eclecticism

Recommendations based purely on my own personal needs, wants, and desires. These are the applications I’ve installed on my iPod Touch that have managed to stick around for more than a few days of experimenting…

Applications:

• WeatherBug: More information than the standard Weather app. I’ve put this on the home screen and moved Weather to a later page.

• Exposure: A beautiful interface to Flickr from the creator of the iPhoto and Aperture FlickrExport plugins.

• Facebook: I don’t really use it that often, but often enough that it’s stuck around.

• Mobile News: AP’s news browser. When I just want a quick browse of major news stories, this is the way to do it. I especially like the localization options.

• Remote: I’m not using it much right now, but it’s fun to play with. It does make it tempting to put an Airport Express in the living room to pipe iTunes into the stereo there, though….

• Pocketpedia: “I wonder if there’s a way for me to easily catalog my DVD collection and sync it with my iPod?” I said one day. A few minutes later, I had Pocketpedia on my iPod and DVDpedia (which generates this list) and Bookpedia on my Mac. Perfect!

• Wordpress: I’ve hardly used it, as I’m usually close enough to my main ‘puter to blog from here, but it could come in quite handy the next time I travel.

• Now Playing (formerly Box Office): Movie listings at local theaters, reviews, even trailers, all in one slick little app.

• iWik: A nice simple Wikipedia interface. The current version is desperately in need of a back button, but the developers promise that that’s coming soon.

• Stanza: An e-book reader that ties directly into Feedbooks, allowing you to download tons of free texts. I read H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine over the past week on lunch, and am just starting Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. There’s also a desktop client, but I don’t think I’ll use that nearly as often, this is more for easy entertainment when I’ve got a few minutes to kill.

• Boom!: Minesweeper. ‘Nuff said.

• Enigmo: I’m not entirely sold on this one. Neat and all, but the screen’s so small on the iPod/iTouch that I lose track of what objects have been placed where. I think I’d like this as a desktop game rather than in its mobile version.

• Quordy: A great little word game. Prairie and I have both had a lot of fun with this one — since the default is to start a game by shaking the iPod as if you were shaking a Yahtzee dice cup, if we’ve got a few minutes to kill somewhere, Prairie will just say “Shake it! Shake it!” and (rather than breaking into a dance, which I’m sure would be amusing as well) out comes Quordy.

• Aurora Feint: While I’m not putting a ton of time into the RPG aspect of the game, the Tetris-like game itself is fun enough to keep me engrossed.

• Jirbo Break: I’ve always liked Breakout clones, and this one works fine for me. I’d made it through all the levels, but they just released an update giving it 99 total levels. Guess I better get back to work!

• Cube Runner: Marvelously simple, engrossing, and a great demonstration of the accelerometer. Still one of my favorite games.

iPhone/iTouch Optimized Sites:

• Ping.fm: The dashboard interface to the Ping.fm one-update-does-all website.

• Twitter: Since I use Ping.fm to update, I’m fine with using the Twitter mobile client to check updates. I do at times wish I could easily check @ replies, but not often enough to install Twitteriffic (which has just never quite felt “right” for me, in either its desktop or mobile incarnations) or another dedicated client.

• NewsGator: Even though there’s a well-regarded NetNewsWire app for the iPhone/iTouch, I still just use the NewsGator mobile site. It’s faster and easier to use than NNW mobile, and while I keep poking at NNW mobile, it still hasn’t been able to win me over.

• CNN Moble: Not actually iPhone/iTouch optimized, and not terribly pretty, but works if I just want a quick look at “what’s happening now”.

• Metafilter: Read-only as far as I can tell, but a slick way to browse MeFi.

• IMDB Mobile: Again, just a nice way to dig through the IMDB. A little slow sometimes is about my only complaint, but since it’s not actually affiliated with IMDB, I can’t complain too much.

• Google Reader: Though I’m a long time NetNewsWire (and therefore NewsGator) user, I’m experimenting with Google Reader. Their iPhone/iTouch interface is as slick as their web interface, and definitely gives the Newsgator juggernaut some strong competition. Now if I could only sync Google Reader to NetNewsWire….

• Tricorder: Pure Star Trek silliness. Could really use being recreated as a standalone app so that it doesn’t have the annoying advertising at the bottom. Perhaps using the accelerometer to affect the displays?

And that’s it for me. Any other recommendations from all of you?

As of a couple hours ago, for the first time since I moved down here and got myself online, I’m no longer a Speakeasy customer. At this point, I can strongly recommend against using Speakeasy for personal broadband service. Perhaps they’re still doing well at the business level, but from a customer point of view, they’re really not worth it.

Here’s a quick rundown of the current situation:

Because Speakeasy works with two other vendors for their installations — Qwest and Covad — it takes a bit longer to get set up with service through them, generally on the order of about a month. In the past, the service that Speakeasy provided made the extra wait worth it. Not so much anymore.

One month before we moved to our new apartment, I called Speakeasy and set up a new install at the new address. This gave plenty of time for them to get everything taken care of by our move-in date of the 18th.

