There were these catalogs in the snack room with a big sign that said “free.” So I picked one up and flipped through it, curious about what is actually sold in a space memorabilia auction. Curiousity pays. There is some standard stuff, like mission patches and flags and signed pictures and figurines and things. There’s also some kinda cool stuff like body temperature regulating systems that flow water through little tubes in a suit, and, you know, space helmets and things….Then there was this crap:

Tom Sims Apollo Whiskey Decanter
–“Contents intact.” Awesome.

**FLOWN** 16 mm camera cable
–This is a PIECE OF WIRE shorter than my fingernail.

Replica Apollo Fisher space pen movie prop (Used in the filming of Apollo 13)
–This is memorabilia from a movie about space.

Possibly flown Apollo 15 foil.
–Possibly flown Reynolds’ Wrap. Excellent. Hope this sells well.

½” sq. Kapton foil in 3.5” dia Lucite
–I leave the cleanroom covered in pieces of Kapton almost every day. I should start saving little bits of it and encasing it in plastic. In 10 years I’ll be able to make a living off of Kapton garbage.

Flown shuttle spacesuit urine collection device.
–This comes with flight documentation. Which means that actual astronauts peed in here. We may still be able to collect forensic evidence, folks.

Bolts (flown)
–As far as I can tell these are standard stainless steel ¼”-20 bolts. Oh but they were on a spaceship. They held something critical together. Maybe they took them out of the rails on the space station.

Payload bay “mil” blanket
–Almost positive they meant MLI blanket. Another entry for the same type of item says “shiny silver blanket.” Do these people know what they’re even selling??

Bunny suit for clean room.
–You know you can still buy these… There are about 200 in our gown room at the moment.

Menu Items:
*Flown chicken noodle soup (w/serial #!)
*Flown crackers (10/10/96) (w/ s/n)
*Flown:
-pears
-mac and cheese
-green beans and broccoli
-strawberries
-tropical punch
-shortbread cookies
-sweet and sour chicken.

Flown on APOLLO missions:
-rye bread
-dried apricots (Apollo 17….YUM)
Also: Apollo food “bites.” (no further description)

Thought I’d share this quality information with the crowd. Especially because, personally, I was so amused by it. You’re also probably not getting March’s Sexy Science article until next week sometime…because I’m lazy and likely preoccupied. Consider this jewel of a post my compensation for that.

Good Friday congregants. The Rt. Rev. Fischer is bringing you the latest sermon on the word of the Lord in indie rock form. Today we have a pretty wide range. We play some cuts from the Ghostly International compilation “Idol Tryouts II” as well as some music composed/influenced by Ennio Morricone who is the soundtrack wizard that wrote the theme for The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. That movie is the final episode in the “Man With No Name Trilogy” which is perhaps the defining film of the entire Joan Baez and Ennio Morricone for the movie Sacco e Vanzetti about those two famous Italian anarchists. I actually got the song from the soundtrack for The Life Aquatic which is an incredible movie done by Wes Anderson (it also has some great trivia). So we play a little movie music and some electronic stuff. So I end with some electronic movie music from the renowed film Hackers, pinnacle of cinema that it is. I seriously have no idea why I find myself watching Hackers every now and then, but it is a strange addiction… which has nothing to do with Angelina Jolie. Until Monday:

1) Ennio Morricone - Titoli (Title) - Il Buono, Il Brutto, Il Cattivo (The Good, The Bad, The Ugly)
2) Band of Horses - The Funeral - Everything All The Time
3) Solvent - Introduction to Ghosts - Idol Tryouts II: Ghostly International
4) Mobius Band - Electric Piano - Idol Tryouts II: Ghostly International
5) Joan Baez - Here’s To You - The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissue OST
6) Underworld - Cowgirl - Dirty Epic (single)

The Rt. Rev. always honors requests and loves to get feedback. As always you can reach the Rev. @ rtrev -at- vdov -dot- net

Portugal. The Man is a quartet from the “barren wastelands of Alaska” and the “mountainy mountains of Oregon.” They are just finishing up their tour, which went through Texas, Arizona, California and will finish up in Oregon and Washington. Their sound is a mix of rock with elements of jazz and modern sounds. Their debut album Waiter: “You Vultures!” is available now. I met up with the band in Roseville, California at the Underground Café. The venue for the Underground Café is pretty interesting for a band like Portugal. The Man. It’s actually in a church, or the café that is directly attached to the Presbyterian Church. The band was asked before the show not to cuss during the show, which they shamefully did not follow. The show was enhanced immensley from the lead singer, John Gourley’s, banter with the crowd. The show had a very personal feel, mostly because the maximum capacity of the venue barely exceeded double digits. I sat down with the band after the show for some interview questions.

