Around the Podosphere

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 [...]

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Disconnecting

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 [...]

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Surreal Podcast Moment

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 [...]

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Convention Season

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 [...]

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Chris Penn Challenges Podcamp Philly

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 [...]

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Eno and DRM Free MP3s

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 [...]

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Purity of a Pop Song

One of my favorite pop songs is Sugar’s “Gee Angel”, partly for the purity and simplicity of the lyric

There’s nothing in this world
That I’d rather do
Than buy a set of wings
And fly away with you

That’s a beautiful sentiment. Everyone needs someone to fly away with.
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Statistically Indistinguishable from Perfect

Here’s a summary of why the Amazon S3 service went down last week. The title of this post comes from a statement at the end of their goals for their own service level. I really like that turn of a phrase. The takeaway lessons from this are 1) engineering services at this scale is always [...]

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Our Ballardian Present

Cousin Brucie blogs about JG Ballard getting recognized as a visionary for his novels of global disaster. When I started getting into science fiction, it was at the beginning of cyberpunk, with which I was smitten including that of Cousin Brucie. At the same time, I really was getting into the “new wave” SF which [...]

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Pay for DRM Digital Goods and Get Screwed

In yet another data point for why you should never commit your cash to any digital good that is protected by DRM, Yahoo Music is shutting down their authorization servers this fall. What I just said goes double for anything that requires a server hit to authorize or reauthorize. Some day, the server will not [...]

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Lunches at the Beach

Some days I really just feel the need to get the hell out of the office at lunchtime. I really prefer if possible to work in a quick walk on the beach, so I tend to head towards the water. This means that often I’m lunching on Kings Highway or Ocean [...]

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Desert Island Discs

I’m currently listening to Wim Merten’s ” Maximizing The Audience“, which is perhaps my all-time favorite song. That put me in mind of other of my favorite bits of music. There is not much here that you’d hear in oldies radio and several songs that few or no one that reads this will know. (Chris [...]

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Myrtle Beach’s War on Tourism

Myrtle Beach is not only looking at driving away the May bike weeks, but when a recent flap arose over an ad encouraging gay travelers people were quick to back away. I’m no tourism expert but it seems to me that in a down economy with crazily rising energy and travel costs, when airlines are [...]

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Moving About

This weekend had a little bit more physical activity than my baseline. Not only were the regular dog walks happening, we went skating yesterday. Next week we’ll be part of a skate party, so we were practicing up a little. I hadn’t been in a roller rink since I was 7 or 8. I tried [...]

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Alison Bechdel

I’ve been a fan of Alison Bechdel’s cartooning for a long time. I have several of the collections of Dykes to Watch Out For comic strips, and when I read her graphic novel Fun Home I was absolutely blown away. I’ve been following her weblog for a while, and I can’t tell you how happy [...]

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White Smoke, It’s a New Pope

My buddy Andre and his wife Heidi are having a baby. Like, right now. Andre is doofus enough to be live blogging the labor. We saw them just before the 4th of July and Heidi was ready to be back down to a single person at that point. I’m delighted to welcome a new member [...]

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My Own Quote of the Day

Driving home from work, listening to a Reverend Bleepo Abernathy rant on the Hour of Slack, a quote occurred to me:

One man’s doomsday is another man’s payday.

It seems like about 2/3 of the current news here in the USA could be something that quote applies to, be it economic meltdown and bank takeovers or bailouts, [...]

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Recordings and SF Conventions

Tom Spurgeon points out that the panels he moderated at Heroes Con were recorded for posterity by the Dollar Bin guys. I’ve been listening to these and really appreciate them since I wanted to go to the convention this year and couldn’t. This brings up a point I’ve been meaning to blog about for years [...]

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Democrat Thought Experiment

If I were running for president as a Democrat right now, I’d be hammering on this whole Karl Rove immunity from subpoena thing pointing out that people in my administration are not above the law and are subject to congressional oversight. Then I’d try to force my opponent to say whether his stance is the [...]

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Samantha Brown in Myrtle Beach

I got a pair of emails from a publicist type who is working with the Travel Channel. Tomorrow night on the Samantha Brown program, they will be featuring Myrtle Beach. I got an email to my regular address here, and then the identical one for the contact address of Grand Strand Bloggers. I could be [...]

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