Around the 12th — while Prairie and I were still packing up in North Seattle — Qwest arrived and completed the loop (whatever that means). On the 17th, the Covad tech called me to let me know that he was in the apartment to do the final install, but that he wasn’t getting a signal. After a little digging, he found that Speakeasy had given Qwest the wrong address, and they’d installed their loop at apartment D100 instead of K100 (not the real apartment numbers). There was nothing he could do, so he sent off his report, and I called Speakeasy.

Speakeasy told me that they didn’t know how this had happened, the address was entered correctly in their system, but whoever had sent the order to Qwest had mistyped it. Unfortunately, this meant that they had to cancel the order and start the entire process again. I made it known that I was pretty upset about facing another month wait to get online because they screwed up, and they said they’d try to escalate the process. I asked about canceling my Speakeasy account, but because our last move was only ten months ago, I was still two months shy of the end of my 12-month contract, and would be hit with a $300 early disconnect charge if I walked away. Eventually, they told me that they’d have Qwest out to the new apartment on the 21st to put the loop in the right spot, and Covad would be able to make it out on the 23rd.

Over the weekend, Prairie and I move everything out of the North Seattle apartment. We left the ‘net and phone hookup intact as long as we could, but eventually disconnected them, figuring we’d have just a couple days of using our emergency-only, pre-paid buy-the-minute cell phones.

Yesterday (the 23rd), the Covad tech calls me to tell me he’s on his way, and he just wanted to double-check the address he was driving to: Apartment D100. Um…no, K100, I say. He said that he hoped Qwest got it right, as did I. A few minutes later, he shows up at my door, shrugs, and tells me that once again, the loop was installed by Qwest, on Speakeasy’s instructions, at the wrong apartment.

I get back on the phone with Speakeasy, even more upset. More excuses come over the line — everybody pointing fingers at everyone else, while I’m the one without internet or telephone service. By this point, I’ve been on the phone fighting with Speakeasy so much that I’ve burned completely through the hours of time I’d put on my prepaid cell phone, and had to refill in the middle of one round with Speakeasy after getting cut off when the phone went dead. Eventually, they tell me that they’ll escalate another level, push to get Qwest out to to their loop in the right building the next day (Thursday, the 24th), have Covad out to do the final install the evening of the 24th or possibly Friday the 25th, and that they’ll have an update by 5pm at the latest on the 24th.

Just before 5pm today, I call them, since they’d not called me at any point during the day. At this point, I’m told that we’re “set for the 28th (Monday).” I’m not thrilled, not sure if I can trust them, and very vocal about this. I was about resigned to give them one last chance — though after the second screwup, they had finally allowed that should I leave, they would be able to waive the $300 early disconnect fee — when I thought to verify that the 28th was the date for the final install. No, actually, that’s the date for Qwest to come back and make a third try at putting in the loop, Covad wouldn’t be able to make it out to do the final install until the 30th, Wednesday. By now, I’m rapidly losing the ability to deal coherently or politely with any of this. The guy I’m talking to can tell that I’m very upset, says that he’ll do everything he can to help, and tells me that while his shift is up at 5pm and he’s about to go home, he will be working remotely, so if I want to drop him an e-mail that evening….

“What?” I paused for a moment. “Was that some sort of sick joke? Did you hear what you just said to me? If I could drop you an e-mail, we wouldn’t be having this conversation!”

And with that, I’m done with Speakeasy. I’ve cancelled this continually botched installation, I’ve cancelled the ‘net and VOIP hookup at the old address (which needed to stay active until the new install was up to avoid the early disconnect fee), and they — finally — decided their company wouldn’t tumble into bankruptcy without my $300 and waived the fee.

Of course, the downside to this is that we’re still without telephone or internet at the new apartment, and because we’re starting the process from scratch, it’ll probably be a week to ten days or so (rough guestimate) before we’re back up. Also, once we are back up, the phone number will change, so those of you that have our home phone number will need the new one. Still, at this point, we’re willing to chalk those up to minor frustrations in the grand scheme of things. I can find open WiFi points here and there that will allow me to check in every few days, and we’re looking at going with Qwest for our new service (on the assumption that it was Speakeasy giving Qwest the wrong address), who should be able to give us a faster DSL ‘net connection (3 MB downstream), the same VOIP service, and DirecTV for the same amount of money I was paying Speakeasy for 1.5 MB DSL and VOIP.

So, as has been the case, updates here are going to be few and far between until all the pieces finally fall into place. Now, at least, you know why.

Thom posted a fun little meme using Wikipedia, a quotations site, and Flickr to randomly choose a band name, album title, and cover art. I wanted to do it, but the one thing that bugged me was the cover art portion: the original instructions simply had people grabbing the third image off of the past week’s ‘interestingness’ page. A great way to get good images, sure, but one that paid no attention to copyright. Each time I reloaded the page, I was coming up with images that were published under a standard ‘all rights reserved’ copyright.

So, here’s my version of the Make a Band meme…

1. The title of whatever random Wikipedia page you land on is the name of the band.

2. The last four words of the last quote on this page is the title of the album.

3. Put the last word of the quote (the album title) into the search box on this page, and the third image the search brings up is the cover of the album (this will search Creative Commons Attribution licensed photos and sort them by interestingness).

Put ‘em together in your image editor of choice, and post your band’s new album for the world to see!

