Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
Whatever I’m geeking out about at the time.
Prairie and I are heading off to Bumbershoot today. Possibilities for places we might end up:
Then, of course, there’s anything else we happen to stumble across that sounds good, all the various art exhibits, and other general mayhem. Whee!
“Dangerous (Sensual)” by Depeche Mode from the album Personal Jesus (1989, 5:25).
Earlier this week, I tossed a link to my linklog to Apple’s new iTunes Affiliate program, but didn’t write up anything more about it, as at that point, I didn’t really know much at all. While I was there, though, I went ahead and tossed in an application…and what do you know, last night I got my e-mail telling me that I was accepted into the program (a little amusing, as they turned down my favorite online soap opera, As the Apple Turns!).
So far, it seems to be fairly straightforward. Basically, once you’re accepted into the program, you’re given a selection of Apple-approved and created text links and banners that can be placed into web pages or e-mail messages that have a special ID in them, so that any sales initiated by a click on one of your links sends a few pennies your way. So far, so good — rather like the Amazon Associates program, in fact.
The one aspect of it that I haven’t figured out yet is how to make links to individual items or searches within the store that tie to my Affiliate ID. Either that part of the program isn’t active yet (since this all just started up this week), or I just can’t find the information on how to do it anywhere. Linking into the store without an Affiliate ID is already easy enough — right-clicking on items in the store gives you their target link, and there are ways to link to iTMS searches — but neither of those includes my Affiliate ID to track the sales.
Once I figure out that part of the process, then it will be extremely similar to the Amazon Associates program — any iTMS link on my site that prompts a sale will send a few pennies my way, and every little bit helps. For now, even though I’m not able to set up links directly to individual items, I have added an iTunes logo in the lower right of the sidebar, and small iTunes links to the “what I’m listening to” line at the bottom of posts. Hey, I may be selling out to The Man and including advertising on my site, but I’m at least making an effort at making it as unobtrusive as possible! ;)
One minor criticism, though (hopefully nothing that’s going to get me rather suddenly dumped from the program): as a web geek, it really bugs me that the provided HTML code to create the links is a little dodgy. No width or height arguments in the img links, un-escaped ampersands, and for some reason, the img tag is capitalized (as IMG), even though all other tags are correctly left lower-case. Nothing that’s terribly difficult to fix, of course, but it is a minor little grumble.
Anyway, that’s that. Should you feel like going shopping at the iTMS, I wouldn’t complain at all if you kicked off your shopping spree by clicking through one of my links…
“Last One” by Days of the New from the album Days of the New (1999, 4:42).
A re-post from last year — some rambling from me on how best to approach this upcoming weekend’s Bumbershoot festival (which, unfortunately, I’ll only be hitting two days of this year, due to my workplace not closing down for Labor Day).
Some general tips and approaches I use for getting through the weekend:
I carry as little as possible, so I don’t wear myself down with a big bag or anything. Camera, wallet, a book to scribble down what I’m doing and seeing so the pictures make sense, and that’s about it.
The Bumbershoot guides published in the Seattle Weekly and the Stranger are godsends. Before each day starts, I browse through to find anything that sounds like it might be interesting, whether or not I’ve heard of the artist, and mark it on the schedule (last year I found that the Seattle Weekly’s guide had better rundowns on the acts, but the Stranger’s single-sheet 4-page schedule was easier to keep in my pocket). Then, when I’m wandering around, I just see what I’ve marked off, and randomly choose one for whatever time it is to check out. If I like them, great, if they don’t quite hold my interest, then there’s plenty of other choices.
Don’t be afraid to deviate from your plan, though. There’s so much good stuff out there that it’s impossible to see it all, so you shouldn’t stress about missing an act — and there’s likely to be something worth seeing that you wouldn’t have picked up on just from reading about it. Not being a big reggae fan, I never would have planned to stop by Jumbalassy last year, but hearing them as I walked by sucked me right in.