Band members include:
John Gourley - Lead Vocals, Lead Guitar
Wesley Hubbard - Keys, Vocals
Zachary Carothers - Bass, Vocals
Jason Sechrist - Drums

Can you explain how you guys got started in your band? Where was that? How long ago was that?

The three of us (John, Wesley, and Zachary) are actually from the same town, Wasilla, Alaska. We were together in a band before we started Portugal. The Man. We met up with Jason just last year.

As a young band starting out unknown, what are some of the techniques for getting your name out there and your music heard?

Well, first off, we chose to host our site on a .net account as opposed to a .com, just to mess with you people. We spell the name of our band wrong on our merchandise; we really are trying to not get our name out there.

So you don’t want to get big?

Oh no, we want to be huge; we want to be on MTV.

You realize they don’t even play music anymore, so you’ll have to be on “Date My Mom.”

Oh god no, they’ll probably come up with something like “On The Road” where they just like tour with a band or something. We wouldn’t be cool enough to be on that show, though.

I really enjoyed your website; who designed it and who did the artwork?

Austin Sellers designed it and does the crazy font you see on the front of the album. We don’t know anything about computers. But John does all the artwork, including the CD covers.

My next question is for whoever is from the “mountainy mountains of Oregon.” My friends from back home (Bend, OR) were really curious as to where that was and were immediately claiming you as their local product.

They’re just the mountainy mountains! We can’t divulge that information.

Who were your high school English teachers and how did they shape your use of punctuation in “Waiter: “You Vultures!”?

Oh god, I think I maybe went to 60 days of high school, no 70. I don’t think I even remember the name of a single teacher. [John]
Mr. Sterns was mine. He was the current events teacher. I liked him because he let me draw instead of reading about current events. [Wesley]

What did you guys do before you became full-time musicians?

John worked as an artist and musician. Wesley worked at a community center working with children in after school programs. Zachary worked as a waiter. You have to guess what Jason did though.

I’m gonna say professional wrestler or slam poetry contestant. (He was wearing a Hulkamania t-shirt and a beret).

No, That’s pretty close though. Just tell them I counted pills.

I hate to ask it, but who are your influences other than Star Trek and Weird Al?

Just Weird Al. I actually saw him in concert and met him and got his autograph when I was younger. He’s definitely our biggest influence. [Zach]
After a lot of debating they also mentioned Taco Grande, Air and the Flaming Lips as other influences. Actually they just said he liked Air and the Flaming Lips, but Taco Grande they decided was an influence as well.

Who is Portugal. The Man?

George Bush is the man. Portugal is a country. Daniel is also the man though.
[Daniel is their publicist and music enthusiast.]

Do you know of Thunderbirds Are Now!?

We’ve heard of them. Actually people have said we should tour with them.

No, I don’t think that would be a good idea. You sound too much alike to go on tour together. But my next question is if you were to get into a brawl…

Oh, we would win!

Yes, I wasn’t even going to ask that, but if you could choose, what weapons would you use in the brawl?

Well, they’re from Detroit so they’ll probably have guns, but as far as what we would use… Wesley would have a battle axe for sure, Jason would have a broad sword, John would have a wizard staff and Zach would have a crossbow. We could kick any band’s ass in a brawl. Actually, there are probably some bands that could f**k us up.

Is there anything else you would like to add?

That we would kick that bands’ ass in a brawl. That, and Jason is seriously sick.

I followed up with the band after the interview was finished. I mentioned that the music management students at the University of the Pacific could probably set up a concert on campus. I will be working with some of these students and some of the bands interviewed and reviewed to try and set up concerts on campus. The concerts tickets would range from $1-$5, depending on university funding.