Here’s what I got, from this Wikipedia page, this quote and this image by Mayr:

So far, I’m a little unimpressed with the leading contender for a collective noun for ‘those people I follow/am following on Twitter,’ which appears to be ‘tweeple’. To my ears, it’s rather silly, and a rather glaringly obvious portmanteau.

Myself, I’d much rather reappropriate an already existing bit of slang, and mash together ‘people’ and ‘tweet’ into ‘peeps’. It’s already culturally (more or less) accepted slang, is already being used to denote a group of people (“my peeps”), and as a nice little bonus, is also onomatopoeia for the chirp (or tweet) of a smallish bird, so it fits right in with the general theme of Twitter.

So you all can go on with your bad selves and your ‘tweeple.’ Me, I’m going to be hanging with my peeps!

(And on a slight tangent: I’d be amused if, since Twitter imposes a limit of 140 characters for tweets, they also imposed a 140 ‘character’ limit for your contacts. Not sure if that should work out as 140 followers and 140 followees [280 total contacts in both directions], or 70 each, or perhaps just 140 total allowed and spread them out however you wish. Realistically, best would be a limit to only following 140 ‘characters’, but allowing for an unlimited number of followers [so that organizational Twitter accounts like Twitterific or high-profile personalities like Wil Wheaton can still be followed by all those who want to]. Of course, this version of the 140 character limit won’t happen, but it works in my head. Really, how many individuals can most people really keep track of full-time?)

While I often, and not entirely tongue-in-cheek, spout off that “friends don’t let friends use MySpace,” it’s no secret that I have my own MySpace page and do occasionally (though not often) check in. Mostly, this is because I’ve got a few friends and acquaintances who seem to have been sucked into that particular hell and I have no other reliable way of keeping up with them, but be that as it may, I’m no stranger.

Some time ago, Facebook opened their doors to the general public, and while I signed up for an account a few months ago, I just really started playing around with the site over the past few days. I have to admit, while I’m not a huge Social Networking junkie (and don’t plan on becoming one), Facebook is pretty slick — the same basic idea as MySpace or any other social networking site, but done in a way that doesn’t leave me feeling like I’ve just spent a few hours being beaten with an ugly stick…or, given the number of times MySpace throws errors at me, an ugly stick carved by blind, palsied, one-armed, three-fingered hyperactive toddlers.

Yes, that analogy completely fell apart, but I think you get my point.

As a quick comparison, here’s a look at the primary pages of the sites that users who are logged in to the system see. Keep in mind, these aren’t the splash pages for the general public — these are for people who’ve already set up an account and are signed in.

I’ve color-coded the screen shot: red highlighted sections are ads for something not directly MySpace related, orange highlighted sections are for items that are (at least arguably) part of the MySpace network. Essentially, the entirety of the first page is advertising — it’s not until you click the tiny ‘home’ link in the menubar (one of three in the header) that you get to your personal page.

Once again, red is for external ads, orange for internal ads, and I’ve used yellow for the “please sucker your friends into joining” box. Around half of the page (or slightly over half, given all the whitespace) devoted to advertising in one form or another.

And this is all just the site default pages — this doesn’t even begin to go into the atrocities that people’s personal profile pages become after they’ve played with every little piece of ‘bling’ that can be added, the horrendous embedded music that far too many people put into their profiles, or the ubiquitous “sorry, we can’t code properly” error messages that pop up as you try to navigate around the site.

In comparison, here’s how Facebook greets their users:

Sure, there’s advertising — one banner ad on the right for an external service, and one section of the main News Feed showing what events Facebook is tracking that are popular in Seattle. I almost chose a different color for the orange block, as where MySpace’s ads are completely generic, Facebook is at least tying their “look what else we do” advertising to my location. The rest of the page is given to actually showing me information: any waiting friend requests or messages in the sidebar (along with their own “invite your friends” box — the same idea as MySpace’s, but far less intrusive), and the larger central section showing me my friends updates.

Not only is the website itself far better designed, making it drastically easier to navigate (and to put up with), but the extensibility of the Facebook ‘applications’ (small, externally hosted plugins) has allowed me to aggregate nearly all of my various online presences onto my profile page. My weblog posts are automatically copied into Facebook’s ‘notes’, and my LibraryThing ‘reading’ tag, Upcoming events, Flickr photos and Last.fm music tracking are all embedded in the page. All in all, it’s more or less ‘one stop shopping’ for my ‘net presence.

Sure, it’s not perfect — though at the moment, the only annoyances I’ve run into have been with some of the third-party application plugins, rather than with Facebook itself — but as far as social networking goes, this is the first I’ve seen that I’m actually fairly impressed by.

Update: PI staffer Mike Thompson let me know that they’ve just enabled RSS feeds for each individual category within the Big Blog. Each category page (like this one for Seattle Outtakes, for instance) now has an RSS link right at the top of the page. Thanks, Mike!

For some time now, I’ve been following the Seattle Outtakes blog from the PI, where PI photographers would post and discuss images that didn’t make the final cut into the paper for one reason or another (and some photos that were published), along with how they got the shot, techniques, and so on. Really good stuff for a photo bug.

