Hmmmm…. not a big fan at first, but it’s really starting to grow on me. Jenny Lewis (of Rilo Kiley) just came out with a new solo called Rabbit Fur Coat. Careful, it’s sneaky good.

Also, watch this - Jenny Lewis performs live with the Watson Twins on KCRW’s Morning Becomes Eclectic

One of my favorite authors, Malcolm Gladwell, has begun posting on a blog of his very own. Like the Steves at Freakonomics, he’s smartly using it as a platform to expound upon and correct elements of his writing in books and in the New Yorker.

Looking at the comments, I noticed a rather effusive comment from Dave Sifry, founder of popular blog-search site Technorati, proving that even heroes have heroes.

Links: Malcolm Gladwell Blogs, Books: Blink and The Tipping Point

>> Jackie Greene and KT Tunstall have video of their sets on Morning Becomes Eclectic.

>> Tivo has aggregated some interesting data of their viewers television recording habits. The TV list is as might be expected, but the directors list is surprisingly sophisticated, trending towards foreign (Kurosawa, Almodovar) and classic (Billy Wilder, Frank Capra) in addition to the usual suspects (Spielberg, Scorsese).

>> This is pretty hilarious, a coloring book for lawyers (pdf).

so yesterday we were shopping in Carrefour (a Thai wal-mart)… we all split up and decided to meet back at the registers…. as i was going to meet Maggie, Eve, and Gina, they replaced the elevator music over the loud speakers with what sounded like some really loud canny Alvin and the Chipmunk’s tune… so i came down the main aisle toward them doing my best drum major strut…. it took me the better part of 30 seconds to realize that the look on their faces was not amusement, but terror, and that no one (and i mean no one, no cashiers, no one) was moving but me… so now i know what the Thai National Anthem sounds like, and I’m told my face has never been so red.

So the men’s cross country 4x10 relay was a bit of an anti-climax compared to the last 3 Olympics in which the Norwegians and the Italians have battled to a photo finish every time. Norway faded to a distant fifth, the equivalent of the American men’s basketball team getting a bronze in 2004. Italy, however, emerged victorious. Christian Zorzi anchored the men’s team to a gold place finish, perhaps soothing the angst of losing by less than a ski length in Salt Lake City.

Video: Italy wins men’s relay, NBC Olympic Special of Previous 4x10 Relays, The Great Race

Previous Posts: Olympic Skiing: Men’s XC 4x10 Relay Tomorrow and Nordic Skiing in Torino & in Northern Maine.

SXSW, the premier music showcase in the country is coming to Austin March 13-19. The website just released the annual bittorrent of the mp3 set of all participating showcase artists. That’s 2.4 glorious gigabytes of musical joyness!

Get the SXSW music showcase mp3 bittorrent

Don’t know what to do with it? Bittorrent is a P2P distributed filesharing application. Grab a copy of utorrent, my personal favorite. Download the .torrent file from the SXSW website then open it in your bittorrent client to start downloading the mp3s. Also, these files are all perfectly legal to share; they’re released by the bands through SXSW to promote their set. It’s a great way to discover a boatload of new artists.

I bought a crappy USB wireless adapter made by this rebate vampire at MicroCenter. Gigafast was offering a $25 rebate, obviously necessary to get anyone to buy the aforementioned crappy $35 USB wireless adapter since no one in their right mind would pay $35 for it, but $10, hmmm….. I do need one for my extra desktop…. so the cycle of rationalization began.

Had I known I would never receive my $25, had I known that Gigafast gets an F Rating from the Better Business Bureau, I likely would have spent a little extra on a quality component from a reputable manufacturer. However, I didn’t know these things at the time of my purchase. Gigafast, I believe, knows exactly what percentage of rebates it will honor. (Ed Foster claims the return rate for one rebate house was less than 30 percent.) This is a classic information inequality resulting in (1) a deadweight loss to society inflicted by this rebate regime in terms of wasted postage and administrative costs for all parties and (2) loss due to the opportunity costs of buying something for a certain (so we think) price, when, had we known the true price, we would have bought something else. This is a market inefficiency, and there are few things that I hate more than market inefficiencies.

Long story short, I e-mailed MicroCenter and relayed my complaint. They were very responsive and a manager offered to apply the amount of the rebate towards another purchase. Great customer service. I’ll shop there again. From Gigafast I heard nothing but a loud clanging silence.

I raised the subject of rebates with the two Steves at Freakonomics and got a kind response:

great question. we’ll put it in the hopper. thanks for writing, sjd

It occurred to me that ‘the hopper’ could be a circular filing cabinet reserved for the rather obvious ideas contributed by intellectual pygmies like myself, but I prefer to think they’re debating the finer points of my suggestion right now at this very instant.

Patches the horse hangs out with the guys. Only in Texas.

The Men’s Cross Country Skiing 4x10 km Relay is set for tomorrow in Torino. I’m not sure how many other people I could find who would agree with me, but I think it’s the most exciting event in sports. At least it has been since Lillehammer in ‘94 when Fauner outdueled Daehlie. Each of the last three finished has come down to the wire. Above is the most recent in 2002, when Thomas Alsgaard held of the Italians once again by a split second.

NBC usually has great coverage. Here’s an article from their website on the rivalry that has sprung up between Italy and Norway - Relay rivalry: Round four, Norway and Italy get set for another cross-country clash. We’ll see if it continues as the Italians ski on their home turf.

