In the middle of a rousing round of “Old MacDonald” tonight, Miles surprised us with a joke, substituting the “O” in “e-i-e-i-o” with… whatever other words from his wee vocabulary he could think of. Legend: “Ucky” = pacifier, derived from “Nucky,” which means Nuk. “Hop hop” is multi-purpose noun standing in for all hopping creatures (frog, cricket, kangaroo, and, most frequently, bunny). By extension, it also means carrot. “Poo poo” means poo-poo, which derives from “poo-poo.” So we may well have caught his first verbal joke on video (kind of poor lighting conditions though). A regular Don Rickles, this one.
Like a chicken with a jewel in its beak.
Ask me about hosting with birdhouse.
July 30th, 2004
e-i-e-i … hop hop!
July 29th, 2004
Boobah Nutjobs
Most threads die almost immediately after scrolling from the bottom of this page. But every now and then, a post develops a spunky afterlife via Google searches on some topic or other.
Last February I posted about my delight at discovering the utterly surreal and imaginative children’s show Boobah. It never crossed my mind that the show was so creatively produced that it would inadvertently inflame the senses of fundamentalists and nutjobs across America. There’s nothing even vaguely religious or sinful about the show, but something in it seems almost to offend the rigidly minded. The thread there is fairly long, but a comment received from “Learell” tonight was so over the top loopy I just had to share. Dude performs a truly paranoid semantic breakdown of the playful opening Boobah chant, finding in it connections to zombies, evil spirits, and supernatural powers.
The chant says a few different words including, “Humbah”, “Zumbah”, “Jumbah”, and “Booh”. This may freak some people out and then others may think it is nothing more than a coincidence. The word “Humbah” is very closely related to the word “Humbaba” which means, “river of the dead”. The word “Zumbah” is very closely related to the word “Zombi” which means “supernatural power that may enter & reanimate a dead body”. … My child will not watch this show and until PBS investigates and monitors its programming more carefully, PBS will be blocked from my TV. I think others should join me. We wonder why our kids love games and movies that promote violence and killing. I believe it starts here.
The mind reels.
Music: Bright Eyes :: False Advertising
July 28th, 2004
James Joyce’s Son is a Litigious Wanker
Want to stage a public reading of Joyce’s Ulysses next Bloomsday? Make sure Joyce’s son Stephen doesn’t find out about it. He’ll sue your pants off.
Few are spared. He has targeted publishing houses, internet readings, and an Edinburgh fringe musical using Molly Bloom’s soliloquy from Ulysses. An Irish composer who requested permission to quote 18 words of Finnegans Wake received a refusal letter saying: “To put it politely, my wife and I don’t like your music.”
But now, fearful for this month’s mammoth celebrations of Joyce’s masterpiece Ulysses, Irish MPs this week rushed through emergency legislation that will prevent Mr Joyce from suing the Government and the National Library over an exhibition which displays 500 pages of Joyce manuscripts…
So much for Joyce’s commitment to freedom of expression.
Music: Steve Turre :: Andromeda
July 27th, 2004
How and Why
Maybe it has something to do with having a kid, marveling at his process of discovery and thinking about his education, or maybe it just comes down to the tenacity of early memories, but a slight chill went up my spine browsing the covers of these How and Why books from the 60s and 70s. Seems like every elementary classroom, library, and doctor’s office had a collection of these books, and I would read in fascination about how the world worked, thirsty for information in the pre-internet era. I’d love to find some of these again. Would they seem ridiculous and dated if I saw them today? Were they well written? No idea. I mostly remember the style of illustration, and just the feeling of being turned on by life, the universe, and everything. Not all of these goose the nostalgia gland, but the ones that do ring such a happy bell.
Music: Joe McPhee :: Shakey Jake
July 26th, 2004
Live Publishing in MT 3.1
Beyond all the talk about big-picture, tectonic vectors of social media that came out of last week’s BlogOn conference, there were a few intriguing technical highlights. Most interesting to me was Ben and Mena’s preview of some of the new features in MT 3.1 (Mena’s entry there doesn’t include details yet, but stay tuned).
