treb’s Neighborhood

According to Google, top ten things people are wanting more of/than/from:

According to Google, the top ten things people want girls covered in:

Yesterday I went over to West Oakland to watch a short documentary my friend Elida made. She had taken a class on film making and was showing off the final product. Pretty cool and inspiring! Justin Chin who hosted the showing also showed one of his recent works (he's a cinematographer). He helped create an unofficial music video for a Green Day song. I'm not a Green Day fan, but I do have more appreciation for them after recently finishing the book Gimme Something Better: The Profound, Progressive, and Occasionally Pointless History of Bay Area Punk from Dead Kennedys to Green Day and in my opinion this is another case where the fan video blows away the official video. Anyhow, compare and contrast for yourself.

Some vid from Symbiosis. Finally got Mie hooping :) Shake it girl

This is just amazing. Sometimes I think maybe I could be an artist then I see something like this and realize I'm just
a chump: Grizzly Bear - Two Weeks, Fan Video (embed didn't work, stupid vimeo).

So one trillion dollars is enough to send everyone in America on an 11 week vacation? And the bailouts are 10 trillion? I'll take the 110 week vacation please. We'll figure it all out when we get back.

This Merge XX festival is the first time I've found Twitter useful for anything other than keeping up with friends. The conversation around #xxmerge has been fun to follow and also useful for gathering information (like what band is going to play next, or who are we missing as we're driving down 15-501 towards the Cat's Cradle). I was curious how many of the #xxmerge tweeting particpants were from outside of the Triangle, so I wrote a quick script to see. It was the first time I'd used the twitter API and was happy to see how simple it was. Probably took me maybe all of 15 minutes; I think it actually took me longer to put together this posting.

Turns out that unsurprisingly most of the participants were from the RDU area, followed by a New England/NYC contingent, then a few west coasters: SF (me), Portland and WA. I could have sworn I saw someone from the Czech Republic, but they disappeared in a subsequent run. Must have been a glitch. Here's the breakdown (or as Google spreadsheet):

1000yregg	Baltimore, MD
AdelaideHayward	Port Ludlow, WA
alycemarie	somerville, ma
barnacle_goose	iPhone: 34.170956,-80.303963
biffbangpowell	Durham, NC
bobbymcdonald	Raleigh, NC
bradleysalmanac	Allston, MA
bwall05	        Connecticut
bzrd	        chapel hill nc
catscradlenc	Carrboro, NC
currincy	iPhone: 35.789791,-78.626205
dan_mccleary	Chapel Hill, NC
dav	        San Francisco, CA
dbrine1	        NJ
ejrc	        Brooklyn
eshep	        apex, nc
indyweek	Raleigh - Durham - Chapel Hill
johndemartino	Durham NC
jonnypolite	iPhone: 45.533173,-122.714920 (Portland, OR)
jseaton	        Raleigh
kbodnar32	Raleigh, NC
malitzd	        Arlington, VA
mergerecords	North Carolina
mike_noodle	Raleigh... RA-LEIGH
nervousacid	Brooklyn, NY
rossgrady	iPhone: 35.994507,-78.902725
spinmagazine	New York, NY
stoftey	        Oak City
straintest	New York, NY
the_dp	        Carrburritos Taqueria
timnyc	        Williamsburg, New York
trianglemusic	Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill, NC
val1124	        Cary, NC
WNRNradio	Charlottesville, VA
wordnerdy	Durham, NC

Here's the source code (need ruby and curb to run):

require 'rubygems'
require 'curb'
require 'json'

STDOUT.sync = true

exit unless ARGV[0]
search_term = ARGV[0]

def grab_page_of_search_results(search_term, page_number)
  json = Curl::Easy.perform("http://search.twitter.com/search.json?rpp=100&q=#{search_term}").body_str
  search_response = JSON.parse(json)
  puts "Found #{search_response['results'].size} tweets on page #{page_number}."
  return search_response['results']
end

def grab_user_data(user)
  json = Curl::Easy.perform("http://twitter.com/users/show/#{user}.json").body_str
  return JSON.parse(json)
end

tweeters = {}
1..15.times do |page|
  results = grab_page_of_search_results(search_term, page)
  break if results.size == 0

  results.each do |result|
    print '.'
    user = result['from_user']
    if tweeters[user].nil?
      user_data = grab_user_data(user)
      tweeters[user] = user_data['location']
    end
  end
  print "\n"
end

puts "#{tweeters.size} unique tweeters:"

tweeters.each do |user,location|
  puts "\"#{user}\",\"#{location}\"" unless location == ''
end

Btw, last nights six slots is putting a serious damper on my 'extra slots' theory. I'm still holding out for surprise band though. Here's the updated schedule sheet. I'm sticking with the previous Friday night picks. Telekinesis and M.Ward for Saturday night. And Arcade Fire.

The Merge 20th anniversary festival has 33 bands in the line up and an interesting schedule: pretty much no schedule. At least no published schedule. For those of us with the five day pass it just means show up at the Cat's Cradle at 7PM and get ready to be happy. For those who didn't get the 5 day pass in the 19 minutes it took for them to sell out, it's a bit more stressful as they probably only managed to get a ticket for one night. They had to be purchased one at a time and few people managed to get two before they all single night tix also sold out.

 I think it's great fun to try to figure out who is going to play when though. Others do too, as straintest mentioned last night "about the same level of rumor and misinformation going around at #xxmerge as at an Apple keynote."

We nailed down a few early, by running into a band at the airport that accidentally let slip which night they were playing, and through some other rumor mill and twisted logic. Tonight is a big mystery though. Taking what we know now can narrow down the possibilities quite a bit though.

There were seven slots last night. If that carries to seven slots per night, and we have some slots filled, plus the 3 knowns on Sunday and 5 on Saturday afternoon, some interesting things become apparent. There are 15 unslotted bands left and 18 slots (7 Thu + 7 Sat + 4 Fri). Room for surprise bands or longer sets? Friday night is shaping up to be a rock night, so maybe Versus will go then as well. Superchunk will probably play Saturday night. Lambchop tonight? I'm going with M. Ward on Saturday night, with Arcade Fire also. Any other guesses?

There was a pretty interesting article in the New Yorker on determining future measures of success by testing a child's ability to succeed in delaying gratification.

Once Mischel began analyzing the results, he noticed that low delayers, the children who rang the bell quickly, seemed more likely to have behavioral problems, both in school and at home. They got lower S.A.T. scores. They struggled in stressful situations, often had trouble paying attention, and found it difficult to maintain friendships. The child who could wait fifteen minutes had an S.A.T. score that was, on average, two hundred and ten points higher than that of the kid who could wait only thirty seconds.
DON'T: The secret of self-control

Every morning I wake up and give Tesla a banana and while she eats that I make her a bowl of applesauce + yogurt + a dab of almond butter. A couple of mornings ago she left a small piece of the banana on her table and told me she wanted to dip it in her applesauce when I got it ready. I went back into the kitchen and finished making the bowl and when I came out she was sitting at her table crying. I asked her why and she said "I ate my banana no applesauce!"

So much for delayed gratification, I thought.

But then the last two days she has done the same thing, saving a small piece of her banana. Yesterday it turned out we ran out of applesauce so she wasn't able to test her will power for long. Today, however, she made it through the temptation all the way to banana dipping time. I was proud.

JR brought me this dish towel from his recent trip to Hong Kong: