Right then, so, My birthday.
Let me go back a moment. 2 years ago I had what was easily the worst birthday of my entire life. God awful. I say this is in direct contradiction to my entry on that day, which says the one prior to it was the worst. The one 3 years ago was stressful, but by and large much less emotionally scarring. I chalk my clouded statement of 2 years ago up to the Guinness referenced in it, and my clarity of observation now up to the continued and obsessive review of my own life's events.
Anyway, on that day 2 years ago, I resolved to find someone who would not treat me the way I was treated that day. I was seeking someone who didn't settle for me. Someone who accepted and even celebrated my goofy and altogether strange nature. As I pointed out in this entry, I found her.
I found a girl named Mia who was every bit as goofy and strange as I was, and was just as interested in not having to hide it, or anything about ourselves, ever again. A girl with a sense of humor and whimsy that it has been my delight to partake in daily for the better part of 2 years now.
Now, this year, I had been surrounded by a doppelganger world of secrets and lies for a week preceding it, as Mia had engineered a number of surprises and covert happenings, so in a weird way I was apprehensive going into it. In and amongst all the cloak and daggery I'd also been running a record sleep deficit, and so I would have been quite happy to just sleep through the whole weekend and call it a day. I will blame this on the daylight savings switch until the day I die.
Mia, though having a disturbing ability to bend the world around me into a scary place full of deception and..well, cahooting, did indeed succeed at her goal of winning at birthday. I had a fantastic rollercoaster ride of surprises and gifts I did not deserve, and over the course of the day received ample proof that I in no way have earned the fantastic life I lead, nor her even spectating it, much less being the central component in it. I am still not quite clear on why she even talks to me, and here she is spending many hours of her day turning all my friends into operatives in a grand scheme to make me unspeakably happy.
It is no surprise my search ended forever with her.
Part of this scheme involved a very elaborate arrangement for a video conference with someone I hadn't seen in the better part of 10 years - which is worth commemorating as a very important milestone, but this entry is about the girl who made it happen - my baby. The effort that took is already staggering, but the sentiment behind it is truly beyond my skill with the english language. I know it wasn't easy to arrange in any sense of the word, and it's something I can't give enough gratitude and praise for. A selfless lack of spite that was at once her defining characteristic and yet a step against a very ingrained habit and psychology - all in the name of an incredibly sweet gesture designed for the sole purpose of making me happy.
Anyway, I once dedicated a song of mine to her - but I'd like to do it again, with someone else's:
You might be the one that I've been seeking for
You might be the strange delightful
You might be the girly who shall end all girls
You might be the sweet unspiteful
--mike doughty, 27 jennifers
[also she totally made me egg foo young]
Hello, boys and girls!
Important news flash:
Being a grown-up is pretty damn amazing.
I still have yet to fully grasp this, but as always, I have excellent teachers.
This is a token of gratitude.
[and apparently hit by some sort of mood]
So, they're trying to kill Internet Radio again, in case you haven't heard. There have been a number of other articles on the subject, but this one gives the gist fairly well.
This time it's a little more blatant - SoundExchange, rather than publishers, are trying to suck some more money up and shut down independent distribution avenues.
These are not people trying to gain compensation for struggling artists whose works are being played at profit and at no promotional value by the seedy pirates of the internet.
These are industry people trying to argue that internet radio somehow provides a different publicity standard than terrestrial radio waves, despite literally being a global venue, and that on top of the understandable publishing royalties for those ARTISTS who hold the copyright that were the eventual outcome of this fight in 2002, the RIAA should get some extra money for all the lawyers they have to hire to sue the pants off thousands of people. Well, presumably they also have to use some of that money to pay the lobbyists who get this kind of stuff slipped into the system.
As the law stood, after the compromise in 2002, royalties were paid to copyright holders based on revenue of the broadcaster. That's fair to me - if you're making money hand over fist by playing someone else's material, you have to cough up. These new royalty structures are punitive, and designed in a way to crush even large-scale net broadcasters, because they are based purely on users and songs, not the profitability of the company. If someone is paying 50 thousand dollars a year in bandwidth, and subsisting off donations, chances are they aren't rolling in piles of money on the backs of the starving artists they are exposing to thousands of new people. They are probably losing some money and doing it out of a love of exposing people to new, or non-mainstream music. So, of course, it is time for them to be stopped, or the mainstream pap-wagon will go the way of network television - death by choice. Capitalism's a bitch, huh?
I believe very strongly in these distribution venues - they provide me with new music I would never have experienced otherwise, which I then research, and go...BUY. Amazing concept, isn't it?
I support the venues themselves, as well, because it is of value to me that there are broadcasters not in bed with or in the pocket of content producers. I put my money where my mouth is, and have a soma fm tshirt to prove it.
I put my actions where my mouth is, as well, and on Friday wrote a series of letters to my elected officials, just as I did in 2002 when this crap was happening. I only hope that this time I will have a similar victory post.
