How great is it that I have a friend named Rachel Black Paradice now? That is a damn cool name. She should be a poet. Or rock star. Or maybe just a wonderful woman that I cherish. Anyways, cool name.
I was able to take some great pictures of people at her wedding and upon looking through them, Rachel & Trip's friends are all very good looking people. And fun. And interesting. And a bit whacky. Yep, just my type!
I have to say that iFilm's player is one of the most complete and cool that I have seen. Not sure if you really need the volume control on it, but the menu section is similar to what Stoph and I have been building and very, very good...
Just checking to see if this myspce video will work outside of their domain....oh, and its a great video as well!
(yes...I still love mashups!)
Whether it be blogs, newspapers, magazine, you have it. The giggle after reading a perfectly crafted feeling:
After 16 hours of tango instruction, the balls of my feet are like tender cutlets of raw chicken. You could bread and deep-fry them, and I’d find it soothing. I bought some of those silicone toe pads to ease the throbbing, and they’re so heavenly that walking feels vaguely obscene, like I should reciprocate somehow. I want to tile our kitchen floor with toe pads; I want to stuff them in my mouth. I’m pretty sure they’d taste like whipping cream.via Mighty Girl
I am so fed up with looting and predators that my inclination at this point, should I encounter anyone on my property who doesn't belong there, is just to shoot him. Would you care to dissuade me of that notion?
Landrieu: Not necessarily. You should ask first why they're there.
Nagin: If you shoot them in the butt, that will be OK. And then we'll take them to Charity Hospital and get 'em fixed up.
In the end, which Bush will wind up helping New Orleans more -- George or Reggie?
Landrieu: Reggie, absolutely. I mean, is it too much to hope that we go to the Super Bowl in the next four years?
Nagin: Reggie.
Last question: There's another flood. You are in a rescue boat. You arrive at a rooftop to find Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie. There's only room for one in the boat. Who do you take?
Landrieu: They both get left.
Nagin: I give them the boat and get on the roof and wait for the helicopter.
This post is one of the reasons that I rarely dig into the comments of Digg or Slashdot. It is really unfortunate that a new blogger, with obviously a fantastic success rate (2 diggs in 10 days of blogging) would have this to say:
Too many peoples were just making comments for the sake of making a comment and hurt my feelings. I assume that this is very normal when many peoples see one article and there will always be some ones that will say “Hey I knew this… This is something very simple and is not worth anything”. I am sure that there are many peoples that are very good in Linux and even if my site is not intended for the first time Linux users, I would have not expected such reactions. Obviously a super Linux sysadmin has not much to learn from here (as probably from nowhere else, as he knows everything already, right?), but still… so much flame… So I have decided that for the time being I will no longer submit any of my articles to Digg, and just keep an eye on the site and get to learn more about it.
This commentary, though not coming from digg directly, has been repeated by Mike Arrington over at TechCrunch and other prominent bloggers. I guess I am just not a negative person. Who knows...but I don't really have the time to spend leaving snarky comments across the web.
A tangent to this would be the argument that is held up that organizations should open their comments and trackbacks to have open communication with their customers. I have often sided on this, however, I have never been in the position of a large organization that is faced with customers whose conversations are irrationally ill natured. How would a very large organization deal with this and be able to handle the scale? Yes, the marketplace is a conversation, but how does the organization scale it's communication and filtering to be able to communicate with real commentary and remove ill intended?
A visit to a site can be seen as an entire experience: design, content, media, etc. I would consider the comments to be an integral portion of the content. Would I my audience to endure the snarky comments that seem to get sprinkled about by so many? I laughed when Mena Trott first addressed this...but I am becoming more and more aware of it.
I do a lot of presentations that involve audio and have been looking for a solution to enhance the sound from my laptop speakers. Is this possibly the answer?
I went to the KFOG Kaboom on Saturday night and watched it from down on the pier. A couple of notes about the experience:
Damn...Bush is getting his ass beat left and right. Just when you thought a 29% approval ratings was a tremendously low blow, the loser in the election is taking pot shots at him on Saturday Night Live. Talk about kicking you in the nuts!