Take the time to just wander around and explore all the nooks and crannies. I almost completely missed the Jazz stage last year — it’s up some stairs, kind of tucked away in a corner. I keep forgetting how big Seattle Center is, and how easy it is to lose bits and pieces of it when you’re focusing on getting from a specific point A to point B. Follow your nose. :)
Don’t forget to peoplewatch! This goes beyond just trying to navigate through the crowds — see who all is around you, pay attention to them, keep an ear out on what they’re saying. I’ve discovered some good shows that I might have missed just by hearing some random stranger get all excited about whatever band they’re heading off to see. A small crowd of people gathered somewhere might be nothing more than a momentary traffic jam, but it might also be a street performer worth watching — I discovered one of my favorite local artists this way the first year I was at Bumbershoot. Saw a crowd and decided to see what was up, ended up picking up a couple CDs and have been a fan ever since.
And most importantly — have fun! Enjoy the music and the sun, browse through the craft booths, go play in the fountain, or wade in the pool. We’re blessed with a huge festival with a ton of things to do on a gorgeous weekend — don’t let it go to waste!
iTunes: “Peach (Cut.Rate.Box)” by Beborn Beton from the album Tales From Another World (1999, 4:43).
Yet another in the ongoing saga of webloggers canned for really stupid reasons. This time, it’s Troutgirl, who until recently worked for Friendster.
Ontario Empoblog has a good rundown of the situation.
Y’know, it’s really a shame I don’t go to Florida State University. Turns out that they’re working on setting up a special deal with Apple…
In an effort to prevent illegal file sharing on campus, Florida State University is on the verge of finalizing a deal with Apple Computer, Inc. — a deal that would provide free iTunes software to students and allow them to download music for 99 cents per song.
I’ve gotta say, that’s one hell of a deal. iTunes for free — and individual songs for just 99 cents!?! Amazing!
\</sarcasm>
iTunes: “Come With Me” by Information Society from the album Hack (1990, 4:22).
Diebold’s voting machines scare me more and more every time I read about them. The latest bombshell? It’s not bad enough that the individual voting machines aren’t as secure as they should be, but the tabulation machines that tally all the votes from the individual machines can be manipulated by entering two digits.
Issue: Manipulation technique found in the Diebold central tabulator — 1,000 of these systems are in place, and they count up to two million votes at a time.
By entering a 2-digit code in a hidden location, a second set of votes is created. This set of votes can be changed, so that it no longer matches the correct votes. The voting system will then read the totals from the bogus vote set. It takes only seconds to change the votes, and to date not a single location in the U.S. has implemented security measures to fully mitigate the risks.
This program is not “stupidity” or sloppiness. It was designed and tested over a series of a dozen version adjustments.
[…]
The central tabulator is far more vulnerable than the touch screen terminals. Think about it: If you were going to tamper with an election, would you rather tamper with 4,500 individual voting machines, or with just one machine, the central tabulator which receives votes from all the machines? Of course, the central tabulator is the most desirable target.
With voting systems like this installed in key states, it’s frighteningly possible that it won’t matter who anybody votes for.
(via MeFi)
The new G5-based iMac is up on Apple’s site. Haven’t spent a ton of time on the site, yet, but first impressions are that it’s a damn impressive piece of engineering, packing all that into such a tiny little space.
But it’s not nearly as cute as the last generation.
More thoughts later on, most likely.
Update: Actually, no update. No further thoughts. Nice new iMac, not as pretty as the last one. That’s about all I’ve got for this one. Just wanted to say something, since I’d expected I’d have more to say.
iTunes: “Hey Jupiter” by Amos, Tori from the album Boys for Pele (1996, 5:11).
As mentioned briefly last week, Saturday’s evening entertainment was wandering down a couple blocks to the Paramount Theatre to see Rent.
Prairie has been a fan of Rent for a while, and had tried to introduce me to the music a while ago, but I just hadn’t been able to get a good feel for what was going on simply by listening to the soundtrack album. Thinking about it on the way home after the show, I realized that part of that may have been because every other major musical that I’ve seen (Cats, Les Misérables, Phantom of the Opera, Jesus Christ Superstar, Tommy, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat), I knew the story before picking up the soundtrack album, either through reading the source material or because I’d learned it while singing the songs back when I was in the Alaska Children’s Choir. With Rent, I had no real idea of what the plot was and what was happening, and I couldn’t quite pick it up just by listening to the album.
