Last week Julian got laid off, part of a bloodbath at Ars that resulted from the Conde Nast powers-that-be deciding that having excellent, industry-leading online properties didn’t fit with their long-term business strategy of making it to retirement without being bothered.

This was pretty disappointing to see, both as a friend and as someone who enjoys reading quality journalism about tech policy. However! Just because he’s no longer being paid to cover, say, government wiretapping, doesn’t mean that he isn’t making contributions to our cultural discourse. I can only assume this is what inspired Yglesias to write this.

(Lest anyone think I’m teasing Julian, let me remind you that I’m the same guy who once meticulously converted the Dharma Initiative logo into a vector graphics format — I’m not a fan of Fringe, but being the first to crack its code is pretty cool.)

My idiot hosting company seems to have made it impossible for PHP to write session files to /tmp, making some code that’s been running nicely for years suddenly start to throw error messages wherever it dares to use session variables (not that I would! it’s a third-party Flickr library). Nice job, guys. A pissy ticket has been filed with their help desk, some error-suppressing @’s have been added to the code, and hopefully the issue will be resolved shortly.

UPDATE: All better. And hey, a new header image to celebrate, courtesy of this CC Flickr image.

This morning I read Ezra and Tim Fernholz’s 140-char-or-less (clever) discussion about Twitter in the front of the current issue of the Prospect (I don’t think the exchange is online). Naturally, I agree with their basic conclusion that everything is terrible and getting worse. But they’re primarily interested in the advent of Twitter within the media industry. I’m more concerned with how the media industry is transforming Twitter.

I’ve been moaning about the mainstream adoption of Twitter for a while now, and simultaneously feeling guilty — or at least hypocritical — for doing so. I really like Twitter! And, knowing one of the guys that works there at least a little, I want to see the company succeed. I really do think they created something cool, original and beautifully simple.

But it’s been horrifying to watch Twitter evolve into a medium used for important (if not serious) communication. First and foremost, I am appalled by our legislators’ embrace of a time-suck communication medium that is necessarily superficial, and (more perniciously) one that is so convincingly fake-democratic while actually just facilitating communication with rich, Apple-computer-owning white people like myself.

Its adoption by the mainstream media has been similarly off-putting. As a cheap and fun SMS interface for media outlets I have no beef with it; as a means of personal marketing for journalists, the pretense and lack of honesty is dismaying (Ezra’s diagnosis of their motivations as being grounded in a desire to avoid being left behind by the next blog-like internet trend is dead-on, I think — we should thank god we were spared from a hypothetical David Gregory Tumblr). I’d say the median journotweet is something like “getting ready to sit down for an i/v w @spalin. the lady is a tough cookie!” when in fact it should be closer to “complaining abt blogs in line to pick up kids @ sidwell frnds. no poor people around!”

The medium’s been a disaster for some of the better bloggers, too. There are a number of hilarious political writers who’ve tried to ply their wares in 140 characters or less and in the process ended up making their entire authorial voice sound like a cliche. This is not to say that tweets can’t be hilariously funny. But if the medium that made your career is less restrictive, your Twittered communiques may just sound like hacky, “gah!”-filled Jon Stewart imitations. It is an almost unbelievably terrible medium for snark, but no one seems to have noticed.

Curmudgeonly enough for you? I’ll happily admit that my bitching about the direction of the D.C. Twitter universe is selfish. It’s a service that provided a form of communication I found charming and valuable: repartee with close friends and complete strangers. When the space between those groups began to fill in, things got weird. Tweeted conversations began to have personal — and, most horrifyingly, professional — implications. Soon it’ll be time to retreat back to emails and texts among friends until the next early-adopter fad reaches that critical point where it’s usefully populated but not yet filled with relatives and people you met at conferences.

But that doesn’t mean that the professional-networking and personal-marketing uses of Twitter are invalid. It’s just that they’re just not what charmed me into using the service, so it makes me sad to see them disappear. This happened to blogs, too, of course, and then Facebook (though I sat that chapter out). At least this time I’m confident that the coming online-fun fallow period won’t last forever.

Sunlight Labs has been running its now-annual Apps for America contest, and this morning I’ve been paging through a bunch of the entries. There’s some pretty cool stuff! I haven’t made it all the way through the 40-some submissions — and frankly, I’m just trying to orient myself, not delve into the apps with attention to make solid judgments about which ones are worthwhile (this is where you notice that the views expressed here have no bearing on the contest or its judging, are not representative of my eployer, are completely misinformed, etc.). But I feel like pointing out two entries in particular.

First, Buddy, partly because I have a soft spot for chatbots but mostly because I find the robotic logo both adorable and terrifying.

And second, there’s Filibusted, which my filibuster-hating friends may find interesting, or at least encouraging.

But do check out the rest of the entries — there’s some really good stuff in there. Although I should probably warn my fellow D.C. residents that repeatedly stopping yourself from entering your own zip code when searching for information about congressional representation is kind of depressing.

