Ever need to make some minor edits to a HUGE file? Like a 30GB XML file? Old standbys like vim don’t handle it too well. Fortunately, there’s tweak. Recommended!

Berkeley went nuts last night. Yesterday around 3PM I went to Triple Rock to start watching the returns roll in. At around 7 or so, once we realized that the geniuses at Triple Rock weren’t going to turn on the sound on their TVs, and not wanting to miss the speeches, we headed up to Haas to watch on the big screens there. On the way there we heard cheers erupt from all around the city–they had just announced Obama’s victory. We got to Haas just in time to see McCain’s concession speech and, of course, Obama’s long-awaited victory speech. Afterwards we went outside to see masses of students filling Bancroft, climbing up on traffic lights, waving flags, chanting U! S! A! (something I don’t think I’ve ever heard in Berkeley)… Every car driving down Shattuck was honking like crazy, fireworks, sparklers, and drums everywhere. A great night. I couldn’t be happier.

This morning, in the game room of the Frances Albrier Community Center, in between Dance Dance Revolution and an air hockey table, I cast my ballot. And I’ve never been happier to do it.

In honor of the last debate, a slideshow of a mural that recently went up a few blocks from my apartment:

Just finished watching the Presidential debate. There were a lot of moments I could write about, but this one particularly resonated with me:

McCain dismisses worries about the safety of nuclear power: “Senator Obama says that it has to be safe, or disposable, or something like that… look, I was on Navy ships that had nuclear power plants. Nuclear power is safe, and it’s clean!” He goes on to praise countries like Japan and France that rely heavily on nuclear energy.

I’ve lived in Japan, and I’ve toured one of its largest nuclear plants. I was extremely impressed with what a tight operation it was. If you know anything about Japanese organizational culture, you know that it is very well suited for the kind of absolute control that successful nuclear power production requires. Yet even the Japanese have not been able to prevent frightening and dangerous nuclear accidents. I was living there in 1999 and remember being very scared about the uranium leak at the Tokaimura plant. That wasn’t first nuclear accident in Japan, either. The lists of civilian and military nuclear accidents that have occurred around the world over the past 50 years are sobering.

I support expanding nuclear power in the U.S., but I can’t dismiss its very real dangers. Beyond the risks of accidents and leaks, nuclear plants make an attractive target for terrorists. Ridiculing someone for insisting on safety is reckless and irresponsible. John McCain says we need “cool hand at the tiller” of our government. He’s right, and the cool hand we need is Barack Obama.

October 15, 2008 update: McCain’s still flogging his “nuclear safety’s for sissies” line:

With the economy in shambles after eight years of Republican policies, and people losing their homes left and right, Democratic victories in the fall elections seem like a sure thing. But the ever-resourceful Republicans have come up with a plan: find the people who have been most victimized by Republican misgovernance, and make sure they can’t vote. Brilliant. Fortunately the Obama campaign isn’t putting up with this bullshit, and has filed suit against the anti-democratic Republicans.

Click album covers for more info.

Inspired by Nick Carr, I decided to compile a list of my favorite albums for each year of my life. The constraints are: only one album per year and no repeated artists. To make the task a bit easier, I also decided to restrict the list to albums I own, and to only consider studio albums: no compilations, live album, or DJ mixes.

Exercises like this are kind of pointless, but I found it interesting nonetheless. First of all, it drives home how unevenly distributed over time good music is. For some years, like 1981, I had a hard time recalling any albums I liked. Other years like 1984, or periods like 1991-1994 (high school!) made for some difficult choices. Purple Rain, The Pod, and Buhloone Mindstate should really be on this list, as should The Chronic.

The other interesting aspect of doing this is seeing at which point my musical taste formed: it isn’t until 1988 that this list reflects what I was actually listening to at the time (no, my parents didn’t play The Modern Lovers and Lust for Life for me in my crib). From that point on, my tastes have gone through various phases and changes (I like jazz a lot more now than I did back then), but I still like now what I liked then.

Finally, it makes me realize how the album is linked to certain genres and modes of consuming music. I had a hard time recalling albums from 1996-1998, because I was DJing at that time and mostly buying and listening to music in the form of 12-inch singles and DJ mixes. And for the last few years as well, a disproportionate amount of the music I listen to is singles downloaded from MP3 blogs and mixes posted to the web. In fact, I haven’t bought any 2008 studio albums yet, but decided to include I Pledge Allegiance to the Grind II because I love Killer Mike and it’s his best album. Which isn’t to say that I believe that the natural unit of music is the track. It’s just that the web allows me to more easily dig for forgotten older stuff, and so most of the albums I’m buying recently are not current releases but older things like Desire Develops an Edge, Joggers & Smoggers and Idiot O’Clock. It’s a great time to be a music maniac…

This should be running in prime time on every network in the country.