Advice to Liberals

Posted on August 21, 2008
Filed Under politics | Leave a Comment

My friend Dan Conover has some advice to liberals in this political season, which mostly can be summed up in the title: “Chill!” I particularly like this bit from the end:

Too many liberals have forgotten how to be winners. Step No. 1 is, when you take the lead, act like you’ve been there before.

Popularity: 1% [?]

EGC Clambake for August 19, 2008 - “Fourth Anniversary, Big Whoop”

Posted on August 19, 2008
Filed Under audio | 1 Comment

Here is the direct MP3 download for the EGC clambake for August 19, 2008. I play a song from Rocket City Riot and then try and fail to read some user mail; I play a song by the Harvey Girls; I discuss this being the fourth anniversary of this podcast, why I started doing this show and why I continue and how I feel about the state of our medium; I mention New Media Expo and Michael Geoghegan and the “death of podcasting”; I play a song by Glass Eye and then groove my way on into the night.

This turns out to have been an unusually foul-mouthed episode. I guess it happens when you wind the monkey up. That’s why I disclaim this up front, kids.

You can subscribe to this podcast feed via RSS. To sponsor the show, contact BackBeat Media. Don’t forget, you can fly your EGC flag by buying the stuff package. This show as a whole is Creative Commons licensed Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5. Bandwidth for this episode is provided by Cachefly.

Links mentioned in this episode:

 
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Popularity: 4% [?]

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Microblogs Need GUIDs

Posted on August 18, 2008
Filed Under programming | 2 Comments

I’m listening to the 8/2/2008 episode of the Gillmor Gang where Steve is talking with Dustin Sailings of Twitterspy. As they are talking about Twitter and Identi.ca and such, a realization hit me. Because I know nothing about how any of these microblogs are implemented this might be naive and redundant but let me throw it out there.

Microblogs absolutely need GUIDs. Particularly if we are talking about federating together identi.ca powered services that exchange messages, it is highly important that we be able to uniquely identify them. Since every microblog post originated somewhere, I believe this GUID should almost always be the URL of the individual message on the originating service.

For example, I make a tweet on Twitter. FriendFeed picks that up and aggregates that in my feed. That FriendFeed message should have a GUID that is the original Twitter URL. If I have a ping.fm or TwitterFeed or any other reposting type service running, they should all pass in the GUID as they do the push from Twitter to other services. If I post originally to Identi.ca and it pushes to Twitter, just reverse that notion. Then in cases like where your blog automatically posts messages to Twitter, the GUID should be the permalink of your blog post. This would enable easy deduplication. For example, now FriendFeed could see that the Twitter notification of the blog post is something it has already seen from the blog itself. It can only show a single occurrence, not the avalanche of duplicate messages we now see.

The same basic principle would hold with Flickr entries that get posted to Twitter or similar services. Use the Flickr page as the GUID so that it is easy to tell that the notification from Twitter, Plurk and FriendFeed are all the same thing so whatever interface you are using should show it only once. I think the benefits of this fall out very quickly. This seems like it would be simple to add in if it doesn’t already exist, simple to add to every bit of message flow and simple to use at all the user interface ends. If the idea is that in the future these services will be distributed and federated, this sort of thing should happen sooner rather than later.

Popularity: 8% [?]

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Creating a Comic Strip

Posted on August 15, 2008
Filed Under comics | Leave a Comment

Via The Comics Reporter I ran across this video showing how Dave Kellett creates the comic strip Sheldon. I’m not a comics creator, can’t really draw but I’m always fascinated with the creation process and particularly the mechanics of it. I found this completely fascinating. I remember the first time I saw original comic book art with all these mystical glyphs on the margins I was intrigued and shocked. “Oh my god, there’s white out all over it!” I thought to myself. It wasn’t this work of perfection that fell from the sky, but something that multiple hands toiled and crafted and maybe even had to back up and do again. If you have any interest in cartooning or the creative process, check out the video.

For a while there I used to listen to Dave and company’s Blank Label Comics Podcast, which seems to be about two years defunct. However, looking up links for this post I ran across Webcomics Weekly, to which I have subscribed. I’ll check out some episodes and see how I like it.

Popularity: 11% [?]

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NBC Olympics Coverage is Unbelievably Bad

Posted on August 12, 2008
Filed Under sports, tv | 4 Comments

[Whoops, I forgot to press publish on this last night. The specifics change but the basics are always the same.]