Gag me with a spoon from some little hole in the wall after-hours place in the LES that was supposed to just serve falafel but actually it started to have these awful high school bands sometimes and if you knew the guy he’d sell you big paper cups of Turkish beer and when I tell people this story now I usually say it turned into a Hot Topic because that’s funnier but actually I just started hating how young everyone there seemed to be.

Oh! Before I forget, I hope you’ll join me for my own symposium: “What was the feckless D.C.-based web developer who complains too much?” I mean can you believe those guys? So lame! Anyway, details to follow.

NON-SARCASTICALLY: A thoughtful after-action report on the aforementioned affair. Via Amanda.

As long as I’m going on about music, I may as well recommend the new Harlem Shakes record. I agree with everyone about the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Bromst will certainly be one of the records I remember from 2009, but right now Technicolor Health is dominating my playlist.

I’ll refrain from trying to review the damn thing myself and instead point you toward this writeup, several paragraphs of which I heartily endorse despite its basically missing the point:

Technicolor Health is some sick candy: it’s what our indie pop should sound like in 2009. It imagines a world where The OC still matters, where goddamned Kanye West is agreeably employed, and where your little brother doesn’t think it’s just ok to listen to Neutral Milk Hotel that many times/isn’t aware of more than half of the bands the Shakes are copping freely when they’re not just writing sad songs about girls, which is a lot. This is indie pop. This is your lousy local band carried forward starship-like into a fizzing pop nebula and left to spin so fast and so ably that you ultimately forget the baggage and any corny adage; because Technicolor Health fundamentally sounds good and because its songs are well-crafted enough to make a lot of the African drumming and horns sound less like garnish and more like some well-earned reward for writing songs strong enough to make that shit sound sort of necessary. Technicolor Health is self-sufficient. It isn’t community, it eats itself. It is every good-to-great pre-Wincing the Night Away (2007) indie pop record brought forth and actualised as the definitive good-to-great (but mostly great) indie pop record you should be hearing as spring turns into summer, 2009. The Harlem Shakes wear everybody’s clothes really well.

The writer seems perturbed, but I don’t know why. This is what’s great about pop music — about really good pop music — it will fool you every time. Don’t be upset or confused; this is its gift, and it would be boorish to question it. If they’re doing it right, that fresh-faced young band will always sound new, they will always make your foot tap, they will always make you feel like you’re soaring. Leave genealogy to the Mormons. You’re wired for this shit. It doesn’t have to be new, it just has to be great.

Man! There are few things I like more than getting back from a good show at the Black Cat. Chris suggested we go see his buddy’s CD release party, and it was unexpectedly great. With the exception of the City Veins’ horn-heavy, guest-star-laden offering, it was probably the best local CD release observation I’ve attended.

A big part of that was Olivia Mancini, whose opener status continues to perplex me. She’s got stage presence, she’s got pipes, she can play and, most importantly, she’s got the songs to make all of the aforementioned matter. All I can hope is that she’s on deck for the next doo-woppy pop/rock slot — between the Pipettes and the Ting Tings it seems like the market can bear one such act every year or two. Olivia certainly deserves that level of… well, if not stardom, then whatever replaced it in the current music industry landscape.

Olivia Mancini & the Mates – Jealous Type

Next up: The Caribbean. I spent a large part of their set retrieving beer, so I’m probably not in a good position to judge them. What I heard I mostly liked, but I think it’s safe to say that they’re not really my thing.

Finally there was Impossible Hair. And while they were oversold — if pressed, I would rate their haircuts as merely unlikely — they proved to be an excellent rock band. It was a tight performance filled with really, really good songs. Recommended! Would buy a t-shirt from again. Go see ‘em if you have a chance — looks like your next opportunity closer than Baltimore will be May 13 at Velvet. Unless you’re planning a trip to Europe, that is.

Impossible Hair – What is the Secret of Impossible Hair?

(which seems to be their entire album, unfortunately — I wish they offered some individual tracks on their site)

Last night I finally found a moment to begin playing around with the WMATA GTFS data. Well, that’s not quite right: I tried to use the Django ORM to load the dataset when it was first released, but a memory leak killed the process when I left it to run overnight — something that doesn’t bode particularly well for our use of the ORM at work.

Last night I shoved the data it into a barebones MySQL database and added a few convenience columns to make it easier to work with the embedded time and date information. The scripts I used to do this take a little while to run (a few hours, perhaps, on the index-creation step — this could doubtless be sped up by moving the math into the SQL itself). And my use of MySQL is somewhat dumb, as the GIS capabilities of Postgres make it a more obvious choice. But if you’re just looking to get started with this stuff, this will at least save you from having to write the CREATE TABLE statements yourself. It’s all up on GitHub — have at it.

The next step for me is to generate a second-by-second snapshot of where every bus in the city is throughout the day, then feed that into Processing to make a movie like this one. Maybe I’ll even add a soundtrack this time — anybody feel like doing some field recordings of Metrobuses?

Of course you do!