More Olympic XC Skiing Links

• XC Ski Schedule (Torino 2006)
• Athletes list by Discipline : Cross-Country Skiing
• Cross Country Ski Page on Torino Olympic Website
• NBC Olympics – Cross Country Skiing

Learn more about Executive Coaching for Lawyers and Debra Bruce’s qualifications as a lawyer coach. She also publishes a series of articles on law practice management that appear in Texas Lawyer and other publications that would be of interest to both lawyers and non-lawyers.

Some people have home security systems some have handguns, and if they are wealthy or important enough, bodyguards… we have Ray. It doesn’t take you long to see how well respected Ray is among his dozens of peers, feared even. When I’m jogging and glance down to see Ray by my side i breathe deep my invincibility. It takes only one moment of vulnerability to bring me back to reality, the moment when you glance up realize Ray is gone (distracted by a rice field or a dirty diaper in a trash heap) and the fox (a reddish brown dog with a pointy face and large mouse like ears) is quickly closing in… you pick up a rock, brace yourself for the worst…. and then there he is like he knew all along that was the exact moment you would need him, good ole Ray. I think I’m gonna buy him a bag of jerky next time I’m at the store.

Our room at the orphanage is larger than i had imagined, not large enough however that you can’t hear Eve chew each bite of muesli 53 times every morning. We are living in ‘community’ a term that i don’t think i ever truly grasped til now. With the help of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Life Together, we are learning to truly appreciate one another… to celebrate that God made the others in His image and not as we would have made them. To minister to the others by being helpful, and by considering ourselves the most frail; by bearing one another in love.

It is funny how we think we need what we want. If we are hot, we need to cool off. If we are hungry, we need to eat. If we are in pain, we need an aspirin… this is not the case here and i can’t help but realize how comfortable we think we must be. It is most refreshing to have needs that cannot be met. There is a little girl, Ning, who lost her mother to AIDS last week, Loisawon very badly needs all her rotting teeth pulled, and daily lives with the pain. Siriporn needs a very simple surgery on ruptured ear drums, and waits patiently to hear again. I came here to teach these young women, and they have taught me. They understand that this world is not their stage, and that the peoples of the world are not here to entertain them… they are here to serve their villages, us, and Jesus(for those of them who have decided to give Him their lives). They are very strong and yet very meek. They don’t worry about tomorrow (they trust that their portion of rice will be on the table three times daily and ask for nothing more), they don’t hoard up belongings… they give freely of what they have, they work when it is time to work and when it is time to play they do so with hesitation. They love others unabashedly as if the rejection that has shaped their lives never occurred. In this way we should all strive to be a little more like the girls who live at Brenna’s House of Joy. Thank you again for your prayers and words of encouragment, they have come to mean more to me than i ever imagined possible. I love and miss you all.

Zoom Cat Bite Marks

Joy told me something funny today. Her cousin Randall is one of my favorite musicians. His album War and Peace made the final 10 in my Top 50 Albums of 2005.

Joy did the artwork for the album. I tried to help but she quite wisely ignored most of my suggestions, which typically began “wouldn’t it be funny if…” It was really neat to see her work though. It’s hand-drawn on brown paper we found lying around at Somerset, colored in photoshop, in the style of Charles Schulz with whom Randall has a minor obsession (you know, Charlie Brown, Peanuts). Hours and hours and hours of painstaking work.

So anyway, the funny thing she told me was that if you look closely at the cover you can see where her cat Oliver left two tiny teethmarks. She didn’t want to risk messing it up further by trying to fix it, and it doesn’t really hurt it. Now that I know, though, I can’t look at it without laughing. What is it with cats and paper, anyway?

UPDATE: Joy wants everyone to know that Oliver is a very sweet little kitty who feels very sorry for what he did. She found him sitting in a hibiscus at Little Woodrow’s, which is not only an odd place to go, but an odd place to find a cat, though perhaps an appropriate place to find an odd cat.

It’s hard to be surprised. I make a point of buying certain things when I go to Cactus, but I find those trips have become less and less frequent. More often I buy it on Amazon, typically used, and at a pretty steep discount. What we’re losing, however, can’t really be found online, the community that brought the artists into the store for performances, and the joy of browsing, which I’ve never seen adequately mimicked on the web. (It’s not an interface problem, it’s a resolution problem, as Tufte might say.) Wouldn’t it make more sense to transform Cactus into something else, a coffee shop, a guitar store, clothing, maybe a little of everything? I kept thinking that I would pay for the community aspect, whether they sold CDs or not. Secretly, when now one’s looking, I wonder if perhaps the Barnes & Noble next door might buy it out since they don’t have a music section.

Steve sends out a hilarious e-mail newsletter, which is always a welcome guest in my inbox. Apparently I’m not the only one who thinks so as Steve has just has a book published based on his e-mails from Africa. Your Pal Steve is available from Amazon.com. Their posts going back to 1999 are also available at the The Peifer Chronicles.

Dave Alvin on stage

Dave Alvin put on a great show at the Mucky Duck last night. Leslie and I got the VIP treatment at the “V” table. “V” is for Vern. Whoo-ooo-oo-ooo-oooo-oo… The impressionist-painting at left is a pic taken from my crappy camera phone. The extent of my knowledge of Dave’s work is from Blackjack David (2002) so it was great to hear things from his latest, Ashgrove, and earlier stuff, both solo and with the Blasters. He was joined by Austin guitarist Chris Miller and harmonica player Dale Spaulding.

Great show. Worth picking up a CD. I recommend Blackjack David or King of California.

Houston Chronicle: “On a blue note“