Now that I’ve seen the show, though, suddenly it all falls into place. “La Vie Boheme” and “Tango: Maureen” were by far my favorite songs, though the entire soundtrack is a blast. I can certainly see why it’s such a popular show.
Our particular performance was quite good, though not perfect. The sound technician was sometimes a little late when activating people’s microphones, so we’d occasionally lose the first couple words of someone’s lines when they appeared. A couple of the performers didn’t have quite as strong a voice as they probably should have (most notably Tallia Brinson as Mimi — while she wasn’t bad by any means, she didn’t quite have the raw power that songs like “Out Tonight” require).
I was also confused for a while about Angel’s character — I knew that the character was supposed to be a drag queen from when Prairie had first tried to introduce me to the music, but Damien DeShaun Smith had such an incredibly feminine voice that I really wasn’t sure if it was a male or female playing Angel until I checked the program during intermission. It made for a slightly confusing first act (as a female Angel would greatly change the dynamic of the relationship with Tom Collins)…of course, on the bright side, if Damien really is a drag queen (off-stage, that is), he’s sure to do a spectacular job! ;)
All in all, though, while not a perfect performance, it was extremely good, and I’ve got a new musical to eventually commit to memory.
iTunes: “La Vie Boheme” by Original Broadway Cast from the album Rent (1996, 8:00).
Phil Ringnalda pointed to an idea that Ian Hickson just tossed out while brainstorming ways to battle the ever-increasing issue of comment spam.
I’m thinking that HTML should have an element that basically says “content within this section may contain links from external sources; just because they are here does not mean we are endorsing them” which Google could then use to block Google rank whoring. I know a bunch of people being affected by Web log spam would jump at that chance to use this element if it was put into a spec.
Personally, I’d love to be able to wrap the comments section of my individual entry pages in something like this — and actually, it reminds me a lot of a technique I used to use when I had my website running on my own webserver. At the time, I had a good number of pages that weren’t part of the weblog, so rather than using MovableType‘s built-in search engine, I used the Fluid Dynamics Search Engine (May 9 2019 update: This link is now dead and has been removed).
FDSE is a very solid system, and one of the things I liked was an extra FDSE-specific tag that allowed an author to designate sections of a page that the search engine would ignore when performing its page scan. In addition to respecting the standard meta tags of index, noindex, follow and nofollow for a full page, FDSE also allows you to use those tags within HTML comments to section off areas of a page that should be treated differently from the page as a whole.
For instance, on my individual entry archive pages, the only real important content as far as a search engine is concerned is the entry itself. As the sidebar in my design is repeated on every page on the site, there’s really no great reason for a search engine to include that text in the database for every page, so I would wrap the entire sidebar inside a noindex, nofollow declaration.
I’d also do the same for things like the TrackBack section headers that appear on every page. As they are repeated on every single archive page, trying to search for an actual discussion on TrackBack is nearly impossible — but when I was using the FDSE and hid that section header from the search engine, it was very easy for me find discussions about TrackBack, as FDSE was only indexing the actual content of each page, rather than every little bit of text that the page contained.
I’ve wished for a long time that Google either supported a way to do the same thing, or just adopted FDSE’s method. According to FDSE’s author, he submitted his technique to Google as a suggestion quite a few years ago, but nothing more was ever heard about that.
Maybe Ian’s suggestion will get something moving in this direction again. Here’s hoping, at least.
iTunes: “Never Say Never (Hot Tracks)” by Romeo Void from the album Edge, The Level 1 (1995, 5:47).
Terrence has a review of his Nomad Zen Xtra mp3 player posted, and while it’s essentially a positive review, one line stood out to me. After having had the unit for six months and using it on what sounds like a near-daily basis, he mentions that he has “basically mastered the controls.”
Yowza.
I pulled my iPod out of the box, and had the controls mastered in about six seconds.
This isn’t at all to disparage his purchase — as I said, he seems to be quite happy with it — but it really stood out to me as one major reason why the iPod is such a success.
iTunes: “Sacred City” by YelworC from the album German Mystic Sound Sampler Vol. IV (1992, 4:51).