This article is a revised edition of an article done for The Pacifican, University of the Pacific’s newspaper.

It’s been awhile since I’ve actually written anything for my own site. You’ve all been taken care of by those that can only be described as co-content directors (r?)(s?)hollen and afischer recently. Given this fact I decided that in my time before class this morning I would update you on a few things that I have found to do with myself lately.

First, mail. Since I’m no longer in the IT world anymore, and don’t run my own mail, I’ve found it difficult to really kill all the spam I’d like to. Alec recently posted an article over at thened.net on this issue. Unfortunately, since I don’t run my own MXes anymore, his approach was more or less off-limits to me. Luckily I’ve been using fastmail to manage my vdov.net email, and at least they let me Sieve it up a bit. Sieve (RFC 3028) is an interesting little language used for mail processing on the server side. In the past when I’ve run my own MXes, I’ve used postfix, SpamAssassin and procmail to do most of my mail processing.

Although I’m really not that happy with Sieve, I did succeed in creating a reasonable rule set that blocks about 99% of spam I recieve. I also played around with rss2email, a nice little RSS application that it quite configurable and e-mails me with new articles. I got this idea from Alec, who also uses rss2email. At the top of this file, I file away all my RSS articles into seperate folders, and then I go after spam. I won’t recreate the entire things below, but I’ll give you the highlights.

###STUFF I ACTUALLY WANT
if allof (
 address :is "From" "feeds@vdov.net",
 header :contains "from" ["Chem", "RSC", "Science", "Aston",
 "Physics"]
) {
 fileinto “INBOX.rss.chem”;
 stop;
}

There are more entires for all of my RSS categories, but they more or less look the same as the one above. Then I get rid of all messages over 10 megabytes, reject most dangerous attachments and completely block all mail from a series of spam-littered countries.


###BIG MESSAGES & ATTACHMENTS
if size : over 10000K {
 reject "over my 10MB limit. please contact me about sending
 this.";
 stop;
}
if header :contains "x-attached"
 [".exe",".bat",".js",".com",".cmd",".ini", ...]
{
 reject “i do not accept attachments of this type.”;
 stop;
}

###DOMAINS THAT SUCK
if header :contains ["from", "received"]
 [".ru ",".jp ", ".kr ", ".pt ",".pl ",".at ",".cz ",
 ".ru>",".jp>", ".kr>", ".pt>", ".pl>",".at>",".cz>"]
{
 reject “i do not accept mail from your country.”;
 stop;
}

Then I simply block all domains that historically send me spam.

###GLOBAL DISCARD
if anyof (
 header :contains ["from", "Received", "X-Sender", "Sender",
 "To","CC","Subject","X-Mail-from"]
 [ "123greetings", "allfreewebsite.com", ...],
 header :value “ge” :comparator “i;ascii-numeric” ["X-Spam-score"]
 ["16"]
)
{
 discard;
 stop;
}


Etc, Etc, Etc. The last punch is to use SpamAssassin scores to grab anything that is suspected of being spam and put it in my spam folder. Above I’ve already discarded anything with a score of 16 or above. Since I’ve implemented these rules, I’ve gone from about 100 spam messages a day to no more than 1. Pretty nice 99% decrease.

###GLOBAL FILE
if header :value "ge" :comparator "i;ascii-numeric"
 ["X-Spam-score"] ["5"]
{
 fileinto “INBOX.spam”;
 stop;
}

While this remains a strikingly inelegant solution, it does work, and I’ve been pretty happy with it so far.

The last and most important note of the day is that smashy is nearing 300 days of uptime. This will occur tomorrow in the late morning before noon. I thought this was something to really write home about until I logged into polar (at Bowdoin) yesterday and saw this …

polar> uptime
10:14 up 428 days, 15:52, 8 users, load average: 0.26, 0.14, 0.11

Damn.