Sadly, Outtakes has now been absorbed into The Big Blog, the PI’s latest addition to their ever-growing linup of weblogs. I’m not sure quite why they made this decision, but I found it rather annoying. As I posted in a comment on their announcement post:

One more vote for keeping Outtakes separate — I watch this one precisely because of my interest in photography, and have really enjoyed the insights into what the PI photographers do. The Big Blog feels too unfocused in tone and too similar to too many other local ‘catchall’ blogs, and it not something I’m likely to check in with regularly…which ends up meaning no Outtakes for me. Pity.

While you can manually check the Outtakes category on The Big Blog, there’s no category-specific RSS feed provided, and there’s just way too much traffic that I’m not terribly interested in for me to bother subscribing to the RSS feed (and even if I did feel like subscribing, it appears to be an excerpts-only feed instead of a full-text feed — one more reason for me not to subscribe).

So…Yahoo Pipes to the (theoretical) rescue. I’ve not actually played with Yahoo Pipes before, but given that it allows you to perform various operations on web data, it seemed like it might be a good potential tool for attempting to regain my Outtakes fix. In theory, if I’ve done this correctly, this pipe should be a Seattle Outtakes RSS feed.

However: I don’t actually know if it’s working correctly yet, and I’m not sure how soon I will…and there’s some potential down-the-road issues with the pipe. Geeky details under the cut… Read the rest of this entry »

A couple of disclaimers to start with:

1. I don’t use digg (outside of setting up an account which has rarely been touched).

2. The analogy is probably quite strained, and I keep bouncing between two ways of expressing it, neither of which I think are quite right:

• internet : politics :: digg : internet
• neocons : politics :: diggers : internet

That said…

Wil went on a rant today about diggers dragging the ‘net down to somewhere below the least common denominator.

I’ve been a Digger for a long time, and always felt like I could rely on Digg’s homepage to reliably and consistently direct me to interesting and useful content, accompanied by insightful, funny, and interesting commentary.

My, how things have changed in just a few months. The links (that make it past the bury brigade) are still pretty good, but for whatever reason, the maturity and behavior of the average Digger has evolved into, well, something resembling a middle school lunch room. While Digg has always been a great way to share your creation with a large audience on the Internet, the associated grief that frequently comes with being exposed to Digg’s userbase has lead to several sites blocking Digg, shutting off comments because of abusive Diggers, and using complicated .htaccess rewrites to send Digg’s traffic away.

This struck me as being the same basic premise of part of what Mike was talking about here (some of which I mentioned yesterday) only applied to neocons and the internet in relation to politics, rather than to diggers.

I think this is a specific result of the rise of neoconservatives to cultural and political power. Note that I don’t attribute this to conservatives or conservatism, but specifically to neoconservatives. I don’t believe that the neoconservative political or social culture is interested in conducting their affairs with civility or with any degree of compromise — and therein lies the problem, as it creates a culture of war. I may not have written about politics in quite a long time…but during that interim, I’ve constantly linklogged to neoconservatives’ actions throughout the American political and social culture, and they are always extremist and seemingly operating under the slogan of “no quarter given.” And although I had hoped this extremism might die with the end of Bush’s Presidency, it seems as if moderates are willing to metamorphose into extremists if it gets them the power they seek (McCain) or that other extremists are ready to jump into the situation the moment a void forms (Romney).

It’s that same all-or-nothing, no-quarter-given, us-or-them, black-and-white viewpoint that our culture is rapidly sinking into. No matter whether the arena is politics or the net, online or off, there seems to be no room left for people who actually want to talk to each other, even if they don’t agree. Respectful discourse, on the whole, doesn’t exist anymore — and how can it, when we’re too busy shouting down the opposition to actually listen to what they have to say?

I’ve been seeing rumblings about coComment for a few weeks now, but finally decided to take a closer look when I noticed it up and running on a post at The Republic of T. coComment is a service that lets you track the comments you’ve made on other weblogs, keep track of when people have responded to them, and so on…basically, trying to make sure that those comments you leave don’t just disappear into the great bit bucket of the ‘net.

So, I’ve signed up, and have enabled coComment integration on this site (for all future entries, at least…all entries on the main page have been rebuilt, the rest of the 3801 entries will be rebuilt eventually) — Movable Type integration was a snap with their included instructions. I don’t figure a huge percentage of my readers will be using it, but it’s there for those who want to.

“Bring on the Dancing Horses” by Echo and the Bunnymen from the album Pretty In Pink (1985, 4:00).

Another example of organizations that should check their web site addresses a little more carefully.

Today’s case in point: The American Heart Association’s Go Red for Women site, promoting heart disease awareness.

Unfortunately, ‘go red for women’, when written as a single phrase for the website — www.goredforwomen.org — looks a lot like ‘Gored for Women’.

This made me laugh.

(It’s still a good cause, though, and if I had any red in my wardrobe, I might wear it today.)

