People laughed about the Cheese Fridge, despite how deadly serious an undertaking it is.
Mia, to her credit, has been supportive of my dream, though is less thoroughly against the concept of Brie. I am categorizing this lapse in judgment in the same part of her brain that is allowing me to convert my old college mini-fridge into a cheese fridge some day.
Anyway, the point. The cheese fridge is not yet here, as right now it is still storing apple juice and Lunchables and such, but when it does arrive, it will already have a supporting role in the internet's newest epic, web 2.0 tour-de-force. Buzzword.
I present: Our Cheese Adventure Blog
What's a cheese adventure?. Why, just look at the first entry:
A Cheese Adventure is essentially russian roulette at the cheese counter at your local fancypants grocery store. We typically choose a cheese at random, usually based on the humorousness of its name, and then take it home and try it out. Sometimes they are winners, sometimes they are brie. A good time is had in any event, and we convince ourselves we are essentially the functional equivalent of Indiana Jones, if he were more interested in reasonably priced cheese than priceless artifacts.
This is admittedly one of the worse abuses of the internet to date, but we figure if we document the Cheese Adventures and share them with others, it becomes a more social experience, and we might have a small glimmer of hope of warning people of possible potholes on the road of cheese exploration. Or even radioactive craters, such as brie.
I put up the graphical razzmatazz today, so off to the presses we go. Enjoy.
[supplemental: DELICIOUS]
Jon Hopkins' song Inner Peace, off the album Opalescent, is just really, really, really damn good.
That is all.
[forward march]
I have finally managed a fortification against the zombie hordes of comment spam. I've written about it before, less than coherently and far less than eloquently. There are people who are literally paid experts in managing this new scourge now.
The free market responding to Sturgeon's Revelation in full force.
I have now gone about 4 days without any spam making it through the various elaborate and Batman-themed nets.
To accomplish this, I have chosen the option that will make the blog anti-spam measures unreadable to those who are visually impaired, or "blind" as they are sometimes called in old-timey movies. Sorry, folks. Market research. I consulted heavily with the delegate from my blind readership, and given that he failed to exist, I decided to forgo all the rest of you in order to have a chance at sanely shoring up my blog against phentermine peddlers and mortgage refinanciers. In one year's time I will call another meeting of the delegates, and decide what to do then. Until then, I am afraid you will be unable to comment on these ramblings instantaneously.
For those of you who can read without the aid of specialized machinery, there is still a new hurdle to commenting. You now have to enter a CAPTCHA or "security code" on the comment form. I had long ago considered adding one of these, back when they were new and confusing. These are all the rage now, though, and you've probably seen them elsewhere. It's just an image with a number that you can easily see but that confuses a machine. If you enter it incorrectly, fear not, the comment is merely queued, not outright discarded. This would apply to the blind, as well - if you enter no code at all, the comment is still saved, just not immediately displayed.
This is also the first blog entry to make use of the tags system in my blog software, and I am tagging it as 'meta' because it is hip to do so.
[actually centimate, but how do you count gradations of zero]
Yahoo Pipes is Awesome.
If I were the personification of Google, I would bring my mighty personified foot and use it to repeatedly kick my personified ubiquitous self for not coming out with something like this first.
I don't really care for Yahoo Mail, even the new Beta. I haven't used Yahoo search since I was doing so on a high school lab computer. I think Yahoo Music's subscription model service fell flat on its face when it raised its price to match competitors; competitors who have infinitely superior software and music selection. I will grant them that Flickr is quite something, and while I have steadfastly avoided it in order to preserve some semblance of free time, I hear del.icio.us is fairly handy. These last two high points are buy-outs, however. Yahoo didn't build them in-house.
So, I guess that was all a long way of saying that Yahoo has a lot of catch up to play for me. The products they have that aren't miserably bad are vastly outclassed by Google's, and the ones that are good they basically just had the good sense to buy before Google did.
They made up a hell of a lot of ground recently.
For the uninitiated, Yahoo Pipes is basically a snazzy, Reason-style unix information piping system, with various modules you drag in and wire up in one of the most slick webapp UIs I've ever seen.
