#wxdu

My name is Mika, and I’m a rising senior and student DJ at WXDU. I’m excited to be representing WXDU as I cover Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago this weekend (7/20 - 7/22). To start, here are the artists I’m most looking forward to seeing:

Tame Impala

The last time I saw Tame Impala was at Lollapalooza in 2015, the year they released Currents. I loved their set then, but am even more excited to see them close out the first day of Pitchfork this year. I’m hoping that they’ll play something new from the Currents B-Sides & Remixes released last year and “Be Above It” from 2012’s Lonerism.

Big Thief

Capacity was my favorite album of 2017—it’s absolutely exquisite. It’s difficult to pick my favorite track from the album, but it’s probably between “Mythological Beauty” and “Mary.”  I was able to see Big Thief in Williamsburg this past fall, and am really looking forward to another beautiful set at Pitchfork.

Paul Cherry

A member of my much-beloved Chicago DIY scene, Paul Cherry is one of the artists I’m most excited to see at Pitchfork. His first LP, Flavour captures millennial culture and modern love, with a sound that’s part dream pop and something a little smoother, a little rock-ier (some have said “yacht rock”).

Kelela

Kelela’s 2017 release, Take Me Apart, was highly acclaimed, but I admit that I didn’t give it a good listen until just recently. Take Me Apart is cohesive, but each song is innovative and honest in its own way. The sexy rhythmic pop sound makes her Saturday evening set a must-see.

Blood Orange

I saw Blood Orange at Pitchfork in 2016, after the release of his third album Freetown Sound. His set then was energetic and dance-y, captivating the crowd with tracks from Freetown Sound and favorites, like “You’re Not Good Enough.” I’m looking forward to seeing Blood Orange again!

Nnamdi Ogbonnaya

Nnamdi Obbonnaya is another musician from Chicago’s DIY scene. 2017’s DROOL is a hybrid rap album that is both goofy and emotional, with standout tracks like “let gO Of my egO” and “dOn’t turn me Off.” His set as opener for Speedy Ortiz in Nashville this past May was one of the most dynamic, captivating sets I’ve seen and I’m excited to see how that energy translates to the Pitchfork stage in his hometown.

Kweku Collins

A former slam poet, Chicago’s very own Kweku Collins’ 2016 LP Nat Love features introspective lyrics and a light sound. His 2017 EP Grey expands the boundaries of what rap can be even more, even featuring a reimagining of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs “Maps.” I’m excited to see another Chicago artist taking the stage at Pitchfork this year.

 Japanese Breakfast

Friday night we watched North Face, the based-on-a-true-story German movie about the race to be the first to climb the north face of the Eiger. The short blurbs I had read did not prepare me for just how dire things got. It was suspenseful and great and sad, and M spent the rest of the evening reading Wikipedia articles about mountaineering in the Swiss Alps.

Saturday we attended a friend’s baby shower, which was baby showery, but with excellent brunch foods because our friends J & V are over-the-top amazing when it comes to hosting massive food-related events at their house.

Saturday evening we went to see What We Do In The Shadows, the New Zealand vampire mockumentary from Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi. It was OK. I don’t remember all that much about their previous film Eagle Vs Shark, which I suspect means that it was also OK. I loved Flight of the Conchords, but it becomes clearer & clearer that Jemaine without Bret is a less humorous entity. 

Monday night I stopped by the new restaurant & bar at the new 21c Hotel downtown. The hotel itself, and its accompanying contemporary art museum, aren’t open yet, but the restaurant & bar are. The space is absolutely gorgeous, with interesting art all over the place.

It was only their second night, so I won’t go into detail, particularly since I only had a couple of cocktails and a couple of dishes. The french fries with the burger were phenomenal -- easily the best in town. Like scaled-up McDonald’s fries. The burger is one of those silly tall double-patty jobs, and it just tasted like underseasoned ground beef. There are plenty of other things on the menu, though, so I’m sure I’ll be back.

This week has been pretty rough, work-wise. We’re in the thicket of making offers and waiting for students to accept, and there have been a number of declines this week, which is always a bummer. By the time someone gets to the offer stage with us, we’ve interviewed them three times, and we’re pretty darn convinced that they would do well with us (and that they would enjoy the work they’d be doing). So while I don’t take declines personally, it’s still a drag.