MT is database-driven, but generates static HTML pages, on the theory that this method reduces overall server load. With high-traffic sites, this is undoubtedly true — build a page once and serve it a million times without having to make repeated database requests. But the penalty for this model is that rebuild times can be annoying, depending on factors like CPU speed and current load, and the number of index templates set to auto-update. I’ve seen page builds take anywhere from 3 to 60 seconds, depending on circumstances. This becomes a real problem when you have multiple popular MT installations on a single machine. If one user updates a page while people are commenting on other blogs at the same time, CPU contention can get hairy for a while (especially when the comment spam bots are hitting multiple blogs simultaneously). Not to mention the fact that simple comment posting really should be as immediate as it is on any discussion board (it’s one thing to force a rebuild on the site author, quite another to make your readers sit through it).
But wait, there’s a database sitting behind MT — what in the architecture forces this static build model? Nothing at all. As Mena demonstrated last Friday, in MT 3.1 you’ll be able to check a “Live build” checkbox, modify a couple of MT tags in your templates, and switch your site to live/dynamic page generation.
The “WordPress” exodus is basically about two things: 1) Philosophical licensing differences (i.e. open source religion) and 2) Live page generation. There goes half the argument for moving to WP.
The interesting twist is that MT has always been a perl-based engine, while the live updating is PHP-based. So MT 3.1 will support inline PHP — write your own, download modules, drop them in place…. this is going to open up the universe of 3rd party MT plugin development immensely. Many of us have been using inline PHP with MT for years, but now we’ll have actual MT tags that make PHP calls.
I’d love to see some metrics comparing the build models: total distributed CPU load for one static build plus a million static requests, vs. a million dynamic requests. Then see how that compares with just a thousand pages, or 10. Deciding just how much traffic best justifies one publishing method or the other should generate some interesting case studies.
Music: José Feliciano :: Just a Little Bit of Rain
July 23rd, 2004
My Mega Power Trip
So I’ve been webcasting the BlogOn conference all day (QuickTime archives will be online middle of next week). Towards the end of the day I check to see who’s been blogging the conference in real time. seanbonner.com is at the top of the list. Scrolling down the page, what do I find in not one, but two separate posts, but Sean slamming the camera man. “The cameraman is a prick” … “total tool” … “power trip from hell” … What the hell is going on here?
Here’s my speculation about what pissed this guy off: The camera, laptop, and mixer, which Milt and I were running together, completely occupied the end of an aisle with a tangle of gear and cables. Early in the day, just seconds before we were getting started, some guy tries to step past me and right through our whole setup. One caught shoelace could have brought the tripod down the stairs, destroyed a $3,000 camera, and ruined the whole webcast. Since when do people at public events take it upon themselves to walk through the broadcasting station, over or through a pile of gear? I mean, it’s just not done. Would you do it? Unbelievable. He had an easy path back down the aisle where the public is allowed, but apparently didn’t want to walk 40 feet out of the way. And he had the nerve to counter me. “I’ve done it twice already today,” he said. “Please don’t do it again,” I answered, and started rolling tape. Times like this, all you can do is ignore the heckler and get your job done. There are way too many things to do in the 10 seconds before going on air to get out of my seat and brace the tripod so an attendee can take a shortcut.
During the first break, a woman asked if she could plug her laptop into our power strip. “Sorry,” I answered, “I just can’t share it with attendees.” She looked almost offended. I think she thought I was suggesting there wasn’t enough electricity, or was just being stingy. The simple fact is that the last time I let a conference attendee plug a laptop into our rig, they screwed up unplugging it later, and unplugged our camera by accident, interrupting the live webcast and tape archive. That person turned out to be Justin Hall of Justin’s Links from the Underground. I vowed never to share our power again. It’s just too risky to have strangers messing around in your gear.
