It’s been ages — literally — since I mixed together any sort of music. This weekend there was some time to kill, so I mixed together some tracks.

Download MP3

• Martin Eyerer & Gui Boratto - The Beach
• Andrea Doria & LXR - Beauty of Silence (Inpetto)
• Wolfgang Gartner - Front To Back
• Junkie XL - Cities in Dust (Glimmer)
• Deadmau5 - Complications
• Quivver - Surin
• Morgan Page ft. Lissie - Longest Road (Deadmau5)
• Hybrid - Finished Symphony (Deadmau5)
• D. Ramirez ft. Tocadisco - With Me Or Against Me
• Plastikman - Spastik (Dubfire)
• Sydney Blu - Give It Up For Me
• Thomas Schwartz - Jupiter Calling
• Lens - Beyond the Shadows (Moonbeam)
• Adam K. & Soha - Give It Up (Alex Gold)
• Wardt - Show My Shuffle
• Ricardo Tobar - El Sunset
• Sander van Doorn - Sushi
• Marcus Schossow - Chase My Rabbit
• DJ Preach - Transatlantic
• Joop - Prominent
• Nick Larson - Barock

Total length: 1:57:42

It’s ranging from progressive and techy house to trance, to some harder stuff towards the end. Enjoy!

Ah, what a beautiful morning. I was woken up by a hot steaming cup of joe, served by the wonderful Greek (who apparently knows me better than myself — go figure.) With that, I also got a big heavy present (it’s my birthday today.) In it was this:

The Demoka M203 home-pro grinder. Yes sir, yes ma’am. Prior to this one, I had this one, and let me tell’ya, it’s a piece of shit. The beans don’t come in in a constant stream, so you have to shake the b-jesus out of it when it runs idle, which loses track of the amount you’ve chosen with the fancy dial. It’s fine for filter coffee, but not for espresso.

I’m very excited about this, and I’ve been grinding beans all morning, which is more work than I’ve ever done before breakfast. I’m a very happy camper! :-)

I just came back from ctaste. It’s a small restaurant, on the Amsteldijk, De Pijp, in Amsterdam. My good friend Remco B. had his birthday dinner there (conveniently, his birthday is also my birthday.)

You are placed in a pitch black room, and you are served a three course meal, by visually impaired people. They can find their way around in the dark — you can’t. It’s literally pitch black; if you wave your hand just in front of your eyes, you can’t see it. We tried.

At first it’s quite strange, almost uncomfortable. I guess that’s your body getting used to the whole no-light scenario. Once you’ve gotten used to it though, it’s a very cool experience! The lack of visual aid, coerces you into really tasting things more than you are used to — a pleasant experience to sit through when you are being served a decent course.

I’d give it 4 out of 5 stars as the experience was unique, alas the food wasn’t mind blowing.

Oh, and to our delight, as the waiter kindly pointed out before the dining began, the menu was very non-fearfactor. Thank God.

Currently brewing a small website for my girlfriend and I needed an API to access Etsy. Not knowing much about their policies, I do know that they use Python and PostgreSQL, so that makes them A-OK in my book.

Here’s a quick API that I wrote, and you’re free to grab it. After reading the horror story over on etsytools.com, I’m releasing this bad boy into the public domain; this means that I offer absolutely no guarantee that this continues to work, or anything of the sort. It depends on BeautifulSoup, which is an excellent library, so you should get it anyway.

Sample use:

from pyetsy import Etsy
e = Etsy(5531346) # User ID can be found in your store URI

for item in e.items:
    print item.item_name
    print item.price
    print item.get_image_url("small") # tiny, small, huge

NB: For a while I contemplated having an item.get_url() that would return the URL to the item, alas, those addresses are not mysteriously constructed, as they are just http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=XXX. Also, note that .items has lazy evaluation, that means that no data will be coming in until you iterate it; it is also cached indefinitely within the object.

Comments are open, have fun.

Apple released Safari 3.1 on March 17, 2008. I had some issues with the copy that shipped with Leopard, so I’m pleased. There’s a lot of new features in here, especially related to web development—an area where Safari has been lacking for quite some time now. On the Firefox side, they’ve had Firebug, an immensely useful debugging console. Luckily, Apple has given us the “web inspector” (which looks a helluvalot like firebug, but that’ll ease the transition even more.)

More after the break.

OK, OK, this post is not laced with code or recipes, but it’s noteworthy at least. In the morning drive-by reading of various news sources, I stumbled upon an upcoming movie, Tropical Thunder. Supposedly, it’s a satire with Ben Stiller, Robert Downey Jr and Jack Black, to name a few. Here’s the major outline: These actors tumble around in the jungle, and somehow—freak occurances as IMDB will have us know—they end up playing some of the roles. And somehow Downey Jr. ends up playing the role that was originally cast for a black man. Yeah, a black guy. Seriously, take a look at this:

This guy:

I don’t know why, but the whole idea of having Robert play a black guy makes me giggle on the inside. I can’t wait to see this movie.