Fujiya & Miyagi's Knickerbocker = more awesome krautrock to code to. Catchy, low-fi stuff.

Fujiya & Miyagi are actually 4 British dudes from Brighton. Not a funky lo fi outfit out of Japan like I expected.

According to wikipedia:
The origins of the band's name come from a character in the movie The Karate Kid as well as the brand of a record player... The story of how they met and formed the band variously reports a mutual hero-worship of world heavyweight wrestler Kendo Nagasaki, and a shared interest in krautrock and early-nineties electronica discovered while warming the subs bench during Sunday league football.

Earlier I praised YouTube's recommended list... but man when I watched this music video, they advertised the crap out of it. They had over-video ads for Guns N Roses' new album Chinese Democracy. What, if I'm listening to Fujiya and Miyagi, YouTube thinks I'm going to like overproduced soulless genetically engineered Pro Tools music?

I guess you can't exactly pull Pandora/Songkick metadata in to get music genre similarity for ads... but it would be a great way to do ads for music.

Hat tip to Patrick -- his posterous iTunes podcast is awesome.

On the menu tonight... Pan-seared Fresh Salmon with a Lemon-Herb Reduction and Buttered Brussel Sprouts

I got my new cast-iron wok tonight, and had Mark and Sanny over for dinner promptly after seasoning it. Cast iron woks are heavy as heck and require seasoning, but so far I've been impressed with the amount of heat the wok dishes out. This is the first time I've felt like I've had a wok that's hot enough to properly cook at the right temperature -- flimsy IKEA woks just don't cut it on an electric burner.

I bought 2 pounds (4 fillets) of Fresh Atlantic Salmon fillets from Safeway, descaled it with a serated knife, and dropped it on the very hot preheated wok with a tiny bit of oil in there. Literally dropped it, because I actually splashed hot oil on my arm have about 5 or 6 big red second degree burns on my right arm from it now. ARGH. Luckily Mark ran out and grabbed some aloe for me across the street. I seared the salmon in the wok on high heat for 3 minutes, then transferred the fillets to a pyrex baking dish for broiling 4 inches from the top heating elements for another 3 minutes. Salt, pepper, and top it off with a light lemon-herb reduction, brown rice and buttered brussel sprouts.

The lemon-herb reduction was a simple mix of about 1/4th of a cup of finely diced fresh sage, thyme and parsely, half a stick of butter, and 2 cups of chicken broth boiled down to a nice sauce. I threw in a table spoon of corn starch to thicken it just a tad.

Since moving to South of Market, I've basically become completely domesticated. The dearth of cheap good food in the area and the lack of a car has resulted in a 300% increase in my cooking. Now if only my cooking safety skills would catch up.

It's kind of like in The Sims when your sim only has 1 or 2 levels of cooking proficiency, and promptly proceeds to chop off his own hand or burn down the house. Yeah. Kind of like that.

What does it profit a social media service to gain the whole world but lose its own soul?

Social media invites make me laugh. Here's one I got just this morning from bebo.com

You will like it.Click to find out whyPlease accept or reject this invitation by clicking below:[[bebo link]]

When I asked my friend if she actually sent it, she was embarrassed as heck. No, she said. She did not write "You will like it." Of course the phrase "Click to find out why" really tipped me off to how fake these invite messages actually are. Are you kidding? I know nobody except a bebo.com engineer would write something so incredibly lame. Call to actions are great, but if you're going to impersonate someone with text (the from line was sent from my friend's email address, not from bebo.com), at least make it a plausible lie.

Was hanging out with my friend Dave Zohrob yesterday and he was mentioning how the most successful social media takes its cues essentially from two places: 1) video games (which is awesome) and 2) spammers (which is just straight up evil).

I think the moral question for these sites is: At what cost viral?

"Bikes are one of the four commodities of the street — cash, drugs, sex, and bikes. You can virtually exchange one for another."

Fascinating quote from this article on bike theft in San Francisco. Unbelievable. Bike theft has fallen to the bottom of the list of things that get prosecuted. It's everywhere. Especially 7th and Market, apparently.

Seventh and Market is where the city's underground economy bubbles to the surface. It's a Wal-Mart of stolen goods — nearly anything can be bought or, as I would soon find out, stolen to order. McCloskey estimated as many as three in seven bikes stolen in San Francisco end up here. The police periodically conduct stings in the area, but the scene seemed to continue unabated.

If you ever have a bike stolen from you, it sounds like there are a few places to check out before you lose all hope.

What in the world is Yelle singing? Youtube has an answer.

Had no idea that Je Veux Te Voir has the following lyric: "I wanna see you in a porno." Also, "Your posters of Lil Jon cover up the ones of Magic Johnson."
 

 
Don't be impolite to Yelle or stare at her neckline, otherwise she'll get her boys to beat your ass:
 

Then I realized this is not just power pop. It's French feminist hip hop.

MySQL is at times a little ghetto

Excerpts from the High Performance MySQL book (2nd Edition):

Another issue is bugs in the server. We don't want to sound negative, but most major versions of the MySQL server have historically had some bugs in replication, especially in the first releases of the major version.
It's encouraging to look back over the last few years and see the changes that have been made during that time. However, it's worth noting that most of the features the first edition of this book predicted never appeared...


Brutal guys, brutal! But, I guess you get what you pay for. ;-)

That being said, hey, I'm thankful as heck. Database technology is incredibly difficult to build. I was talking with a friend recently about what core software engineers used to do, vs. today. The interesting work has been pushed from what used to be very core technology (database platforms, communications infrastructure, etc.) to very high level app-level work (websites for specific verticals or needs).

In large part, this can be credited to the works of gangsters like the MySQL team, the Apache team, and the like. Because of their herculean works, we can all build on these foundational pieces to create impactful, meaningful user experiences. You know, like superpoke.