It’s 10 PM and the NBC coverage of the Olympics just went something like 30 minutes without showing any actual competitions. We got people talking in the studio, mind-numbing preproduced bits about the Great Wall of China and lots of assorted nonsense that had nothing to do with the actual competitions taking place.

I think you could do a lot better by just having a few channels on digital cable that just aired uncut, live footage of competitions with no commentators at all. Instead, we get coverage that is time-shifted, edited to where we see only the USA and the bits that affect the outcome of the finals, lots of schmaltzy bullshit set pieces. I hate the way NBC covers this event, and they screw it up the same way every two years.

Update: I turned in tonight to find Mary Carillo doing a piece on food in China. For Dobb’s sake, you have got to be kidding me! They truncate the coverage but they have time for this? I think I am just about done even bothering with this. NBC coverage is so execrable as to make the Olympics more pain than they are worth to watch. I’ll check the medal count via the web every now and, but screw NBC. For reals, hoss.

Popularity: 17% [?]

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Black Gate Fantasy Magazine

Posted on August 11, 2008
Filed Under sciencefiction | 2 Comments

I’ve heard of Black Gate fantasy magazine but I’d never actually seen a print copy on a newstand or ever read it. They’ve recently decided to make it available not just in print but also in a high quality digital version as well. In order to promote this, they have made issue #12 available for free download. I’ve downloaded it and checked it out and it looks quite nice, although I haven’t sat down and read any of the stories yet. They also have a two page Knights of the Dinner Table comic, so that’s really cool for those into gaming or this comic.

If you are at all interested, download this and try it out for free. If it’s something you like, help a brother out and subscribe or buy some back issues. Support the genre, support those few small press print magazines still making a go of it, support people willing to let you download the magazine without suing your nuts off.

PS - the free download is for a limited time so don’t fart around. If you want to get it, time to hop on it.

Popularity: 17% [?]

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Back From Vacation but Really Not

Posted on August 10, 2008
Filed Under life | 1 Comment

We returned from the mountains late Friday afternoon but it has been really hard to transition from vacation mode to normal life mode. I haven’t blogged or really wanted to do much of anything this weekend. We did go see The Dark Knight yesterday, a brilliant movie about which I should blog at length. I’m not sure the last time we took a whole week long vacation. It’s possible that we never have - Xmas holidays excluded because that’s the opposite of restful for us, usually involving shlepping from state to state seeing the various families. I enjoyed doing it, but I have no practice in decompressing and then recompressing. Maybe I should make a habit of this.

Popularity: 18% [?]

Vacation in the Woods

Posted on August 6, 2008
Filed Under life | Leave a Comment


View from the Cabin
Hooker Falls
Wolfe's Angel

I’m writing this Wednesday August 7th, no idea when it will get posted. [Answer: later that day, at an Atlanta Bread Company.] Surprising myself, I haven’t even been that interested in finding wifi and checking my mail up to this point. I expected I’d be jonesing at the lack of internet but it just hasn’t mattered to me.

Our cabin is truly out in the nowheresville woods, which is kind of what we were shooting for. Just up the hill is a 3 acre pasture that we can run around in with the dog. The view on two sides is thick forest, on one is the main house and the last is an apple orchard. I’m not above picking an illicit apple or two, but they aren’t ripe yet.

Monday we got our bearings and drove around Hendersonville. We went up to Jump Off Rock, which we found interesting and a pretty view but probably not worth the pain of driving up to it. It was close to sunset when we got there, and there was one dude there who gave us as close to a serial killer vibe as we’ve ever gotten from anyone so our time there was limited.

On Tuesday we packed up and went to Dupont State Forest. We first went to Hooker Falls, which has a swimming area at the bottom of the falls. Best of all you can take your dog! We played around there for a while, then had lunch and hiked up to the other falls across the highway, Triple Falls and High Falls. We of course did all this on a day that was setting a record high temperature for the area, but under the canopy of trees it wasn’t so bad. After going up and down the trails, we were ready for some more swimming in the chilly water of Hooker Falls so we went back there. On the drive back to town we stopped at the cemetery and I snapped a picture of “Wolfe’s Angel” - the angel statue created by Thomas Wolfe’s father and the titular object of Look Homeward, Angel.

And that was that. The first full day of vacation was a success, and everyone was so tuckered that we ate and went to bed early. Just exactly the sort of thing we were hoping for.