Update: Apparently, the article I’m quoting is somewhat misleading. According to a lawyer’s comment on BoingBoing:

> Declan’s article is misleading. The provision extends a telephone harassment law to apply to email. Declan describes the provision as applying whenever a person “annoys” another: “A new federal law states that when you annoy someone on the Internet, you must disclose your identity.” > > But that’s not what the law says. Instead it provides: “Whoever…utilizes any device or software that can be used to originate telecommunications or other types of communications that are transmitted, in whole or in part, by the Internet… without disclosing his identity and with intent to annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass any person…who receives the communications…shall be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.” > > Note that “annoy” is part of the intent element of the statute — it requires the intent to annoy, abuse, threaten or harass. Far from an anti-anonymity provision that applies whenever a person annoys another, it is merely a prohibition on harassment.

Thanks, Don! This kind of thing happens when I’m a bit behind…

No, I’m not kidding. Annoying someone via the Internet is now a federal crime.

> It’s no joke. Last Thursday, President Bush signed into law a prohibition on posting annoying Web messages or sending annoying e-mail messages without disclosing your true identity. > > In other words, it’s OK to flame someone on a mailing list or in a blog as long as you do it under your real name. Thank Congress for small favors, I guess. > > This ridiculous prohibition, which would likely imperil much of Usenet, is buried in the so-called Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act. Criminal penalties include stiff fines and two years in prison. > > […] Buried deep in the new law is Sec. 113, an innocuously titled bit called “Preventing Cyberstalking.” It rewrites existing telephone harassment law to prohibit anyone from using the Internet “without disclosing his identity and with intent to annoy.” > > To grease the rails for this idea, Sen. Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, and the section’s other sponsors slipped it into an unrelated, must-pass bill to fund the Department of Justice. The plan: to make it politically infeasible for politicians to oppose the measure. > > The tactic worked. The bill cleared the House of Representatives by voice vote, and the Senate unanimously approved it Dec. 16.

Once again, something which, admittedly, likely started from good intentions — preventing cyberstalking — has been dumbed down to the point of ludicrousness by politicians too stupid to think about the real legal ramifications of the laws they’re enacting.

On the bright side, maybe we can use this law to get the freepers booted off the ‘net?

(via seattle)

“Relax (AK1200)” by Keoki from the album Jealousy (2001, 6:46).

I first started bouncing around the ‘net in the fall of 1991, when I made my first ill-fated attempt at being a college student (a half-semester at UAA that I pretty much just stopped going to). I had the user ID of ‘ASMDH’ — Anchorage, Student, Michael David Hanscom — and the sole remaining evidence of that first ‘net address is a comment by Royce from a few days ago, and a listing in the IRN FAQ, also courtesy of Royce. Digging through the IRN archives gives me an earliest confirmable ‘net presence of Thursday, the 17th of October, 1991 at 12:18:11 (entry #5 in IRN 1.5).

As I discovered about four years ago, the first definite evidence of my existence as a denizen of the ‘net outside of UAA comes from a Usenet post archived by Google Groups that dates to February 9th, 1994 at 5:49am. The post is to rec.music.industrial and concerns nine inch nails bootleg CDs. Heh. Sounds like me, alright. By then I had an account through Alaska.net, but there’s no web presence listed in my signature — which makes sense, as the web was still a brand new thing in 1994.

My first web page went up sometime in 1995, though I don’t know exactly when. The earliest archive I have dates back to February 27, 1996, but I’d been working with the space and teaching myself HTML for some time at that point. With a little poking around, however, you might stumble across the “these pages last updated” link at the bottom of that page. And what do you think you’ll find if you follow that link?

Time- and date-stamped entries in reverse chronological order (the most recent at the top) detailing little updates I’d made to the website and some personal bits here and there.

Sound familiar?

Going by the earliest entry on that page, I’ve been blogging in one form or another for ten years as of 3:13am (Alaska time), December 29, 2005.

That’s a long time. Honestly, I probably wouldn’t even have noticed this if I hadn’t decided to put all those early, hand-coded entries into my current Movable Type installation a while ago. It was kind of fun to see my archives page list posts all the way back to that earliest archived post!

I just wish I hadn’t lost a lot of pages from back when I was hand-coding my site. While my archives jump from early 1996 up to 2001, I was keeping a blog-like website during all that time…I was just hand-coding everything, and when the page got too long, I’d delete the oldest entries at the bottom. Ah, well…as often seems to be the case, it seemed to be a good idea at the time.

In any case, this post marks ten years of archived babbling and rambling — blogging, in today’s vernacular — for me. As I write this post, those ten years have created (and this doesn’t even factor in my LiveJournal account):

• 3,614 entries.
• 8,548 comments.
• 1,228 trackbacks.
• Four different management systems:
  1. Hand-coded
  2. NewsPro
  3. Movable Type
  4. TypePad
• One lost job and subsequent Slashdotting.
• Countless new contacts, friends, and interactions, some of which have spilled over into the “real world”, others of which have been entirely through the electrons of the ‘net.

Those of you who stop by from time to time, be you family, friend, anonymous stranger, or any other visitor — thanks for being around, dropping by and saying hi, and generally giving me a reason to keep this thing going.

And here’s to the next ten years.

“Anniversary” by Voltaire from the album Devil’s Bris, The (1998, 4:35).

Ten months ago, when I was trying to figure out BitTorrent so I could keep up with Battlestar Galactica, I wrote this in a comment:

> As it is, I’d gladly pay a few dollars per episode to download high-quality versions of this show (and, theoretically, other shows that I might be interested in in the future), much like I currently do with music from the iTMS (with the caveat that I’d expect any DRM to be no more restrictive than what the iTMS uses).

