During my recent font problems, after reinstalling Mac OS X, I discovered that I couldn't watch Real content in a browser anymore. Reinstalling the RealOne Player application didn't bring back the plugin, and installing the beta of RealPlayer 10 didn't help either. After an amazingly fruitless series of emails to Real's support people I searched the forums at macosxhints.com and found what I was looking for.

So, for anyone who's arrived here after a google search, here's what I did. As always, YMMV.

The solution has been to manually put aliases of the RealPlayer 10 plugin files into the Internet Plugins directory of the main Library folder of the system. For some reason these aliases were not being created on my system when RealPlayer 10 was first installed and configured. The Real plugin files are not easily accessible however. They are located in the application package itself and must be accessed using the "Show Package Contents" function on the Mac OS X system. Right-click on the RealPlayer 10 application (or control-click if you've only got one mouse button) and choose "Show Package Contents" from the contextual menu. Then navigate to Contents/Mac OS/ and you'll see the two plugin files which need aliases. Make aliases of both "RealPlayer plugin" and "RealPlayer Plugin.plugin" and then move those aliases to the Internet Plugins folder inside the main Library folder. Quit the browser and relaunch it, and the plugin should be available.

This concludes today's public service announcement. 

This week has been taken up by reading Theodore Gracyk's Rock Music and the Politics of Identity as well as rereading my proposal, chapter summaries (so I can remember what I'm supposed to be writing about!), and the first part of the first dissertation chapter (so I can remember how I've already written about the first chapter in the book). Rereading the dissertation is always a nervous experience for me, especially now that I'm working on the book version. What seemed like great writing at the time, full of useful discussion, now seems simplistic and almost naïve, and in need of some serious stepping up (isn't this always the way it is though?). There needs to be more depth to my discussions of genre, the cultural context of thrash metal in the early 80s, and what I mean by big concepts like "the body" and "identity." Thus the reading this week. Gracyk is only one resource of course, and I'm primarily interested in that book as part of the larger conversation on these issues. Professor Steve was nice enough to send me his chapter on the NWOBHM (part of his upcoming book on punk and metal) and that's also been helpful. 

Oh joy of joys! We're having the asphalt resealed in the complex this week. They're doing it in sections and there's lots of car shuffling going on since individual sections are closed off for two days (one to do the resealing tar and another to repaint the lines). I watched the guys working yesterday (because I can) and it was interesting. The tar/goo is actually brown when it's wet. Then the guys spread it all over the section with these rake-like things. Today they're doing our section and it looks like it'll be one of the larger sections of the whole job. They work really fast though, almost running as they spread the goo. 

R3 and I went to Sacramento last Saturday night to see the Iron Maidens at The Roadhouse. The Maidens are an all-female tribute to Iron Maiden and one of the better tribute bands I've seen. They've recently acquired a new lead singer and I was impressed with how she handled the material. The instrumentalists are also very impressive, especially the drummer (who happens to look like UCLA alum Maria, but with dark brown hair). The band also pulled out some really obscure stuff from Iron Maiden's first album and the crowd loved it. Interestingly, they opened with the song "Be Quick or Be Dead" and their penultimate song was "Fear of the Dark," both of which come from 1992's Fear of the Dark, released a few years after the classic Maiden line-up generally portrayed by the tribute. I'm always interested in this kind of thing from tribute bands, when they seem to bend the "rules" like that. The Roadhouse is an okay joint though. It's kind of like Paladino's in Tarzana -- lots of 80s metal throwbacks walking around watching tribute bands -- but with a huge patio area out back. Oh, Mountain played there last month. Yes, Mountain from the 70s Southern Rock era. I can't decide whether to feel sorry for them or to applaud their enjoyment of simply playing live regardless of where.