When we (the J-School) run our own events, we’re totally accommodating with presenters who want to bring their own laptops and hook them up to the audio, projection, and internet (although we ask for advance notice). But we weren’t running this event – K2 was — and I was just helping out. K2 has a very strict policy about not letting people bring their own laptops to the podium. Presenters had had months to prepare to get their stuff onto the podium laptop, and had been told in very certain terms that they would only be allowed to use that one. K2’s policy is designed to avoid the unprofessionalism of having people fiddling with cords onstage, with cameras rolling, with sometimes unpredictable results (I’ve seen ridiculous things happen — broken VGA ports, network settings not working, etc, all while the audience fidgets in their seats — we have at times considered adopting K2’s same policy about personal laptops). But K2 had stepped out of the room, so people suddenly looked to me for help hooking up their laptop in the middle of the conference. So even though I would have loved to accomodate, had the adapter they needed, and could have done it in 30 seconds flat, and even though I would have loved to see her software too, and even though the woman was well aware of K2’s policy, having had months of advance warning about it, it was now my job to enforce K2’s policy. Against my better judgment, I left the camera and webcast machine untended (god knows where the camera was pointing during this episode), went down to the stage, and told them that K2 had a strict policy about this and I would have to say no. So the woman turns into her mic and tells the audience that the university has a strict policy about this. Whatever. As it turns out, this was part II of what lead Sean Bonner to call me a total prick, power tripper, etc.
You know what Sean? I’m about as mellow as they come. But I’ve been doing these events for a few years now, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that it’s up to our crew to take control of the situation. To guard the integrity of the equipment, the flow of the presentation, and to make sure everything runs as smoothly as possible. Because if we don’t, people will just run roughshod over everything they can. Kind of like you tried to do to me today, practically demanding you be allowed to walk through a pile of broadcasting gear, around a tripod balanced on a flight of stairs, no less.
If you’re really sure I’m a total prick, why don’t you come over for dinner one night? I’ll grill you some tempeh, you can meet my wife and kid, and we’ll get drunk, shoot the shit. Maybe you’ll see me differently the next day. The goal would not be so much to befriend you as it would be to get you thinking about the stupidity of mouthing off at people you don’t know when you have no clue about the back story, don’t know what’s involved in putting on a production of this scale, and obviously aren’t familiar with the million things that can go wrong if the people running the gear don’t do their jobs right. Fortunately, I was doing my job right, and the conference went well. I guess getting publicly slandered without justification by a total stranger just goes with the territory. Ah well.
And all this for a conference that wasn’t even ours, preparations for which consumed me almost the entire work week, waking up at 5:00 am this morning and getting home after 8:00 pm, just to help out with someone else’s event. It’s so nice to be appreciated.
Music: Django Reinhardt :: Ain’t Misbehavin’
July 23rd, 2004
Put Your Bodies Upon the Gears
During the free speech sit-ins at UC Berkeley in December 1964 (two months after I was born), Mario Savio said:
There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!
The Free Speech Movement Cafe at the center of campus is where I get my coffee every day. The interior is decorated with blow-up images from the free speech movement, memorializing it for the current generation so we don’t take it for granted, and so we are reminded that the relative freedom of speech we have today was hard-won, and that the threats to civil liberties we experience today are nothing new under the sun.
Music: Iggy Pop :: funtime
July 22nd, 2004
Reason #811 Not To Eat KFC
What is it about prisons that causes guards to turn so sadistic? Eleven workers (three of them managers) at a chicken processing planet that supplies poultry to KFC have been suspended for brutally abusing live chickens. We’ll call this the Pilgrim’s Pride prison abuse scandal — the Abu Ghraib of the chicken world:
… grainy videotape was released over the Internet by the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals showing employees “ripping birds’ beaks off, spray-painting their faces, twisting their heads off, spitting tobacco into their mouths and eyes, and breaking them in half — all while the birds are still alive.”
(Yes, we’ve talked about prison guard syndrome here before). Speaking of sadism, why is the story about women and young boys being raped in Iraqi prisons not getting more press?