OK I kind of take them personally when the person waits until the very instant of their deadline (or even later) to decline. I’m sure that their mental image of how we work involves us simultaneously offering to dozens of people, and building our teams from those who accept.

That’s not how it works, though. Every offer is a potential binding contract, and we have a finite number of slots, so we have to wait until one offer is declined before we can proceed with another. And because we’re an internship, we basically have to get all of this done in a fairly narrow window during the first quarter of the year.

So every day that someone stalls unnecessarily before declining is actually pretty painful. As I said, I’m sure they don’t realize this, but still.

Today I emailed a student to see if they were still available to interview, and they said that they weren’t, but some of their classmates were still looking, and they offered to forward my note to their classmates. This is what we need more of.

Today involved a huge discussion on my Facebook page about copyright. It didn’t need to go on for as long as it did (which is true of any Facebook discussion longer than 25 comments), and it mostly just cemented my opinion that the term of copyright should be recalibrated to that of patents, i.e. 20 years. If you want more details, go look at my Facebook page, I guess.

As I write this I’m also battling a DDoS attack on one of the WXDU servers. It’s not even one of the boxes that would be in the public eye -- it’s a host that has a DJ-only music database on it. It doesn’t make any sense for someone to DDoS it and not, say, our actual public website. 

I don’t have a ton of experience in dealing with such attacks. This one takes the form of a flood of http requests to the IP address of the host, but requesting other random site URLs. So far I have blocked close to 2000 IP addresses. I haven’t yet gotten to the point where I’m ready to try to script & automate the process -- I mean, I have the blocking automated, but I’m sanity-checking the list of IPs that I block manually, because there’s some legitimate traffic in there as well.

If it goes on for significantly longer, I’ll write something that can differentiate between legitimate traffic and this bogus stuff, and just auto-block all of it.

I've been doing a lot of technical interviewing lately, and I have a suggestion for the nation's universities' Computer Science departments:

Quit making your undergraduate curricula so polyglot

I feel like a decade ago, you had a pretty good chance of talking to a Computer Science student who had at least a solid 2 years of Java or C++ under his or her belt, and at some schools more like 3 or even all 4 years.

This was of course highly problematic -- it meant that you would encounter students who hadn't the foggiest idea about web technologies, or how to use useful scripting languages. But at least they knew a pretty solid range of advanced topics in their department's language of choice.

Lately I've been talking to a ton of students who had maybe two semesters taught in Java freshman year, and then perhaps a couple of classes in C, and some more advanced classes in Python, and perhaps a web class in PHP or Javascript, and then maybe some crank of a prof teaching in a functional language.

Which is neat, right? They get exposed to all of these different languages, blah blah blah. 

So they can barely remember how to write a for loop in any of them.

I would like to suggest that perhaps a minimum of four consecutive semesters or eight core CS courses should be taught in the SAME LANGUAGE, which should be enough time for the students to get past the initial learning curve, master the basics, and pick up the more advanced concepts. 

Because right now I'm talking to too many students who've essentially repeated the basics in three different languages & never seen advanced topics in any of them.

Anyway. I'm backlogged on writing diary entries again. Let's see:

Sunday was Sunday, with the added bonus of a power outage at WXDU that resulted in no show for me. But I was able to switch our internet radio stream over to a higher-quality audio processor. I think it sounds better. You tell me. 

We watched the Golden Globes. I don't have a lot to say about that, other than to register my annoyance that Selma didn't win anything. I mean, I enjoyed Birdman, and I enjoyed Boyhood, but I liked Selma better. And COME ON there have already been a lot of movies about WHITE MEN.

Our Alien-series film festival has ground to a halt due to Having to Work At Night After Work. Yuck.

My nighttime work has mostly been refactoring someone else's 10-year-old PHP code so that it doesn't throw 10,000 errors every time a page loads now that we're on PHP 5.x. It's actually fairly straightforward, just gotta put EVERY SINGLE HASH KEY into single quotes instead of barewords.

M has had real work-work to do, which is a drag.

My work has been rendered far more pleasant by my incessant repeat playing of the new Sleater-Kinney. Gonna be hard to knock this one off of my #1 spot for 2015. It's January 14th as I'm writing this. Yep.