And wouldn’t you know it — Battlestar Galactica is now available through the iTunes Music Store at $1.99 per episode! Very nice.

Of course, over the past ten months I’ve become accustomed to the quality afforded through captures of HD broadcasts: the episodes I download through BitTorrent are ~350Mb each and widescreen at 624x352 pixels; the episodes Apple offers are ~200Mb and shown at the ‘standard’ (pan-and-scan? cropped?) 4:3 ratio at a much smaller 320x240 pixels. Of course, there is the risk of getting a bad quality rip from BitTorrent that wouldn’t hold up to the norm, while it’s probably safe to assume that the officially sanctioned videos from Apple will be consistently good quality.

As an experiment, I purchased the most recent episode of BSG (‘Pegasus’) and compared Apple’s version to the version I downloaded via BitTorrent.

So, now what? I did say in the original quote that I’d happily pay for “high quality” copies. At the moment, with Apple’s focus on optimizing the video for the iPod, I’m not sure that the video offerings are quite enough to tempt me away from BitTorrent on a regular basis. It’s close…but not quite there.

Unless someone gives me an iPod video for Christmas, of course. Then I may need to re-evaluate.

This is great.

Some time ago — back in April of ‘04 — I came across an old Anchorage Press article talking about the “glory days” of the underground/punk/alternative music scene in Anchorage, from the late ‘70’s up to the early ‘90’s, which touched off my own post reminiscing about my days running around the local scene, from the ‘90’s to the early 2000’s.

Touched off by a couple of random Google searches, over the past couple of weeks (starting in August, and really picking up steam in November), that post has become an impromptu meeting point and simple message board for quite a few of the Anchorage scenesters of the ‘80’s. While I was just a few years younger and don’t know any of the people who’ve been posting, I have been having an absolute blast watching all the various comments come in as this group of old friends re-connect after twenty-odd years or so.

All I did was provide the right Google keywords and a comment form that these guys have been using to get back in touch…but it’s enough to get a grin on my face whenever I see another comment roll in.

Last June, I got a comment on my site that as far as I could tell was comment spam advertising a site called Opinion Outpost. Not being a fan of that style of advertising, I posted about it. In the following months I’ve gotten a few comments from satisfied Opinion Outpost customers defending the company — but yesterday, I actually got an apology from the person who originally left the comment that started it all.

> I was looking your webpage this morning and wanted to apologize for posting our email on your weblog.  When I first posted on your site I was looking for your email address to contact you about our affiliate program and I could not find it so I thought I would make a post not knowing what I was doing was inappropriate in the weblogging community.  I was new with the company when I posted this and learned very early that this kind of practice was wrong and I haven’t done it since.  I know that what I have done has made you very upset with me and Opinion Outpost.  I ask that you hold nothing against Opinion Outpost, I am the one at fault. > > As for this email that you said you sent me, I don’t ever remember receiving it.  I receive large amounts of emails every day and I probably looked at it with confusion (not understanding it or not knowing what I did wrong) and discarded it.  I am very sorry for my actions and hope this post will ease the tension and conflict between you, your weblog and me. > > I am willing to post this on your weblog if you would like me to.  Just let me know what you would prefer.  Thank you!

Sounds reasonable to me — it’s a pity my original e-mail got lost, but everyone makes mistakes from time to time, and he was kind enough to send the apology along. The apology is certainly accepted, and I’ve gone back and edited out all the names and contact information from the original post and the follow-up comments.

Opinion Outpost still doesn’t look like the kind of thing I’m interested in for my own needs, but with this, I’ll file them back into the “on the level” bin.

After a friend asked me a few questions about the basic HTML tags while trying to clear up some confusion, I went Googling for some sort of cheat sheet listing just the most basic tags. I couldn’t find one — just came up with a lot of full-blown tutorials or cheat sheets listing every tag in the book — so I tossed this together. Hopefully it helps.

I’m only looking at the tags most likely to be used in your standard, basic weblog post, so there won’t be much in the way of structural stuff here, just presentational. Read the rest of this entry »

This month’s Wired has what is likely not just the best article I’ve seen come out of Wired in a long time, but the best piece I’ve seen in ages on the Web, where it’s been, and where it may be headed in the future.

> Not only did we fail to imagine what the Web would become, we still don’t see it today! We are blind to the miracle it has blossomed into. And as a result of ignoring what the Web really is, we are likely to miss what it will grow into over the next 10 years. Any hope of discerning the state of the Web in 2015 requires that we own up to how wrong we were 10 years ago. Read the rest of this entry »

Note: On 10/27/2005, I received an apology e-mail from the person who left the comment that originally prompted this post. I’ve accepted his apology, and have removed his name and contact information from this post. Mistakes happen, but Opinion Outpost does appear to be on the level.

[redacted] —

Today I received the following comment on my weblog. The comment was posted to an old entry (a technique often used to “hide” information, as it is less likely to be noticed by site owners), had nothing to do with the subject of the entry, and was nothing more than an unsolicited advertisement — in short, it was spam.