Short and sweet is tonight’s take home message. I have decided to actually get some sleep, which is a new thing I might try out some. Until Friday, enjoy:

1) Robyn Hitchcock & The Egyptians - Madonna of the Wasps - Greatest Hits
2) The Cloud Room - The Hunger - The Cloud Room
3) Ghostface & MF DOOM - Angeles - Natural Selection (Promo)
4) Band of Horses - Our Swords - Everything All The Time
5) Portugal. The Man - AKA M80 The Wolf - Waiter: “You Vultures”
6) Belle and Sebastian - Funny Little Frog - Life Pursuit
7) Man Man - Skin Tension - Six Demon Bag

Once again thanks for some suggestions from none other than rhollen of the Hollencomium Podcast. Also, for those that use iTunes, the Rt. Rev. Fischer’s Indie Sermons are now fixed in the iTunes podcast directory. Just search there for “Fischer” and you will find it.

The Rt. Rev. always honors requests and loves to get feedback. As always you can reach the Rev. @ rtrev -at- vdov -dot- net.

Ahoy listeners… I have been rather negligent of my sermonizing duties recently. This has involved a combination of work, standardized testing, and wimmin. However, I am bringing you a Friday podcast in just under time. The real gem in this podcast is “Chinese Bones” as played by Colin Meloy and as of yet two unnamed male singer/guitarrists. I am going to fish for more info on this one. I got this from the original Youth And Beauty Brigade email list, powered by Yahoo lists. This was the first Decemberists fan forum and started before their firsy LP. This awesome video was one of the first things that made me love the Decemberists. I think you can all enjoy it, especially since people have been delving deep into the Decemberists’ past with the recent release of the Tarkio discography “Omnibus.” Also, I recently learned that one of my favorite artists Carson Ellis (and Meloy’s longtime girlfriend) is now a proud mother of a baby boy, Henry “Hank” Meloy. This is probably why she didn’t get back to me right away about an interview for vdov. I am deeply indebted to Carson for making a water color for me as a gift to someone else. It is absolutely gorgeous in the original and I wish I had also bought a print. Her website is a treasure trove of excellent pen and ink, watercolor, and general excellence.

Ok enough digression from the podcast at hand. We also dig into some Tapes ‘n Tapes, Band of Horses, and Nightmares on Wax. Until Monday:

1) Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians - So You Think You’re In Love - Greatest Hits
2) The Music - Breakin’ - Welcome to the North
3) Colin Meloy and unknown others - Chinese Bones - Live somewhere
4) Band of Horses - Monsters - Everything All The Time
5) Nightmares on Wax - African Pirates - In A Space Outta Sound
6) Tapes ‘n Tapes - Jackov’s Suite - The Loon

The Rt. Rev. always honors requests and loves to get feedback. As always you can reach the Rev. @ rtrev -at- vdov -dot- net.

UPDATE: Oops I forgot to link to Hollencomium Podcast which is just chock full of musical tidbits.

UPDATE: Better info on the Colin Meloy video clip from the original fan email list for The Decemberists
Date: Sat, 25 Mar 2006 08:48:18 -0600
From: Molly < *********.com>
Subject: Re: question

I’m pretty sure that’s from 22-July-2000 at the Mad Hatter Lounge in
Portland as part of a Robym Hitchcock tribute…..

Molly

Date: Sat, 25 Mar 2006 13:42:27 -0800 (PST)
From: Dan Townsend < **********.com>
Subject: Re: question

Molly is correct, and as I recall there was a whole slew of other songs as well, not all performed by Colin though. There is a link to all of the videos in the YABB list “Links” area. Here it is, for anyone interested: http://fegmania.org/audio/tributeconcert/

BTW, this list isn’t dead, it’s just sleeping…that is, until people start posting here again. There’s still over 900 people signed up, but I guess the “official” message board is just too alluring.

Dan

As part of my growth as a “journalist” for the Pacifican, the editor and the student planning committee for MEIEA (Music and Entertainment Industry Educators Association) conference thought it would be appropriate for me to attend this two day event and report on it for the paper. MEIEA is a non-profit organization responsible for educating students in the changes that they will be facing once graduating and entering the music industry workforce. This two day conference, which I will report in entirety for the Pacifican and on vdov when it is finished, is the most important event for the organization. While most of the conference details will not be unexceedingly unpleasant to most of the vdov faithful, there was one presenter from Creative Commons non-profit organization who really did not fit in with the crowd there.

