Wow, I truly cannot see the screen at all today. Must be a different quality of sunlight, or else a different angle.

I saw a box full of Advil, which is intended to relieve sinus congestion and pain. I swear I thought it said anus congestion and pain. Hah.

Did not think I’d make it out today but here I am back at the Windmill Garden, which has no windmills. Plans for social congress with a friend fell through, postponed probably until tomorrow.

The laborious process of writing that story about William Howard Taft getting trapped in a phone booth paid off about as well as I expected. Which is to say, barely at all. A smattering of pageviews which might have all been bots.

Friend of mine with a blogspot site called once to ask if there was anything suspect about the 30,000 daily referers he was getting from a site the name of which I can’t remember, but it was something spammy sounding. I hated to break it to him but in fact, no, those are all garbage pageviews from bots that send out URLs as a form of advertising. When you click a link on one web site, and if that link takes you to another web site, chances are good that the first site’s URL will show up in the next site’s referer_log. Once spammers keyed in to this (decades ago) the game was on, and the traffic reporting for web sites everywhere were suddenly clogged with phony referers from poker and casino web sites. That does not seem to be quite the plague it used to be but it’s still an irritant. I was surprised Blogspot, which is a Google thing, did not have filters in place to prevent that crap from showing up in bloggers’ hit reports.

I also never understood why “referer” must be spelled wrong like that. Without giving it a lot of thought I had assumed it was some kind of character limitation, but other variables in this realm are longer. referer_log has 9 but access_log has 10. Oh, but wait, access_log is a filename and not a variable. Hmm, maybe it is simply a character limitation, though that seems kinda lame. It’s like abbreviating July as Jul. You have got to be in a hurry if you think that’s going to save you one damn second.

…

So the CBS thing, if it’s done nothing else, has brought in a small but enthusiastic cadre of new site visitors, Twitter followers, and people who are just genuinely into this stuff. I guess it’s alright. I’d been ambivalent about returning to the role of curator of this stuff but it’s fine. People are nice. I remember how one of the guys I did the payphone guided tour at Union Square with a while back said that any time he mentioned payphones to people like police or security guards they would soften up, as if they were rooting for the little guy. He had to go through security and police at times to get access to and permission to film in places like the Port Authority Bus Terminal and I think the subways. Normally, he said, a dude show up with a phalanx of camera gear and lighting and the reaction is to just say no. But somehow, when he would ask if it was OK to shoot footage of the payphones, they would be like “Aw, OK.”

…

Listening to a Henselt etude played by one of the great heroes of my youth: Michael Ponti. I think he’s gone now. I seem to remember overhearing this at the premiere of a documentary about Sviatoslav Richter at one of the Lincoln Center theaters. The news was given almost off-handedly to the person who had introduced me to Ponti: Don Garvelmann. He seemed miffed, appropriately so I think, at getting the news of a long time friend’s passing in this rather casual manner. They must have been out of touch for a while but Don did consider Ponti to be a true friend.

I had a stack of Ponti LP records rivaled by, I imagine, none or very few. Such horrible cover art but the liner notes, often written by Don, were always good. That is one of many things we lose in the rush to digitize all the music ever recorded. The program notes that accompanied CDs and LPs were often real jewels of musicological insight. You never get that on Spotify, and with the obscure classical stuff you’re lucky if you can find anything of real scholarship anywhere else online. And with Spotify it can be lucky if you can even tell what the hell it is you are listening to in the first place. So many times Spotify (referring only to classical tracks) shows confusing info about what is playing, sometimes listing the performer as the composer and the composer as the performer, other times listing neither composer nor performer. I guess they do not have or do not realize they have separate database fields for composer and performer, which would be pretty lame. So they sometimes combine both fields into the “Artist” spot, where it could be right or it could be wrong. For pop and most other genres (I would think, having not looked too deeply into it) the artist field is pretty much reserved for the band name or that of the singer. With orchestras that does not really tell you enough, though, unless they go to the trouble of including the name of the conductor. The Philadelphia with Eugene Ormandy is a different creature compared to the same orchestra with, I don’t know, Michael Tilson Thomas.

Of course a lot of casual listeners, and even not so casual, don’t much care who the performer is. But still, Spotify almost certainly has access to all the segmented data it needs to make this no-brainer product feature an easy reality.

Well, I’m off that soapbox. On to the next one. Hah.

…

Interesting… assuming the churchbells rang on the hour a few minutes ago it would seem I did not hear them at all. This, if it is even true, would be courtesy of my ace noise canceling headphones. Oh yeah.

…

OK, then getting out and about is good for the flesh but I have to work the bone. Wait, what? Should be back at home doing more blasting out of thousands of pages. My scripts that pump these pages out are turning up a strange problem. I think the server I’m on, which is the most souped up web server I’ve ever had, actually has too much resource available. It’s causing my primitive little perl scripts to barf. That’s the best I can figure about it at the moment. Still I prefer the flat HTML to dynamic content, as seemingly inefficient as it might sound. There’s just no need to expose yourself to needless possibility for MYSQL injections and PHP bugs, especially for content that you do not expect to update very often, if ever again (as is the case here).

Derf, sun just went behind the fence and it suddenly is cold as butt.