Read the rest of this entry »

This really shouldn’t surprise me, but Google’s just-announced video hosting service has continued their tradition of being Mac-unfriendly at launch.

At this point, they don’t even provide a backup web-upload option — just the Windows-only uploader application. Pity, that, as Ourmedia.org seems to be going through some growing pains (I uploaded a video three days ago, and it’s yet to actually appear in a useable form on the site), and I’m looking forward to being able to host some of my more bandwidth-intensive experiments on servers more powerful than mine.

Still, I’ll hope that this is just a temporary thing, and as with Gmail and Google Maps, Safari/Mac OS X support will come along before too long. In the meantime, though, I’ll just have to keep poking along as I have been until now.

Update: As of May 18th, they now support Mac (and *nix) uploading thanks to a Java-based uploader.

“Blister in the Sun” by Violent Femmes from the album Violent Femmes (1982, 2:24).

The rumors were true, as it turns out, and the official announcement was made today on the FlickrBlog: Yahoo actually does acquire Flickr.

> Holy smokes, SOMEBODY out there is bad at keeping secrets!!  Yes! We can finally confirm that Yahoo has made a definitive agreement to acquire Flickr and us, Ludicorp. Smack the tattlers and pop the champagne corks!

While I’m sure this is good news for both Yahoo! and Flickr, I have to admit that in some ways, I’m a little less than thrilled that Yahoo! is the winning buyer. While the Flickr post assures us that “nothing will change”, that’s the mantra we get every time there’s a merger of this sort, and I just hope it’s true.

My main concern is simply that I’ve never been overly impressed with Yahoo’s Mac support. The main offenders are Yahoo! Messenger — admittedly, a downloadable program and not a web-based offering — and Yahoo! Chat. The Mac version of Yahoo! Messenger has perpetually lagged years behind the PC version in terms of what features it offers, and I’ve never been able to get Yahoo! Chat to work reliably under Mac OS X.

Flickr, on the other hand, has worked flawlessly for me from day one, I quite happily paid to upgrade to a Pro account some time back, and was just recommending them to my brother last night when he and I were talking about how horrendously slow the family photo gallery hosted on my server can be (I can only afford so much bandwidth, after all).

Still, I’m not about to entirely write them off — as I’ve said, Flickr’s ben great so far, and I’m hoping that the acquisition by Yahoo! will be primarily a case of Yahoo! getting to add an incredible set of services to their system, and not one of Flickr being forced to dumb things down to coddle the lowest common denominator of Yahoo! subscribers.

Besides, I’m very curious about this section of the post aimed at those of us who have already paid for Pro accounts:

> I liked Flickr BEFORE you even heard of it! > > You shall be recognized for your discerning taste in web sites!! I bet you also liked the Flaming Lips before they appeared on Beverly Hills 90210, and for that we salute you. Pro account holders will get super mega bonuses, to be announced soon.

Super mega bonuses, huh? Gotta like the sound of that!

(via Jonas)

Update: Yahoo!’s Jeremy Zawodny has some encouraging things to say about the merger:

> The first time I used Flickr, I knew it was something different and something important. It took me a while to figure out and try to articulate exactly what that was, but I took my first swipe back in September when I called it a Next Generation Web Service. > > […] > > Since then a lot has happened and I’ve had the chance to meet the Flickr team a few times. That has only convinced me even more that they have what it takes to really change things. Combining their mix of tagging, communities, syndication, open APIs, and interactive UI with Yahoo’s services and millions of users will lead to even more great stuff. > > As Caterina wrote, this isn’t about just throwing millions of users at Flickr or bolting Flickr onto Yahoo! Photos. Think more deeply about it. There are many parts of Yahoo that will be Flickrized in the coming months. And with more resources available, Flickr itself will be able to grow like never before.

Sounds like the concerns I’ve brought up are rather well-known in the Yahoo!/Flickr camps, which is encouraging. Time to just sit back and see where things go from here.

(via Stewart in FlickrCentral)

“Medusa Bitch (cry.on.my.console)” by Prodigy, The from the album Always Outsiders Never Outdone (2004, 2:37).

For the past few days, rumors have been flying around that Yahoo is buying Flickr.

Whatever the truth of the matter, never let it be said that Flickr isn’t handling the rumors with good grace and a sense of humor. While the general public won’t see anything different, logged-in users are seeing a new logo on the page. Even funnier, the filename for the graphic is gossipgossipgossip.gif.

Here’s a quick look at just what we’ve got, then:

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“Rat Poison” by Prodigy, The from the album Voodoo People (1995, 5:31).

Another one bites the dust, as they say — this time Mark Jen, formerly of Google.

TDavid has a good wrapup of information on this latest “blogger gets fired” story.

Update: A sure sign that I’m on the tail end of my fifteen minutes of fame: in this CNET article about Mark’s firing, I’m the only blogger mentioned who didn’t get a link. This amused me.

(CNET link via Terrance)

One of the reasons I like Speakeasy — my ‘net connection just went down (and is still down as I type this, so nobody’s going to see this post until the issue is fixed). I called Speakeasy’s tech support, and got this automated message:

> Thanks for calling Speakeasy. Some of our broadband customers in the greater Seattle area are currently reporting a network outage due to a vendor failure. We hope to have this resolved within 30 minutes. > > (pause) > > (big sigh) > > If we’re lucky.

