Bonoff / Squeeze?

May 26, 2010

Karla Bonoff’s “I Can’t Hold On” is co-written with Difford and Tilbrook (Squeeze)!? Who knew?
I think this is just allmusic.com being confused about two songs with the same name.

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Ruby GData API, Google Calendar, and redirects

May 6, 2010

The Ruby GData API provides for accessing a number of Google data sources: Google Apps, Analytics, YouTube, you name it (http://code.google.com/apis/gdata/docs/directory.html).
When you access a Google Calendar that is managed through a Google Apps username (e.g., you@example.com, as opposed to you@gmail.com), the standard lookup feed (example: http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/default/owncalendars/full) redirects after you access it. (Not the case for [...]

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Default params for POST in HTTParty

May 5, 2010

So I was looking at the API for ping.fm (http://groups.google.com/group/pingfm-developers/web/api-documentation?_done=%2Fgroup%2Fpingfm-developers%3F), and thought: Ah, this would be easy to wrap with HTTParty (http://github.com/jnunemaker/httparty).
For ping.fm, all requests must be POSTs, and each request much include a couple of keys. But in HTTParty, you can’t specify default params that should be used every time for POST.
So I fixed [...]

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Goodbye, Alex Chilton; 1950-2010

March 18, 2010

Some time around 1979, I was DJ’s at the college radio station, and someone pointed out to me a scuffed-up album called “Radio City” by a group I’d never heard of called Big Star. The album had come out in 1974. I listened to it, liked it, played it a bit, and forgot about it. [...]

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The iPad and the classroom

March 10, 2010

I’ve been thinking some about the iPad and the classroom. My bet is that it would be a better book reader than the Amazon Kindle for two reasons:

it seems likely that books will be delivered to the platform as PDFs, which typically means that the page numbers will correspond to the printed editions. In [...]

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Recent reading about the economy: Lanchester’s I.O.U. and Stiglitz’s Freefall

March 4, 2010

I’ve been trying to educate myself on the recent economic slide, and was given for my birthday two books that have received a lot of notice: John Lanchester’s I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay [amazon], and Joseph E. Stiglitz’s Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy [amazon]. [...]

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Heilemann and Halperin, Game Change (Book Review)

February 24, 2010

John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime. [Amazon]

I paid attention to the Presidential primary and general elections like everyone else, and even drove up to New Hampshire to see one candidate in person. I kept up enough to know that during one [...]

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Dave Thompson, London’s Burning: True Adventures on the Frontlines of Punk, 1976-1977 (Book Review)

December 6, 2009

Dave Thompson, London’s Burning: True Adventures on the Front Lines of Punk, 1976-1977 (2009). $18.95. [Amazon]
The history of UK punk has been told so many times, and so well, that it’s hard to believe that the story can be told again. But it can. Dave Thompson’s London’s Burning is a recollection of his mid to [...]

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Tom Davis, Thirty-Nine years of Short-Term Memory Loss (Book Review)

December 6, 2009

Tom Davis, Thirty-Nine Years of Short-Term Memory Loss: The Early Days of SNL from Someone Who was There (2009). $24.00. [Amazon]
I read a fair number of showbiz memories (for reasons I know not), usually with a bit of a rock-and-roll cast, and this is one of the worst. Tom Davis was half of the Franken [...]

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Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked (Book Review)

November 29, 2009

Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked (2009) $25.99. [Amazon]
Nick Hornby’s Juliet, Naked is about a cult musician, his fans, and his legacy. Tucker Crowe recorded what fanboys seem to think is the greatest break-up album of all time, “Juliet.” Then Crowe dropped out of the music business. One of his biggest fans is a musical trainspotter in [...]

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