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Luke Melia

A Cricket in the Court of Akbar

Andrew is a friend of a friend who I’ve met a few times at parties. Last time I saw him, we chatted about his upcoming trip to India. I gathered that he was a musician interested in Indian music.

At the time, he gave me a card with his website on it. Cleaning up my desk today, I remembered that he must be on his way to India now, and decided to take a look at the website on his card. RagamalaProductions.com.

Turns out that Andrew, a jewish guy from Texas, is one of the world’s best sitar players! His trip to India is in part to defend his title at an annual Rajasthan-wide music and dance competition, and he’s making a documentatry of the experience. Pretty cool! Check out the trailer for A Cricket in the Court of Akbar.

What lurks behind the smile of a friendly New Yorker rarely ceases to amaze…

Inaugurate This

Dear Mr. President,

I hoped fervently that it wouldn’t be you getting inaugurated today. You are dragging this country, with half of us kicking and screaming, in the wrong direction. Away from reason, toward faith. Away from peace, toward war. Away from open arms, toward closed borders. Away from justice, toward military tribunals. Away from ecological sanity, toward environmental destruction. Away from allies, toward arrogance. Away from humanity, toward torture. Away from building an economy for the next generation, toward astronomical deficits.

So, on the occasion of your inauguration, I’d like to be the first of many to wish you a hearty “go to hell!” I hope your forty million dollar ego boost makes you secretly feel like crap inside.

Your kicking, screaming citizen,
Luke

P.S. You should ditch this Social Security “reform” idea. A bunch of people checked it out, and it turns out There is No Crisis.

P.P.S. Can you do something about making really high speed internet access available to everyone free? That would totally rock.

Tsunami – Before and After

The power these waves packed is still difficult for me to comprehend. My dad compared it to Hiroshima on the phone last night in respect to the death of so many people in such a short time.

Alec passed along these satellite pics of affected areas, before and after.

London Pics

If I can pull it together, you’ll get some stories from the trip, but for now here are pictures from our trip to London. Cheers!

Mailing lists with Bloglines & procmail

I love the Bloglines feature that lets you subscribe to a mailing list using a generate bloglines.com address. It’s much more manageable for me to read email newsletters in an RSS reader than in my email client. In a New Years-inspired organizational frenzy, I decided to take advantage of this feature to streamline what I had to deal with in my Inbox.

Two problems. First, I’d have to unsubscribe and then resubscribe using the new bloglines.com address I create for the list. Second, for interactive lists where I mostly read but sometimes want to post, I want to read in Bloglines but be able to post as luke [at] lukemelia.com.

I came up with an elegant solution to the problem by using procmail. The usefulness of this post is limited to those with fairly sophisticated email setups. I host my mail along with this site at Pair Networks, which fortunately lets you get fairly sophisticated.

Anyway, I already have my mail routed through procmail, so I just added a recipe for each of my lists. If procmail sees that a message is from a mailing list (using criteria I specify, like a particular From address or a subject token), it forwards the message to the bloglines address I specify and discards it. Example recipe:

# filter Rude Awakening newsletter
:0
* ^From:.*Awake@dailyreckoning.com
! lukemelia.9893280@bloglines.com

This avoids lock-in to bloglines (not that I don’t love it, but lock-in is not cool…) and makes it easy to start receiving the mail in my inbox again if I choose to without resubscribing.

Fresh Tofu in NYC

In the New York Times Dining section, a list of restaurants that serve homemade tofu: Fresh Tofu From Three Lands

LukeMelia.com created 1999. ··· Luke Melia created 1976. ··· Live With Passion!
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