Creative Commons was started by Stanford professor Lawrence Lessig in response to the influx of open source programming and the copyright problems that followed. The company has since evolved into providing copyright services not only for programming, but also for media. This media includes music, movies, photography, etc. The copyright services are free and easy to use, have been upheld in court and provide varying levels of security that you choose for your work.

The varying levels of security to choose from opens the floodgates of creativity while upholding the personalized demands of the original creator. These levels of security include any combination of the following:

By: - The new author of the changed work must give credit to the creator of the original work.
Non-Commercial - The new author cannot use the changed work for commercial purposes.
No Derivatives - The user cannot change the work, but may redistribute it.
Share Alike - The new author can use the new work as long as they use the same copyright terms as was originally put on the object.

Using these four copyright options people can personalize their copyrights to best benefit them and the community as a whole. These types of copyright options encourage the use of open source in all contexts, not just programming.

The organization is doing some really cool things with this new open source data. Under their Creative Commons Mixter website there is a contest sponsored by Warner Brothers Records to remix an existing song that is under a “cc” copyright. The winner of this contest receives a record contract from Warner Brothers. Another interesting tidbit: artists such as Boards of Canada and DJ Danger Mouse and Jemini, have uploaded their songs to be remixed or mashed by anyone who wants to.

The organization has been growing exponentially since its inception and is now providing flexible copyright laws in over 20 countries. The company has also recently started providing copyrights for scientific research under their Science Commons website.The growing need for these innovative copyright licenses ensure the protection of artists and the flexibility for creative minds to improve on others work.

Here is a very useful mp3 on how NASA’s missle guidance program works. Very interesting and useful for those who are interested in math, especially vector calculus. Also provides some great insight in programming for such complicated systems.

I have a feeling I will be criticized for such a short post, so I will also review the March 15th edition of the Universe, JPL’s newspaper:

1) MRO is the sh**, and is now orbiting around Mars as an orbiter should. If I ever find my notes on the Mars communications lecture, I will write a summary of how all that works. Pretty interesting, but more meticulous details than fantastic science.

2) Enceladus, which caused a huge splash in popular space news recently, may in fact be wet. They say “We realize that this is a radical conclusion–that we may have evidence for liquid water within a body so small and so cold…However, if we are right, we have significantly broadened the diversity of solar system environments where we might possibly have conditions suitable for living organisms.” This is the clearest response to the hype that I have seen yet. The reason for the explosions was an article published in the March 10th issue of Science. The hypothesis of water gushing out of Enceladus also explains an anomalous abundance of oxygen atoms observed in the Saturnian system.

3) GRACE has demonstrated that Antarctica’s ice sheet has lost a significant amount of mass since 2002–enough to raise global sea level about 1.2 mm (the volume of water the United States consumes in 3 months). Global warming anyone?

4) 55 gallon fuel drums. $10 each. + 1 43 gallon reserve fuel tank with valve and hose: $15. Acosta, aboone- revisit houseboat designs?

So I’ve been really busy in the last month, but it looks like things might be settling down for a split second. I very much enjoyed my first day off in Los Angeles since February 3rd and celebrated by taking the metro into downtown. Megan snuck me up onto the roof of the Los Angeles Athletic Club, and … bad place to take an excitable photographer. Some of the pictures turned out pretty well, though, and you should check them out. Also, if you’re ever riding the red line through to 7th/Figueroa, notice the life-size paper-maché people committing suicide from the tile ceiling onto the tracks (positive messages).

Oh, PS I’m going to Brown for graduate school (thanks to Mr. acosta for this decision).

This podcast is (of course) going to be timely and to the point. I will keep things short but give you all the neccessary links. Firstly, I need to give some props to Idol Tryouts, which gives some insight into the Chicago/Detroit/Midwestern electronic scene from Ghostly International. I love the Midwestern creativity so I applaud this album and will probably drop some more tracks in a little bit. The track I play is from the Mobius Band who actually did their recording in Shutesbury, Massachusetts, which I denounce. However, you should love the electronic stylings of said band. Matt Costa also makes an appearance. This has nothing to do with our favorite Costa, but the music is good nonetheless. Also, look for Tapes ‘n’ Tapes with their which comes from none other than Sam Ubl who collaborates with my hometown boy Bob.