Unlike in 2002, I had a cool little tool in Congress.org, which the soma site directed me to. It basically makes pestering the crap out of your officials as easy as ordering books or searching for porngiving to various non-porn-charities.
One of congress.org's great features is what I will call the blab-o-meter. Couple tips if you want to actually get noticed by your elected officials:
1. Vote in primaries
2. Keep your stupid letter under 1500 words.
In addition to auto-detecting your various reps and automatically filling in their email address for you, this Blab-o-meter also lets you know when you are getting a bit lippy and will probably lose the attention of the windbag you're writing to. Very handy feature.
Anyway, I urge anyone reading this who is distressed by the United States of Clearchannel and is sick of the RIAA bullying everything they don't control with legal threats or lobbying maneuvers to use the link on soma.fm and use congress.org to scream pretty loudly.
Unless you live in Alaska. Then your personal letter will get caught behind some massive amounts of material, because I mean I just got internet from there yesterday.
Yes, I am still doing Ted Stevens jokes. The man was head of a committee and was a national embarassment.
[you meddling kids]
This post is about blogs as a medium. I know this is a tiresome topic beaten to death by those who are so preoccupied with espousing the legitimacy of the medium that their particular blog becomes the inane, illegitimate exception they rail against, but bear with me. This one is mildly insightful, though those parts are almost entirely stolen.
John C Dvorak is a tech writer who I've been aware of for my entire adult life thanks to my mother's subscriptions to various Ziff Davis publications, and is quite a crank. He has a show to that effect, even, which I listen to on my obscenely long commute to work. He has a blog (drink, TWIT listeners!) I subscribe to and for the most part enjoy, despite the fact that it is ugly as sin and about as unified design-wise as a Tripod or Geocities page in 1997. (I am harsh because I care, John.)
Anyway, on TWIT (another commute favorite) a while back, he put in pretty clear terms the main camps of blogs, in a way I had tried in vain to nail down in the past. While I didn't fully agree with the way he valued each on the TWIT episode, I think he put it quite expertly on his site's Blog Primer:
First of all there are two categories of blogs. One is the traditional web-log where a web surfer shares his online discoveries. And the second is the web diary where person shares his or her thoughts of the day. Most blogs of either style often have elements of the other style once in a while. A diarist will often discuss a link while traditional web-loggers will commonly ramble on about something that happened to them that day.
I think this is a very accurate and uncharacteristically even handed take on the "blogosphere," which is a word I despise so much that my use of it should tell you this is a serious discussion.
This blog has been in the "web diary" camp for the bulk of its life, though as Dvorak points out there is always some cross pollination - so I've had some "Check out this cool thing I found" posts as well. Even those were mostly autobiographical in nature, though, and the effort involved in stringing them together into a theme and narrative usually meant the links were either incredibly esoteric or lacking in the hot and fresh department.
I've wanted to move to a more balanced approach, being a more "professional" style blog, where instead of myspace-style articles about what I had for lunch and cryptic references made to people who (I thought) will never read this, I had general interest commentary on the massive amounts of material that certain entities trickle through the tubes.
The problem I had was response time. I do like to string these things together into a coherent theme, and have something more to say than "go look it's cool lol." I am wasting a degree in journalism by doing consulting work, and damn it, those skills are gonna get used, even if only in a capacity where I constantly talk about how I am not using them. However, in the blagohedron, life moves fast. It's hard to do the kind of themes and commentary I want to do without posting weeks-old news.
After a trip to the venerable Chris' blog (or blag, as I'm sure he'd be honored to have it called) I found he had implemented a Google Reader widget that I will from now on refer to as the Magic Share-O-Tron 7500. As previously noted, I am now a fairly devout Google Reader user for my various feeds, and I star and tag some items with the intention of manually stringing them together into blog posts of merit and value.
Rarely does this actually happen, however, because I am still terrible at adhering to a writing schedule.
So, to hell with it. The Share-o-Tron 7500 not only creates a feed people can subscribe to if they wish to see what I am finding interesting, but a web widget you can simply drop into pages and give people a glimpse at what you find cool. This is almost like automating a large segment of the second camp of blogs out there - those of this format:
Directly Copied Headline
Copier byline, timestamp, tagsIncredibly brief summary, often not including data past the 2nd paragraph of the source material.
LINK (via Link Source)
Automating this kind of slipshod rumor-milling wouldn't be such a bad thing - you'd have a lot less of those RUMOR posts with a sensationalist headline that is based on assumption that is clearly debunked by the 3rd paragraph of the source article - and a HELL of a lot less comment flamewars pointing that out. There are a number of sites, video gaming in particular, who make their ad revenue on the back of this principle.