Like Reason, using these simple modules, you can process, combine and filter information in a seemingly infinite number of ways. It's being heralded as an "instant mash-up tool" and I suppose it could be used for that, in order to find YouTube videos that match keywords within the media-watchdog blog you read to create what is almost a web-based media watchdog TV network.
Those mashups are pretty cool, but even the ones done before they were made trivial by this tool never really wowed me. Yay, so I can see the spots mentioned in a local newspaper's web feed pinpointed on Google or Yahoo maps. Nifty, I suppose, but that novelty wore off quickly.
However, last year I moved to an RSS aggregator with a certain about of regret - not only was I joining those who bypass site ads to get content, but I simply didn't like being that busy. Well, I am that busy. And while I'm no fan of ads, I recognize that without them many of the sites I enjoy could not continue their existence, so I like to help out with the cume where I can.
The real issue is that I got so much I wanted to read that I was basically forced into aggregation. The time wasted checking a site that hadn't updated 5 times was piling up. I had tried downloadable feed readers in the past, but was never wowed with them, either, and now I was using 4 computers regularly. I am loathe to install any application but a browser on four computers, so I tried Google Reader, trusting Google to do for my web page problem what they had for my email one.
Well, at the time, Google reader sucked. So, I used Bloglines a bit, and basically just kept checking sites manually. Then I found this article on Lifehacker, with the intrepid Gina Trapani informing me that maybe Google Reader had stopped sucking. Indeed it had, and thus began my complete and utter exodus into RSS fandom.
The problem I always had was that there were a couple sites I liked reading, but had a lot of crap I always skipped. They were predictable bits of crap - nay, machine-predictable bits of crap (see where this is going) and I hated them clogging my reader, keeping other, interesting items under their harsh, oppressive crappiness.
The choice was then to either remove them, or deal with them glutting my already insanely cluttered reading list.
Enter Yahoo Pipes. I do not consider it a mash-up tool, even though I have already used it as such.
What I view as its true power are two simple things: processing and filtering. I can now take 2 feeds that I like, combine them, filter out stuff I don't like that regularly occurs in them, and output a feed with just the stuff I care about, which I can then subscribe to.
This is a more mild version of the feeling I got when I fired up my first DVR. Finally, I can filter the vast sea of content drifting into my mouth in an automated fashion, and spend more time actually reading information instead of managing it.
That said, the mash up capabilities are pretty interesting. I've created this pipe (that's the pipe page, not the feed it generates - check out the insane list of feed readers it supports auto-adding to) as basically an all-inclusive feed of everything I generate that gets syndicated: this blog, my livejournal (which i'm basically abandoning,) my comic, my flickr stream, and my old buzznet stream (which I am also basically abandoning.)
So, with one subscription you get a merged and reverse-chronological archive of all my stuff across the entire interwebs (RSS-less music not withstanding, though I do list those here.) I've even restricted the Flickr stream from displaying any photos with the "projects" tag as those tend to be a huge number of pics of stuff being disassembled.
This kind of combination and filtering and sorting is all easily mechanically done, but it makes organizing my online web presence (an ongoing project) hugely easier, because in a way it's already done. If someone truly wanted a well organized summary of all my online output, there ya go. It's all the organization, seamlessness, and effortlessness I am aiming for in my future web stuff, while still maintaining the history contained in all my disparate sources, which would be an enormous hassle to try and pull together.
I've already been tinkering with some complex filtering and recombination. This is basically heaven for anyone who likes Legos or Reason and reading stuff on the internet, and in case you didn't know, I make a comic out of Legos and make music in Reason, and I love reading stuff on the internet.
So, I'm well on my way to a series of pipes. And they are delivering massive, just massive amounts of material.
[would smell entirely different]
May we all live in a place so tame that we must invent our evil.
--PA for today
[won't someone think of the children in a sane and practical way]
wow.
Ten years ago, some amazing things happened.
7 years after that I stopped watching the tapes.
I thought I was hated for my allegiance to some by some, and I was disappointed in the lack of allegiance to some by some.
Maybe not.
I was celebrating in my own little way on the 2nd, and thought I was alone.
Maybe not.
Miss you guys.
.p