1) The Capricorns - Call Me Down - Pure Magical Love
2) Mobius Band - The Loving Sounds of Static (Junior Boys Remix) - Idol Tryouts Two: Ghostly International Vol. II
3) Matt Costa - Behind He Moon - Songs We Sing
4) Tapes ‘n’ Tapes - Cowbell - The Loon
5) Ghostface Killah - The Champ - Fishscale

The Rt. Rev. always honors requests and loves to get feedback. As always you can reach the Rev. @ rtrev -at- vdov -dot- net.

Ooooh yes this is the St. Patrick Podcast. I have obviously gotten my Irish all up. This podcast has some Irish tunes. It also has some music inspored by none other than the Hollencomium Music Review which is really where it is at. I will not ramble on and will keep this short. Until Monday:

1) The Cloud Room - Hey Now Now - The Cloud Room
2) Iggy Pop - Real Wild Child (Wild One) - A Million In Prizes: The Anthology
3) The Dandy Warhols - Bohemian Like You - 13 Tales From Urban Bohemia
4) The Cloud Room - Oh My Love - The Cloud Room
5) Dropkick Murphys - The Rocky Road To Dublin - Sing Loud, Sing Proud!
6) The Chieftains - The Rebel Jesus - The Bells of Dublin
7) Flogging Molly - Rebels of the Sacred Heart - Drunken Lullabies

7 songs! Word!

In order to break up the mid-week malaise that the writing staff at vdov has seemed to slumped into I thought I would cull out some nuggets from our Google Analytics account. Costa wrote a post about it before but at the time we didn’t have a large timeline of data. Now we have almost 4 months of data (which has remained surprisingly consistent) so here is a rundown of vdov.net stats.

SINCE NOV. 16 2005

–77.5% of users are first time visitors.
–57% of people get to the site by direct linking, 26% from google, and the next two highest are referrals from purdue.facebook.com and technorati.com at about 2% of users.
–The most referrals we have ever had is 26 in one day and the average is around 8 per day.
–We get about 15 search engine hits a day.
–People who find us from technorati.com view the most pages on the site (~3 which is huge considering we are really a one page type of site) followed by people linking from thepacificanonline.com (~2.7).
–We average 30 unique visitors a day (which isn’t bad considering that Costa and I probably don’t have 30 friends combined). My guess is that most of these are Shawna’s friends.
–About 74% of vdov users are Firefox users. While we may not have the most visitors we seem to have the smart ones. Also, some jerk has visited using Konqueror 6 times… seriously who uses Linux?
–Costa takes the sympathy vote with this article taking the cake for most viewed content of all time.

LAST 30 DAYS

–79% first time users.
–27% get here from Google searches, and the Pacifican Onlince accounts for 3% (props to rhollen).
–We averaged 27 visitors a day (we have been a little down recently across the board).
–Nearly all of our users visit every day or every other day.
–Costa continues to rack up the points with the most poular article in the last 30 days.

KEYWORD FUN

Here are some of our most popular keywords that get people to vdov from search engines.
–emily wischow (these people also read a lot of pages at ~3 per visit)
–jash pictures
–vdov.net
–itsim+ion (these people are 85.3% nerds winning the %nerds per keyword category)
–”shawna hollen” | “shawna+hollen” | “richmond hollen” (the hollens have been blowing up all over the site recently)

And from the weird one time hit bag
–free download hey willpower hundredaire
–cannibalism subtilis losick
–victoria hall naked
–”spinning bucket” lagrangian constraint volume
–andy panda knock knock
–quailman
–what are megayears
–nerdy comment
–stray light run existentialism on prom night lyrics
–”i hate mensa”
–how technology has affected badminton preformance
–emo sidebar (this has actually gotten 3 seperate hits in Dec 05 and Jan 06 and is probably my personal favorite)
–larry+taylor+irish+spring+soap+microwave
–r0><0r my b0><0rz (ahhh yes t3h l33t)
–rahmah bin jabir aljalahma
–e.coli and christmas and sweets

This is probably my favorite graph because it really gets to the heart of who our readers are. We have a lot of random hits from people who never come back, but we have even more from a small group of dedicated vdovers.

Thats all I have for now. Post any questions about our stats in the comments and I will answer them.