Popularity: 26% [?]

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This Blog is on Vacation

Posted on August 4, 2008
Filed Under life | 1 Comment

This week we will be in a cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains. I don’t believe there is any internet where we are staying. Although we might check in at various joints with free wifi, assume there is nothing happening here. I might try to upload a few photos from our big woods adventure if we can.

I haven’t drifted off or gotten busy, I have explicitly disconnected from the grid. Check you on the flipside next weekend!

Popularity: 27% [?]

EGC Clambake for August 4, 2008 - “Vacate”

Posted on August 4, 2008
Filed Under audio | Leave a Comment

Here is the direct MP3 download for the EGC clambake for August 4, 2008. It’s a short show, as I talk about going on vacation and play some Amy Ray. See you on the flipside, tanned and relaxed like Richard Nixon.

You can subscribe to this podcast feed via RSS. To sponsor the show, contact BackBeat Media. Don’t forget, you can fly your EGC flag by buying the stuff package. This show as a whole is Creative Commons licensed Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5. Bandwidth for this episode is provided by Cachefly.

Links mentioned in this episode:

 
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Popularity: 31% [?]

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I Don’t Care About What You Are, I Care About What You Did

Posted on August 2, 2008
Filed Under misc | Leave a Comment


Jay Smooth lays it all out when he explains how to tell people that they sound racist. It works on individuals, politicians or anyone. I like the focus on the two conversations and how the “what you are” conversation is not effective. Says Jay:

We don’t need to see inside their soul to know they shouldn’t have said all that about the watermelon.

and

When a dude picks my pocket, I’m not going to chase him down so I can figure out if he feels like a thief, I’m chasing him down to get my wallet back.

Via Edge of the American West.

Popularity: 32% [?]

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The Continuing Death of Twitter

Posted on August 2, 2008
Filed Under digital-lifestlye | 2 Comments

So I haven’t a created an original tweet over on Twitter - one that wasn’t either housekeeping or a reply to someone else - in a month. That mode of interaction exists entirely on my Friend Feed account now. Any tweets that do happen are exhortations to get followers to move over to FriendFeed with me, or crossposted FF comments. I’m happy with that.

For a month of Steve Gillmor has been telling me that I was philosophically inconsistent for still having any Twitter in my life. He thinks I should hide it all on FriendFeed if I’m such a hardcore switcher. I’ve toyed with the idea but am not ready to pull that trigger. FriendFeed has a beautiful transition plan in place automatically so why not take advantage of that a little long. Now I heard on his show that Steve too has ceased to originate tweets, in his case choosing to use Identi.ca exclusively. If he’s getting fed up, then things are coming to a head. He’s been a die hard proponent for longer than is reasonable and a better friend to Twitter than it was to anyone else as it enters the fast part of the toilet bowl swirl. I’ve always wondered how much of this love of Twitter by Silicon Valley types even as it was sucking ass was for the service itself and how much is residual affection and loyalty for the founders? Odeo was winning awards for “best podcast startup” when all it had was a “under construction” page, so this dynamic of over-valuing their ventures is real.

Now, as if all the various unreliabilities weren’t enough, users are finding their accounts blocked for TOS violations and removed with no apparent cause. I’ve obviously been done with Twitter for a while, but this should be check and mate for everyone else. When the unreliability goes beyond website downtime, rollback of feature sets, intermittent unavailability of your account data into full fledged spurious lockouts from the account, it is time to bail. Twitter is like your drunk uncle, and now this is the 5th baseball practice in a row that he has failed to show up and give you a ride home. Are you going to trust it to be there when you need it? I don’t.

I’d suggest that everyone that still cares about the Twitter mode of interaction move to Identi.ca or FriendFeed (or both hooked together), leave a pointer in your Twitter account that you are moving over and shut out the lights. Enough is enough. I understand you once loved the service but if you continue to use it now you are entering the codependent enabling phase of the relationship. Don’t come crying to me when you get hurt. It doesn’t deserve your loyalty, so withdraw it. I’ll see you on the other side, as geniodiabolico at both FriendFeed and Identi.ca. Check and mate.

Popularity: 37% [?]

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Linguistics Note to the World

Posted on August 2, 2008
Filed Under misc | 1 Comment

If you describe anything as “X on steroids”, I’m going to think you are kind of intellectually lazy. It will give me the impression you are a cliche talker on steroids.

Popularity: 32% [?]