The women were passing messages saying “Please come and kill me, because of what’s happened”. Basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys/children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. The worst about all of them is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror it’s going to come out.
Music: Pete Townshend :: Parvardigar
July 21st, 2004
BlogOn Webcast, Registration Culture Clash
The J-School is co-sponsoring an event this Friday on the business and commercial aspects of social software, and of blogging in particular. Lots of great speakers, but the theme basically boils down to the question of how to monetize the blogging phenomenon. The event’s main site is here, and I’ll be webcasting it live.
Something about this whole thing feels uncomfortable to me — isn’t the non-commercial aspect of blogging part of what makes it so powerful? That we’re able to sidestep The Man and forge our own editorial and distribution mechanisms? Monetization of the blogosphere serves the monetizers — how can it possibly serve bloggers? But what really got me steamed was the fact that the conference organizers asked me to force users who wanted to view the webcast to fill out a form and register with them first. I’m pretty accommodating, but I threw down the gauntlet on this one — I believe strongly that forced registration is an annoyance, and offers no benefit to viewers (I have no problem with voluntary registration, of course).
We’re an academic institution, and part of a culture of free information – why should I toss a bone to corporate organizers and drive away potential viewers in the process? The organizers felt that their viewers wouldn’t mind at all — surely they’re only thinking of the same sorts of viewers who are paying up to $550 to attend in person. In contrast, I believe that the 99% of viewers who watch the webcast in perpetuity will be “ordinary people,” and that ordinary people pretty much agree that We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Login. Culture clash.
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July 19th, 2004
Money and the Brain
The July 5 issue of Newsweek has an interesting piece (not online) about the weird interaction between money, the brain, and social psychology. Try this experiment: Take any two people. Give one of them (A) $10 and tell them they have to offer some of the money to the other person (B), who is free to accept or reject the offer. Game over. The goal is for both parties to walk away with as much money as possible.
As predicted by John (“A Beautiful Mind”) Nash, A should offer $1 to B, and B should accept the offer. But what in fact happens in the vast majority of cases where the experiment is tried is that low offers of $1 or $2 are almost universally rejected by B, even though it serves B’s best interests to accept the offer. This is where funny motivators like pride and dignity interlope, overriding pure reason. B is insulted that A would keep most of the money for themselves, and so rejects the offer altogether. And for similar reasons (sensitivity to the prospect of insulting another), most people playing A don’t offer $1 or $2, but something closer to a 50/50 split, e.g. $4.
It makes no mathematical sense for B to reject any offer, and it makes no mathematical sense for A to offer more than $1, but that’s how humans interact. Interestingly, people will offer or accept just $1 when playing the same game against a computer. But the part that I found really fascinating is that there is one group of people who play the game “rationally” (I put rational in quotes, because I do think that treating humans fairly is a rational thing to do, even if not mathematically sensible) — autistics will generally offer or accept $1, since they lack the sense of social fabric that most people experience.
Music: Yello :: Homer Hossa
July 18th, 2004
Clinton on Bush’s 2003 Tax Cuts
Via saladwithsteve, an excerpted transcription of Bill Clinton on NPR, speaking on Bush’s 2003 tax cuts:
“And to make matters worse, we gave half of the money to the top 1 percent and an extraordinary amount of the money to the other 200,000 americans like me who paid income taxes on over a million dollars last year and I just think it’s wrong. I think it is so wrong. We’ve got national guardsman fighting over in iraq and the administration doesn’t even want to make them eligible for military health care benefits if they’re not covered by their own plans. We’ve increased the cost of veterans benefits at health centers by 500%. We’ve cut 300,000 kids out of health care programs and I’ve still got my tax cut? That’s my sacrifice in the war on terror? I think it’s bad ethics and terrible economics and it’s something we’re going to have to pay for a long time to come.”
[...]
