Shayman fought manic-depression for much of his adult life. He told URB in April of 2006, “It got to the point where I tried to kill myself. It was bad.”

In 2001, I drove Shayman and another Detroit DJ to an event in Indianapolis, Indiana where he was scheduled to play. Still in college, Dave sat in the back seat of the rental car, smoking a foul dollar cigar and reading an economics textbook with a portable reading light. An hour later, he was cutting and scratching ghettotech classics like “Ass ‘N Titties” to the collected ravers. This mix of high-minded business and down low funk made him a successful producer. It’s unfortunate that despite his incredible talent, his disease kept him from finding contentment.

I think the world needs more lamps.

Link to Dave Shayman obit

Filed under: beats | 1 Comment
Tagged: counterproductive

So, an artist makes some blinky adverts for an upcoming major motion picture, featuring a well-recognized cartoon character, and the Boston police go ballistic and have the bomb squad detonate one of them. Pretty typical for Boston.. Well, then they arrest the artist who made the blinkies! They are holding him on terrorism charges, and calling a bunch of LEDs connected to some batteries a PIPE BOMB! Crazy, right?

Well, last year San Francisco police detonated a flashlight that was left in a Starbucks bathroom by a homeless guy. A fucking flashlight! From CNN:

SAN FRANCISCO, California (CNN) — An explosive device was found in a Starbucks coffee shop in central San Francisco on Monday. The building was evacuated and a police bomb squad disarmed the device, authorities said.

A Starbucks employee found the device about 1:15 p.m. (4:15 p.m. ET) on the coffee shop’s bathroom floor, police spokesman Neville Gittens said.

“If it had detonated, it would have caused damage,” Gittens said. “It was what we consider an IED,” an improvised explosive device.

Acutally, it was just a flashlight. And guess what? They arrested the flashlight dude too.

Filed under: tronix | 9 Comments
Tagged: counterproductive

Hey, probably not a good idea do this on your Mac OS X machine:

sudo mv Security.framework Security-1046.framework

Good lord, every process uses PAM, which links to Security, so basically you won’t be able to launch or use any programs, even command line. In particular you can’t use “sudo mv” to fix what you broke because sudo, of course, uses Security.framework for authentication. It’s pretty hilarious, kind of like messing with ld.so or libc.so on a Linux system.

To fix it, reboot, hold down command-S to boot into single user mode, follow the directions to make the filesystem read/write, and then use “mv” to fix it.

I’ve been dorking around more with /System days, just like I did with Linux lo those many years ago (well, it was /lib on Linux). I need to start watching TV or something.

Filed under: osx | 1 Comment
Tagged: commandline , counterproductive

Link to “Geekiest Wedding Present Evar” (via nephology)

Filed under: cuuuuute, video | 1 Comment
Tagged: counterproductive

Vale94 requested to be my friend on Twitter …

Who would say no to this???

Vale, not only do I want to be friends with you, I want to fix your laptop.

Filed under: all talk, lifehacking | 3 Comments
Tagged: counterproductive

My landing page at Urban Dictionary was so laugh out loud funny I forgot what I went there to look up in the first place. I’ve never even heard of this:

A “Third Joke” is when someone says something funny, someone else feels the need to follow it with something that may or may not also be funny, and then a third person, trying to keep up, follows up with a third quip, which by this point is most definitely no longer funny.

It is important for others at this point to call “Third Joke” out loud to point out the third individual’s social error, to embarass them for killing the funny.

A truly unskilled individual can Third Joke on the second quip.

Bob: “And then I said, “That’s not my fish!”” Haha!

Bill: “A halibut tale!” Haha!

Ted: “I smell fish!” Ha.. um.

Bob: “Third Joke, Ted.”

Leave it to me to be out of touch with basic modern humor …. I think I should get a medal for being able to Third Joke on the First Joke.

Oh yeah, now I remember my original query: “ropegun”:

1. ropegun
in rock climbing:
(n) ropegun: the person who climbs first and attaches the rope to the safety devices on the way up, allowing everyone else to climb with the rope attached above them. more dangerous and fun.

Link to “third joke” at Urban Dictionary
Link to “ropegun” at Urban Dictionary

Filed under: all talk | 1 Comment
Tagged: counterproductive

OK, not really. But there’s a bit of an exposé over at the New York Times with some behind the scenes action on Frienster’s infamous fall from grace.

It’s funny …. back in day, during the routine of checking into Friendster and giving up in frustration when the home page wouldn’t even load, I always figured I was trying to log into some uppity teenager’s Windows NT Server box. Some kid who’s side project hit it big and couldn’t keep up with being Slashdotted, BoingBoing’ed, Time Magazine’d, the works. Only recently did I find out that Frienster was (and still is) a real company, with a real CEO and real engineers and real millions of dollars in venture funding. $30 million dollars and can’t make a database serve up some web pages? It boggles the mind. I mean really, nerdy college dropouts with some basic PHP skillz seem to be routinely pulling off landslide web plays.

Assistant professor Mikolaj Jan Piskorski at the Harvard Business School uses Frienster as a case study:

Friendster’s fate is “a real puzzle,” Professor Piskorski said. “This was a company that had the talent and had the connections.” he said. “They had this great idea that people really took to.”

There is no single reason that explains Friendster’s failures, Professor Piskorski added, which is what makes it academic fodder. “It’s a power story,” he said. “It’s a status story. It’s an ego story.” But largely, he said, Friendster is a “very Silicon Valley story that tells us a lot about how the Valley operates.”

I know that in my days of misguided youth I used to say, famously, “I wouldn’t wipe my ass with the New York Times” … but now I’m over 30, and I think this article, at least, is worth reading.

Link to … just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful slip …

Filed under: all talk | 2 Comments
Tagged: counterproductive

For those unfamiliar with ReiserFS, it’s a filesystem authored by a notoriously argumentative dude. Inclusion of ReiserFS in the Linux Kernel has always been controversial because, well … ReiserFS sucks, but for some reason some people want to include it in Linux.

Link to Reiser Murder / Arrest Story

Filed under: code code | 1 Comment
Tagged: counterproductive

What Are You?

Filed under: why are we here? | 3 Comments
Tagged: counterproductive

Holy crap this site is funny.

Why are people always stealing my ideas?

Like penis in vagina sex. MY IDEA.

Link to ..:Things My Boyfriend Says:..

Filed under: comix | 3 Comments
Tagged: counterproductive

What is a SuperMax prison exactly? According to the Spunk Library SuperMax prisons are essentially solitary confinement for the duration of the sentence. Prisoners are locked into a small cell for 23 hours a day, (1 hour a day “exercise” in a different concrete room with a pullup bar) communication is restriction or totally denied, etc, etc. This quote from the article is notable:

The effects of solitary confinement have been known for more than a century. The following is a quotation from an opinion by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1890: “[E]xperience demonstrated that there were serious objections to [solitary confinement]. A considerable number of the prisoners fell, after even a short confinement, into a semi-fatuous condition, from which it was next to impossible to arouse them, and others became violently insane; others still, committed suicide; while those who stood the ordeal better were not generally reformed, and in most cases did not recover sufficient mental activity to be of any subsequent service. . . .”

Filed under: why are we here? | 0 Comments
Tagged: counterproductive