Monthly Archives: February 2009

Here’s the Blitzen Trapper boys on stage at First Avenue the other night. It got moved to the mainroom from the Cedar a few weeks prior, and the hype machine seems like it was set on full blast ever since. Vita and The Current and who all knows who all else, it doesn’t matter, it turned into a pretty full house for a band who was last here in November playing the way smaller Turf Club – a show that I couldn’t go to because I had a wedding that night and that of course got jumping-up-and-down reviews. Burn.
And now here’s the part where I was going to write my review of how the show was kind of all over the place and how the crowd was kinda lost and how the setbreak was too long and the energy and vibe was just kinda weird in general. But instead of that, I’m just gonna say that Josh’s review at Culture Bully basically says everything I would have said and more and it has way better pictures so just read that and picture me nodding along the whole time. Perfect.
Opener was the charming-but-soft-and-downtempo Alela Diane, who seemed way out of place in the Mainroom. Doubleso with a crowd who talked thru her whole set. Curious.

Here’s junior with Lucy Michelle after her mini in-store set with the Velvet Lapelles down at The Electric Fetus tonight. He was really excited to meet her, she’s totally one of his favs. Mine, too. Obvs.
We sat right up front on the floor for the 30 or 40 minute set. LMVL were the first band to play as part of this new Minneconomy thing. It sounds like they’re really going to start ramping this stuff up, adding some drinks and snacks and stuff and I don’t see how it’s gonna be anything but great. So yeah, watch for that.
I asked Lucy about the timing of the new record. She said they were recording an EP in a few months (April, I think?) and that it’d be out late spring / early summer. So yeah, that’ll be a great way to kick off your summertime music collectin’.

Brace yourself – the Strib caught wind of my stupid javascript pagination inflation workaround hack and changed something in their code and now it doesn’t work anymore. Shocking, I know. I’m sure all 6 of you who started using it really demolished their ad income. Behold the power of my stupid blog.
Here’s my hypothetical breakdown of how I could react.

• If I were Ed, I’d write up a 4-part miniseries that called shenanigans on the entire Institution of the Star Tribune. I’d hire mechanical turks in the Ukraine to load random strib pages and see if the ads were geotargeted correctly. I have no idea what that means.
• If I were Garrick, I’d go off about how if media doesn’t want to produce content in the way I want to consume it, hey, no big deal, I’ll just stop consuming it. And by ‘go off’, I mean ‘record a podcast’.
• If I were Huna, I’d point out that I subscribe to the paper already, and that forcing me to click thru 4 pages – presumably in the name of advertising impressions (?) – is a turn off. Then I’d post a bunch of mp3′s from Journey’s latest album. In other news, Journey is still making albums.
• If I were Taylor I’d post some crazy picture of MC Hammer where he’s like holding a can of Tab in one hand and a cardboard sign that says “STOP PAGINATION INFLATION” in the other.
• If I were 10 years younger I’d stay up all night writing some crazy f-u script that pre-fetched all the pages and stripped the ads and showed it all nice and clean. Then Juettner could point out again that that’s pretty much what “printable view” does. Screw him.

But whatever, none of those are me. Who has the time for podcasts and shenanigan calling, there’s 19 hours of Idol on this week. So I took 2 minutes and looked at the page source for Strib content and go figure ALL THE CONTENT IS ON THE PAGE they just hide it with stylesheets. Well this’ll be easy.
So yeah, here’s your new bookmarklet that “unhides” the “hidden” content. It’s actually better than the first one because it doesn’t have to reload the page and/or deal with the URL at all. Superfast.
Drag this link to your bookmarks bar: all-strib
Again, I tested this for 30 seconds. It works mint for me, but your mileage may vary. Have fun.

Maybe it’s just me – seriously, maybe it is – but doesn’t it seem like the Strib has really cranked up the pagination insanity to some new level of cuckoo for cocoa puffs lately? Take, for example, this recent piece about 4 Thai restaurants in town. It spans 4 pages. I know, right? Right. Worse yet: the ‘continue to next page’ link is like 25 scrolls away, hidden under the sidebar. Ugh.
Anyway, I found myself url hacking to get all the pages on a single page. It’s not hard, you add a page=all parameter and it shows all the pages. Nice.
Then I made a bookmarket, so all I have to do when I open an article is click this button on my bookmarks bar and it shows all the pages. Here, you can use it, too. Just drag this link to your bookmarks bar.
all-strib
I know, right? Totally.
It’s prob not feature complete. It’s certainly not guaranteed to work. I tested it on chrome and firefox for like 30 seconds. Have at it.