What I tried to do was to leave my generation, the baby boom generation, with the security of knowing that their children would not have to support them instead of their grandchildren. It was a huge economic gift to the next generation of Americans. Now we’ve thrown all of that away on what I consider to be highly self indulgent tax cuts for upper income people. I think it’s selfish and I think it’s wrong. [...] We should have targetted these tax cuts to middle class people and small business. They could have even been bigger. [...] I would liked to seen an expansion in earned income tax credit for lower income working people. They could have been permanent. Most of this stuff is just wrong. It’s bad economics. It’s personally selfish for really wealthy people to have this kind of money. I know no pertinent millionaire in New York, and I know a lot of them, Republican and Democrat, who thinks this is right. I don’t know anybody who thinks this is right.
Music: Laika :: Shut off, Curl Up
July 16th, 2004
Art Is Not Terrorism
Steve Kurtz is a professor at the University of Buffalo and also an artist using biotech as his medium to create commentary on genetic modification and modern American food culture. When his wife died of a heart attack recently, police found scientific equipment in his home he was using to produce one of his works — equipment similar to what you’d find in any factory producing GMO foods, and even in many high school biology labs. But the police decided Kurtz was a budding eco-terrorist, and called in the FBI, who are trying to hang him out to dry.
FBI lab tests immediately proved that not only was Kurtz’s equipment not used for any illegal purpose, it was not even possible to use it as a terrorist weapon … That hasn’t stopped the feds from continuing to pursue their case against Kurtz, in yet another egregious instance of contemptibly misdirected Patriot Act terrorist hysteria run amok.
Critical Art Ensemble maintains a site detailing Kurtz’ case, and runs a legal defense fund on his behalf.
Thanks Larry.
Music: Gruppo Sportivo :: Lock Yourself Up
July 15th, 2004
grep puzzler
Here’s a puzzler for all you shell-heads (you know who you are). Normal souls, please move along — nothing interesting to see here.
OK. You’re sitting in the parent of “dirname.” Inside dirname and its children are files that you know contain the string “string.” You want a text file listing the names of all those files. You run:
grep -r “string” dirname > dirname/output.txt
One of two things happens:
1) A few seconds later you have the file listing you need.
2) The command runs forever and output.txt grows indefinitely, until you run out of disk space.
As I discovered the hard way, which of these two occurs depends on which version of grep is installed on your system. In 2.5.x, you get outcome #1. Any version prior to that, you get outcome #2. On closer inspection, it’s easy to see what’s happening — grep is greedy, and is scanning the output file even as the shell is appending grep’s results to it. Reading itself and simultaneously reporting into itself. Devilish. Fortunately I spotted my error before I overflowed the drive. And sending output to any location outside of dirname avoids the problem, of course.
But here’s the puzzler: How was this fixed in grep 2.5? grep is not doing the output redirection — the shell is. grep only knows to pass results to stdout. Beyond that is a black box. So how is grep 2.5 able to avoid the problem of infinite recursion? How was it made aware of what the shell is doing? Cue Twilight Zone intro music.
Freaky deaky, super geeky.
Music: Stranglers :: Get A Grip
July 15th, 2004
BMRC Is Dead
Before I arrived at the J-School and set up the QuickTime Streaming Server, our multimedia classes used a university streaming service called bmrc to post Real Video content. Unbeknownst to me, bmrc lost funding a while ago and they pulled the plug on their servers, breaking tons of legacy content on our site (and others). Nice. No warning, not even a how-do-you-do, just blam, you’re dead.
After a chain of emails to various departments, finally tracked down someone who knew where the original servers were located — in a walk-in closet in his boss’ office. Cool guy. I gave him a list of .rm files and he kindly yanked the server out of storage, then passed me a gigabyte of legacy video content. Spent most of the day updating .ram files to point to the new location on our own server, where they all should have been to begin with.
Every summer at the J-School is like this – go into it with my sights set on a fistful of big-eyed projects I want to complete, and it slips away with a series of stupid emergencies and fiddly things. Death by a thousand papercuts. Sigh.