I can't really make it a week without posting some sort of multimedia...so here is today's:
Starting from today it doesn't matter if it's a Skype-to-Skype call or a call to landline or mobile phone - it's free as long as you're calling from within the US or Canada to US or Canadian phone number.
All of the new competition within VOIP is great for consumers! My gut says that this is not sustainable and a throwback to the thinking of the first bubble, however, I'll take it!
"When children leave the home and go to school or the public library and have access to social-networking sites, we have reason to be concerned," Rep. Michael Fitzpatrick, a Pennsylvania Republican, told CNET News.com in an interview. Fitzpatrick and fellow Republicans, including House Speaker Dennis Hastert, on Wednesday endorsed new legislation (click here for PDF) that would cordon off access to commercial Web sites that let users create public "Web pages or profiles" and also offer a discussion board, chat room, or e-mail service.
Dear Rep. Fitzpatrick,
I appreciate your valiant efforts in protecting the youth of our society from online predators. As the media has been hyping the dangers of such sites as MySpace, it makes absolute sense for you to jump on the bandwagon and align with the perceived needs of your constituents. Our defenseless, unintelligent youth are not exposed to harmful, scary people in real life situations, only online and I appreciate you taking steps to protect our youth. However, I would like to alert you to some of the hopefully unintentional consquences of your broad language:
Cheers,
A Voter
Ok...the little excursion into drumlines today has led me to this performance of Blast! Blast! was born out of the Star of Indiana Drum and Bugle Corps moving from the field to stages, auditorioms and finally to Broadway. Lisa and I attended the opening on Broadway as guests of Donnie Van Doren's and had an absolute blast (don't really know if pun is intended!) Soooooo many of the performers were either students, fellow performers, instructors when I was running the drum corps, or my instructors it was insane.
Ah, but the point of this post, other than sharing with you the incredible athleticism and musicianship, is a discussion about pay per play, ad supported, and free content that generates supplemental income. I am faced with these discussion daily now that I run a startup in podcasting that generates ad revenue for content producers. When I was involved with YEA!, the budgets were extremely tight and changes to our way of being were extremely difficult as any miscalculation could mean that the buses may not get fuel that night. Yes, the budget ran that tight at times (and I can't imagine what George is doing now with the incredible jump in diesel this summer).
One of the significant sources of revenue, for both YEA! (including the Cadets and Crossmen) and DCI (for that matter, any of the top 6-10 corps) is multimedia sales -- CD, VHS, DVD. There were always discussions about copy protection, fighting digital distribution, etc. Upon my departure in '99, discussions began to embrace the emerging internet market and illegal distribution of content through new, easier, faster channels.
A quick search of DCI or USSBA (which is run by YEA!) on YouTube displays quite a few copyrighted videos from previous years/seasons. One aspect of this is that it may immediately affect sales of multimedia which has an immediate and direct impact on the not-for-profits and their services to young people. This is not good.
However, further analysis may prove differently and show that the syndication of these performances through sites like YouTube and through podcasting actually enhance reputation of each group and have the opportunity to increase revenue:
So where does that leave us? I argue that using systems like Castfire can enable activities such as drum corps to gain additional revenue through existing ticket and promotional opportunities by increasing exposure to new audiences. To enable this, systems must be used where the content producers, in this case DCI or YEA!, can insert marketing messages to drive ticket and promo sales at the beginning, end or middle of each segment published. In addition, the marketing message must be relevant to the time that it is played by the consumer, not the time that it is published by the content producer. Therefore, dynamic creation of multimedia content and the ability to update marketing messages is key.
By not moving ahead of the fan base that is already posting the content, the DCI and YEA! lose the ability to add these revenue generating segments. Embrace the new medium and take advantage of it -- there are new audiences that will be interested!
You might recall that when I wander around NYC neighborhoods, I like to drop in on apartment broker agencies who post on our site. I'm not checking in on them, just being curious, and indulging my sense of humor a little.