I can respect honesty like that.

Things seem to be up now, though (at least, DNS services are back, so websites are accessible again, though iChat can’t connect to the AIM network), so it was only about a ten minute outage. All in all, just a minor annoyance. These things happen.

“Bongo Tune” by Quarter from the album Essential Chillout (2000, 5:52).

Shop at Amazon a lot? Sign up for Amazon Prime…

> Dear Customers, > > I am very excited to announce Amazon Prime, our first ever membership program, which provides “all-you-can-eat” express shipping. It’s simple: for a flat annual membership fee, you get unlimited two-day shipping for free on over a million in-stock items. Members also get overnight shipping for only $3.99 per item — order as late as 6:30PM ET. > > […] > > We are offering Amazon Prime membership at the introductory price of $79 per year, which includes sharing the benefits with up to four family members in your household.

Looks like a pretty good deal, actually. If you order often, it wouldn’t take long at all to make that $79 back. I don’t order often enough to join in just yet, though.

“Up-Toon (Instrumental)” by Clash, The from the album London Calling (Legacy Edition) (1979, 1:57).

THIS STORY IS FICTION

> ####Death of a Spammer, in a Place Called Hope#### > > By Todd F. Bryant
> Staff Writer > > HOPE, CA — In this dusty Mojave town, pop. 5000, which averages roughly one murder per decade, Sheriff James Wilcox recently encountered the first serious crime he was unable to solve in his 25-year law enforcement career. > > “Incidents like this don’t happen here,” said the 50-year-old Wilcox, who has one deputy, his daughter, and operates out of a converted construction trailer with a single makeshift cell, which is rarely occupied. “We’re not exactly Crime City, U.S.A.” > > The crime was murder. The victim was a local resident, a white male, 42, shot six times in the chest and arms. The time was roughly 4 p.m. The location was the post office. There were no witnesses. The Hope post office is staffed only 4 hours a day, but the lobby doors are unlocked around the clock so that residents can access their post-office boxes. The victim, Keith James Lawrence, unmarried, was gunned down in the post-office-box area. > > “Heidi [his daughter] and I knew this was going to be a tough one,” said Wilcox. “Nobody around to see it. Nobody even heard any shots. Not even a suspicious vehicle seen in the area. Just bad luck for us. It happens.”
> > It was during the autopsy that things took a turn for the weird. The medical examiner noticed an obstruction lodged deep in the victim’s throat. He reached in and pulled out the objectÐa can of Spam. “I knew then that we had something that was maybe out of our league,” said the examiner, Dr. Anu Ram, a surgeon at Mojave County Hospital. “I mean, we don’t know anything about serial killers here, and I told Jim [Wilcox], ‘This is really scary. It’s probably some guy traveling around killing random people, and this is his signature.’” > > It is perhaps only in small rural towns like Hope that a can of Spam and murder wouldn’t immediately conjure up an obvious hypothesis. Wilcox, while not oblivious to the existence of the World Wide Web and email, did not have an Internet connection and hadn’t heard the word “spam” used in the context of junk mail. It was only when Wilcox talked to his daughter on the phone two days after the crime (she had gone out of town for a scheduled visit with her husband’s relatives), that the pieces began to fit together. Read the rest of this entry »

Wow. Straight from Jay Allen:

Six Apart has announced in co-operation with Google, Yahoo, MSN Search and other blog vendors a massive joint anti-spam initiative based on the HTML link type rel=“nofollow”.

The initiative is based upon the idea of taking away the value of user-submitted links in determining search rankings. By placing rel=“nofollow” into the hyperlink tags of user-submitted feedback, search engines will ignore those links for the purposes of ranking (e.g. PageRank) and will not follow them when spidering a site. […] It is important to note that while the links will no longer count for PageRank (and other search engines’ algorithms), the content of user-submitted data will still be indexed along with the rest of the contents of the page. Forget all of those silly ideas of hiding your comments from the GoogleBot. Heck, the comments in most blogs are more interesting that the posts themselves. Why would you want to do that to the web? Now, the astute will point out that because links in comments/TrackBacks are ignored by the search bots, the PageRank of bloggers all around the blooog-o-sphere will suffer because hundreds of thousands of comments linking back to their own sites will no longer count in the rankings. And that is most likely true. But that inflated PageRank, which was a problem created by the search engines themselves, is the rotting flesh that the maggots sought out in the first place. If you ask me, I say fair trade. In the end, of course, this isn’t the end of weblog spam. But because it completely takes away the incentive for the type of spamming we’re seeing today in the weblog world, you will probably see steady decline as many spammers find greener pastures elsewhere. That decline combined with better tools should help to make this a non-issue in the future. Every little step counts, some count more than others, and history will be the judge of all.

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p>Very cool. Also very similar to a technique I was using a couple years back, though that was geared to blocking off areas of the site to ignore rather than affecting individual links. Either way, though, it’s a big step forward. I’m especially heartened to see the list of competing companies and weblogging systems that are participating in this.

“Smack My Bitch Up” by Prodigy, The from the album Fat of the Land, The (1997, 5:42).