Music: Tindersticks :: Don’t Ever Get Tired
July 14th, 2004
Miles Finds the Parallel Port
Amy asks Miles what he’s doing behind the printer. “Bahroo!” he answers, hiding. Miles emerges, goes to town on his pounding bench for a bit, returns to his snack dish to munch a few more nuts, then returns to his spot behind the printer. More fiddling. “Miles, what are you doing back there?” “Nnnah bazzah!” Amy heads back to investigate, finds these two cashews gingerly placed in the clasps of the parallel port from behind. He does these things with so much intention, like he has a real and definite goal, even if he is the only boy in the Little Boy Universe who knows what that goal might be. He’s surprising us daily with his dexterity and imagination.
Music: Seeds :: Can’t Seem To Make You Mine
July 13th, 2004
National Sprinklerhead Day
Never dreamed having a lawn would be so much work. We apply great amounts of energy, water, nutrients and still it goes brown, dry, splotchy. Research: Lawn mites? Enough water? Thatch? Aeration? Soil penetrant? Dude at American Soil Products suggests it’s just too old — lawns apparently have lifespans. Said it’s probably time to rip it out and start from seed (he’s not a sod fan). Not ready to go there yet (the back yard is new sod six months old, it has its own set of problems).
Decided to resuscitate the decrepit, corroded, half-working original sprinkler system — manual watering is just too much labor for our schedules. Timer works fine, but the heads are whack. Took a vacation day and dug out 12 old Champion heads, installed new Rain Birds. Better, but needs tuning. 90% of the job is locating and digging out the old heads through rocks, under sidewalk underhangs, creeping roots…
Three trips for teflon pipe tape: Once when I ran out, again when Miles absconded with a roll, and the third when a roll vanished into thin air. Looked everywhere, time running out, gave up, got in the car again. As soon as I pulled into the street, saw it in the middle of the road — it had rolled into traffic and been run over. A bit crunched, but still teflon-y enough to work.
Amazed to study the water bill for May and June — we averaged 190 gallons per day, most of that going into the lawn I’m sure. And here we are concerned about low-flush toilets and the Water Miser setting on the dishwasher. With the century’s impending global water crisis, we’ll all have desert-themed yards soon anyway. Now I see why so many retirees decided to do the yard in a quaint gravel theme — throw on a few dead pine cones for good measure and call it a day.
Music: Gong :: Bodilingus
July 12th, 2004
Abalone Feast
When I was a kid, my dad dived for marine specimens with an outfit called Pacific Biomarine for a living. At the time, abalone were plentiful along the California coast, and he would often fill up his goodie bag with wild abs as he worked. We ate abalone several times a month, though I of course had no concept how lucky we were. Dad brought me an ab iron of my own for my sixth birthday. I remember that his friend at a machine shop forged it out of slab, and that it had a glittery purple bicycle hand grip.
Today, wild abalone populations have dwindled to almost nothing, thanks to a combination of factors — human overfishing, hungry otters, and the fact that abalone squirt their sperm into open waters hoping it will land somewhere useful (talk about getting lucky!); so when populations decline, the odds of this accidental fertilization succeeding drop precipitously.
You can still buy abalone, but you probably won’t find it at your local fish market. A handful of abalone farms raise them under protected conditions, and charge $20 – $50 / pound — an endangered delicacy. Dad’s coming to town this weekend, so I decided to throw him an abalone feast as a belated father’s day gift. Called Monterey Abalone to place an order, got to talking with the guy who picked up the phone, and it turned out that his dad was my dad’s boss at Pacific Biomarine, back in the 60s and early 70s! So this guy and I probably played together as little kids a few times, though we didn’t remember each other. Amazing how threads come together.
So a box of live abs will arrive this Friday, and the question of the week is how to prepare them. There are a lot of great recipes out there, but somehow I don’t think we should mess with tradition. Tenderize, a real light breading, a bit of garlic salt, and flash fry in olive oil (or butter, if memory serves).