My visit first creates a combination of disbelief and panic. I don't really say "Sure is a nice place you have here, sure be a shame if...", which is to say I manage to control my sense of humor, but it's tempting.
Brother Consolmagno argued that the Christian God was a supernatural one, a belief that had led the clergy in the past to become involved in science to seek natural reasons for phenomena such as thunder and lightning, which had been previously attributed to vengeful gods. "Knowledge is dangerous, but so is ignorance. That's why science and religion need to talk to each other," he said.
Such an interesting perspective that I rarely contemplate. I guess, being a recovering Catholic, I always perceived the God in Catholicism as a supernatural one. A different thought process has now kicked off for me...
Sunday morning May 7th
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What is it? People having fun running in front of art cars with bulls heads on the lead cars.
Gather 8:15am Start 8:45
Runners and Taunters try to wear something red.
Assemble at Clay St. and Drumm - course is 8 blocks, flat, no hills.
I will chime in on this one as it is an area that I am familiar with and have been quite agitated with...
The basis of net neutrality is that all end points and all data is treated the same. With little exception, traffic on the internet is transported without preference or bias. Because of this, websites that are run on cable modems (like thepartycow.com) can be accessed by someone in Maine the same way that Google.com or Yahoo.com can. I can IM with people in Australia. I can Skype with friends in Brussells. There is no preference or bias to the data that is passed...
The issue at point is that some of the main backbone providers believe that profitable companies such as Yahoo, Google, and eBay are getting a free ride to their profits. Therefore, the infrastructure providers (AT&T, Verizon, et al) believe that they should be able to create internet tiers that have different pricing. The definition and pricing of the tiers do not exist, but they are hinting and working to establish them.
This removes one of the foundations of growth of the internet: we are all the same. The network that makes up the internet is not important. It is millions of cables, fiber, switches, hubs and routers. It is all useless junk without the key ingredients: the endpoints. At the end of the Ethernet cables, your computer, my computer, YouTube's servers, thepartycow.com's servers all exist. They make the internet valuable.
Some will argue that the backbone providers are not generating revenues on their billions of dollars of investment. However, both parties are already paying a toll: the companies (Google, Yahoo, etc) pay MILLIONS in access fees, and you and I pay for our access to this network as well. In this case, it is purely a matter of pricing!
So...part of me wants to let the markets mash it out. It will become apparent that if AT&T blocks Google, YouTube and Yahoo IM, I would quickly leave any service that was associated with AT&T. However, the portion of this that is affected is the backbone -- companies that you and I do not pay directly. Companies that we are not direct customers of. My fear is that their battles will directly affect me on multiple levels:
- As an entrepreneur with a startup that will be generating terabytes of bandwidth, it is fearful that a gatekeeper could set higher costs for me for arbitrary reasons.
- As someone addicted to the internet. Excuse me, as someone addicted to the endpoints of the internet, I am fearful that battles between backbone providers and content companies will only end in a courtroom far, far away. This process will drag on for years, dragging my experience through gutters along the way.
- Today’s web experience has been possible because we can just try things without a huge financial investment. Instant messaging was developed by a couple of guys in Israel for which AOL acquired them and made it explode! Blogger was started on 2 servers in an office in SOMA. Blogging is now dominate enough that people start their blogs on MySpace, Tribe, Friendster, etc. The future of the web is sitting in a couple of garages, scattered around the world right now.
And I think the last point above is the most important. The future of the web is in a couple of people’s garages and studio apartments around the world. They are not the ones that are funded with millions of dollars. They are not being developed by the ones with billions of capital. They are the ones being developed out of passion, with little or no money. There are smart, creative people trying new things, stretching boundaries and creating new experiences. Net neutrality enables these opportunities to make better end points for you and I.
Perhaps the most important reason to release early, though, is that it makes you work harder. When you're working on something that isn't released, problems are intriguing. In something that's out there, problems are alarming. There is a lot more urgency once you release. And I think that's precisely why people put it off. They know they're going to work a lot harder once they do.
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