John Kelly’s Voxford on Hard Rock Park

Posted on August 1, 2008
Filed Under myrtlebeach | Leave a Comment

I work about 3/4 of a mile from Hard Rock Park but I’ve never been there. However, this dude who lives in England has been and posted a review of it that I found via Largehearted Boy. He seemed to generally like it. It’s one of those things I feel like I should go to, but mostly the price structure has kept me away. As the prices for locals keep dropping, at some point it will cross my buy line and then I’ll go.

The idea seems, by being so worshipful of rock and roll, to be the exact opposite of rock. I tend to think of it like those anarchy symbol shirts that I seen kids buying from Hot Topic. The way you make your statement completely cuts the legs out from the meaning of it. The saving grace would be if the goal of Hard Rock Park is to celebrate modern day mainstream rock by presenting something overpriced and bloated, which I would actually like if that was their intention. Here in Myrtle Beach they constantly run TV commercials for the park with people behaving in superficially “rocking” douchebag behavior as a selling point. Yeah.

One of these days I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and try the place out. We’ll see how it holds up to my diminished expectations.

Popularity: 33% [?]

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Around the Podosphere

Posted on July 31, 2008
Filed Under podcasting | 1 Comment

Here’s a few things that have struck me as interesting from my recent listening.

I’m a fan of Harry Shearer’s Le Show and the July 20th episode featured a lot of talk with John M. Barry, a writer and expert on New Orleanian issues. I liked how Mr. Barry debunked the whole ridiculous “why rebuild a city under sea level?” meme quite well. If you are at all interested in New Orleans, the failure of the federal levees and related topics, I recommend this for a listen.

I continue to be interested in minicomics. I’ll be honest, most of my inspiration and excitement that I get from DIY media lately has come from the minicomics community. I really want to find a place where I can send them some dough and they’ll send me a grab bag of mixed stuff. I’m interested in the medium but the search costs are high. I do love when I can get a nice compact burst of information on the topic, which I did get from this Dollar Bin recording of the minicomics panel from HeroesCon. This panel had a lot of Alec Longstreth in it. This does make me realize that I need to go to Lulu.com and buy the collection of his minicomics.

I like listening to SModcast and I don’t begrudge the boys making some money, particularly when they are paying a dude to edit and lay in their music bed. Considering the music bed is really the third guy on the show, it’s a significant part of the program. However, their Think Geek sponsorship on the show I listened to today was painful. It was goofy and all and in the kind of style I like to do mine, but damn it felt like it went on forever. I checked the MP3 player and it was a little under 3 minutes but it felt like 10. I’d suggest after about a minute, y’all stop. Past that, you subtract value and make me pissed off at Think Geek. I’m just saying.

Popularity: 43% [?]

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Disconnecting

Posted on July 31, 2008
Filed Under life | 2 Comments

We’ll be on vacation next week in a cabin sort of environment near (but not in) Asheville. We won’t have internet in the room, which isn’t necessarily a problem to me. We’re taking the dog because the place has doggie day care, and we’ll be taking him with us to dog friendly state parks. All in all, it seems like a really good time. I could handle a little decompression time.

It’s a little sad that I’m thinking about this in terms of things to do. I’m looking at stacks of books to take and thinking about writing projects I could work on during that off time. I don’t idle well, and even when I’m doing nothing I want to be doing something. Even so, there should be much relaxation involved. We seldom take full week vacations, usually just long weekend getways, so this should be good.

Popularity: 35% [?]

Surreal Podcast Moment

Posted on July 30, 2008
Filed Under podcasting | Leave a Comment

Not to brag or anything, but it’s not that unusual to hear my name mentioned on podcasts. I like it, it’s generally a fun experience (unless the mentioner is a specific Canadian dude) but it has long ceased to be a novel experience. However it is definitely surreal to be driving home from work listening to an episode of News Gang Live and hear them talk about me for five minutes, about how I use Friend Feed and why I have left Twitter.

For the record, I’ve been wanting to call in for weeks because what they say about me is never quite right. When I’ve had the codes to call I haven’t had time and when I’ve had time I didn’t get the codes. I’m also bummed that I never got to call in during the period when they were talking about the recently departed George Carlin. I have a hell of a lot to say about him.

Popularity: 38% [?]