Dad’s gonna flip when he hears the story.
Music: Spaceways Incorporated :: Tapestry from an Asteroid
July 10th, 2004
24-Hour Poetry Party
Some online friends from antiweb run the New York-based poetry collective LitKicks.com, which has been doing cool readings, gatherings and publications for a decade now. To celebrate their 10th anniversary, they’re hosting a massive, timezone-busting, internet-wide collaborative poetry generation happening next weekend (Friday 23 / Saturday 24):
The 24 HOUR POETRY PARTY is one of the most ambitious poetry experiments ever attempted. The entire event will take place online at LitKicks.com during the course of a single day and night. Seeded with original poems, writings and koans by a number of renowned poets, participants all over the world will join in the spontaneous composition of a single epic “real-time poem” describing 24 hours in the life of planet Earth.
Music: Loop Guru :: Buruk Burang
July 9th, 2004
Jeffy for Veep
Defective Yeti’s take on the NY Post’s Gephardt gaffe. “Can’t even pronounce spaghetti…” Although I might have been more inclined to give Nancy the nod over Jeffy (Family Circus is just “simple” dumb, whereas Nancy is (was) “delightfully surreal” dumb).
Note: The above in no way reflects my opinion of Edwards. Just thought it was funny.
Music: Cream :: Swlabr
July 8th, 2004
CSS Pencils
Stunning display of just how far CSS can be taken, given sufficient patience and a little imagination: There are no images on this page. Near as I can tell, he ran a bitmap through an image analyzer to determine the value of each pixel and translated each one into a corresponding DIV with matching CSS color value. He then created PHP transforms to let you drop channels, go grayscale, etc.
I’m not sure exactly how useful this is in practical terms, since the amount of CSS it takes to create a photographic representation exceeds the number of bytes it would take to represent the image as a JPEG, but it does seem to open a lot of doors for as-yet unimagined CSS designs. You’ve got to respect him just for showing that it’s possible. Check the fawning comments.
Described this to a non-geek friend and his only reaction was “That guy must have a lot of time on his hands.” Some people, ah swear.
Music: Linton Kwesi Johnson :: Di Black Petty Booshwah
July 5th, 2004
Tivo, RSS, Gluttony
We recently purchased Tivo for the house.* Like many users, we got Tivo not because we’re TV junkies, but because we don’t have time for TV. When we do sit down to watch, we want to spend less time, and we want to watch better TV. For the most part, the formula is working – we’re no longer spending a third of our time watching (or trying to navigate around) commercials, and we’re not watching whatever crap happens to be on once the boy is down and the dishes done, just to enjoy some well-earned veg time.
But there’s an unanticipated consequence: Suddenly we have a library of shows we like at our fingertips, always ready to watch. As a result, there’s suddenly the desire to watch more TV, not less. Oooo! All in the Family re-runs! Let’s stay up! That’s not how it was supposed to work.
It struck me that this phenomenon is exactly like the backlash against RSS that some people are experiencing. At first, RSS feels like a great time saver — I can skim 10 sites in the time it used to take to skim one. But RSS readers make it so easy to harvest lots of great content that you have this tendency not to save time, i.e. to move on and go do something else after your daily news gulp, but to spend more time overwhelming yourself with information.
Who can eat just three M&Ms? The tantalizing aggregation of desirable content that Tivo and RSS readers provide only gives you the illusion of saving time; in truth, most of us are seduced by the overabundance that accompanies aggregation, and merely dig ourselves deeper into the content hole. Aggregation lends itself to gluttony.
The key to dealing with content overload is not just in finding better tools to manage the flow, it’s knowing when to get up and walk away.
* We’re feeding the Tivo via antenna, still not willing to pay $50+/month for cable** when we would only want a couple of extra channels; the inability to purchase cable channels on an a la carte basis should be a case for the feds. While there are some good arguments explaining why you can’t just buy the channels you want, it’s still an abuse of monopoly, as I see it).
