Spotify

If you check my Last.FM list, you'll see that instead of getting ready for bed and tomorrow, I've been frittering away the evening playing with the free stream from Spotify, which launched in the US today (Hacker News was full of free invites, and in fact included a Python program to scan for available invites, so I used that).

Like all music services, for sale or streaming, it is incomplete, failing some of my 'acid test' list of hard-to-find musicians and albums, but it nevertheless has an impressive playlist with many 'soundtrack-of-my-life' songs. It won't replace eMusic, or anyway, it won't replace the eMusic I liked before they tried to become iTunes-only-more-expensive-and-less-convenient, but it will let me play in the more popular streams. Still need a good indie/jazz/world/outsider vendor to force me outside of my comfort zone, but this will be fun for more conventional needs.

Photo Finish

Okay, I finally worked through the pile of photos from Paris. The photoset is complete at 248 pics. And while there are many I enjoy (and many I admit are pretty pedestrian), this metro candid and this Montmartre stairwell photo are my favorites. So much for snaps of tourist attractions!

Paris

Before I left for work this morning, I queued up an upload of the first batch of photos from our trip to Paris, which happened last week. The first batch I managed to work through since our return home amounts to around eighty pics. When I'm finished, however long that takes, it should be around 300 photos, some interesting to the general public, some only to me. You can watch the evolving photoset here.

And for the record, I am a bad person. I did not get anybody souvenirs. This is partly because we packed a single carry-on each (even going so far as to hand wash a pair of pants in the hotel tub during the trip). The only 'souvenir' I got myself was a museum shirt so that I had something to wear one day, and I wore it home on the plane.

Sorry friends, I am a bad friend. If I ever go on another trans-continental trip, I'll try to mail things back home...

On a lighter note, I discovered that my stabbing sinus flight malady can be greatly reduced by applying saline nasal sprays every half hour during the trip, and taking a vicodin about an hour before the final descent. This is a single data point, so it may have been just luck, but the landing in Paris was nasty, and the landing in Sea-Tac was merely unpleasant, so I'll be trying that drill again if ever forced aboard another jet.

Haircut

Funny world. I put up a photoset of Renee's summer haircut (taken at her request), and within hours someone had added several of the photos to their favorites. Said person seems to specialize in hairstyle photos/images...

Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum

Back in February, Jean, Renee and I went to an all-day Robotics Tournament at the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum. I took my P&S camera, and took scads of photos. I finally got around to uploading the better images (mostly in focus), and the banner is a sample.

Twenty-two Years Ago

This time the banner samples a mere twenty-two years ago (February of 1989). I was working at what was then called the NASA Lewis Research Center (it was rechristened the Glenn Research Center in 1999). I really can't recall anymore where this picture was taken. Truth to tell, I look a little stoned, holding my precious lab notebook. Perhaps I'd been working to hard (I was known to take classes and work fulltime in those days).

Odds are this was somewhere in the microgravity research labs, where I worked for Arnon Chait. The dude next to me is Mike Fuller. I have no idea what he went on to do.

Sorry, no long hair this time. I was trying to pass as a normal. Still am...

Hunky Dory (and Hanna)

A couple of weeks ago I went to see Hanna, after reading this interview with the director, Joe Wright, who had previously been known for more arty fare, such as Pride and Prejudice. The conflict between a tense spy action movie and a coming of age drama struck me as intriguing. As it turns out, I enjoyed the movie very much. Saoirse Ronan is striking and has great stage presence. The supporting cast seemed perfect. And, the jumps between action and long, contemplative passages where Hanna revels in the new world, are very appealing.

However! There was one scene which tormented me for the last couple of weeks. In it, Hanna has 'stowed away' in a family's van as they drive across Europe on holiday. The scene is meant to show how she is exposed to the casual love and playfulness of a family, so unlike her own boot camp relationship with her own father, played by Eric Bana. But as the family is playfully mucking about, with Hanna observing from her hiding place in the laundry box at the back of the van, a whimsical tune is playing. I knew I had heard this tune many times, but just could not place it.

Well, I tried to look up the song in the soundtrack credits, but they don't include it. The soundtrack for sale is just all Chemical Brothers (the electronica duo responsible for most of the music). Okay, they are fun, but this was not what I wanted to know. No matter how I rephrased my search in Google, it always turned up Chemical Brothers. Wrong!

I had given up.

So tonight, for some reason, I'm browsing album samples on Amazon MP3. I come across an old David Bowie album, Hunky Dory, which I remember listening to in early college years (it had already been out perhaps five years by then). And what a surprise, Kooks is the damn song I was looking for! Interesting synchronicity there, as the song was written by Bowie for his son, whom I knew for years as Zowie Bowie, but whose full legal name is Duncan Zowie Haywood Jones. He is now a well regarded director, responsible for the lovely scifi film Moon (starring Sam Rockwell), and the more recent scifi puzzle/thriller (echoing Philip K. Dick): Source Code.

Anyway, I'm thrilled to uncover this when the Internet failed me. So I'm logging it here in case anyone else is going through the same struggle I did.