A note about these kinds of sites - I like some of them, I read some of them. I do get a bit infuriated when I see saucy headlines that are clearly wrong if you read the entire source article linked in the post, but I'm not trying to be Mr. Journalism Snob here. I like those blogs, I just don't want to be those blogs.
For my purposes, I still want to try to actually insert some informed commentary and insight into the list of links. However, I am not paid to do this, and have no intentions of adding advertising anytime soon, so the time I have available to do that is lacking.
There's something to be said for zero commentary, though. It's not slipshod, it's nonexistant. What made it click in my head when I saw the Share-O-Tron 7500 on Chris' site was that it's like a wire service, which is an edifice of journalism I can still respect.
I may be too slow to react to be an effective pundit, but there's still something of value in my being a filter. So, if I stole Chris' feature added my own Share-O-Tron 7500, I could still "post" hot links by virtue of me reading them, but I wouldn't have to take the time to write the level of commentary I feel they deserve. They would exist in a vacuum - without insightful commentary, but also without ill-informed disinformation.
Awesome.
The next step was to skin the Share-O-Tron 7500, because drop in components are useless to me if they look hacked together...like a Tripod or Geocities page from 1997. It has to gel with the rest of my layout, or its out - especially since I am in the middle of a grandiose site redesign for Patrickcentral.com.
Google doesn't make this easy, but it's not impossible either. You have to choose the unskinned version of the widget on their little code cut-and-paste tool, and then make CSS classes matching those their script applies to each of the elements of the widget.
A rudimentary version of a Z Axis skinned one is available here.
I'll be working to integrate it into the main design soon. For now, you can also get a feed of my share-o-tron here.
We'll have to see how well I do at having my cake and eating it too.
[choose the form of the destructor]
I've tried since 2001 to find a viable web-based whiteboard system. Anyone who knows me will tell you I have whiteboards all around me, and use them all the time to try and illustrate the various things that I like to incoherently ramble on about. This urge is no less present when talking to someone across town, or even in another state, though, so I have wanted an easy to use, web-based whiteboard app, preferably collaborative, but with a permissions hierarchy so it can't be vandalized, unless I allow it to be.
I found a couple promising linux apps, but configuring them was always a pain, and the functionality was a shadow of MS Paint. Plus, my home linux server/dsl connection isn't the kind of stable connection I like to rely on for 99% uptime. Not good.
For my last job, I managed to find GE's imagination cubed, which is a pretty stellar effort, I admit - but sharing boards ended in an 8000 character URL, and since usually by the time I want to draw a picture for someone they have already completely lost interest, I need as painless a process to get them there as possible. Also, it ran a little sluggishly for me, thought that is probably a function of the admittedly very slick and full-featured interface.
Imaginationcubed worked for that job, where a lot of collaboration occurred in geographically separate places, but (as far as I could tell) it lacked the permanence of an office whiteboard that could simply be left as it was at the end of the day, and returned to the next day.
Today I read about Skrbl, which follows the incredibly annoying "Encapsulation Buzzword 2.0" standard of eschewing vowels for its name, but is actually quite awesome.
It's got a no-login mode, so a quick, 5 second "let me draw you a picture" mode exists. Check.
It's got a login-based persistent mode, so I can "own" a board, and have its contents maintained even when no one is using it. Check
It's got a password-based system so I can restrict access. Check.
More important than those, perhaps, is that you can SAVE the contents of a board to a file to take with you offline, or just to save a drawing while still being able to clear your board. That said, you can also "own" multiple boards, so I could have the "New Website Mockup" board to brainstorm with friends, and the "Doomsday Machine Schematic" whiteboard that is just for my own personal..er...scientific inquiry. Saving the boards is a huge and unexpected feature for me, as I literally used to take digital pictures of my whiteboards before erasing them just to have them to refer to later.
Drawing and text and stuff are fairly standard, but have a good response time and good level of sophistication in the features. There aren't a thousand buttons to confuse people who just want to make it work quickly to convey an idea, but you're not locked into a set font size or pen color or anything.
The delete function is a little strange - you have to select the element with the arrow tool and then right click in order to get a delete option. The main problem with this is that it's not immediately apparent - it works fine when you know its there, it just doesn't leap out at you.
I'll completely forgive the delete weirdness (and absence of a simple Eraser tool) for the fact that it has zoom and search capability.
You can also upload (small in file size) images and include them - very useful for doing a whiteboard mockup, and in a way transcending what most people can actually do with a real life whiteboard. This requires login, but it's pretty obvious that the no-login section of the site is designed for quickies, and in that respect it accomplishes everything it needs to. If I want the more advanced features, it makes sense to have to log in.
If they can add in a Flickr style API to this, allowing people to include these whiteboards on other pages..holy CRAP.
I'll be posting later with some examples of its use, but I couldn't contain my excitement when I first read about this - finally Buzzword 9.0 has delivered one of the few apps I really WANTED on the web.
[and it was good]