** Basic cable is only $14/month, but we already get 90% of what we’d get with basic via antenna. We do have a reception issue with the antenna that we’d like to improve upon (most local stations are transmitted from San Francisco, to the west, except for NBC, which comes from San Jose, to the south; it’s tough to make one antenna receive from both directions happily without an antenna rotator, so we might end up doing basic cable for the duration of the Olympics at least).
Music: Stevie Wonder :: All Day Sucker
July 4th, 2004
Manufacturing Celebrity
Great story about how musician Matt Tuozo grappled with frustration trying to get people to listen to his music on MP3.com, AudioGalaxy etc. until he came up with a brilliant idea: Manufacture a hot female persona to “live” behind the music, in the same way that mega-stars like Brittney are manufactured by producers. With the creation of Joy Reid, Matt’s music took off. Same music as before, now with breasts! Joy’s face was generated by morphing images of Jodie Foster and Winona Ryder gathered from FTP servers.
“Joy” made the front page of MP3.com. A thriving fan base developed, and Matt made thousands selling “her” music online, until he could no longer maintain the ruse and had to kill her off in a larger-than-life manner befitting a faux pop icon.
It’s comforting to know that modern publishing tools not only empower the proletariat to make and sell its own music without help from The Man, but to manufacture celebrity itself, cost free. We now not only need to wonder whether a star is popular by virtue of their own talents or by pure marketing muscle, but whether the star even exists at all.
Thanks Michael Bazeley.
Music: The Leaves :: Hey Joe
July 2nd, 2004
Homeless Tales
In traffic court this morning to see what I could do about a lame speeding ticket (31 in a 25 zone, so sue me). Thought I could pop in quickly before work and take care of it. Show up at 9:15, they said. Two hours later, courtroom still full of cases, people trying to excuse themselves for driving without licenses, insurance, registration. Maddening. Finally gave up and paid the damn thing. Would have taken forever, and my case seemed so freeze-dried compared to the “edge cases” that were being handled.
During the proceedings a homeless man took the stand. Scruffy, hair sticking up, dirty Halvoline jacket, original Sony Walkman on his hip. Looked permanently drunk. His crime: Riding a bicycle without a helmet. When it was his turn to testify, the sum of his testimony for the judge was: “I was born without a helmet, why should I wear one now?” Judge fined him $53. Man said he couldn’t pay, asked to do community service. Judge said no, gave him an extra month to scrape together the money.
Another man lives on the streets near my work. Usually friendly, occasionally rants. Sweeps the sidewalks for all of us. Sweeping is “his thing.” Recently learned that he had planted a few stalks of corn next to a nearby parking garage – his own little public garden. One of my many bosses apparently suggested that he tell the government about his corn, because they would pay him to stop growing it. Pretty brilliant when you think about it. I wonder if our homeless friend got the joke.
Music: Shuggie Otis :: Aht Uh Mi Hed
July 1st, 2004
New Domains on Birdhouse
Birdhouse is happy to be hosting some great new sites:
journalist.org: “The Online News Association was founded in 1999 by several working members of the online press. ONA is open to journalists from around the world who produce news on the Internet and other digital platforms.” This nicely designed site is actually driven by four separate-but-related Movable Type weblogs, though you probably wouldn’t guess it by looking – they’ve dispensed with the MT templates altogether (why is this so rare?) The News section looks a bit more like a “traditional” blog. Also accessible via journalists.org and onlinenewsassociation.org.
landwater.com: A San Francisco-based environmental defense law firm. One of my good friends works here, humbly and skillfully championing some of California’s and Nevada’s most pressing environmental cases. Straight to The Supremes! We’ll be overhauling this site soon – watch for updates.
milesabovethemovie.com : “4 stories above the ground.” A film project by J-School student Michael Welt. I love seeing the kinds of sites our students come up with after emerging from our multimedia skills classes. Some of them go from zero to 60 very quickly.
… and one more I’ll save for another day…
Music: Tom Zé :: Chamegá