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Convention Season

Posted on July 29, 2008
Filed Under conventions | 5 Comments

I’m thinking a lot about conventions lately. This is the first year where not only am I not going to Podcast Expo but I never for a second even considered going. I was scheduled to speak last year but when it came down not only was my day job so crushing at the time but it had been for months and I just couldn’t do it. I had to cancel a few weeks before the show, which was a crappy way to go about it and made me feel bad. However when it came to the actual missing of the show other than not being able to hang out with my friends, I was OK with not going. The extended to this year when I just never considered going at all. Nothing against the event but a combination of losing the scruffy charm of the Ontario CA conference center and just not having much interest in the “podcast industry” as a goal left me uninterested this year.

In contrast, since I have a reborn Reality Break on my hands, I’m trying to increase my attendance at science fiction and comic book conventions. That’s where I choose to put my energy and travel budget now rather than Podcast Expo. I’d rather go where my potential listeners and fans are. People generally have this idea of promoting their show at Podcast Expo but really that’s not a great place for promotion unless your goal is to get the attention primarily of other podcasters.

However because I’m ever less enthralled with getting on airplanes the cons I attend will skew heavily towards the southeast where I can drive to them. I missed Heroes Con but I will be attending Dragon*Con where I will be participating in the podcasting track and also doing interviews. I hope to make it to Small Press Expo in Bethesda, Maryland this fall and do some interviews there too. I have an invitation to OryCon in Portland OR that I’m thinking hard about but is low probability. I’d love to do it as I have lots of friends out there but it’s just such a shlep to get there and back. When I went in 2006 I ended up losing most of one of my days with friends and sleeping in Ohare airport.

There is a new comic convention called XCon that will be starting up in Myrtle Beach this Halloween season. I’ll obviously go to that one. If people have suggestions of good cons for both promoting my work and getting new interview material recorded, let me know. The probability that I can go decreases with the square of the distance from the South Carolina coast but I’d love to know about them.

Popularity: 44% [?]

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Chris Penn Challenges Podcamp Philly

Posted on July 28, 2008
Filed Under podcasting | Leave a Comment

Chris Penn has a post challenging the attendees of Podcamp Philly to not just geek out but build something of practical use to the citizens of Philadelphia. I really like that idea. When we put on CREATE South our primary motivation was to provide a framework so that people could walk out with a tangible set of things to do in order to join this community. We didn’t want to have a nerdish gabfest, it was always envisioned as a way to bring people out with similar interest and get as many people up to speed as we could.

What I like about Podcamp Philly challenge is that by putting a specific and achievable goal it helps focus the potentially meandering agenda, gets people honed in on not just building things but building things that help. I’d love to see this model work and be adopted at more places. If it works well it will make people feel better about their time, help some people and avoid the tendency for insularity that can come from these events. Make it happen, y’all!

Popularity: 39% [?]

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Eno and DRM Free MP3s

Posted on July 27, 2008
Filed Under digital-lifestlye, music | 4 Comments

I can hit the quinella and make a new post that ties together two recents posts about music I love and DRM protected music. I realized that Brian Eno’s Here Come the Warm Jets is probably the album I love most that I don’t own. Somewhere in a box I believe I have a cassette of it that I recorded during an overnight at WREK. That was one of the perks of working in the station - bring blank cassettes and tape all the music you can stand too. I went to search for it on Amazon and I found that it is available as a DRM free MP3s.

I’ve never bought MP3s from Amazon. For that matter, I’ve never bought from iTunes either. I have one song I got via a coupon for a free download, Jimi Hendrix’ “When 6 was 9″. Apple has never received cash from me for music or movies, mainly because of my disdain for DRM protection, even when defeatable. I downloaded the OS X version of the Amazon Music downloader, completed the purchase and the downloader came up and within a minute or two I had the songs. They are in good sounding 256 kb unprotected MP3s. The downloader tool created an Amazon directory in my OS X Music folder, and it also added them to iTunes. 20 seconds after the purchase, I was listening to the album.

This is really a winner, as far as I’m concerned. I’m not getting involved with DRM music but I will buy it this way. Everything about the experience was pleasant and Just Worked. I like it when it goes like that. Brian Eno (or probably his record label) made a little money he might not have any other way. I wish it could just go straight to Eno. Now, if record labels were largely disintermediated out and bands could sign up directly with Amazon, we’d really have something.

A quote from the album seem appropriate now:

Some of them are old, some of them are new
Some of them will turn up when you least expect them to
And when they do, remember me, remember me.

Popularity: 40% [?]

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